Poker Weekend

Yo. This was a positive and negative weekend as far as my poker playing goes. On the bright side, I finished in the top 100 players in three consecutive large tournaments on pokerstars. Which believe me, given the cards I tend to get on ps, is *quite* a feat. I got as high as 76th place out of 2274 entrants in the Saturday night tournament at around 7pm ET. One thing I have noticed is that the large tournaments that occur earlier in the evening than I usually play (I'm usually on around 10pm ET) are not only larger, but full of much more fish than the later ones. Maybe that's because only the more serious players such as myself stay up until midnight or later every night playing even when they know they have to be up in a few hours to leave for their day jobs. All I know is that when I played the 2200-person event on Saturday night, it was unreal all the stoopid fishing going on. I can't count how many times someone called all in, or even MOVED all in, with just a flush draw, in several cases not even on the flop but on the turn! So anyways, I did place in the top 100 in three consecutive large tourneys on ps from Thursday to Saturday night, so that is certainly a good sign for my game.

Let me digress for a minute. Am I the only guy out there who can't STAND ps's redickulous 20% payment award schedule? I mean, I'm all for the top 20% getting paid out all things being equal. But when is ps going to realize that all things are NOT equal? When you make the top 20% in a large stars tournament, your payout is less than 2 or 3 times your buyin or everyone between top 20% and about top 3%. Think about that. You pay $3 to play against 2000 other people in a nlh event. You do well and manage to make it well into the money before being busted out on a suckout in 168th place. It takes you 3 hours and 42 minutes to get from 2000 down to 168th, and all you have to show for it after almost 4 hours and a top 8% finish among 2000 entrants is a payback of $5.88. What's up with that? Can I really be the only one who can't stand this? As with most of my complaints about ps, this is just another sign of them being designed for, and run for, the fish. I'm sure the fish love the 20% payout schedule. Why? Because for them, it is dumb luck if they EVER manage to sneak into the top 400, and they desperately want to be able to tell their friends and their mommies "I actually CASHED in a 2000 person tournament last night! Praise me!" And ps wants them to be doing that too, just like ps wants the fish sucking out more often than usual, so that they can recruit more fish to come play at their site.

Which leads me to the bad part of the weekend poker festivities. In each of my three large tournament successes, as well as in 5 other tournaments I played on Sunday and Monday, I got busted where I had the lead when all the chips went to the middle. Not every one was a bad beat per se, because there were a few where I had only the upper hand in a race situation, but I have to tell you, losing 38,000 chips in 78th place after 4 hours of hard-fought poker action because my 99 loses to the other guy's AJ is not much more comforting than losing my 99 to his 77 or something else with better odds. And the other thing, I have started a *very* annoying habit of running into other people's Aces when I am deep into a tournament. I have yet in my life to ever see AA myself once I'm in the money in a nlh tournament, but I have run into someone else playing AA against me probably 5 or 6 times. That is also a source of tremendous frustration.

One other thing for today: I played in the ps $20 buyin 180-person sng on Sunday night, and sitting two seats to my left at my first table is none other than Drizz himself. I gave him the shout out, but in an anonymous way so that no one else at the table knew I was talking to him specifically, which I imagine he enjoyed though he clearly wanted to remain anonymous. Anyways, as a note to Drizz, I just want to say I have NEVER in my ENTIRE life seen people donk off chips to someone as badly as they did to Drizz in the maybe one hour I remained in that tournament before being bad beat out on the river to a guy with nothing but on OESD against my 2 pairs. I mean he had 3000 chips before we blinked an eye, and this included people calling repeated bets against him with nothing more than Q9 suited on a board of AK9, and multiple people playing for inside straight draws against him through the flop and turn. It was incredible. I think I checked in later and saw that Drizz did not money, but still, I would KILL for people to play like that against me, even for just a few minutes on pokerstars. Sure I get fish playing against me all day long on ps, but for whatever reason they always seem to hit what they're fishing for and knock me out of these things, rather than staking me to a huge early stack. Just once and I'll be happy for at least a few weeks, I promise.