Well It Ain't Exactly a Mookie, But...

Yeah I did not recognize the name of the guy who won the Mookie last night, but I did recognize the guy who won the Dookie:



That's right, I took down the Dookie last night. And I have to give credit for this name where it is due, to jeciimd, who's been referring to the Mookie 2nd Chance as the Dookie for at least a couple of months now in our girly chats. It's stuck with me and I love the name, so that's me, this week's Dookie champion! Last night at 11:30pm ET the game was HA as chosen by Zeem, which for those of you who don't know is alternating rounds of pot-limit holdem and pot-limit Omaha (high). These are two of my best games so I always go into anything like this expecting to do well, but of course it never seems to turn out that way for me whenever anything associated with the Mookie is concerned. As I've written about here many times, although I've been playing the Mookie regularly for over a year now, and the Dookie regularly for however long it's been going (probably a good 6 months maybe?), this is my first win of anything associated with the guy who runs the biggest weekly almost-exclusively-blogger tournament around. I won a few normal sized pots early, took a couple of people for suckers as per my usual with semi-slowplayed nut hands in Omaha high, and then near the end won a few big pots to take a significant chip lead into the money spots with just three players left. From there it was just smooth sailing, and I never hit a big draw once I already had the money in the pot, but I also never got drawn out on when somebody else got it in big with a not-yet-made hand. And that my friends is a recipe to winning Omaha, where a lot of my big wins ended up coming in last night's Dookie tournament. Lord knows winning an HA event with 17 donkey participants late at night isn't much. But I'll take it. Perhaps this is a harbinger of things to come in the real Mookie the next time I can get back in there?

Speaking of which, the funny thing is that I've been focusing so much on getting into the WSOP via these nightly bracelet races on full tilt, that I actually have ended up playing poker right through Lost each of the last two Wednesdays, but I still have literally not had room on my screen to play the Mookie. In the end I've found it makes the most sense on most Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for me to play all three of the 9:10pm ET $14 turbo sat, the 9:20pm $14 turbo rebuy sat and the 9:40pm $24 turbo sats into the midnight bracelet race, where a full top 10% of the players win the $2000 WSOP prize packages, because it's hard to win your way in via just one satellite, and on one occasion already before last night I have managed to money in more than one of these things, which just puts $216 cash into your account for every additional seat won beyond the first one that nets you your buyin into the midnight tournament. Last night was sorta one of those nights, as I actually scored in both the rebuy satellite and the $14 satellite (bubbling in one of them for $74 cash instead of the full seat), and so eventually by around 11:20pm ET when I was just finishing up Lost on the DVR, I knew I'd be racing for bracelets once again at midnight.

Anyways the point I was trying to make about the Mookie was that my laptop screen, even at a 16.1 or whatever inch display, is only really large enough for me to play 4 tables at once in online poker, and even at that there is a lot of overlap between all four of the tables. So by the time 10pm ET runs around and it's Mookie time, I was already in the 9:10, 9:20 and the 9:40pm satellites to the midnight bracelet race, and of course I also have to play the actual Wednesday night bracelet race at 9:30pm ET, which is the best of the early races each week because it is a $75 buyin instead of the normal $24 that pays only one seat out of 10 million players in it. These Wednesday night 9:30pm $75 buyin jobs usually end up paying 3 seats out of 80 or 90 players, as was the case last night, so I had to play that thing as well, and as a result there was just no room on my screen. It's hard enough trying to act like I'm focusing on Lost so that the Hammer Wife doesn't get pissy with me while I've got four online poker tournaments running at the same time. To try to throw in a fifth, which I guess would have to just go right in the middle of my screen and block off most of each of the other four windows, is something I've tried on a few occasions but it thoroughly doesn't work. So no Mookie for me last night, though 46 runners did come out for another great showing for this event which I'm sure was a lot of fun as always. And did I mention I won the Dookie last night? Like the title says, it ain't a Mookie, but it is the next best thing so I'll take it and I'll take it hard.

I don't even remember how I got knocked out of the 9:30pm bracelet race, but I know I lasted into the top third of the field, and usually when I don't recall the specifics of a beat the next morning, that means that it wasn't a bad beat or a horrible play by me, and was probably instead me pushing a middle pocket pair into an overpair or something like that. But the midnight race was a little different. At $216 a pop to buy in, one might think that the level of play in this tri-weekly event is pretty solid. But one would be wrong. There are always a certain number of good players in this thing, no doubt, but when it comes right down to it, the guys in this tournament are pretty much total donkeys no less than the jassacks who populate the lower buyin bracelet races and generally speaking all the lower buyin mtts on a site like full tilt or pokerstars. Let me just tell you my elimination story and you can see what I mean.

So it's almost exactly 2am ET. I'm up much later than I should be given that the Hammer Girls are up like clockwork by 6am every single morning and I am up with them, as I need to get into work earlyish anyways so I couldn't sleep much past that time even if the kids had pixie dust sprinkled on them by Mr. Sandman himself. There's about 3 minutes left until the end of the second hour of the tournament, and of the 97 original entrants (top 9 will win WSOP packages), there are exactly 45 players left. So we're through just over half the field, and I am sitting on a stack of 4800 chips, putting me in around 28th place of 45 remaining players, and about 25% below the tournament average at the time of around 6300 chips. So I've chipped up a bit, won a few nice hands but otherwise have managed to avoid the big suckouts or the bonehead plays or the setups or just otherwise the bad luck that can all conspire to knock you out early from one of these things. I need to think about making some moves, but with blinds at I think 400-800 and 75-chip antes and me still near the middle of the pack, it wasn't quite crunch time yet for me. Soon, but not quite yet.

I look down to find AJs, my first "big" hand (ha ha) in some time, in early-middle (UTG+2) position in an unopened pot. I make the standard move to raise it up 3x to 2400 chips, the exact same opening raise I've made from early-middle position in 100% of the other hands I have entered in the entire tournament. It folds around to the button, who is sitting on a stack of around 10,000 chips, who thinks for a few minutes before actually typing in to the fucking chat "One time, poker gods, just one time" before calling. And this biatch had been playing like such a calldonkey in the tournament, I knew with nearly 100% certainty she wasn't trying to F with me and really had Aces or something. You just have to take my word for it on that.

The blinds fold, and the flop comes J82, all hearts. My AJ is in diamonds, and at this point over half of my stack is in the pot, and with all those hearts out there and me holding TPTK, I make the executive decision to push in my last 2200 chips or whatever it was and take this shiat down right now. Instantly the biatch types in "thank you poker gods" and calls, flipping up....

A4. Of hearts.

So let's review. This whore calls off a full quarter of her largeish stack halfway through the field in the midnight bracelet race, with A4s, when facing a 3x raise from early-middle position. That is a recipe for fucking disaster right there, but this is not atypical of the kind of play that you will see rampant throughout even the $216 buyin bracelet race. It's despicable. The fucking fool even knows she's making an utter bonehead play, to the point that she actually types in "one time poker gods, just one time" before making the call, and then happily puts in a quarter of her hard-earned stack with A4 against a preflop early-middle position raiser. Smarrrrrrt. I mean, it's bad enough to make this kind of call with a hand like A9 or AT, which are probably dominated or behind a pocket pair, but could be ahead if I am pushing with a weak Ace, unlikely as even that is. But to call off a quarter of your stack with A4 against a middle position preflop raiser, that is even worse than calling it off with a hand like JTs, which at least is likely to be two live cards as opposed to the A4 which is probably dominated, and in any event even if I am on a hand like two high non-Ace cards, when she has the 4 in her hand she knows she can't possibly be more than a 60% favorite or so, and is probably more like a 20% to 40% underdog. Horrible, horrible play, and even more horribly rewarded by full tilt for her donkery. So no, the play in these $216 buyin bracelet races is no good, and maybe only marginally if even at all better than the lower buyin races. And I still haven't won a bracelet race yet after 3 weeks of trying, with my closest performance yet still last Saturday night's limit holdem bracelet race, where I was 1st out of 4 players remaining before running into the asshat calling the cap raise preflop with Q7s (!!!!) and then flopping two pairs and turning a boat. Sick.

And about yesterday's ATC hand, it seems just about everyone agrees with my own feelings on the hand -- that it is a clear fold. 96o is just a downright crappy starting hand -- must be in the bottom 35% or so of all starting hands -- and putting in any more chips in this spot is to me a terrible idea, even if you are currently the 2nd place chip stack in the tournament with 54 players remaining out of 400 who started. Truth be told, this example is actually a combination of another hand from Harrington on Holdem Volume II, but with a twist. In the Harrington hand, the pot odds were more like 3 to 1 and he therefore advocated making the call. It's a call I still would not make, personally, because even though the pot odds in that spot were basically (barely) there, 96o is just so not likely to win the hand that I would not want to lose even a tenth of my stack on the off chance that I can eliminate a player this early on in the event (54 players left, with 40 making the money, and presumably only the top few reaching the big bucks). With 96o, even getting more or less very close to the "correct" pot odds to call preflop, I'm not making that call. But to me, Harrington's example obfuscates that issue by making the pot odds to call 3-to-1, allowing the reader to rely just on pot odds alone instead of really thinking through the whole "Any Two Cards" concept, and that's why I changed the situation somewhat. And what I did was, I reviewed the last ten Hoy tournament final tables, and I set up the pot odds in this hand to be basically exactly what they've been on a few occasions where players with big chip stacks at the final table have called -- not open-raised, mind you, but called -- smaller stacks with hands equal to or worse than 96o. In one case the MATH hand in question that called the allin at 2-to-1 odds was exactly 96o -- which went on to win btw thanks to donkey gods -- and in the other case, the Hoy big stack took a significant loss of about a quarter of his stack making a 2-to-1 pot odds call when holding 94o.

My point about all this is a fewfold I guess. IMO there are only a few justifications for making any ATC play here. #1 is if you have good pot odds to make the call. Even though I might not choose to devote a lot of chips to a highly likely losing situation just because I barely have sufficient math pot odds to make the call, I will agree that on a big stack, making such a call is justifiable if the pot odds are there. #2, as many of the commenters point out, if you are getting some good first-in viggorish by being the guy open-raising with ATC, instead of the guy calling an allin with ATC, that can also make a lot of sense. The chance that you could win the pot outright without seeing a flop by causing your opponent to fold right then and there can easily compensate somewhat for the actual lesser holding in your hand. And lastly, as Blinders and some others mentioned as well in the comments, the ATC play IMO really only has useful application nearing the end of tournaments, unless you're getting just unbelievable pot odds of course in which case you happily make the call from the big blind with 32o when your stack is 87,000 chips, and the short stack from the small blind has just gone all in for his last 870 chips. But to be making an ATC type of call like Harrington advises in this example with 54 players left in a 400-person tournament, not even at the cash bubble yet let alone anywhere near the final table, to me this is not a great plan. I may do some more stuff on ATC one of these days as I certainly have more to say about it, but in general I guess I should hope that you donkeys continue to make these ill-advised ATC calls late in blogger tournaments. I do wish Lucko would write more about this one of these days, as he is perhaps the only blogger type I've seen who really seems to have a good grasp of the strategy (and the math) behind this type of play. Maybe if you guys bother him enough in comments on his blog, he'll return to this topic at some point in the future.

As my asswork continues to block all pokerworks blogs, I don't know but can only assume that cc is back tonight with his Thursday bash on pokerstars, at 9:30pm ET and with a password of "pokerworks" as always. If he is, I will be in there tonight as I look to make it two in a row in the blogger tournaments after last night's Dookie win. I also was excited to see that Al is back with the latest Riverchasers tournament tonight on full tilt, which goes down at 9pm ET and with a new password of "riverchasers6". I will most definitely be in there, as Riverchasers has quickly become the new largest weekly private event for us with its eclectic mix of blogger donkeys and drunk donkeys, and I always have a good time seeing how full tilt comes up with a way for me to get sucked out on or set up in this thing to knock me out without cashing. Fun times. I'll also be in on whatever bracelet race there is tonight at 9:30pm ET on full tilt -- I know Thursday alternates between two games but for the life of me I can't remember which, and of course the dorkwork blocks full tilt's website since me accessing that site also causes all the evils of the world, so I can't check for sure. But I always seem to be up for my nightly 9:30 bracelet race donation in the winner-take-all format that nobody actually ever wins. And knowing me I'll probably try my hand at a chance or five in some more of those heads-up $13.75 token sngs on full tilt during the night, so if you want a piece of me in one of those (brdweb learned the hard way about this a few days back as I recall), you know where to find me. Just let me know.