Full Tilt vs. Pokerstars

It's Wednesday, and you know what that means. Yep, Mookday. The tournament I get excited for every week, the tournament I get recockusucked out of most weeks, the tournament I can never win yadda yadda yadda why do I bother. I have no chance, but especially with ABC's brilliant move of Lost from Wednesday to Thursday, the magic 8-ball no longer says "Outlook not so good" for me playing this thing every single week. So I will be there tonight, we all know what's gonna happen, I believe Mookie himself will be on Buddydank radio, you know the routine. With some of the beats I've taken lately, nothing would surprise me at this point. When I'm losing with flopped overboats in huge spots twice in two weeks, that's when you know you're running bad.

Despite the above, my overall balance in the roll on full tilt continues to inch higher, thanks mostly to these mega-satellites full tilt's been running for the FTOPS. Having already qualified for most of the FTOPS tournaments I intend to play, at this point the megasats I'm playing are mostly for cash, but mega satelllites are probably my single best and cashiest form of poker tournament out there for me, the king of multi-seat satellite tournaments. Earlier this week I won a second seat into FTOPS #9 via the nightly 10:30pm ET megasat which offers 10 seats guaranteed to the $322 tournament and has yet to reach the minimum 65 players to meet the guarantee. I've come close in this one a couple of other times, and I know KOD won I think his third seat into this tournament on Tuesday night as well, but frankly this nightly 10:30pm ET $50 buyin tournament is something I will probably play every night of the week until FTOPS #9 goes off this coming Sunday evening, hosted by the highly aggro small-ball playing Erick Lindgren.

Now that FTOPS is upon us starting Wednesday tonight with FTOPS #1 $216 buyin nlh tournament at 9pm ET, that means that starting on Tuesday night were the nightly 9:30pm ET megasatellites into the next day's nighttime FTOPS event. These things are an absolute goldmine, take it from me, if again you know how to play some poker, can win just a couple of big pots over a few hours of play, and know solid multi-seat tournament strategy. Tuesday night at 9:30pm ET was the 100-seat guaranteed, $50 buyin megasat to FTOPS #1 on Wednesday, which again I am already in to but which I certainly fired up to win me another $216 cash money for the roll. As usual things started off slow, but with the non-turbo format and with 500-some runners and 156 FTOPS #1 seats guaranteed, there is just no reason to do anything but wait and pick your spots early on. Eventually I won a big pot when I turned a flush and the guy with two pairs could not stop himself from calling me down through the river for most of his stack and a double-up for me. I played patiently again after that, and it was probably an hour later when my AJ held up against A9 to knock out another medium-stacked player, followed shortly afterwards by my JJ winning a race against AQ, and suddenly I was top 25 in chips with about 250 players remaining. This is the place you want to be with 156 seats being awarded, because then I was basically able to sit my ass out the rest of the way. Just to be safe, I would check back in every 20 minutes or so, play for a few minutes until a good stealing opportunity presented itself and then steal me some blinds n antes, but otherwise I just sat out for the most part and was able to remain in the top 30 as the bubble approached. With 164 players remaining and me still in the top 30 in chips, I closed up for the night and went to sleep. I woke up this morning to find I finished in 12th place overall -- I'm sure some of the other donkeys who were trying to actually play the stupid thing out were good n pissed that I just blinded myself down, but what can I do when full tilt makes you play these things out even once everyone remaining will win the exact same first prize, and it's approach 1am ET? So despite coming up short in the 5050, the FTOPS #9 megasat and the hilo Skills Series tournament (thanks to Mr. Luckbox himself and his gheyass river five-outter), the roll still bumped up by a good hundy or so on the night thanks to the 9:30pm ET megasat that I will probably also be hitting up every night this week if possible.

I did see that ANIguy ended up snatching away the hilo victory from our boy Waffles. Nothing like waking up to an IM from Waffles that he thinks he just might win the Skills event, followed by opening up the final board and seeing him finished in that ugly 2nd place spot. Not that I wouldn't be psyched to even come near 2nd place in one of these things. I mean, I know I know how to play every one of these games better than most of the guys in these Skills Series tournaments, but somehow that ends up being a liability every Tuesday and on alternating Thursday nights as well for the non-nlh Riverchasers events, and I may well never cash in any of these things. But dam if I don't play better than the fonkaramas who eliminate me every single week. As usual though I had a really good time playing Skills with the no-skills bloggers, and like I always say, that's what it's all about as another large crowd of I think 46 runners came out to show the world how poorly they know even starting hand selection in stud hi-lo 8 or better.

So as I've been playing more and more at pokerstars recently, I've been thinking a lot about what exactly the differences are between the two sites. I've boiled down the list to a small handful of items that I think tell the major story between playing on the two sites, and I am interested if anyone has any different or additional thoughts on the matter. So here is my list of full tilt vs pokerstars:

1. The players are worse at pokerstars. Not by a whole lot, but it is simply easier to double-up in the big tournaments early on pokerstars than it is on full tilt. They're all full of donkeys, don't get me wrong. But here's the difference. On full tilt when you get AK on the first hand of a big mtt and the flop comes Ace-high, you can bet out your stack with bets on the flop, turn and the rest on the river, and get smooth called all three times by a guy holding AJ. Whereas, on pokerstars you will get the same clown doing the same calling off his stack with AJ through three separate bets, but there he will do it with no Ace (and not even a Jack) on the board at all. That right there sums up from my perspective the difference between the quality of opponents in the mtt's on the two sites.

2. The suckouts are worse and more plentiful on pokerstars. This has always been the case, and everyone who's played a lot on both sites has always known this to be the case. And again, it's not more by a huge margin, but pokerstars has simply always been the fucking king of giving you pocket Aces, one other guy calls your preflop raise with what turns out to be 73s or some shit like that, and then the flop comes 456 rainbow. Or you flop the overboat and end up getting beat by the runner-runner straight flush. Full tilt offers up plenty o beats, don't get me wrong, and many of them truly sick ones, but pokerstars will always be worse.

3. Pokerstars for some inexplicable reason still insits on having no "bet pot" button. So, you always have to type in the amount you want to bet, even if you want to bet exactly the pot, half the pot, or whatever. It's not the end of the world, and donkeypuncher even says that he prefers no bet pot button so that donkeys are not encouraged to make right-sized bets which is an interesting take that I had not thought of previously, but overall I find it to be an inconvenience that I know as a player I should not have to deal with. It is just dumb, period.

4. Similarly, the "last hand" function on pokerstars is about 10,000 times worse than the comparable feature on full tilt. On full tilt, you get a nice picture of the previous hand, showing your own cards as well as all of the cards that were eventually exposed or which went to showdown (even if mucked), with the hand history embedded in a text box right at the bottom of the screen. On stars, you need to click the fairly inconspicuous "Previous" link with some longass number on it, and then you have to scroll through just a textual hand history and then look to the bottom to see what was mucked by the other players who went to showdown. This one is not even close and I cannot for the life of me figure out why stars won't just admit defeat and put a dam picture up there.

5. One thing I do like on stars is that stars automatically shows you your holecards that you've previously folded, later during the same hand if people are still playing in it, just by you rolling over your avatar. On full tilt you have to hover over your avatar for a few seconds, and even then it only pops up a texty-looking "alt" window with text versions of your holecards. Stars gives you the full-out picture of the cards in true-to-life size and everything. Me likey.

6. I've mentioned this one before recently, but stars is very smart about their mtt satellites, which they automatically end instantaneously just as soon as the bubble bursts and everyone left is a winners, with no choice in the matter to play the thing out like a bunch of donkeys. On full tilt you are left with like what I did last night, going to bed and then even once the bubble in that FOTPS #1 megasat "ended", I bet it was another 45, 50 minutes before they awarded the seat because donkeys like me had to get blinded all the way down to zero, sit through a 5-minute break that had already been coming up, and just generally wait through a lot of bullshit and stooopidity even though every single winner and the winning prizes had already been determined. Dumb dumb dumb.

OK that's my thoughts.

Mookie tonight, 10pm ET, full tilt. Password as always is "vegas1". I should be out by 10:20 or so.