Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes...in the MATH

Mondays at the Hoy returns again tonight on full tilt at 10pm ET, which I am thinking is likely to be our last with the 6-max no-limit holdem format. As most of you know, I changed the format to shorthanded nlh at the beginning of this year merely to benefit my own self, but as that change has not worked to my benefit I am thinking about a new change that hopefully will result in me winning several MATH titles in the balance of the year.

God how I love that stuff. You really can't make it up, can you? I mean, there's about 50 of you out there who rail my ass every single solitary second I am online on full tilt and have for months, so you know as well as I do how many total shorthanded nlh tournaments I have played of any size or any kind in this entire year since making the perma-change to the Hoy tournament format. It was something I played quite a bit in the first half of 2007, but that shit is so foreign to me at this point and has been all during the past twelve months or so that frankly 6-max holdem just feels a bit funny whenever I do sit down to play such a tournament. But hey you have a blog so why not just write down whatever you want about somebody, right? Don't want to be confused with the facts, I know how it works.

Anyways, back to reality for a minute -- yes I am planning a fresh change to the MATH format starting with the July events which will begin one week from tonight, July 7. While I have enjoyed playing for $216 buyins to the weekly Sunday evening tournaments on full tilt, in the end the very thing which attracted me to this payout format -- the availability of $T -- also I think makes paying out in this way somewhat ineffective, since one can so easily (and usually does, it seems) simply use the $T for any tournament other than the weekly Sunday guarantees. Which is a great outcome btw as far as I'm concerned -- people should be playing only those tournaments that they want -- but it does make it somewhat more pointless than I thought it would to structure the payouts in this way, so I think that experiment will be over with the end of the month of June here in Hammer land.

Instead, starting with next week, I am going to take advantage of one of the new tournament structures recently made available on full tilt and try to give it a whirl with the Shootout tournament format. We will go back to the regular payout format, but I am eager to see how a Shootout structure works for a regular blogger tournament for the first time. I'm not sure if anyone has ever even done a shootout blogger event in the past, but I'm going to give that a try and see how the shootout works for the MATH for a few weeks as I continue to look to optimize this thing moving forward.

My hope is that, starting not tonight but next week, the change back to regular money payouts in addition to putting forth a shootout structure for a month or so will increase the fun and excitement for the blogger tournament to start off the action every week in our group. Personally I am not someone who has logged any significant time at all playing shootout tournaments in the past, but I think there might be something a little bit extra fun about winning a couple of one-table sngs on your way to winning a blogger tournament. Plus the other fun side of the shootout format is that it still provides lots of fun and useful experience with shorthanded and even heads-up confrontations, as winning a shootout tournament will require everyone who eventually wins to play all the way down to heads-up and eventually to win out at their starting table to even reach the final table of the tournament. As I said, I have personally played probably fewer than five shootout toutrnaments in my entire life, but to me this sounds like a fun experiment and one that I expect to last for a while as we move into the summer and beyond with the Mondays at the Hoy tournament on full tilt.

So again, tonight we are still in a regular 6-max nlh tournament format, with payouts in the $216 increments that we have had all through the month of June, but this week will be the last week of this tournament format for the Hoy. Tonight the game is at the usual time of 10pm ET, right under the "tournament" tab under "private" on full tilt, and the password as always is "hammer". The buyin remains the same at $24 + $2, where I plan for it to remain as we head into the Shootout format starting next week. And remember, last week saw MATH virgin AGuda take advantage of the usual beginners' luck to power his way to a second-place finish, so tonight we will see if AGuda is just a flash in the pan, or if he even shows up at all to defend his first-timer luck performance.

See you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt!