Ultimate Bet

So after watching Chad rip up Ultimate Bet like it's his job and hearing nonstop about the great structures available in the multi-table tournaments there, I decided to re-download the UB software and take a looksie for myself. I had an account at UB a good 3 or 4 years ago, played there a little bit, but quickly determined at the time that I did not like the software nearly as much as pokerstars -- the only other site I was playing on at the time -- and with the tournament availability at UB also paling in comparison to stars, I quickly got rid of the client and focused entirely on pokerstars until full tilt came into the picture some months later.

Now, the first thing you may be asking is how on earth can I put my money into a site that recently got caught with a massive cheating scam? The answer is I have no idea just how "safe" or "real" the poker there is, but if Chad has won fifty billion dollars there in the past couple of weeks, then I have every reason to believe that the site is now on the up and up. I certainly would never spend a dime at a poker site that I did not believe is offering legitimate poker (hence why I absolutely love when people claim the sites they play at are rigged or fixed in some way), and I know UB recently joined a new network of poker sites following the "superuser" scandal, so in an attempt to stay afloat it is probably fair to say that right now UB is among the safest of the poker sites. But I'm not trying to make any guarantees to anyone, I just figured it was worth checking out what a site that is bending over backwards right now to keep its users happy.

And what I found, I have to say I really liked. There are two aspects I was particularly into -- the software, and the tournament structures.

First, the software. UB has really got it going on in this department. I will still always be partial to full tilt, which I think has the best "last hand" feature, no problems with accessing hand histories, offers the best stats and the best in-tournament information about your current place in the tournament, stack size, etc. And I just like the look and feel of full tilt more than the other poker clients out there. But UB is right up there. The chat box is not intrusive and is easy to mute or detach, unlike some sites. The size and graphics of the cards is just right. They have a "bet pot" button and a good-working bet slider. You can get an array of stats at the click of one button for any playing session, and the "info" tab for tournaments gives you everything you want to know in one fell swoop. I know that in the past when I first sat down to play at a new site, it has taken me some time in all cases before being able to do well just due to adjusting to the new client, the graphics, where all the buttons are, etc. Not so with UB.

And this leads to the second big appeal of Ultimate Bet -- the structure of the tournaments. Every night at 8pm ET is a 20k guaranteed deep stack mtt, which starts you with 5000 chips and blinds of 5-10. Yes that is 500 big blinds to play with, which makes this totally unlike the daily tournaments at any other online poker site I know of. And the blind rounds in both the nightly 8pm 20k deep stack and the 9pm ET 30k bounty mtt are a full 15 minutes, which as I wrote about last week, make no sense IMO for a $10 buyin blonkament with a $150 first prize but which are awesome for a large mtt with a nice big prize pool worth winning. And the games play differently at UB as a result of these structural advantages, which I can say from just two mtt's played at UB so far. With stacks this deep and structures this slow, these things end up playing more like cash games for the entire first hour or so, if not more. There is far more limping and less raising in the earlygoing, and you can easily see a flop with just about any pocket pair or any speculative hand whatsoever and have sufficient odds to do so. There is far more postflop play for a longer period of time than in any other online site's regular daily tournaments, even the slow-structured mtts on full tilt and pokerstars like I have written about recently.

As a result, as these things get deeper, you pretty much always have the chance through the first several hours to raise, bet on the flop and still get away without decimating your stack. Imagine having just an average stack three hours in to the 50-50 on full tilt. Even at average, if you raise preflop and then c-bet the flop, if you have to fold after that, you just gave up probably 35-40% of your stack. Not so on UB. That would probably amount to 20% or less of your stack given the structure there, a good three hours in to their nightly guaranteed tournaments. And more than that, even at the final tables, the M's are a good 2-3 times higher than they are at the other major online poker sites. Now of course even with 15-minute blind rounds you're not talking about M's of 50 at the final table, but believe you me an average M of 15 is a hell of a lot better than an average M of 6 by the time the final table comes around. Anyone skilled at final table play should be thrilled to know that at UB the final table is not a complete push-n-pray cardrack fest like it is at most other sites.

That said, luck still plays a major factor in the final table play, of course. Here was me in my first mtt on Ultimate Bet this weekend in over three years:





So, a cool $2200 payout, plus 13 $10 bounties along the way to max out at just over a $2200 net profit for the tournament. And this, again, in my very first tournament with the new UB software that I had ever seen. That right there is a real testament to how useable the software really is, and how friendly the tournament structure is to skilled players. But as I said, luck still reared its ugly head in a big way for me at the final table, in two key hands. First, I picked up AA with eight players left, in the big blind no less, and to top it off the shorty in first position pushed allin before the action even got to me. We took the flop heads-up, with him holding JTs, and a totally innocuous flop quickly turned into tunner-runner straight for him and knocked me out of what would have been the chip lead. And, as if that wouldn't have been enough already, down to seven players remaining I got it allin with another shortish stack when I flopped two pairs before he again runner-runner four-flushed me to crush me.

This has been the story of my play of late -- I'm actualy making a fair number of final tables, but for some reason or another I just haven't been able of late to close the deal and home in on the top few spots when the real money is. Sure I am making nice profits along the way no doubt, and sure I've been able to crush at the end of some blonkaments, but those things are more like sng's than real mtts, and when the big money isn't on the line, it's just not at all the same thing. This weekend I thought I was playing well, but I will freely admit that after that second screwage at the final table on UB, my game was shaken badly and I limped my way to the next two spots before making an idiotic reraise against an UTG raiser with some shitty hand, 76o or some point, sitting on a miniscule stack of the five remaining players. But in other final tables recently, it hasn't been suckouts so much as lack of cards, lack of focus, or you name it. The bottom line is, any successful mtt player knows that the only way you really nail down profits over time in mtts is to consistently post top-3 cashes. You could make 50 big final tables a year, but if they are all 9th place finishes, you won't do nearly as well as the guy with 10 final tables, but including 4 wins, 4 second-places and 2 thirds. I need to focus better on final tables here as we head into the end of my best year by far in online poker, and this is a lesson I will not forget the next time I find myself in this situation, hopefully sooner rather than later.