50-50 Final Table Hand Revisited

On Thursday I wrote about the silly suckout that knocked me out of the 50-50 on the final table bubble on Wednesday night, netting me about $900 cash but raping me of an expected value from the tournament that was probably closer to $3000 or so before the suckout occurred, and significantly higher once I was a better than 4-to-1 favorite to become the chip leader with ten players remaining in the tournament with just one river card to come. In the comments to Thursday's post it was suggested that my opponent did not make a bad play by pushing in his entire chip-leading stack on a massive overbet to the size of the pot when he flopped 743 rainbow with his holding of 75o. This strikes me as a particuarly bad play -- in fact as the very worst of the chipleader's options in this spot -- but I always focus on keeping an open mind about things so I spent my entire train ride home on Thursday with a pen and some paper trying to work this question out and see if my math instincts, which do not usually lead my astray, might have done just that on this one. As I worked through the problem it occurred to me this might be a fun blog post. So here we are. And keep in mind, I am well aware that solving this sort of problem in a poker context requires one to make about 8500 assumptions, all of which are challengeable if you want to, but without assuming many things there is simply no way to compare the worth of one play versus another. So I'm going to solve this the way I believe Sklansky, Harrington, etc. would approach it, having read pretty much all of their books.

OK so to review and give you the whole setup, there are 10 players left in the 50-50. This was a larger than usual 50-50 with just under 1100 runners, a good 10-15% more entrants than this thing has been attracting most weeknights these days, and this number of players equates to approximately 2.1 million chips in play. The approximate payouts for the top 10 spots range from $900 for 10th place, $1000 for 9th, $1200 for 8th, $1600 for 7th, $2100 for 6th, $2700 for 5th, $3500 for 4th, $4600 for 3rd, $7000 for 2nd place and up to just about $11,000 for first place, for a total distrubtion to the final 10 finishers of $35,600. For lack of any better way of determining the players' relative Expected Value of the Tournament in cold, hard cash (TEV), I will add up all the money available in the remaining prize pool ($35,600), and I will assume that each player's TEV share of that $35,600 prize pool is equal to their proportion of the total chips in play with 10 players remaining, multiplied by the total prize pool left to be distributed. As I mentioned above, this obviously is not an exact science, but I can't think of a more accurate way than this of determining what each player is likely to win given their current chip stack and the money available to the remaining players in payouts in this event.

One important caveat I will have to follow about using this TEV formula, however, is that it very quickly gets out of whack once one player amasses more than, say, 20% of the outstanding chips with still a full table of players remaining. This is because the first prize of 11k is itself only less than a third of the total $35,600 prize pool to be paid out to the top 10 finishers in the 50-50, so if one player has, say, half the chips, it's not like his Tournament EV is actually half of $35,600, since the maximum he could possibly win by taking down the entire tournament is only the 11k first prize. So, once we get above around 20% of the chips in play with ten players remaining, I can't use this simple TEV formula anymore since it leads to TEV outcomes that are highly skewed to the upside. So for those calculations in the below solution, I will explain the alternative formula I have opted to use instead as I go through it.

So here is a chart of the approximate chipcounts of the 10 remaining players and the respective Tournament Expected Value (TEV) of each player in the tournament given their current chip stack when this problem occurred:

Player     Chips  TEV
Player 1   440k  $7120 (Villian)
Player 2   290k  $4692
Player 3   270k  $4369
Player 4   250k  $4045
Player 5   240k  $3883 (Me)
Player 6   190k  $3075
Player 7   170k   $2750
Player 8   140k  $2265
Player 9   120k  $1942
Player 10  90k   $1456

Again, these TEV figures come from simply taking each player's proportion of the total 2.2 million chips in play, and calculating an equal proportion of the $35,600 in total prize money available.

So, Player 1, the Villain in this hand, has an expected value from this tournament of $7120 right now before the hand in question, due mainly to the fact that he has almst exactly one-fifth of the total chips in play, giving his an excellent chance of nabbing one of the top few cash payouts in the prize pool. I should note that his nearly 20% of the outstanding chips is right up against the point I mentioned above where my simple TEV formula starts to skew, but even if this $7120 figure is skewed by his 20% of the outstanding chips, it is only skewed by a little bit, a couple hundred chips maximum in any event. So I'm sticking with the $7120 as Villain's starting TEV for this problem, although if you prefer to think of it as $7000, or even as low as maybe $6800 or so, I can't really say that is any more or less accurate than the $7120 figure I am using. Anyways, my TEV at the time this hand occurred was $3883, as I had just over 10% of the chips in play and thus my TEV is very close to the average of all payouts remaining in the pool.

OK on to the hand in question. Villain, the significant chip leader, is in the small blind and the action folds around to him. He looks down to find 75o. He should probably fold here, but I'm not gonna kill him for trying to pad his chip lead at a time when everyone else is probably going to be playing tight, scared of missing the final table. So he raises the 5000-chip blind around the size of the pot to $18,500, bringing his chip stack down to 421k (these numbers are not necessarily exact, but they're all very close). I wake up in the big blind with pocket Kings, my first premium pair of the entire tournament. No point in slow-playing this, I don't want to go up against the big stack here on the literal final table bubble with a hand that's going to be hard to lay down, so I bump it up by the size of the pot again, to 55k, bringing my chip stack down to 185k. Villain calls -- with 75o!! -- which was a horrible, horrid, putrid play that stinks so bad I can still smell it here more than 30 hours later, making his stack now 384k.

The flop comes down 743, rainbow. Villain has flopped top pair and a 5 kicker. He also has an inside straight draw. As I even just begin to ponder how much I love this raggy flop in this key spot for me, Villain instantly pushes allin for 384k into a 113k pot. I think for about 2 seconds and then of course I call for all my chips, the turn is a raggy 9 but the river brings a 7, giving the Villain trips and sending me home in 10th place for the $900 final table bubble payout. I know I played this hand optimally, so I don't have any doubts at all about my own play, but my feeling when I posted on Thursday was that Villain's allin insta-overpush on the flop against my preflop reraise was a bad move that clearly cost Villain TEV over time. Some comments said otherwise. So let's work it out.

Remember, the starting point here is that Villain comes into the hand with 440k in chips, and thus an TEV of this tournament of $7120.

The first, and really the central, issue in this hand is what is my hand range for me to pot-reraise the chip leader preflop for over 25% of my stack here on the final table bubble. The answer is that this is a hugely tight range of only the absolute very best hands. He is the chip leader, and we're right on the final table bubble. Now, with ATs or something like that, it is unlikely but I suppose conceivable that I might push allin on a reraise. I actually would fold a hand like that in this spot, but trying to get into Villain's head, maybe he could think that way. But to only pot-reraise as opposed to pushing allin, with about 27% of my stack into the pot preflop, against the chip leader, on the literal final table bubble with the payouts just about to start really escalating, a reasonable hand range for me is AA-JJ, and AK. That's it. Perhaps he could think I would make this move with AQ as well, although of course in reality I would not. I might reraise allin, and I might (more likely) fold to his preflop raise given that this is the final table bubble and he is the chip leader, but no way in hike I pot-reraise with AQ there. So it's AA-JJ or AK, and maybe he would throw AQ in there as well. That's it.

The next assumption is to predict what I'm going to do with each of those hands to his massive insta-allin overbet on the flop. This one is easy. I'm folding the AK (or AQ), and I'm calling with all the big pairs. He was making a move from the small blind, I had been playing fairly tight while he had been an uber-calling donkey for the last hour or so, and I felt more or less positive that I was well ahead of anything he might have been holding as soon as he did not re-reraise me before the flop. His allin massive overbet insta-push on the flop absolutely iced it for me. AA or a flopped set would never, ever do that in this spot for fear of losing me, and would surely require at least a few moments of thought as to how to extract the most chips from me with such a flop. So I'm calling 100% of the time with AA-JJ, and folding 100% of the time with AK, or AQ if you think that's in my range.

So let's look at the structured hand analysis of how likely each of those hands is for me. There are 6 ways to make each pocket pair of JJ, QQ, KK and AA, and there are 12 ways to make AK (and AQ). So there are either 36 hands in my total range (if AQ is not included), or 48 hands in the range (if AQ is included), and in both cases 24 of them are pocket pairs which call 100% of the time in this spot.

So, moving on to the math, let's see what happens to his stack and with what probabilities, and thus what happens to that $7120 TEV he started the hand with, once he pushes allin on the flop. He should figure, if he is behind (he always will be if I call), he has 9 outs (two more 7s, four 6s and three 5s), discounted a bit for my redraws to trips with my pocket pair and better two-pair hands:

If AQ is not in my hand range, so it is just AA-JJ and AK:

66.7% of the time, I have a pocket pair (24 out of 36 possible hands), which I call with every time given the circumstances. In this case:

(1) Villain will win 36% of the time with his 9 outs twice, discounted slightly for my redraws. If he wins the 483k pot, his stack jumps to 682k, giving him around 31% of the chips in play and a very high likelihood of nabbing one of the top 3 payouts. Unfortunately here we cannot use my Tournament EV formula, because it would equate with him having a TEV of around $11,100, or higher than the first place payout, which of course makes no sense whatsoever since the maximum he can possibly win by winning this tournament outright is the $11,000 first prize, and there is still an entire final table of players to get through. This is exactly the skew I was referencing earlier with my TEV formula once someone starts amassing a huge portion of the remaining chips with more than a few players remaining. So for Villain if he beats me here, we will have to devise a different method of computing his Tournament EV. To do this, let's instead just intuit that, with 31% of the chips outstanding and 10 players remaining, he has just a 10% chance of missing the top 3 payouts, paying him an average of $2000 if he does, and a 20% chance of ending in 3rd place ($4600), 30% of second place ($7000) and 40% of ending in 1st place ($11,000). This equates to a Tournament EV of $200 + $920 + $2100 + $4400 = $7620.

At first glance this may not sound right because his TEV with 440k in chips was already $7120, and now with another 245k in chips on top, the TEV only rises another $500 or so. But in reality this makes perfect sense. With ten players left, there is only so close to the $11,000 first prize that one's Tournament EV can ever come. So much can happen, so much is still dependent on luck, that with 10 players left it's going to be nearly impossible to nab a TEV much higher than 2/3 or so of the first prize payout. So $7620 for Villain's TEV if he wins my stack seems about right to me.

(2) Villain will lose 64% of the time to my higher pocket pair, in which case his stack drops to 199k. At 199k, his TEV drops to $3220 from the $7120 it began the hand with.

So, to summarize, 66.7% of the time when he pushes, I have a pocket pair and will call. When that happens, 36% of the time he wins anyways and his TEV climbs to $7620. 64% of the time he loses and his TEV drops to $3220.

What happens the other 33.3% of the time, when I have AK? I fold, so Villain automatically wins the 483k pot, bringing his stack up to 517k. Once again my original TEV formula is going to produce a TEV value skewed too high with Villain then holding nearly a quarter of the total chips in play with still 10 players remaining, so let's intuit again for a bit. With 517,000 out of 2.2 million chips, let's figure he has a 15% chance of missing the top 3 payouts for an average payout of $2000, an 18% chance of 3rd place for $4600, a 28% chance of 2nd place for $7000 and a 39% chance of first place for $11,000. This equates to a Tournament EV of $300 + $828 + $1960 + $4290 = $7378. Again, not much higher than his TEV with 440k chips and ten players remaining before the hand even started. Of course these numbers are all so inexact and you could adjust them here and there however you want, but my point is, his TEV does not rise much by getting me to fold and bumping his stack up another 113k with still ten players left.

OK, so for the grand summary, when Villain pushes allin on this flop, 66.7% of the time, I have a pocket pair and will call. When that happens, 36% of those times he wins anyways and his TEV climbs to $7620. 64% of those times he loses and his TEV drops to $3220. In the other 33.3% of cases, I have AK and I fold, raising his TEV to $7378.

Now we can easily figure out his overall TEV from the above probabilities and values. Remember, he started with a TEV of $7120 before this hand began.

66.7% (I call) x 36% (he wins anyways) = TEV of $7620.
66.7% (I call) x 64% (he loses) = TEV of $3220
33.3% (I fold) = TEV of $7378

Adding these three mutually exclusive outcomes up, we have $1829.71 + $1374.55 + $2456.87 = $5661.13. Villain's Tournament EV from pushing allin on the flop against a guy with a range of AA-JJ or AK who will call with any of the pairs and fold the AK, drops from $7120 to $5661.13. That right there is a hugely bad play for Villain, which is what I felt at the time. As chip leader with these payouts now all within reach, making that overpush is a major mistake. Now of course there are a million different assumptions and guesses thrown in to the above calculation, but hopefully it is clear that my results are so far below the $7120 TEV that he started with, that it is obvious the play is a bad one regardless of my being a little bit off here or there. He simply cannot increase his TEV very much no matter what he does in this particular hand with ten players still remaining in the tournament, but he has an overall 42% chance of decreasing his TEV to $3220 if he doubles me through. This is a gamble he should never make given that he is in position to make a serious run to the hefty top few payouts in the tournament given where he is already situated.

For interest's sake, let's throw AQ into my range as well. Like I said, there is no way I pot-reraise the chip leader with AQ in this spot, absolutely none (I might reraise allin, or I might more likely fold, but never a pot-reraise for 27% of my stack), and I refuse to even consider my doing that with a shithand like AJ or KQ or worse because that is just plain looptidin this spot. But let's throw in AQ, because it makes a whole new 12 hands in the structured hand analysis that I would fold to his flop push. I will try to simplify some of these calculations now since I've already been through how it all works once above.

So, if AQ is in my range, so it's AA-JJ, AK and AQ:

(1) Now only 50% of the time do I have one of the pairs (24 out of 48 possible hands). So I call 50% of the time, and once again when that happens, 36% of the time he wins anyways and his TEV climbs to $7620. 64% of the time he loses and his TEV drops to $3220.

(2) Now the other 50% of the time, I have AK or AQ, and I fold, raising Villain's TEV to $7378.

Again, we can easily figure out his overall TEV from the above probabilities and values, given a range of AA-JJ, AK and AQ for me:

50% (I call) x 36% (he wins anyways) = TEV of $7620.
50% (I call) x 64% (he loses) = TEV of $3220
50% (I fold) = TEV of $7378

Adding the TEV's of these three outcomes up, we have $1373.04 + $1030.40 + $3689 = $6092.44.

So, in sum, if I would pot-reraise Villain before the flop in this spot with AA-JJ or AK only, Villain's TEV by overpushing allin on the 743 flop drops from $7120 to $5661. If I would pot-reraise preflop with AA-JJ, AK or AQ, his TEV drops from $7120 to $6092. As I said, I won't even consider adding AJ, KQ or weaker hands to the mix, because that is a ludicrous assumption given that we're on the final table bubble and I'm going up against the chip leader. I suppose we could add TT to my hand range as well, but hopefully it is intuitive to you that adding another big pair to my range is only going to lower Villain's TEV from the move, because that is another hand that I will call with and be ahead of him on the flop. And I wouldn't pot-reraise with TT anyways preflop in this spot. Again, as with AQ, I might reraise allin preflop with it, and I might more likely fold it in this spot, but pot-reraise with a vulnerable and hard-to-play hand on the flop like TT? Not happening. And equally unthinkable is sinking 27% of my chips into this pot before the flop here on the final table bubble, and then folding an overpair to hsi insta-overbet allin push. Not in a million years.

So there it is, in all its boring and overcomplicated glory. It is definitively a bad play for Villain to push allin on that 734 rainbow flop with his 75o, only because the range of hands I would need to have in order to have reraised the chip leader the size of the pot on the final table bubble is so strong that his 75 is behind more often than not. If he wants to push way earlier in the tournament with 9 outs twice and possibly being in the lead in the hand in any event, there is some math to at least make that not an objectively poor play. But once you're down to the final table like this, the cash payouts take on utmost importance and the relevant calculation for many allin moves like this becomes not EV but Tournament EV -- at least the way I view it, it does.

By the way, once the guy flopped top pair, you know he could have considered that he had only top pair shit kicker and an inside straight draw, and that it was about 2-to-1 likely that I had a higher pocket pair in my hand, and he could have gone ahead with a bet of approximately half the pot,say 60k into the 113k pot. This would have brought his chip stack from 384k down to 324k, and I would doubtless have raised him allin, and he could have insta-folded there. With 324k chips and still a solid 2nd-place stack, this would have left his Tournament EV at $5196. So he could have made this half-pot bet on the flop, and I'm still going to fold my AK (33.3% of the time) or my AK/AQ (50% of the time). So his TEV of betting half the pot instead of the foolish massive overbet allin looks much better:

With a hand range of AA-JJ and AK, I have the big pair 66.7% of the time, I raise allin on the flop, and he folds, leaving him with a TEV of $5196. The other 33.3% of the time I have AK and I still fold to his half-pot bet, giving him a TEV of $7378. So this equates to an overall TEV of $3465.73 + 2456.87 = $5922.60.

With a hand range of AA-JJ and AK or AQ, I have the big pair 50% of the time, I raise allin on the flop, and he folds, leaving him with a TEV of $5196. The other 50% of the time I have AK or AQ and I fold to his half-pot bet, giving him a TEV of $7378. So this equates to an overall TEV of $2598 + 3689 = $6287.

As you can see, whether my range includes AQ or excludes AQ, the strategy of Villain betting just half the pot on the flop and then folding to any push by me dominates his silly allin overpush, leading to a higher TEV for him in either case. So even if you think him check-folding to me after flopping top pair and an inside straight draw (admittedly, that seems a bit weak to me as well) is too wimpy for the chip leader in this spot, the allin overpush on the flop was truly the worst of all of his available options.

Flame away.

Have a great weekend everyone. I should be in the FTOPS Main Event on Sunday night at 6pm ET, looking to make a big run in the first ME I have played in I think this entire year in the FTOPS.

Suckout Blues

In bottom-line profits, this has been a good week for me at the online poker tables. I've won I think three or four FTOPS satellites, having a particularly good win rate with those $50 mega-satellites they run every night during FTOPS time at 9:45pm ET, as well as the highly juicy $100 turbo sats into the FTOPS Main Event that are now running every night at 8:45pm and 10:45pm ET as well. After cashing but failing to nab the seat in two out of three of those ME sats, I did win my seat the other day, so I do intend to play on Sunday night at 6pm ET in the $535 buyin event in which I have cashed at least two times before.

But despite my being up solidly for the week so far, this has also been one of those highly frustrating weeks where you can't help but focus far more on the money left on the table than on the money you've won. Those of you out there who play a lot of multi-table tournaments will know exactly what I'm talking about. I mean, in the two FTOPS ME sats that I mentioned I cashed in but failed to win, in both cases I was eliminated on a redonkulous two- or three-outer on the turn or river, when the money didn't get in until after the flop when I was a good 90% favorite or better. That was about $900 down the drain right there over those two tourneys. Similarly, late in "the" 32k on Sunday night, I lost Tens vs 9s allin preflop in a situation where I would have had the literal chip lead but instead took a major hit to my stack, and then shortly afterwards I ran Queens into Kings allin preflop with less than the average stack. And I'm not even going in to my at least two other two- and three-outer eliminations this week, all since just Sunday night, each of which cost me a good shot at some more tournament cash. Before Wednesday evening, I had estimated to a couple of people in blog comments and in the girly that I had -- conservatively speaking -- benn rooked out of a good $2000 in tournament winnings by disgusting low-odds beatdowns, all of which featured me as at least 80% to win the hand, if not 90% or more, when the money went to the middle of the table.

Then Wednesday night made it about a hundred times even worse. I played my bitch the 50-50 on full tilt, and I amassed an early stack with some strong tactics despite not being dealt a premium pair all night long that I can recall. Out of just short of 1100 entrants, I was in the top 10 out of around 700 runners left at the end of Hour 1, and I remained there all through Hour 2 as well, ending that hour in I believe 4th out of 290 remaining. I just kept building and building, near-doubling and near-doubling, and I didn't even show down many hands to do it, which is when you know I am playing my best. I did not suck out one time in the entire night of play, and was dealt AK a bunch of times but I don't recall any of the big pairs, and yet over 5 1/2 hours of play I never really fell too far from the top of the leaderboard. In fact, the only two times I did get knocked down to the middle of the pack of remaining players were two dominated suckouts against me, once when A9 beat my AQ allin preflop, and once when JT bested my KTs allin preflop, both against shortish stacks where I took a calculated gamble in raising it allin and really didn't mind the call in either spot.

Other than those two very, very typical beatdowns, I seriously cruised through the field in the 50-50 on Wednesday, to the point that I was the literal chipleader with 300 left, with 200 left, with 100 left, and even down to 40 left, 30 left and 20 left. There were a number of bloggers and people I know on the rail to see it all happen -- this run was a thing of beauty, even compared to my other 50-50 final table runs this year. I mean, I don't think I got in behind more than one time all night long, again against a shorty where I knew exactly what I was doing and figured I had the odds to take a stab at a racey-sort of situation with my two high, sooted cards. Eventually, as the blinds escalated as we got down to the final two tables, a couple of pushbots got taken out by bigger stacks, and my stack slipped to 4th place out of 10 remaining. As usual, the play even down to this point of a $55 buyin tournament online was generally garbage, and a couple of guys at my table were so awful that they were being berated by railbirds incessantly for the better part of the previous hour for some truly unbelievable moves. The worst of these people was the chip leader with 10 left, who had a little over 400k while 2nd through 5th (including me) each had between 200k and 250k), who had amassed his big pile of chips by doing shit like instacalling allin reraises with K7s and A7o against sizable stacks with just 12 or 13 players remaining.

So it's the last hand before the 5th break, it's just before 3am ET, and I pick up pocket Kings. In the big blind no less. This is my first premium pair of the entire night, mind you. Fewlbot chip leader open-raises the pot on the small blind, and I'm not effing around with this hand of course, so I reraise. The full pot. At the time blinds were probably 2500-5000 with a 500 ante or so, so his first raise was to something like 19k, and my pot-reraise was to a little over 50k. Like I said, I wasn't going to mess around here, on the literal final table bubble. He thinks for 2 seconds and calls. No sooner does the flop come down 743 rainbow than this guy pushes allin for 400-some thousand on a massive overbet into the 130k or so pot. I took maybe 3 seconds to consider, but realized quickly enough that even a poker blogger the biggest donk alive does not get away in this spot. I'm about to be the significant chip leader in fact. I mean, this wasn't on pokerstars, so I know he doesn't have 65o in there, and he did raise and then call my pot-reraise before the flop. He's done. I call.

The chip leader flips up 75o for shitty top pair against a preflop reraiser, and an even shittier kicker just for good measure. Turn is an offsuit 9, and I am better than 5-to-1 to be chip leader. That is, until the 7 on the river rivers the donkey trips, and IGH in 10th place, one away from the final table. Just like that. Dude raises preflop with 75o (strike 1!), then calls a pot-reraise with it as chip leader down to 10 players left (strike 2!), then flops top pair 7s with a 5 kicker and pushes allin on a massive overbet (strike 3!). The money is allin and he is a solid dog. And BOOOOOooom, IGHN. It is hard to believe and even harder to swallow.

Sure I won nearly a thousand for my efforts on the night. As I said, this has been symptomatic of my entire week (and my entire career, who are we kidding) of online poker. It was yet another very profitable run into the 50-50 on full tilt, probably my 15th top-25 finish of the year in this thing, which it's not like I play every night. And while it's always fun to run deep in front of a bunch of bloggers, losing like that is just so deflating, it can't really be described in words. Yes, I won another grand on Wednesday night overall playing poker, and I am thankful and happy for that. But it doesn't feel that way. It feels like I lost about $3500 to $4000 of expected value, all on that redonkulous riversuck by a guy who desperately tried to gift me his chips.

I've said this a million times before and I'll say it again -- to me the real trick, and the real difficulty -- in regularly playing poker tournaments is not figuring out how to win them. That part is elusive for many, but not for me, and certainly not for those whose tournament skills dwarf my own. It's more or less a formula, and for the most part that formula, if applied pretty much blindly, can increase your chances of final-tabling probably 4 to 5 times above the average online player's chances at this buyin level in my experience. To me, the real skill involved in being a regular tournament player is being able to withstand the bad beats, the setup hands, the thousand-dollar losing suckouts like mine last night, and still be able to show up tomorrow in the right mindset to come back and succeed again. Sometimes I really don't understand how anyone does it.

And pardon me if I can't feel too bad about your suckout with two tables left in a $10 buyin tournament with 30-some donkeys in it. If anything that happens in that level of an event is going to have a profoundly negative effect on you, you are really never going to be cut out for mtt play. Which is not an insult in the least btw, but a very accurate obsevation nonetheless.

MATH Recap, and Multitabling MTTs

We had a strong showing for Mondays at the Hoy this week on full tilt, as 23 runners came out to play in the first Shootout-format blogger tournament that I can ever recall. And I have to say, I think it worked out really well. I went with a shorthanded 6-max format for the shootout, anticipating not the huge fields that we generally see when the BBT is in da house, and this worked out nicely as we were left with four starting tables of 6, 6, 6 and 5, with each playing down to their one winner before the four table winners sat down at the final table to battle it out for the cash.

The only downer that I saw was that all four of the starting table winners did not get paid, since 23 runners only translates to the top 3 finishers receiving payouts. Thus, Jordan from HighOnPoker, who utterly dominated his first table and basically crushed his entire starting field within just 30 minutes or so, still ended up not cashing when he busted first in 4th place of the four final tablers on the day. I regret that, as I think it would be much nicer for Jordan to have shared in the payouts since he won his first table in the shootout, but it's not like that is my decision since that is instead decided solely by full tilt, but as I said I still think the Shootout format worked very well overall. I could see extending the format to full ring Shootout tables if the fields were consistently going to be larger, but with a usual turnout in the 20-30 range, I think shorthanded tables works out much better and makes for a much better final table of original table winners as well.

In the end, as I mentioned, Jordan bubbled the cash despite crushing his original starting table and just generally continuing his lawyerly dominance in the Hoy so far this year. The final three players remaining after Jordan busted were left making the cash, and here is how it all broke out by the time the smoke had cleared on the final table:

1. Bayne $276
2. lucyfred $165.60
3. VinNay $110.40

So one lawyer on the bubble this week, one lawyer-hater at the bottom of the cash list, and an unknown player in lucyfred whose name I think I recognize from a few other blonkaments in the recent past. Lucyfred, please let me know in the comments if you have a blog and I will link your shit up.

Otherwise, just to recap on my last few days, I have played an incredible amount of tournament poker since returning to my bachelor pad without my family for the week late on Saturday night. From midnight to midnight on Sunday, for example, I managed to rack up over 1600 FTP points, and unlike some of you cash gamers to whom that number is probably not so stratospheric, those 1600+ frequent player points were amassed using 100% sitngos and mtts only. And it's not like I'm buying in to the Monday 1k or some shit where it's easy to rack this kind of points up. I played basically every large mtt that ran on Sunday, in addition to a ton of satellites into those and other larger tournaments. I did regular speed, turbo and even a number of those delicious super turbo sngs, where I am standardizing to the $45 and $75 level as my preferred donkathons of choice.

I mentioned yesterday that I also ran the turbo fiddy and the turbo hundo for the first time very late on Saturday, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe it's just me, but I really love me some turbo mtt action. Not just a turbo sng like are constantly running on one or two tables on full tilt, but a straight-out multi-table tournament. The $3 turbos n shit I just find too donkorific even for my tastes as such a low buyin tends to really make people just push n pray with any two right from the getgo, but this week's MATH winner bayne said it best in the girly over the weekend when he told me that the turbo fiddy and turbo hundo both play like a super turbo sng after the first 30 minutes. And I have to agree, that pretty much sums it up, although there is still a bit more tournament skill, use of position, and deception involved in the large mtts than in a similar one-table event any day of the week. Give me a regular nightly turbo mtt at a reasonable hour on the East Coast, with a buyin of between $26 and $50, and I am there. Every night.

I've actually even toyed with changing the MATH to a straight-up turbo event for a month and seeing how that goes. As I was discussing with some of the players in the chat box in this week's MATH tournament, I find it usually takes a good 3 or 4 weeks to really identify the problems, weakness or just differences with a particular tournament format that are not otherwise readily apparent or intuitively obvious. So I've taken to trying new structures and new formats for about a month before making a decision, as I did with the change to and then change back from payouts based on the big Sunday guarantees, which in the end I felt after four weeks to see it play out that people were mostly just changing it over to $T anyways and not playing on Sunday, so why bother. But it took a month of Hoy tournaments like that in order to ascertain that it wasn't really acting to spice things up. With the BBT away for a bit I am definitely looking to keep things interesting with the MATH -- because when I know that my own interest in playing has been sapped after a long trek like the BBT3, I can only assume this feeling is even more noticeable among you all out there who play or might play in the private blogger tournaments. So I am trying some new formats out to see if anything works best, like for example I absolutely love the double-stack Mookie's on Wednesdays as compared to the old 1500-chip style format. So right now we're checking out the Shootout, and so far so good I would say after last night. But I do long sometimes for a month of turbo MATHs, I won't deny it.

Anyways, I also took 4th place in Sunday night's 50-50, to the tune of $3400 and change. As I mentioned briefly yesterday, it is ironic because my first ever final table at the 50-50 occurred one year ago almost to the fricking day, during this exact same week right after July 4 when my wife and kids were again spending the extra week at the beach while I came home to work for the week before heading back to the beach the next weekend. So I final tabled that biatch again in my first full day home alone this time around, which was another fun ride and which I have a million screenshots of, but I can't be getting into the habit of doing a full tournament recap every time I run to frigging 4th place in an mtt. Suffice it to say, this was one of the gheyest, suckoutiest tournaments I've ever run deep in (excluding blogger tournaments, of course), one where I got highlariously lucky when I was allin and behind I think four separate times during the tournament. That's ok, though, because I know I stopped counting the times I was sucked out against when I reached eight suckouts against me, and that wasn't even all that close to the end. But it's hard for me to feel too too good about the big cash when I was allin behind a bunch of times and managed to win those key 35-40% shots a few times in addition to one nice flopped set with an underpair when allin before the flop. Still, what a ride, and what a nice re-introduction to the world of mtts. As I have played so few mtts over the past few months, the big 5050 cash gets me back into the black for even just the past 3 or 4 months worth of action, which when combined with profits at the cash tables, blogger tournaments and in sngs, is making out for easily my best year yet as an online poker player. I may actually have to really work to drum up some losses this time around just to keep myself from having to write a big fat check to good ol' Uncle Sam early in 2009 for all of this year's poker donkery, who woulda thought it. I guess in the overall scheme of things that is a good problem to have, and one I look forward to hopefully making even worse for myself here as I still have another several nights of home-alone-ness and I feel like I have another score inside me, just waiting to come bursting out.

OK don't forget the Skills game is back, now hosted by cemfredmd. That should be tonight again at 9:30pm ET I believe on full tilt. Same password as always of "skillz". I'm not sure what the game today is but I plan to be there to donk it up and then complain about it tomorrow. You know how I roll.

Monday Quickie and Nice MTT Score

This is gonna have to be a quick one since I am technically still on vacation until the end of Monday. Well, technically I am back to work today, but I've got some shit going on for most of the day that will keep me otherwise occupied and away from the pc where I spin my clever little yarns for you all on a daily basis.

So here goes:

First, tonight is once again Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt, and tonight we're going to start for the first time with the Shootout format for the tournament. Same time of 10pm ET as always, same buyin of $24 + $2, and the same password of "hammer", but the game this week will be a shorthanded shootout structure as we explore how shootouts work for our private blogger tournaments for the first time. So come on out and be among the first to play a blogger shootout and experience all the fun and excitement for yourself. There has already been a rare Tripjax sighting on the early registration list for this week's Hoy, and of course first-timers are always welcome, encouraged and lucky as ballz in this thing. See you then!

I should also make brief mention of a few other items around the world of the other poker blogs and bloggers out there that I have taken note of over the past week or so but have not been able yet to blog about. PLO expert and overall good guy Bayne recently busted out with yet another big score which can be read about over at his blog. Of course everyone knows about Lucko and LJ's recent online tournament successes, but Bayne has quietly watched his tournament game improve, pretty much right in line with an increased focus on tight, smart poker. It's always a thrill for me to watch anyone in our group evolving their tournament game and seeing the results they are looking for, and Bayne is no exception here so if you haven't been keeping up with that, head over to Bayne's blog and catch yourself up.

And speaking of some great blog posts, I have been remiss in not mentioning until now the spate of great strategy posts that once again have been regularly populating the space over at Emptyman's blog. Empty is a somewhat recent blogger and an excellent player in all the poker games, and he has had a whole host of great posts over the past year or so detailing various strategy points relating to holdem and most of the HORSE variants. Take it from me, if you are looking to improve your HORSE game, do yourself a personal favor and read through the recent archives as well as the older stuff at Emptyman's blog and you will not be disappointed.

And speaking of Lucko and LJ btw, it appears that both sides of the happy couple are busto from the World Series of Poker Main Event, both on Day One during the second round of the tournament. Loretta did make it through to Day Two, to be played later this week, and is sitting on a stack of around 35k after starting with 20k in chips. And the big story has got to be everyone's favorite poker dwarf Iggy himself, who has also survived through to Day Two with a stack of just under 38,000 chips. With the incredibly slow structure of the WSOP ME, lasting to the second day having nearly doubled the starting chip stack is a great outcome in my book, and I continue to think that Iggy has just the kind of patient, smart game to make a real run in a tournamemt like this. I'm sure you can keep up with all the Vegas happenings for these guys on their own blogs and of course on Pauly and the other media outlets covering the WSOP this year.

Well this is really all the time I have for today. Let me just reiterate that if I have any say in it, this week is going to be perhaps the biggest mtt bender of my entire life, an effort that I got off to a great start with over the weekend upon my late night Saturday return to New York City sans Hammer Girls and sans Hammer Wife, who again remain at the beach for one more week until I head down to pick them up next weekend. I played a bunch of tournaments for the first time ever over the weekend, including the donkorific phenomena known as the Turbo Fiddy and the Turbo Hundo, including a 14th place cash in the Hundo after losing a race that would have left me atop the leaderboard with a little luck. I also played my first ever Sunday Brawl as well as the 750k this week, neither of which worked out as I had been hoping although I made a decent run in each.

One thing that did work out on Sunday night / Monday morning was this:





A 4th place finish is nothing to go nuts about, but it's the first big score I've had since getting sick as I have pretty much stayed away from the mtt scene for a few months, so in that sense this felt great. I had been in 2nd place of four left before pushing into the chip leader when his top pair had mine beat, but in the end I'll take the cash and try to duplicate it again in my bender that has started off about as good as could reasonably be hoped. The most interesting aspect of this thing I think is that here I am final-tabling the 5050 again right here during the exact same week-after-July-4th when I first final-tabled it on back to back nights last year. As I mentioned last week, something about being free to play all night without disturbing anyone or anyone else being around is very liberating to me and has historically led to good results for my game. Here's hoping that this can continue tonight and into the rest of the week with my own mtt play.

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

Workin the Wii

Congratulations to Chippy McStacks for taking down this week's Skills Series event. In what, 9 or 10 Skill Series tournaments this year, yours truly still has yet to pick up even one measly bounty. That's right. I haven't eliminated nary a soul from the entire Skill Series, with no exceptions. Between that and the BBT3 in general, I am absolutely donking the shit out of the world of blonkaments, one of my worst performances ever. And last night was no different, with me busting in the first quintile or so when my split Kings went up against someone else's split 7s -- both of which were very obvious, mind you -- when the 7s declared he was allin and going home right from 3rd street. We got all the money in by 5th, and BOooooooooom there was 7s over 3s at the river for my opponent to not only keep me out of the top 5 in chips but to eliminate me entirely from the tournament. Awesome.

I wanted to write today about something related to all the 5050 final tables I made in the past month. It's something that I spoke about on buddydank radio on at least one occasion, but from some of the emails and IMs I have gotten lately it reminds me that I never really mentioned it here at all even though far more people read here than have been listening on BDR on the one or two nights where this came up. So the question is, was there anything tangible that I did differently on the nights when I made the deep mtt runs, from how I otherwise handle myself on other nights I am playing online poker? And the answer is:

The Nintendo Wii.

Yep, the Wii. See, early in the evenings, most of you who have ever searched for me online will know that I am a notorious multi-tabler. I am basically always in 2 or 3 tournaments or at 2 or 3 tables at the same time when I play 95% of my online poker. While I did not start off that way, it quickly became apparent to me that, for my particular mindset and style of play, a few tables actually is easier for me to play my game and stay focused on my style at all three. With just one table open I tend to get bored and lose focus, start playing too many hands, get awfuckitty, whatever the vice. So I'm usually at between 2 and 4 tables at all times early in the evening, say before midnight ET or so, in most cases. Nowadays with me playing at a few different poker sites again I may not always been at multiple tables on full tilt, but trust me I've got it goin on back at the Hammer House with at least 2 or 3 other tables even if I'm sitting in a blonkament or something with you.

But later in the evening, this all changes. When I'm getting decently into the money in an mtt, #1 it is very late and I am always loathe to start a new mtt or other tournament that could involve a substantial time commitment even if I bust from the 5050 or whatever tournament I am ITM in one second later. But #2, as these games move into the late stages, as I have written about previously, my game morphs from a generally tight-aggressive style, waiting for good cards in good situations and then trying to get maximum value from them while losing as little as possible when I miss, to a more purely instinctual approach, where I am basically reading my opponents for strength or weakness, and trying to use maximal pressure to take down pots before the flop except where I happen to hold a monster starting hand. This kind of game requires much more work and much more focus, and generally speaking I try not to play any other tables for this highly read-dependent, highly instinctual brand of poker that I only really crack out during what I call Push Time once down to the last 5% or so of the field in the big mtt's. I end up being fairly tense and very painstakingly involved in all the action at the table, and as a result the feeling can be highly intense and frankly, very draining on the person who does it.

And this is where the Wii comes in. During the 5-minute hourly breaks from the big mtt's earlier in the evenings, I am always playing at a few other tables at the same time, and they never all have the exact same starting times or break times. So when the 5050 takes it first, second or third hourly breaks of the night at approximately 10:30pm, 11:35pm and 12:40am ET every night, I sit right at my computer and play through whatever other sng or mtt or cash table I have open at the time. But come those 4th, 5th and 6th breaks starting in the 1 and 2am timeframe New York time, I try not to have any other tables working, so when breaktime hits, I am left with a quandary. What to do?

Now, a wise man once told me that he recommends people always get up, stretch your legs and take a short time off during your breaks, especially as we get later into an mtt, and even though much of that wise man's advice has proven to be laughable, this one has always stuck for me. Again it's not something that I worry about early in the night for the first few breaks, but I have had much success over the past several weeks by getting myself away from the computer screen for 5 minutes every hour in these deep mtt runs. I would be interested in hearing if anyone takes a different approach, but for me I find that getting away from the laptop for a bit is a helpful diversion for me, and in some ways can actually be affirmatively beneficial to some of the skills I am relying on at these deep ITM mtt stages of play. And lately, during my 5-minute breaks in the wee hours of the morning, I've been playing the Nintendo Wii to a great deal of success. So far, I've played the Wii four times during the break of a 5050 type of tournament, and I have final tabled all four times.

And I'm not just playing any old Wii game either. It's been all Wii baseball for me late at night in the midst of big mtt runs, all the time. In fact, it's not even regular Wii baseball. It's been purely the home run hitting contest under the Wii Training tab on the main menu. The 5 minutes is perfect for this. It gives me just enough time to maybe make a quick trip to the head, especially good if it's a "drinking night" in the Hammer House as usual, and then still leaves me with enough time to get through one if not two rounds of 10 pitches and try to take my swings for the fences. And given my four-for-four final tables when hitting home runs on the Wii during my breaks, I have spent a good deal of time trying to figure out what it is about the Wii that might be helping me in my poker performance late into the night. I've come up with a few explanations.

First and foremost, there is a lot of self-selection going on here, and the 4-for-4 is not really as impressive as it seems. In other words, I've only been playing the Wii in those 4th and 5th and 6th hourly breaks, which itself has only happened just a small handful of times. It's not like I've been playing the Wii after the first break in the 5050 every time I last for an hour, and then I'm going and final tabling every time I do that. Rather, I'm only hitting the Wii when I'm down to, say, the final 100 or fewer players in the big mtts, so me final tabling every time I've done it is not nearly the big feat that it may otherwise seem. And yet it still seems significant to me.

One other major point to make here is that it may just be getting my mind off of poker for 5 minutes at a time has a real impact on my ability to return to the laptop 5 minutes later and start deeply focusing once again. Like, maybe if I was exercising or something instead of hitting Wii home runs "Out of the Park!", I would be seeing the 100% identical results. That could easily be. I also am sure to stretch my legs, I sit back in my highly comfortable rocking chair while I play the Wii, and just generally I am doing something that makes me feel comfortable and might reasonably realistically work to prepare me to get back into the grind a few minutes later, almost like a 5-minute pitstop for these Nascar donks in their wifebeaters and with their mullets blazing.

But I have another theory. For those of you with the Wii and especially those of you who are familiar with the home run hitting contest, what that thing really comes down to in my mind is instinct. I mean, you see the pitch coming in, but you still need to time it and swing it just right if you want to hit that home run. A lot of it is about reaction time, and about early recognition of the location and type of pitch hurtling at you at 75 miles per hour. In the end, swinging for the fences like this is very much instinctual above all else, and my theory is that taking 5 minutes to hone my instincts like this during my break is really helping me to play a fine-tuned brand of instinctual poker in the very late stages of Push Time, and heading right up to the final table. In fact, this theory might also help explain why, after probably 500 separate attempts to take on the home run hitting contest, I today have officially one time and one time only when I actually hit home runs in all 10 at-bats I had. And that time was? The break immediately before I went on to win the 50-50 outright a couple of weeks back. That was it. Now isn't that awfully coincidental, if there is no relation at all between the quality of my Wii hitting and the quality of my poker play? I find it too coincidental to believe.

So I definitely think there is something to my Wii playing during the hourly breaks in my late mtt runs. Like I said, I spent a good deal of time talking about this during a couple of appearances I had on Buddydank radio since those few final tables, but I don't believe I have mentioned here at all yet and I wanted the rest of you to hear what one thing more than anything else I have done differently on those days than basically on all other days I am ever sitting in my place and playing online poker. Somehow, some way, trying to time and whack ten consecutive pitches out of the stadium in the Wii home run hitting contest really seems to help my poker game in real time. Working on my timing and my reactions and my recognition of situations for just 5 minutes out of every hour has seemingly shown a noticeable good effect on my late-stage mtt game generally. So take that for what you will, and if I can help any of you in your own mtt performances with what I've said here today, then that's all gravy as far as I'm concerned.

Don't forget the Mookie tonight at 10pm ET on full tilt. It's the latest BBT3 tournament and the latest chance to win a BBT3 Tournament of Champions seat to play for the four WSOP packages at the end of the 3-month BBT3 challenge, and the buyin is a mere $11, making it an affordable play for most of you out there. The Mookie password as always is "vegas1", and I will be there to donate since I couldn't win a Mookie tournament even if my life depended on it. The past few weeks I have played the Mookie fine but gotten sucked out on in redonkulous fashion, so I look for more of the same tonight, while Lucko will probably have a monstrous stack at some point along the way if things hold as they have been in the blonkaments lately in general. And I guess I should mention, my Mookie buyin is being paid for courtesy of another blogger who I helped make some money this week -- this is the second time now in a month where this has been the case, strangely -- in this case on some call options in a very juicy and very volatile stock market earlier this week. So will that $11 transfer I received yesterday prove to be my good luck charm for the Mookie?

Not. See you then though for the donation, 10pm ET on full tilt.

Another 50-50 Final Table

So on Tuesday night, I final tabled the 50-50 again on full tilt. That is three final tables in a little over 3 weeks I think in that thing. I think I really am the King of Fifty, what can I say. Seriously though, I ended up busting out uncharacteristically for me at mtt final tables in 8th place, making the whole thing kind of anticlimactic as I only ended up winning a thousand and some dollars, while there was over 9k sitting there for the winner:



Often this kind of a loss hurts more than an early bustout. In the first- or second-hour knockouts, I never really have the time or the interest to get emotionally invested in that particiular ride on the roller coaster that is mtts. I bust, maybe I get sucked out on or maybe I just get outplayed, whatever, I stew for a couple minutes if that's my inclination, but then I move on to the next thing. Or go to bed. Again, whatever. Almost every one of my four final tables in the full tilt and pokerstars 5050 tournaments over the past month included me flaming out early and spectacularly in the other of that same night's 5050s, and plenty of nights even during this hot streak I've been on in mtts, I end up busting early from both of them. And that stuff just doesn't bother me anymore. But the late runs, the ones where I can literally sniff that muffled, dank odor of internet cash before it is all snatched away from me, those are the ones that can really tend to stick with me for a while.

And yet, right not it's just not bothering me at all. It's funny, about a week ago I had another deep run in the pokerstars 5050. I ended up busting out in 16th place out of 1100-some runners when I overbet-pushed K9o on a Q84 flop and got called by K8 for all my stack. I was short at the time and needed to make a move, and I had been overpushing with strong and weak hands alike for the past couple of hours. I was fine with it, despite a few bloggers who had been on the rail asking me how much that deep loss bothered me. I told a few readers on the girly or over email that busting in 16th there didn't feel bad in the least. Now I am feeling that same feeling today. Yes I busted out in a tremendous opportunity to win some more real cash, something which is inconsistent with my goals and is not characterstic of me in general, as I have tended to convert mtt final tables into solid scores far more often than busting early from the last table. But, I feel fine about it. In fact, I actually feel great about it, because it means I am still running good. And like I told my friends after that run to 16th in the pokerstars 5050 last week -- I know I will be back again soon, so no reason to fret over lost opportunity. I can feel it. I am feeling it right now, plain and simple.

So much of mtt's is about mental state. Being mentally prepared to actually wait for the good cards and the playable situations. Being emotionally able to recover quickly from the inevitable bad beats you will take over a several-hour affair. Being in the right mental state to make the 8th laydown over 2 hours when you've repeatedly been caught stealing. It is a delicate balance of playing consistently within these correct states of mind, combined with a fair amount of luck just to really spice things up, that it takes to make a deep run in a big mtt like these 5050 tournaments are every night.

I have to say, this year during my great mtt run here I have really gotten back in touch with something I had nearly completely forgotten, although now that I have re-learned it I can very clearly remember learning and knowing this about myself a year or two ago: my greatest mtt strength is easily the late-game stage when everyone can sense the final table being close and when the Ms start getting silly for everyone. That is, the period from, say, 10% or so of the original players remaining all the way down to the final table. This is what I call "Push Time". By Push Time, basically every online mtt including even the better-structured 5050 tournaments is already in preflop push mode, where certainly any resteal or reraise will automatically commit most players left in the event, other than maybe the people at the very top of the chain. Push Time is an environment where my playing style and poker insticts really flourish.

Once you're down to that final 10% or so of the starting players, the game changes entirely. The first few hours of a big online mtt are to me all about survival. I mean yeah you need to accumulate somewhat during this time period, at least near the end of it, or you will be 100% at luck's whim as to whether you can last even a short while in Push Time. But once you get to Push Time, especially in the last half or third of Push Time when you're down to four tables, then three, and then two, suddenly the game is no longer about waiting for the good cards, not letting people outdraw you on later streets and things like that that are the absolute focus of early-tournament poker in all these online (and live) mtts. By the latter stages of Push Time, I almost never want to see a flop unless I have AA or maybe KK, and I really never want to see a turn or river unless I am holding the nuts or got there for free without a made hand. The focus changes entirely from calling behind four limpers with 98s 20 minutes in to the 5050, to instead down to two tables left and reraising a late-position open-raiser allin with your A7s and hoping your move is strong enough to get the other guy to lay down when there's just a few bustouts left before the final table. And that's the kind of move I will make too -- I don't mind in the least missing the final table by two spots, if it means I took a sensible gamble for a big stack or bust. Of course, keeping true to the "sensible" part there is important, but if you think about my recent success, I'm not limping to the final table with a distant last stack and little to no chance of the big money. I would rather not play from that situation, so I will make moves into unopened pots before my stack gets to that point if at all possible, and again I don't mind busting in 16th place or 11th place if I liked the gamble I took that eventually got me busted. It's a powerful feeling to know that most of the other guys at your 6-person table with 12 left in the 5050 are just desperately trying to hold on so they can say they made a final table, while I know that I don't mind gambling it up here in the least as long as I'm being smart about it. I hope you all get to feel that way someday.

Because there are so many moves being made, so much of Push Time for me comes down to poker instincts. Is that guy trying to steal from the cutoff again, or does he want a call? Did that extra delay he took before making the bet indicate strength or weakness? Does that particular raise amount suggest that my opponent wants (expects) me to call? What does that mean about his hand? These are the kinds of questions that I am focusing on almost exclusively starting maybe halfway or so through Push Time. Sure if I am lucky enough to pick up AA or AK I know how to play it strong, but otherwise my poker efforts are dedicated entirely to reading the other players and getting as good a feel as I can for how they do their thing late in the game. And as I've mentioned here many times, I am positive that one of my greatest late-game strengths is my ability to lay down a hand if a raise or reraise tells me I am beat, even if I have invested a fair proportion of my stack in the pot to that point. It's all about feeling when I'm ahead and feeling when I'm behind. And the thing is, there's just no way to get to the final table without finding your way through quite a lengthy Push Time period that is in my view mostly instinct-driven if played optimally. In a tournament like either of the nightly 5050s on pokerstars or full tilt, you're going to get down to 100 players left probably a good 3 hours before the tournament ends. Probably half your total time in an online entire tournament will take place in Push Time if you make it to the end. And it's a place where I survive almost entirely on my instincts, which have helped me to get to my fair share of final tables and deep runs even where I didn't have a big stack at some point with say 5% of the starting field remaining.

Anyways, Push Time and even the period before Push Time where stealing and restealing start to become the norm, that is where my bread and butter is. I used to know this. I remember thinking about it, and I'm sure I could find myself writing about it here at the blog too sometime over the past couple of years. I just need to remember that my biggest goal in these large online tournaments is to get through the first three hours with a playable stack. Average, below average is even fine as long as I have enough chips to create some action with. Within reason, with almost any stack size I turn into a real threat to make a move once we are into Hour 4 and the blinds and antes are really cranking it up to sick levels. Sickly high blinds and antes is where I thrive the most. I just need to find a way to remind myself of that when I am mired in the inevitable losing streak that is doubtless on its way.

Now tonight I'm going to find a way to channel this knowledge into a Mookie win. Oh and congrats to Mr. Smokkee himself for winning last night's PLO Skill Series tournament in huge fashion and nabbing the latest BBT3 ToC seat. Could not have happened to a nicer guy.

See you tonight for the Mookie at 10pm ET on full tilt (password is "vegas1")!