The Fish Roar Back on Donkey Island

And the hits just keep on coming in Survivor Poker. Not to be outdone by what we've seen already happen in just a few short weeks on Donkey Island, Wednesday night's Dank tournament brought a couple of new shocking surprises. For starters, Team Fish outlasted Team Donkey for only the first time since I won the opening tournament of the series, meaning that the Fish won a key battle to allow themselves to retain their four remaining team members, and instead force the Donkeys to show us all a little more about who is in charge of their own alliance as they would have to vote a player off of their team here in the last tournament before the two teams merge and it becomes every person for themselves.

But the bigger shock to me had to be who the Donkeys voted out, although I guess at some point I have to stop acting all shocked when this happens and just accept that this is the way the game is going. Jordan has been eliminated in what I can only describe as a major upset, and I will be honest in admitting that I lost a little bit of coin on two prop bets each of which involved Jordan being alive in the competition at least for another couple of weeks.

One trend I just don't think can be denied at this point is that the vote-off selections have little to nothing to do with poker prowess. Or, should I say, the teams do not seem to be keeping around the people who are perceived to be the best blogger tournament players. The Fish got rid of Al and myself pretty quick on our half of the bracket, and in two chances the Donkeys now voted off Numb and Jordan, surely two of their strongest competitors from a poker perspective. And frankly, I can see the refreshingness to these decisions. I mean, this is not the way that I would be handling the eliminations personally, but it's nice for a change that a bunch of bloggers have gotten together for a tournament series, and yet the ultimate winner of the series is not the person who plays the best in the tournaments. That's not something we've ever done before as a group, and I think what we're finding is that the participants are revelling in that, in their chance to make a run at a trophy without the pressure of needing to necessarily play the best or last the longest or win the most tournaments, what have you. On Donkey Island, the tournaments all matter, and who gets voted off can and has been greatly influenced by what happens in our tournaments, but at the end of the day the guys who in my view seem like the most skilled blonkament players seem to have very short half-lives. It's an interesting twist on the usual blogger tournament series, and one that I am enjoying. From the rail. Thanks to my own former teammates.

Seriously though, both Josie and Iaatg played excellent games at the Dank on Wednesday, both of them cashing along with myself and Joanada, and ultimately the two of them went head to head for a few hands before iaatg nabbed the title. Jordan managed to last the longest of the Donkeys (again), but eventually after amassing a number of big stacks he finally succumbed to the pressure of the blinds after seeing himself slip to the bottom of the leaderboard with 5 or 6 runners remaining. But iiatg and Josie really played smart, never once getting out of line as the pressure mounted and the number of Donkeys remaining shrank and shrank, and they fully earned the right not to have to vote someone out on Wednesday before the merger of the two teams. It was a well-fought win and well-deserved by my former teammates to preserve I think any real chance they have of survival once the merger occurs heading into the next tournament. Now down just 6-4 of the ten remaining players, the Fish gave themselves a fighting chance at near-even teams and alliances by ensuring they would not need to eliminate another team member.

Oh, and my individual immunity bounty? No dice. Several people tried, and I eliminated two Team Donkey members along the way, but nobody could take me out until the last of the losing team members in Jordan was finally eliminated. Eventually I pushed AJ into iiatg's AK when down to 4-handed and iiatg took me out, but at that point the immunity was worthless because the Fish had already secured victory and knew they would all be immune from elimination on the night.

So, with Jordan now gone, the list of my pre-tournament favorites in Survivor Poker continues to shrink, and this is really, truly anyone's game. You've got the series creator in Julius Goat still alive, and you've got several people who've been around for ages in Katitude, Heffmike and BrainMc, in addition to a number of newer or more recent bloggers like Josie, muhctim, iiatg and others still lurking in the weeds. I will repeat what I said a couple of weeks ago -- and Jordan's elimination last night only furthers this case -- but this thing might come down to a contest to see who has done the least in their blog to annoy or irritate the other bloggers who are a part of this competition. A guy like myself, or Jordan, we've got years and years worth of many many many posts on our blogs, we tell it like it is and we speak our minds, and I can only assume that what has been seen and interpreted on Jordan's blog over time makes some contribution to his being voted off last night, whether he or even the other voters explicitly realize that or not. A number of the remaining participants in Donkey Island as the teams merge together are clearly not in that boat, as they either don't blog much, are relatively new to the scene entirely, or simply don't generally make many controversial or direct statements in their blog to get other readers' dander up. I think I'm going to wait another week or so before I post some odds on the remaining players, but we've got a number of strong poker players and solid writers whose blogs I enjoy left to compete for the last ten spots on Donkey Island.

Play the Goat on Sunday

While I continue to wallow in having had my time on Donkey Island cut short by my teammates, don't forget that the next tournament of Survivor Poker is this Sunday, and unlike the past two weeks' $1 rebuy format, this time around Goat has set up a $5 multi-entry tournament. I like that structure ten times better than any $1 monkey pushfest, and I think it will make the tournament a lot more interesting, let alone make it easier for the better players to probably end up battling it out at the end.

In case you live under a rock or something, Survivor Poker is that thing that basically everybody who's anybody has been writing about in their blogs this week, and it's the brainchild of one Julius K. Goat, who if you read his blog is already used to filling our days with things that are crazy and awesome, so it should not be surprising that such a crawesome idea would have sprung from his head. So come out to full tilt at 9:30pm ET on Sunday night and play the Goat (password is "survive" -- not that I know anything about that!), and buy in once, or buy in four times, and take your shot at helping Team Fish outlast the Donkeys and force Team Donkey to splinter their happy little alliance there if at all possible. Because so far, other than acting in near-unison after tournament #1 in booting Numb, those guys have just been sitting around scheming amongst themselves, making plans for the eventuality that all of their times will eventually come as well in this tournament series. I say it's about time we start learning a little bit more about the alliances going on within the Donkeys -- other than of course than Numb wasn't in on it. But who else is on the outside looking in? Because I can solemnly guarantee you that it's already been decided who will get voted off of the Donkeys if they ever do lose another tournament during Team Play time, whether you realize it or not, and that the required number of votes to make that happen have already been secured.

Which reminds me, for those of you on either team still on Donkey Island and hoping Sunday night will not be the night that your name is called, remember this piece of advice that became apparent to me basically the moment I was shocked to see Numb summarily voted out by his team in near-unanimous fashion just minutes after taking me to the mat at the final table of the very first Survivor Poker tournament earlier this month: If you don't already know who your team will be voting out if they lose the tournament that night, then it's probably going to be you.

End of the Road

Well, that was fun. Really. Survivor Poker was a blast for me, for all three tournaments I stayed alive. Which, frankly, is three tournaments longer than I thought I would. While I won't take the time to review exactly what happened to me, suffice it to say that the others on my team certainly took the game more seriously than I did, and in the end they played the game a heck of a lot better than me. I thought I was safe for another couple of votes, but it turns out that somebody else on the team obviously had got into my teammates' heads and once that happened, the die was cast. And that is the reason why I now write to you as a less than proud member of the tribal council and not a current player on Donkey Island.

So let's see, with still two more tournaments left during Team Play, Team Fish grows more handicapped by the day. Now it will be iiatg, Dawn Summers, Josie, xkm and SmBoatDrinks going up against the stacked Team Donkey lineup twice more to try to last the longest and thus avoid having to shorten that team even further.

I've had about five people since last night ask me how the team could vote me off when that so clearly seems to hurt their chances to avoid elimination votes during the balance of Team Play. I think there are a lot of good answers to that question. For starters, the Team Play time of the competition is short. At first I thought it would last for half of the game, but the more recent rules announced that the teams would only persist for the first six tournaments, of which four are already done after last night. So we're talking about a total of two more tournaments that my five ex-teammates need to survive in order to make it to the merge. And I think a lot if not all of the people left on my team take some amount of comfort in that -- think about it, even if the worst possible outcome goes down and Team Fish loses and loses hard on Sunday night and then again at next week's Dank tournament, that's still a total of only two more players who need to get eliminated, and I think there is fairly good reason for pretty much all five of the remaining Fish to think they cannot possibly be "it" over the next two weeks. Even though two of them may soon find out that they were wrong, much like I did this week.

Moreover, what have I really done in these four tournaments to show my worth as some kind of a "stopper" to my teammates? Yes, I won the first tournament, and yes I strategically outlasted NumbBono to make sure I took care of my team before just pushing allin every hand after that. But what about in the other three tournaments since then? In the first Dank, I lost a big pot early to somebody and was never able to recover, busting among the first handful of players out and hitting the sack early. In last week's Goat tournament on Sunday night, I played great, of course getting donked on 15 or 20 times during Monkey Hour but then righting the ship near the end and building up a nice stack after I went set over set vs. Goat early in Hour 2. At some point, twoblackaces raised preflop from middle position, and I just called to trap with AK, and the flop came K33 to boot which is pretty much the literal best flop imaginable for someone with my holding. TBA bet out like I knew he would, I raised, and he immediately pushed, but I knew with this board and the fact that he had raised preflop that I was ahead. That is, until TBA flipped up 53s to turn that best-possible flop for me into the "unmitigated disaster" flop instead, and two hands later IGH. And then in this week's Dank, I once again was off to a nice start, building up a workable stack and trying to outlast as many of the Team Donkeys as I could, and then a poo flinger got allin against me with just an inside straight draw on the flop. They did not hit their straight, but the river rewarded the play with a miracle trips and IGH early again despite having taking advantage of my opponently badly in the tournament. So what value have I really shown to these guys anyways, beyond my historical success in blogger tournaments in general? I mean, yeah I won the only tournament our team has won so far in this series, but otherwise I haven't done any better than anybody else on my team -- with not even a top-20 finish to show for those other three efforts -- and we have been suffering as a result. I imagine that if I had won 3 of the 4 tournaments already, I would still be writing to you today from inside Donkey Island instead of out here on the Council, but then there would still be 7 members left of our team instead of the 5 we are down to now.

The last thing to think of in terms of making this decision -- and this surely played in to Al receiving so many of Team Fish's votes the other day as well, though I don't think he gets this yet -- is that the popular bloggers are always going to be good targets to take out whenever you think you can get the popular vote up enough to get them out. Why wouldn't somebody want to take AlCantHang out of Donkey Island at the very first chance you get, as early as possible in the competition? The longer a guy like that stays alive, the more of a risk he is to continue staying alive, and eventually to vote you out in a later week? People out there have to realize that there are very valid strategic reasons, in addition to the personal reasons mentioned above, for anyone on my team to want me out of the competition as soon as humanly possible. Even if I can help the team a little bit over the next week during the remainder of Team Play, geetting rid of me specifically when the ability was there to do so would be a wise move for anyone with designs of running deep, and this is certainly not lost on me.

One of the interesting aspects to all of this is what is likely to happen when the teams do merge in just one short week from now. Because the way I see it, judging by what happened in the very first tournament -- the only tournament that Team Fish managed to win so far -- Team Donkey obviously has a nice, tight voting alliance going on, and one can only assume that the Team Fish participants will be fighting an uphill battle to get inside that alliance once the merge happens. With much of the successful blonkament experience now gone from Team Fish, I would not want to be them and head into the merge with just 3 Fish combining with those 7 Donkeys and their strong voting alliance -- that does not sound to me like it bodes well for the surviving Fish. If the Fish can manage to win the next two tournaments during Team Play this coming week, then they can cut that margin to 5-5 and give themselves a much better chance at post-merger survival. Again, if I had been playing better in these tournaments so far, I would feel much more justified in giving my teammates crap for eliminating me when I can help so much, but as I said above, I've been getting covered in flung monkey-poo so far in these events and haven't been able to do much of anything to help the team any more than anybody else among the Fish.

Here now a quarter of the way through the competition, I thought I would take a quick look at handicapping some of the potential winners here. In the end, one thing I have definitely taken from this so far is that the people surviving so far seem to be centered on those without much history, and without much public involvement in the group. Basically, people who haven't had several years to build up a bunch of haters that inevitably amass when someone has a public blog that people in our group read, in particular someone like myself who tells it like it is, and someone who has had poker success as well to boot. All of these things tend to lead to haterism, and haterism is deadly as anything you can imagine in a competition like Survivor Poker. I knew as soon as Goat pitched me on this idea that I could not last more than a few weeks, because there are just too many people out there with a reason (or fifty) to want to vote against me the first chance they get. I mean, look at the people who have survived now three elimination votes from Team Fish. Josie, who is new, and hasn't had any time to get people to hate her. I mean, who hates Josie? Nobody. SmBoatDrinks? Boat has won a coupl e of Mookie's or something in his day, but I ask again: Who hates him? iaatgwhateverhisnameis? I've seen him in some BBTs in the past and also he has won a Mookie or two as I recall, but who hates him? xkm? There's another guy without a prominent blog to have pissed people off in over the past several years. Who even knows these people really? But I can't help but notice that those are the guys who are surviving these elimination votes so far.

Taking that into account, I think Boat and Josie have as good a chance as anyone to survive from Team Fish. They are generally well-liked, and are not out there enough with strong opinions to be hated by anyone that I can imagine. On the Donkeys side, we haven't really seen enough of their voting strategy yet to have a good feel as to who can survive from their team, but I have some general thoughts. Not only is Team Donkey stacked with experienced blogger tournament players, but my sense is that they are also the more experienced Survivor viewers and those more facile with the nuances of playing the elimination type of game. I predict some serious alliances, and some serious dicking over of alliance-mates, coming out of the Donkey side of the house in the second half of this competition, which should make for some compelling viewing as the series wears on. I think Goat will be hard to get knocked out of his own brainchild, although to be honest I am not sure he has the raw lack of scruples that I'm sure will be necessary to finish as the victor in a backstabby competition like this. Something tells me that Jordan and Jamyhawk are likely to run deep in this thing, although I expect to post some more detailed odds a little bit later in the competition as we continue wearing down the list of eligible players still alive and well on Donkey Island.

The last question for me right now -- and frankly, one I do not know the answer to just yet -- is what I will do from here. Do I keep making an effort to play in these Donkey Island tournaments, or just let them happen around me and get in there only when I can? And more importantly, assuming I do play some or most of them, what is my objective? Do I try to keep the Fish in the game and do my best to knock out the Donkeys? But why, what's in it for me to do that? Do I just try to play my best and win? Or, do I do what I can to work against my former teammates, the ones who were convinced at the last minute to vote me out this week by a 4-1-1 margin? I could see any of those options making sense. Every time I see Numb run deep in one of these things like last night, I find myself wondering why he does it for that team that so screwed one of their best players right after he ran the deepest of anyone right off the bat in week 1. I'm not sure I would be interested in being that guy.

One thing is for sure -- with 42 runners in the Dank last night as proof, Goat and Buddy have definitely found a nice way to make our regular blogger tournaments fun again. If you haven't been getting in on the action so far, there's still plenty of time to participate and even affect the outcome of Survivor Poker: Donkey Island.