More Thoughts on Foxwoods and My Live MTT Performances

Jordan left me an interesting comment to my post yesterday expressing my disappointment about my performance at Foxwoods this past weekend, or to be more specific, about my performance in large live mtt's in general. Here is the text of Jordan's comment from that post:

"Hoy, if you played 7 MTTs in a night and didn't cash in any of them, would it disturb you as much as playing 7 big tournaments over several years without a cash?

I only mention this because I, too, was unable to succeed at the Turning Stone tournament this weekend (for some reason, my site is down, so no post yet). It sucked, but I had to remind myself of the fact that it is one tournament and my sample size of large buy-in tournaments is relatively small. I thought I'd pass the thought on to you. Being 0 for 7 sucks, but its only out of 7, after all."

All fair enough. But here's the thing: I know I should be performing better in these tournaments. I'm there, and I see how the others play, and I know how I play, and it is very obvious that I should be doing better. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

First, a few clarifications. For starters, I'm only referring to the largest, multi-day live mtt's I've played in, because in one-day live events I am perfectly happy with my performance and my profitability. And also, I'm not talking about cashing in these large live mtts -- rather, I'm just talking about making it to Day Two. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I think I have played in seven multi-day live mtt's in my poker career -- three WSOP tournaments, one WSOP circuit event at Caesar's in AC, one large-buyin tournament series event at Foxwoods last year, and the Venetian Deep Stack event where I recorded my biggest ever live score, plus this past weekend's near-bubblage. In about half of these events, making Day Two and cashing were pretty close to the same thing -- even in the Venetian DSE back in 2009, we made the money around midnight on Day One, played another two or three hours to get down to 48 players, and then reconvened the next day to determine the winners. But in the other half -- namely, the 3 WSOP tournaments as well as the WSOP Circuit tournament I played in -- those were three-day events, so making it to Day Two would not at all have even necessarily meant cashing in the tournament. So I could easily have several more Day Two's under my belt without having some obscene cashing percentage in the largest live mtt's I have played in. And yet I have just the one Day Two at the Venetian, and that pisses the shit out of me.

Looking directly at Jordan's comment, to answer his question, yeah, I think I would be a little bit surprised (though I'm sure it's happened before) if I played 7 online mtt's each at full attention in say a week and failed to get through maybe 60% of the field in any one of them. If I played seven live mtt's and could not even last far enough to the equivalent of Day Two in a WSOP tournament in any of them, hells to the yeah that would disturb me. Shouldn't it? Day Two in the preliminary WSOP events is what, roughly two-thirds of the field gone? That sure as hell would strike me as unacceptably poor performance for me, if I failed to outlast two-thirds of the field in all seven out of seven live mtt's I played in. It would. If that makes me pompous in someone's mind, I can live with that. I am a self-proclaimed "hammer-playin pompous ass" right here on the blog, so yeah, call me pompous if that's your read. But yeah, to answer the question asked, if I don't even last through two-thirds of the field in seven out of seven live mtt's -- in particular live, where I am playing just one mtt and there are zero other distractions to take my attention away from the game -- then yes, that seems more than bad enough to be worthy of my noticing, and my lamenting my poor performance.

And don't get me wrong -- I understand Jordan's point perfectly, and it is perfectly valid to a point. A sample size of seven is pretty much not even worth mentioning, statistically speaking, when it comes to drawing conclusions about the totality of my poker tournament prowess. Of course. Which is why I'm not using my lifetime 1-for-7 in making Day Two's at all to argue that it comprises a representative sample from which to draw conclusions regarding my poker tournament skill in general. Yesterday's was not a post of me saying "I guess I'm just not that good at poker tournaments after all!" or anything similar, which I agree totally with Jordan is not a conclusion one can draw from this relatively tiny sample size of seven live nlh tournaments spread over five full years of play. Much the opposite -- my point in barching about my results in the largest live mtt's I've played in is that I clearly am a good tournament player, and yet my results simply do not jibe with that conclusion. It is precisely because I know this 7-tournament sample of tournament results is not representative of my actual skills, that I am here writing these posts lamenting my lack of performance in those events.

I should be doing better in these tournaments. I don't just mean that in the abstract, either. I'm better than most of the people who enter these larger-buyin tournaments in casinos these days. Period. That wasn't true when I first started playing tournaments in casinos -- much the opposite, I've written here about how I could not imagine ever winning a casino tournament way back when I first started getting seriously into this game several years ago -- but in today's day and age, it's very clear that I am closer to the top of the skill levels of the players in the tournaments in which I play. Anyone can choose to believe or not believe this as they see fit, and of course I am more than fine with that, but the bottom line is, one of my favorite things about the whole experience of playing a large-field, solid-buyin live casino mtt, is going through the motions of quickly figuring out who is playing too tight to win, who is playing too loose to hold on to their stacks, who the calling stations are, who are going to be the chasefonkeys at the table, etc.

Let me say this a slightly different way. For the past three or four years or so, when I sit down to a live mtt of almost any reasonable size, things quickly shake out at the table in a way that is only known to a few of the players at the table. I'm sure this will sound familiar to a few of you out there as well. There are usually one or two other guys there that are more or less like me at a random table -- guys who play smart, tight-aggressive poker, guys who you quickly realize you don't really want to mix it up with in a pot in the earlygoing unless you have to. These are often the guys who are out there firing barrel after barrel and taking down a lot of pots uncontested, or they're the guys who always seem to be showing down big cards in the biggest pots, etc. It doesn't usually take more than an hour or so for it to be clear -- at least to those two or three of us at the table -- who the other Players are seated with us. And everyone else has already by that point made it very obvious, again at least to the two or three of us, what their specific weaknesses are. Within an hour or two of sitting down -- who am I kidding, I start doing this almost immediately once I figure out specifically how someone is bad at tournament poker -- the two or three Players have not only correctly applied labels like "chasefonkey", "calling station", etc. to each of the bad players at the table, but we actually start isolating against them. So when dickhead calling station open-raises from early position, and I find a hand like KQ or AJ that I would fold against many raisers for whom I have more respect, I won't just call with that hand against the calling station -- I'll raise. Because even if you told me he had AT vs. my KQ, I would want to be in there against him heads-up in a heartbeat. All the Players do this, it is as natural to us as the day is long. And I can see the other couple of Players at every table I am at early in these things doing the exact same thing. We generally try to avoid playing each other, but boy do we take our whacks at the poker fools around us. That's almost the sole focus of our games for the first several hours at any live mtt -- taking the money of the non-Players at the table.

Anyways, this isn't supposed to be a description of every little trick of the trade that I employ in poker tournaments. It is, however, a simple statement of fact that I am one of those guys -- at every single live poker tournament I ever enter nowadays, all the way up to the $2500 WSOP buyin events that I have played -- that is very aware of the badness of those at my tables, and who follows the same strategy of attacking those bad players just like every other good player there. We all do the same thing, and it's very overt in its own way if you know it is going on. And I'm one of those guys, noting carefully how these two players call every single raise preflop ("I can't wait to pick up a hand against either of those monkeys!"), these two guys limp in with every single hand ("They'll bleed those chips away or get caught holding second-best if I don't get their chips first."), and how the guy to my right as well as two to my left have only played two hands in two hours ("Either they'll pick up pocket Aces, or they'll blind themselves to death like Broomcorn's uncle.") When I am so clearly above most of my opponents at every live tournament table I play at these days in terms of skill, in terms of knowledge of the game, in terms of feel, and -- thanks to the wonders of online poker while that was allowed -- in terms of mtt experience as well, it is difficult for me to be satisfied with 1 Day Two out of seven tries.

All of this would be much easier if I could just chalk my poor large live tournament results to bad play. Or to not paying attention. Or to a lack of study or care about the game and how to get better. But that is simply not the case with me. Every time I sit down to a poker tournament table, I know very quickly what most of the other players' weaknesses are, and I immediately join with the other skilled player or two at the table in a concerted plan to exploit those specific weaknesses. I'm sure I have spent more time reading about and studying the game than 99% of people out there, and I never let a hand go by at the table without carefully noting any salient details and tucking them away for future use against the participants. I know just from sitting there that I'm better than the majority of the players I've been up against in the large live mtt's I've played in, and that contributes quite a bit to my feeling of total dissatisfaction with only making it to Day Two one time in seven tries. The way I have outplayed people and the bad beats I've taken in a number of these events are more a testament to this fact -- and to Jordan's correct point about the sample size being very small in relative terms.

Somehow, the world's most successful poker players don't seem to get eliminated on Day One nearly as much as I do, suckouts or not. And I wish I had a good handle on why that is.
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Foxwoods Keys to Success

Just one more day of workin for the man and I will be off to Foxwoods for Event #1 of the Spring Into Summer Mega Madness tournament series. As I have mentioned here over the past week or two, this is a $600 buyin no-limit holdem tournament with a $125k guaranteed prize pool. Based on what I've seen and heard, I would guess this event will end up pulling in a good 300, 350 runners on a weekend (hopefully more, of course) and that 125k guarantee will be easily exceeded, but I guess I won't know until a couple hours after Saturday's 11am ET start time. It would be so great to finally make just the second Day Two of my poker playing career, but in order to do that, I'm going to have to play a heck of a lot better poker than I played in my two recent practice tournaments I detailed in yesterday's post. I wanted to take today's post to write down and cram into my brain once again the lessons I learned from playing this week that I had grown quite rusty about over my three-month poker hiatus.

First and foremost, I have to do better at not betting too aggressively and/or play too loose right off the bat in the hopes of hitting that miracle flop. This is simply not advice I have ever needed to focus on before -- I think playing 100 mtt's a month thanks to the wonder of online poker helps from making any one tournament seem too important or too boring to sit on the sidelines for -- but it is clear from my recent tournament experiences that it's where I am at now. I resolve on Saturday not to drop more than 10% below my starting stack during the first two rounds of play unless I pick up a big hand and am forced to make a major laydown. In general, making laydowns has never been and continued not to be my problem over the past week -- I laid TT and AQs preflop, I folded a slow-played TPTK to a big river raise from a guy who made too many deliberate faces at me while I was pondering my move on the river to have anything other than a big, strong hand, and I even laid down two pairs twice on the river to big action, one of which was still a multi-way pot. But unless something like happens, I flop a set and then the river four-flushes or something and I face a huge bet, I will not play too aggro early on, I will not call preflop raises or reraises with garbage, and I will absolutely not allow my desire to mix it up with the clear fish at the table to back me into a corner where I am in against a strong player with a weak hand late into a pot.

Secondly, assuming I last through the first, say, three or four hours of this tournament, I resolve to resteal more. Shit, I resolve to resteal at all, given my timidness in several a propos situations over the past 9 or 10 hours of tournament play I put in this week. I have simply got to take advantage of stealing from the stealers, because each time you do it, it is worth a good couple of orbits of sitting out and just ceaselessly contributing your blinds and antes. And the big problem is, everyone steals nowadays. The blind steal has become such a part of the nlh tournament game nowadays -- in particular among the young types that will likely predominate the scene at Foxwoods this weekend -- that if you do not take advantage of the stealers from time to time, not only do your own blinds get eaten up when you are in the first two seats left of the dealer, but your ability to steal any pots diminishes over time since someone else is always in there ahead of you opening the action. I have to tell myself over and over again: there is no way these guys are that strong, all the time. This was always something that I used to take for granted as it came naturally to me to play with this type of attitude over the years, but as I mentioned yesterday, if there's one thing I take away from my tournament play this week, my lack of balls when it comes to restealing from the preflop stealers is That Thing. Of course, restealing with total air will eventually run me into a monster and end my tournament run prematurely, but all I can say is, I've honestly never had a deep, deep tournament run where I never restole from someone who I thought was trying to pick up the blinds and antes with a weakish hand preflop. Never. Some of that of course is the cards I get, some of it is situational of course, but the bottom line is, if someone is on a medium stack and we're getting down near the money, a well-time allin against a guy giving off a weak vibe pays dividends, not only directly in terms of the amount of chips in my stack, but also in the meta game, as you keep everyone thinking every time they consider putting in a raise before the flop with less than a premium holding.

My game has always relied as a major cornerstone on preflop aggression. Even when I can feel the bubble near, as I could twice over the past week, I need to keep up the pressure against the people I believe can fold and who have demonstrated a willingness to mix it up with beatable hands.

The last thing I want to make sure I remember -- and this, too, is something that needn't even be said back when I was playing with regular consistency -- is to preserve my chips. In that first tournament this week, I know why I pushed allin on the flop on a stone bluff with 9-high in the hand where I got eliminated. I know what went into the decision, and taking everything into account, I still think there was a good chance when I made that move that I was right in that spot and could have chipped up nicely in that hand. But did I need to make that move just then? I was 5th in chips with less than two full tables remaining, and the top 8 slated to receive payouts. Was there a good reason for me to risk my entire stack on a guess -- and that's all it was, an educated guess -- that the biggest stack left in the tournament was weak, when I couldn't even beat a bluff and had barely any outs to draw to even if I got called? No, of course, there was not. So I probably shouldn't have been doing it. Or at the least, I should have thought about my play in the exact terms that I just described it before making the decision to push everything allin and risk elimination just short of the money by one of the few stacks left in the tournament that could wipe me out in one hand. And I can tell you, I did not think about it at all like that at the time. At the time it was just like "Well, there's no way that clown has a hand again. If he leads out on the flop, I'm pushing no matter what." I didn't look at his stack, my stack, the other stacks at the table, and I did not consider that I had literally just managed to climb my stack out of the doldrums for several hours back up well above average as we were fixing for a run to the final table. To go and throw away all of that patience, all of that hard work, all of that deserving success, running a stone bluff with 9-high against a guy with a monster stack who'd been hitting hands all day and who raised me preflop and led out on the flop? Not smart.

Play tight early. Loosen up preflop late, especially against the middle stacks who already have an inclination towards folding. And protect my chips from needless, thoughtless risks. These are the keys to my having a successful tournament at Foxwoods on Saturday. I will try to update here how I am doing, in particular if I last a little while and might be making a run. Have a great weekend everybody and wish me luck at the indian reservation in Connecticut.

Donkey Island Poker, and Parting Thoughts on This Week's Win

Before I forget, this coming Sunday night is the first of tournament of the Donkey Island blonkament series. Goat will be hosting a regular Sunday night tournament as part of Donkey Island, and although there are only 16 slots in the Donkey Island vote-Hoy-off-as-soon-as-possible thing, the tournaments are open to anyone who wants to play. And this one, just about anyone but Waffles can afford -- it's just one dollah to get in and take your shot!

Sunday, February 13, 2011
Full Tilt Poker
9:30 PM EST
$1 + $1 Rebuy
password: survive

You remember Katitude's old $1 rebuy on Friday nights, right? Wasn't that fun? Now's your chance to come play for cheap with the bloggers again, this Sunday night at 9:30pm on full tilt. Figure, you'll already be down to couple hundred left in the Sunday 750k by 9:30 on Sunday night, so why not hit up the "Private" tab under "Tournaments" and check out "the Goat" as I am affectionately referring to this Sunday night tournament, for the couple of months it is currently scheduled to endure.

OK, with that out of the way, I thought I would close the book on this week's 10k win on pokerstars as I usually do with some final thoughts. This was an odd tournament -- I have gone over the hand histories and the screen shots three times in full now, and something just seems a little "off" about it. I mean, I never had that one huge hand -- flopping a set against AA and KK allin preflop, or turning a flush after getting allin with a couple of guys with solid made hands ahead of me, etc. -- and really, it's hard to quantify or explain exactly what I did in this tournament to run so deep, or even what I avoided from a luck perspective. Although I obviously played very well in the event to last as long as I did and to amass the stack that I had by the end, frankly there wasn't any one hand that I thought I played particularly well or one type of play I repeatedly took advantage of given my image in the tournament. More than any other tournament cash I can recall, this one was more an amalgamation of several things, all coming together at just the right time to make me some money. And if there was one theme that carries through the whole tournament, more than anything else -- as if often the case with my deep mtt runs -- it would be the bad play of my opponents, more than anything specific that I did.

Just look through all my big hands in this thing, every one of which I think I included in my tournament recap post on Wednesday. My first double occurred during Hour 1, when a guy insta-called three bets from me with 99 on an 8-high board, after first calling my preflop reraise. That's just a pure, old fashioned terrible poker play. I mean, this isn't limit poker here. The guy basically busted himself in the first hour of a $109 buyin event when he raised preflop, got reraised -- clearly suggesting a higher pair could be out there -- and then the guy called not one, not two, but three times on a raggy board, never once even raising early to try to find out if his 9s were already beat? It's a terrible play, and I was lucky to be the beneficiary before someone else at the table had the pleasure.

My second big hand literally only ever happened in the first place because of this same opponent's bad play. On that hand, I took AK to a raggy turn card after a raggy flop, and my opponent then led out for 600 chips into a 2700-chip pot. I already thought I could be ahead with my AK in that spot, but to any reasonably-sized bet I would have folded most of the time, no doubt about it. Instead, he bet so small that I felt I actually had odds to stay in. The river comes a King, I lead out big and he folds. More chips for me, in a pot I would literally not even have been in to river the top pair if my opponent makes even close to a good bet there, instead of a terrible one.

My next big hand was when I flopped the set of 5s in a 5-way pot with a flop of 578. This was just more fortuitous than anything else -- I mean, it's an obvious call for me with pocket 5s after four other raise-callers ahead of me before the flop, and then I did the usual donk move of slow-playing the set by just calling a lead bet on that flop. What really got me the chips was when I pushed hugely on the turn (a 2), and the guy called with his pocket 9s. Yes, it was an overpair, and it's not as bad as my first big hand above because there, I had reraised him preflop, all but screaming at him right off the bat that his 9s were no good, but here in the end, the guy still called off his last 7500 in chips with just one medium pair and a one-card inside straight draw on a board that was 5-way to see the flop (a terrible move, generally speaking), with not only a possible straight and myriad straight draws out there, but the turn card also dropping a second flush draw possibility as well for the river. Even if his 9s were ahead at the time -- I bad guess to begin with as it is -- he called off his last 7500 chips with what he had to know were a gillion possible ways to lose. It's another bad play, and ultimately this was the closest thing I had to that big hand I was talking about -- I shot up to the top few spots on the leaderboard early, and it really set me up with a big stack that I never lost again throughout the rest of the tournament. I played the hand about as well as it could be played I think, including the ridiculous push on the turn that I tried hard to be perceived as weak, so I'll take some credit there. But in the end, it was a very light call by a bad opponent that gave me my first true huge stack of the night and empowered me to last the next four or five hours of tough nlh play.

After amassing my huge stack, I took it easy, helped by a lack of any good cardage to play, and after a couple of hours was getting pretty short when I finally needed to get a little lucky, and I did just that when my JTs allin preflop bested an opponent's AQo when down to just under 50 players left in the tournament. It's nowhere near a suckout, but that was my tournament life allin and on the line, with about a 43% chance of winning, and my 43'er came through in a big way, giving me new life and a chance to take a breather from the escalating blinds and antes. I would probably make that play again there given my situation -- my opponent had basically as bad of a hand as I could have ever wanted him to have there with my JTs -- but I needed to get lucky to stay alive, so I can't take a whole lot of credit for some kind of great play on my part for sho.

When we got down to two tables remaining, I had another big stack flip out and call allin preflop on a rereraise with his AJo, which I called with my AKo and held up to climb into first place of 12 runners left. Who knows what happens with my stack if I don't get gifted those chips in that situation? I think I made the right play not laying down my AK in that spot, but again, hard to give myself a lot of credit for getting dealt AK in the final two tables and refusing to lay down to heavy action preflop in a blind vs. blind situation.

And then the same thing happened for me early at the final table, when with 8 players left, I called allin preflop with my JJ vs a medium stack who had TT. He would have played QQ probably exactly the same way there, and when I called I could have seen QQ, or just as easily AK or AQ or even KQs, and lost to any of those hands. Again I think I made the right decision to get allin pre with my JJ there, but the hands just got in ahead at the right times over and over for me in this thing. Similarly when I eliminated a short-stacked #7 when my AK won a race against his TT allin pre.

And that's every big hand I won all through the night in the pokerstars 50k guaranteed. It was three different guys getting allin with medium overpairs on raggy boards against me in bad spots, one horrible bet from an opponent on the turn that priced me in to see a river card that won for me, and one big 43% win with JTs against AQo allin pre, to get to the final table. And then at the final table, someone ran TT into my JJ, and then my AK beat TT in a race. And then the other guy knocked out the last four players while I just sat around, holding my own, until he eventually got heads-up against me and he picked up pocket Aces just when I decided to attack.

So what's the lesson I should take from this? I know I played a great tournament, but I know just as well that this was nowhere near the best I can play. I wasn't presented with nearly enough opportunities, not nearly enough decisions, to really play the best I could play in this. In a sense, the lesson really is kind of like the New York Lottery's constant marketing message -- you can't win if you don't play. That is to say, if you are resigning yourself to the life of mtt grinder, you cannot expect to play a couple large tournaments a week and record a lot of success. As I've said here many times, the name of the game when it comes to mtts is reps. More than anything else, more than making good decisions, more than tournament selection, more than anything else, it's all about reps. Everyone's going to get lucky some night, be it finding pocket Aces eight times in one tournament, be it avoiding the suckouts, or just winning your key races. The key is that you have to be in there playing the game when it's your night. Of course, if you play good poker as opposed to bad poker, you will give yourself many more chances to get lucky than you ever will if you don't play well enough and make enough good decisions to survive long enough to be alive for the luck at the end.

On the day, I did not suck out on anyone in any pot that I could find, though I did win that one key hand with me allin before the flop with JTs against AQo. I took three suckouts, only one of which I showed in my tournament recap, as the other two did not end up being material losses for my stack, but even that number is nothing out of the ordinary for me -- if anything, it's a bit favorable compared to my usual night in a deep mtt run. As I mentioned in my recap post, I ended up the night winning 21 of 24 pots at showdown, whereas I normally spend most of my time winning pots without a showdown and only coming in at around 50% or so in this stat. Part of that is me playing well and consistently getting out of pots when I was not the favorite, but a good deal of that extraordinary win % just goes to show the kind of "luck" I had on this night. Ultimately, I got in as a solid favorite a lot in this, and my favorites for the most part held up. In fact, every time you could fairly say that I needed my favorite to hold up, it held up. Every single time, and then some. When I got in dominating someone preflop, I held. When I many times in this tournament got someone allin against me on the flop with an underpair and an inside straight draw, just an oesd, etc., I held. I won a couple of key races near the end to keep building my stack, and did not lose a race once we got down to the final two tables. All that is how I won this cash, nothing more and nothing less.

And someone also mentioned in the comments that, not only did I win 21 of 24 times at showdown, but I had won 40 hands without a showdown as of right around the beginning of the final table. The comment expressed how large that number was, but in reality, that's pretty much standard for me in any deep mtt run. At the time we had played right around 375 hands, so this amounts to me having won roughly 11% of all hands dealt at my table on the night without a showdown. Admittedly, this is a big number, but it's also the way I play nlh. I raise a lot preflop, and I take down a ton of pots that way before anyone even sees the community cards. And, just like Doyle, I don't like to put my chips into the pot and then not back them up once the flop comes down. It helps that I generally only play strong cards or cards that can easily make a strong hand or draw once the flop falls. But I bet and raise all the time, all over the place, trying to keep the pots small as much as possible unless I'm working on something big in my own hand. In all, winning 40 pots uncontested and another 21 at showdown means I was winning 61 / 375 hands at the time, or 16-17% of the total hands I saw on the night. That number is also high, but, again, it is not that out of the ordinary for me in any deep mtt run. Playing at mostly 9- and 10-handed tables all through the night, to win more than your 10/11% of hands over time is very telling, and in my case it reflects the fact that I play very aggressively pre- and post-flop, and that in this case I amassed a huge stack early and then used it like a club to beat down on the heads of my opponents for long periods of time in the middle of this mtt. I am quite sure there are plenty of people who can win an nlh tournament with a lower percentage of total hands won that that, and to be perfectly honest I've had multi-hour runs in mtts when I am up over 20% of total hands won. A lot of it does ultimately come down to the cards you are being dealt, but in my case whenever I run deep I am usually winning right up there around 10% of the total hands I've seen without a flop. When I am executing my strategy, and my approach to nlh tournaments just right, that's what it looks like.

I wish more people posted their stats from deep mtt runs. I am sure there is much to be gained from analyzing those stats against the type of game that the relevant person plays. But I'm the only person I ever really see posting this sort of thing. Personally, I would really like to know if all the top mtt guys come in around the same area in most of their wins, as far as total percent of flops seen (mine was 12% in this, which as I mentioned previously is right around my average for a deep mtt run), percent of hands defended in the blinds, and total flops seen and total hands won, both with and without a showdown. I do know that winning 21 of 24 showdowns in a tournament is an extreme outlier, but that takes me back to this tournament overall, which in its own way was also an outlier for me as I started off this post saying. It was a little bit of cards for me and a lot of aggression, and a whole whole lot of bad play by others, combined with a whole whole lot of my favorites holding up. Get enough favorites to hold, and almost anybody could make a deep run in an mtt. You just have to find a way to be in there when it's your night to run, and you never know it's your night until the end.

Live Poker Hand Question -- Conclusion

Yesterday I posted about a hand that occurred early in a $400 buyin tournament in AC this past weekend, and asked what you would do on the river if you were me. As a reminder, here is the setup from yesterday's post:

The tournament started with 10k in chips, and late in the first hour I called a preflop raise from mp with T8s, and the big blind called as well which brought us a flop of T84 rainbow, three-handed. With 1250 in the pot, the big blind led out for 400 chips, and the original preflop raiser thought for a few seconds before just calling, and I smooth called as well with the flopped top two.

The turn card was an offsuit Queen, making a board now of T84Q. The big blind surprised me by leading out again, this time for 1000 chips into a pot of 2450. The guy to my right thought it over, for a little longer this time, and eventually slid out a purple chip as well for the call, and again I made the pot-odds call as well, a bit reluctantly.

The river card then brought an Ace. The big blind hesitated a bit and then slid out another purple and some yellows, a 1400-chip bet for his third lead of the hand. The guy to my right had a kind of disgusted look on his face, but after a few seconds he too slid out 1400 chips to make his third postflop call of the hand. The action was to me on the river to call 1400 to win 8250 in the pot.

Now of course, the answers I got in the comments were mostly well thought-out, but like any good "What would you do?" hand, almost nobody could keep themselves from critiquing my earlier play of the hand -- even though that's not what I asked -- in particular my not raising on the flop. As I mentioned yesterday, top two pairs is the only two-pair hand that I will generally slow-play, and I should re-mention that nobody gave me any credit for the fact that I wasn't checking here, I was calling a decent bet, building the pot by about 60% on that street while keeping two potentially weak players in the pot. Someone, I think it was Astin, mentioned that when your top two pairs are Tens and 8s, it is almost not like top two pairs at all. That is a semi-valid point, although the math I imagine would not bear out that statement in its extreme. The turn card will be a Ten or below still more often than it will not be, and even if a Jack or Queen falls it is hard to be too concerned with just the one non-Ace and non-King overcard on the board (I certainly would not be, given the action in this hand so far). Another commenter mentioned the many straight draws available on this board as a reason for the raise on the flop, which I simply do not understand at all. For my money, if I see a flop of T84 in a 3-way raised pot, that is one of the least drawy boards I could ever hope for. If T84 rainbow is scaring you away from slow-playing because of draws, then you just have a different view of math and odds than I do I guess. Sure, 732 rainbow would be even less drawy, but T84? Come on. That is almost ideal from a drawing perspective as far as maybe letting another card slide off.

This is all a long way of saying that I think I agree that with medium two pairs like this, and only because of the fact that this is a 3-way pot and not heads-up, some kind of a raise on the flop is probably the more +EV play over time (I'll have to check with Blinders on the EV calculation of course). Certainly in this spot it did not work, as the turn was an overcard that also completed an open-ended straight draw from the flop, and then of course the river brought the dreaded Ace, but taking the results-oriented viewpoint out, I think I buy that raising my hand on the flop was probably the better move against two opponents. I just don't think it is nearly as obvious as the commenters seem to think it is, as I think a couple of key considerations I mentioned above were overlooked in general by the commenters.

That said, this was really a question about what I should do at the river. The comments were split about 50-50 as to folding and calling, though even those recommending a call seemed not very confident, calling more for the pot odds than anything else. Well, I already had the alarm bells going off in my head from the flop when the guy to my right just smooth called, and when he did the same thing again on the turn, I was thinking either overpair or flopped set in a big way. When the Ace hit the river, I figured I was going to have to fold to any action since at least one opponent had at least one pair heading into this street, and the odds of one of them holding an Ace as a kicker are fairly good given that they called a preflop raise in this hand to begin with. So when the first guy led out again -- for the third time after getting two callers on both the flop and the turn -- this to me smelled like a very solid hand, at least an overpair himself if not two pairs or better. I mean, how many times do you ever lead out on the flop, get called (twice), lead out again on the turn and get called (twice), and then actually lead out still another time on the river? That to me just screamed of strength. Similarly, the player to my right calling all three of those bets also screamed out that it was at least strong ish -- more than one pair, say -- in which case it seemed to me that I had no option but to fold on this river. I was not sure that both of my opponents had my two pairs beat, but 3rd and 4th pair really could not reasonably be ahead of both of these guys the way I saw it.

And so I laid it down, even for the measly 1400 into an 8250-chip pot. I would only have to be ahead of both guys roughly one time in six to make always calling here profitable, and yet I relied on my reads sufficiently to figure that I'm not going to be ahead of both of these guys even that often to make the call worthwhile.

The big blind flipped up?












Pocket Kings. How he bets out a third time on that river after getting called twice on each of the flop and turn is utterly beyond me, but that's definitely the way a big-time donkey would play this hand.

And the guy to my right flipped up?











We'll never know. He took one look at the big blind's pocket Kings and he fucking mucked.

One pair FTW!!!

As an epilogue, although it took me a good hour to truly get calmed down from the tilt induction that was that hand, eventually I bounced back in the tournament with several big hands, mostly without having to show down anything, and in the end I took 3rd place when my short stack push with J9s got called by A8o and I could not catch up. Still, I won almost $1600 for my efforts, and overall I played great in my last live tournament tune-up prior to leaving for Las Vegas three weeks from yesterday. Make that two weeks and six days from now. Just two+ weeks baby, just two+ weeks.

But tell me, how do those two clowns both bet and call three times with just one pair?

Live Poker Hand Question

This past weekend, after an absolutely brutal week of work, on a whim I decided to head down to AC for some live poker action, in what will be my final live tune-up before I depart for Las Vegas and the 2010 WSOP.

**As an aside, holy shipe my plane leaves three weeks from today! Am I excited about that? Maybe just a teeny little bit?**

Anyways, when I got to my casino of choice on Friday night, they happened to be running a $400 buyin turbo tournament, which picked up somewhere between 30 and 40 runners and featured 15-minute blind levels. A horrible structure for a live tournament for sure, but one of the fun things about me playing a live turbo tournament like this is that it is likely that I have logged more hours playing turbo structures online than anyone else in a field like this on a given night, so theoretically I should have an advantage over most of the other players who will not be properly adjusting their play to the faster than normal blinds and antes.

The tournament started with 10k in chips, and late in the first hour I called a preflop raise from mp with T8s, and the big blind called as well which brought us a flop of T84 rainbow, three-handed. With 1250 in the pot, the big blind led out for 400 chips, and the original preflop raiser thought for a few seconds before just calling. Now, normally I'm not a big fan of slow-playing with more than one other player in the pot, but this was a fairly innocuous board, and while I would not have checked if the action had not been opened in front of me, I thought just smooth calling with top two pairs here was an acceptable move. I've mentioned this here many times before, but my general theory on flopped two pairs is that it's not worth slow-playing unless you flop the top two. It's just too easy to get counterfeited when someone else hits their kicker and you end up losing a big pot, but with top two the chances of that are much less and it makes for a hand that I thought simply calling along on the flop was a nice idea.

The turn card was an offsuit Queen, making a board now of T84Q. The big blind surprised me by leading out again, this time for 1000 chips into a pot of 2450. The guy to my right thought it over, for a little longer this time, and eventually slid out a purple chip as well for the call. So now I have T8 on a QT84 board, and it is 1000 chips for me to call into a 4450-chip pot. I did not love the fact that the big blind led out again, and I especially did not like the fact that the original preflop raiser had smooth called those lead-out bets, twice in a row now. But getting around 4.5 to 1 odds, how could I fold the hidden two pairs? So I reluctantly called, swelling the big early pot to 5450 chips.

The river card was an Ace. An ugly, vicious, despicable Ace as far as I was concerned. The big blind hesitated a bit and then slid out another purple and some yellows, a 1400-chip bet for his third lead of the hand. The guy to my right had a kind of disgusted look on his face, but after a few seconds he too slid out 1400 chips to make his third postflop call of the hand. The action was to me on the river to call 1400 to win 8250 in the pot.

What do you do?

On MTT Grinding

I got an interesting comment to my last post last week where I did a pretty complete and robust recap post of my 2nd place in the nightly $30 rebuy tournament on full tilt a few days back. If you haven't read that post, #1 go back and read it now, and #2, in a nutshell, I ended up winning over $5100 for 2nd place in the $30 rebuy with a 25k guarantee on full tilt, getting sucked out on three times in a row in succession to eventually lose in heads-up play, but only even being alive for heads-up play after a series of lucky events in my favor along the way throughout the 6+ hours I played in this tournament. The comment, from OES as I recall, was essentially to say that it's just so demoralizing to many readers to see all the luck that had to happen just for me to end up in second place in this thing, with the implication being that this is what it takes to succeed in mtt play.

I have a few responses to this. First and foremost, it should be noted that this is only the way that some of my big tournament scores have gone down. I've had plenty of deep mtt runs where I got lucky -- either early, to build a big stack, or late, to survive and chip up at the final table -- all of which I have detailed here. I recall winning countless blonkaments after getting lucky at some point from behind with all my chips in the middle. Christ, my one and only WWdN win in fact saw me double up from dominated position allin preflop with 14 runners left, go on a massive tear, and an hour later I was the victor. So it happens. Sometimes it just takes massive luck to get you to a final table that you would not otherwise have been at.

And so what of that? I mean, how many times have I been sucked out on on the tournament bubble, with 50 runners left, at the final table bubble or even early at the final table when I am just short of the really big payouts? For all those times, shouldn't there be a tournament every once in a while where I hit a couple of lucky hands along the way and end up at a final table that I maybe should not otherwise have been at? Big deal. It happens all the time. But not always.

Looking back over all the tournaments where I've won, say, more than $2000 or so in my day, it should be noted that it's really a distinct minority where I got luckier than average to get where I ended up. So it really shouldn't be demoralizing to see how much luck it took me to get to 2nd place in this thing last week. This time it happened to take a lot of luck, as detailed in my post. But not always. I've had many, many deep runs where I did not get abnormally lucky at all -- the vast majority of my 2k+ scores in fact. Just think about my Venetian score last summer. In that thing as I recall I played 27 hours of no-limit tournament poker over two days, and I didn't get it in bad even once. Now maybe that's the other extreme, but my point is that, there are all different kinds of ways to find yourself at a big mtt final table.

It should also be noted that it's not like I just sat there in the $30 rebuy last week, bought in and rebought, and donkeypushed 18 times with every 74o I saw as if this were the now defunct Friday Night Donkament. Sure, I cracked a couple of AA with flopped sets. Sure, I made a straight on the turn against a guy who flopped a set. Sure at the final table I doubled up with K6 vs A6, JT vs AK and 43 vs AK. But thinking of it only in that way denies the very real fact that I played some pretty great poker in that $30 rebuy tournament along the way. Even in some of those 'lucky" situations that I mentioned above, there was some serious skill on my part to have gotten into that situation in the first place, such that perhaps many of you out there reading this would nebver even have been involved in those spots to begin with. For example, take that hand where I turned the straight against the guy who it turned out had flopped a set against me. In that case, as I recall, the guy had bet something ridiculous like a quarter of the pot with his flopped set. I had 8 outs, and I knew that the guy had just given me express odds (let alone the implied odds that were obviously there) to draw a card at my oesd. I imagine that many people in my spot might have folded to that bet with no made hand at the time. But it was only due to my knowledge of pot odds that I quickly made the calculation in my head and knew how obvious of a call this was. In fact, in that sense I totally outplayed my opponent there, who made a truly hideous play with that tiny bet with the flopped set, essentially forcing anyone who understands math to stay in and try to take one off and beat his set with a draw of some kind. Similarly, I don't even mention the other 50 times I could have raised on the flop -- either with top pair mediocre kicker, some kind of a draw, or even with air for that matter -- but chose not to because the math, my instincts, whatever told me not to. All of those were more examples of good play by me. Shit, even when I open-pushed JTs under the gun down to the final two tables and got called by UTG+1 with AK, I have no doubt whatsoever that I made the right play, a play that someone worse at poker than I might not have made, therefore not doubling up, and probably would not have won as much money as I did in this tournament. But if you aren't open-pushing with JTs and 11 players left in an mtt, when you are now down to 11th out of 11 remaining stacks, then I'm not sure you really understand how to play mtt's to win.

My point in all this is not to say that I actually didn't get lucky at all in last week's run in the $30 rebuy. You can see my post, and I've never been one to deny that I got lucky in those few times I was able to turn some run-goodery into cold hard cash at the mtt tables. I managed to prevail in a number of spots where I was not a favorite to survive at some point in the hand. But my point is that, regardless of the way I portrayed it in my recap post, there was a ton of skill that went into that win in addition to the few lucky hands I benefitted from. There always is. Even being allin there with the JTs to be in a position to double up and end up taking second for 5 grand can be thought of as skill-based, in that a lesser skilled mtt player might not have gotten in in that spot, and thus would not have doubled up and probably not been around at the end when we moved to heads-up. And notice, I was in there with JT and 43 in those times when I held up in key spots to stay alive at the final table. I wasn't in there with A4 or K7, the kinds of hands that are likely to be dominated against a preflop raiser or a caller of a preflop raise from me, and that was also based on skill. In each of those three spots, I got in as an underdog, but only a roughly 40% underdog (in some cases even better than that). If I call allin reraises preflop with A4 and A6, I'm going to find myself a 20% underdog a whole lot more frequently, and it's going to be hard to survive very many of those 4-to-1 against shots until the last couple players of these tournaments.

So no, it does not by a long shot take massive amounts of luck to win an mtt. As I mentioned, the vast majority of my big mtt scores have come in situations where I played pretty much great on the night, had minimal suckouts and minimal situations where I needed a particular card to hit in order for me to stay alive. Those of you who took from my post last week that I played like a fonkey but kept getting lucky again and again after making bad play after bad play, are sorely mistaken. To be clear, I played pretty much great poker that night -- most of it in ways that are not illustrable via screen shot like I like to do -- and in the end that great play combined with some mathematical luck in some very key spots to keep me alive, build me a stack and eventually carry me well into four figures for my tournament payout. But it shouldn't be disheartening to anyone who might think that the only way to make a deep run like this is to get extremely lucky, multiple times. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Moreover -- and this is the other point I've been struggling to put into coherent words over the past week or so -- is that luck plays a huge factor in almost any mtt anyone ever plays in. If you don't realize that, then you probably don't play a ton of mtts, or at least you don't run deep in a bunch of them. But it's true -- you have to get lucky to win the big money any mtt, period. "Lucky" in some form in the poker context, anyways. You don't need to be dealt AA and KK 85 times, you don't need to flop a ton of sets (though that doesn't hurt) and you don't need to suck out on someone at the river three times at the final table either. But you do need to avoid picking up KK vs AA, pretty much all the way from the first hand of the tournament to head-up play at the final table, and you do need to avoid losing a key 80% dominated favorite all-in at the final table. You do need to avoid reraising a late-position stealer into his pocket Aces, and you do need to avoid picking up TPTK against an overpair late in the event when the blinds are getting big enough to make it hard to lay down in such a situation. There are simply wayyyyyy too many ways to lose a big tournament like this, and you have to avoid essentially all of them in order to be the guy still alive at the very end when the big money is in play. It's impossible to do this without luck, a good deal of it, at least the situational kind of luck I am describing above. Again, this is something which any true mtt grinder knowns right down to his soul. It doesn't mean you didn't play well, and it doesn't mean you don't deserve to be where you ended up getting in the tournament, but luck is just an ever-present obstacle that completely permeates through the results and play of all mtt grinders. It's always there, waiting to pounce if you make just one misstep, and personally that's what always seems to make it feel so special in those times that I do persevere through and last all the way to the end of a large mtt.

After countless tournaments -- live and online -- over the past, say, five years, and after limitless hours sitting at the computer and playing this game we all know and love, one thing above all else has become clear to me regarding the nature of griding mtt's, one of the many ideas addressed superbly by Arnold Snyder in his tournament poker books: When it comes right down to it, all you can do with tournament poker skill is increase your advantage over the rest of the field. That's it. So in an mtt with 1000 runners in it, for example, if everyone was of equal skill and there was no luck involved, each player would have a 1-in-1000 chance of winning the first prize. But of course, everyone has different skill levels, such that the best player in that tournament might be able to lower his odds of winning from 1-in-1000 to, say, 1-in-500. And that's only for a really good tournament player. But luck plays such a huge factor in any large field mtt that there's just no way that anybody, in my view, can really get more than that 200% advantage over the rest of the field in a big tournament. There's just no way. Phil Ivey might be the best player in the world, and with 6300 entrants in the WSOP Main Event, he might have a better than the 1-in-700 chance on average of making the final 9 spots for the November Nine. But it's not like Ivey's chance is 1 in 20, or even 1 in 100 or anything close to that to make the final table. Nobody is that good at mtt's that they can overcome poker luck in all its various forms, from the starting cards you get, to the starting cards your opponents' get, to the cards you and your opponents get in the same hands, to the seat assignments, to the suckouts, to the races you win, etc.

Being able to increase your raw odds of winning a tournament at the expense of a bunch of other lesser players in an mtt is the best you can hope for, and even for the best players in the world, they can only realistically expect to have 200% or so as good of odds of winning than everyone else. And if you accept that as fact like I do, then it stands to reason that luck is still going to play a massive part in any deep mtt run, because even the best players in the world are only going to be roughly twice as likely as "average" to win. The best players will just be the ones who take best advantage of that luck when it does happen, and those who most consistently put themselves into positions where if they do get lucky, they can really make some noise with it.

As a rule, the very best large-field mtt players in the world make consistently better poker decisions in the moment than the rest of us. That's what gives them that 200% advantage in lasting through these large fields to the big money payouts at the end of poker tournaments. But the fact that their advantage is still only maybe twice as great as the rest of us leads to the one other thing you will note about any professional who is widely regarded as being a tournament specialist -- they run a lot of mtts. They have to. That's the only way to really get that 200% advantage over the field to work for you. In the end, the trick with these things is to consistently get yourself into positions in these tournaments where you can make some real noise if you get a little bit of luck. And then, play that way as many times as you possibly can. If you consistently get yourself into situations in large-field mtts where you can make a deep run if you get a little lucky, then the frequency with with you can get yourself into such a situation will have a direct correlation with your mtt results over the long haul.

Playing Those Sooted Connectors, Plus an NFL Pick

Wow. I write a little bit about poker one day and I must have had 15 people tell me to do it more yesterday. You wanted another poker post? Well here comes another poker post.

But first, I will get on the record right now and pick the San Francisco 49ers -3 vs. the Chicago Bears on Thursday night on the NFL Network. I will pick my other four of my Pick 5 NFL picks on Friday as usual, but with Thursday Night Football starting up this week I will try to get in a pick on the Thursday night game wherever it makes sense for me, and that means it will have to go up a day earlier than the other picks. Thursday night's matchup is a battle of the losers in a sense, with the 49ers having lost four in a row heading into Week 10 while the Bears have chipped in losing three of their last four as well. Both teams started the season off hot but have since really cooled, although their problems are kind of opposite of each other. The Bears can't stop anyone right now -- they've allowed 45 to the Bungles and 41 to the Falcons in their last two games against NFL-worthy opponents. Meanwhile, in San Francisco the problem is that, after scoring an average of nearly 26 points per game over their first four outings of 2009, the team has now managed to scrape together just 18 points per game over their last four, and they've lost three games in a row by a touchdown or less as a result. I don't love how the 49ers are playing right now, but the bottom line is that, especially at home, I have more confidence in Mike Singletary and the 49ers finding their footing tonight than I do in Jay Cutler and the Bears. At Candlestick Park this season, the 49ers have scored in the 20's three times, and that's roughly where I expect them to end up tonight against the porous Bears' defense. But on the road, Jay Cutler has led his team to four separate subpar offensive outputs, including games with 15, 14, 10 and 21 points. If the Niners can run it up to the mid-20s like I think they will, that ought to be enough to cover against the reeling Bears who will then have to face the Eagles next Sunday night in Chicago to try to right their own ship.

OK, so with that out of the way, you wanted some poker. As I've gotten back into playing a little bit these past couple of weeks, I've started dipping my toe back into the mtt pool, something I really haven't done almost any of since my big score out at the Venetian last summer in Vegas. I was kinda burned out on tournament poker for a while after that magical weekend in the desert, and then the baby came, and before I knew it it'd been basically three or four months of very little mtt play for me. But as I've started playing again I've really been enjoy anew the process of building a stack from scratch in the earlygoing in these things. Especially online, where even the "slow" tournament structures are still actually super duper fast in reality, where the whole time you have to "build a stack" amounts to maybe a couple of hours, as opposed to a couple of days of poker in most live events. After some time away, I'm finding myself amazed at how easy it is to just slide right back into it and play the same aggressive way I've always played ever since I first learned the game. I've always been someone who tries to stir up action -- rather than avoid it -- early in most of the mtt's I play, again especially when it's online. I like to see a lot of cheap flops when the blinds are small relative to the stacks, try to flop a big hand and then figure out the best way to extract the most chips from the most players when I do. I don't want to sit around the starting stack for 90 minutes and then hope to pick up AA or to win a race with AJ vs 88. I want to force the action with lots of spec hands for cheap early anid try to turn one of them into a big big pot for me and get myself up to full chip utility as early as possible whenever I can.

Recently I was playing in the nightly 25k guaranteed tournament on pokerstars at 8pm ET. It has a $27.50 buyin and typically attracts between 1100-1500 runners or so, with four-digit payouts usually going to the top 5 or 6 spots, and a top prize somewhere in the 5k range. It's about as small of a payout tournament as I will generally play in the no-limit context at 25k guaranteed, as I generally prefer larger prizes for the final table to even make it worth bothering trying to wade through the level of donkery one must always survive to make a run like this. I think nothing would piss me off more than to outlast 1500 other shitheads in a $1 buyin tournament, just to end up in third place when my AK goes down to JJ and get paid a total of $500. For me that's just not worth the effort, and the luck, really, that it takes to last through a huge field of players like that, so I typically try to play 30k guaranteed or larger events only whenever I can. This way I can at least be assured that if tonight's going to be another magical run for me, I know I can win more than 5k or at least in the few thousand range for a top-few-spots finish.

So anyways, it's very early (first round) in the pokerstars 25k, and the UTG player limps for 20 chips. The next guy at our full 9-person table folds, and then the action is to me. I am holding 87s.

What do you do here?

I actually love to raise with sooted connectors in early position. In fact, as I've written here many times, when you raise preflop as aggressively as I do, it's basically a requirement to raise with these hands as well, just for balance if nothing else. From what I've seen and read, it seems like mostly all of the big tournament pros raise sooted connectors from early position as well, again in particular when the stacks are deep early in a tournament. However, in this particular spot, with one limper already in the pot, and him seated under the gun at that, I opt to check. To clarify my earlier statement, I like to open-raise with sooted connectors from early position. When the pot's already been opened for a limp from early position, now with a hand like 87s I am looking at a good possibility of a multiway pot if I just limp behind, which actually is my best pure math strategy for this kind of a hand. So where someone else has made the decision for me by open-limping ahead of me, and there is a decent chance of a multiway pot developing if I just limp as well, I will usually limp with connectors in this situation:



Two other players in late position limp in as well, as does the big blind, so we end up seeing a 5-way flop which is exactly perfect for what I'm holding. The flop comes down 962, with one of my suit, giving me the open-ended straight draw. The big blind checks, as does the UTG player, and the action is to me:



What do you do?

My answer is this: try to either take down the 110 chips in the pot now, or, if I end up building a little bit of a pot here, that's ok as well as long as I control the size of that pot such that I can profitably see at least one more card. Nobody has shown any strength yet before the flop here, and the flop is raggy enough that even most limpers should not really have connected with it in some huge way. More than that, the way I play I like to take a lot of little stabs at flops when the pots are still small, and this is a perfect opportunity to start creating that image of an active flop bettor so that the next time I am holding TPTK and of course decide to bet the flop, I will actually have created more action for myself by betting at flops like these as well. And, at this point in the hand, the pot is still super small relative to our stacks, so unlike at some point later in the tournament possibly, right now I have plenty of chips to make a move and still fold to a huge reraise or even to a turn bet or raise from my opponent. So I decided to make the exact same type and size of bet as I would make if I were holding top pair, or an overpair, on most flops:



90 chips into the 110-chip pot. In a pot with four other players, all of whom limped in and thus could be holding the middling-sort of cards that could have connected in some way with this flop, and with the flush draw on the board, I want to make sure I am forcing my opponents to make a poor call odds-wise at whatever they're drawing at. Remember, my game here is to play this flop exactly like I would if I were holding TPTK or something, because I know I'm going to be getting out there and betting at a lot of flops just exactly like that over the next hour or so here.

The late position player called my 90-chip bet here, while the big blind and UTG both folded their hands. So we saw a turn heads-up, and I was first to act:



Boom! I just made my nut straight on the turn. And I picked up a flush draw. And an open-ended straight flush draw. There's 290 chips in the pot, and both myself and my opponent each have around 10x that still behind. I'm thinking this is my chance to hopefully extract some serious chippage from this guy early on in an mtt and get some much-needed chip utility early, as the big blind will move from 20 to 50 over the next 20 minutes or so and I will soon be well below that magical utility level of 100 big blinds.

How do you play this hand now? If you bet, how much? If you check, why?

Back tomorrow with the conclusion.

MTT Stats

It's vacation time again for the Hammer Family, as we are once again spending a few days in a place far warmer than it is back home in New York. Not that spring isn't basically springing right now in New York either, as it's finally started to warm up a little at least in the northeast after a colder-than-average winter for sure, but hopping on a plane and finding your way to warmer climes just never seems to get old, does it? So pardon me if this space might not be updated quite as regularly this week, but I'm doing my best.

Today I thought I would post something interesting I found during my poker play earlier in the week. In a nutshell, UltimateBet has an interesting feature where the statistics tab does not reset like all the other real poker sites do every time you log out and close the poker client. Rather, on UB, those stats continue to amass over time, unless you specifically opt to reset them, which I have not. As a result, I have hand statistics saved up on my account on UB ranging over nearly 6000 hands, all of them large multi-table tournament hands. No sitngos, no cash hands, absolutely none. It's just 5800 hands played in all ranges of multi-table tournaments, from the opening rounds of extremely deep-stacked play that UB specializes in, all the way to late-round and final table action where you're certainly playing more hands as the table gets shorter and shorter. And the best part about these stats is that they are legitimate good poker stats, comprising every tournament hand I have played over about four months of solidly profitable poker, to the tune of probably about a 6k - 7k profit over that time period. So I thought it was interesting to take a look at those statistics and see if there is anything interesting and worthwhile to glean from them as far as hints on playing profitable deep-stacked mtt poker.

So here are the numbers:



In terms of conclusions, first with the easy stuff. I have seen 20% of flops in total, a number that may seem high to some of the tighties out there, but in reality is right in my wheelhouse as far as the way I play the game. And keep in mind, this figure of my relative tightness/looseness includes all hands with 9 players at the table, as well as five final table runs and a few top-3 finishes, each of which included a significant period of time at 5- and 6-handed play and even fewer near the end of the big tournaments I have won this year on UB. So I don't think the 20% of flops is anything extraordinary, other than to demonstrate that one can certainly play very profitable, very successful poker seeing that many flops overall. I have periods where that percentage is up closer to 25 or even 30%, and I have also had times when I'm playing much tighter for whatever reason. I remember when I won my first major tournament, the Party 40k some three years ago, I think I saw 7% of flops over the entirety of the event. So I can play it all those ways, but over 6000 hands I've seen 20% of flops and won a lot money doing it.

Another overall statistic that I find interesting is my 47% winning percentage in showdowns. 47% is decent, but it's not anything superb. Again, I have had periods where I've run that number closer to 60%, and other times when it's been down below 40. In general, although I think that's a number you don't necessarily need to focus on as much as some people do, I imagine that anyone is going to have trouble playing consistent winning poker if you're losing more than 60% of your showdowns seen. Interestingly, a couple of years ago when I was focusing more on cash play, I found that once that number got down below 50%, I was having trouble winning consistently at the game. But in tournaments, I find that as long as I'm above 40, 45%, I can do ok.

Going along with the above stat is my winning percentage in those hands where I see the flop. In this case, over 5800 mtt hands on UB, I am at 46%. This strikes me as a huge number, and I think it reflects my aggression on the flop and afterwards to have won so much. It is that percentage, boned up mostly by relentless betting and raising on the flop, turn and a little bit on the river as well to cause folds in my opponents, that allows me to get away with only winning 47% of my showdowns. Normally as I mentioned I have found 50% to be a better target for showdown winning percentage, but if I am constantly making other players fold their hands when I do see the flop, then I can afford to take a little the worst of it come showdown time and make up for some of those losses by all the pots I pick up along the way. That's Doyle Brunson for you right there, if you're a Super/System fan like I am.

Moving down the rows in the stats chart above, I note that while my checking percentage is roughly the same on the flop, turn and river, my check raising percentage steadily increases the later in the hand I get. That surprises me in that it's not something I am ever thinking about at the table, but I guess it makes sense for me. I've always been someone who doesn't mind giving someone a chance of catching up if I have a strong hand, because I am always aware of the odds and I am confident in my ability to fold if I think I am beat or that my opponent might have just spiked his flush card on the turn or river. Given that, I don't normally like to check raise so much on the flop, because it is such a strong move and generally tends to tip your hand's strength and chase most opponents out unless they are bloggers morons or on what they think is a really big draw. When I'm check-raising on the flop, it is most often either a monster draw like a straight and a flush draw, or it is a beatable hand like a big pocket pair that I want to find out early if I am behind by making it very obvious that I am strong early in the hand. Otherwise, if I flop a set or a straight or something, the odds of me check-raising the flop are quite low, whereas on the turn I will do it a little more due to the increased amount of chips already in the pot on this street, and on the river why the hell not if I think I can get more chips out of my opponents. But that's the lesson I take from this particular statistic -- not check-raising as much earlier in the hand as later has worked out very well for me over time in several thousand hands of profitable mtt play.

The next row covers my calling percentage, and you might notice that these numbers tend to be fairly low, another symbol of what I think of as generally profitable poker play, especially in tournaments when chips are short and you can't reload. Those of you who have played with me often know how unusual it is for me to just call before the flop. Usually, I am raising or I am out, unless I'm either slow-playing, I am in the big blind, or I have a multi-opponent hand like suited connectors or a small pair. I am confident that almost all of those 12% preflop calls fall into one of those three situations. Similarly, after the flop, I call less than 10% of the time, culminating in the river, my lowest calling percentage of all the streets of 6%, which is just as it should be. By the river I should have a very good idea of where I and my opponent am at in the hand, and just calling a bet on the end indicates that I think I might be ahead, but I'm not confident enough to raise. That doesn't happen much with me, and I am glad to see it in print there in the form of hard math to support what I already thought about my general strategy about calling in this game.

My betting percentage is almost exactly identical on the flop and turn, although I was a bit surprised at it being only 18%, especially on the flop. I certainly am an avid c-bettor on the flop, as evidenced by my overall 46% winning percentage on flops seen, but I guess the 18% reflects at least somewhat the fact that I do not just recklessly c-bet all the time like I used to way back when when I was first starting out and read Super/System for the first time. In other words, say I open-raise from middle position with an AJ or AT type of hand. If I am called twice from late position and then the flop comes all raggy, the odds of me leading out with a bet are not so great. Certainly I will fire out about 2/3 of the pot often enough to keep people from calling me with crap preflop, but the bottom line is, the odds are great that with two LP callers behind me, someone either has a higher Ace than me, a pocket pair, or maybe has flopped a set or something. One of the big changes I made to my game a few years ago, to very solid profits I am sure, has been to not c-bet recklessly when I am highly likely given the preflop action to be behind and where my opponent is not likely to fold. Is the guy with AK or 99 folding against me in the situation I described above when I raised preflop, got two LP callers and the flop comes all raggy, or comes KQJ or something like that? Hells no. So why c-bet it then, right?

Raising percentage is another interesting statistic buried in the above table, indicating that I am raising 12% of the time before the flop, which gibes nicely with my 20% of flops seen. This means more than half the time I am seeing the flop, I am raising. In fact, if you take out the small blind and big blind limping I have done, that number probably is more like 15% preflop raises out of 20% of flops seen. And then you need to factor in as well the incredible deep stacks featured only at UB among all the major poker sites. Due to this, I have adjusted my play significantly there to seeing far more flops early on in mtt's on UB, many of those extra flops seen coming in the form of calls with low suited connectors, semi-connectors, etc. The bottom line here is that when I am seeing a flop, I am generally raising before the flop, to try to chase people out right there and to give credibility to the c-bet that I am inclined to try to lead with on the flop as well. Adjusting my raising percentage down a bit to see some flops with more speculative hands is an adjustment I have made just for the deep stacks on UB, and if you looked at this stat on all other poker sites for me I'm sure I am raising more like 75-80% of the time preflop when I am seeing a flop overall. The only other aspect of my raising percentage worth nothing is that on the flop and turn, I once again do not tend to raise as much as I do on the river, for all the same reasons I discussed above in connection with check-raising. I have always been the type of player who can wait until later in the hand to give away the strength of my hand with a raise of some kind, because I have a solid capability of folding when I believe I just got beat with a particularly bad turn or river card.

The last thing I would mention about the above mtt stats is my percent of hands won before the flop. Take a look at that number -- 7.77% over 5800+ hands. That basically equates to about 450 hands I have won before the flop, just like that. Many of those occur early in the tournaments to be sure, but a fair number of them are midway through and many of them are late, at final tables, down to the final 3 or 4, etc. This is basically the entire key to my poker success in my view. I have won nearly 8% of the total tournament hands dealt to me without even seeing a flop. With typically 9 or close to 9 players sitting at the table with me, that equates to basically 1 out of every 12 hands dealt, I win before the flop. Not only does this bring me a ton of chips, chips I need desperately to amass early and to survive late, but this kind of relentless pressure before the flop is crucial to my desire to build up a loose image early, one which I can more easily take advantage of later in the tournament when I do pick up a big hand or make a big flop and can surprise someone who is looking to push allin or play back at me in a big spot.

So there it is, my read on my stats over several thousand mtt-only hands on a site where I have a very strong ROI playing at those statistics. For those of you who never do this, if you care about your game and your success playing it, I encourage you to take a look at your own stats -- most real poker sites will offer you this kind of detail on your play with little trouble as part of the normal poker client -- and try to figure out what you're seeing about the way you're playing overall, and more importantly, whether those things are helping you or hurting you as you try to make money in online poker tournaments. If anyone notices anything starkly different from what I see in my stats, I would always be interested in hearing the what, and more importantly, the why of those differences.

Have a great week everyone. I will try to be back tomorrow with another quickie to end the week, but either way I am back in New York next week and will be back to my usual blog schedule at that time. For now, I am off to the beach and the luscious 80 degree weather already here long before noon local time. Somebody bring me my dam Captain n Coke please.

BBT and Bodog ToCs, and More on the Late-Game MTT Question

Two blogger tournaments for me since the BBT3 ended, and two final tables so far.

And zero cashes.

Delicious. But I am playing well, and in fact if you count the Sunday Heads-Up which started around the same time as the BBT ended, I am 3 for 3 in final tables. So I'm playing good poker overall and that is of course the most important thing. It's always the most important thing when compared to actual results, which can be skewed by short-term luck and other variance-related fluctuations, but I think of the quality of my play as being especially important with my trip to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker coming up.

One week away now. I am so utterly and completely swamped at work that, if this isn't obvious already, I haven't really even come up for air enough to think about how very close my annual WSOP pilgrimage to the poker Mecca of the universe is, but that's it right there. One week. Seven days from now, I will be kissing the wife and kids goodbye and jumping on a jet plane for 5 hours before rolling into Sin City around midnight local time and registering myself for the $2000 buyin nlh World Series of Poker tournament on Thursday, June 12. Just one week, just seven days. It's a measly 168 hours from now, and just over 10,000 minutes. And if you figure that about a quarter of that remaining time will see me in bed sleeping, it's sort of even closer than that. One week. One week.

OK so with the BBT3 ending its run this past weekend with last Sunday night's Big Game, and now with the Bodonk ending its WSOP run this week as well, I thought I would take a quick look at the fields in each, and begin the process of handicapping various people's chances of finishing in the money and heading to the WSOP this year from these two awesome setups awarding WSOP seats to bloggers essentially for free. It will be a few more days before I come to any conclusions as far as making picks or spotting trends, but that's ok because I have a few more days before this coming Saturday afternoon's BBT3 Tournament of Champions. Yes, the one I am in because I won the Skills Stud-8 event back in event #28 I believe of the BBT3. And the Bodonk ToC is scheduled for next Tuesday night, a smarter way to do it since the players in the Bodonkey challenge are already free on Tuesday nights to have been playing every week in the tournament. Saturday afternoon at 5pm ET is already cauing me major flak at home, and to be honest with you, I can't blame my wife. We have frigging BBT tournaments at this point every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night already, the people in the ToC therefore are used to playing blonkaments Monday through Thursday nights, to being available at those times usually and to already have clearance to play at those hours. For me to just plop down on a Saturday at 5pm ET, I am getting killed for this at home. But what am I going to do? Not play in the ToC now that I've qualified for it? Come on. So instead I am just the asshole this weekend playing poker during family time. I still can't believe that's the situation, but it is what it is and I understand that these things were scheduled a long time ago and cannot be changed now. But dam what a bad, thoughtless decision. As if a Saturday wasn't bad enough, it goes at 5pm ET on a Saturday. Just crushing.

So first, let's take a look at the complete suite of winners from the two blogger tournament challenge series (I am deleting out the 10 multiple BBT3 winners so that all that shows on this list are the 46 players who won at least one BBT3 tournament):

BBT3 TOC Winners:

Scott Fischman
columbo
corron10
twoblackaces
TuscaloosaJohn
lucko21
Smokkee
swimmom95
dwal78
Chippy McStacks
pureprophet
ScottMc
tilt away
hellory
GottaWinSum
misogynist
Breeze81
Martyr99
wwonka69
katiemother
PokahDave
Loretta8
SirFWALGMan
RecessRampage
iam23skidoo
hoyazo
MEMPHIS00
ShipFaced12
wormmsu
DonkeyPuncher74
PirateLawyer
RNallin
cmitch
surflexus
oossuuu754
bdidde
JD Schellnutt
heffmike
OMGitsPokerFool
Shabazz Jenkins
Julkeus
lilkimmer77
Astin
Bone_Daddy84
scottc25
maneki_neko


And the Bodog ToC winners, which is not at all a "Tournament of Champions" since apparently it's not based on winners of individual events but rather just the top 18 finishers in the points race. And wait a minute, wasn't Smokkee the guy doing so much complaining about the BBT ToC not really being a ToC due to some tournament chops involved along the way? Check your mirror young man before you cast aspersions perhaps? Anyways, here are the Bodonkey "ToC" winners:

1 Newinnov 8 723.64
2 smokkee 9 499.53
3 emptyman 6 450.01
4 ICrushBloggers 6 448.99
5 Drizztdj 7 439.74
6 MiamiDon 7 435.56
7 donkette 6 423.71
8 GoldenHammer 7 418.91
9 vin_nay 5 379.47
10 cbags 7 374.38
11 WhatsTheNuts 6 370.98
12 InstantTragedy 6 370.89
13 JL514 6 370.44
14 ScottMc 7 362.74
15 Columbo777 6 355.12
16 yestbay1 5 352.90
17 JD Schellnutt 8 351.71
18 BuddyDank 6 351.59

So I thought for starters it might be interesting to see who shows up on both lists, which would be indiciative of someone playing very solid tournament poker and who probably has a better than average chance of making some noise in one or both of these things. Now granted, since I have a general policy of not liking to play on the very worst and most check-bouncy of poker clients, I am not 100% sure at all of who every player on the Bodog list is, but with most of them it is obviously pretty self-explanatory.

So, for our double-ToC cashers, I see JD Schellnutt, who sneaked into 17th place on the Bodog list and who also won not one but two BBT3 tournaments in rapid succession in the second half of the challenge. This is not a guy who has had a huge resume of blonkament wins, but he can play the game and he obviously has some skills against this particular field of monkeydonks.

We've also got Columbo and Scottmc who won BBT events and also finished mid-teens in the Bodonkey series, both of whom are more than capable of winning out in either or both ToC tournaments.

And I only recognize one other player from the Bodog list who also won a BBT3 tournament this time around, and that is none other than Bodog host Smokkee himself. Smokkee sucked out his way to I think a PLO victory early on in the BBT3, and he ends the Bodog series in second place on the top 18 leaderboard as well after winning this week despite (or thanks to) the $270 bounty placed on his head for the final Bodonkey tournament. I saw some of the hands people were taking up allin against him for giant pots in this thing, and it seems pretty clear that Smokkee really got the benefit of people playing like complete jackasses against him during the evening of his big win.

In any event, that is it as far as I recognize of players who finished in the Tournament of Champions in both the Bodog and the BBT3: JD Schellnutt, Columbo, Scottmc and Smokkee. Are these the four guys with the best chance of cashing in one or both of the upcoming Tournament of Champions? More on my thoughts on that later this week.

Oh and btw, the EP2 player in the hand I posted about yesterday actually folded AKs. I think I soiled myself when I saw him fold that hand right when it happened, although I have to admit, he went on to survive far enough into the tournament that I guess I have to question the merits of calling the push with still a third player to act behind you, which could make even AKs a wise fold in that spot. Can't say as I am folding AKs in that situation, pretty much ever, let alone in a game full of blonkeys.

See you all tonight at the Mookie. 10pm ET on full tilt, password as always is "vegas1".

Indy, MATH Recap, and Late-Game MTT Question

Yesterday I forgot to mention that I saw the new Indiana Jones movie this past weekend as part of my little brother's bachelor party festivities. Now, I will admit right off the bat to being a bit of a dickhead about most "blockbuster" type of movies, and certainly of most unnecessary sequels, and most of all about bringing back a superhero type of movie with a guy who is what, 67 years old now in real life? Crazy. So I went to see this movie over the weekend, and you know what? It wasn't half bad. Now don't get me wrong -- the first Indiana Jones was and always will be a top 10 or so movie of all time. You just can't beat that for a thriller / adventure / hero flick. I know it is one of the all-time greats because literally every fucking scene in that movie is top notch. From the opening scene where he switches the golden statue with a bag of sand, and ends up being chased by the huge boulder down the thin rock hallway, to where that guy comes out at him with the knives and shit and he just smirks and pulls out his gun and shoots. And who can forget the face melting. Am I right or what? Face melting almost always = kickass movie. Remember that one.

So anyways, this movie was not half bad. It was no Raiders of the Lost Ark, but as I said above, what could be. It wasn't as good as the third Indy movie either, the one with Sean Connery, which was also a pretty great movie. But this one has got to be better than Temple of Doom, that shit pretty much sucked. To be sure, Harrison Ford really did look old, older than I thought he would even. He could barely run in the scenes that called for him to run, let alone do any of the simple stunts that were all clearly done with stunt men. And the acting or the story aren't about to win an oscar or anything. But I enjoyed it ok. I would rate this one as 3 out of 5 stars. Watchable if you want to see it. Not nearly as bad as I figured this thing was gonna be, that is for sure.

So, I received some feedback in emails and girlies from a few of you on Monday evening, and it seems that the decision to keep things fresh in the Mondays at the Hoy by changing the payout structure to pay the winners in entries to the weekend's big Sunday Guarantee tournament has been generally well received. That is good. I really wanted to do something to spice it up as the BBT3 came to a close, because I myself was feeling a bit drained from all the high-pressure tournaments day after day like it was for three long months. And I know if I was feeling that way heading in to my own weekly tournament that I love, then lord knows what the rest of you must feel like. It's great how many of you came out and played in so many of the BBT events, and it just felt to me like now was the right time to try to add a little new intrigue to the MATH. As I said yesterday, I really would like to do what I can and what we can to get some bloggers into the big weekend tournaments, and hopefully help someone find their own biggest career online score, because for me in the end that's what it's all about. It always has been and it always will be.

So, with that in mind, 22 runners came out for the new 750k satellite MATH, making for a cool $528 prize pool and payouts to the top four finishers in our weekly shorthanded nlh tournament. Unfortunately I missed the first 50 minutes of the Hoy out being entertained by a big law firm at one of the finest restaurants in New York, and yet somehow I still managed to final table, busting out in 6th place as I was the short stack for the entire time I sat with the final 5 players. The MATH is always a fun time for me though, as the pace of a shorthanded blonkament gets really fun after about 90 minutes and that pretty much lasts right through the end, with this week being no exception. And with just 22 runners we are right in our sweet spot after so many weeks of the huge crowds that make it so dam near impossible to consistently survive in this thing.

Here are the list of players who did survive to the top 4 spots, including our two winners of their buyins to Sunday afternoon's 6pm ET full tilt 750k guaranteed tournament:

1. astin $216 (Sunday 750k buyin)
2. chitwood $216 (Sunday 750k buyin)
3. twoblackaces $62.40
4. HighOnPoker $33.60

So we're back out of BBT land, and once again we resume where we left off, with two lawyers out of our four cashers this week. Lawyers = best bloggers poker players, period.

So here's a hand analysis question I have for you all. This hand went down in a blonkament over the recent past. It was part of the BBT3, so there was that added pressure to win, if you choose to think of it that way. We are about 3 hours in to the tournament, and we were down to 11 players remaining. The player with over 34,000 chips in Early Position 2 (EP2) is the chip leader, by a small amount over second place but then with a nice gap until the Button's 26k stack in 3rd of 11 remaining players. The Small Blind with 17k was around 8th of 11 left.

Now take a look at the hand history that went down here:

Full Tilt Poker Game: Table 1 - 400/800 Ante 100 - No Limit Hold'em -

Seat 2: EP1 (14,193)
Seat 3: EP2 (34,466)
Seat 5: Cutoff (11,825)
Seat 6: Button (26,006)
Seat 7: Small Blind (17,134)
Seat 9: Big Blind (18,675)
*** all players ante 100 ***
Small Blind posts the small blind of 400
Big Blind posts the big blind of 800
*** HOLE CARDS ***
EP1 folds
EP2 has 15 seconds left to act
EP2 raises to 2,700
Cutoff folds
Button has 15 seconds left to act
Button calls 2,700
Small Blind raises to 17,034, and is all in
Big Blind folds
EP2 has 15 seconds left to act
EP2 has requested TIME
EP2 folds
Button folds
Uncalled bet of 14,334 returned to Small Blind
Small Blind mucks
Small Blind wins the pot (9,500)
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 9,500 | Rake 0
Seat 2: EP1 folded before the Flop
Seat 3: EP2 folded before the Flop
Seat 5: Cutoff folded before the Flop
Seat 6: Button folded before the Flop
Seat 7: Small Blind collected (9,500), mucked
Seat 9: Big Blind folded before the Flop

I want to focus on the EP2 player. Again, this person is the new chip leader with 11 runners remaining in a BBT3 tournament. He raises from early position #2, gets called by the button, and is then raised allin for half of his new chipleading stack by the small blind, who was in 8th of 11 players remaining at the time. He thought it over quite a bit, and then folded.

My question for you is, how good of a hand does EP2 need to have in order to call here? In other words, he obviously calls with AA and KK. What about QQ? Do you call the big allin if you are holding QQ in EP2 in this spot, having just taken over the chip lead? What if you have JJ or TT? Or here's another question. What if you hold AK? How about AKs? Anybody folding AKs in this spot? Please leave your responses in the comments as I have had some useful discussion on this point over the past few days and would really like to hear everyone's views.

Small Field vs Big Field Mtts

As we approach another Mookie Wednesday, I am left to ponder the topic I have returned to the most over the past several weeks concerning my poker play: why am I once again completely invisible in terms of my performances during the BBT3? I mean, I am still running hot in my mtt game overall; just in the past week I have recorded probably three top-100 finishes in the 5050 tournaments on full tilt and pokerstars, two of them ending well into the top 50 players, in addition to some other random tournament cashes in various forms of poker plus a number of nice hits in the sitngo arena. So my tournament game is still doing fine overall. But the problem is the blonkaments.

Sure, I managed to win one more blonkament in the past month -- the first of the $10 Turbo PLO Dookie's a few weeks back -- bringing my total blonkament wins for the year up to 4 -- two Dookies, a Donkament and an O8 Riverchasers event in January. But in general, my blonkament game overall has not been up to snuff so far in 2008, and I keep asking myself the same question over and over again: Why?

I've done a lot of soul searching on this point, and I am simply not hitting on any of the right answers. So I thought today I would use this space to write down my thoughts and solicit any opinions that anyone has on the topic. I really don't have any conclusions to make in this post, though, so it will probably end up being more stream of consciousness than anything else when all is said and done.

The biggest thing about the blonkaments over the past few weeks in particular has to be the large fields. With the BBT3 in effect, the average blonkament between the Big Game, the Hoy, the Skills Series, the Mookie and the Riverchasers has probably been what, around 90 players? Compare this to the non-BBT "usual" size of these events, which is maybe 20 for the Big Game, 30 for the Hoy, 40 for Skills, 60 for the Mookie and 50 for the Riverchasers, for a back-of-the-envelope average participation of around 40 players. So with the BBT, the fields are a good twice the size of average if not a little moreso than that even. Obviously this makes it very much more difficult to win a tournament when the field is more than twice as large.

But my problem with it all just being that simple as far as my complete lack of success in the blonkaments since the BBT3 hit is that for the most part I am not even cashing in these events. Should it really be that much harder for me to finish in the top 10% of the field, say, with 40 players or with 90? I think not. So clearly, I am simply doing something wrong.

For example, after how many Skills Series events there have been so far this year -- let's say around 12 at this point -- finally this week's Razz event saw me score my first elimination bounty of the entire series when I knocked out blogger razz champion Gary Cox when he boated up on the river (you gotta love razz!). My first fucking bounty! In 12 events. How can that be? I keep asking myself that question, and on that particular point I think the answer is a little clearer than the other blonkaments in general: I am playing way too loose up front.

I told myself I was playing too loose after my first several Skills Series failures, don't get me wrong. I went back and reviewed my hand histories and noticed that I was taking a lot of chances that, while maybe sensible plays given the context in the tournaments at the time, simply did not need to be made at that point in time. Like, for example, I'm playing razz and I am dealt (KJ)4, the action folds to me with just two players left to act and up cards behind me of 7 and J. Do I need to raise here? Sure I am tempted to raise and likely steal the blinds, and generally speaking that is how I try to play razz as a rule and I believe that is a winning approach to the game. But in a freezeout tournament, especially one with a bunch of unlesser-skilled players who are more likely than your average bear to make a bad-looking call or to chase a draw down to the final card, I think perhaps in these situations, where the hand I actually have is not a good or even playable one at all, I can pass up playing in more of these situations than I have been. This in fact was the exact approach I followed for the first time in the entire Skills Series run this very week with razz, and I ended up posting not only my first elimination bounty but also my best overall Skill Series finish, a still disappointing 22nd or 23rd place out of 80-some runners on Tuesday night. Still not where I want to be, but I definitely felt like, at least where the Skills Series limit poker events are concerned, I need to actively focus on playing tighter early in these events, and that should help my bottom line going forward. It is definitely not something I have focused on at all to this point, and I think that fact shows in my results thus far.

But my better question involves when I move my self-analysis away from just the Skills Series. The rest of our games are, for the most part, no-limit holdem tournaments, and it is in those events that I am most surprised and most disappointed with my complete inability to even cash. Now to be fair, in the very first event of the BBT3 in the Big Game, I played great and ran all the way to 3rd place before being the second-to-last cooler victim of Scott Fischman's at the final table. I won $953 or something for my efforts, basically paying for all of the BBT3 events I will be playing in (most of them) and giving me a very confident feeling heading into the rest of the challenge. But since then I do not believe I have cashed in a single tournament of the BBT3. So again I ask, what am I doing wrong in these nlh tournaments? Here is my analysis:

In the Mookie, I already wrote earlier this week about my theory on the 1500 vs 3000-chip starting stacks. I have been playing every one of our events as if it were a 3000-chip tournamnet, even though in reality only the last Mookie of every month -- including tonight's, btw -- starts with 3000 chips. The rest of the Mookies over the past couple of months have been 1500-chip starters, and as I mentioned earlier in the week, I know now that I have been playing those also too loose. Again as with the Skills Series tournaments, the majority of my LAGgy weakness has been occurring early in the Mookie tournaments, where I have been raising preflop too liberally with less than stellar cards, and I have been betting and calling too liberally on the flop as well. As much as that is a drag on anyone's results in anyone's tournament game, doing so in the shorter-stack Mookie tournaments has been a complete disaster. I think I have figured that out and internalized it now, so hopefully starting with next week's Mookie tournament I can see some better results with my new 1500-chip tournament approach. So I think that explains my terrible Mookie showings so far this year.

But what of the other tournaments? In Riverchasers I do have the one win this year already, and otherwise I have missed probably half of them, and all the RCs during the BBT so far, to watch Lost, so with that particular tournament I have not really made enough attempts to claim a real lack of success yet. But take the MATH for example. This is an event that I won what, 6 or 7 separate times in 2007. Now this year, I am relegated to just one cash, an early final table exit at that, and an overall loss of a good $200+ in my own tournament so far in 2008. What is up with that? Now this is a 6-max tournament so in some ways I doubt the story is as simple as me just playing too tight early on. In 6-max I think you really have to play a much looser game in the earlygoing just in order to keep up with the escalating blinds and the shorthanded format in general. I have reviewed my hands from every Hoy of the year so far, and for the life of me I can not focus on one single thing that I seem to be doing wrong. So those of you who have been playing with me in the blonkaments lately, if you have any ideas what I've been doing wrong this month as compared to my past performances, I am all ears.

Lastly, I will mention that I have been a bit of a tiltmonkey in the blogger games through much of this year so far, and I know that is something that has affected me in every single one of our regular weekly events. Too many times I have taken a bad beat or two, or lost a nice portion of my stack, and then proceeded to auto-donk the rest of the way out of the tournament. Now, this is not an approach that I use in my sng play, nor is it something I would ever do in my larger mtt play either, which tells me that on some level I know it is losing poker to allow myself to tilt-donk in this way. And yet, so far over the past several weeks I am just not giving myself a chance to survive, to clear my head and to come back from a big loss. All that I realize now as of this week and I am specifically targeting that as one key area of change going forward.

In all, I think it is a very tricky business trying to act like anyone actually has an actual plan to win one of these large-field blonkaments. But I certainly know that I have the skill required to be making some final tables, at least to be consistently making the BBT points cutoff. Not that I would ever in a million years "play to make the points" (you donks), but as a benchmark of my performance I should definitely be in there more than the three times or whatever I have reached this plateau so far in the first month's worth of BBT tournaments. So look for me tonight in the Mookie at 10pm ET on full tilt -- password as always is "vegas1" -- and I will once again be planning to practice a tighter strategy, at least during the first hour or two of play. At some point as I have mentioned previously I bellieve that my advantage increases exponentially over most of my peers as the tournament progresses to the late stages and the game becomes more of an instinctual pushfest stealfest and even restealfest, but in order to be able to benefit from that advantage I feel I have, I need to focus on the fact that first I need to get to the third hour of a tournament before I can start to open up. So that's the plan for tonight, but I really do welcome any thoughts from any of you on my plan in the blonkaments over the past month or so.

Cuz boy do my results suck some balls.

See you tonight for the Mewk.