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.

MATH Recap and a New Mookie Strategy

Ittttttttt's Moooooookie Day!!! And for once on a MookDay, I am actually running well in the world of online poker. On Tuesday night I made two final tables, though with no big scores to report as they were both of the $10 or so variety and in one case (the Skills Series) did not include any cash at all. But I played well on the night, cashing as well in a PLO8 rebuy tournament on pokerstars, and I also rounded out my poker for the evening by winning a 6-max $110 turbo sng, my first outright sng win in the past few days since my score in the stars 50-50 on Saturday evening. With that nice bump up in the roll from the sitngo, my net for the past couple of days turned back to positive which is always a good thing. Anyways, more on the Mookie in a minute.

But first, back to the MATH tournament from this week. We had another nice turnout of 31 runners, including I noticed a few people who have not played the MATH for a while, a number of New Yorkers which is always good since I don't get out to play much live poker with the nyc blogging crew, and even what appeared to be a few first-timers which I always to see out at the Hoy on Monday nights on full tilt. 31 players made for a $744 prize pool at $24 a pop, and the result was payouts to the top 5 finishers as has been our usual for most of the non-BBT-enabled MATH tournaments over the past several months.

Personally, I missed the first 31 minutes of the MATH this week as Hammer Wife and I went out to a belated Valentine's Day dinner at a place downtown in the city that came highly recommended from my little brother. Man do I have to stop listening to that guy's recommendations. If you recall this is the same guy who said the two Matrix sequels in addition to Terminator 3 were all three of them "the greatest movies ever made" after seeing them, so I should know by now what I am getting in to when I follow one of his recommendations. Anyways my brother told me that this place Scalini Fedeli was the second-best restaurant he has been to in the city (behind Daniel which I simply do not think can be topped by anyone, anywhere), so we headed out there for our annual few-days-after-V-Day dinner, and I have to say, I give it about a 6 overall out of 10, which is no good. Now I'm not about to turn this into a food blog or anything, but let me just say that for the price they charge, the food was pretty mediocre and the service was actually surprisingly poor for a swanky New York City location. Anyways, thanks in large part to the shoddy service, I missed the first half hour of the MATH, and when I sat down at 10:31pm ET, the very first hand dealt to me was pocket 5s, and of all people Fuel was sitting to my left at my table. I couldn't resist, so I raised preflop, and when Fuel reraised me, I just went for the massive overpush on my very first hand at the table, hoping Fuel would call me with two overcards and I would race with him for the quick double-up and the chance to impale him with his own favorite hand. Fortunately, Fuel did call me with two overcards. Unfortunately, they were both Aces. Yep, the very first fucking hand I sit down to at the table, it is my pocket pair up against his pocket Aces, a nice sign of how I typically run at the virtual tables. For a guy who only sees 15-20% of flops on average, I must run into pocket Aces a good 5 or 6 times every single night over a few hours of play. Maybe I've been playing with Astin at my table too much.

And speaking of Astin, he was our big winner on the night in this week's Mondays at the Hoy tournament, outlasting jmathewson_III and LJ in a pretty marathonic 3-way battle before Astin finally got LJ when he hit his set on the turn to eliminate her TP9K in third place. Then I looked away for 2 seconds a few minutes later, and when I looked up, Astin and j_mathewson has gotten it allin preflop with Astin's 78 against j's A7. I watched unsurprisedly as Astin hit his dominated 8 on the flop and he took down the MATH as only Astin knows how. Astin won this thing in typical Astin style, finding a lot of luck when he needed it and winning a few key races, but IMO it was not typical Astin poker in the strictest sense. Really, it was more Bayneage than Astinnage, as I do not recall seeing any of the AA and KK hands that have come to be so well-associated with Astin's starting holdem hands. It was in this case really much more a case of hitting the right cards on the board at the right time, and once again Astin played much more patiently and smartly than people sometimes give him credit for at the final table. He waited until the good spots and did not often get his chips in behind that I saw, and this solid strategy combined with some luck when he needed it brought him the win. Here is the list of cashers from this week's MATH tournament:

5. $66.96 -- fuel55
4. $89.28 -- ANIguy
3. $119.04 -- LJ
2. $171.12 -- jmathewson_III
1. $297.60 -- astin

And here is the updated 2008 MATH moneyboard, including this week's results:

1. astin $664
2. fuel55 $512
3. surflexus $488
4. Jordan $332
5. Pirate Wes $312
6. twoblackaces $298
7. Tripjax $288
8. Donkey Shortz $215
9. VinNay $203
10. columbo $180
11. jmathewson_III $171
12. buckhoya $150
12. Miami Don $150
12. Mike Maloney $150
15. pureprophet $144
16. chitwood $127
17. cubanlinks $120
18. LJ $119
19. bayne_s $112
20. thepokergrind $95
21. ANIguy $89
21. bartonf $89
23. Hoyazo $67
24. PirateLawyer $60

So as you can see, Astin powers ahead to the early moneyboard lead so far in 2008 with another big MATH victory this week, with Fuel also jumping over blonkament killer Surflexus to finish the week in 2nd position on the board. And don't worry, two of the top 5 MATH moneywinners this year are still lawyers, so we're all good, the Earth can keep on spinning without freaking anybody out too much. I'm still expecting Surf to tell us that he is actually a practicing lawyer with the way he crushes the bloggers on an almost nightly basis, but I won't hold my breath on that one....

So back to the Mookie before I sign off here. Obviously much too much has been written right here and elsewhere about my complete inability to win this tournament. No matter how much I tell myself I am focused on securing that victory in the Mookie, it just never comes. It's never even close, really. And I get some funny fuckin comments from you donkeys about my Mookie non-success as well. Some people like to say that I will never win the Mookie until I get the right mindset and level of optimism in it. I love that one. Like I go into these other blonkaments every week somehow expecting to actually win them outright every night, and that's why I do well. Or like the cards are going to fall differently or not have my AA cracked by runner runner broadway to AK on the river. Uh huh. My other favorite is that I don't adjust to the play in the blonkaments and that's why I am never winning the Mookie. Wake up people. I adjust to the play in the blonkaments like it's my job. That's why other people have a goal to win one blonkament in a year, but my goal is to win 15. Because I know how to play them all and I have had much relative success in that endeavor across the board. It is not for lack of adjustment and it's not for lack of having the right mindset. Believe me, those of you who know me well and are "fortunate" enough to be part of my nightly girly chat plans all know how horrible of a minset I have when it comes to, for example, the Friday night donkament. I go into that thing knowing I'm going to pull all my hair out during Monkey Hour every week, and yet every week it is still worse for me than I expected. You couldn't have a worse mindset going in to a tournament. And yet still I have won four of those. So I don't know exactly what it is that has kept me away from the winners' circle in the Mookie, but I know it's not either of those popular suggestions.

And what's the point of all this contemplation about the Mookie anyways? I'll tell you the point. I'm going to go back to the last time I felt this completely inept at something poker-related and then managed to dig out of my hole and finally find some success -- the first BBT. There, I effed up redonkulously during the whole first month, and at that point I made the conscious decision to stop donking and start playing tight, tight poker. And eventually, I cashed in a bunch of BBT tournaments, winning a few on my way to a nice finish on the leaderboard and winning my Nintendo Wii in the process. And that my friends is my plan for tonight's Mookie and for all the Mookie's in the foreseeable future. I will be sure to 4-table, which is my comfortable maximum given my normal-resolution laptop screen, so as to give me ample opportunities to play more hands more aggressively at the same time, but I am going to play dog-tight tonight at the Mookie. Just watch me. If I raise before the flop, I have a pocket pair 8s or higher or I have AQ or AK. Period. And if I reraise you, it is Aces or Kings, and that's it. Those are the fucking rules tonight and I'm going to follow them and see where it gets me. If I'm raising you and you can't beat those hands, you had better get the flock out of my way. I'll play Waffles-limit cash holdem if I have to so that I can just play every single pot and see every single flop if that's what it takes to enable me to withstand the Mookie boredom, but tonight you're going to need to crack my Aces if you expect to eliminate me in the first two hours of this thing. Book it, those are the rules and I'm sticking to 'em.

See you tonight at the final table of the Mook, 10pm ET on full tilt, password as always is "vegas1"!