Unbearably Bad Poker

So I've been watching a little bit of ESPN's WSOP Main Event coverage from time to time this year, moreso here as we wind down towards the November Nine, and I find myself struck by frankly the same thought that I've had in each and every one of the WSOP Main Events I have ever watched over the past decade or so:

These people absolutely suck shit at poker.

Yeah that's right, I said it. It's true. These people play like absolute anusshit. And that, I think, is being kind.

I mean, this is the biggest tournament of their lives by definition. Each and every one of these guys, once we're down to the final 27 players or so, is for sure playing poker for the most money they have ever played in their lives. There is not just the immediate cash payouts on the line, but the sponsorship opportunities involved with making it to the November Nine final table and with potentially winning the tournament. There is a literal lifetime of playing poker and never having to have a real job again within their grasp. All this and more is at stake here for every single player left as the ESPN coverage worked its way down this week to the final table and a half remaining in the WSOP Main Event.

And what are these players doing with this tremendous opportunity?

They're reraising an early-position raiser preflop from middle position with 42o.

They're calling large bets on the flop for a quarter of their stack with just an overcard and an inside straight draw.

They're reraising allin preflop with A7s.

They're calling allin preflop for 50% of their stack with AQs.

And, my personal favorite, a super aggro guy who's been raising all day raises again preflop, this time with pocket Aces. The guy on the other side of the table reraises with JTs. The guy with AA re-reraises again, a fairly small amount, which itself was a truly bad play because (1) it makes it very, very obvious that he has precisely pocket Aces, and (2) the small raise gives the first player now better than 5-to-1 to call the re-reraise with his JTs, well known as the literal best hand to crack what he now knows his opponent has in pocket Aces.

And then the shithead insta-folds his JTs, getting better than 5 to 1 to call the re-reraise!!!

You could not make this stuff up, and you certainly can't defend these plays from a poker perspective. I've watched the Main Event coverage on ESPN for years, albeit some years more than others. But every single year, my reaction to the quality of play I've seen throughout has been more or less exactly the same.

The Main Event is an absolute donkfest. Sure, good skill will work much better for you than no skill, and a player who has played on the big stage before and knows how to extract chips will always have a better chance of surviving than one who doesn't know shit and is quaking in his boots because of the amount of money on the line. But that increased chance of success is still utterly minuscule, given the field and what it takes to survive the kind of indefensible, thoughtless donkery you will be facing right from the first deal on Day 1A, and clearly lasting all the way up to the final table itself. Last year it was that unthinkable idiot Chino Rheem freaking six-betting allin preflop with Ace-rag with just a few players remaining and directly costing himself probably about $15 million in tournament winnings and sponsorships as a result -- if you don't know you're not only beat but crushed after your opponent re-re-re-re-reraises you preflop and you are holding Ace-rag, then you are absolutely, utterly hopeless as a poker player on the big stage -- and this year the play to make the final table is enough to make just about anyone with half a poker brain scratch their head in amazement.

Somewhere, I imagine Phil Ivey is out there watching this week's coverage with that same absolutely classic look on his face as when Jen Tilly didn't bet her boat on the river against Patrick Antonius and then proclaimed that she thought he had pocket Kings, at 2:03 of the clip below:



All I know is this: the raging clowns playing for the biggest money of their lives at this year's WSOP Main Event are doing nothing to help anyone out there who loves to argue that poker is a game of skill and not luck. Sure, there is more than a little skill involved, but for these players to have lasted this long, and to be playing for this amount of money after surviving some 6600 other entrants, while playing as unmitigatedly horrible poker as they are here even at the end, it's certainly not helping the luck vs. skill debate.

Internet Poker Killed the WPT

I realized this week that having a baby recently has given me a whole new perspective on watching televised poker. I'm serious about this, and I think I really mean what I said in the title up there: the spread of internet poker ultimately hurts, not helps, the popularity of poker on television.

For years I've thought it's more or less the exact opposite -- people will watch poker on tv, get into it, and soon they'll realize they can qualify for those very same tournaments they're watching by playing online, so they'll play more poker, and the cycle goes on. All the while, my (and ESPN's, clearly) thinking has been that people getting more and more in to playing poker would also be getting more and more in to watching poker. I mean, it stands to reason, right? You're becoming more interested in the game, you're taking shots at playing in the very same size tournaments as the ones you can watch on tv, against some of the very same players you can watch on tv, and in some of the very same situations as you can watch on tv. And, over the past several years, there's been tons of poker on the tube to choose from -- not just 16 episodes of ESPN WSOP coverage every summer, but also the WPT all year round, High Stakes Poker for the big cash games, the Heads-Up Championship, and various other sitngo, cash and tournament options to watch. So why wouldn't people watch more and more poker as they get more and more in to playing poker, especially online?

Overload.

It's that simple. It's poker overload.

This has finally occurred to me because since having a baby I have more or less not turned on the computer at home. Hardly even once. I can't have even logged in to full tilt more than two or three times since the little guy came, and I haven't seen an image of a playing card on a screen for maybe the longest time in a few years. Poker, in all its forms, has just been on a hiatus with me for a little bit with more important things take up the time that poker has competed for.

But then a couple days ago I happened to be rocking the kid to sleep while zoning out to some random tv, and on ESPN after sportscenter ended suddenly came up the coverage of the WSOP Main Event, Day 2, which I haven't been watching much of this year, just as I haven't watched most of the past couple of years' coverage either. But this time, it was different. For me anyways. The colors of the cards were bright. The guys' characters were on display. George was there and even giving up some famous George quotes for the table. Lawyer-turned-poker-player Greg Raymer was there too, making for a really fun feature table. It was really interesting, and I watched poker on tv with more gusto than I have in several years, without a doubt. I was really into it. Hammer Wife couldn't believe it but I was honestly even laughing out loud at Norman Chad (!!) with all the Seinfeld references.

And further, there was the poker. Ahh the poker. I watched some Russian dude in sunglasses at the feature table call down a c-bet from Raymer on the flop with just overcards for about 6% of his stack. Then I got really interested as he checked, Raymer fired out again on the turn (which gave the Russian dude second pair with second kicker), and the guy pondered forever, staring Raymer down, and eventually slid out another sixth of his stack to call again. I was really rapt by the time the river fell a rag, Raymer pushed out a big bet for about half of the Russian's remaining stack, and the guy thought forever again before actually calling down Raymer's two pairs with his QJ on an xxK-Q-x board. I couldn't believe it.

Later I was similarly interested to watch Greg Raymer himself make a seriously call-stationy play, calling an preflop raising opponent's decently large allin bet on the flop when Raymer had just top pair with a Ten kicker. Frankly I could not believe Raymer made that call, and somehow of course he happened to be right, the other guy had top pair with a 9 kicker, which just added to my amazement.

But when I really knew something was up was when I watched Jesus raise preflop from early position with pocket Jacks, and get called from late position by AQo. The flop came down an amazing JTT, and I was completely glued to the tv set. I really wanted to see how Jesus would play this hand. I was truly excited to get to watch how an amazingly successful WSOP player like Chris Ferguson opts to play a flopped monster like this. And I don't just mean watching whether he bets or checks the flop. I mean, how long he waits to make the bets or calls (or raises) that he makes throughout the hand. How he holds and moves the chips he does bet from his stack into the pot. And any other clues or signals that Chris seems to give off when he knows from the getgo he's got the board locked up.

What made that hand particularly enthralling to me was that Chris played it more or less totally differently than the line I would have taken. And boy did it pay off. When that flop came down JTT, knowing I had not just flopped a boat but the over boat on the board, I am pretty certain I would have checked. I would have check-called the flop for sure. On the turn, if my opponent had checked behind on the flop, I would bet out around 2/3 the size of the pot and hope my opponent thinks I'm trying to steal. But if my opponent had bed the flop and I had called, then I would probably check to him and hope he leads out again so I can at that point move in my stack and he will have to call for the pot odds. For what it's worth, I do seem to recall Doyle even saying in Super System that he tends to check the flop with the overboat, just because you have the board locked and there isn't much your opponent can have hit when you connect with the flop that hard.

But Chris doesn't play by Doyle's rules, and he doesn't play by what I'm sure is the standard donkey move of checking the flopped boat even regardless of having been the raiser before the flop. Chris figured he raised from early position before the flop and this guy called him from late position, so he's got to have something good. Two high cards maybe, or a medium pair. And Chris knows -- instantaneously, I was extremely impressed to note -- that for either of those hands (two high cards or a medium pair), the TTJ flop is not necessarily a bad thing. If his opponent called preflop with AK or AQ, he's now got 6 outs to top pair and another four outs to a straight. If it was KQ, he's now got the open ended straight draw. If it was AJ, KJ or QJ, he's just made top pair and a decent kicker on a paired board, which is also playable in many situations. And lordy if the guy called preflop with AT, KT, QT or even JT, then he is in a world of hurt cuz he will obviously play those hands as well. So Chris considers all of this over the span of maybe two seconds after the flop hits the board, and then he slides right out a standard c-bet, just like he'd been planning the move since last Thursday. His opponent, who does have AQ and reasonably thinks he has ten outs, calls there as the pot odds plus the implied odds make that a pretty good call against a decent stack early in a big no-limit event like this.

When the turn brings a rag, I am once again really interested in what's on the tv, and I of course am immediately thinking of my favorite move, which is to bet when I flop strong as if it's a c-bet, and then if I get called, to check the turn even though I actually did flop strong to the hand. This way the other guy, who already called my flop c-bet so clearly has something or some intent to steal the pot from me later in the hand, will often lead out on the turn as if I am admitting defeat and willing to give up my c-bet. Then I spring the allin check-raise on them, and only the really good players fold. It's a great move and I've made thousands of dollars in real cash just doing that to donkeys, especially early in tournaments.

But once again Chris had another surprise for me up his sleeve. Jesus didn't even skip a beat before sliding another bet out on the turn, larger this time since the pot itself has grown larger after the bet and call on the flop. I mean, this guy flopped the over boat, immediately c-bet the flop, got called and then immediately bet out again with a standard second-bullet bet on the turn. I couldn't believe he would waste his chance to double up on that play, but wouldn't you know it, the guy smooth called again. I guess Chris's immediate betting was making this guy think Chris was just firing a second-bullet bluff, I don't know, but I couldn't believe he called again. Amazingly, the river card brought the killer K, making the final board JTTxK, and when Jesus quickly moved allin on the river, his opponent had to call having rivered broadway and getting exactly the card he was calling all the way to pick up.

It was really an amazing hand, and just one of several interesting showdowns I saw in just under an hour of watching the first poker on tv I've seen in years probably. And I had an awesome time, something I definitely haven't felt about televised poker in a long, long time. And I could tell while I was watching it exactly why that is: because I haven't spent the last several nights already staring at a screen, flopping full houses and making those calls with top pair. Even after just a couple of weeks, the whole game seems fresher to me, more interesting.

Playing online poker a couple of hours every night causes a tremendous overload of poker in my brain, and I would venture to say the brains of most of you out there as well. It may not feel that way, and I'm not saying we would necessarily be happier playing less, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and guess publicly here that most of you who have played online poker with some regularity over the past, say, two years or more, now watch far less televised poker than they did two years ago. I'm sure it's true for most people out there. When I'm already facing these exact same situations myself, night in and night out -- sometimes several times a night -- seeing the cards fall, the big calls or folds, the rush of praying for that miracle on the river, the thrill of successfully slow-playing a donkey out of his stack, then watching more of the same on tv is really quite boring nowadays. Back when I didn't have online poker is an outlet for my interest in the game, I was an online poker junkie. You couldn't get me to turn it off and I wouldn't even go out on Tuesday nights when the WSOP coverage was running. But then I got into actually playing the game instead of just watching it, started playing in tournaments regularly, and suddenly poker on tv just seemed, well, second-best.

Now after just a couple of weeks away from online poker and the immersion that medium allows me in this game I still love and enjoy, I'm already ready to let my old poker outlet back into my life just a little bit. ESPN's WSOP coverage was just about the best hour of tv I've watched since the one where SpongeBob gets left in charge of the Krusty Krab and tries to make Squidward do all this extra work, and Squidward tells SpongeBob all those funny lies and SpongeBob believes every single one of them because he is the most gullible sponge in the sea.

Einhorn the Whippersnapper, and Exploring the Stop and Go

Watching this Tuesday's WSOP coverage on ESPN -- only the second time I have done so this year btw since televised poker became so ungodly boring -- I was cracked up a bit by Mr. David Einhorn, who was at one of the featured tables with two other well-known pros. I forget their names, I wasn't watching that closely, but one guy was the hispanic guy with the same name as his father, and I think the other pro there was none other than Chris Moneymaker himself. Anyways if you can't tell, I wasn't that interested in the coverage itself -- which to me is at its absolute low point ever as far as substance goes and has really degenerated into just showing some allins and not even any interesting hands anymore -- but I was very interested in seeing this David Einhorn for the first time. Although I knew he had finished in the final two tables of the WSOP Main Event a couple of years ago, I had never actually seen what he looks like before, and I have a bit of personal involvement with Mr. Einhorn.

You see, David Einhorn runs hedge fun Greenlight Capital, and has been very successful for some 10 years at that. Late last November, Einhorn spoke at the Third Annual Value Investing Congress in New York, and in his speech, he mentioned out of nowhere really that he thought Lehman Brothers was a good short sell candidate. Mind you, this was with the stock trading just over $60 a share. Many people at Lehman paid no attention to this, or didn't notice it at all -- despite being a large global investment bank, one of the funny things I always throught about working there is that once you leave the trading floor, most of the employees don't know (or want to know) the first thing about finance or investing -- but I saw the story and read it with interest, mostly because I thought this guy was some kind of dick. Back then I still believed confidently in Lehman management, and when they told me Einhorn's claims were the baseless, self-interested whines of just another short-seller, I took them at their word.

As the months wore on, though, Lehman shares continued to weaken, then Bear Stearns collapsed, and all the while this little prick David Einhorn kept shelling LEH shares every chance he could get in the media. After a while, the head-butting between Einhorn and Lehman senior management became quite well known, and by this past summer, even the New York Times was reporting on the story. Obviously there is a picture of him right there in that article online, but I don't recall seeing this picture when I read up on what he had to say then. In my mind's eye, I pictured an old, stodgy man with white hair and a red hankie sticking out of the breast pocket of his blue pinstripe suit. Anyways, suffice it to say, most Lehman Brothers employees over the past year or so came to really hate David Einhorn, and I can't say that I was any different, even once I had accepted much of what he had been saying as true, which I am happy to say happened for me long before it happened for most Lehman employees.

Anwyays so there I am on Tuesday night, I'm flipping through the tv on my way to watch the Mets hopefully blow another game (they won actually, now only one game behind the Phillies in the loss column), and I see the WSOP coverage so I stop for a minute. And before I even know what's going on, there is Lon McEachern introducing David Einhorn at this featured table. And I'll be damned if that guy isn't some little kid. I mean, a young whippersnapper like that is the guy that hurt Lehman shares this year more than any single other individual (other than maybe Lehman CEO Dick Fuld himself, but that's another story)? I watched in amazement, hoping to see him get his child-looking ass busted out on some donkey play just to make myself feel good, but alas it was not meant to be. He was behind and drawing dead on a couple of occasions in this Tuesday night's episode, most notably a hand where he had a flush draw and two middle cards on a raggy-looking flop against Chris Moneymaker, but both times he managed to sniff out the situation and get out with a minimal loss. I may actually have to tune in next week just to see if they'll show me his bustout hand, although my sense is that the likelihood of seeing him again is probably fairly low, and given how boring the tv coverage is these days, I doubt I'll be back. But actually getting to see what a young guy he is -- he is just a kid, really -- was quite an eye-opener. To think that someone who looks like that could see through the opaqueness of Lehman Brothers' books and their strategies so easily, and so long ago at that, is really a telling statement about a lot of things I think. I still think there is a special place in hell for these guys who go around shorting stocks and then talking them down as much as they possibly can after taking a large short position -- probably somewhere on the same level of hell as the Don't Pass bettors at the craps table -- but I guess I have to give the little boy some credit for being able to figure this out and for sticking his neck out there and going public with his convictions long before anyone else in the marketplace was saying boo about Lehman or any of the other large investment banks.

So on to today's topic, which is maybe a simple point but one which I am writing down here because it's something I know I need to focus on better myself in the poker tournaments I play. Arnold Snyder is a big fan of the stop and go, a move which I rarely if ever use in my own tournament play. Snyder basically explains that a preflop allin move from a shortish stack is actually perceived by many larger stacks as a fairly weak move, and one that they are often likely to call with a somewhat wide range of hands. Snyder far and away favors the stop and go, where you just call preflop when you have a shortish stack, and then push allin on the flop no matter what falls.

Now, it's not like the stop and go is some new move that Arnold Snyder has thought up all on his own. Of course it's been written about and talked about and used by successful poker players for years and years. Centuries even, maybe. But, it's not something which I myself have incorporated into my game at all. And I know I need to. Because I've seen several successful tournament players use this ploy on tv to much success, Arnold Snyder believes in it as well, and I personally know at least one or two guys I play with somehwat regularly myself who swear by the stop and go, in the right spot at the right time.

Snyder himself gives a very convincing argument for the stop and go, especially from out of position, essentially arguing that sometimes you are actually "giving free cards" to your big-stacked opponent when you reraise his preflop raise allin and you are not on a particularly large stack. Say you have a hand like pocket Tens or AK, you have 50k in chips late in a large-field mtt where the average stack is more like 100 to 150k. So you're pretty short, and a guy with 200k in chips raises a standard amount -- say to 18k or something -- from middle position, and you're in the small blind. If you push allin now, it will be 32k more for this big stack to call into a pot with 74k in chips in it, assuming 3k-6k blinds at this point in the event, so he is probably going to call with almost any hand that he would have put in that first raise with before the flop. And now the guy is going to have five cards with which to hit his AK or his set of 6s against your TT.

Now think about what would happen if you just flat called his 18k raise preflop. Yet this only leaves you with 32k behind into a pot of 45k. but say the flop comes down Q94 with two to a suit, a fairly standard flop. Now you push allin from the small blind, and even though this player has a nice stack of still around 180k, does he really want to call off another 32k -- more than a sixth of his remaining stack -- with just pocket 6s, or AK? Probably not. And that right there is the strength of the stop and go play. When you push (on just about any flop, mind you), he is likely to lay down most hands in this spot, and your stack will grow from 50k to 92k. That right there is a huge move for you, getting you much closer to average in a spot where you really need to add to your stack pretty desperately, and you did it in a spot where had you pushed allin before the flop, you would have gotten called and given the 66 or AK a much better chance to draw out on you.

As I said, I don't mean to suggest that this is anything earth-shattering at all, as I know it's not, but it is something which I personally do not use nearly enough in my own game. I am much more apt to push in that spot before the flop, get called, and then go to sleep muttering about my bad luck of losing a race or, if I'm playing on pokerstars especially, getting 2-outered at the river to lose to a set. In reality, I can probably increase my chances of survival and of chipping up in spots where I really need to chip up if I raise a little less and call a little more before the flop when I do not hold a big pair, and then just push in more or less blind on any flop that falls. Snyder considers the preflop push here giving up your post-flop utility in a hand, and in his eyes doing so is almost always a mistake. Giving your opponent a chance to fold after the flop where there is very little chance he will fold before the flop is the much smarter, more effective move from a chip utility perspective in many cases.

This is something you can expect to see me do tonight at the final table of the Mookie. For those of you who do not know, tonight is the last night for Waffles to make good on his self-challenge to surpass LJ in annual Mookie winnings, and although Waffles has made a good go of it, in order to be able to catch LJ at all tonight, he is going to need something like 80 people to play in the Mookie. 80 people. It's doable of course, but absent the BBT this is not a number we have seen too many times even for the greatest blogger event of the week. So what I'm hoping to see tonight -- and frankly I would enjoy an 80-person Mookie in its own right probably as much as I would enjoy Waffles having one more longshot of a chance to win his bet -- is as many of you as possible come out to donate your $10 to the Give-Waffles-a-Chance prize pool for the Mookie. Maybe you have never played a blogger event before and have been reading here for a while and have always kicked around the idea. Maybe you've played many times but have kinda gotten away from the blogger events since the last BBT ended. Maybe you think you might miss the first 20 or 30 minutes due to work or whatever but otherwise wouldn't mind playing with your blogger friends tonight. Whatever the situation, I urge you to come out tonight and get that field size up as high as we can to Give Peace Waffles a Chance. As always, the Mookie is on full tilt at 10pm ET, under the "Tournament" and then "Private" tabs, and the password as always is "vegas1". For $11 you can know you made a difference in the life of one of the game's great ambassadors, and the Mookie is basically always guaranteed to bring fun and enjoyment to everyone's life to boot. So please come out if you can. I know I will be there.

MATH Recap, and Poker on TV

61 runners came out for this week's Mondays at the Hoy tournament on full tilt, making for a cool $1464 prize pool and payouts to the top eight spots as has been usual during the BBT. I made another nice run, surviving for two hours at the superfast 6-max format with no good starting cards to speak of, including a big comeback I made from being down to under 500 chips late in the first hour after attempting to run a particularly poorly-timed bluff against a guy who obviously had the hand that I was trying to represent. I hate when that happens, but at the same time you simply don't have much choice other than to steal, push and represent hands when you are dealt nothing playable and especially when the tables are all shorthanded, all the time. And, at least if you trust yourself and you size your bets properly, the good players can still fold out when your bluff is obviously beat given your opponent's actions, leaving you with some stack to keep playing with, which is exactly what happened with me last night. An hour in I was down to 500 or so chips after having to fold to a reraise on a bluff I had tried to run, but then an hour or so later there I was at the final two tables of the Hoy. Unfortunately my luck ran out when I pushed with ATC from the big blind against a certain someone in the small blind, and that certain someone instacalled me with K8o. As insta as it comes. But I was behind and in fact dominated, so we'll let that certain someone feel like he or she made a good play there, and IGH in I think 16th place overall.

Here are the people who did cash in this week's Mondays at the Hoy tournament:

8. $51.24 -- Shabazz Jenkins
7. $51.24 -- Mattazuma
6. $80.52 -- Fuel55
5. $117.12 -- a10419
4. $161.04 -- willwonka
3. $212.28 -- twoblackaces
2. $307.44 -- actyper
1. $483.12 - wwonka69

So Evil Wonka uses his devil worshipness to win his second BBT3 tournament, thereby decreasing the field in the upcoming BBT3 Tournament of Champions to a maximum I believe of now 49 total runners. That is just awesome. And EW, obviously, is a dominating poker player to boot, so if anyone deserves to win multiple BBT3 events, clearly it is him.

So today I wanted to write briefly about something I saw written about by Change100 as well as Otis over at UpForPoker, and that topic is televised poker on tv. Basically, my question is, who out there actually watches poker anymore on tv? I sure don't. And I used to be a televised poker monster, believe you me. But I'm not surprised in the least to read Change's news that High Stakes Poker, the WPT and even potentially the WSOP are in danger of losing their television sponsorship due to poor ratings. And this gets back to my point above -- I believe the ratings must be sucking huge balls lately for these shows. Why? Because I don't even consider watching that stuff anymore.

Three years ago or so, you couldn't tear me away from the WPT or ESPN's WSOP coverage. I had the recorder set for Tuesday nights 8-10pm ET and I would watch every minute, every shot, every everything that was shown on tv when it came to poker. And I don't just mean no-limit holdem either. Anything the stations were willing to put on tv with regard to poker, I was willing to watch. Again and again and again. The huge Chris Moneymaker stone cold bluff against Farha shortly before he finally took down the Main Event in -- when was it -- 2003? Mike Matusow telling Greg Raymer he has "tiny little cojones", remember that one? Tiffany Williamson being an anushead, "I know you have Kings", all her stupid splendor. Alix Powers or whatever his name is starting that fight at the table with James McManus. I watched it all, and I hung on every scene and every hand shown. When HSP first aired on Game Show Network, I was all over that shit. I didn't miss an episode of the WPT for the first couple of seasons I remember.

But now, I don't even know when these shows are on anymore. Seriously. I just don't care. I don't even care about watching the World Series coverage anymore on ESPN. By 2007, I bet I didn't even watch a total of one full hour of coverage of the WSOP on ESPN. And it's not like I don't care about or love poker anymore -- if you're reading this then you can probably tell that I am still as in to the game of poker itself as I have ever been, and I play it as much as I ever did. But I just don't care about watching it on tv anymore. And it seems that many many other people share my view.

Do tell me, dear readers, do you guys still make watching poker on tv anywhere near the priority in your lives that it once was? Does anyone even know when the WPT airs originally on its new home on the Game Show Network? How does the amount of poker you watch on tv today compare to the amount you watched, say, three or four years ago?

Don't forget Skills tonight, 9:30pm ET on full tilt. I for one really can't believe how many people are winning multiple ToC seats in this thing at this point, it's really amazing. Hopefully I will join the ranks of winning two BBT3 tournaments tonight or sometime over the final eight events before the end of the three-month-long challenge. See you tonight at 9:30 on full tilt (password is "skillz" as always).