Full Tilt Shootouts Suck My Ball

Instead of the nice, normal praise of everyone that I was going to post today, instead you're gonna get this.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, should EVER play a shootout on full tilt poker again.

The shootouts on full tilt are horrible. They are beyond horrible. I mean, it's one thing to have something fail because of technological reasons. Those are embarrassing as shit, and full tilt has certainly had its share of those, with the servers crashing and whatnot. But the saddest thing about the full tilt shootouts is that the errors involved are not technical in nature. They are Just. Plain. Stupid. Honestly, you would never ever believe there are actual pros behind the scenes here running this site. Although I've only ever said two words to any of the poker pros who are actually associated with full tilt, I know them enough to know that not a single one of them would support any facet of the way full tilt has structured its shootout tournaments right from the first time they became available.

Silly me to expect that after not having shootouts for like three years on their site, when they finally get them going, they're still set up like the way a blogger would likely set them up. Fucking ridiculous.

Think back to Loretta's short-lived Sunday heads-up shootout tournament. These idiots then and even still now start people in later rounds with different amounts of chips. That whole notion is so sick, no real bona fide pro would ever consider playing for any real money with that setup. It's recockulous. So on Thursday night in the "NOT FTOPS #3" tournament, which I paid $109 of my hard-earned money to enter, I started out with 3 players at my starting table, and since it was a double-stack tournament, we all started with 3000 chips. Thus, when I won my first table, I moved to my second table (after a full hour delay, yet another delicious part of these shootouts) and started there with the 9000 chips I had amassed from my first table. And yet, two of the six players at my Round 2 table started with 6000 chips.

Now I understand, and everyone has been through this before, that I had to go through an extra player in Round 1 and these 6000-chip guys only had to play through one player in their first round table. But you know what? I don't give a fuck. Start everyone with the same number of chips in Round 2 you ass puppies!! What the fliggity fluck is so hard about that? Just fucking do it! What the fuck man. In Loretta's tournament, we had people starting Round 2 in a heads-up matchup with one guy with 3000 chips and the other starting with 1500. Could anything show just how gheyly idiotic this setup is more than that? I mean, so what if twice I won Loretta's tournament after starting Round 2 with 1500 chips to my opponent's 3000, still for a mere mortal, starting off 1500-3000 in a heads-up battle is not even close to a fair deal. It's the height of folly. Period. PERIOD!! Don't try to deny it, just fucking change your shootout structure full tilt!! If anything was ever indefensible, it's that. Period. Fuckfaces.

So yeah, on Thursday night I started off in Round 2 of the $109 shootout with 9000 chips along with three other players, while two others at my table started with 6000. It's unfair and it is truly recockudonkulous. It's not even close to not being recockudonkulous. And last night I was one of the 9000-chip guys, but I'm still telling you. Full tilt oughta be embarrassed to even try to run such an event on their site, and the pros who play there and own the shit should be mortified to be associated with such a practice. Some of you guys know Howard Lederer a little bit. Do you think he thinks this is the right way to play a shooout tournament? How about Jesus Ferguson? Better yet, do you think any of these guys would put, say, $1000 of their own money into a tournament where in Round 2 there are likely to be people starting out with 50% more chips than him? If you think they would, then you are a genuine schmuck. They wouldn't even consider doing such a thing, and in fact if you told them this story and didn't let them know that it was full tilt where it happened, they would immediately advise you never to play any poker at that site because it's obviously run and owned by a bunch of schmike (plural of schmuck in hoy-speak).

But the kicker here is, this isn't even the dumbest or most redickufuck thing about the full tilt shootouts anymore, as they have apparently "upgraded" the payout structure since they first brought this format to full tilt with a software upgrade a few months back. So last night there were 500-some entrants in the 6-max $109 shootout, and it listed that it pays 108 spots. After Round 1 there were 216 players left, meaning that the top half of the remaining field would get paid out. I had already been girly chatting with a few of you out there about how stoopid that payout structure is, because it really means that at one table you could run down to heads-up quickly and then lose, and still be one of the first half of players eliminated in Round 2, and therefore not get paid. This does not seem like a fair outcome in many ways, but when you think about it, is it really any different from a regular tournament? In a regular mtt, the players at one table could all play super slow and super tight, all stall their way to the bubble, and a bunch of short stacks not only could but do cash in mtt's several thousand times every single day of the year playing in just this exact way. Most of the completely scrotumless bloggers out there have repeatedly stated that stalling is a key part of the game, and even though every single person who's ever made that point is an undeniable pussy loser, it's still something that is simply a part of tournament poker, both live and online, for as long as there's been tournaments and will be for as long as there is tournament poker going forward.

So anyways, I'm playing this thing, and I'm doing well at my Round 2 table. The number of players remaining is whittling down, whittling down towards the 108 ITM positions. 120 left, 116 left, 112 left, and my stack is still strong, sitting me probably right around the halfway mark of the remaining players. Of course then I find pocket Aces and some anusass flops a set of Jacks and depletes me down to 112th out of 112 remaining with some 600 chips. Several of you out there were on the girly with me laughing at the horridious luck I have been facing this week, but then you got treated to the greatest display of aggro-stealery in history, as I proceed over the next 15 or 20 hands or so to raise and push my way back all the way up to over 6000 chips without even being called one time. It was amazing. Along the way there the bubble bursts and we are down to 108, 105 and eventually down to under 100 players left in the tournament. So I know I'm going to cash at least, and with my still-short 6600 chips I am still playing relentlessly aggressive poker to try to double up or go home. Suddenly in the midst of my raising allin in maybe 15 of the previous 20 hands, I find pocket Queens and I know I'm in great shape with the worst possible table image. I bump it up again, knowing I will get no respect, and the guy to my left pushes allin with a larger stack than mine. I call of course, he has pocket 6s (what a play with pocket 6s btw), and natch he flops a 6 and IGH in 98th place.

Only that is when things start to get freaky. The little window pops up and informs me that I just finished in 118th place in the tournament. Conveniently, out of the money positions by some 10 places. Hmmmm. I check the lobby, and there are only 68 players remaining in the event, and yet when I check the leaderboard out, there I am showing as busted in 118th place on the list. Even though I just busted out not two seconds earlier.

Upon further inspection, the geniuses at full tilt poker have set up their shootout payouts such that the fucking thing literally shows the top 108 spots paying out, and literally shows fewer than 70 players remaining at that time (which was accurate), but apparently they are saving fucking spots lower down on the list from the number of players remaining, so that when people bust with more people left at their table, they will be slotted in as busting significantly lower than the number of people actually remaining in the tournament at the time of their bust! Sure enough, I click through to full tilt's shootout payout structure rules on their website, and there it is in black and white. So apparently everyone who busts out 3rd of in their Round 2 tournament will automatically be slotted in as being eliminated from the tournament in spots 108-144, regardless of how many people were actually left in the event at the time of your actual elimination.

Sheer fucking brilliance, huh?

So there I am, I literally watch the bubble break, and I am conrgatulated by several friends who are watching the tournament with me in the girly. I play down further, and I make decisions about how I play certain hands based on the fact that there are already far fewer people remaining alive than the number of spots being paid out. We're then well below 100 players left -- in fact as I mentioned there are only 68 players remaining at the time of my untimely bullfuck cocknshit bustout that took not one but two flopped sets against my dominating higher pocket pairs to knock me out of this thing. There are fucking 68 players remaining, and when I bust I am slotted in to spot #118th?

Nice job, full tilt.

Do not play ANY, and I repeat -- ANY -- shootout tournaments on full tilt until they fix this shit up! You would think it is fucking rocket science, figuring out how to do a shootout tournament. Either these horses' asses are limiting the number of entrants to a multiple of 2, or they're starting people with 100% or 50% more chips than other people at every table in every round after the first round in these shootouts, or better yet they are inexplicably changing things from the very same way every other tournament that has ever run works as far as being able to pussy-stall and last to the money positions. They're showing 68 runners left and the top 108 paid, and then when I bust out 68th, they decide to "route" me to having busted out in 118th place. They're showing me already in the lobby who's busted out in 69th place, and yet there are 98 players officially left in the tournament?

Sheer brilliance huh.

Can somebody please get the guy who makes all these decisions for full tilt a poker blog right away?

Math Shootout Take II, and All Good Things Come to an End

Yes, I'm sure most of you are already well aware of this but everyone's favorite poker dwarf Iggy did bust from the World Series of Poker Main Event, I guess it was late on Friday, several hours in to Day Four of the world's largest poker tournament. As the title says, all good things must come to an end, and I guess in that sense I am getting over it after a few days to relax. In the spirit of vengeance against the WSOP gods for not spiking Iggy his two-outer or whatever he needed on the river once he was forced to push his last 100k in more or less blind under the gun, I did not take one look at any WSOP updates over the weekend after Iggy busted. Not one. I don't know who busted, I don't know who's alive, I don't know who made the final table or if there even is a final table yet. I don't even know if Hellmuth busted and went crazy on everyone yet. I imagine I will check in for all the updates sometime today, but for now I am mired in the bliss of WSOP ignorance following the elimination of Iggy somewhere just north of 400th place, a finish in the top 7th percentile or so of one of the greatest minefields in the history of tournament poker.

So don't forget, Mondays at the Hoy is back tonight on full tilt, and this will be the second MATH tournament that will feature full tilt's new Shootout format. We're once again going to be playing shorthanded tables to keep the action going and the energy high, and we will for the second straight week play down to winners at each of the full shorthanded tables, and then those winners will meet up at the final table for a balls-out battle royale to see who can be the back-to-back winner that it will take down this week's Hoy title. We had a very respectable 23 runners come out for the first Shootout event last Monday, and I would say that the tournament went over very well and seems to have been quite well received as the shootout structure really seemed to spice things up a bit for all the players. Hopefully this means we can get a nice turnout going again tonight, as a shootout really works better with the more people involved, at least at the relatively low levels of participation that we tend to see outside of the BBT-enabled events. So come on out and play -- you know how much we love first-timers at Mondays at the Hoy as well, so even if you've never played with the group before -- the tournament goes off tonight at 10pm ET on full tilt, the buyin remains at $26, and the password as always is "hammer".

OK I can't take the suspense....I'm going to go and read up on the rest of this weekend' WSOP Main Event action now. See you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt!

MATH Recap, and Multitabling MTTs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes...in the MATH

Mondays at the Hoy returns again tonight on full tilt at 10pm ET, which I am thinking is likely to be our last with the 6-max no-limit holdem format. As most of you know, I changed the format to shorthanded nlh at the beginning of this year merely to benefit my own self, but as that change has not worked to my benefit I am thinking about a new change that hopefully will result in me winning several MATH titles in the balance of the year.

God how I love that stuff. You really can't make it up, can you? I mean, there's about 50 of you out there who rail my ass every single solitary second I am online on full tilt and have for months, so you know as well as I do how many total shorthanded nlh tournaments I have played of any size or any kind in this entire year since making the perma-change to the Hoy tournament format. It was something I played quite a bit in the first half of 2007, but that shit is so foreign to me at this point and has been all during the past twelve months or so that frankly 6-max holdem just feels a bit funny whenever I do sit down to play such a tournament. But hey you have a blog so why not just write down whatever you want about somebody, right? Don't want to be confused with the facts, I know how it works.

Anyways, back to reality for a minute -- yes I am planning a fresh change to the MATH format starting with the July events which will begin one week from tonight, July 7. While I have enjoyed playing for $216 buyins to the weekly Sunday evening tournaments on full tilt, in the end the very thing which attracted me to this payout format -- the availability of $T -- also I think makes paying out in this way somewhat ineffective, since one can so easily (and usually does, it seems) simply use the $T for any tournament other than the weekly Sunday guarantees. Which is a great outcome btw as far as I'm concerned -- people should be playing only those tournaments that they want -- but it does make it somewhat more pointless than I thought it would to structure the payouts in this way, so I think that experiment will be over with the end of the month of June here in Hammer land.

Instead, starting with next week, I am going to take advantage of one of the new tournament structures recently made available on full tilt and try to give it a whirl with the Shootout tournament format. We will go back to the regular payout format, but I am eager to see how a Shootout structure works for a regular blogger tournament for the first time. I'm not sure if anyone has ever even done a shootout blogger event in the past, but I'm going to give that a try and see how the shootout works for the MATH for a few weeks as I continue to look to optimize this thing moving forward.

My hope is that, starting not tonight but next week, the change back to regular money payouts in addition to putting forth a shootout structure for a month or so will increase the fun and excitement for the blogger tournament to start off the action every week in our group. Personally I am not someone who has logged any significant time at all playing shootout tournaments in the past, but I think there might be something a little bit extra fun about winning a couple of one-table sngs on your way to winning a blogger tournament. Plus the other fun side of the shootout format is that it still provides lots of fun and useful experience with shorthanded and even heads-up confrontations, as winning a shootout tournament will require everyone who eventually wins to play all the way down to heads-up and eventually to win out at their starting table to even reach the final table of the tournament. As I said, I have personally played probably fewer than five shootout toutrnaments in my entire life, but to me this sounds like a fun experiment and one that I expect to last for a while as we move into the summer and beyond with the Mondays at the Hoy tournament on full tilt.

So again, tonight we are still in a regular 6-max nlh tournament format, with payouts in the $216 increments that we have had all through the month of June, but this week will be the last week of this tournament format for the Hoy. Tonight the game is at the usual time of 10pm ET, right under the "tournament" tab under "private" on full tilt, and the password as always is "hammer". The buyin remains the same at $24 + $2, where I plan for it to remain as we head into the Shootout format starting next week. And remember, last week saw MATH virgin AGuda take advantage of the usual beginners' luck to power his way to a second-place finish, so tonight we will see if AGuda is just a flash in the pan, or if he even shows up at all to defend his first-timer luck performance.

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