64 But I Need More

Wow I am on a miserable run lately on the online poker front. My live poker game is as good as it's ever been -- I've mentioned before here that I remember not all that long ago the first time I ever played one of those daily holdem tournaments in a casino, I was so nervous, I got bounced early on a race I didn't need to take on at the time, and I distinctly remember thinking at that time how I would be lucky to ever even make the top 20% of any live casino tournament in my life. Fast forward five years or so, and I've won some solid coin in live events in Vegas, and more than that, I've won three different daily casino tournaments while just goofing around so far this year. But online, the past week or so has been absolutely brutal.

It's happened to me before. More times than I can count, really. In fact, truth be told, this downswing isn't even close to as bad as the worst it's ever been. But for the past few weeks, I just can't win anything I play. I've barely touched the mtt's over the past couple of months -- not sure why, although I do seem to recall having a similar period after returning from Las Vegas last summer, so maybe I burn out a little playing so much poker over four days that I literally see pocket pairs and flop-turn-river whenever I blink my eyes, I don't know. But I've been mostly playing turbo sitngos lately, and damn the variance on those things is just sick. Especially when you play a lot of turbo heads-up.

Oh, and a lot of super turbos.

I can't help it sometimes. I realized a long time ago that online turbo tournaments are a style that I can play realllly well, and to this day it is clear whenever I play turbo events that at least half the people at the table -- be it sitngo or mtt -- honestly do not understand the kind of adjustment that needs to be made in order to have long-term success at this pace. Sitting around and waiting for a big pocket pair might work in this one instance if you get lucky, and sure it might make you some money for a week or two while you run good and get just the right situations just when you need them, but over time it's a far losing strategy in turbo tournaments, and quite simply you should not be playing turbo if that is the plan going in. Anyways, these guys might get lucky against me in a given event or three of course, but in general I am at a major skill advantage whenever I'm playing in a turbo tournament structure online.

Narrow that down to heads-up turbo sitngos, and the skill advantage is even more obvious. Now granted, in heads-up play, it is also concurrently harder to take advantage of that skill differential because the play can be so automatic throughout, but at the same time it is just painfully easy to see the deficiencies in the games of most heads-up players at the stakes I tend to play. It's just them and me, and no one else to focus on or to complicate the analysis and make it harder to make moves, etc. And amazingly, if you take it a step further and play the super turbo heads-up sitngos, it is sad how much almost every single person dumb enough to be playing in these rake machines is truly totally out of it when it comes to strategy for these things.

If you play turbo heads-up sitngos at anything above micro stakes, I'm sure you've noticed the autobots who automatically min-raise every single time they act first before the flop. From start to finish, without deviation, every single time. And never a real raise, always just a min-raise. It's such an exploitable strategy, and once I've noted them, I'll usually just kick it back up 4x their raise on a reraise with air right there, they will invariably fold, and then I will instantly show them my trash. These auto-minraisers are such clowns, I will steal their minraise 7, sometimes 8 or more times in one turbo sitngo that lasts 7 minutes. It's unbelievable the free chips that are available over the long run from these people who think they've figured out the way to beat the games. It's so awesome, really. But the best part of all is, even in the super turbo heads-up sitngos, there are idiots who still are out there min-raising every single pre-flop when they act first. Minimum raising, when starting with ten big blinds and with 3-minute blind rounds. How can you not love that?

So yes, as I'm sure the snarkers out there are thinking, why am I on here writing about this instead of playing those super turbo min-raising idiots right now this very second? The answer of course is that I've been playing the super turbo heads up sngs for hours a day over the past several weeks, and yet I don't have anything good to show for it. Lately the variance has just been on the ugly side over and over and over again. Yes I'm getting in ahead with the same consistency as always, but when you're playing in super-turbo land, getting allin pre with A7s vs K9s is not just commonplace -- it's around the best you can really realistically hope for if you're the A7s guy. That's why the variance is so sick in these things. Cuz you're really coming out there and just trying to get it allin preflop with a 60-70% advantage and hope you get your worth out of that situation over the long run. But 59-41 or 63-37 is just not all that favored to be able to avoid getting beat with some actual regularity when you actually play it out, something I've always known but which is so easy to forget until you go through one of those rough patches that mathematically have to happen if you play this game enough times over a long enough period of time.

Over the long run, I've performed fairly well in the turbo and super turbo sitngos that I have played. But lately, 64 percenters and even a few 80 percenters have just not been holding up their end of the bargain. And it's been probably the most annoying few weeks of poker that I've experienced in a year or more.

Super Turbo Heads Up SNGs

That's right, folks. As I've gradually started getting back in to online poker as my son has started sleeping a good portion of the night, I noticed something brand new last night that I had not noticed before on full tilt -- the presence of heads-up sitngos in a super turbo format. Now, for those of you who don't konw, the super turbos are the satellites that start each player with just 300 chips, and 15-30 blinds, and the blinds escalate every three minutes. Basically, the structure in super turbo formats more or less forces you to play allin preflop poker almost every single time a flop is seen, certainly in the early part of the tournament. If you think you can bump the 30-chip big blind to 90 chips with a preflop raise, but then fold when reraised from late position, you're nuts because with 90 chips already invested, you have already committed around 30% of your stack in a tournament with very quick blind escalation. So it's either allin-or-fold right from the getgo in these things, and it's been well documented among several bloggers over the past year or so since the super turbo format first appeared in limited instances on full tilt that playing in the large super turbo's is basically just a crapshoot, at any level of buyin.

So it would stand to reason, then, that the heads-up flavor of these things would also be a total and complete crapshoot, right?

Not so fast. As I have written about here myself, and as I recall some others have chipped in as well, there actually is some strategy that can be used in the super turbo structure. Ultimately, there is little you can do to prevent yourself from taking your AQs up against someone else's 77 in the third hand of the tournament for all of your respective stacks, but there is a general way of approaching these hyper-quick tournament structures that can give you an advantage over others at your table who don't get it. And what I found last night is that, in the heads-up context, if you can get up against someone who doesn't have the same feel for the super-turbo game as you do, you can actually make some decent, albeit extremely high-variance, profits.

I was lucky last night. I ran into a guy sitting at one of these $160 + $4 super turbo heads-up sitngos who really had no clue how to play them. And more than that, either he was some sick points whore or he had wayyyyyyy too much money for his own good, because whether he won or lost, the guy immediately accepted a rematch offer within seconds of the last sng ending. Although I stopped counting maybe around 20, we must have played at least 25 of these super-turbo heads-up sngs, and in the end I think I won maybe five more than I lost by the time this guy had finally had enough. And more than that, net of any suckouts I foisted on my opponent during the session, he won three or four of our battles on hardcore dominated suckouts, situations where we got allin preflop with my AJ vs. his QJ, or my K9 vs his 97, etc. Plus he won another two or so on what I would call mild suckouts, like allin preflop my AK vs his T9 and hands like that where my preflop odds were probably not more than 60% but where I still had a nice lead when all the money went into the middle.

How did I play this such that I ended up +5 in sngs won, plus another 5 or so where my opponent sucked out but where really I was the odds-on favorite to win maybe 2/3 of the super-turbo contests we played? Given the speed, there are really just a few tricks I employed:

1. Push! Whenever I get relatively short and I am first to act preflop. With any two cards. So when he won the first couple of pots and the chip stacks were 390 for him to 210 for me, I would push in preflop automatically with my 30-chip big blind and his 15 already in the pot, even if I'm holding 34o, a hand I pushed with many a time through our 30- or 40-sng session last night. Almost every time he folded, and the couple of times he does call, I am generally only a 55-60% dog or so, which means I am winning more than 4 times out of 10 in any event even when he does call.

2. Read! My opponent. Yes it is hard to read too much into my opponent's actions when we are playing super-turbo which by definition forces the action quite a bit as it is. But there are still variations in the players who get mixed up in these things, and generally speaking you only have a few short minutes to figure out which kind of guy you are up against. Is he, like me, a push-n-pray guy every time he gets a little short, so that when he is short and moves in before the flop I do not necessarily have to fear being up against a monster. Or, is he one of these guys who only auto-pushes with any Ace or with any two face cards? Will he move in with that 34o if he is first to act and has already put big blind money into the pot, or will he try to wait for a better spot? Does a pause before he bets generally indicate that he has a big hand and wants to bait me into calling, or that he has a horrible hand and needs to psyche himself up into raising with it? These are the things I attune myself to right away in the super turbo structure tournaments, and in heads-up play it becomes significantly more important given that you're up against the same guy every single hand for all the marbles.

3. Know! My preflop pushing odds. This is the last key I used last night in abusing this guy in the super-turbo heads up sngs, and it really goes hand in hand with item #2 above. Once I can put some reasonable limitation on his hand range when he moves in in a given spot at a given speed, I need to know whether it makes sense for me to call given my own hole cards. So, for example, once I determined in our first 10 matches or so that this guy was pushing in with any two cards on the first hand of every tournament, then suddenly that K7o I was dealt becomes a calling hand and not a folding hand. And when I know for sure that this guy autopushes with any Ace or any King at all, that A6 or A7 I am holding once again becomes a caller instead of a possible folder. The key is understanding the math behind the allin preflop decisions, at least on a categorical level, for any reasonable two-card hands he and I might be holding.

Still, in the end as I mentioned above, the variance on these super-turbo badboys is more than anyone should have to deal with in trying to amass some quality results. As I pointed out, although I did end the 40-sng-or-so session 4 or 5 wins ahead of my opponent, these results did include a good 5 or 6 net suckouts on my opponent's part that severely hampered my ability to really lay a smackdown on him, but the fact remains that I got in good position to win his $160 buyin in a good two-thirds of the sngs we played simply by following the three keys above and executing my game plan without making rash calls or bad plays. I'm not sure I want to make a habit of playing heads-up super-turbo poker, but when a profitable situation presents itself I feel good knowing I am prepared with a plan that should work against most lesser-experienced opponents.

"Super Turbo" Satellite Strategy

Ha ha, what a joke of a title. But seriously, today I wanted to talk briefly about these super turbo satellites that full tilt runs for the 30 to 60 minuts prior to each of their largest buyin events. They're called "super turbo" because the pace and M sizes in these things put even the site's regular turbo satellites to shame, beginning each player with 100 chips, with starting blinds of 15-30. 15 and 30, with 100 total chips in each starting stack! And just to add fuel to the fire, the blinds rounds increase every 3 minutes, meaning you won't even get a full orbit in before the blinds are up to 20-40, then 30-60 and so on.

Given the above structure, you would think these things are basically just total luckfests. And you know what? You're basically right. The thing is, though, as with most poker variations, there is still some level of skill involved, some level of strategy involved, where you can increase or decrease your chances of winning your way in to one of the tournaments via the super turbo satellite process. At the end of the day of course, if you get effed by bad luck just one time in one of these super turbo satellites, you're done. Period. But, there are some things you can do and some general strategies you can follow to at least maximize your chances of survival and minimize your chances of losing out in one of these things.

In case you're wondering, after Thursday night where I qualified in my one attempt to satellite via the super turbo sats into FTOPS #11, the $535 HORSE event, my lifetime record in these super turbo sats is now 4 wins and 4 losses. While 4-4 may not sound so good on its face, take it from me (those of you who play these things will know what I mean), winning a seat in 4 out of 8 of these tournaments is actually indicative of me knowing a little something about what I'm doing in these tournaments. And I'm going to say again here for the record, super turbo satellites are still going to be more dictated by luck than anything else, so don't get me wrong here. But that doesn't mean there aren't any steps you can take to help increase your chances of good luck and decrease your chances of preventing yourself from qualifying for the large events in this way.

So here are your basic rules for increasing your luck in the super turbo satellite structure:

1. First and foremost, just like I've written about before about other satellite tournaments, is satellite selection. In the case of the super turbos, there really are only two choices. First you have the 1-seat qualifiers (all of the full tilt super turbo sats are 1-tablers), and then you have the 2-seat qualifiers. That's really your only decision. Of course, the sats where the top two finishers win seats will be exactly twice the buyin cost of those which award only one seat. So, the overall point here is, if you can afford it you should always try to play the two-seaters. For example, when I qualified the other day for the 1k buyin FTOPS #8 nlh tournament, I played a few of the super turbo sats, and in the end the one I qualified for the tournament in was a 2-seater. That meant that I had to spend something like $235 to buy in to the sat, and that my friends is a lot of money, even to me on the bankroll that I play with online. That said, look at what happened in that sat -- when down to 3 players, one with 400 chips, one with 360 chips and me with 120 chips, the idiot with 360 pushed foolishly with A3 and got called by the 400-chip guy with TT, with the TT holding up and I was in, just like that. The chip stacks after that play were 720 chips to my 120 chips. Anybody here think I'm good enough in super turbo structure to overcome that chip deficit? Me neither. And that's why you want to be in the two-seats-awarded sats moreso than the one-seaters where at all possible. Yes I could have spent just $118 on the 1-seat satellite, but then you are deciding that you have to win outright out of 9 players in a very luck-driven super fast, super low-M strucutre, and even for the best player or the biggest luckbox in the world, that is a very tall order. It just is. Finishing in the top two out of 9 players is a far easier feat, and frankly in my opinion, if you have the money it is almost always worth it to play those instead.

2. This may go without saying, but when it comes to actual playing strategy in these super turbo satellites, the biggest point of all is that you absolutely, positively cannot lose any big hands, the entire time, even when heads up. You just can't. You can't call a raise in limit holdem (such as the HORSE super turbo sat this week) before the flop, thereby having 40 of your 100 starting chips in the pot, see a flop that you miss entirely, and just fold to any action. I mean, I suppose I can conceive of a situation where I could see myself doing that, but at the end of the day, not really. Once you're in for 40 of your 100 chips, it would take a truly extraordinary situation for me to fold, even if I miss the flop. Your chances of clawing your way back into contention are exceedingly small once you're down to 50 or 60 chips and a few other guys have won allins between two or three of the 100-chip starting stacks. Once you commit any chips to a hand, you're basically committed to see the hand through and taking your chances to either have your lead hold up, or spike a card on the later streets to hand you the victory. If you approach anything resembling a super turbo as a situation where you can call a preflop raise and then fold on the flop, you're done. A gone goose, as T.J. Cloutier would say. Once you're in, you're in. And this leads to my last two strategy points, for these otherwise luck-driven satellite tournaments.

3. Don't wait for monsters. They just don't come. When I won the HORSE super turbo satellite this week on Thursday night, I did it in exactly 22 hands total (see below). Out of 22 hands, do you think I saw AA and KK twice each? I'm not this guy you know. No, the best hands I saw all night were AJ in limit holdem, AKK5 in O8, 235 in razz (that really was a premium starting hand of course), and K55 in stud hi. Not exactly a bunch of strong -- or even playable, really -- starting hands. But you simply have to loosen your standards, in most cases significantly, if you're going to have any shot at all in these things. You basically get one orbit to make a move, and that is it. Think about it -- you're starting off with 100 chips, and the big blind is 30 chips. You're basically almost going to have to play the hand the first time you're in the big blind, and unless I am dealt total garbage that I'm sure is dominated against 3 allin raisers ahead of me, that's exactly the way I play in the big blind. You have to. The structure is made to force you to, and if you try to resist, you're going to very quickly find yourself after just a few hands in these super turbo satellites down to 55 chips (100 to start, minus 30 for the bb and 15 for the sb), when 2 people at your table will already be over 250 chips. And let me tell you, a 5-to-1 chip deficit is no easier to come back from in super turbo than it is in a regular structure tournament. In fact, it's harder because you have absolutely zero ability to wait for anything resembling a strong hand.

4. And the previous two points lead to this, perhaps the most useful individual hand strategy advice I can give for the super turbo sats: Play hands with strong showdown value. This is because, as described above, most of the time when you and another person see a flop or the first street after the first round of betting in whichever game you're playing, you are almost always going to go to showdown. Again, the structure of the super turbos makes you play this way. See a flop, see 4th street, and you're going to show it down. By the time the flop or 4th street is out, almost every player involved will have more than half of their chips in the pot, and that is almost never a good time to throw your hand away. So, this very high likelihood of going to showdown means you're playing things like high cards in limit holdem and Stud hi, and high pairs with A2s in O8. A hand like 55 in limit holdem is nice, but since you know you're going to see all five cards almost every time you play it, you should really view that hand as just what it is hot-and-cold -- about a 50% chance of winning or losing. I would almost prefer to play a hand like AT or KJ over a hand like 55 or 66, and things like middle soooted connectors like 54s and 87s are greatly diminished in value, because you're not getting the odds to play them, with the likelihood of just folding them on the flop if you miss, that you would in a normal poker situation. So focus on the high cards and the strongest hands in terms of going to a showdown in every game, and that's the best thing you can do in these ridonkulously quick super turbo satellites. Often times, I am pushing the first time I am dealt two cards ten or higher in lhe, or the first time I am dealt A2xx or two sooted combinations in O8, etc. Anything that has a decently high chance of being ahead after five cards, without regard to how well these things play on the flop or the turn per se.

There you have it. Now I will show quickly how this works in action, detailing my super turbo satellite HORSE victory from Thursday night to show how to apply the above points in practice. This super turbo took precisely 22 hands for me to win -- 6 lhe, 6 O8, 6 razz and 4 stud hi -- so again you can see just how few opportunities you're going to have to get the big cards in one of these things, and how important it is to push almost right away when you are dealt decent showdown hands.

I folded the first four hands dealt to me in lhe before the big blind hit me, which is what I always do unless I'm in the blinds or unless I'm dealt the kind of strong showdown hand I'm talking about -- big pairs or any two big cards, really. I got lucky when the big blind hit me that I found my old friend the JackAce, which I was probably going to try to play anyways since the big blind represented 30% of my stack at the time anyways, but it definitely meets my high-card strong-showdown requirements for the super turbo structure:



Here I get effed hard by the setup flop, especially given the super turbo nature here:



But then, can you say Resuck?



I didn't play any other hands in lhe, but then in the first hand of O8 play I decided to go up against three other fuckers with AKK5. This is a very strong hand for high, and solid for low as well all things considered, and it also squarely meets my standards for strong showdown hands as a result:



I nailed a big big flop with the hand, allin against three other fonkeys whom I've watched playing hands like 279Q and K854, etc.:



And here I won huge, scooping the large pot with again what I viewed preflop as a very solid showdown type of hand:



And suddenly we are down to four players remaining, with only the winner getting the HORSE FTOPS seat, and with me leading in chips 445-220-100-35.

I then split a big pot against the short up top when I flopped bottom two pairs and he made his low on the turn, and before I knew it, O8 was over and that friendly lovable game of razz was upon us.

Razz is where I made my big move, of all games. I like to think that full tilt felt bad about that anusass from the previous night's HORSE megasatellite and decided to make things right. Not throw me a bone, mind you, but just make me whole for that effing. Anyways, razz started off with me winning two hands by betting out with the low card showing on 3rd street and taking down 40 chips each hand.

I made a big fold here, when a 5 raised it up and I had two low cards, but only one below the 5 and one Jack underneath. With some chips to play with finally, I did not want to do anything to jeopardize my lead, and in razz of all games you do not want to start out behind your opponent any more than you otherwise have to:



Here I had to take on a shorty who decided to make his move allin with a 6-up in razz:



and I busted him somehow here:



I am now up 558-242. I really want to win at this point. It's a big chip lead, but remember with the super turbo high blinds and incredibly low Ms, one mistake can be a very big game-changer.

Here is a decent win at stud hi, I'll take it:



And here is the piece de resistance hand, also in stud hi, where at first I bet out here with a couple of high cards showing:



He raised me allin, and I felt I had to call:



Turns out he had just an oesd, not a very good play in stud hi but at the same time, at these M levels you basically have to pick a hand and go with it.

The end result:



Boooooom! Nothing like winning a $535 satellite tournament in stud with a King-high, huh?



And there it is. Hopefully this is helpful for those of you who are just crazy enough to play the luckfestivals known as the super turbo satellites on full tilt.

Now, if you're wondering how the actual HORSE FTOPS #11 went, it was myself, KOD, jec and emptyman that I know of among our group, and we represented pretty well at first, all three of us making it to the fourth hour of the tournament with over a third of the 673-person field already gone. But check out my starting table in this thing:



So not only do I have full tilt pros David Bradley (who?) and Keith Sexton, but emptyseat88 over there is none other than Scott Fischmann, and of course I've also got the donkalicious KOD to my right as well. What a starting table! Anyways, to make a very long and frustrating story short, the ftp pros at the table played generally horribly, and Fischmann over in the corner there played about as bad a HORSE game overall as I could possibly imagine. I have a bunch of screenshots of his clownings, but he got called down with just QJ on a Ace-high flop against a preflop raiser, he got called down when he bet on every street with A9 unimproved, losing to AK, and several moves like that. When he finally busted in razz on the last hand of the second hour to Keith Secton with a Ten-Nine low, KOD typed into the chat: "pro." It was good times.

In the end, I busted out in 263rd place out of 673 when some anushole drew out on me on 6th street in razz and my 76 lost to his 75. I had been a board-lock ahead on 4th and again on 5th street, but then on 6th I caught bad and he caught good, and the rest was history. The thing is, when you bet out on 3rd, 4th and 5th streets once the blinds and antes are into fourth-hour territory in a double-stacked limit tournament like this, that is a major chip loss, in this case taking up about 80% of my previously 100th place or so stack. When I looked on Friday morning, it turns out that none of the four bloggers in the event cashed, which bums me out because like I said we had represented fairly well during the first several hours of the event before it looks like things started falling apart for all of us around 1am ET. Oh well, it was a frustrating but good time and I'm glad I did it, if nothing else to win that super turbo sat to play in this $535 buyin tournament for a total of $66.

Friday night is FTOPS #12 in 6-max limit holdem, a game I am very strong at and which I am really looking forward to. As with all the limit games, in tournaments the big key I find is simply not to lose any big pots early, period. If I'm not sure I'm ahead, I do not want to call any large bets chasing or drawing dead. Limit really gives the opportunity to make some tricky and fancy moves, and to mix up your play, sometimes betting out with the nuts and sometimes check-raising, sometimes even checking and betting or raising on a later more expensive street. I will also try to get it on the donkament at 9pm ET on full tilt (password is "donkarama" as always), so if you're around I look forward to seeing you there. Sunday is the FTOPS ME, which I may or may not play in, depending on how things go for me between now and then. Best of luck to anyone who is in the ME, and I'll hopefully chat with you over the weekend either at the tables or in the girlie.

MATH Recap, and Losing My Races

75 runners came out for Mondays at the Hoy, Turbo style on Monday night on full tilt. In the end I don't think the turbo feature of things affected much, and frankly I have to say that for the first time in a while, I did not personally witness any really terrible plays. I mean, of course whenever you're playing turbo for a couple of hours, by the end the blinds are silly high and the Ms are silly low and that of course means push-and-pray territory for everyone, but in the end I have to say I was pleased with the play and the pace of the tournament overall. We made the final table at around 11:45pm ET, and the tournament ended just a hair after 12:15am, just as I had predicted here yesterday. It's really impossible to run more than 2 1/2 hours or so in a turbo tournament, as the players simply get eliminated too fast near the end, but I thought 2 hours and 18 minutes on Monday made for a nice quick tournament that did not keep the east coast donks -- myself included of course -- up any later than needed to crown our latest champion and the winner of the 11th of 27 seats to the BBTwo Aussie Millions Tournament of Champions coming up next month. And that champion is....

Jamyhawk. Although I won't try to say that I saw every play at every table, I did manage to follow most of the action and I think I saw most of the hands played at the final table where the action was fast and furious. Jamy had himself a nice chip lead when down to four of five players remaining, and he did whatever he had to do to win out. This included overcoming multiple suckouts by tournament runner-up Daddy when down to heads-up, one of which gave Daddy a chip lead of nearly 3-to-1 after Jamy had held a similar lead just a few hands earlier. But then I don't know if Jamy went on a rush of cards or what, but he bet and raised like mad, and eventually was able to reclaim the lead from Daddy before getting him allin with the best hand, which held up to crown Jamy this week's MATH champion, and the latest Tournament of Champions qualifier.

Congratulations to all 9 of this week's cashers in Mondays at the Hoy:

1. Jamyhawk $576
2. Daddy $351
3. cardgrrl $252
4. Tripjax $198
5. Julkeus $144
6. LJ $144
7. evy35 $72
8. Mookie $54
9. Kajagugu $45

As always, if anyone is not linked above but actually has a blog, please let me know in the comments and I will be happy to update the post accordingly.

And here is the updated 2007 MATH moneyboard, including the results of this week's tournament:

1. Bayne_s $1400
2. Columbo $1362
3. Hoyazo $1162
4. RaisingCayne $1110
5. cmitch $840
6. Kajagugu $806
7. Astin $793
8. Pirate Wes $792
9. VinNay $775
10. Tripjax $759
11. Iggy $745
12. NewinNov $677
13. Fuel55 $666
14. Lucko21 $665
15. Waffles $650
16. IslandBum1 $642
17. XxMagiciaNxX $630
17. JJ $630
19. Surflexus $608
20. Jamyhawk $576
21. Buddydank $553
22. Numbbono $549
23. swimmom95 $545
24. Gary Cox $518
25. Byron $510
26. Daddy $508
27. Julius Goat $507
28. bartonf $492
28. mtnrider81 $492
30. PokerBrian322 $490
31. riggstad $487
32. Chad $485
33. wormmsu $475
34. scots_chris $474
35. LJ $470
36. Emptyman $461
37. Mike_Maloney $456
38. RecessRampage $434
39. Otis $429
40. twoblackaces $426
41. Miami Don $402
42. Zeem $389
43. Joe Speaker $384
44. jeciimd $382
44. Jordan $382
46. Blinders $379
47. leftylu $374
48. lightning36 $371
49. ChapelncHill $353
50. OMGitsPokerFool $324
51. oossuuu754 $312
52. Wigginx $288
53. ScottMc $282
54. Fishy McDonk $277
55. actyper $276
56. cardgrrl $252
56. Irongirl $252
56. Manik79 $252
59. Wippy1313 $248
60. Easycure $244
61. Garthmeister $216
61. wwonka69 $216
63. Omega_man_99 $210
64. katiemother $209
65. Pushmonkey72 $208
66. Thepokergrind $198
67. Mookie $191
68. StatikKling $180
69. 23Skidoo $176
70. Santa Clauss $170
71. jimdniacc $166
72. Iakaris $162
72. Smokkee $162
74. cemfredmd $156
75. lester000 $147
76. Heffmike $145
77. Julkeus $144
78. brdweb $143
79. DDionysus $137
80. Patchmaster $135
81. InstantTragedy $129
82. NinaW $120
83. UnTiltable $118
85. Fluxer $110
86. -o-LuckTruck-o- $103
87. hoops15mt $95
88. Gracie $94
88. Scurvydog $94
90. Shag0103 $84
91. crazdgamer $82
92. PhinCity $80
93. Presidentdave $79
94. maf212 $78
95. evy35 $72
96. Alceste $71
96. dbirider $71
98. kevin-with-AK $66
99. Rake Feeder $53

Thanks to everyone who participated in this week's Mondays at the Hoy tournament, and look forward to next week where I expect to take the best of the last two weeks' changes and run a turbo 6-max nlh tournament to award the 15th seat to the Aussie Millions ToC.

In other news, although I did not think I was planning to do this at the time, I found myself jumping in to a few of those idiotic "super turbo" satellites to the 1k buyin FTOPS #8 nlh tournament that run for the 30 minutes preceding the start of the event. Fast forward about 15 minutes and a "few" hundy dollars later, and I had qualified for the event. But make no mistake, these super turbo satellites are really just super ghey more than anything else, with 100 starting chips and blinds of 15-30, there is no move for any player at the table at any time other than to just move allin whenever you are going to play any hand at all. These things are probably 90% luck and 10% skill, don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise. Anyways the super turbo sat that I qualified in was actually I think a $235 buyin sat that pays seats to the top two finishers, and thank god for that because I got sucked out on recockulously, at the river of course, when down to 5 players left and I was about to amass a 2nd-place stack of the remaining players until the donk across the table from me managed to hit his 3-outer kicker to best my dominated hand. This was actually a fantastic example of just how awful the play can be even in a $200+ buyin satellite tournament like this.

So there I was, down to just 60 chips remaining out of 4 players left, with the top 2 winning seats. The stacks were approximately 400, 320, 120 and me at 60. With the blinds escalating every 3 minutes, I was a goner, dead in the water with basically no chance to recover against those two monster stacks each some 6 or 7 times my own stack and needing to get into one of the top 2 spots to play my way in to FTOPS #8. On the very next hand I was able to double up against the 3rd place guy, who was eliminated on the hand following that, leaving me at 120 chips vs. the 360 and 400 of my two opponents who were obviously going to get the seats. I was pissed because the silly suckout has cost me the chance to be the 320-chip stack at this point, but what could I do. First to act, I looked down to find 82o, debated pushing and hoping for a call and a suckout, but instead I figured I had to fold and just take my chances to auto-push from the big blind on the next hand. But I would never get the chance, because the jackmoron in the small blind had the brilliant idea to push allin for 360 chips into the big blind with 400 chips, even though I was sitting with just 120 chips and would be forced allin on the very next hand and even though two of the three of us would win the FTOPS #8 seats. So the sb pushed allin with what turned out to be A3o, and the big blind called pretty quickly with TT. No Ace for the sb, and I had won my seat. All because the small blind did not have enough sense to auto-fold and move on to the next hand. I mean, A3o is beatable in so many ways, it's hard to imagine him playing the hand with any possible holdings, although sure with pocket Aces or maybe AK the play is marginally justifiable.

Anyways, that donkery -- truly one of the worst plays I've ever seen in satellite play -- got me in to FTOPS #8 with about 2 minutes to spare. Long story short, the play in this event, even with a 1k buyin, was pretty horrible overall. I won about 2000 chips in the first 15 minutes when some guy called me down on every street with pocket 4s on a board of A9T56. That's right. With sixth pair. Unfortunately, I would not see any AK or any pocket pairs above 9s all through my run in FTOPS #8, and as a result I only managed to win one other major pot all night when I flopped a set with pocket 8s against an opponent's AK on an A8x flop. That's always nice. But otherwise, I got no cards and I could not win any big hands seeing very few flops. After flopping the set I was up over 10k in chips (starting stacks were 5k in this super-stack tournament), and that was basically where I sat for the next two hours, ranging up a bit and down a bit but otherwise basically right in the neighborhood of 10k or 11k for the next two hours or so. The problem was that, by the middle of hour 3, with the 1500-some entrants now down to 380 or so (211 would get paid), my 11k stack was only about half of average, and I was down near the bottom of the leaderboard and looking to make a move if I was going to survive to the cash and beyond. So, when I found pocket 9s in late position and faced an allin reraise from the small blind who had observed me stealing only about 900 times over the past few hours, I decided I had to call, knowing that I was likely a 52% favorite in a race, but hoping I might be an 80% favorite against a smaller pair, or at the very least not a 20% dog against a higher pair. My opponent, equally short stacked as I, flipped up AK, and the Ace on the flop did me in, sending me home in 300 something place. I was not happy with the result of course, but it was another FTOPS tournament in this series where I managed to play well without much cardage to work with, last well beyond the halfway point in a large field event, but in the end not have quite enough ammo to make it to the cash. I could not win a race to save my life on Monday night. I busted from the MATH on a race in I think 41st place out of 75 runners, after losing 2 out of 2 races along the way to get there. I lost three races in the FTOPS 1k buyin tournament, and I won that one big pot when I flopped the set. Not much you're going to be able to do in big poker tournaments when you can't beat AK and you can't win with AK, what can you do about that.

In some good news, I did absolutely crush the big mtt satellite to Tuesday night's FTOPS #9 PLO8 tournament, so you can look for me there starting at 9pm ET on Tuesday on full tilt.

Sorry this is so late. Life tilt, work tilt, yaddayaddayadda you know the routine.