Massive Prizes in Multi-Entry Double Guarantees Week on Full Tilt

Holy shipe! What's the opposite of overlay? Underlay? Whatever it is, that's the one word to best describe what happened on Monday night on full tilt, for the start of the site's Double Guarantees Week. As part of the introduction of the new multi-entry tournaments I wrote about last week, full tilt is running a promotion all this week in which every one of the nightly guaranteed prize pool mtts on the site is, for this week only, a multi-entry event, and the guaranteed prize pool is doubled from what it usually is to reflect the larger number of expected entrants into these tournaments as a result of the whole multi-entry thang.

And it looks like full tilt might have slightly underestimated the interest in checking out what the multi-entries are all about. Check out just the tournaments I regularly look into playing on a nightly basis these days on full tilt during the early evening hours east coast time:

6pm ET: The $26 buyin, 32k guaranteed is this week a 64k guaranteed. This tournament usually features around 1700, 1800 runners. On Monday night, with multi-entries in effect? 3,747 runners (entries). Total prize pool: $89,928. But this was just the beginning of the effect, as us east coasters weren't quite home from work enough yet to really start jumping in and fluffing up the prize pools.

7pm ET: This is where it starts to get good. The $75 buyin 40k guaranteed is this week an 80k guaranteed. This tournament usually features between 600 and 700 runners. On Monday night, it got 2,101 runners (entries), for a total prize pool of 144,969! $75 buyin, and a shot at a 145k prize pool. I would say you can't beat that in terms of value, but look at some of the other tournaments below and you might beg to differ. I was in this tournament, and actually ran pretty deep, surviving over 90% of the field despite being dealt zero pocket pairs, and having to fold JJ and TT preflop each once during the night, before I ran into Aces -- my specialty lately -- and busted in 96th place. It was a crazy tournament, far fuller than I've ever seen it even come close to before, with nearly three times the normal number of entries, which really showed in how this thing played out. It was a pushfest from about the second hour on, and I was lucky to last as long as I did.

8pm ET: Here was another incredible value. The $150 buyin 8pm ET tournament is usually a 75k guarantee, and this week is a 150k. Instead of the usual 500 or so runners that this tournament brings in, Monday night saw it attract 2,302 entrants with multi-entries in effect, for a total prize pool of $345,300! Again, if you're looking to play for a shot at a massive prize pool -- first prize in this thing was something like 80 grand -- for a relatively small buyin, this was as good a value as you almost ever see in online poker outside of the massive annual or quarterly tournament series.

Also at 8pm ET is the $26 buyin, 35k guaranteed that is this week a 70k guaranteed. Normally this tournament ends up with somewhere around 2000 runners, but on Monday night, it had 4,333 runners. This made for an awesome prize pool of $103,992, all for a $26 buyin. Again, if you don't like to play too big but love the thought of making a run at a 20k+ first prize, this was your chance.

Now, if you do like to play big, Monday night also featured one of the most amazing values I've ever seen in a regular nightly event. The 9pm ET Monday 1k ($1000 buyin) mtt, which usually features a 300k guarantee these days was bumped up to a 600k guarantee with multi-entries in effect. While attracting around 300-400 runners on a normal night, Monday night saw this behemoth tournament lure in 1,454 entries, for a whopping prize pool of $1,454,000! I'm not generally into buying in to one of the toughest tournaments available anywhere, for a grand a pop at that, but if I were such a person, my lord a 1.5M prize pool on a normal Monday night? This is like what the FTOPS ME used to be just a few years ago, and now it's the regular Monday night 1k tournament's prize pool? Simply incredible.

Lastly, I will mention the 50-50, which is a $50 buyin tournament that runs at 9:30pm ET on full tilt, and typically attracts somewhere around 1100 or so runners a pop. On Monday night, it swelled to 2,045 entries with the multi-entries in effect. This made for a lofty prize pool of $147,500! Again, a nearly 150k tournament for a $50 buyin? That's really awesome value if you're looking to make a nice bang for your buck.

And these were just the guarantee tournaments on display during the regular times when I am normally looking to play online poker in the evenings nyc time. I imagine it was much of the same throughout the day and night on the site, as everyone and their mother seemed to be flocking to full tilt to see what all the multi-entry hubbub was about. Now, don't get me wrong -- these prize pools were huge, but you were playing against a bunch of guys with up to four entries into each tournament, so if like me you only played the usual one entry for one buyin, you were at a massive disadvantage in terms of running deep. And also, the play in these things was looser than usual, in particular in the earlygoing, as players played them -- predictably -- much like monkey hour in the standard online rebuy events, and while loose play early might sound good to someone like me in terms of making it easier than usual to double up (which I did), it also makes it far more likely than usual that some poo-flinger will pick you off early (I did that too). Please don't read this post as me taking back any of what I said in my post on Friday about this new multi-entry phenomenon -- I'm not a fan, and I hope they don't make the multi-entry feature a widespread thing on full tilt going forward, because it doubtlessly bastardizes the game and turns these tournaments into more of a poker gimmick than they already are as a rule. But damn, if you're looking for some excellent bang for your tournament buyin buck, a week of these things here may be right up your alley. You're certainly not going to find much better value than these anywhere on the planet in terms of low-buyin, high prize pool tournaments.

I am hoping to play some actual multiple entries myself in these one or two nights this week just to see how that all plays out -- that 8pm ET with a $96 buyin for four entries, giving four shots at winning a piece of a 100k+ prize pool looks particularly compelling to me -- but for now I will probably continue taking my one shot in a few of these while I play some more of the UBOC events on the side as well. But double guarantees week on full tilt will certainly spice up the excitement a bit, and if nothing else it keeps me off of pokerstars for the week. Suddenly a $27.50 buyin with a "mere" 30k guarantee on pokerstars just doesn't seem all that exciting at 8pm ET, even if I have taken more than 10 grand out of that mtt just this month so far.

Full Tilt Double Guarantees Week in Review

Well, double-guarantees week has come and gone on full tilt, and I am left to give my impressions of the whole experience.

In a word, it sucked. For me, anyways.

Perhaps I should re-phrase that. The promotion was, I am sure, a raging success for full tilt, as I regularly saw between 100,000 and 125,000 players logged on to the poker site all week long in the evenings. This, after usually averaging around 80k or so prior to this week. So in absolute traffic terms, doubling the guarantees was an absolute bonanza for business.

And it should be mentioned here again that I played a lot of mtt's during double guarantees week. And I mean a lot of em. And yet, I never even one time saw a single tournament that had any overlay at all, despite full tilt doubling the guarantee and never that I can almost ever recall attracting enough players to any mtt previously that it ended up doubling the stated guarantee. But whatever full tilt did to get the word out about the 2x Guarantees promotion, it worked, because the tournodonks came out of the woodwork. They flocked to full tilt mtt's this week like it was their job. That, and holding the late registration open for these tournaments for nearly a full hour after their stated start times, much like pokerstars has been doing for some time. I imagine that at least part of this promotion last week has a market-research bent to it, and that the full tilt marketing gurus will now spend some time huddling over the results, boiling things down to what they learned about their traffic by the conclusion of the promotion, and I would not be at all surprised to see full tilt soon announce that late registration will be kept open longer for all tournaments for the foreseeable future, mostly because I don't see why they wouldn't do that as long as there are people still willing to pay full price to enter these events even having missed as much as 10 or 15% of the total time in play in the tournament before they joined in. But anyways, one way or another the upshot here is that full tilt managed to increase their overall sit traffic tremendously -- I would venture to guess by 20-33% overall during the entirety of double guarantees week -- and they did so without even having to pay one red cent of tournament overlay, at least in what I saw along the way.

It also does not fail to escape me that double-guarantees week happened to come at the exact same time as Rush Poker debuted on full tilt. Give the new Rush games a couple of days to work out any kinks, and then right away bring in all the tournament donks and overlay chasers to the site with the double-guarantees promotion, prominently featuring promos for the All-New Rush Poker all over the site of course, and then let the two play off of each other. Get some of these tournodonks to start playing regular cash at full tilt on the Rush tables, and full tilt can literally completely transform the rake structure they can expect to earn from the site forever. Plain and simple. So this is another way in which I am sure the double-guarantee idea was a very successful one site-wide for full tilt.

So given all of the above, why did double guarantees week suck so bad? Because it literally attracted every tournament monkey who has ever watched a single episode of poker on ESPN or the Travel Channel to come out and try to nab some of the large coin available. And that is just so not my bread and butter when it comes to mtt play, and I was unable to successfully adjust during the short time of just one week of inflated tournament prize pools to benefit from this influx of donks.

I cannot tell you how many times I got essentially eliminated from a tournament this week by somebody who had absolutely no business whatsoever even being involved in the hand in question. I mean, guys calling preflop raises from me in early position, when holding a veritable monster like 53o and then flopping trips against my pocket Aces on a completely non-threatening J55 board. Or the inevitable monkey-caller with AK unimproved on the all-rags flop against my middle pair, then hitting one of his six outs after the money gets in. Or, there's always the Harringbot who feels so desperate with his chipstack that he calls my allin with Q7o preflop against my pocket Jacks and then (of course) flops the Queen that he obviously knew was coming all along. And, in addition to the plays like this, you've also invariably got to add in the suckouts that always go down in crowds like this as well, just mathematically speaking. I mean, when you are getting all the money in ahead 10 to 15 times a night at an average clip of maybe a 70% favorite -- this builds in all the times its my AK against the other guy's AQ or A9s, all the times I am allin preflop with Aces or Kings versus a lower pocket pair, and all the times my AK gets called by QJ or T9s as well -- the math dictates that you're going to take a lot of suckouts, many of which are going to be painful just given the nature of poker tournaments. Even if all stays to form and I win 70% of those chances, that means I am taking 4 or 5 potentially very stinging suckouts every night -- many of which when I am 80% or better to win -- and then multiply that by seven since it happened every single night of the past week, and the end result is that I am about as burned out on online mtt's right now as I ever get. The unique dynamic of getting all these largely inexperienced tournament monkeys together to play all night last week meant that, at least for me, it was exceedingly easy to exploit someone into a double up -- I must have amassed top-20 stacks in 8 or 9 different tournaments over the entirety of the past week -- but also very, very difficult to avoid getting donked hard by one of those same monkeys somewhere along the way.

So at the moment I am feeling a kind of mtt burnout that is normally only usually reserved with me for just after some very long, deep run in an mtt that had me playing the same game for many many hours over multiple days in a row. And in a way, I guess that's exactly what I did last week, with unfortunately nothing other than a few minimal cashes on full tilt to show for it. I don't think you'll be seeing me tonight in any true multi-table tournaments as I am going to need some time away from that structure after the past week. I may still donk around in some sngs, cash or maybe some turbo satellites -- as I recall the ultra-juicy FTOPS satellites had just started up again for FTOPS MMMMMMMMMDCMDCMDXMCDXMDCXMCDXMCDXMXDCIII coming -- but my mtt play is going to need a little breather here in order for me to recharge and to get the mtt hunger back that I know is so crucial for anyone who expects to make a deep run through a large field of players in a no-limit tournament.

Big MTT Week

Whew! With the UBOC going on over on UltimateBet -- and the events starting at actually playable times for Americans (mostly 8:05pm ET) as opposed to WCOOP at pokerstars these days -- as well as Full Tilt's double-guarantee week, I have been playing the most mtt poker I've played in probably a year over the past week or so. As I have alluded to previously, I made a deep run to the final table in one of the UBOC events earlier this week, about which I plan to get a post up later this week for sure recapping what ended up being another solid tournament score for me, albeit one where I -- again -- left a lot of dough on the table thanks to multiple bad breaks when down to the final few at the last table. But otherwise, I have been trying to get in on as many of the larger mtt's on full tilt in the evenings as I can, even taking it so far as to leave work a bit early one day this week to get in on the 7pm ET mtt's which I pretty much never, ever get to play anymore thanks to work and family obligations.

So far, as I mentioned I made a big hit in the UBOC a few days ago, but on full tilt I have just not been feeling the love yet after two nights of heavy mtt playing (heavy for me, anyways). I continue this week to amass some massive stacks in the UltimateBet tournaments -- some leading to small cashes and some to no cash at all, sadly -- but I have had very little luck getting anything serious going on full tilt so far, and I'm not sure exactly why. I think part of it is that, despite my hope that there would be tons of overlay in these events with the guarantees doubled, what we're finding instead is that every fonkadonk and his mother are joining in on these tournaments to try to get a piece of the swollen prize pools that this week offers. As a result, unlike past times when this double-guarantee promo has been run, I have literally yet to see a single tournament on full tilt with any overlay at all. The 50-50 usually attracts around 1000 runners for very close to the 50k guaranteed in the prize pool. So this week, they turn it into the "Fifty Hundo" with a 100k guarantee, and what happens? 2200 donklickers show up to try to slip on some banana peels and stagger their way into the money. The 28k at 8pm ET on full tilt, which usually attracts around 1500 runners at $26 apiece, this week suddenly sports fields of over 3000 runners every night. And like I mentioned, for the most part these additional players are not the more skilled players who you might normally find participating in the large-field $26 and $50 mtts available on line. No, for the most part I think these extra guys are by a vast majority flonkeys -- the kind of guys who would never normally play in an mtt at this level -- but you are just hoping to get lucky and get deck-smacked for a few hours and try to make a hundy or two.

With such a huge influx of flonkadonks in the big guarantees on full tilt, it's no wonder to me that I am not having success. I've never really done particularly well in the $26 level nlh mtts on full tilt. If you think about it, most of my success has either been at the next level or two up ($50 or $75 buyins or more), or in rebuy events which again distort the buyin levels up from just allowing anybody with $26 of scratch in their full tilt account to register to donk it up. As compared to a guy like, say, Chad, who has been called the King of Donks for a reason after he won the nightly 10pm ET 32k on full tilt like seven times in one year, I simply do not fare as well against the lesser competition as I do against just one level up from the bottom of the large-field mtts. I have written about this before and have long thought that this is because these clowns simply do not understand when to fold, be it preflop, on the flop, or afterwards. And you know what? I could not count how many times -- just in the past two days of double-guarantees week on full tilt -- I have been called down in a big mtt by an abject moron making a hideous play, even some times where they actually turned out to be ahead. Because I have noticed that, when the board comes down 9TJ with two suits, and then the river brings an 8 of the same suit as the other two sooted cards, there is just no way you're getting your opponent to lay down his pocket Kings, not on the flop, and not on the turn, and it just doesn't matter how much you're betting or how well you have told your story of strength right from the getgo in these things. I've always fared better against opponents who know how to fold at least a little bit, and that is exactly what appears to be missing from the fields this week on full tilt as opposed to the normal participants in these events.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop trying. I would love to say that I'm just not going to try to push anyone off a hand unless I am holding a monster for the rest of this week on full tilt, but in a nutshell I get dealt a monster hand only about once a week or two, leaving me with no other option but to make plays when I know more or less exactly what my opponent has that I cannot imagine him calling me down with. They just keep calling anyways. Thank god there's been UB this week to get my game on in sort of the opposite -- a smaller field of players where people are at least willing to fold if it is obvious they are beat, even if they started off with two good cards in the hole. I don't see this as much of an issue on full tilt in general, but this week it's just been painful watching these tournament morons call call call with shit, and then either suck out or just end up ahead because they aren't smart enough to fold their pocket pair to the obvious straight or flush on the board, etc. Unfortunately I do not think Wednesday's action in the UBOC is any good from what I recall, so I might be stuck playing a million full tilt mtts again, resigning myself to just hoping to limp to the min-cash like all the other monkeys while praying to get slapped in the face with the deck.

There's just so much money at stake, I feel like I can't stay away.