UBOC vs FTOPS: It's Not Even Close

Well, apparently the art of putting together a kickass online poker tournament series has not been lost entirely -- it's only pokerstars and full tilt who either can't figure out or don't care about the needs of their U.S.-based poker customers. On pokerstars' side, it appears to be the latter, as the real issues with the annual WCOOP on pokerstars are the start times, which -- all being in the early afternoon east coast time -- make it more or less impossible for any U.S. player who works a job or is not either a professional poker player or unemployed to play in them.

But, as I have written about here several times over, in full tilt's case the problem is far worse. Full tilt seems to have adopted a hybrid approach to the U.S. - Euro issue, offering a number of events in the afternoons (prime Eurodonk time) as well as a U.S.-facing event almost every evening during the quarterly FTOPS tournament series they run. But what's so horrible about full tilt is that, while three or four years ago I looked forward with baited breath to playing in the myriad attractive events they had to offer in the FTOPS, nowadays they have slowly but surely eaten away at all of the good events, leaving in place just a small handful of pretty much bullshit tournaments in their FTOPS tournament series.

Ultimate Bet, on the other hand, has really got it going on. I imagine some of this stems from the site's past problems, and the resulting need / desire to really cater to their players, but why on earth is catering to the players such a lost art these days? In the land where full tilt has almost no good FTOPS tournaments anymore, and does whatever they can to promote gimmicks like Rush poker and the new multi-entry tournaments that are straight-up designed to hurt the customer base at the expense of the poker site's rake coffers, the UBOC has come around this year and I cannot tell you how exciting almost every night's tournament is. It is like night and day compared to the FTOPS, which leaves me asking why the shike can't full tilt offer the customers what we want?

Let me show you exactly what I mean. Here is a comparison of the current UBOC VI schedule of tournaments, and the upcoming FTOPS XIX series scheduled for next month. After each event on the list, I'm going to put a rating (scale from 1-10, 10 being most attractive and 1 being least attractive to play), indicating how attractive that tournament is to me to want to try to play in, being that I am basically these sites' exact demographic among U.S. players for their periodic tournament series -- my ratings will take into account the game being played, the structure, the buyin, and the gimmicks involved. And to keep things as short as possible, I'm only going to list the tournaments that are in prime evening time on the weeknights (say, after 7pm ET New York time) -- so none of the afternoon events in the east coast. Take a look at the below and you tell me who knows how to satisfy their U.S. poker tournament customers, and who simply just doesn't give a shit:


UBOC VI:

1/17/11 20:05 UBOC 4 NLH 4-MAX $300+20 $100K guaranteed Rating: 5
1/17/11 20:05 UBOC 5 NLH ($200 Rock Star Bounty) $200+15 $100K guaranteed Rating: 10
1/18/11 20:05 UBOC 6 PLO 6-MAX $200+15 $50K guaranteed Rating: 9
1/18/11 20:05 UBOC 7 NLH Deep Stack $300+20 $100K guaranteed Rating: 9
1/19/11 20:05 UBOC 9 PLO 1 rebuy + 1 add on $200+15 $100K guaranteed Rating: 8
1/19/11 20:05 UBOC 10 NLH Deep Stack 6-MAX $500+30 $250K guaranteed Rating: 6
1/20/11 20:05 UBOC 11 NLH Deep Stack $150+12 $75K guaranteed Rating: 10
1/21/11 20:05 UBOC 12 Sniper NLH Deep Stack ($15 bounty) $150+12 $75K guaranteed Rating: 10
1/24/11 20:05 UBOC 18 NLH 1 rebuy + 1 add on $200+15 $150K guaranteed Rating: 8
1/24/11 20:05 UBOC 19 8 Game Mix (HORSE+PLO, PLH, PLO8) $200+15 $50K guaranteed Rating: 8
1/25/11 20:05 UBOC 20 Sniper NLH Deep Stack ($20 bounty) $200+15 $100K guaranteed Rating: 10
1/25/11 20:05 UBOC 21 NLH/PLO Mix $200+15 $50K guaranteed Rating: 9
1/26/11 20:05 UBOC 23 PLO8 $200+15 $75K guaranteed Rating: 7
1/26/11 20:05 UBOC 24 NLH Deep Stack (antes from the start) $300+20 $100K guaranteed Rating: 10
1/27/11 20:05 UBOC 25 NLH ($200 Centerfold Bounty) $150+12 $75K guaranteed Rating: 10
1/28/11 20:05 UBOC 26 NLH Deep Stack $150+12 $75K guaranteed Rating: 10

So, in UBOV VI, there are 16 nighttime events, perfect for primetime U.S. players, and of those 16 events, seven score a perfect 10, another three events score a 9, and still another three tournament score an 8 on my 1-10 scale of how much I would like to play in these tournaments. The buyin levels are generally good -- $200 or so -- there's not a ton of gimmicks, and there's certainly not a ton of shitty games or tournaments with so many bells and whistles that are designed to benefit the flonkeys at the expense of the skilled players. Even when they offer rebuys -- which I think is an essential part of any real tournament series for sho -- they generally limit those to 1 rebuy and 1 addon. This is still a lot of money to put into one big tournament, but it just doesn't compare to a straight-up unlimited rebuy, where you have no idea how much you might have to buy in to compete with the others in there whose bankrolls might otherwise allow them to play incredibly loose over a number of different buyins a la Daniel Negreanu in the WSOP rebuy a few years back. In all, out of 16 events designed for U.S. players, fully 13 of them are the kind of tournaments I am really interested in playing, and as a result, I've played in many of the UBOC tournaments and really find myself looking forward to the series almost every night of the week while it's running.

Now let's flip over to full tilt, who again is scheduled to run FTOPS XIX starting in just a couple short weeks once again on their site, where once again I will provide the schedule, stripping out the afternoon events, and putting an attractiveness rating 1-10 next to each event:


FTOPS XIX:

2/7/11 21:00 ftops #4 NLH 6-MAX $1000+60 1M guaranteed Rating: 1
2/8/11 21:00 ftops #7 HORSE $200+16 100k guaranteed Rating: 6
2/9/11 21:00 ftops #10 NLH 6-MAX Rebuy $100+9 500k guaranteed Rating: 5
2/10/11 21:00 ftops #13 7-Stud Hi/Lo $200+16 100k guaranteed Rating: 3
2/11/11 21:00 ftops #16 Razz $300+22 100k guaranteed Rating: 1
2/12/11 21:00 ftops #21 2-7 Triple Draw $300+22 6-max 100k guaranteed Rating: 1
2/14/11 21:00 ftops #27 NLH Multi-Entry $1000+60 750k guaranteed Rating: 1
2/15/11 21:00 ftops #30 9-game 6-MAX Multi-Entry $500+35 200k guaranteed Rating: 1
2/16/11 21:00 ftops #33 NLH 6-MAX Rebuy $300+22 1M guaranteed Rating: 1
2/17/11 21:00 ftops #36 7-Stud $200+16 100k guaranteed Rating: 1
2/18/11 21:00 ftops #39 Limit Omaha Hi/Lo $200+16 150k guaranteed Rating: 1
2/19/11 21:00 ftops #43 Badugi $200+22 50k guaranteed Rating: 1

O. M. M. F. G. Look at that embarrassment up there. After seeing UB go out of their way to satisfy what they U.S. customers want at the times when the U.S. customers can play the most when it comes to their annual UBOC series, just look at the filth that the FTOPS has become. Of the 12 weeknight events in New York prime time, one of them is a 6 (being generous -- HORSE), one a 5 and one a 4, and the other nine U.S.-accessible tournaments are all 1's on my scale. Flat-out 1's. And frankly, a lot of them should really be more like negative 100's -- in that I would not play them even if someone else offered to front me the full buyin and to keep 90% of what I win -- because going through the motions of actually playing such a shitty game would bother me a heck of a lot more than the price of the buyin.

It's pretty unbelievable really if you think about it. Every single one of the 16 UBOC nighttime tournaments on Ultimate Bet scores higher in terms of attractiveness to me, than every single one of the 12 nighttime FTOPS events on full tilt. How can that be? There's not a single exception -- the very best of the FTOPS weeknight tournaments -- a $200 limit HORSE event -- is less attractive to me to play than the very worst of the UBOC tournaments, which was the 4-max $300 buyin nlh event. Think about that!!

It's just another example -- right along with Rush poker and Multi-Entry tournaments and the like -- of full tilt not having the customers' best interests in at the front of its mind, or really as a consideration anywhere in its mind at all. Whereas UB is actively looking to excite their U.S. fan base and create tournaments that we actually want to play in.

And people actually wonder why I continue to play at UB despite their past problems.

Another Nice Tournament Score

So I've mentioned a few times this week about the UBOC tournament series running over a ten-period period over on UltimateBet. As you know if you read here, I do love the software, the players and especially the tournament structures at UB, with deep stacks and just generally more skill-favoring, slower blinds escalation than at any other major online poker site. By a mile. Even in the non-deep-stack events end up having better stacks and more time to play than most other online mtt's available today. So I've dipped my toe in to several of the UBOC events this time around, for the first time I have ever played in UB's version of FTOPS or WCOOP, and one that I was really looking forward to was UBOC #4 last weekend, the $120 buyin, 30k guaranteed sniper (bounty) tournament. I play the nightly 9pm ET sniper mtt with a $120 buyin most nights I play on UB, and it is one of my favorite tournaments out there and one I have had a lot of success in, so naturally this larger version of my nightly favorite immediately attracted my attention. And, while I'm too lazy at this point to do a full recap post for this run, here's what I ended up with last Friday:





So, it was $4758 and change, another awesome score, and now my second score in under two months in a major online poker site's periodic tournament series, building on last month's 27k win in the Mini-FTOPS on full tilt. Plus, I also managed to score 18 bounties by the time all was said and done -- as with my live bounty tournament win a couple of weeks back in AC, I was chip leader through most of the last three hours of this tournament -- for another $360 in bounties bringing my total cash over the 5k mark in Friday night's UBOC 30k guaranteed $120 Sniper Event.

All that said, as I mentioned I was the chip leader in this thing for most of the last few hours heading up to the final table, having built a massive stack when I made a straight on the turn against one guy's flopset and the other's pocket Kings when they both decided to bet and call tiny bets and easily priced me in for the draw based on pot odds alone, let alone the implied odds in a no-limit event like this. I lost the chip lead heading into the final table, but I got it back at some point around halfway through. I recall at one point I fought my way back to the chip lead again with 5 runners left. 25 minutes later, I would exit, out in 4th place, leaving 12k on the table between my payout and the 16k first prize. How did this happen to me again?

I've looked and looked and re-looked at my screen shots from the final table run, and I think my problem here is best attributable to an incredible run of bad timing when down to the last half of the final table, after about five hours of having great timing with my bets and raises to be able to survive this late along the way. I've written a lot about the importance of having great timing in any large-field nlh tournament, but so much of mtt success, especially late in tournaments, comes down to not pushing into the guy with Aces, or top pair, or AK, and not running any monsters into higher monsters, which are always crushers in final table play. But halfway through the final table in UBOC 4, over the span of 25 minutes, I raised preflop and then was forced to fold to an allin reraise before the flop 7 consecutive times. That's never good. UB is deep, but nowhere is it that deep that you can literally raise preflop and then fold to a reraise without even giving yourself a chance to see or win a flop after seven consecutive failed raises. I could not believe it, and this after raising pretty much with reckless abandon for over 7 hours to even have survived anywhere near this far (you don't eliminate 18 shitdonks without betting and raising a lot and mixing it up quite a bit). But two of those 7 raises were standard button-steals from me with two low unconnected cards, both of which were easy folds for me rather than risk calling off a big stack on. Two of them were also button- or cutoff-steals with decent cards -- one with KTs (I folded to a reraise from a guy who despite being a little short had not pushed his entire stack in for more than an hour and was clearly just in holding-on-for-dear-life mode), one with KJo (I knew the reraiser held an Ace, and at the time he had just under the number of chips that I held). And the other three were also standard preflop raising hands for 5 left at the final table, one A6o in early position, which I folded rather than call a large allin reraise with a likely dominated hand, and two were 44 and 77, also both easy raises pre in this spot but neither of which did I have any interest in calling an allin reraise with and then racing or being dominated for most of my stack. It was just a terrible run of I think the right play preflop and frankly the right play by me to fold as well, but it took my chip-leading stack and turned me into the short stack over the span of 25 minutes without me having any chance to even play some poker or see a flop to show for it. And as the short stack, I ended up raising a guy allin on a 9♠5♠3♥ flop with a flush draw and an over when I held A♠7♠, my opponent made the pretty much mandatory called with pocket Kings, I did not hit and IGH in 4th place.

So again, 5 large is 5 large, and to have the opportunity to make that kind of money from this game and have such a great time doing it -- knocking out 18 people from a single tournament is always a good time in my book -- is awesome of course, no doubt. But once again I find myself more angry than pleased with the result, as half an hour earlier I had been chip leader with 5 left and in line to nab 16 grand and change for first prize, and then boom, out in 4th for "only" 5 grand.

It's a good consolation prize to be sure. But I need to keep focusing on turning these 4-figure scores into 5-figure scores if there is to be any chance of me stepping up my game from here heading into 2010. It's been a great January so far for me poker-wise, but just one or two big wins here is what separates a good month from a good year in poker profits.

Mtt Update

Still haven't had the time to do a proper recap of my score in UBOC Event #4 a few days back. It's just hard to find the time this week in the evenings with all the double-guarantee tournaments running all day long on full tilt in addition to the rest of the UBOC series on UltimateBet. If I don't get to do a real recap, I might just post the two or three most significant hands for posterity's sake, but hopefully this is something I will get to in the next day or two.

In the meantime, I had my first cash in a big mtt on full tilt of the past three days, a tiny score for just a few hundy in the 150k, which is double the usual 75k guarantee which runs nightly at 8pm ET for a buyin of $150 + $13. Normally this is a tournament I stay away from, because (1) I am rarely home in time to play it from the beginning anyways, and (2) even the few times when I have been able to play, I find the level of competition to be noticeably better than at the $50 or $100 level where my mtt play tends to focus. I think I've only cashed in this thing twice before in my entire life, so in that sense running through to the final 60 or so players was a nice feat, especially with the mtt being double its usual size, up in the 1200-player range on the day. But in the end, a run to the 60s just doesn't mean squat in terms of cash in a tournament like this, so I'll take my $300 profit and plow it back into full tilt's double-guarantee tournaments over the next couple of nights.

For the first night in a few, I did not participate in any of the UBOC events. They smartly have a "mini-UBOC" which runs the exact same tournaments as the big UBOC events at the exact same times, but at one-tenth the buyin. The problem with these events for me is that, for the most part, the mini UBOC events only have a tiny guarantee -- usually 10k or less -- and I just don't generally take the time these days to play any mtt without at least a 20k guarantee. I just don't want to go through the rigamarole and roller coaster of luck and timing that it takes to run deep in one of these tournaments, bust out in 4th place, and win what? $500? Definitely not worth it from my perspective. So I've been staying away from the mini UBOC events generally, but otherwise I think the variety of events in the UBOC has been pretty great, personally. They've had some rebuys at reasonable buyin levels, they've had some nice deep stack sniper (bounty) tournaments in the $100-$200 range, and they've had events in no-limit and limit holdem, both 6-max and full-ring, as well as plenty of Omaha and Stud events to pique my interest. As I mentioned yesterday I have built up a massive stack in a few of these other events but so far it has not translated to any big scores since UBOC #4, and on Wednesday night I was tempted by the $1000 buyin nlh event that seemed to be attracting all the big pros from UB's roster.

I originally registered for the 1k buyin tournament, but later unregistered after more carefully considering the situation. I have the money in UB thanks to my score last week in UBOC #4, but do I really want to drop a grand to play this tournament? It struck me how different buyin levels are at live vs online tournaments. In a live casino, a tournament with a $1000 buyin would be big, but nothing so huge in my experience that it would attract all pros or something. Not even close. For the most part, if I play a $1000 buyin event in a live casino in Atlantic City or Las Vegas, I would expect the average level of skill of my competition to be mediocre at best, with plenty of total donkeys in the mix ever-ready to get involved with subpar hands and try to suck out on someone even for $1000 a pop. But in an online tournament, the 1k buyin events in my experience tend to turn out a whole different level of opponent. I'm not trying to say these things are not beatable or anything, but in an online event, a 1k buyin tournament will generally speaking be comprised of mostly solid players, something I would never say about a live 1k buyin event. I've written about this before with respect to the Monday 1k mtt on full tilt -- that field every week is good enough such that my expected value from playing the tournament is measurably lower than when I play, say, the 5050 or a similar-level of buyin. The bottom line is that, for online poker play at the major sites available in the U.S., all the lower limits available make a buyin like 1k something that generally speaking only the best of the best tournament players are looking into.

With that in mind, I ended up unregistering from the 1k UBOC tournament and saving that dough for a better spot. Again, it's not a question of not having faith in myself or not thinking I can do it. I do have faith and I do think I can outlast anyone in the world in the right situation in a large-field mtt. But, that doesn't change the fact that my expected ROI of entering the 1k event is significantly lower over the long run that my expected ROI of entering the other tournaments I normally confine my play to.

Tonight's UBOC was much better as I recall, although I think there is only one of them instead of the normal two events starting simultaneously at 8:05pm ET. I think tonight's is a $200 or $300 buyin pot-limit Omaha event or something like that. Too lazy to look it up. But I checked on Wednesday night and I recall thinking that Thursday's UBOC would be a fun one to play, so I will definitely plan to be there at 8pm. I'm sure I'll make an appearance in the $26 buyin 28k guaranteed (56k this week!) 8pm mtt on full tilt as well, and you might even see me once again in the 40k (80k this week), $150 buyin mtt at 8pm as well. The 8:30pm ET 50k ($30 rebuy) that I won recently is also a distinct possibility. I haven't had a big cash yet in this week's double-guarantee festival on full tilt, but that won't stop me from trying. It only takes one great run to make up for several months days of mtt futility.