Two weeks ago I found myself unexpectedly at the Reading Grosvenor. A friend had given me a last minute text that he was changing trains in Reading and wondered if I could meet up. At the time I was playing the PKR Open and about to fire up a load more tournaments but decided to abandon that idea. I got the chips in at the Open table fast, a number of times, looking to chip up to a stack that might make it to the cash or otherwise be smashed out. Usually this strategy leads to donking yourself out. Somehow I kept getting it in with trash and winning. Out of a 450 runner tournament I found myself abandoning it as Chip Leader with 153 left. I had made the money when I checked the next day but it was painful that the first time all month I find myself with a workable stack I then sat out and min cashed with it.
Anyway, after a couple of drinks my friend got his next train and I found myself heading to the casino. As I hadn't played live since before Christmas it would be a nice warm up for Leeds. Sometimes evenings at a poker table just go weird. You find yourself sat with odd people who you wonder how they can possibly function as human beings on a dayto day basis. Both tables were full when I got there so I didn't get on a table until 11pm. There were a few useful regs I had seen before. There were a couple of standard fish and then there was a very drunk Scotsman. Most Scottish accents are clear and easy to follow. The odd one is quiet, fast and full of words that don't make a lot of sense south of the border. He was talking constantly but only every fourth word or so made any sense. Every time the action was on him we had to wait 15 seconds of Hollywooding before he asked 'Cann'a fold?' before folding, or putting chips into the pot for the next spectacular piece of donking he was about to perform. He was winding people up long before the first explosive moment of the evening.
He was sat next to an okay reg known as 'Pedro'. Pedro is a youngish black local, currently on crutches after breaking his foot. After raking in a decent pot The Scotsman had missed a £1 chip. It was in front of Pedro who flicked it back over towards him. Pedro was wearing a very expensive watch as many casino gamblers have a tendency to own. The Scotsman picked up the chip and proceeded to rub the flat side of it over the face of Pedro's watch. Pedro went for him in a flash with much shoving and swearing following. Security was there about ten seconds later dragging away the man on crutches as he seemed to be the aggressor. After ten minutes reviewing the video he was returned and our drunk friend was ejected. Gutting as one of the two value players was now gone.
It was okay though as about thirty minutes prior to that an older guy with short, spiky and gelled, grey hair and a diamond stud earring had sat down at the table. To buy in he brought out a giant wodge of £50 notes and threw a couple of the table. He was drinking from the biggest glass of baileys I have ever seen in my life. He then bluffed every other pot all in by the time it got to the river. The dealer changed just before the previous incident happened and the new one clearly knew several of the regs very well. You really have to watch out in small regional cash tables as there is often a lot of behaviour that would not be tolerated in any decent cardroom. The dealer was talking to the reg in the 9 seat and commenting about the hands after they had finished, or on several occasions when the hand was still in progress at the other end of the table. This is pretty unwelcome at the best of times though wasn't impacting on any of the play.
The new fish had bluffed off about £300 when he decided to ship King high into the second nut flush on a paired board. The dealer had made a comment to the other player before he called, it sounded something like 'Your go.' After the other guy called the bluff (which no one was ever folding against this guy) Baileys Man decided the dealer had told him what to do and worked himself up into a bizarre state. He got what I can only describe as passive aggressive with the dealer before standing up and demanding to see the Floorman. He kept wandering back over telling the dealer that he 'was done'. The guy was clearly an idiot but the dealer had very much blurred the lines of acceptability already already and whilst there was no cheating or collusion the lines of good practise had very much been blurred. The dealer's actions likely cost the table a lot of free money and left the Floor Manager probably wondering who he had upset in a previous life to be stuck dealing with this nonsense. As the cameras didn't have good sound pick up the Floor Manager could do nothing and Baileys Man huffed off convinced he had been cheated.
I had got about £120 up then drifted back to about even by the time Baileys Man had properly left, abandoning about £60 on the table with no intention of coming back. Weird incidents had left the table short of both the value players. It was quite early for me to consider finishing a session at 2 a.m. but I hadn't won a pot in over an hour, neither of the fish had spewed my way and the table was turning into a solid nit-fest. I quit it £1.50 to the good. Not a good nights work but easily the most entertaining £1.50 I had earned in a long time.
Friday 24 February 2012
Wednesday 8 February 2012
PKR TV: Gold Rush 18th November 2011
There is a rather short cameo appearance from me in one of the most recent PKR TV uploads:
http://www.pkr.com/en/community/news-events/pkr-tv-28-01/
I was sceptical when they first mentioned they were going to show the final table of a Gold Rush tournament as I didn't think it would make for particularly great viewing. They just about get away it as there is the intrigue of whether or not flo1223 can manage ridiculous back to back wins in it. The following are some of my thoughts on this tournament structure and on rebuys in general.
First off the chances of winning this $2 rebuy on just $2 are virtually non-existant. A single buy in doesn't even cover the big blind by the end of the rebuy hour and the add-on is so big you would be a fool not to take it. The turbo nature of this tournament makes it massively swingy and often sends you on devastating runs of rebuying. This is especially true when in this particular tournament you get 1,000 chips per buy in and can rebuy up to a cap of 9,000 chips. As a general rule of thumb I wouldn't enter any rebuy tournament I wasn't able to cover at least 20 rebuys for. Clearly in an a normal structured rebuy 20 buy ins would constitute a particularly bad day at the office, 5 to 10 rebuys would be much more standard. In the Gold Rush I have certainly gone over 20 rebuys on a number of occasions though.
The biggest error any player can make in a rebuy is to buy into one then quit it before the end of the rebuy period. Once you have put money into a rebuy tourney you are committing equity suicide by doing this. You might be on a hideous run but putting in 10 rebuys and quitting is doing you way more damage than hanging on into the end of the rebuy period and doing another 5 rebuys. Staying in is the only way you stand a chance of seeing a return on your investment.
The turbo nature of the Gold Rush means you can pretty much forget about seeing flops after the first hour unless you find yourself on a super bad limpy table. Most of the time even a slightly above average stack will leave you in shove/fold territory. Under these circumstances forget about speculative holdings unless you are short enough to open shove them. There are virtually no implied odds spots to set mine or speculate with connectors or gap connectors. Conversely big broadway hands like K J and A 10 go up in value massively as people are put in spots where they are forced into calling much lighter.
Getting an idea of the players at your table is essential. Late on in this tournament you can find that open shoving to steal the blinds/antes will add 10/15/20% to your stack without going to a showdown. The more passive the table you are at, the tighter the players are, the more you need to be using your stack like a cudgel and shipping it in to pick up the chips. I believe my record for open-shipping in the Gold Rush once in the money stands at 8 consecutive hands. Some of those I had something, some of them I had nothing. The circumstances and players present dictated that this was the best strategy so that is what I did. There were 5 other players at the table so over 8 hands 40 pairs of cards were folded to my naked aggression.
At the final table you need to be willing to be aggressive but you need to keep the ladder principle in the back of your mind and be aware of what the short stacks are doing. There is no point shipping junk if the short stack is going to end up getting doubled through.
The final thing to say about the Gold Rush is that the format is a lot of fun. It is fast paced and exciting. It is also very short. You can win over a $1,000 but you do not have to be up to 2am in the morning to get to it.
http://www.pkr.com/en/community/news-events/pkr-tv-28-01/
I was sceptical when they first mentioned they were going to show the final table of a Gold Rush tournament as I didn't think it would make for particularly great viewing. They just about get away it as there is the intrigue of whether or not flo1223 can manage ridiculous back to back wins in it. The following are some of my thoughts on this tournament structure and on rebuys in general.
First off the chances of winning this $2 rebuy on just $2 are virtually non-existant. A single buy in doesn't even cover the big blind by the end of the rebuy hour and the add-on is so big you would be a fool not to take it. The turbo nature of this tournament makes it massively swingy and often sends you on devastating runs of rebuying. This is especially true when in this particular tournament you get 1,000 chips per buy in and can rebuy up to a cap of 9,000 chips. As a general rule of thumb I wouldn't enter any rebuy tournament I wasn't able to cover at least 20 rebuys for. Clearly in an a normal structured rebuy 20 buy ins would constitute a particularly bad day at the office, 5 to 10 rebuys would be much more standard. In the Gold Rush I have certainly gone over 20 rebuys on a number of occasions though.
The biggest error any player can make in a rebuy is to buy into one then quit it before the end of the rebuy period. Once you have put money into a rebuy tourney you are committing equity suicide by doing this. You might be on a hideous run but putting in 10 rebuys and quitting is doing you way more damage than hanging on into the end of the rebuy period and doing another 5 rebuys. Staying in is the only way you stand a chance of seeing a return on your investment.
The turbo nature of the Gold Rush means you can pretty much forget about seeing flops after the first hour unless you find yourself on a super bad limpy table. Most of the time even a slightly above average stack will leave you in shove/fold territory. Under these circumstances forget about speculative holdings unless you are short enough to open shove them. There are virtually no implied odds spots to set mine or speculate with connectors or gap connectors. Conversely big broadway hands like K J and A 10 go up in value massively as people are put in spots where they are forced into calling much lighter.
Getting an idea of the players at your table is essential. Late on in this tournament you can find that open shoving to steal the blinds/antes will add 10/15/20% to your stack without going to a showdown. The more passive the table you are at, the tighter the players are, the more you need to be using your stack like a cudgel and shipping it in to pick up the chips. I believe my record for open-shipping in the Gold Rush once in the money stands at 8 consecutive hands. Some of those I had something, some of them I had nothing. The circumstances and players present dictated that this was the best strategy so that is what I did. There were 5 other players at the table so over 8 hands 40 pairs of cards were folded to my naked aggression.
At the final table you need to be willing to be aggressive but you need to keep the ladder principle in the back of your mind and be aware of what the short stacks are doing. There is no point shipping junk if the short stack is going to end up getting doubled through.
The final thing to say about the Gold Rush is that the format is a lot of fun. It is fast paced and exciting. It is also very short. You can win over a $1,000 but you do not have to be up to 2am in the morning to get to it.
Tuesday 7 February 2012
January Review
Things almost started well. I got into the cash in the PKR Masters but exited about 50th after running flopped two pair into an on fire KarlTheKiller's overpair that got there on the turn. In typical fashion he managed to go from having 5 times the average chip stack with 50 players left, with double what the second place guy had, to out in 28th. If he could just fractionally moderate the aggression in his game I 'm sure he'd bink everything going. Beyond that I managed to bubble two PKR Primetimes, and several other tournaments, and do an awful lot of crashing out after losing monster pots .
There are two reasons cash was a particular downer this month. Firstly I am not sure how is it even possible to run 25 buy ins under EV at $0.25/0.50????? Answers on a postcard please. Secondly I put in what is, by my standards, a huge amount of volume at 85,000 hands. As we all know the more volume a good player can put in the more it should help to reduce variance. What this month neatly shows is that a) If anyone tells you that 20 buy ins is enough to play any cash level you should just laugh in their faces and b) 100,000 hands is not big enough to draw any conclusions about accurate win rates from. I also failed in my New Years Resolution to run better at $1/2.
This was probably my worst month for online tournaments since 'I did my bollox', as Neil Channing would say, during SCOOP last year. The only saving grace this month was that I used up a lot of points on different places for tickets so it wasn't quite as bad as it looks.
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