HugePoker

Tonight I played in and won the biggest buyin online poker tournament of my career. That sounds pretty good, right? Well it is, but it’s also the best and most hyperbolic spin on the event I could possibly invent. I think I’ve written about the “Steps” tournaments that I’ve been playing a lot of lately. They’re single-table tournaments (9 players) and if you finish in the top 2 or 3 you advance to the next Step. They start at Step 1 for $7.50, Step 2 is $27, Step 3 at $82, Step 4 $215, Step5 $700 and the final step, Step 6 costs $2100 to play. I’ve been doing pretty well with them, and had built up a good stash of Step 5 tickets at $700 a pop, intending to use them to win a few Step 6 tickets, which I would hopefully transform into at least one $12,000 WSOP package. But then I won a WSOP package elsewhere and started making plans to go to Vegas and the Steps got put on the back burner. I did play one Step 5 in Vegas and won it, yielding my first Step 6 ticket, but other than that I didn’t play much online poker in Vegas.

On my return to Seattle I discovered that the target for the next set of Steps tournaments would be the upcoming World Series of Online Poker, or WCOOP, a series of tournaments running from Sept 5th through the 21st, culminating in what will be the biggest online tournament in history: $5200 buyin, $10,000,000 guaranteed prize pool, over a million dollars for first prize. So now instead of a Step 6 tournament yielding one $12,000 WSOP package and a bit of loose change for 2nd – 4th finishers, now a Step 6 ticket would lead to a $5200 WCOOP main event entry for the top 3 finishers and $1200 in cash for 4th and 5th. And if I win that prize I can just unregister from the target tournament and collect tournament dollars, which are like cash to me since I play so many tournaments. Obviously that’s not as great a payday as $12,000, but those of you who’ve been reading my long-winded stories (and have actually paid attention to some of them) might have noticed all my crowing about my satellite prowess, and that a 9-person tournament awarding the same prize to the top three finishers is about as satellitey as you can get. When you get to the point in a satellite when there are 4 or 5 players left and 3 of them get the top prize things get pretty tense, and normal poker strategy goes out the window. In that situation there are spots where you should push all your chips into the pot with 3-2-offsuit and times when you should fold a pair of Aces before the flop. A strange phenomenon happens in which player A bets all his chips and player B has a pretty good hand and is thinking about calling, so player A’s job is done and is praying for player B to fold, player B has a tough decision because he KNOWS that his hand is probably better than player A’s, but if he calls and loses he’s out of the tournament, whereas if he folds he might be able to just wait for someone else to bust out. Meanwhile players C and D are just pray-pray-praying for player B to call so that they might win the tournament without firing a single shot. A poker hand between two players in normal circumstances is usually pretty close to a zero-sum game between just those two players, ie if I hurt you then I gain, and if I make a mistake then you gain, and the players not in the hand don’t care all that much what happens to either of us. But in a satellite bubble, all that gets out of whack. If you make a smart bet and I make a bad call, obviously I hurt my own chances, but I hurt yours as well, and mathematically if you and I are hurting someone somewhere has to be happy, so it has to be the other players who are out of the hand. It’s weird. It’s mostly a game of chicken, where I bet, banking on the idea that you can’t call, but if I overestimate your intelligence or sanity or if you wake up with a monster hand, then I’m screwed and the other players rejoice. There’s a whole new branch of math that comes into play called Nash Equilibrium – if you’ve seen the movie “A Beautiful Mind”, it’s that Nash – John Nash, math and Economics and game theory guru, sometime loony, husband of the incredibly beautiful Jennif … oh wait, that’s the actress, never mind. Anyway, in a satellite bubble, I try to decide what range of hands I should bet with and you try to decide what hands you should call with, but my range depends on my estimate of what your range is and vice versa. If I bet and you call and I win, that’s terrific, but if I bet and you call and I lose that’s absolutely horrible, so given a choice I would almost always prefer to have you fold. If I know you’re never going to call then I can always bet, but if I’m always going to bet then you can call as long as your hand is pretty strong, but if I know that you’re going to call pretty often then I’m only going to bet with a pretty strong hand, and if you know that then you will only call with a VERY strong hand, and then if I know that, then I can loosen up a little, and so on and so on. We keep dancing around each other until we zero in on an equilibrium in which I’m betting the exact perfect range of hands and you’re defending with the exact perfect range and neither of us can exploit the other one’s mistakes. That’s Nash equilibrium.

So if everyone knows what they’re doing, a satellite bubble becomes a cold exercise in shoving and folding until someone gets a great hand or someone gets so many chips that they don’t care or so few chips that they’re desperate. That’s the theory anyway. But I’ve never been on a satellite bubble in which everyone knew what they were doing, and that throws another monkey wrench into the machinery. Are you too scared to call even when your hand is strong enough, or are you too stupid or stubborn or drunk to fold when your hand is pretty good but not excellent? If the former is true, then I can diverge from Nash equilibrium to take advantage of your timidity to maximize my own profit. If the latter is true then I HAVE to diverge from Nash in order to protect myself from your stupidity, while hoping that someone else will not be so observant of your hubris and gleefully pull the pin out of your grenade while I watch safely from the bleachers. And if I think one of the above is true but I’m wrong, then I’m likely to end up in a world of hurt.

So as of a few days ago I had notched up two more Step 6 ($2100) tickets and was down to one remaining Step 5 ($700) ticket. My record with the Step5’s had been mediocre – a small profit but nothing exciting. I think I played a couple of them badly and got unlucky in one, so it seemed like there was potential for profit there, I just hadn’t tapped into it. I played off my last one and won it, improving my profitability substantially in one blow. But I still hadn’t taken a stab at the big leagues, the Step 6. The whole Step system creates an exaggerated microcosm of the whole poker economy. The Step 1’s are filled with the little fish, putting up $7.50 for a lottery ticket to glory. Some little fish play a handful, some play hundreds or thousands. No matter how good or bad or fishy they are, some of them win and move up to Step 2, where they join some slightly less fishy bigger fish, as well as some sharks who play 8 or 12 Step 2 tables at a time, playing straightforwardly and feeding on the stinky mistakes of the fish. This upward percolation continues through Step 3 and 4. I’ve played a fair number of Step 3’s but lately I’ve been mostly just starting at Step 4. At the higher step levels you start running into the same people, and I’ve gotten to know some of them pretty well. It’s harder to find the Step 5 and Step 6 tournaments running, so the sharks just hang out there waiting for unsuspecting fish to stumble into their shark … umm … caves. And then there are a handful of great white sharks, who play every Step 6 tournament they can get their hands on, and maybe some Step 5 tournaments just to keep their teeth sharp while waiting for a Step 6 to get going. I’ve played with all of them in the Step 4’s and 5’s, and I’ve watched some Step6’s, so I pretty much know who they are, I know a few of their tendencies, and I know which ones play a ton of tournaments at once. I figure that even though these guys are bigger sharks than me and their knowledge of push/fold decisions might be a little more solid than mine, I have an advantage over them to the extent that I know I can count on them to play somewhere in the ballpark of correct bubble strategy, but they don’t know the same about me. But it still doesn’t seem like the greatest idea to jump into a tank filled with them - much better if I can find a tank filled with tasty tasty tuna for the sharks to feed on while I swim behind them sticking harpoons in their side from time to time.

Tonight I was playing in a $130 multitable tournament, and doing OK. I happened to notice that a Step 6 tournament with 6 players registered so far. It only had one of the great white sharks in it (perhaps the biggest Step Shark of all – Stevie444, who seems to be in every Step 6 that ever runs, and who has reportedly won over 100 WSOP packages, ie over a million bucks playing these little single-table tournaments) and several names I didn’t recognize. Names I don’t recognize in a Step 6 tournament is a good sign, so I started to look them up in the StarTracker and Sharkscope databases, and the good news continued. Two players looked pretty good – they played in over-$100 tournaments on a regular basis and clearly were successful in them. But three of them looked like little fish that didn’t belong there – their usual habitat was the $10-$15 buyin aquarium and here they were in a $2100 tournament, just waiting to be filleted. I started to think that this might be a good time to pop my cherry. Two 2nd-tier sharks smelled the blood in the water and joined in, but Stevie444 (British) must have needed some tea and crumpets or something because he unregistered, leaving room for one more fish.

As I decided that this looked like a good spot for me to move up, I started playing wildly in the $130 tournament I was already in. I didn’t want to just throw it away, but I figured I would either build up a big stack or crash and burn trying, thereby freeing up my focus for the big one. I did crash pretty quickly in the $130, and I could give my entire focus to the $2100. CLICK HERE to watch the tournament over my shoulder.

I treaded water for a while through the low blind levels until I caught my first big break – a pair of Aces and a re-raise into me from the big blind. In a normal tournament I would likely just call here hoping to lure an opponent into the fray, but in a satellite like this avoiding risk is more important than taking a stab at trapping an opponent’s whole stack. So I reraised to 700, over a third of my stack. The flop came all diamonds and I had the Ace of diamonds, so I was in pretty good shape, and when my opponent immediately tossed all his chips in I could worry a little about an already made flush or set, but it’s not like I really had much of a decision to make. Turned out he had A-Q with the Queen of diamonds, and his only faint hope was a Queen on the Turn and another Queen on the river – I think I was about a 300:1 favorite at that point. He caught a little glimmer with the first Queen, but the River was a blank and I had gobbled up the first fish and chips dinner of the event, putting me solidly in the lead.

Maybe I need a little self-control on the blog-writing front. It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m picking up from where I left off at 2:30 in the morning, it’s three pages long and I’ve only described one hand. Sigh. I guess there aren’t any specific big hands to report on after that though. I played carefully from there on out until we got down to 5-handed. The bad players played badly and busted out and we were down to me, three strong players, and one guy who maybe was out of his depth but seemed like he knew what he was doing. Two of the better players seemed like they were not adequately shifting into push/fold mode, and I picked up a nice pot from one of them when he made his fourth or fifth standard raise and I came over the top of him for all his chips in a spot where he just couldn’t call unless he was holding a monster. It was a good lesson for me because I’m sometimes the guy caught with his proverbial pants down in that situation, and it felt better being the one doing the pantsing. Between that hand and the fact that they just weren’t putting as much pressure on my big blind as they should have been, I maintained a healthy chip stack all through the bubble. I never called an all-in bet and was never called when I shoved all-in, except one time when I doubled up a short stack without too much harm to my own. The 5th and 4th place finishers busted out in confrontations when I was already out of the hand, so I just got to watch the fireworks. When the smoke cleared and the whooping died down, and after I unregistered for the tournament I had won the seat in, I was down one $2100 Step 6 ticket and up $5200 in tournament dollars, or $3100 to the good for an hour and a half’s work. I’m not sure but I think that might be my best ever hourly rate for a session of poker – I’ve had a few $1000/hr sessions, including last year’s world series main event, and maybe some of the smaller WSOP satellites might rival this one, but I always had investors’ money in for those, so I think this one probably takes the lead at just over $2000 profit per hour free and clear of any encumbrances. I probably won’t be able to maintain a 100% win rate, but if I can win with one of the two remaining Step 6 tickets I’m holding, I’ll be in excellent shape.

If you’ve stuck with me through this rambling … I can’t decide whether to say “bless you” or “get a life” … take your pick.

-huge