HugePoker

I went tonight to play in a super-satellite for the wacky tournament at the Holiday Inn that runs in parallel with the Aruba Classic. Everything about this whole event is just weird – the dealers aren’t very skilled or knowledgeable, the structure is like no other tournament I’ve ever seen, the printed schedule of events is more of a guideline really, and the rules are enforced in a sometimes … umm … creative way. I might find all of this frustrating except that (A) the players are some of the worst specimens of poker players I’ve ever seen, and (B) with most of these irregularities I’ve figured out a way to turn them to my advantage, if only by remaining calm when other players accustomed to a higher (i.e. existent) standard of organization start tearing their hair out. This is all in contrast to the events at the Radisson, where Ultimatebet has imported experienced dealers from the U.S. and hired one of the best-known tournament directors in the business.

So I decided to play in the $75-rebuy super-satellite at the Holiday Inn rather than the $200-rebuy super-satellite at the Radisson. I’m not sure that it was theoretically the best financial decision – I’m confident of being better than the field in each tournament, and while the players at the Holiday Inn are much weaker, I’m not sure that gives me triple the edge I would need to put that tournament on even footing on a dollars-per-hour basis, but after my poor start yesterday I felt like a lower-risk, higher-possibility-of-win effort.

So the printed schedule says it starts at 4PM, but when I get there at 3:55 the white board says *Sign-ups* are at 4, and when I ask when the tournament will actually start the answer is a pensive “probably in about half an hour”. So I sign up, go sit on the beach for half an hour and then come back in, wait another 20 minutes and then start playing. I make an immediate mistake because we start with 1000 chips for $75 and can rebuy 1000 chips for $50 any time our stacks are 1000 or less, but I don’t want to draw attention to myself by being the only guy at the table to rebuy before the first hand is dealt and I’m almost sad to win a few hundred chips on the first hand because it means I can’t rebuy any more. I actually sort of try to lose my way back down to 1000 but the other players literally won’t let me, and pretty soon I’m up over 2000 and don’t need to think about trying to rebuy any more. I never look back, and by the end of the rebuy period I’ve got about 9000, and I take the $50 addon for 3000 more chips, which several people declined. Let’s think about that. You paid $75 for your first 1000 chips, plus however many lots of 1000 you elected to buy at $50 a pop, and now I’m offering you 3000 chips for $50 and you say “nahhhh – I’ll just stick with what I’ve got”. Ummm, OK then. Please come to my special rebuy tournament for the analytically and strategically challenged – you and your dead-money chips are welcome any time.

After all the addons they can announce the prize pool, and it turns out we’ve got about $7000, so four players will get the $1650 seats into the target tournament and 5th place will get $400 cash. I’ve got only $125 invested so it will be a nice little score, but also a difficult road. I’ve got one of the bigger stacks among the 27 remaining players (we started with 36, so nine players departed before the chance to buy triple the buyin stack for 2/3 the price – once again, Thank You Dead Money!). I’ve got 12,000-ish and I hover around there for quite a while. A very young tall lanky young-gun type moves to the seat on my left, and he’s pretty good, which is a big pain in my ass (he’ll make a couple of really stupid mistakes later on the bubble which I can’t really explain, but at first he just seems strong and aggressive and decisive and I’ve gotten so spoiled on these absolutely atrocious players that I’m really unhappy about his presence. Yet another pot is limped around to me in the small blind, and I know I shouldn’t do it but I can’t resist limping in with 9-5-hearts. Annoying young gun checks his option and the flop comes a joyous all hearts. With 5 players in the hand I can be pretty sure someone will bet at it so I check my little flush, young gun checks as well and the under-the-gun obliges me by betting 1000 (blinds at 300-600, 5 players, so he’s betting 1/3 the pot on an all-heart board – good luck protecting your hand like that, buddy). It’s folded to me and I think I probably can’t get UTG to fold any decent heart or maybe even top pair, so I might as well charge him the maximum, so I shove in my big stack and I get the nasty surprise of having now-super-annoying young gun call for all his (considerable) chips and UTG fold. Uhhh, wait. That’s not how that was supposed to work. The only suspense remaining is whether he has the nut flush or the second-nuts, but I’m pretty sure my 9-high flush is extra-crispy toast, and he turns over K-2-hearts for the second nuts. I’ve got about a 500:1 shot at making a straight flush with two perfect running cards, and I holler “One TIME!” but somehow that doesn’t work out for me and I’m knocked down from 13,000 to 2,000 with the blinds at 300-600, pretty grim indeed.

I manage to triple up a few hands later when I make the King-high flush this time and it miraculously holds up, and then I get all-in with A-Q vs A-5 (YES! A-5! Awesome hand … I mean it has an Ace in it, that’s good enough to call a 10BB reraise-shove with, right?) and double up and from death’s door I’m back to having a playable, probably about average, 12,000 chip stack.

By now we’re down to two tables and I really want to make sure I don’t piss away a bunch of chips before we make it to the final table, where I figure I’ll have a satellite bubble skill advantage over the other players of about … ohh … seven trillion percent. With any luck young gun will crash and burn somehow and I’ll be alone in the sheep-field, or at least he won’t be on my left any more. The former hope is too much to ask for, but when we move to the final table he’s three seats to my right, so that’s a significant improvement.

So we’re down to ten players, eight of them hideously, stupendously bad, and 4 of us will get the top prize and one will get $400. I’m a bit under average in chips but not in bad shape. I can’t be too aggressive because these donkeys will call me with anything when they “had a feeling you were bluffing”. The cream of the slop is a woman from Virginia who was nice enough to lend me her cell phone to call Rachel on the break, so I feel bad about maligning her, but oh my god she was bad. You could see her debating when facing a big bet, you could clearly see that she clearly knew she shouldn’t call, but there was that one time when someone bluffed her with a busted straight draw and her Ace-high no pair was good, and by god she wasn’t going to let that happen again, so she would sigh and reluctantly put her chips into the pot. To her credit (well, not really, but at least to her credit relative to the other stupid people) people still tried to bluff her even after it was completely obvious that she just wasn’t capable of folding, which really makes them the stupid ones, it’s just that her play was so dramatically bad. Anyway, she got lucky a couple of times and built up a big stack at the final table, probably big enough that she could have gone out and had dinner and come back and collected the $1650 seat, but just as quickly she flamed out in a string of spectacular calls when she was practically drawing dead. A couple of short stacks had busted already, so we were down to seven, and unfortunately none of her chip-spewage landed in my stack, so I was getting pretty short. Two big stacks collided (YAY! Way to go for it with a coin flip fellas!) and we were at six players and on the bubble. A young Dutch guy who actually wasn’t bad from what I saw was short stacked as well, and the other four were way ahead of us. At that point it looked like one of us would bust and the other one would get the consolation prize of $400. I was in a quandary about how to play – with my 4-5BB stack I would normally be going into Kamikaze mode and just hoping for other people to fold or to get lucky and double up, but with these players and another short stack playing tight I felt like there was enough chance of someone else making a monumental mistake that there was added value in sitting back and praying for a train wreck. The other short stack was either thinking the same thing or just didn’t understand that he had to get aggressive before he lost all his fold equity, because while I managed to steal blinds a couple of times to pull ahead of him, he just kept folding until he had about 4500 with the blinds at 1000-2000, at which point he finally had to just shove and pray. I was happy to see two of the big stacks gang up to try and bust him, but his Q-3 caught a 3 on the board and he tripled up, and now I couldn’t be patient anymore. I got lucky only once the whole tournament, when I shoved with K-6, got called by K-8 … Flop Q-Q-6, Turn 6, River doesn’t matter unless it’s a Queen and it’s not, and I more than double up. Dutch guy then doubles up again on a hand where I missed the straight he made on the river so I thought he had lost and I stupidly got up to shake his hand in consolation – I think I covered it well though, since it could have been a congratulatory handshake and there’s often a sort of solidarity among the short stacks even when we’re rooting for the other to bust out. I said “let’s keep doubling up and bust them all” and he laughed, but soon thereafter he finally ran into a big stack with a big hand and he was out on the bubble.

I had stolen the blinds a couple of times to get to a half-way manageable stack of 9 or 10 big blinds, and another player had fallen down around my level, so I felt I could afford to be patient again. In a thrillingly idiotic meltdown – the other short stack, an older guy who seemed to be playing pretty tight until then, all of the sudden made a small raise from the small blind (weird for him to raise instead of shoving his whole stack in – I thought he was trapping with a monster). The big blind called and I was scared that I was going to see another short stack double up … Flop A-6-6 and the old guy instantly shoves the rest of his chips in and I think “he’s got Ace-King”, and the big blind calls pretty quickly and I think “Hey! Maybe he has a Six!”. Neither of my brilliant deductions proved true. The old guy groans disgustedly when the big blind calls and I think I’m golden. Old guy Ten-Three (!), big blind Ace-Eight (bad call but good news for me). I don’t mind if the old guy shoves all his chips in preflop, but the small raise followed by the shove that will only get called if he’s beat is just a travesty. The Aces hold, the old guy curses some more, and I squeeeaaak into the money, a $1650 ticket to play in one of the “qualifying heats” starting on Wednesday.

So a nailbiting good result after a poor start. I’ll try to play at the Holiday Inn as much as I can, because, well, I’ve slashed at the players enough – you get the picture.

My start in the Main Event at the Radisson is tomorrow at Noon (Eastern) - $5500 buyin, $4 million prize pool, first prize guaranteed to be $1 million. Cross ‘em if you got ‘em.

-huge