poker no mas

by huge on Oct.11, 2008, under Poker

Something went wrong the first time I published this - if it seems like you’ve read it before, you have … if you previously got an empty screen when you opened the blog, here’s what you missed…

The Caribbean International Poker Tour (which consists of exactly one event in one location, so I’m not sure how it warrants the designation “tour”) did not fail to provide the entertainment and chaos that is its defining characteristic. Yesterday the schedule was that they would play the fourth and final qualifying round at 2PM, and then start the “finals” at 8PM. This schedule was problematic to begin with, because (A) nothing ever starts on time at the Excelsior Casino at the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort, and (B) when I won the first qualifying round on Wednesday night we had 19 players and it took 7.5 hours, and yesterday afternoon they had 44 players – you do the math.

At 7:30 we checked on the proceedings on our way to the Awards Banquet at the Radisson. I knew 8PM was completely unrealistic, but I wanted to get an estimate of when the finals might start. When we arrived the qualifying round was down to 24 players and they were playing down to 9, so they were nowhere near done. I couldn’t get anyone to promise a start time any later than 9PM, and I wouldn’t put it past them to start raising the blinds like crazy just to get the thing done in a hurry, so I figured we’d come back at 9 just to be safe. We had copious amounts of food and dessert and mojitos (Huge:1 Mrs Huge:3) at the banquet and apparently missed the part where Phil Hellmuth encouraged everyone to jump into the pool.

We made it back to the Excelsior a little after Nine, and it sure was lucky that we did that, because the qualifying round only had 5 more people to eliminate, and that only took another hour and a half. So the 8PM finals began at 10:30PM, and people were starting to place bets on whether the winner would emerge before or after 9AM.

I was expecting the same controversy as last year regarding the “English Only” rule. It’s pretty standard at major international poker tournaments to require players to only speak English at the table, and they clearly have a desire to have this be a major international tournament (which it clearly isn’t), so last year they tried to be serious about English Only, and it turned into complete melee verging on fist-fights. There was talk about enforcing the rule again this year, but the announcement and ensuing battle that I was expecting at the start of the tournament never came – perhaps with everyone already grumbling about the 10:30 start time they decided not to throw more kindling on the fire.

But that didn’t eliminate the chaos – we just needed a new thing to get all hot-blooded about (and by “we”, I mean the crazy Venezuelans). We started playing (34 of us), and nothing too dramatic happened to my stack – down to 9400, up to 11,000, back down to 10,000 … about 20 minutes in I asked Marta if we were ever going to hear the prize list, and she reacted as if to say “wow, what a novel idea to tell the players what they’re playing for! Thanks, Huge”. It still took another 20 minutes before anything came of my suggestion, but when she got the microphone and started listing the prizes I could sense trouble brewing. We already knew that all 34 of us were guaranteed some payout but we didn’t know what it would be – I think it was $2500 last year, covering the cost of one $1650 qualifying round entry plus one $825 add-on. So she says 21st-34th place will get $3000, fine, fine … and that 11th through 20th will get $4000 – I think to myself that seems sort of stupid – last year you had to make the final table to get more than the lowest prize, but whatever … and then she starts listing the final table prizes and you can just feel the tension in the room start to percolate (does tension percolate?). 10th and 9th place get $4500, 8th gets $5000, 7th $5500, 6th $6000, 5th $7000, 4th $9000, 3rd $24000, 2nd $44000 and 1st $100,000. There are various outbursts around the room – the problem with that payout structure is that it’s too top-heavy – you have to finish 5th to get more than double the prize you get for 34th, and the fact that 1st place is more than double 2nd and more than 10 times 4th is just too much of a jump. So people are up in arms. A lot of people are seriously suggesting that we just split the money evenly, take our $9000 each and go home, others are saying we should give more money to everyone and only have the top three or five spots pay more. Finally it gets so heated that they have to stop the tournament clock … the proposal that emerges with near-unanimous support is that we give everyone $6,000 and split the rest between 1st, 2nd and 3rd 50%-30%-20%, and that we cut the levels down from 40 to 20 minutes so that we won’t be there until noon the next day. I’m torn about this idea – on the one hand, locking in an extra three grand is nice after an as-yet unproductive trip, and I’m starting to get sick so staying up all night playing poker doesn’t seem all that appealing – but on the other hand this deal clearly loses me some equity, because I’m better than most of the players in the room and what they’re essentially proposing is to spread the money around much more evenly. There’s a Dutch/Indonesian kid on my right who has built his stack up to 16,000 who is clearly hesitant about the proposal as well (the bigger stacks shouldn’t like it in theory, but this early in the tournament a 60% gain in your stack size doesn’t really make that much difference), but in the end it gets enacted, with a little more controversy about what the levels should be (ending up at 25 minutes).

The kid on my right and I grumble to each other about the deal and how it was kind of hammered down our throats, and just from the way he’s talking about prize payouts makes me think he’s a solid, knowledgeable player. I’m glad he’s on my right but I’d rather just have him gone, and soon I get my wish when another player busts out and they move the kid to another table. My table is actually pretty tough given the weakness of the field as a whole. There’s one guy who clearly wants to be the table captain, and I decide that he’s the one I want to try to get chips from if I can pick up a legitimate hand when he’s splashing chips around. We get down to 27 players and combine to 3 tables … oh but wait, we’re not really down to 27, someone mis-counted (what a surprise) and we have 28, so one table has to play 10-handed until there’s another bust-out. It turns out it’s our table, and it turns out it’s the Dutch/Indonesian kid who returns to us, now across the table from me instead of on my right where I can keep an eye on (and act after) him. So that sucks. What sucks even worse is when we DO get to 27 players so someone from our table needs to move, and it turns out it’s the table captain who I had designated as my best target. So that’s about the worst player-trade possible from my point of view.

What sucks most of all is when the kid raises from late position, as he has done quite frequently, and I look down at pocket Jacks in the big blind, and I re-raise to 2700, and the kid thinks for a while and then re-raises all-in (for the rest of my 10,000 chip stack). The blinds are 200-400 with a 25 chip ante, so I have 25 big blinds (or had 25 big blinds at the start of the hand – 7 of them are already in the pot being held hostage by the gun pointed at my head). This is just an ugly ugly spot. With Tens here I think I can fold pretty easily. With Queens I’m not happy but I have to call. With Jacks and 8,000 chips I have to call. With Jacks and 15,000 chips I think it’s a pretty easy fold. With Jacks against a more predictable player I can fold, and against a wilder, weaker player I can probably call pretty easily. On all those axes I’m at the point of maximum pain in the difficult-decision dimension. Because of our earlier conversation I know that he knows that I’m a pretty good player, and that I’m not going to want to put my tournament life on the line with all these weak players waiting to give me their chips, which suggests that he might make this move on me with less than a premium hand. On the other hand, he’s right – I don’t want to put my tournament on the line. On the other hand, with the deal we’ve struck and the shorter levels, I’m going to have to accumulate chips now to make a run at the final three and the good money, and busting out now in 27th will get me exactly the same prize money as playing until 5AM and busting out in 4th. I convince myself that it’s possible that he could be making that move with AK, or Tens, in addition to the big pairs that crush me, and that there’s a small chance that he’s making that move as a pure steal. I’m getting less than 2:1 from the pot, but against that range of hands I don’t need 2:1, and I decide to gamble and make the call. I’ll never know if he conceivably *could* have made that move with some weaker hands, because in this particular instance he has Kings, and I don’t improve, and I’m out in 27th place. The Dutch guy on my left – strong player who I’ve met elsewhere and with whom I’ve been having pleasant poker chat so far – turns to shake my hand and says “you kind of knew it and you called anyway, right?” and I say “yeah, little bit”. I get up from the table, collect my $6,000, and head for home at 1AM, a lot earlier than I was supposed to.

So this has been overall an unsuccessful trip – with the prize money from the last tournament I’ll be returning home with a few more hundred-dollar-bills than I came with, but with the non-cash in the $5500 main event I have to log the trip as an overall loss. You can argue that I won the $5500 entry plus enough cash to pay for the trip online, and that’s true, so I basically got a trip to Aruba for free, and I’m not complaining about that, but from the standpoint of arrival-to-departure poker profits … not so great. I’m not sure if there will be another HugePoker international trip this year, and barring some stunning online success in the next couple of months, 2008 will end up as a disappointing poker year (not a disaster, just disappointing compared to the glow of 2007 and 2006). I’m not throwing in the towel or anything, maybe just pouting a little.

But it’s been a good trip nonetheless. Some good food, some beautiful sunsets, a new Caribbean island explored, a lot of laying on the beach and swimming in the ocean, and a lot of good poker even if the results weren’t what I would have hoped for. I’ll certainly be trying to make it back to Aruba in 2009.

I’m off to the beach for one last afternoon…

-huge

1 Comment for this entry

Paul Z
October 5th, 2008 on 10:41 pm
Interesting reading Laurence…you have certainly had the chance to see amazing locales on the poker dime…enjoy your time there and keep up the excellent posts!

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