davidross
01-01-2005, 06:55 PM
A better title for this would probably be “I’ve come a long way, but I have so far to go”. Documenting my ring game play for a year was such a positive experience for me I decided to write a little about my tournament play. At the start of this year I had never played a multi table tournament. I had very limited experience with single table tourneys, but I did enjoy them. I needed to spend all my poker time playing ring games however if I wanted to keep my earnings where I wanted them, I couldn’t give up 3 hours or more to play in a multi table tournament, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t even give it much thought.
2 things happened this year to change all that. First I moved up to 15/30 full time and experienced a lot of success. Suddenly I was making a lot more money which gave me some freedom to play less hours. The second was that I decided to go to Las Vegas for the WSOP. My primary motivation for going to Vegas was to finish my First year of playing professionally off with an interesting trip, as I was thinking of writing a book on the year. The book still hasn’t materialized (I probably have enough chapters written to fill 2 books, but I can’t seem to pull them together in any kind of an interesting fashion), but I really enjoyed the trip. Empire poker gave me 2K towards travel expenses and satellite entry fees because I was the highest bidder using E-points I had earned from all my online play. I made arrangements with eMark to meet up in Vegas and spend a few days trying to qualify for the WSOP, and play some ring games. During the weeks leading up to the trip I played a lot of online satellites trying to win a seat in the main event. As one poster suggested, I probably should have passed on the tournaments, just spent the hours playing ring games, and bought into the main event for the 10K. I was very much dead money in the satellites. I don’t recall even getting close to winning a seat. I do remember watching eMark bubble out for a seat when his opponent spiked a 2-out set on the river. However, the tournament bug had set in.
I came back from Vegas determined to learn how to play tournaments, both limit and no-limit. As usual for me, I had a game plan all laid out on how to do it. I would read everything I could, and play as much as I could make time for. The reading was limited to a very small number of tournament books available at the time (now there seem to be many more), and living in the tournament forum at 2+2. I started playing $20 and $30 tournaments at Party, and the $11 rebuy at Stars each night. It was a very frustrating experience.
First of all, I’m a very results oriented individual. I like to see improvement and success all the time. If you followed my ring game posts during my first year of playing, you’ll remember how important daily and weekly results were to me. It’s how I kept score, and monitored myself, and I would play marathon sessions to get un-stuck if I was down. I worried terribly if I had losses for 2 days in a row. So to now start playing in a structure where you could(and I regularly did) finish out of the money for 30 tournaments in a row, was extremely hard to take. Even when I did manage to cash, unless you won, you were still disappointed with your finish. And I certainly wasn’t winning. Tournament poker certainly wasn’t a good fit for me psychologically.
I had to pay my dues while I was learning to play ring games, and I was back to square one again with tournaments. I was totally clueless, especially playing no-limit. I played my hands thinking only about the cards I held, and how much I should bet on each street based again solely on my cards. Thinking about what my opponent might have, or what significance the blinds or chip stacks might have was completely foreign to me. But like they say, even a blind squirrel finds some nuts, and every once in a while, I would cash, and slowly I began to improve. The Stars rebuy was absolutely the best learning ground for me. First of all the cost was low. $11 to get in, I would rebuy for $10 right away, and add-on for $10 more. There would be 700 players most nights, and after the rebuy period was over there were a lot of chips in play. This meant usually a lot of play with blinds small in relation to the stacks, and this was very good for me. Playing after the flop was certainly the worst part of my game.
The difficult part for me was that I was finding it very hard to play ring games at the same time as tournaments. It didn’t really affect my ring games, but I made too many careless mistakes in the tournaments when I wasn’t focused. The Stars rebuy started pretty late, and with the rebuy structure, and my natural tight play, I was playing well past midnight every night, cutting into my bread and butter regular games. So after a couple of months of playing the low buy in tournaments, I moved up to playing the bigger buy-in events, and dropping the re-buy. My schedule became playing the Party “Super” tournament each night at 9:00, and any interesting Empire tournament at the same time. There was also a $100 NL at Party at 9:15, and then when I was eliminated from all the tourneys, I would get down to my normal games. Occasionally I would play a bigger money event on weekends, as well as satellites for WPT events.
So how has it worked out? My regular earning have been very satisfying. I think my game has continued to improve, and I still love to play. I think playing tournaments has allowed me to stay fresh and not get bored of poker. I don’t have exact numbers on my tournament play because I have spread the play over several sites, but since most of my tournament play has been at Party, and I keep a separate bankroll there I can get a rough Idea of how I have done over the 6 or 7 months I’ve been playing tournaments. I put 3K into the Party account as seed money, and I had to top it up once with 4K more. I have withdrawn 27K and I have 12K in the roll right now. If my math is right I am up 32K in 7 months of tournament play. It sounds pretty good, but I think I play 50 hours a month(a conservative guess) of tournaments, so that would be just under $100 /hr. It’s actually much higher than I thought it was.
As you can expect from the way tournament’s pay out, most of my earnings have come from a few good results. My biggest payday was a 15K 2nd place in a $150 Super tournament. My biggest win was a 9K 1st place in a $100 NL, and I have had a couple of 8K 2nd places. I have won 3 times now, the other 2 in smaller buy in events, one a $30 at Party and the other an Empire guaranteed event.
The good results have come in very different ways. Sometimes I’ve acquired chips early and cruised to a final table, and others I’ve been barely staying alive through the entire tournament. The one consistent thing to all my good results is that I was lucky enough not to run into a monster hand that had me covered. My own hands didn’t seem to matter nearly as much as avoiding a big hand when I chose to play. I finished 3rd last night in a $100 NL event without ever holding a pair higher than 10’s. I was short stacked the entire event. I pushed all in at least 35 times without ever being called. I actually got back into the hunt by stealing 2 blinds a round during the bubble stage. Now clearly with all that pushing I was doing, I would have been called with and decent pair or AK, and I never ran into it once. That’s pretty lucky. In my 15K 2nd place tournament I had QQ 6 times, KK once and AA once all after getting down to 2 tables, and they all held up. Solid play will get you into a position to get lucky more often than bad play will, but you have to get lucky down the stretch to finish high.
My most disappointing moment had to be during the World championship of Online Poker held at Stars this past summer. It was a big buy in event ($500 or $1K) that I had decided to enter and I had been pretty fortunate to get into the money with a healthy stack. In fact I was 2nd at my table with around 100 players left. Unfortunately the tournament chip leader was at my table too. I had around 50K in chips when the average was around 20K. The big stack had 100K though. He raised my big blind when I had AA and he called my all-in re-raise with KK. His K hit on the river and I felt sick. I would have been a huge chip leader n a tournament where everyone at the final table made over 10K, and 1st place was over 250K. It still hurts to think about it.
I think my game has improved in several ways. I have learned to vary my play depending on what the table is playing like. When the table is tight, I loosen up. When the table is loose, I tighten up. These adjustments are crucial during the bubble stages. Picking up chips when everyone else gets tight trying to slip into the money has become a regular occurrence for me. I have bubbled way more than I should because of taking chances during these stages, but the times I’ve made it into the money with a nice stack instead of just surviving have certainly made up for it. I’ve also learned that the implied odds inherent in No-Limit make a lot of hands playable if you can get in cheap. I’m always amazed to hear a guy with AA bitching to the guy who just busted him with 64s because he had raised pre-flop. So the guy called 45 chips with a bad hand, but got over 1K in return, because the guy with AA couldn’t lay it down.
I am getting pretty good at reading the “average” players in these tournaments. Most of them aren’t very tricky so their bets usually mean just what you think they would mean. The huge overbet is usually a semi-bluff post-flop, and AK pre-flop. The small flop bet is usually an attempt to steal a pot. Of course the really good players use these plays as misdirection, so recognizing if your opponent is an “average” player or a better player becomes extremely important. Another reason I need to avoid playing ring games at the same time.
I have learned that I play better short stacked, or with a lot of chips. In both cases I have much less fear, and it seems to me the best players are fearless. I actually quite enjoy the short stacked play because the only decision I have to make is which hands to play. Then I just push all-in, and it’s out of my hands. There is something quite liberating about that. Because I usually find myself in this situation at some point during every tournament, I have gotten better at playing it. Unless I have a big hand, I won’t do it with anyone else in the pot, but if I’m first in you can do it with almost any hand. I try to avoid hands with a weak Ace or King because they are so easily dominated by the most likely calling hands, I’m hoping for 2 live cards if I get called, so I prefer hands like QJ or JT over A4 for example, but really you’re hoping no one calls until you have a real hand, or you hope to get lucky if you get called. With a lot of chips, I don’t worry so much about betting a missed flop, or making a semi-bluff raise, because I can still get away from the hand. It’s been an eye-opener for me to see how often these plays work.
Where I really need to improve is my play as an average stack. I play a very conservative game. When 1 hand can take me from an average stack to a small stack, I am much less willing to play anything marginal. Usually this leads to me being blinded down. I also think it labels me to the better players as someone who can be pushed off a hand. I see some very good players calling raises with hands like AJ or suited connectors, hands I would never call a raise with. They seem to have the ability to get away from them post flop, even if they hit if they read the opponent as being strong. I’m just not there yet on my reading I guess, so I can’t take the chance and play those hands. I also have to stop making what I call “tilt” plays. Those are the plays where I make calls even though I know I’m beat because I’m still steaming about another bad beat, or I’m just being impatient. I get beat often enough when I’m ahead or on coin tosses, I don’t need to lose by calling off all my chips when I know I’m beat, and it happens way to often. Let’s face it, a lot of people get knocked out of tournaments on hands where both players played it correctly. Fortune chooses who advances and who goes home. All I can control is avoiding situations where I’m a big dog.
I am trying to get my game to the point where I can get into a position to win even without good or lucky cards. Learning to play my opponents is something that has started to improve for me, but I need to take it a lot further if I want to get to the next level. And I do want to get to the next level. I want to cash in some big entry events. I want to play in a WPT event. And I really want to play in the WSOP main event. But there is no way I’m shelling out 10K to play in a tournament, so it’s satellites for me.
The game plan for this year is to keep playing the nightly tournaments, and to try and find some live action tournaments locally. I was a fish out of water when I went to Foxwoods in November to play NL and the satellites for the main event of the WPO. I need to get more comfortable playing live and experience is the only way I know of to do it.
I wish all of you a great 2005, lets hope we can all meet our goals for the year.
2 things happened this year to change all that. First I moved up to 15/30 full time and experienced a lot of success. Suddenly I was making a lot more money which gave me some freedom to play less hours. The second was that I decided to go to Las Vegas for the WSOP. My primary motivation for going to Vegas was to finish my First year of playing professionally off with an interesting trip, as I was thinking of writing a book on the year. The book still hasn’t materialized (I probably have enough chapters written to fill 2 books, but I can’t seem to pull them together in any kind of an interesting fashion), but I really enjoyed the trip. Empire poker gave me 2K towards travel expenses and satellite entry fees because I was the highest bidder using E-points I had earned from all my online play. I made arrangements with eMark to meet up in Vegas and spend a few days trying to qualify for the WSOP, and play some ring games. During the weeks leading up to the trip I played a lot of online satellites trying to win a seat in the main event. As one poster suggested, I probably should have passed on the tournaments, just spent the hours playing ring games, and bought into the main event for the 10K. I was very much dead money in the satellites. I don’t recall even getting close to winning a seat. I do remember watching eMark bubble out for a seat when his opponent spiked a 2-out set on the river. However, the tournament bug had set in.
I came back from Vegas determined to learn how to play tournaments, both limit and no-limit. As usual for me, I had a game plan all laid out on how to do it. I would read everything I could, and play as much as I could make time for. The reading was limited to a very small number of tournament books available at the time (now there seem to be many more), and living in the tournament forum at 2+2. I started playing $20 and $30 tournaments at Party, and the $11 rebuy at Stars each night. It was a very frustrating experience.
First of all, I’m a very results oriented individual. I like to see improvement and success all the time. If you followed my ring game posts during my first year of playing, you’ll remember how important daily and weekly results were to me. It’s how I kept score, and monitored myself, and I would play marathon sessions to get un-stuck if I was down. I worried terribly if I had losses for 2 days in a row. So to now start playing in a structure where you could(and I regularly did) finish out of the money for 30 tournaments in a row, was extremely hard to take. Even when I did manage to cash, unless you won, you were still disappointed with your finish. And I certainly wasn’t winning. Tournament poker certainly wasn’t a good fit for me psychologically.
I had to pay my dues while I was learning to play ring games, and I was back to square one again with tournaments. I was totally clueless, especially playing no-limit. I played my hands thinking only about the cards I held, and how much I should bet on each street based again solely on my cards. Thinking about what my opponent might have, or what significance the blinds or chip stacks might have was completely foreign to me. But like they say, even a blind squirrel finds some nuts, and every once in a while, I would cash, and slowly I began to improve. The Stars rebuy was absolutely the best learning ground for me. First of all the cost was low. $11 to get in, I would rebuy for $10 right away, and add-on for $10 more. There would be 700 players most nights, and after the rebuy period was over there were a lot of chips in play. This meant usually a lot of play with blinds small in relation to the stacks, and this was very good for me. Playing after the flop was certainly the worst part of my game.
The difficult part for me was that I was finding it very hard to play ring games at the same time as tournaments. It didn’t really affect my ring games, but I made too many careless mistakes in the tournaments when I wasn’t focused. The Stars rebuy started pretty late, and with the rebuy structure, and my natural tight play, I was playing well past midnight every night, cutting into my bread and butter regular games. So after a couple of months of playing the low buy in tournaments, I moved up to playing the bigger buy-in events, and dropping the re-buy. My schedule became playing the Party “Super” tournament each night at 9:00, and any interesting Empire tournament at the same time. There was also a $100 NL at Party at 9:15, and then when I was eliminated from all the tourneys, I would get down to my normal games. Occasionally I would play a bigger money event on weekends, as well as satellites for WPT events.
So how has it worked out? My regular earning have been very satisfying. I think my game has continued to improve, and I still love to play. I think playing tournaments has allowed me to stay fresh and not get bored of poker. I don’t have exact numbers on my tournament play because I have spread the play over several sites, but since most of my tournament play has been at Party, and I keep a separate bankroll there I can get a rough Idea of how I have done over the 6 or 7 months I’ve been playing tournaments. I put 3K into the Party account as seed money, and I had to top it up once with 4K more. I have withdrawn 27K and I have 12K in the roll right now. If my math is right I am up 32K in 7 months of tournament play. It sounds pretty good, but I think I play 50 hours a month(a conservative guess) of tournaments, so that would be just under $100 /hr. It’s actually much higher than I thought it was.
As you can expect from the way tournament’s pay out, most of my earnings have come from a few good results. My biggest payday was a 15K 2nd place in a $150 Super tournament. My biggest win was a 9K 1st place in a $100 NL, and I have had a couple of 8K 2nd places. I have won 3 times now, the other 2 in smaller buy in events, one a $30 at Party and the other an Empire guaranteed event.
The good results have come in very different ways. Sometimes I’ve acquired chips early and cruised to a final table, and others I’ve been barely staying alive through the entire tournament. The one consistent thing to all my good results is that I was lucky enough not to run into a monster hand that had me covered. My own hands didn’t seem to matter nearly as much as avoiding a big hand when I chose to play. I finished 3rd last night in a $100 NL event without ever holding a pair higher than 10’s. I was short stacked the entire event. I pushed all in at least 35 times without ever being called. I actually got back into the hunt by stealing 2 blinds a round during the bubble stage. Now clearly with all that pushing I was doing, I would have been called with and decent pair or AK, and I never ran into it once. That’s pretty lucky. In my 15K 2nd place tournament I had QQ 6 times, KK once and AA once all after getting down to 2 tables, and they all held up. Solid play will get you into a position to get lucky more often than bad play will, but you have to get lucky down the stretch to finish high.
My most disappointing moment had to be during the World championship of Online Poker held at Stars this past summer. It was a big buy in event ($500 or $1K) that I had decided to enter and I had been pretty fortunate to get into the money with a healthy stack. In fact I was 2nd at my table with around 100 players left. Unfortunately the tournament chip leader was at my table too. I had around 50K in chips when the average was around 20K. The big stack had 100K though. He raised my big blind when I had AA and he called my all-in re-raise with KK. His K hit on the river and I felt sick. I would have been a huge chip leader n a tournament where everyone at the final table made over 10K, and 1st place was over 250K. It still hurts to think about it.
I think my game has improved in several ways. I have learned to vary my play depending on what the table is playing like. When the table is tight, I loosen up. When the table is loose, I tighten up. These adjustments are crucial during the bubble stages. Picking up chips when everyone else gets tight trying to slip into the money has become a regular occurrence for me. I have bubbled way more than I should because of taking chances during these stages, but the times I’ve made it into the money with a nice stack instead of just surviving have certainly made up for it. I’ve also learned that the implied odds inherent in No-Limit make a lot of hands playable if you can get in cheap. I’m always amazed to hear a guy with AA bitching to the guy who just busted him with 64s because he had raised pre-flop. So the guy called 45 chips with a bad hand, but got over 1K in return, because the guy with AA couldn’t lay it down.
I am getting pretty good at reading the “average” players in these tournaments. Most of them aren’t very tricky so their bets usually mean just what you think they would mean. The huge overbet is usually a semi-bluff post-flop, and AK pre-flop. The small flop bet is usually an attempt to steal a pot. Of course the really good players use these plays as misdirection, so recognizing if your opponent is an “average” player or a better player becomes extremely important. Another reason I need to avoid playing ring games at the same time.
I have learned that I play better short stacked, or with a lot of chips. In both cases I have much less fear, and it seems to me the best players are fearless. I actually quite enjoy the short stacked play because the only decision I have to make is which hands to play. Then I just push all-in, and it’s out of my hands. There is something quite liberating about that. Because I usually find myself in this situation at some point during every tournament, I have gotten better at playing it. Unless I have a big hand, I won’t do it with anyone else in the pot, but if I’m first in you can do it with almost any hand. I try to avoid hands with a weak Ace or King because they are so easily dominated by the most likely calling hands, I’m hoping for 2 live cards if I get called, so I prefer hands like QJ or JT over A4 for example, but really you’re hoping no one calls until you have a real hand, or you hope to get lucky if you get called. With a lot of chips, I don’t worry so much about betting a missed flop, or making a semi-bluff raise, because I can still get away from the hand. It’s been an eye-opener for me to see how often these plays work.
Where I really need to improve is my play as an average stack. I play a very conservative game. When 1 hand can take me from an average stack to a small stack, I am much less willing to play anything marginal. Usually this leads to me being blinded down. I also think it labels me to the better players as someone who can be pushed off a hand. I see some very good players calling raises with hands like AJ or suited connectors, hands I would never call a raise with. They seem to have the ability to get away from them post flop, even if they hit if they read the opponent as being strong. I’m just not there yet on my reading I guess, so I can’t take the chance and play those hands. I also have to stop making what I call “tilt” plays. Those are the plays where I make calls even though I know I’m beat because I’m still steaming about another bad beat, or I’m just being impatient. I get beat often enough when I’m ahead or on coin tosses, I don’t need to lose by calling off all my chips when I know I’m beat, and it happens way to often. Let’s face it, a lot of people get knocked out of tournaments on hands where both players played it correctly. Fortune chooses who advances and who goes home. All I can control is avoiding situations where I’m a big dog.
I am trying to get my game to the point where I can get into a position to win even without good or lucky cards. Learning to play my opponents is something that has started to improve for me, but I need to take it a lot further if I want to get to the next level. And I do want to get to the next level. I want to cash in some big entry events. I want to play in a WPT event. And I really want to play in the WSOP main event. But there is no way I’m shelling out 10K to play in a tournament, so it’s satellites for me.
The game plan for this year is to keep playing the nightly tournaments, and to try and find some live action tournaments locally. I was a fish out of water when I went to Foxwoods in November to play NL and the satellites for the main event of the WPO. I need to get more comfortable playing live and experience is the only way I know of to do it.
I wish all of you a great 2005, lets hope we can all meet our goals for the year.