SDouble on Poker Stars

[MuckMuck]

I recently was in the 20+rebuy tourney on Pokerstars and this hand came up with Player SDouble one of the tourney leaderboard points players at PS. Blinds 300-600 SDouble has an avg stack T-10,500 and is UTG he min raises to 1200 (which he has been doing frequently while i was at the table and showing mediocre hands) there's a cold caller in mid position with about T-12,000, then to me on the button I move all in for T-11,000 with AQd hoping to pick up the pot there and then. SDouble calls instantly the other player folds and I am kicking myself thinking damn he's got a monster. To my surprise he flips over QJo and of course he flops JJ5 and it's all over for me except for utter shock that someone could make such a brutal call? Can anyone justify this call...I could accept it if it was a $1 or $2 tourney where you have players with no clue but this guy is supposedly good??? I just had to share this because I know there are a lot of players who despise SDouble.

Muck

[cferejohn]

Moral: Getting onto the tournament leaderboards has more to do with playing a lot of tournaments than being particularly skillful.

[M.B.E.]

You can get on the TLB by playing a lot of tournaments and playing a high-variance game. You need many top-3 finishes to do well on the TLB. You can't accomplish that by entering a lot of tournaments and playing weak-tight.

TLB points are keyed to the square root of the place of finish. When you finish first you get twice as many TLB points as the fourth-place finisher. (Three times as many as the ninth-place finisher, etc.)

[Johnsears]

SDouble is by no means a bad tournament player. There is a reason for this call that you don't know or understand.

[The Prince]

Yeah but playing weak-tight is a recipe for disaster anyway. And having a high variance strategy in tournaments is good IMO, because it gets you in the top 3 more often. If he's doing that and playing well, he might have a good ROI.

But I agree that the tournament leaderboards are too biased towards the number of tournaments you play vs the quality of your results.

I would pay more attention to them if they would do it like the batting average leaders in baseball. Where you would need to play a minimum number of tournaments to qualify and then compare your results by a point system. That way, if I have a better ROI (or points per tournament) but played 100 tournaments, yet you played 150 tournament with a much worse ROI, I would be ranked higher (if I played the minimum required). This would be much more exact.

I know there are some players in the top of the leaderboards that trully play atrocious but play in so many tournaments per week, that they score often. But if you ask them what their cash ROI is, I suspect many of them are not doing as well.

Then again I perfectly understand why the poker sites are counting the points this way, as it rewards the players playing the most. I just don't think you can base a player's expertise by his ranking on these leaderboards.

Take me for example, I do very well in tournaments. But when I sit down to play online, I might play one tournament at three different sites, so that I can start all of them at the same time. Plus I don't play in smallish entry fees tournaments. Playing like this will never get me into these leaderboards.

Nicolas Fradet (The Prince)
www.wptinsider.com

[cferejohn]

[ QUOTE ]
SDouble is by no means a bad tournament player. There is a reason for this call that you don't know or understand.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sorry. No. Nobody gets a free pass just because he plays alot, even if he wins alot. If TJ Cloutier made this call, it would still be a bad call.

*Maybe* if SDouble had some reason to believe that his opponent was on a small or medium pair (and even then, he's not getting odds by a whole lot), but there is just no way to make such a read online.

I've played against SDouble quite a lot, and he will certainly make calls that seem to me to be right on the edge of +chip EV (and ones that seem over it like this one).

There is something to be said for this strategy, especially against observant opponents (who now are not going to want to push with medium pairs knowing that he will call with coinflip hands; Gus Hansen has a similar reputation).

However, I still think this was a bad call, unless *maybe* you have been watching your opponent push preflop constantly and you know that he may well have absolutely nothing (and there is no reason to believe this was the case here.

"There is a reason for this call that you don't know or understand" is a complete cop-out. The whole point of this board is to discuss questionable plays so that we can understand how other players think and how we should think about poker. If you are going to blow off a poster who came with a legitimate question, why don't you just go back to lurking.

[eMarkM]

You should see him in the $10 rebuy, all-in every hand. I understand the concept in theory, just ram in everytime and keep it up until you get the big stack for post-rebuy. Riverloser, another well respected Stars player, does the same thing. 20 rebuys or more, not uncommon with these guys, they'll keep it up until they have large stack.

In the meantime they're giving everyone around them big stacks. I like to be the other guy at their table being the beneficiary of calling their bets with big pocket pairs when they are doing the ultra-LAG thing.

[Johnsears]

What I said was perfectly legit. He may have had somewhere else to be, or maybe he just didn't want to play anymore. The guy's post seemed more like an attack on SDouble's skill than a question about why he made the play he did. Loosen up.

[cferejohn]

[ QUOTE ]
What I said was perfectly legit. He may have had somewhere else to be, or maybe he just didn't want to play anymore. The guy's post seemed more like an attack on SDouble's skill than a question about why he made the play he did. Loosen up.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sorry if I misinterpreted what you said. It sounded like you were being very patronizing to the original poster. Obviously what you say re: Sdouble's reasons for playing the way he did may be true; we don't really know.

I've played against SDouble a number of times though, and have never been particularly impressed with his play. If this was the only time I'd seen him make a questionable move like this, I'd chalk it up to the cat jumping on the keyboard or a sudden and unrefusable call of nature, but I think the point that a high standing on the TLB shouldn't necessarily be equated with good play is a good one.

[Boris]

MuckMuck -

This Dirtrancher. welcome to the forums but please dont share your bad beat stories. If you're not careful you willl end up like Riverloser. Of course his call sucked. That is about all there is to it.