Friendliness at End of Tournament!?!?!?!?!?!?!

[fnurt]

The Stars satellites always end up like this, in my experience. If it seems like an exceedingly stupid process to you, I would have to agree.

After all this time, though, I'm shocked they haven't made them go to hand-to-hand earlier. The stalling is just ridiculous. And even though I don't believe in stalling, if everyone at the other table is stalling, what are you supposed to do?

The most absurd part of it is this notion that each table is a team ("everyone fold to the BB, and we can ALL get a seat!"). Sometimes this comes about because one of the short stacks begs for mercy and the big stacks figure, "why should I run over him when we can just wait for someone to be eliminated at the other table?" But it makes no rational sense.

One of my all-time favorites involved this guy who appointed himself table captain and kept ordering people to raise, fold, etc. - all in capital letters of course - with the goal of letting the whole table qualify. At one point he announces, "I HAVE QQ JUST FOLD" and goes all-in, at which point some big stack calls with Ax and busts him. It was worth the price of admission just to hear his screams of agony.

[plaid]

I've seen the same 'friendliness' in on-line satellite play -- I've even seen a big stack offering his chips to the lesser stacks at the table. Not sure if there's a deeper strategy at work here, eg: he'd rather face a known guy again in the actual event, rather than an unknown from another table.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of delay tactics or chip dumping, simply because I usually want to go to bed. And at one time, I'd gone from middle position to the periphery of getting knocked out, because others where protecting the BB of the short players at the table.