Most of the live poker tournaments I play in also incorporate a highest hand competition. You pay an extra $5 at the start and the person who hits the highest hand by a certain time wins the prize-pool. The cut-off time is usually at the end of the first or second break and the hand has to go to showdown to qualify.
I never enter these competitions for two reasons. First off, it's purely a matter of chance who wins it, and I'm not much of a gambler (obviously, I don't consider playing poker to be gambling). If I want to take a punt, I'll buy a raffle ticket or maybe take a bet on the horses. Secondly, and more importantly, entering the high hand competition changes the way you play. The pay-out is usually pretty good, often equaling third prize in the tournament or better, so players tend to chase that high hand relentlessly. That means a lot of calling with long shots and entering a lot more pots than usual. In other words, if you play in the high hand comp it turns you into a donkey.
The high hand comp was introduced to my regular Friday night tournament a couple of years ago and since then the game has got even looser than it already was. And it was already ridiculously loose. People just chase, chase, chase if they have even the smallest chance of hitting that big two-outer. This is actually good for me as I'm more likely to be paid off if I'm in a hand with one of these chasers. But of course it also means that there are a lot of people in each hand, which makes it very difficult to protect a good starting hand.
I occasionally play ring games at the Auckland Casino and I see that they have introduced something similar. They now have a Royal Flush Jackpot which goes up a little at a time. The first time I saw it running it was at $4,000. The last time I was there it was up to $12,000. That's a massive incentive to become a chaser. The way it works is, you have to flop a royal flush to win. So any two suited broadway cards suddenly become very desirable. Anyone with Jack Ten, King Ten, or Queen Jack suited is going to play, even if they have to call a big raise. But even though you are automatically in the jackpot if you play in this game, I just play the way I always do. I'm there to play poker, not to gamble on a massive long shot.
I've always considered that not playing in the high hand competition gives me an edge over those that do. Playing in a tournament a couple of weeks ago, I saw a concrete example of how advantageous this could be. During the early stages of the game the person who was running the HH comp made it clear to everyone else at the table that I was one of only two people who were not participating in the High Hand. Later on, I got involved in a hand where this paid off nicely.
I raised with A K and got the usual assortment of callers. The flop came J J 8, I put in a decent-sized bet and got called again by a couple of players. The turn was another Jack. By this stage I was getting worried that my Ace was no good and someone had a pocket pair, but I figured that I should keep the pressure on, so I bet again. This time I got one caller, Helen, a regular from the Friday game. Now I was really worried that I was behind, and was praying for an Ace or King on the river. The river was another Jack. This was actually the best possible card for me; I had the stone cold nuts.
Now I had something to consider. I knew that Helen was in the HH comp and more importantly, she knew that I wasn't. So she knew that even if I had an Ace, she still had quad Jacks, which was likely to be the winning hand for the day. The HH winner stood to collect $150. So I figured that she was likely to call a substantial bet with the second-best hand. I put in a decent-sized bet, she thought for a minute and said, "I'm going to be a [expletive deleted] and call because I know you're not in the high hand." She showed down pocket sixes; she later collected her $150 and I collected a much bigger pot than I otherwise would have.
There was a lot of talk around the table after this hand and some people thought that Helen might have called an all-in bet. She said that she probably wouldn't have but I guess I'll never know for sure. In retrospect, I probably could have got more from her than I did, but I still made a tidy sum on that hand. Helen was eliminated from the tournament a little later but I went on to cash. But it was only 6th place and I barely got my money back. But I have no regrets. I was eliminated after going all-in and being called by someone with a dominated hand. Then they hit their three-outer on the river and I was left with no chips and a minimum cash. If it had gone the other way, I would have been on track to make one of the top spots, all worth a lot more than $150.
My approach to the game is still the same. I'm not there to show down a higher hand than everyone else. I'm not there to gamble. I'm there to play poker.
Thursday, 21 December 2017
Sunday, 22 October 2017
Tournament Director, Part 2
I'm pretty sure that it was the National Pub Poker League (NPPL) that originally introduced Texas Hold'em tournaments to the New Zealand pub and club scene. The NPPL is an Australian organisation that bought poker tournaments here maybe 20 years ago and is still going strong. As a result, the NPPL rules and procedures are what most tournament players are used to in this country.
A few years ago, when I ran my first poker tournament I decided that I needed to have a written set of rules that I could refer to if necessary. I first went to the NPPL website to see what their rules were but I found them to be somewhat basic and not really what I was looking for. After a quick google search I soon discovered the Tournament Director's Association (TDA) rules, which were much more detailed and comprehensive. I thought the TDA rules were much better so I adopted them and have been using them ever since.
Well, to be more precise, I've been using most of the TDA rules. The thing is, there are a number of areas where the TDA and the NPPL do not agree, and the vast majority of players are so used to the NPPL way of doing things that they find it hard to change. In the two tournaments that I currently run (the weekly Turbo at the Landmark Bar and the monthly deep stack tourney at the Onehunga Workies) I've been working towards changing the rules, with varying degrees of success.
Changing the 'forced check rule' was simplest. The NPPL procedure when someone bets out of turn is that the offending player is then not allowed to bet and can only call or check. So this is effectively an instantly applied penalty. The TDA approach is less severe. There is no instant penalty and the player who bet out of turn has to go through with their declared bet, provided that the action hasn't changed. A penalty is only applied in the case of repeated offences by the same player. I've been able to introduce this rule in both the tournaments that I run with a minimum of fuss.
Another change that I've been able to introduce is the procedure for moving a player to another table. I now move the player in the 'under the gun' position to the other table and they get dealt in immediately, regardless of the position they come into, even if that means paying the big blind or being the dealer. The procedure that is used in other local tournaments is that the player behind the dealer moves and they go on to the new table in whatever position is available. If they come into the blinds the procedure is a bit confused. In most cases the moving player is required to sit out several hands until the button passes. This is actually the rule for cash games and is not really a fair way to do things in tournaments.
Breaking tables is another area that is a bit confused in local tournaments. There tends to be no set procedure and most of the time the tournament director moves the players by saying something like 'I need two at this table and three at that table', and players then make their own choice of table. Although the games that I run are not actually big enough for me to worry about this procedure at the moment, if I did have a three table game then I would use the TDA rule. This involves randomly assigning new positions to the players. This is pretty simple using a random card draw. That way, everything is not only fair, but is seen to be fair.
Part of the problem with moving players in most tournaments I attend is that organisers usually have only as many seats as are necessary at each table. I've found that it works out better if you have a full number of seats at each table, regardless of the number of seated players. That way, I have vacant seats that I can move players into with a minimum of disruption. Players are used to tidying seats away when they get knocked out, so I just have to be alert and make sure that the seats are moved back into place.
According to another NPPL rule, if three or more players get moved to a new table there is a re-draw for dealer position. According to the TDA rules, players just take on whatever responsibilities their new seat carries, regardless of the number of players that move. I'm still a bit ambiguous about which way I should go on this one. It seems to be an entrenched idea among local players that if three or more move you re-establish for dealer. But it seems kind of arbitrary to me. Either you should re-establish every time or not, rather than creating an artificial line at a certain number of players. On balance, I think I will be just keeping it simple and sticking with the TDA, if and when this issue comes up.
The trickiest area I've had to deal with is the chip-up. The standard local procedure is pretty simple: chips are always rounded up. So if changing up 100 chips to 500s, anyone with 4x100 chips gets a 500, and even a player with a single 100 chip also gets a 500. On the other hand the TDA rule is different and somewhat complicated. The chip-up involves a 'chip race'. This is where the left-over chips are pooled and changed up and the TD deals out cards to determine which player gets the extras.
I don't like either of these chip-up procedures. Using the NPPL method, some-one with one 100 chip gets 500, and some-one with 4x100 also gets 500. That's not very fair. On the other hand, the TDA system is worse; depending on the luck of the draw, some-one with one 100 chip could get a 500 while the player with 4x100 could get nothing. So I've gone with a compromise procedure. In my Wednesday night game I simply round up or down. So 100 or 200 gets nothing and 300 or 400 gets a 500 chip. It seems to me to be the simplest and fairest way to do things.
When I introduced this rounding up and down process to my Wednesday night tournament there were initially a few murmurings about losing chips but overall it went okay. People got used to it. However, I haven't yet introduced it to the monthly game I run at Onehunga. This is because the main game at Onehunga is the weekly Friday-nighter which is run by the poker organiser at that club, and he uses the NPPL rounding up system. So I am likely to meet up with more resistance if I try to change the colour-up procedure at my game.
Nevertheless, assuming I'm still getting enough players coming to my Onehunga game, I intend to change the chip-up procedure starting next year. I'm sure there will be some objections but in the end, it's my game and my goal is to run it in the fairest and most transparent way possible. Once I introduce that change I will have got rid of the worst anomalies created by the traditional NPPL procedures and be pretty much running according to the TDA rules (apart from the chip-up). It's not that the NPPL rules are all that bad, it's just that I need a proper written set of rules to fall back on if required, and the TDA rules provide that. My main aim when running tournaments has always been to ensure that they are run in a fair and consistent way and I think that the procedures I'm working on adopting will achieve that.
A few years ago, when I ran my first poker tournament I decided that I needed to have a written set of rules that I could refer to if necessary. I first went to the NPPL website to see what their rules were but I found them to be somewhat basic and not really what I was looking for. After a quick google search I soon discovered the Tournament Director's Association (TDA) rules, which were much more detailed and comprehensive. I thought the TDA rules were much better so I adopted them and have been using them ever since.
Well, to be more precise, I've been using most of the TDA rules. The thing is, there are a number of areas where the TDA and the NPPL do not agree, and the vast majority of players are so used to the NPPL way of doing things that they find it hard to change. In the two tournaments that I currently run (the weekly Turbo at the Landmark Bar and the monthly deep stack tourney at the Onehunga Workies) I've been working towards changing the rules, with varying degrees of success.
Changing the 'forced check rule' was simplest. The NPPL procedure when someone bets out of turn is that the offending player is then not allowed to bet and can only call or check. So this is effectively an instantly applied penalty. The TDA approach is less severe. There is no instant penalty and the player who bet out of turn has to go through with their declared bet, provided that the action hasn't changed. A penalty is only applied in the case of repeated offences by the same player. I've been able to introduce this rule in both the tournaments that I run with a minimum of fuss.
Another change that I've been able to introduce is the procedure for moving a player to another table. I now move the player in the 'under the gun' position to the other table and they get dealt in immediately, regardless of the position they come into, even if that means paying the big blind or being the dealer. The procedure that is used in other local tournaments is that the player behind the dealer moves and they go on to the new table in whatever position is available. If they come into the blinds the procedure is a bit confused. In most cases the moving player is required to sit out several hands until the button passes. This is actually the rule for cash games and is not really a fair way to do things in tournaments.
Breaking tables is another area that is a bit confused in local tournaments. There tends to be no set procedure and most of the time the tournament director moves the players by saying something like 'I need two at this table and three at that table', and players then make their own choice of table. Although the games that I run are not actually big enough for me to worry about this procedure at the moment, if I did have a three table game then I would use the TDA rule. This involves randomly assigning new positions to the players. This is pretty simple using a random card draw. That way, everything is not only fair, but is seen to be fair.
Part of the problem with moving players in most tournaments I attend is that organisers usually have only as many seats as are necessary at each table. I've found that it works out better if you have a full number of seats at each table, regardless of the number of seated players. That way, I have vacant seats that I can move players into with a minimum of disruption. Players are used to tidying seats away when they get knocked out, so I just have to be alert and make sure that the seats are moved back into place.
According to another NPPL rule, if three or more players get moved to a new table there is a re-draw for dealer position. According to the TDA rules, players just take on whatever responsibilities their new seat carries, regardless of the number of players that move. I'm still a bit ambiguous about which way I should go on this one. It seems to be an entrenched idea among local players that if three or more move you re-establish for dealer. But it seems kind of arbitrary to me. Either you should re-establish every time or not, rather than creating an artificial line at a certain number of players. On balance, I think I will be just keeping it simple and sticking with the TDA, if and when this issue comes up.
The trickiest area I've had to deal with is the chip-up. The standard local procedure is pretty simple: chips are always rounded up. So if changing up 100 chips to 500s, anyone with 4x100 chips gets a 500, and even a player with a single 100 chip also gets a 500. On the other hand the TDA rule is different and somewhat complicated. The chip-up involves a 'chip race'. This is where the left-over chips are pooled and changed up and the TD deals out cards to determine which player gets the extras.
I don't like either of these chip-up procedures. Using the NPPL method, some-one with one 100 chip gets 500, and some-one with 4x100 also gets 500. That's not very fair. On the other hand, the TDA system is worse; depending on the luck of the draw, some-one with one 100 chip could get a 500 while the player with 4x100 could get nothing. So I've gone with a compromise procedure. In my Wednesday night game I simply round up or down. So 100 or 200 gets nothing and 300 or 400 gets a 500 chip. It seems to me to be the simplest and fairest way to do things.
When I introduced this rounding up and down process to my Wednesday night tournament there were initially a few murmurings about losing chips but overall it went okay. People got used to it. However, I haven't yet introduced it to the monthly game I run at Onehunga. This is because the main game at Onehunga is the weekly Friday-nighter which is run by the poker organiser at that club, and he uses the NPPL rounding up system. So I am likely to meet up with more resistance if I try to change the colour-up procedure at my game.
Nevertheless, assuming I'm still getting enough players coming to my Onehunga game, I intend to change the chip-up procedure starting next year. I'm sure there will be some objections but in the end, it's my game and my goal is to run it in the fairest and most transparent way possible. Once I introduce that change I will have got rid of the worst anomalies created by the traditional NPPL procedures and be pretty much running according to the TDA rules (apart from the chip-up). It's not that the NPPL rules are all that bad, it's just that I need a proper written set of rules to fall back on if required, and the TDA rules provide that. My main aim when running tournaments has always been to ensure that they are run in a fair and consistent way and I think that the procedures I'm working on adopting will achieve that.
Tuesday, 19 September 2017
Sky City Cashie
Auckland's Sky City Casino plays two types of no-limit Texas Hold'em ring game (cash game). They spread a $1/$3 game and a $2/$5 game. Both are standard ring games with a maximum buy-in of 100 big blinds but the $3 game has a time limit: players have 15 seconds to act before their cards are mucked. I've been hoping to have a go at the lower buy-in game for a while now and a couple of months ago my poker bankroll finally reached a level where I could afford to buy in to this game for 60 big blinds ($180). I decided that I would allow myself three buy-ins and then pull the plug if I hadn't made any progress.
I've always maintained that I prefer to play in ring games but the fact is most of my experience in this game type comes from home games that are usually played as spread limit. I have played in no-limit games at the casino from time to time, but with mixed results. So I figured I'd better get myself some lessons on no-limit ring games first. I checked out some recommendations for books on the subject and settled on 'Harrington on Cash Games ( Volume 1). I'd just finished reading Harrington's first volume on tournaments and had found it to be quite useful, so was hoping that this book would be equally illuminating.
I had a couple of false starts with the casino games because it turns out that, although the 'Poker Zone' opens at 5 pm weekdays and at midday on weekends, the $3 games don't actually start until about 7 pm. So, having read half a cash game primer, I headed up to the casino about a month ago to give it a try. My wife came along as well and she wandered off to play the slots while I went upstairs to the poker room and bought myself in for my 60 big blinds.
I was surprised to find that play in this game was very loose and quite passive. I'd heard a little about this game from some tournament players who'd tried it and the impression I'd got was that there were some serious players in this game. This certainly wasn't the case when I was up there. There was an awful lot of pre-flop limping and post-flop calling going on and not much raising. The one exception was a player to my left who was mostly folding and very occasionally 3-betting a pre-flop raiser. The raiser invariably folded, so I never got to see what sort of hands this guy was re-raising with. Apart from that it was pretty much a call-fest and some of the winning hands that got shown down were pretty weak.
Despite all this I wasn't getting many playable hands and ended up steadily losing chips. My biggest loss came when I had two pair against a higher two pair. I ended up having to reload and by the time my wife came upstairs to see how I was doing I'd lost my original buy-in and decided it was time to call it a night.
I wasn't too worried about this poor start and continued reading Harrington. I soon realised that this book is aimed at people playing in medium stakes games against reasonably tough opposition. What's more, the main focus of the book is correct strategy for playing in deep stacked games where players have 100 big blinds or more. Neither of these assumptions are true for the Sky City cashies. The standard of play is generally pretty poor and only some of the players have deep stacks. And it also occurred to me that even if everyone had 100 BBs in front of them, my starting stack was only 60 BBs, making for a medium-sized effective stack. Despite all this I still found the general principals set out in Harrington's book to be useful and continued to study it.
My second trip to the Poker Zone was about three weeks ago, on a Saturday night. As before, play was pretty loose. There seemed to be an epidemic of limp-calling at this table. The player to my right was limping in a lot and seemed to call every time that he got raised pre-flop. Players were coming and going on a regular basis, with some losing their stacks then reloading and returning to the table. I was doing okay for a while and my stack got up to about $400. I'd already decided that this was the most I wanted sitting on the table so I was going to cash out and take a break. But then my stack dropped down a little, so I carried on playing.
I noticed that the '15 seconds to act' rule was being observed fairly loosely. I couldn't see any time-keeping apparatus that the dealers might be using. As far as I could tell, if a dealer decided that you were taking too long to act then they would start a 5 second count-down. The only time that this affected me was in a hand where I was facing a bet on the river with just one pair in my hand. Then I thought that I might have hit a straight as the dealer started counting down. I quickly called to avoid my cards being mucked, only to realise that I had no straight. Oops.
My stack was down to about $300 when I hit the hand that ended my night. I had A K in early position, put in a big raise and got 3 callers. The flop came K 8 9 and I bet about 3/4 of the pot with my top pair, top kicker and got one caller. By the time the hand was over I was all-in with my pair of Kings and the other player turned over 8 9 for two pair. This was an idiot move on my part. The call of my big bet on the flop should have been setting off all sorts of alarm bells but I ignored them. Once more I fell into the trap of refusing to believe that my big hand could get outdrawn. If I'd done this in a tournament I might have lost as much as $60. But this was a cashie, so I gave away $300. That's the difference between tournies and cashies. The funny thing is, on reviewing some chapters of the Harrington book I found a sample hand that was almost exactly the same. The point of the example was, 'don't overvalue one pair hands in no-limit ring games'. Oh well.
So I've got one buy-in left. I intend to try again in a couple of weeks. Despite my poor showing so far, I'm moderately confident of doing better next time. Thinking about these games, I can see that the general standard of play is pretty low. And it's not really deep stack poker. I've come to the conclusion that the best way to approach these games is to play straightforward A B C poker; tight and aggressive and not too fancy. I'm still going to read Harrington Volume 2, but when I go back up to Sky City I think it will be a case of sticking to the basics. And I'll bring some money for the roulette table, just in case I lose my buy-in again.
I've always maintained that I prefer to play in ring games but the fact is most of my experience in this game type comes from home games that are usually played as spread limit. I have played in no-limit games at the casino from time to time, but with mixed results. So I figured I'd better get myself some lessons on no-limit ring games first. I checked out some recommendations for books on the subject and settled on 'Harrington on Cash Games ( Volume 1). I'd just finished reading Harrington's first volume on tournaments and had found it to be quite useful, so was hoping that this book would be equally illuminating.
I had a couple of false starts with the casino games because it turns out that, although the 'Poker Zone' opens at 5 pm weekdays and at midday on weekends, the $3 games don't actually start until about 7 pm. So, having read half a cash game primer, I headed up to the casino about a month ago to give it a try. My wife came along as well and she wandered off to play the slots while I went upstairs to the poker room and bought myself in for my 60 big blinds.
I was surprised to find that play in this game was very loose and quite passive. I'd heard a little about this game from some tournament players who'd tried it and the impression I'd got was that there were some serious players in this game. This certainly wasn't the case when I was up there. There was an awful lot of pre-flop limping and post-flop calling going on and not much raising. The one exception was a player to my left who was mostly folding and very occasionally 3-betting a pre-flop raiser. The raiser invariably folded, so I never got to see what sort of hands this guy was re-raising with. Apart from that it was pretty much a call-fest and some of the winning hands that got shown down were pretty weak.
Despite all this I wasn't getting many playable hands and ended up steadily losing chips. My biggest loss came when I had two pair against a higher two pair. I ended up having to reload and by the time my wife came upstairs to see how I was doing I'd lost my original buy-in and decided it was time to call it a night.
I wasn't too worried about this poor start and continued reading Harrington. I soon realised that this book is aimed at people playing in medium stakes games against reasonably tough opposition. What's more, the main focus of the book is correct strategy for playing in deep stacked games where players have 100 big blinds or more. Neither of these assumptions are true for the Sky City cashies. The standard of play is generally pretty poor and only some of the players have deep stacks. And it also occurred to me that even if everyone had 100 BBs in front of them, my starting stack was only 60 BBs, making for a medium-sized effective stack. Despite all this I still found the general principals set out in Harrington's book to be useful and continued to study it.My second trip to the Poker Zone was about three weeks ago, on a Saturday night. As before, play was pretty loose. There seemed to be an epidemic of limp-calling at this table. The player to my right was limping in a lot and seemed to call every time that he got raised pre-flop. Players were coming and going on a regular basis, with some losing their stacks then reloading and returning to the table. I was doing okay for a while and my stack got up to about $400. I'd already decided that this was the most I wanted sitting on the table so I was going to cash out and take a break. But then my stack dropped down a little, so I carried on playing.
I noticed that the '15 seconds to act' rule was being observed fairly loosely. I couldn't see any time-keeping apparatus that the dealers might be using. As far as I could tell, if a dealer decided that you were taking too long to act then they would start a 5 second count-down. The only time that this affected me was in a hand where I was facing a bet on the river with just one pair in my hand. Then I thought that I might have hit a straight as the dealer started counting down. I quickly called to avoid my cards being mucked, only to realise that I had no straight. Oops.
My stack was down to about $300 when I hit the hand that ended my night. I had A K in early position, put in a big raise and got 3 callers. The flop came K 8 9 and I bet about 3/4 of the pot with my top pair, top kicker and got one caller. By the time the hand was over I was all-in with my pair of Kings and the other player turned over 8 9 for two pair. This was an idiot move on my part. The call of my big bet on the flop should have been setting off all sorts of alarm bells but I ignored them. Once more I fell into the trap of refusing to believe that my big hand could get outdrawn. If I'd done this in a tournament I might have lost as much as $60. But this was a cashie, so I gave away $300. That's the difference between tournies and cashies. The funny thing is, on reviewing some chapters of the Harrington book I found a sample hand that was almost exactly the same. The point of the example was, 'don't overvalue one pair hands in no-limit ring games'. Oh well.
So I've got one buy-in left. I intend to try again in a couple of weeks. Despite my poor showing so far, I'm moderately confident of doing better next time. Thinking about these games, I can see that the general standard of play is pretty low. And it's not really deep stack poker. I've come to the conclusion that the best way to approach these games is to play straightforward A B C poker; tight and aggressive and not too fancy. I'm still going to read Harrington Volume 2, but when I go back up to Sky City I think it will be a case of sticking to the basics. And I'll bring some money for the roulette table, just in case I lose my buy-in again.
Friday, 4 August 2017
Tournament Director, Part 1
I've been playing every Wednesday night in the Landmark Bar re-buy tournament for about three years now and for the last five months I've also been running the game. This came about because Dan, the original game organizer, decided to quit last year and nobody else stepped up to take over. I like this game and didn't want to see it fold so when there was no sign of it re-starting by the end of February this year I went up to the Landmark, talked to the management, and volunteered to run it myself.
I'd run a couple of tournaments previously at my old club and had a pretty good idea of how to go about running this game. The hotel has all the essential equipment: a couple of rather tatty but still usable 8-player poker tables (leftovers from the National Pub Poker League), a couple of cases of tournament chips, some packs of cards, cut cards and dealer buttons. As for the tournament blinds timer, Dan originally used an app on his phone for this, then he changed to using a tournament timer that was in the shape of a dealer button. He passed this on to me but I found that the battery connection wasn't good; sometimes it worked okay and sometimes it didn't. So in the end I bought a cheap kitchen timer and have been using that ever since.
When I took it over, this was a turbo-style re-buy tournament. For a buy-in of $20 players got a chip stack of 4,000. The blinds started at 25/50 and then went to 50/100, 100/200, 200/400, 300/600, 400/800, 500/1k, 1k/2k. 2k/4k... Late entries were allowed for the first hour of play (7 pm to 8 pm) with a maximum of 18 players. Players could re-buy if they lost all their chips, getting a stack of 2,500 for $20. Re-buys were allowed until the prize-pool reached $500 (the maximum allowed for this type of game under New Zealand's gaming laws). With a maximum prize-pool the prizes were $250, $150, $60 and $40 with a couple of bar vouchers provided by the hotel management for 5th and 6th places. We usually got two full tables and a maximum prize-pool, with the tournament ending around 10.30 pm.
There were a couple of things that I wanted to change when I took over. I never liked the short re-buy stack and as a result it was my policy to never re-buy. So I changed the re-buy stack to 4,000, the same as the buy-in. I also changed the blind intervals. Originally, the first two blind levels lasted for 25 minutes, followed by a break. Then they went to 15 minute blinds with a break after every 4th level. I've never been a fan of variable blind intervals in a tournament so, after making a few calculations, I changed the blind intervals to 17 minutes all the way through, with a 10 minute break after every 3rd level. Apart from making it more consistent this also worked well for the timing of the chip-ups on each break.
My first game was in mid March and only 7 players turned up. I had advertised the game on Eventfinda, an event listing website, and the hotel had listed the game on their 'upcoming events' blackboard. I'd been in touch with Dan and got contact details for some of the regulars, but he only had a few available. The second week was also a small field and it wasn't looking too good for a reboot of this game. But over the next few weeks the number of players grew and pretty soon I was paying out the $500 maximum. The 'old hands' finally got the word that the Landmark game was back and I started getting a few new regular players. Even Dan turned up for most of the games.
It took a while but I eventually got into the routine of setting up the tables and chips, taking down names, announcing new blind levels and so on. I had to work out some basic procedures for moving players from one to two tables and for seating new players, but now that's all pretty straightforward. Now I don't really get a break when everyone else does, because I have to do the chip up. It also means I can't just go home when I'm eliminated. I have to stay to the end and pay out the prizes, and I also do the dealing for the final four players if I'm not still in the game. On the plus side, I get to use some of the bar vouchers for myself, so I get a couple of free beers for my trouble.
When I started out I received some files which included a fairly basic set of tournament rules. But I dropped those and adopted the Tournament Directors Association Rules for my game. Applying the rules in a typically loose pub game can be a bit of a challenge. On the one hand, this is not the World Series Main Event, but on the other hand, you've got to make sure the game is played in a fair and consistent way. With so many different players with varying amounts of live poker experience you find yourself having to pull people up over really basic stuff like string betting, keeping cards on the table, talking about a hand, rabbit hunting and so on. I try not to intrude too much into the general flow of the game but I'm coming to the conclusion that I've been a little too relaxed and things are getting a bit too loose. So I think I'll be cracking down a bit more on etiquette breaches over the next few weeks, just to bring things back into line.
As far as juggling the roles of player and Tournament Director goes, it's a challenge. I always keep the same seat, close to the chip case, because I'm constantly getting up to buy in and seat new players or organize re-buys, especially in the first hour. I'm also acutely aware that, as a TD who is also a player, I have to be seen to be fair and impartial. In particular, I'm careful to ensure that the chip-up process is open and transparent for all players to observe if they wish. Despite the constant interruptions I don't think my game has suffered significantly. I'm definitely less able to concentrate on the game in the first hour or so, but if I make it through to the second period it's not so bad. I've had a few cashes over the last few months and I'm definitely ahead overall. My change to the re-buy stack size also means I can sometimes re-buy if I need to, which I think improves my chances of cashing.
Apart from the two changes mentioned earlier I've kept the game pretty much the same as it was in previous years. But I had to make another change a few weeks ago. The original procedure was to set out 8 stacks of chips on both tables and have players deal to all the stacks and have all stacks pay the blinds in turn. New players were then seated at one of these stacks at random. I thought this system was a little unfair, because new players would get varying stack sizes depending on which table they were seated at and at which position. It was also a headache for me to keep track of the 'dead stacks' especially when I had enough players to make two tables. So a couple of weeks ago I changed to an 'earlybird' system. There are no stacks on the tables; when players register they get a starting stack to play with. If they register after the game starts they get a shorter stack of 3,800. This system is much easier to administer and it seems to have encouraged some of the habitual late-comers to turn up on time. So I'll be continuing to run the stacks this way.
I'm pretty happy that I've been able to rescue the Landmark game, even if it does mean having to run the game as well as play. Despite a shaky start the game is now going well. There are 4 or 5 regulars who turn up every week as well as a larger pool of semi-regulars and quite a few casual players who turn up from time to time. I'll definitely keep on as a TD/player for the rest of the year. After that, probably not. It's my intention to try and find someone else to take over the reins next year. The thing is, I have no interest in being a Tournament Director. I took on the role because it was the only way I could see of keeping a good, profitable poker game going. But I just want to play, not run the game. So for the rest of the year, I'm TD for the Landmark Poker Tournament. Next year it becomes somebody else's problem.
I'd run a couple of tournaments previously at my old club and had a pretty good idea of how to go about running this game. The hotel has all the essential equipment: a couple of rather tatty but still usable 8-player poker tables (leftovers from the National Pub Poker League), a couple of cases of tournament chips, some packs of cards, cut cards and dealer buttons. As for the tournament blinds timer, Dan originally used an app on his phone for this, then he changed to using a tournament timer that was in the shape of a dealer button. He passed this on to me but I found that the battery connection wasn't good; sometimes it worked okay and sometimes it didn't. So in the end I bought a cheap kitchen timer and have been using that ever since.
When I took it over, this was a turbo-style re-buy tournament. For a buy-in of $20 players got a chip stack of 4,000. The blinds started at 25/50 and then went to 50/100, 100/200, 200/400, 300/600, 400/800, 500/1k, 1k/2k. 2k/4k... Late entries were allowed for the first hour of play (7 pm to 8 pm) with a maximum of 18 players. Players could re-buy if they lost all their chips, getting a stack of 2,500 for $20. Re-buys were allowed until the prize-pool reached $500 (the maximum allowed for this type of game under New Zealand's gaming laws). With a maximum prize-pool the prizes were $250, $150, $60 and $40 with a couple of bar vouchers provided by the hotel management for 5th and 6th places. We usually got two full tables and a maximum prize-pool, with the tournament ending around 10.30 pm.
There were a couple of things that I wanted to change when I took over. I never liked the short re-buy stack and as a result it was my policy to never re-buy. So I changed the re-buy stack to 4,000, the same as the buy-in. I also changed the blind intervals. Originally, the first two blind levels lasted for 25 minutes, followed by a break. Then they went to 15 minute blinds with a break after every 4th level. I've never been a fan of variable blind intervals in a tournament so, after making a few calculations, I changed the blind intervals to 17 minutes all the way through, with a 10 minute break after every 3rd level. Apart from making it more consistent this also worked well for the timing of the chip-ups on each break.
My first game was in mid March and only 7 players turned up. I had advertised the game on Eventfinda, an event listing website, and the hotel had listed the game on their 'upcoming events' blackboard. I'd been in touch with Dan and got contact details for some of the regulars, but he only had a few available. The second week was also a small field and it wasn't looking too good for a reboot of this game. But over the next few weeks the number of players grew and pretty soon I was paying out the $500 maximum. The 'old hands' finally got the word that the Landmark game was back and I started getting a few new regular players. Even Dan turned up for most of the games.
It took a while but I eventually got into the routine of setting up the tables and chips, taking down names, announcing new blind levels and so on. I had to work out some basic procedures for moving players from one to two tables and for seating new players, but now that's all pretty straightforward. Now I don't really get a break when everyone else does, because I have to do the chip up. It also means I can't just go home when I'm eliminated. I have to stay to the end and pay out the prizes, and I also do the dealing for the final four players if I'm not still in the game. On the plus side, I get to use some of the bar vouchers for myself, so I get a couple of free beers for my trouble.
When I started out I received some files which included a fairly basic set of tournament rules. But I dropped those and adopted the Tournament Directors Association Rules for my game. Applying the rules in a typically loose pub game can be a bit of a challenge. On the one hand, this is not the World Series Main Event, but on the other hand, you've got to make sure the game is played in a fair and consistent way. With so many different players with varying amounts of live poker experience you find yourself having to pull people up over really basic stuff like string betting, keeping cards on the table, talking about a hand, rabbit hunting and so on. I try not to intrude too much into the general flow of the game but I'm coming to the conclusion that I've been a little too relaxed and things are getting a bit too loose. So I think I'll be cracking down a bit more on etiquette breaches over the next few weeks, just to bring things back into line.
As far as juggling the roles of player and Tournament Director goes, it's a challenge. I always keep the same seat, close to the chip case, because I'm constantly getting up to buy in and seat new players or organize re-buys, especially in the first hour. I'm also acutely aware that, as a TD who is also a player, I have to be seen to be fair and impartial. In particular, I'm careful to ensure that the chip-up process is open and transparent for all players to observe if they wish. Despite the constant interruptions I don't think my game has suffered significantly. I'm definitely less able to concentrate on the game in the first hour or so, but if I make it through to the second period it's not so bad. I've had a few cashes over the last few months and I'm definitely ahead overall. My change to the re-buy stack size also means I can sometimes re-buy if I need to, which I think improves my chances of cashing.
Apart from the two changes mentioned earlier I've kept the game pretty much the same as it was in previous years. But I had to make another change a few weeks ago. The original procedure was to set out 8 stacks of chips on both tables and have players deal to all the stacks and have all stacks pay the blinds in turn. New players were then seated at one of these stacks at random. I thought this system was a little unfair, because new players would get varying stack sizes depending on which table they were seated at and at which position. It was also a headache for me to keep track of the 'dead stacks' especially when I had enough players to make two tables. So a couple of weeks ago I changed to an 'earlybird' system. There are no stacks on the tables; when players register they get a starting stack to play with. If they register after the game starts they get a shorter stack of 3,800. This system is much easier to administer and it seems to have encouraged some of the habitual late-comers to turn up on time. So I'll be continuing to run the stacks this way.
I'm pretty happy that I've been able to rescue the Landmark game, even if it does mean having to run the game as well as play. Despite a shaky start the game is now going well. There are 4 or 5 regulars who turn up every week as well as a larger pool of semi-regulars and quite a few casual players who turn up from time to time. I'll definitely keep on as a TD/player for the rest of the year. After that, probably not. It's my intention to try and find someone else to take over the reins next year. The thing is, I have no interest in being a Tournament Director. I took on the role because it was the only way I could see of keeping a good, profitable poker game going. But I just want to play, not run the game. So for the rest of the year, I'm TD for the Landmark Poker Tournament. Next year it becomes somebody else's problem.
Friday, 30 June 2017
Weymouth
Friday
It was Queen's Birthday Weekend early in June; time for another round of the Clubs NZ North Island Poker Championship. This year it was being hosted by the Weymouth Cosmopolitan Club in South Auckland, so no away trip required. This event kicks off with a stand-alone tournament on the Friday night before the main event starts on the Saturday. I got my wife to pick me up at work and we were able to avoid the worst of the long weekend traffic and arrived at Weymouth nice and early. I was surprised at first to see there were no tables set up in the main club area and then realised they must be using the downstairs function room for the tournament.
This Friday event was being run differently to previous years; the Weymouth Club had decided to run three different tournaments on the night. They were all re-buy and add-on events with three different buy-in levels: $20, $40 and $80. The higher buy-in options were a bit outside my comfort zone so I opted for the $20 game, as did my wife. We had plenty of time so went and had a bite to eat while the players from other clubs started to drift in. By the time we reached the 7 pm start time there was no sign of any action and we were all just milling about in the club-rooms. But eventually we were given the word to go downstairs for the start of the tournament.
They had about 20 tables set up downstairs, but the organisers were still frantically working on their laptops, trying to get the seating charts set up. Eventually they announced that we should just pick a seat at any table. The $20 tournament tables with their 20k starting stacks were all at one end of the room and each tournament had a different clock set up. So I picked a seat at one of the flash 'Tuakau tables'. These are octagonal tables borrowed from the Tuakau club. They have wooden rails around the edges and are covered with speed-cloth with felt underneath, and are a joy to play on. There were a couple of Aucklanders at my table but the rest were from various clubs around the North Island, and we were in a field of 50 players.
I was quite surprised to find that play was generally pretty loose and passive, although not as bad as it is at my usual Friday night game. Things progressed pretty well but the one major distraction was a particularly loud and increasingly drunk player sitting across from me. She was winning quite a few hands but seemed incapable of remembering what the chip values were, or of keeping her chip stacks from falling over. In the end, one of the other players had to help her to make her bets or calls. Normally I wouldn't let something like this bother me but I'd had to deal with a couple of drunk and/or inexperienced players a couple of days earlier at my Wednesday game, so I was pretty happy when she was moved to another table.
I didn't need to re-buy but I did take the $20 add-on at the first break. As for my progress in the game, my stack had its ups and downs but as the evening wore on it was mostly down. The pivotal hand came when I pushed all-in short-stacked with pocket twos. I was not happy to be called by three people. However my mood changed when I flopped trips and went on to turn a full house, chipping me up nicely. However, the rate of increase in the blinds seemed to be getting higher, so my decent-sized stack dropped in value pretty quickly.
By the time we were approaching the final table I was seriously short-stacked, but so were most of the other players. I had less than 6 big blinds left for most of the last hour of play, so was reduced to a basic push or fold strategy. Some of my table-mates seemed to think I was going for the world record for all-in pushes, but it was a strategy that kept me alive in the game. It was approaching midnight when I reached the final table. Looking around the room, I could see that the other two tournaments were at about the same stage. We were in the money but all still pretty short-stacked thanks to the massively increasing blinds. The remaining players started to drop out very quickly at this stage and when two of them fell victim to the player opposite me I suddenly found myself heads up, playing for first or second place. My opponent was from Stokes Valley in Wellington and he had a bigger chip stack than me. So with the blinds at 60k/120k we started playing heads up poker. We'd only played one hand when the tournament director walked past our table and it occurred to me to ask him what the payouts were, as they hadn't been posted anywhere. When he told me how much the prizes were it seemed like a very good idea to me to split the prize money with Mr Stokes Valley. I put the question and he agreed to split 50/50, so I walked away from the table with $620 for my $40 investment. This was my first ever cash in this event (not counting side games) and I was very happy.
Saturday
We turned up on Saturday morning in plenty of time for the scheduled 10.30 start of the qualifying tournament for the Sunday Main Event. The other 10 players from my club were there. They hadn't played the previous night at Weymouth; our poker organiser had continued to run his regular Friday night game and the others had all played in that. Obviously, I was glad to have come and supported the Weymouth Club's game. When we got downstairs we were surprised to discover that the organisers were still taking late entries for the game, even though the cut-off had been advertised as being a week before the start. There was a single sheet of paper on one of the tables with a table allocation list so things were somewhat chaotic as everyone crowded around trying to find out where they were sitting. But in the end it settled down and we got under way.
There was a total of 172 players and we were playing to qualify for the main game to be held on Sunday. Normally it's the last 48 players who qualify but we knew that with such a large field there were likely to be more qualifiers this time, but no-one had said how many. The blind intervals were 30 minutes long and we'd started with reasonably deep stacks, so there was plenty of time to play. I had a couple of decent collects early on but spent most of my time just watching lots of passive play including an epidemic of limping under the gun.
After 90 minutes of play I was ahead of my starting stack and it was time for a one hour lunch break. When we came back downstairs we were told the game would be delayed. It seems that the players that went to eat had to order their food then wait for it to be cooked, resulting in a long wait for over 100 hungry people. So we had to wait for a while for everyone to get fed. No points to Weymouth for organisation on the catering front.
Eventually play got under way again and the field slowly started to thin out. The blinds began to increase a lot faster and we had several levels where they doubled up, thinning the field even more. My wife had been knocked out and had gone back upstairs to play the pokies and I was starting to wonder what the qualifying mark was. There was a lot of speculation about this at our table; we thought it might be 56 players (7 tables) but we weren't sure. The TD announced that we'd be playing hand for hand when we were down to 60 players, so we figured the bubble must be at 56. In the last hour of play I had fewer than 10 big blinds (BB) left so I tightened right up. I was trying to figure out if I had enough chips to fold my way to the qualifying mark but I wasn't sure how many players were left, and the TD wasn't saying. So I started standing up and counting the number of players left after every few hands. I thought I could limp across the bubble so just started folding everything.
Most of the others at my table were now also serial folding. Only the big stacks could afford to play if they wanted. At one point a woman at my table got out her phone and took a picture of her hand before folding it. She later told us it was pocket kings. Finally it was announced that we were playing hand for hand. It looked to me like there were only 58 players left. Every time there was an all-in hand play was stopped and a lot of players would go and watch, hoping to see someone eliminated. This happened about half a dozen times before a cheer went up and we were told that we'd qualified. It was about 6 pm and I had about 3 BBs left.
I went looking for some food while they set up the tables for the Second Chance Qualifier, which my wife was due to play in. The catering was not very well organised but I eventually found myself something to eat, then I found myself a cash game to play in. I'd been looking forward to the cashies at this event, but it was a bit of a let down. They were playing dealer's choice, Omaha or Hold'em, with a short stack buy-in. This is the sort of game that a lot of Auckland clubs play after tournaments and I wasn't very keen, but I thought I might as well have a go. At least the Omaha game was being played pot limit.
I lost my starting stack in the very first hand when I flopped top set in Omaha and bet it hard, thinking I had the nuts. Unfortunately, I didn't see the possible straight and ended up giving all my chips to one of my club-mates. So I reloaded and played on but they were mostly playing Omaha and I just wasn't feeling it. I lost more chips when I did hit the nuts but then got rivered. Then I took someone else's chips when I rivered them. Let's play bingo. In the end I decided to leave but had to wait for one full round to do so, so I just folded every hand. It was a $30 loss, but I guess it could have been worse.
The second chance event was well under way and my wife was doing okay so I went upstairs to see what was going on in the clubrooms. I saw that they were showing the first British and Irish Lions game, versus a provincial Barbarians selection, so I watched the end of that. After the game I went back downstairs with the news that the Lions had managed a rather unconvincing win over the Barbarians. The second chance game was nearing the end and I went and found a spot near my wife's table to see the action. The field was approaching the last 16 qualifiers level and there were a lot of short stacks. Knowing how much she likes to gamble, I kept willing my wife to 'fold, fold, fold', although I couldn't actually say anything. She did fold a lot and in the end she was sitting left of the big blind with a stack of about 100k, with the blinds at 30k/60k when the bubble finally burst. A very close thing indeed. Six of our twelve OWMC players had qualified for the Main Event. It was about 10 pm and time to go home and rest up for round three.
Sunday
Once again we were due to start the main game and the consolation tournament at 10.30 in the morning. This time the organisers had everything under control and everyone was was given an assigned table. Their were 72 players in the main game, so probably eighty or so in the consolation event. Both tournaments were to run on the same clock but the consolation players started with a shorter chip stack. The blind intervals were just 15 minutes this time and once again we started with a reasonably gentle blind structure in the early stages.
The early to middle stages of this tournament were pretty straightforward for me. I was just playing my good hands, taking the occasional gamble, and mostly just keeping out of trouble while always keeping an eye on the size of my stack. It was nice to be playing for the win again, rather than trying to limp over the qualifying line. One of our six OWMC players got knocked out fairly early but the rest of us played on into the afternoon.
By mid-afternoon the blinds were getting pretty steep and once again they doubled up several times in a row, pushing the remaining players into increasingly desperate situations. By the time we were down to four tables only my wife and myself were left from the Onehunga Workingmen's Club and the tournament had degenerated into a push-fest. I was just sitting there, nursing my short stack and trying to gauge the right time to get my chips into the middle. On being moved to another table my first hand was KJ and I pushed all-in and everyone folded. My next hand was KJ again, so I announced to the table that I had the same hand and pushed again. Everyone folded. Someone asked me to turn over one card so I obliged. It was the jack so they decided I must have pushed with JJ. I let them believe that.
By this stage I had about 12 BBs, which was actually a big stack at this table, but not at all comfortable for me. When Neil, a solid player from the Papakura Club, went all-in and I had 77, I had to decide what to do. I knew I had to double up soon if I was to go deep in this tournament and Neil's stack was smaller than mine. I figured it was most likely a coin-flip situation and even if I lost, I'd still have some chips, so I called. He showed A9 and he hit a 9 on the turn, so I was a seriously short-stacked again. Meanwhile we were down to three tables and my wife was the last of the OWMC players to be knocked out, at about 20th place.
I got moved again and soon found myself with 2 BBs left and the big blind fast approaching. So I min-raised all-in with Q2. Desperate times call for desperate measures. When someone called me with QJ I felt sure that my tournament was over. There was a queen and a king on the flop, but then one of the other cards paired up, giving us both two pair with a king kicker and we split the pot! But my luck didn't hold and my next desperate push with a marginal hand didn't hold and I was eliminated in 17th place. Although it was disappointing not to make the money I was still pretty happy about another deep run in this tournament and another year when I've managed to qualify first up.
It wasn't long after this that they got down to the last nine players and they took a break while the final table was set up. They set this table up in a roped-off area and had a camera suspended above the table which was connected to a couple of big screens, so everyone could see the action. There were five Auckland players at the final table, including Neil. The TD then introduced the players one by one and announced to everyone that the blinds would now be dropped down a level 'to give them a fair chance at playing'. I thought this was grossly unfair on the players who'd had to endure those huge blinds and simply went to prove that the TDs had done a poor job of arranging the blind structure.
Nevertheless, the game began again, with a crowd of people eagerly watching the TV screens. It soon became apparent that all we could see on the screens was a lot of green cloth with a pair of hands dealing the cards, which then disappeared from view. Most of the time we couldn't even see the board cards when they were dealt. There was also someone with a microphone giving a commentary on the action but it was patchy at best and most of the time the audience had no idea what was going on. It was a good idea, but very poorly executed.
By this time my wife had come down from upstairs and we sat and watched the green screens long enough to see a couple of players get eliminated but it was all a bit pointless so we decided to skip the prize giving and call it a day. So, another year, another Clubs NZ tournament, another deep run. As if that wasn't good enough, my wife also had her first main event game and went deep also. And let's not forget the big cash on Friday night. Despite some organisational glitches from the hosts it was an enjoyable and profitable weekend of poker. Next year it's back down to Wellington I believe. I'm counting the days.
It was Queen's Birthday Weekend early in June; time for another round of the Clubs NZ North Island Poker Championship. This year it was being hosted by the Weymouth Cosmopolitan Club in South Auckland, so no away trip required. This event kicks off with a stand-alone tournament on the Friday night before the main event starts on the Saturday. I got my wife to pick me up at work and we were able to avoid the worst of the long weekend traffic and arrived at Weymouth nice and early. I was surprised at first to see there were no tables set up in the main club area and then realised they must be using the downstairs function room for the tournament.
This Friday event was being run differently to previous years; the Weymouth Club had decided to run three different tournaments on the night. They were all re-buy and add-on events with three different buy-in levels: $20, $40 and $80. The higher buy-in options were a bit outside my comfort zone so I opted for the $20 game, as did my wife. We had plenty of time so went and had a bite to eat while the players from other clubs started to drift in. By the time we reached the 7 pm start time there was no sign of any action and we were all just milling about in the club-rooms. But eventually we were given the word to go downstairs for the start of the tournament.
They had about 20 tables set up downstairs, but the organisers were still frantically working on their laptops, trying to get the seating charts set up. Eventually they announced that we should just pick a seat at any table. The $20 tournament tables with their 20k starting stacks were all at one end of the room and each tournament had a different clock set up. So I picked a seat at one of the flash 'Tuakau tables'. These are octagonal tables borrowed from the Tuakau club. They have wooden rails around the edges and are covered with speed-cloth with felt underneath, and are a joy to play on. There were a couple of Aucklanders at my table but the rest were from various clubs around the North Island, and we were in a field of 50 players.
I was quite surprised to find that play was generally pretty loose and passive, although not as bad as it is at my usual Friday night game. Things progressed pretty well but the one major distraction was a particularly loud and increasingly drunk player sitting across from me. She was winning quite a few hands but seemed incapable of remembering what the chip values were, or of keeping her chip stacks from falling over. In the end, one of the other players had to help her to make her bets or calls. Normally I wouldn't let something like this bother me but I'd had to deal with a couple of drunk and/or inexperienced players a couple of days earlier at my Wednesday game, so I was pretty happy when she was moved to another table.
I didn't need to re-buy but I did take the $20 add-on at the first break. As for my progress in the game, my stack had its ups and downs but as the evening wore on it was mostly down. The pivotal hand came when I pushed all-in short-stacked with pocket twos. I was not happy to be called by three people. However my mood changed when I flopped trips and went on to turn a full house, chipping me up nicely. However, the rate of increase in the blinds seemed to be getting higher, so my decent-sized stack dropped in value pretty quickly.
By the time we were approaching the final table I was seriously short-stacked, but so were most of the other players. I had less than 6 big blinds left for most of the last hour of play, so was reduced to a basic push or fold strategy. Some of my table-mates seemed to think I was going for the world record for all-in pushes, but it was a strategy that kept me alive in the game. It was approaching midnight when I reached the final table. Looking around the room, I could see that the other two tournaments were at about the same stage. We were in the money but all still pretty short-stacked thanks to the massively increasing blinds. The remaining players started to drop out very quickly at this stage and when two of them fell victim to the player opposite me I suddenly found myself heads up, playing for first or second place. My opponent was from Stokes Valley in Wellington and he had a bigger chip stack than me. So with the blinds at 60k/120k we started playing heads up poker. We'd only played one hand when the tournament director walked past our table and it occurred to me to ask him what the payouts were, as they hadn't been posted anywhere. When he told me how much the prizes were it seemed like a very good idea to me to split the prize money with Mr Stokes Valley. I put the question and he agreed to split 50/50, so I walked away from the table with $620 for my $40 investment. This was my first ever cash in this event (not counting side games) and I was very happy.
Saturday
We turned up on Saturday morning in plenty of time for the scheduled 10.30 start of the qualifying tournament for the Sunday Main Event. The other 10 players from my club were there. They hadn't played the previous night at Weymouth; our poker organiser had continued to run his regular Friday night game and the others had all played in that. Obviously, I was glad to have come and supported the Weymouth Club's game. When we got downstairs we were surprised to discover that the organisers were still taking late entries for the game, even though the cut-off had been advertised as being a week before the start. There was a single sheet of paper on one of the tables with a table allocation list so things were somewhat chaotic as everyone crowded around trying to find out where they were sitting. But in the end it settled down and we got under way.
There was a total of 172 players and we were playing to qualify for the main game to be held on Sunday. Normally it's the last 48 players who qualify but we knew that with such a large field there were likely to be more qualifiers this time, but no-one had said how many. The blind intervals were 30 minutes long and we'd started with reasonably deep stacks, so there was plenty of time to play. I had a couple of decent collects early on but spent most of my time just watching lots of passive play including an epidemic of limping under the gun.
After 90 minutes of play I was ahead of my starting stack and it was time for a one hour lunch break. When we came back downstairs we were told the game would be delayed. It seems that the players that went to eat had to order their food then wait for it to be cooked, resulting in a long wait for over 100 hungry people. So we had to wait for a while for everyone to get fed. No points to Weymouth for organisation on the catering front.
Eventually play got under way again and the field slowly started to thin out. The blinds began to increase a lot faster and we had several levels where they doubled up, thinning the field even more. My wife had been knocked out and had gone back upstairs to play the pokies and I was starting to wonder what the qualifying mark was. There was a lot of speculation about this at our table; we thought it might be 56 players (7 tables) but we weren't sure. The TD announced that we'd be playing hand for hand when we were down to 60 players, so we figured the bubble must be at 56. In the last hour of play I had fewer than 10 big blinds (BB) left so I tightened right up. I was trying to figure out if I had enough chips to fold my way to the qualifying mark but I wasn't sure how many players were left, and the TD wasn't saying. So I started standing up and counting the number of players left after every few hands. I thought I could limp across the bubble so just started folding everything.
Most of the others at my table were now also serial folding. Only the big stacks could afford to play if they wanted. At one point a woman at my table got out her phone and took a picture of her hand before folding it. She later told us it was pocket kings. Finally it was announced that we were playing hand for hand. It looked to me like there were only 58 players left. Every time there was an all-in hand play was stopped and a lot of players would go and watch, hoping to see someone eliminated. This happened about half a dozen times before a cheer went up and we were told that we'd qualified. It was about 6 pm and I had about 3 BBs left.
I went looking for some food while they set up the tables for the Second Chance Qualifier, which my wife was due to play in. The catering was not very well organised but I eventually found myself something to eat, then I found myself a cash game to play in. I'd been looking forward to the cashies at this event, but it was a bit of a let down. They were playing dealer's choice, Omaha or Hold'em, with a short stack buy-in. This is the sort of game that a lot of Auckland clubs play after tournaments and I wasn't very keen, but I thought I might as well have a go. At least the Omaha game was being played pot limit.
I lost my starting stack in the very first hand when I flopped top set in Omaha and bet it hard, thinking I had the nuts. Unfortunately, I didn't see the possible straight and ended up giving all my chips to one of my club-mates. So I reloaded and played on but they were mostly playing Omaha and I just wasn't feeling it. I lost more chips when I did hit the nuts but then got rivered. Then I took someone else's chips when I rivered them. Let's play bingo. In the end I decided to leave but had to wait for one full round to do so, so I just folded every hand. It was a $30 loss, but I guess it could have been worse.
The second chance event was well under way and my wife was doing okay so I went upstairs to see what was going on in the clubrooms. I saw that they were showing the first British and Irish Lions game, versus a provincial Barbarians selection, so I watched the end of that. After the game I went back downstairs with the news that the Lions had managed a rather unconvincing win over the Barbarians. The second chance game was nearing the end and I went and found a spot near my wife's table to see the action. The field was approaching the last 16 qualifiers level and there were a lot of short stacks. Knowing how much she likes to gamble, I kept willing my wife to 'fold, fold, fold', although I couldn't actually say anything. She did fold a lot and in the end she was sitting left of the big blind with a stack of about 100k, with the blinds at 30k/60k when the bubble finally burst. A very close thing indeed. Six of our twelve OWMC players had qualified for the Main Event. It was about 10 pm and time to go home and rest up for round three.
Sunday
Once again we were due to start the main game and the consolation tournament at 10.30 in the morning. This time the organisers had everything under control and everyone was was given an assigned table. Their were 72 players in the main game, so probably eighty or so in the consolation event. Both tournaments were to run on the same clock but the consolation players started with a shorter chip stack. The blind intervals were just 15 minutes this time and once again we started with a reasonably gentle blind structure in the early stages.
The early to middle stages of this tournament were pretty straightforward for me. I was just playing my good hands, taking the occasional gamble, and mostly just keeping out of trouble while always keeping an eye on the size of my stack. It was nice to be playing for the win again, rather than trying to limp over the qualifying line. One of our six OWMC players got knocked out fairly early but the rest of us played on into the afternoon.
By mid-afternoon the blinds were getting pretty steep and once again they doubled up several times in a row, pushing the remaining players into increasingly desperate situations. By the time we were down to four tables only my wife and myself were left from the Onehunga Workingmen's Club and the tournament had degenerated into a push-fest. I was just sitting there, nursing my short stack and trying to gauge the right time to get my chips into the middle. On being moved to another table my first hand was KJ and I pushed all-in and everyone folded. My next hand was KJ again, so I announced to the table that I had the same hand and pushed again. Everyone folded. Someone asked me to turn over one card so I obliged. It was the jack so they decided I must have pushed with JJ. I let them believe that.By this stage I had about 12 BBs, which was actually a big stack at this table, but not at all comfortable for me. When Neil, a solid player from the Papakura Club, went all-in and I had 77, I had to decide what to do. I knew I had to double up soon if I was to go deep in this tournament and Neil's stack was smaller than mine. I figured it was most likely a coin-flip situation and even if I lost, I'd still have some chips, so I called. He showed A9 and he hit a 9 on the turn, so I was a seriously short-stacked again. Meanwhile we were down to three tables and my wife was the last of the OWMC players to be knocked out, at about 20th place.
I got moved again and soon found myself with 2 BBs left and the big blind fast approaching. So I min-raised all-in with Q2. Desperate times call for desperate measures. When someone called me with QJ I felt sure that my tournament was over. There was a queen and a king on the flop, but then one of the other cards paired up, giving us both two pair with a king kicker and we split the pot! But my luck didn't hold and my next desperate push with a marginal hand didn't hold and I was eliminated in 17th place. Although it was disappointing not to make the money I was still pretty happy about another deep run in this tournament and another year when I've managed to qualify first up.
It wasn't long after this that they got down to the last nine players and they took a break while the final table was set up. They set this table up in a roped-off area and had a camera suspended above the table which was connected to a couple of big screens, so everyone could see the action. There were five Auckland players at the final table, including Neil. The TD then introduced the players one by one and announced to everyone that the blinds would now be dropped down a level 'to give them a fair chance at playing'. I thought this was grossly unfair on the players who'd had to endure those huge blinds and simply went to prove that the TDs had done a poor job of arranging the blind structure.
Nevertheless, the game began again, with a crowd of people eagerly watching the TV screens. It soon became apparent that all we could see on the screens was a lot of green cloth with a pair of hands dealing the cards, which then disappeared from view. Most of the time we couldn't even see the board cards when they were dealt. There was also someone with a microphone giving a commentary on the action but it was patchy at best and most of the time the audience had no idea what was going on. It was a good idea, but very poorly executed.
By this time my wife had come down from upstairs and we sat and watched the green screens long enough to see a couple of players get eliminated but it was all a bit pointless so we decided to skip the prize giving and call it a day. So, another year, another Clubs NZ tournament, another deep run. As if that wasn't good enough, my wife also had her first main event game and went deep also. And let's not forget the big cash on Friday night. Despite some organisational glitches from the hosts it was an enjoyable and profitable weekend of poker. Next year it's back down to Wellington I believe. I'm counting the days.
Saturday, 13 May 2017
The Story So Far (Part 2)
I started writing this blog about five years ago, in May of 2012. At that time I'd already been running a poker 'log book' for a while, keeping records of my games and results. My live tournaments had dried up and I was basically just playing one online session a week. Since then, things have changed a lot.
I think the watershed moment in my poker journey over the last five years was my discovery of the Onehunga Workingmen's Club Friday night tournament. I stumbled across this game in June of 2013 and have been playing in it pretty much every week since. Previously I'd been playing only in online games and it was great to get back into the live poker scene. This is a $20 to $25 'freeze-out' tournament and it has been pretty profitable for me over the years (although things have slowed down a bit in recent months). Not only does this give me a regular weekly tournament to play in, but it has opened up a variety of other club games to me. So I now play in the monthly 'Interclub' Tournament and have also attended the annual Clubs Championship for the last three years. In addition, I am now aware of a number of other regular club games and play in some of these from time to time.
As for other live games, the only others available five years ago were the National Pub Poker League (NPPL) games held in various bars around Auckland. For reasons detailed in previous posts, I just don't play in these. However, about a year ago some ex NPPL players started up the Avengers Poker League. They started running games in a number of venues and these games are pretty good. I've played in a couple of them and would make them regular games if they were played at a convenient time and location for me. Unfortunately most of them fall outside of my 'optimal range' so I'm not playing in them, but it's nice to know that there are some alternatives to the NPPL available.
A couple of years ago I discovered another pub game, not affiliated to any league, that is played just down the road from where I live. This Wednesday night game at the Landmark Bar has become my second weekly live poker game, and this game has also been pretty consistently profitable for me. However, at the end of last year the organizer decided he didn't want to run it anymore. Then at the start of this year I found that none of the people who'd volunteered to take over had done anything, so in the end I took it over myself. I'd much rather just be a player than a Tournament Director/player but this game was just to good for me to let it fade away. So now I'm back to playing in this game as well as running it. The downside is that it's harder to concentrate on my hands when I'm also running the game (especially in the first hour when late entries are available). The upside is that I've been able to make a few changes that make it an even more attractive game for me to play in.
The Landmark game is not the only one that I've ended up running this year. Last year the Onehunga Workies was running a monthly $50 deep stack tournament that I really enjoyed playing. However, the organizer decided not to run it anymore, so I stepped up and volunteered. So once again I've ended up being a TD when I'd much rather just play, but when a game is good you've got to do whatever it takes to make sure it keeps running. Fortunately this game is not a rebuy and has a slow structure, so it's less distracting being the TD as well as a player. This tournament started out fairly slowly, with only a handful of players turning up, but it seems to be gaining momentum and I'm pretty happy with the way it's going now.
During the last five years I've played a handful of games at Auckland's Sky City Casino, but mainly just casual 'non-bankroll' games.
When I first played in ring games at the casino the blinds were $1/$2, making for a maximum buy-in of $200. Since then they have steadily increased and are now at $2/$5. This is way beyond my bankroll's buy-in range. However, I did manage to win a Satellite that got me into a big buy-in tournament a couple of years ago. I only managed to get halfway through the field but I've always wanted to play in a big buy-in tournament and it was a great experience.
As for online games, I've spent the last five years playing in a variety of different poker games on both 888poker and Pokerstars. The online games I've played include pot limit Omaha ring games, both fixed limit and no-limit Texas Holdem ring games, 9 player Sit N Gos, 27 player Sit N Gos, freeze-out Tournaments and seven card stud ring games. This was all part of my mission to try every possible poker game type. Fortunately I came to my senses and abandoned this project a couple of years ago. It turned out that trying a new form of poker is actually pretty hard and all I was doing was throwing money away. That's one thing that I've learned the hard way: stick to what you know.
These days I play almost exclusively on 888poker. Some of the other game types I tried were on Pokerstars because they were more readily available on that site. But since returning to my core games I've found that I prefer 888. Pokerstars has a lot more ring games available, but there are a lot of 'grinders' on this site, leaving very little room for an amateur player like me to move. The Sit and Go games on both sites are okay, but I prefer the blind structure that's used on 888. My other core game is freeze-out tournaments; I've tried these on both sites but I think that the play is generally looser and more passive on 888 so that's where I'm playing my tournaments.
I've played a lot of Sit and Go tournaments (SNGs) over the last few years. Sometimes I've played these as my main game and at other times they've been 'fillers' that I've played when I only had an hour or two to spare. Playing in SNGs has been a real rollercoaster ride. For a few years my results were pretty good and I was slowly moving up the buy-in levels. Then it all turned around and I had a year when I just didn't seem to be able to do anything right in this game type. I now play SNGs only occasionally, at a very low buy-in, and I'm struggling to find a strategy that works. This is perplexing to me. I do reasonably well in multi-table tournaments and can't understand why my results are so bad in single table tournaments. At the moment it's a work in progress.
My preferred online games now are multi-table freeze-out tournaments (no rebuys or add-ons). There's one on 888poker during the middle of the day that I sometimes play on the weekend. I did well enough last year that I thought I could move up a level and have been playing at this new level for the last few months. However, because of the number of live games I'm now playing, I only play in this online tournament a couple of times a month. I try to play in at least 3 poker session a week. I already play in two weekly pub/club games. Then I also have two monthly live games I play; the Interclub game and the $50 Deep Stack Tournament. So I usually end up playing online on the weekends when I don't have a live game. But that's fine with me. It's nice to have so many live tournaments available.
For most of the last five years I've been maintaining a graph of my total profit/loss from playing poker, which I update every second month. It was around the time I first starting writing this blog that my bankroll started taking its first stuttering steps over the break-even line. All through 2012 my graph flirted with the base line but then in 2013 it started to move up and it's been trending upwards ever since. Of course there have been periods when the line has dipped down but it always recovers eventually and starts to climb again. The worst of these dips lasted almost a year; I started losing money in late 2014, hitting a low point about four months later, climbed a little, then levelled out for nearly six months before returning to a positive trend late in 2015. I am currently in another levelled out phase but I'm confident that the upwards trend will return in time. Being able to look at a graphic depiction of my poker results is a very useful thing and shows me that I'm on the right track regarding my poker play and game selection.
I've also been doing a fair bit of study of poker theory in an effort to improve my game over the last few years. I've read a few poker books, including a couple of classics and found them reasonably helpful. But most of my information has come from websites and video clips. I found Poker School Online to be particularly useful and also School of Cards on YouTube. There is a huge amount of information on poker available online but not all of it is worthwhile. Googling a particular topic brings up a huge variety of links and the trick is to sort through it all and find the good stuff.
I think my game has developed pretty well over the last five years. Some of this is due to the study I've been doing but I think a lot of it is due to just putting in the game time. There's really no substitute for experience. I've worked out a basic game plan for poker tournaments based on my stack size compared to the blinds; ie, the number of big blinds I have.. As my stack size changes, my playing style changes. I go from the green zone where I basically play it like a cashie, to the much tighter yellow zone, to the 'push the action and steal the blinds' orange zone and then finally the red zone; the all-in or fold level. This basic plan seems to work pretty well for me for most games. However, the one exception is the Friday night tournament.
The Workies tournament has always been a very loose game but lately it seems to have become ridiculously loose. I'm not sure why this is, but it has become a major preoccupation of mine over the last year or so to find a way of beating this game. Raising with decent starting hands pre-flop becomes completely pointless because massive raises will still get called by at least half the table, significantly reducing the chance of your one pair hand being the winner after the flop. And then the pot odds are so huge that it's impossible to bet enough to stop the chasers from drawing to the next card. I'm still trying to work this one out. I'm sure there's an answer somewhere, but I'm yet to find it.
So five years on, that's where I'm at now; playing three poker sessions a week, most of them live games, building my bankroll and constantly looking for an edge. As for the next five years, who knows, but I did at least set myself some goals to achieve for this year. I've already achieved a couple of these, having revived the Landmark game and also got the $50 game moving in the right direction. But I've had to rethink a couple of the other goals that I set for myself in February. I no longer think that it's practical to play 4 poker sessions per week. I do have a life beyond poker and I just don't think I have the spare time available for that 4th session. So I no longer need to try all the other available games in order to find the right one to play. I'm just sticking to my current regular tourneys for now. Even though the Friday-nighter is no longer an optimal game for me there are other factors that come into play. Most importantly, this is the weekly night out for my wife and I, so it's not just about the poker any more.
That leaves two more goals for me to achieve this year. One is to read 'Harrington on Holdem, Volume Two' which I haven't done yet but will be doing soon. The other is to play in the Sky City Casino $1/$3 ring game (a new turbo-style cashie that started recently). I'm actually getting very close to having enough in my bankroll to be able to afford to play in this game. Another couple of hundred dollars in the kitty and I'll be off to try my luck in the 'Poker Zone'. Once that happens, well I'll just have to set some more goals won't I? Maybe I'll try to figure out how to win at Omaha. No, just kidding.
I think the watershed moment in my poker journey over the last five years was my discovery of the Onehunga Workingmen's Club Friday night tournament. I stumbled across this game in June of 2013 and have been playing in it pretty much every week since. Previously I'd been playing only in online games and it was great to get back into the live poker scene. This is a $20 to $25 'freeze-out' tournament and it has been pretty profitable for me over the years (although things have slowed down a bit in recent months). Not only does this give me a regular weekly tournament to play in, but it has opened up a variety of other club games to me. So I now play in the monthly 'Interclub' Tournament and have also attended the annual Clubs Championship for the last three years. In addition, I am now aware of a number of other regular club games and play in some of these from time to time.
As for other live games, the only others available five years ago were the National Pub Poker League (NPPL) games held in various bars around Auckland. For reasons detailed in previous posts, I just don't play in these. However, about a year ago some ex NPPL players started up the Avengers Poker League. They started running games in a number of venues and these games are pretty good. I've played in a couple of them and would make them regular games if they were played at a convenient time and location for me. Unfortunately most of them fall outside of my 'optimal range' so I'm not playing in them, but it's nice to know that there are some alternatives to the NPPL available.
A couple of years ago I discovered another pub game, not affiliated to any league, that is played just down the road from where I live. This Wednesday night game at the Landmark Bar has become my second weekly live poker game, and this game has also been pretty consistently profitable for me. However, at the end of last year the organizer decided he didn't want to run it anymore. Then at the start of this year I found that none of the people who'd volunteered to take over had done anything, so in the end I took it over myself. I'd much rather just be a player than a Tournament Director/player but this game was just to good for me to let it fade away. So now I'm back to playing in this game as well as running it. The downside is that it's harder to concentrate on my hands when I'm also running the game (especially in the first hour when late entries are available). The upside is that I've been able to make a few changes that make it an even more attractive game for me to play in.
The Landmark game is not the only one that I've ended up running this year. Last year the Onehunga Workies was running a monthly $50 deep stack tournament that I really enjoyed playing. However, the organizer decided not to run it anymore, so I stepped up and volunteered. So once again I've ended up being a TD when I'd much rather just play, but when a game is good you've got to do whatever it takes to make sure it keeps running. Fortunately this game is not a rebuy and has a slow structure, so it's less distracting being the TD as well as a player. This tournament started out fairly slowly, with only a handful of players turning up, but it seems to be gaining momentum and I'm pretty happy with the way it's going now.
During the last five years I've played a handful of games at Auckland's Sky City Casino, but mainly just casual 'non-bankroll' games.
When I first played in ring games at the casino the blinds were $1/$2, making for a maximum buy-in of $200. Since then they have steadily increased and are now at $2/$5. This is way beyond my bankroll's buy-in range. However, I did manage to win a Satellite that got me into a big buy-in tournament a couple of years ago. I only managed to get halfway through the field but I've always wanted to play in a big buy-in tournament and it was a great experience.As for online games, I've spent the last five years playing in a variety of different poker games on both 888poker and Pokerstars. The online games I've played include pot limit Omaha ring games, both fixed limit and no-limit Texas Holdem ring games, 9 player Sit N Gos, 27 player Sit N Gos, freeze-out Tournaments and seven card stud ring games. This was all part of my mission to try every possible poker game type. Fortunately I came to my senses and abandoned this project a couple of years ago. It turned out that trying a new form of poker is actually pretty hard and all I was doing was throwing money away. That's one thing that I've learned the hard way: stick to what you know.
These days I play almost exclusively on 888poker. Some of the other game types I tried were on Pokerstars because they were more readily available on that site. But since returning to my core games I've found that I prefer 888. Pokerstars has a lot more ring games available, but there are a lot of 'grinders' on this site, leaving very little room for an amateur player like me to move. The Sit and Go games on both sites are okay, but I prefer the blind structure that's used on 888. My other core game is freeze-out tournaments; I've tried these on both sites but I think that the play is generally looser and more passive on 888 so that's where I'm playing my tournaments.
I've played a lot of Sit and Go tournaments (SNGs) over the last few years. Sometimes I've played these as my main game and at other times they've been 'fillers' that I've played when I only had an hour or two to spare. Playing in SNGs has been a real rollercoaster ride. For a few years my results were pretty good and I was slowly moving up the buy-in levels. Then it all turned around and I had a year when I just didn't seem to be able to do anything right in this game type. I now play SNGs only occasionally, at a very low buy-in, and I'm struggling to find a strategy that works. This is perplexing to me. I do reasonably well in multi-table tournaments and can't understand why my results are so bad in single table tournaments. At the moment it's a work in progress.
My preferred online games now are multi-table freeze-out tournaments (no rebuys or add-ons). There's one on 888poker during the middle of the day that I sometimes play on the weekend. I did well enough last year that I thought I could move up a level and have been playing at this new level for the last few months. However, because of the number of live games I'm now playing, I only play in this online tournament a couple of times a month. I try to play in at least 3 poker session a week. I already play in two weekly pub/club games. Then I also have two monthly live games I play; the Interclub game and the $50 Deep Stack Tournament. So I usually end up playing online on the weekends when I don't have a live game. But that's fine with me. It's nice to have so many live tournaments available.
For most of the last five years I've been maintaining a graph of my total profit/loss from playing poker, which I update every second month. It was around the time I first starting writing this blog that my bankroll started taking its first stuttering steps over the break-even line. All through 2012 my graph flirted with the base line but then in 2013 it started to move up and it's been trending upwards ever since. Of course there have been periods when the line has dipped down but it always recovers eventually and starts to climb again. The worst of these dips lasted almost a year; I started losing money in late 2014, hitting a low point about four months later, climbed a little, then levelled out for nearly six months before returning to a positive trend late in 2015. I am currently in another levelled out phase but I'm confident that the upwards trend will return in time. Being able to look at a graphic depiction of my poker results is a very useful thing and shows me that I'm on the right track regarding my poker play and game selection.
I've also been doing a fair bit of study of poker theory in an effort to improve my game over the last few years. I've read a few poker books, including a couple of classics and found them reasonably helpful. But most of my information has come from websites and video clips. I found Poker School Online to be particularly useful and also School of Cards on YouTube. There is a huge amount of information on poker available online but not all of it is worthwhile. Googling a particular topic brings up a huge variety of links and the trick is to sort through it all and find the good stuff.
I think my game has developed pretty well over the last five years. Some of this is due to the study I've been doing but I think a lot of it is due to just putting in the game time. There's really no substitute for experience. I've worked out a basic game plan for poker tournaments based on my stack size compared to the blinds; ie, the number of big blinds I have.. As my stack size changes, my playing style changes. I go from the green zone where I basically play it like a cashie, to the much tighter yellow zone, to the 'push the action and steal the blinds' orange zone and then finally the red zone; the all-in or fold level. This basic plan seems to work pretty well for me for most games. However, the one exception is the Friday night tournament.
The Workies tournament has always been a very loose game but lately it seems to have become ridiculously loose. I'm not sure why this is, but it has become a major preoccupation of mine over the last year or so to find a way of beating this game. Raising with decent starting hands pre-flop becomes completely pointless because massive raises will still get called by at least half the table, significantly reducing the chance of your one pair hand being the winner after the flop. And then the pot odds are so huge that it's impossible to bet enough to stop the chasers from drawing to the next card. I'm still trying to work this one out. I'm sure there's an answer somewhere, but I'm yet to find it.
So five years on, that's where I'm at now; playing three poker sessions a week, most of them live games, building my bankroll and constantly looking for an edge. As for the next five years, who knows, but I did at least set myself some goals to achieve for this year. I've already achieved a couple of these, having revived the Landmark game and also got the $50 game moving in the right direction. But I've had to rethink a couple of the other goals that I set for myself in February. I no longer think that it's practical to play 4 poker sessions per week. I do have a life beyond poker and I just don't think I have the spare time available for that 4th session. So I no longer need to try all the other available games in order to find the right one to play. I'm just sticking to my current regular tourneys for now. Even though the Friday-nighter is no longer an optimal game for me there are other factors that come into play. Most importantly, this is the weekly night out for my wife and I, so it's not just about the poker any more.
That leaves two more goals for me to achieve this year. One is to read 'Harrington on Holdem, Volume Two' which I haven't done yet but will be doing soon. The other is to play in the Sky City Casino $1/$3 ring game (a new turbo-style cashie that started recently). I'm actually getting very close to having enough in my bankroll to be able to afford to play in this game. Another couple of hundred dollars in the kitty and I'll be off to try my luck in the 'Poker Zone'. Once that happens, well I'll just have to set some more goals won't I? Maybe I'll try to figure out how to win at Omaha. No, just kidding.
Monday, 13 February 2017
2017
Last year I played in the Waitangi Weekend Deep Stack Tournament at the Sky City Casino after winning a couple of satellite events. I was hoping to play my way into this $1100 buy-in tournament again this year. However, the casino have changed the schedule so there are no longer any low buy-in 2-stage satellites to the main event. But there is a regular $80 tournament with multiple prizes of $550 each. And there's also a $220 satellite to the main event. So I headed up to the casino in mid-January, hoping to win a prize in the first game, which would have given me me two shots at the Deep Stack Tournament. But it wasn't to be. I played for about 2 hours in a field of 43 players but got knocked out in 22nd place, having gone all-in with AQ and coming up against AK. That's poker.
Getting into the Waitangi Weekend Tournament was the first of my goals for 2017. I have a few others for this year and hopefully I'll be able to actually achieve these ones. As it's mid-February already, I thought I'd better list them now:
Try all available games. In my unending quest for the perfect game I have decided to try out all the available local live games (except the NPPL craps-shoots) to see if I can find a good one to add to my poker schedule. There are a lot more pub games available now than there used to be and I intend to check them all out. I've already tried the Saturday game at Maverick's Bar, the Tuesday game at the F Bar and the Thursday game at Ye Olde Bailey. Each of these venues hold games on several days of the week and there are plenty of other pubs and clubs to try out. I figure that if I try one game per week then I might have tried them all by mid-winter. Then all I have to do is decide which one I want to play regularly.
Promote the $50 game. The monthly $50 tournament at my local club has struggled along for a few months now. Each time we've had barely enough entrants to play a single table game. But I really like this tournament because it's the sort of game I want to play in. It's played on a Sunday afternoon at a very convenient location and the buy-in is just right. So I'm determined to do everything I can to make it work. I was able to persuade the organiser to make a few changes for the January event that I thought would make it more attractive. I also advertised it as much as I could. In the end we got 15 players; our best result yet. So I'm pushing the advertising for the upcoming game this weekend. Our organiser won't be able to play this time so it's going to be down to me to run the game on the day. Hopefully we'll get at least two tables and then I can continue working on making it an attractive game that lots of people want to participate in.
Revive the Landmark game. I've really enjoyed playing in the Wednesday night re-buy tournament at the Landmark Bar. It is played at a convenient time and place for me and I've also had a lot of success playing in this game. But at the end of last year the game organiser announced that he didn't want to do it anymore. A couple of the regulars put their hands up and volunteered to take over but I haven't seen any action yet. I've been down to the Landmark a couple of times but no-one seems to know anything. I also met one of the volunteers on Friday but he was rather vague about what was happening. So I'm headed back to the pub on Wednesday in an effort to get some answers. Having found a game that ticks all the boxes, I don't want to lose it. I'm going to do everything I can to get this tournament running again, even if I have to run it myself.
Play in optimal games. Once I've tried out all the available games I have to pick the one that I want to play on a regular basis. Assuming I can get the Wednesday game back, I'll be playing in two live tournaments a week; Wednesday and Friday nights. I'll also be playing in an online tourney once a week. My goal is to play in 4 poker games a week. As I'm also playing in the monthly Interclub tournament and the monthly $50 game, that leaves 2 games a month that I have to find. Once I've decided on my optimal 4th game, I'll start playing it twice a month. That's the plan anyway.
Read Harrington, Volume 2. During the holidays I bought myself a Christmas present: Harrington on Hold'em, Volume 1. This is one of the titles on my list of the ten best poker books. I've been reading it over the last month or so and it's absolutely fascinating. I particularly like the 'problems' section at the end of each chapter where you get to test yourself on what you've learned. So I'll be ordering volume 2 soon and working my way through it.
Play in Sky City Cashies. I would very much like to have a go at the ring games at the Auckland Casino. The problem is, they're a bit too expensive for my bankroll. I don't want to play in a cash game that costs more than 5 percent of my bankroll. Last year I figured that, with the blinds at $2/$4, if I bought in for 50 big blinds it would cost me $200. This meant that I'd have to come close to doubling my bankroll to be able to afford it. I thought that might be possible, but then I discovered this year that the blinds had gone up to $2/$5. That put the Sky City cashies further out of reach. But I learned recently that there is now a lower level 'turbo' game available. This game has blinds of $2/$3 and a 15 second time limit on all action. I've spoken to a couple of people who've played in this game and they both say that the time clock is not really a problem. So I only have to increase my bankroll by about 30 %, something that is definitely achievable. So I'll be keeping one eye on my poker bankroll and if I can hit that magic number then I'll be headed up to Sky City to try my hand at the turbo ring game.
Looking back at my previous posts, I see that it's five years since I set myself some goals for the year. That time I failed to achieve the last two. This time around I'm reasonably confident that I can tick off all of these goals. I'm certainly going to give it my best shot.
Getting into the Waitangi Weekend Tournament was the first of my goals for 2017. I have a few others for this year and hopefully I'll be able to actually achieve these ones. As it's mid-February already, I thought I'd better list them now:
Try all available games. In my unending quest for the perfect game I have decided to try out all the available local live games (except the NPPL craps-shoots) to see if I can find a good one to add to my poker schedule. There are a lot more pub games available now than there used to be and I intend to check them all out. I've already tried the Saturday game at Maverick's Bar, the Tuesday game at the F Bar and the Thursday game at Ye Olde Bailey. Each of these venues hold games on several days of the week and there are plenty of other pubs and clubs to try out. I figure that if I try one game per week then I might have tried them all by mid-winter. Then all I have to do is decide which one I want to play regularly.
Promote the $50 game. The monthly $50 tournament at my local club has struggled along for a few months now. Each time we've had barely enough entrants to play a single table game. But I really like this tournament because it's the sort of game I want to play in. It's played on a Sunday afternoon at a very convenient location and the buy-in is just right. So I'm determined to do everything I can to make it work. I was able to persuade the organiser to make a few changes for the January event that I thought would make it more attractive. I also advertised it as much as I could. In the end we got 15 players; our best result yet. So I'm pushing the advertising for the upcoming game this weekend. Our organiser won't be able to play this time so it's going to be down to me to run the game on the day. Hopefully we'll get at least two tables and then I can continue working on making it an attractive game that lots of people want to participate in.
Revive the Landmark game. I've really enjoyed playing in the Wednesday night re-buy tournament at the Landmark Bar. It is played at a convenient time and place for me and I've also had a lot of success playing in this game. But at the end of last year the game organiser announced that he didn't want to do it anymore. A couple of the regulars put their hands up and volunteered to take over but I haven't seen any action yet. I've been down to the Landmark a couple of times but no-one seems to know anything. I also met one of the volunteers on Friday but he was rather vague about what was happening. So I'm headed back to the pub on Wednesday in an effort to get some answers. Having found a game that ticks all the boxes, I don't want to lose it. I'm going to do everything I can to get this tournament running again, even if I have to run it myself.
Play in optimal games. Once I've tried out all the available games I have to pick the one that I want to play on a regular basis. Assuming I can get the Wednesday game back, I'll be playing in two live tournaments a week; Wednesday and Friday nights. I'll also be playing in an online tourney once a week. My goal is to play in 4 poker games a week. As I'm also playing in the monthly Interclub tournament and the monthly $50 game, that leaves 2 games a month that I have to find. Once I've decided on my optimal 4th game, I'll start playing it twice a month. That's the plan anyway.
Read Harrington, Volume 2. During the holidays I bought myself a Christmas present: Harrington on Hold'em, Volume 1. This is one of the titles on my list of the ten best poker books. I've been reading it over the last month or so and it's absolutely fascinating. I particularly like the 'problems' section at the end of each chapter where you get to test yourself on what you've learned. So I'll be ordering volume 2 soon and working my way through it.
Play in Sky City Cashies. I would very much like to have a go at the ring games at the Auckland Casino. The problem is, they're a bit too expensive for my bankroll. I don't want to play in a cash game that costs more than 5 percent of my bankroll. Last year I figured that, with the blinds at $2/$4, if I bought in for 50 big blinds it would cost me $200. This meant that I'd have to come close to doubling my bankroll to be able to afford it. I thought that might be possible, but then I discovered this year that the blinds had gone up to $2/$5. That put the Sky City cashies further out of reach. But I learned recently that there is now a lower level 'turbo' game available. This game has blinds of $2/$3 and a 15 second time limit on all action. I've spoken to a couple of people who've played in this game and they both say that the time clock is not really a problem. So I only have to increase my bankroll by about 30 %, something that is definitely achievable. So I'll be keeping one eye on my poker bankroll and if I can hit that magic number then I'll be headed up to Sky City to try my hand at the turbo ring game.
Looking back at my previous posts, I see that it's five years since I set myself some goals for the year. That time I failed to achieve the last two. This time around I'm reasonably confident that I can tick off all of these goals. I'm certainly going to give it my best shot.
Tuesday, 10 January 2017
2016
Last year was a busy year for me poker-wise, so here are some edited highlights.
JANUARY. At the start of 2016 I decided that my primary online game would be Texas Holdem tournaments. The year before I'd performed poorly in ring games so I figured it was time to try something different. However, while I was still on holiday I decided to try a Sit and Go marathon session. I spent about 6 hours playing in a total of nine $3.50 games. I managed one second place and two thirds in this session, coming out with a loss of US$13.20. This served to confirm that my Sit and Go mojo was well and truly lost.
FEBRUARY. As chronicled elsewhere ('The Deep Stack Tournament', 26/02/16) I played in the Sky City Casino Waitangi Day Tournament. I played for 6 1/2 hours on day 1A, then managed another 2 hours on day two before being eliminated, finishing in 53rd place out of 105 players. Getting knocked out halfway through was disappointing but I was very happy with the fact that I managed to finish well enough in two satellite events to get a ticket to the main event. It was great to just be involved in a $1,100 buy-in event and I'd love to play again this year. Unfortunately, they seem to be running things differently this year and there don't seem to be any reasonably cheap satellites that I could afford to play in.
MARCH. This was a very good month in terms of results. I had a couple of good cashes in the micro stakes online tournaments. I came in 1st out of 85 and 2nd out of 76, collecting US$145 in total. There were also a couple of good live tournament finishes: 2/23 for +$85 and 1/18 for +$230. I also won a bit in two ring games this month. So I was able to make a withdrawal from my 888 Poker account and I was able to deposit some more into my bankroll bank account.
APRIL. A ring game usually starts up towards the end of my regular Wednesday night tournament. This is usually a limited dealer's choice game, the choice being between Holdem, Omaha and Crazy Pineapple. On the 13th I played in this game and lost $20. The loss itself was no big deal but it got me thinking about the nature of these kinds of post-tournament ring games. They are usually structured in such a way that you don't have enough time or a deep enough stack to play a proper ring game strategy. In the end I decided that, despite a couple of wins the previous month, the variance was just too high. So that was the last time I played in a short-stack ring game.
MAY. This is the month when I decided to look back at the last 12 months of live tournament results. I was interested to find out how often I actually cash in live tournaments. It turns out I'd played in 71 tournaments over the last year. I cashed in 24 of these, or one in every 3. Of these, 6 were wins, giving me a win rate of 1/12. I was pretty happy with a 1 in 3 rate for cashes but figured that I need to do some work on getting more first places. That is still an ongoing project.
JUNE. Early in June I went to the Clubs NZ North Island Poker Championships in Hastings (see 'The Big Weekend', 12/07/16). After 11 hours of play I came in 14/155, just off the money. I was pretty happy with this result. Two years previously I finished 9th, and the year after I made it about halfway through the field. So I'm usually in the hunt. It's also great to get out of Auckland and meet some new people and see some new places.
JULY. I'd been going through a bit of a slow patch in terms of results over the last few weeks. On Friday 29th I broke the drought and cashed in a live tournament profiting by $30. My last live cash had been on the 20th May, when I'd picked up +$170. As it happens, both of these were re-buy tournaments. Maybe re-buys are my best game?
AUGUST. The winter season (June, July, August) didn't go well overall. My ROI (return on investment) for this 3 month period was -25%. I was looking at overall losses for all my regular live tournaments and a miniscule +US$13 overall for online tourneys. My best result for the winter period was a $70 profit in live ring games; this was the result of a single game played during the Queen's Birthday weekend trip. Winter seems to be my worst season. I don't know why.
SEPTEMBER. The Onehunga Workingmen's Club held the first of a series of monthly deep stack tournaments with a $50 entry fee. Although we only had enough players for a single table, it was an enjoyable event, especially as I came in second and pocketed an $80 profit. Subsequent games also ended up being single table events and I continued to cash on a regular basis. These games were played on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, which was very convenient for me.
OCTOBER. I started playing in the occasional micro stakes big field tournament on Poker Stars in the previous month. I had my first cash in this type of game this month, coming in 127th place out of 5093 players. As the buy-in is only US$2.20, I didn't make much, but it was an encouraging start. I've continued playing in these big field events from time to time, but haven't had any more cashes yet.
NOVEMBER. One Friday night the regular tournament at the OWMC was cancelled as the organiser had a prior engagement. So some of the regulars played a ring game instead. I ended up running it as everyone knows I'm 'the cashie guy'. So I did blinds of 25c/50c, Texas Holdem only, with buy-ins up to $50. A good time was had by all. Although I came out of the game with only a small profit it was great to be able to play in a proper ring game for a change.
DECEMBER. I came 5th on the overall points table for the Auckland Inter-club Poker this year. Although only the top 3 players win cash prizes I was looking forward to the prize-giving day at Tuakau because the poker tournament on that day had no rake taken out of the prize-pool; it was all paid out. But in their infinite wisdom the organisers decided to pay out the top 18 finishers, rather than the usual top 9. So even though I came in 7/54 I only collected $40 for my troubles, a measly $20 profit. Oh well. Thems the breaks.
JANUARY. At the start of 2016 I decided that my primary online game would be Texas Holdem tournaments. The year before I'd performed poorly in ring games so I figured it was time to try something different. However, while I was still on holiday I decided to try a Sit and Go marathon session. I spent about 6 hours playing in a total of nine $3.50 games. I managed one second place and two thirds in this session, coming out with a loss of US$13.20. This served to confirm that my Sit and Go mojo was well and truly lost.
FEBRUARY. As chronicled elsewhere ('The Deep Stack Tournament', 26/02/16) I played in the Sky City Casino Waitangi Day Tournament. I played for 6 1/2 hours on day 1A, then managed another 2 hours on day two before being eliminated, finishing in 53rd place out of 105 players. Getting knocked out halfway through was disappointing but I was very happy with the fact that I managed to finish well enough in two satellite events to get a ticket to the main event. It was great to just be involved in a $1,100 buy-in event and I'd love to play again this year. Unfortunately, they seem to be running things differently this year and there don't seem to be any reasonably cheap satellites that I could afford to play in.
MARCH. This was a very good month in terms of results. I had a couple of good cashes in the micro stakes online tournaments. I came in 1st out of 85 and 2nd out of 76, collecting US$145 in total. There were also a couple of good live tournament finishes: 2/23 for +$85 and 1/18 for +$230. I also won a bit in two ring games this month. So I was able to make a withdrawal from my 888 Poker account and I was able to deposit some more into my bankroll bank account.
APRIL. A ring game usually starts up towards the end of my regular Wednesday night tournament. This is usually a limited dealer's choice game, the choice being between Holdem, Omaha and Crazy Pineapple. On the 13th I played in this game and lost $20. The loss itself was no big deal but it got me thinking about the nature of these kinds of post-tournament ring games. They are usually structured in such a way that you don't have enough time or a deep enough stack to play a proper ring game strategy. In the end I decided that, despite a couple of wins the previous month, the variance was just too high. So that was the last time I played in a short-stack ring game.
MAY. This is the month when I decided to look back at the last 12 months of live tournament results. I was interested to find out how often I actually cash in live tournaments. It turns out I'd played in 71 tournaments over the last year. I cashed in 24 of these, or one in every 3. Of these, 6 were wins, giving me a win rate of 1/12. I was pretty happy with a 1 in 3 rate for cashes but figured that I need to do some work on getting more first places. That is still an ongoing project.
JUNE. Early in June I went to the Clubs NZ North Island Poker Championships in Hastings (see 'The Big Weekend', 12/07/16). After 11 hours of play I came in 14/155, just off the money. I was pretty happy with this result. Two years previously I finished 9th, and the year after I made it about halfway through the field. So I'm usually in the hunt. It's also great to get out of Auckland and meet some new people and see some new places.
JULY. I'd been going through a bit of a slow patch in terms of results over the last few weeks. On Friday 29th I broke the drought and cashed in a live tournament profiting by $30. My last live cash had been on the 20th May, when I'd picked up +$170. As it happens, both of these were re-buy tournaments. Maybe re-buys are my best game?
AUGUST. The winter season (June, July, August) didn't go well overall. My ROI (return on investment) for this 3 month period was -25%. I was looking at overall losses for all my regular live tournaments and a miniscule +US$13 overall for online tourneys. My best result for the winter period was a $70 profit in live ring games; this was the result of a single game played during the Queen's Birthday weekend trip. Winter seems to be my worst season. I don't know why.
SEPTEMBER. The Onehunga Workingmen's Club held the first of a series of monthly deep stack tournaments with a $50 entry fee. Although we only had enough players for a single table, it was an enjoyable event, especially as I came in second and pocketed an $80 profit. Subsequent games also ended up being single table events and I continued to cash on a regular basis. These games were played on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, which was very convenient for me.
OCTOBER. I started playing in the occasional micro stakes big field tournament on Poker Stars in the previous month. I had my first cash in this type of game this month, coming in 127th place out of 5093 players. As the buy-in is only US$2.20, I didn't make much, but it was an encouraging start. I've continued playing in these big field events from time to time, but haven't had any more cashes yet.
NOVEMBER. One Friday night the regular tournament at the OWMC was cancelled as the organiser had a prior engagement. So some of the regulars played a ring game instead. I ended up running it as everyone knows I'm 'the cashie guy'. So I did blinds of 25c/50c, Texas Holdem only, with buy-ins up to $50. A good time was had by all. Although I came out of the game with only a small profit it was great to be able to play in a proper ring game for a change.
DECEMBER. I came 5th on the overall points table for the Auckland Inter-club Poker this year. Although only the top 3 players win cash prizes I was looking forward to the prize-giving day at Tuakau because the poker tournament on that day had no rake taken out of the prize-pool; it was all paid out. But in their infinite wisdom the organisers decided to pay out the top 18 finishers, rather than the usual top 9. So even though I came in 7/54 I only collected $40 for my troubles, a measly $20 profit. Oh well. Thems the breaks.
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