Rumor has it, a few years ago at the main event of the WSOP (2006, I think) a couple hundred thousand "extra" chips were found to be in play by the time the final table rolled around. In other words, counterfeit chips had been introduced into the tournament at some point by someone. This year, a similar rumor has been circulating by the conspiracy theorists. I've heard this tidbit from two separate sources and it intrigued me. To see if there was any validity to it, I simply checked the chip counts of the final nine players. Adding up all the cheques at the final table results in 136,865,000 chips. With 6844 original entrants, each starting with 20,000 chips, we should have summed to 136,880,000. In other words, this year they were short by 15,000 chips! Where'd all the colored money go? Dunno. Maybe some folks simply pocketed some chips on their way out as a token reminder of their experience at the main event. Or maybe someone got lost when being moved from one table to another. Or space aliens took them away. Bottom line is it's a minuscule amount of missing chips, so it's not really worth worrying about.
In other non-YIPES news, I taught a second tournament poker class for the Guru, as he was still in Vegas. I had a lot of fun doing it, and hopefully the students got something out of my lecture. The focus was on post-flop play, board texture, and betting strategies (e.g., continuation bets, stop and gos, etc.). We jumped into a single table SnG at the end of the night, but unfortunately we were absolutely card dead and we were sitting in between two 50%/30% maniacs who wouldn't let us get away with anything. We barely made it to the bubble, but died an ignominious death when our final push with J-9 off-suit ran into a pair of queens. Sigh. It would have been nice to have monied in front of the students, but what are you gonna do?
Okay, back to the topic of the YIPES experiment. Bottom line is I've had another wild ride over the course of the last few days. In my previous post, I crowed that I was up to $102 in the bank roll. Well, of course that didn't last long. I had a couple of tough days this week, dropping all the way down to $86 at one point, with most of the losses coming from bubble crashes in $3.40 SnGs. Fortunately, I didn't panic. Instead, I quit the SnGs for a while and have concentrated on solid, tight-aggressive $.25/.50 limit cash games. I've been multi-tabling these games, with my usual MO being 4 games played at once. Four is ever-so slightly more than I'm comfortable with, but by forcing myself to play ultra-tight poker, and by getting off of marginal hand situations before the betting gets too big, I've done fairly well. I have found that by playing a minimum of 150 hands or so (takes about 45 minutes with four tables open), and by keeping my non-blind VPIP in the 15-16% range, I can make a fairly steady profit at the game. As seen in the chart above, I'm back up again and feeling pretty good about things. The 'roll as of this post is $113.45. Not too shabby, and in fact it would be a couple of bucks higher if I hadn't gotten stupid in some $.10/.20 hi-lo stud cash games that I tried to play tonight. When will I ever learn?
Finally, my friend Bret brought up an interesting question the other day: When is the YIPES experiment over? At the end of one year, come hell or high water and regardless of where my bankroll is? Or is it finished the first time I don't meet the monthly double-up goal? Or maybe when I don't meet it two months in row? Or is it when I go broke, trying to double up by betting insanely large percentages of my bankroll in an attempt to "catch up" to the doubling curve? Maybe it's simply when my bankroll flattens out on the curve; i.e., when I get to the point where I'm not winning any more than I'm losing. As Bret says, this last method will at least tell me what level of a player I am. In other words, when I reach a level where I can't make a profit, I've kinda labeled myself as being just slightly worse than the other players at that level. For instance, if I make money at $2/4, but can't at $3/6, I'm a $2/4 player by definition. Interesting idea.
In any case, I dunno what the answer is to deciding when the game is over, but it's a good question to ponder. Fortunately, it looks like I don't have to answer it this month, given the good success I've been having at limit poker (knock on wood).
All-in for now...
-Bug
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