Live Tournaments, Patience Factors, and Elections

I need some (a lot, actually) live poker practice to prep for next years WSOP, so I ambled out to one of the local casinos yesterday evening to play in their Wednesday night 40-man tournament. Buy in was $30+$5, no rebuys or add-on, and the competition looked very soft. The thing I couldn't find out ahead of time, however, was the blind structure... and now I know why it was hidden. The Patience Factor of the tournament was a microscopic 1.1, which put the thing well into the "crapshoot" zone. Blind levels were just 10 minutes long and went up at a very, very fast rate relative to the starting stack size of T2K. People were just jamming with essentially any two cards from the start of the tourney just to double up.

I busted in about one hour, playing just a handful of cards dealt to me, while player after player around me either doubled or went home. I finally ended up getting it all-in preflop with just 8 times the big blind stack size when I open raised at a 6-handed table UTG with AKs. Got called by an really cranky middle aged lady holding Q4s, who then got re-shoved on by our table chip leader, who ended up holding 22. Flop of course came with a deuce, and I was sent a'packin in 12th place. Sigh. 

All-in all I played fairly well despite the ridiculous structure, but I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. Don't these casinos realize that just increasing the blind time from 10 minutes to 15 might result in players like me actually wanting to make a return visit to their facility in the future? As it is, I'm not going back to this particular casino anytime soon; I like to play poker, not dice.

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In other news, the section of the Snyder book I read yesterday addressed the topic of online tournament PFs. His method of dealing with the faster, more efficient play is to simply artificially increase the blind level period by the ratio of how many hands per hour are dealt online vs. live, and then running the calculation with this new blind level "time." The trick, of course, is knowing what this multiplier is. Per Snyder, he uses 8/5 as a multiplier, which when comparing an online game to a casino with automatic shufflers isn't bad.

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And then there was that other little bit of wonderful news leaked from the GOP convention in Florida in which a prohibition stance against online poker is now an official party plank. If there wasn't a good reason to vote GOP in the upcoming November elections before (and there are damn few, if any), there certainly isn't now. What a bunch of imbeciles. (Of course the Dems aren't functionally any better at all, with their own imbecilic plans to drive this country into default.) Ergo, as usual, I'm going to throw my vote away on the Libertarian candidate, whatever the hell his name is, come that ignominious second Tuesday in November. 

All-in for now...

-Bug