Wednesday Night Poker

Played in my monthly live poker tournament. The crew showed up in force, with six of us representing in the 30-person field. In addition to the $35 buy-in, each of us tossed $5 into a last-longer bet, which ended going to The Tash. Here's the good and bad news:

Good News. 

• I played a very solid first couple of hours, slowly but steadily adding to my chip stack with very little risk or fanfare. My own cards almost didn't matter. I really felt like I was playing the other players at the table very solidly, picking up tells, watching chips stacks, and trying to put myself inside the head of my opponents. Four of the seven guys at my first table were particularly easy to read. I've been skimming some of Driver's book on lie detection, and there was one guy in particular that I could absolutely read as strong or weak based on the advice of that book. Very cool beans.
• Snyder's book was another big help. I played his strategies solidly for the first hour, using position almost exclusively until I got deeper stacked. Then I started employing the "chip utility" mindset, which further helped. 
• Technically, I "bluffed" a lot, but only against players that were good enough to fold. I even showed a big bluff to one particular gentleman who I had immediate position on and was beginning to steam a bit. I re-stole all-in from the BB right before a break with 7-2o and showed. This really got under his skin, and I took more chips off him later in the night as a direct result.
• Another bluff I made was against the dealer, who is a very solid player. I put him squarely on a moderate overpair on a 9-high two-tone flop with me holding 7-7. I knew he wouldn't fold to a single c-bet, but thought he would if I fired multiple barrels to get him off his hand. Turn was a K, which brought two flush draws, and I fired again. I saw him give a momentary grimmace when the K hit, and he reluctantly called my bet. River paired the nine, and I fired again. Only mistake I made bet sizing on the river, which should have been bigger. He really squirmed, and then folded, telling the table he had J-J, which I believe. This play could *not* have been made against some of the other opponents at the table, who were basically playing L1 poker and committing with TPGK-type hands, but against a thinking player this bluff had a high chance of success.

Bad News. 

• I got lazy a few hours in, not paying full attention, including one ill-timed steal attempt against Flyboy, who, if I had been more alert, I would have seen had a short enough stack to RR me all-in, which he did, and of course, I folded. This mini-tilted me a bit (basically, I was mad at myself), which was compounded by my picking up AJo the next hand, and then getting frisky against a non-thinking player and losing a bit more of my stack. Arghg. I used to rock climb as a younger man, and my primary climbing partner (a very cautious fellow, which is a great trait to have when hanging from a rope on the side of a 200ft cliff, btw) always said with great solemnity before we climbed, "Remember, courage and strength are naught without prudence. A momentary lapse can destroy the happiness of a lifetime."  To which I would reply, "Okay, let's double check everything." Should have heeded that advice here.
• I also didn't adjust well to the increasing blinds. What's a bit weird about this particular tournament is the effective PF in the first hour is essentially higher than in the later hours. The blinds increase fairly linearly in size, but the frequency of bumps accelerates on an hourly basis. First hour, the blind levels are 20 minutes long, then the second hour they're 15 minutes, then they go to 10 minutes. I didn't really make the mental shift to the lower effective PF stage early enough, which caused me to get "thirsty" as Mr. Multi likes to say. Arhgh.
• Busted on a stupid hand that I could have played much better. I had 88 in SB and had about 12 big blinds left. LAggy UTG player open limped. Two folds, then the guy in CO goes all in for a tiny, irrelevant amount. Another fold, and I shove. BB folds, and the UTG player snap calls with QTo. Flop was middle card rags, turn a blank, but river was Q, sending me packing. This is the third time I've busted with a middle pair like this, getting into a race. Now of coures, 88 is too strong to fold here, but sitting in the blinds, first to act post-flop, I should have just limped and then shoved on any flop, which would have looked much stronger and would have had more fold equity. Stop and go, Bug, stop and go. Why can't I remember this?

On to the next entry in the WSOP-2013 journey...

All-in for now...
-Bug

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

MTT Patience Factor

In Arnold Snyder's book The Poker Tournament Formula, he writes in the first chapter about something called the Patience Factor. This term is a measure of how fast a tournament moves/blinds escalate compared to how many chips each player starts with. The lower the PF, the less skill is involved in winning the tournament; conversely, the higher the PF, the less luck comes into play and the more skill is required to go deep.

In short, his formula is essentially just the square of the so-called "blind-off" time; i.e., the time it would take to bust out due to blinding off, assuming you never played a single hand. For instance, let's assume we're going to play in a tournament with the following blind structure:

Assuming that each player began this tournament with T1000, we can see that somewhere between level 3 and 4, the cumulative cost of paying the blinds would exceed the initial stack size, and a player who was auto-mucking* would get blinded off at this point. Specifically, the player would get blinded off 1.3 hours into the tournament**. Squaring this figure*** gives us a PF of 1.6.

Once you have calculated the PF, you can estimate how much skill or luck a particular tournament will have in it, and therefore compare tourneys and find one best suited to your own abilities. Here's Snyder's chart that lists PF vs. Skill Level:

Note that this chart is only for live play; online play is significantly faster (read: more hands per hour). Per Snyder, the way to account for this is to multiply the online blind level time by the ratio of hands dealt per hour online to that of live. In other words, if we assume that the average hands per hour dealt online in a tournament is 50, and the average live is 30, then we multiple the online blind period by 50/30 to get an "adjusted" blind level period. This figure is then run through the spreadsheet and the new, adjusted PF can be plugged into the chart above to see how bad of a crapshoot the tourney is or isn't. Makes sense.

All-in for now...
-Bug
*We're assuming here that the player never gets a walk in the big blind.
**I'll leave it to the reader to figure out for themselves how to do this calculation. It's pretty straightforward to do, and in fact I put it into a spreadsheet format so I can calculate different tourneys and compare them. You might consider doing the same.
***Snyder squares the tournament time to blind-off simply to make the differences between values more accentuated. Strange, but whatever.