Friday, September 14, 2007

And We're Off!

Event #1 Started with 4,610 players and a total prize pool of $922,000. Just to give you an idea of some of the payouts. 1st place pays $172,875, 5th is $18,901, 12th is $6,454, 138th is $1,198 and 534th (the edge of the money) pays $369. I'll let you know what happened when it's over.

A Massive Flaw in the Plan and a few WCOOP Satellites

My quest for TLB supremecy has been totally derailed. Jake discovered while reading up on the TLB rules that only my top 10 results for a given week count towards the weekly TLB. ACK! I can't say that I'm really surprised or disappointed. This is certainly a case of if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is.

Of course I never would have played the $11, 1870 player tournament that I won without this little scheme so in the end it turned out to be wildly profitable!

This morning I played 6 WCOOP satellites. 3 of them were $8 with rebuys to win $215 seats, one was a $39 satellite to a $215 seat and two more were $16 double shootouts to win $530 seats. For those of you who don't know a shootout is when you start a tournament with many tables and each table plays until one player at that table has all the chips. Then the winners of each table come together and play at a new table. So for example, today in my $16 double shootout we started with 36 players split into 6 tables of 6. The 6 winners of the initial 6 tables then come together and play and the winner of that table gets the $530 entry. Of course the odds of you winning both your first table and the final table are slim (1 in 36 for the average player), but you get a shot at $530 for a $16 investment.

This style of tournament really suits my game since I've played so many SNG's, but for some reason I don't really seem to enjoy it despite some past success. In fact the first time I played a shootout the only reason I did so was because my friend Matt offered me a deal I couldn't refuse.
He offered to put up all the money and give me 25% of the profits in an 81 player $109 double shootout. Unlike in the satellite version I described above this was not a winner take all payout structure and the top 9 spots paid much like they would in a normal multitable tournament.

Since I was only getting a quarter of the profits of course I won the damn thing which made me about $600 and Matt about $1,800. To his credit Matt did take Jen and I out the next day and shelled out a big chunk of that $1,800 to buy us each a set of golf clubs as a wedding present. What a guy.

So what happened in my 6 satellites? Well when I started writing this post it looked like I was going to get shut out. But in my last of the $8 with rebuys I managed to pull out a victory. This means I'm ahead $72.60 so far in the WCOOP! Yep looks like it's time to retire.

More results coming later today.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Hitting the Tournament Leaderboard and a Big Win

Yesterday I started my mini quest to win the Pokerstars weekly tournament leader board (TLB) by playing as many $12, 180 entrant tournaments as possible. I ran into a little difficulty early both in terms of luck and logistics. It turns out that around 9 am the tournaments in question only go off about every 15 minutes so it's impossible to play the volume that I'd hoped. But I made up some of the slack by playing in a few other tournaments which turned out to be a VERY good idea.

I ended up playing 21 of the 180 player tournaments and had 4 money finishes and 1 final table, but the most significant result by far came in an $11 tournament that started with 1,870 players. I played in this tournament because it had 10 minute limits so while it would be slower than the turbo 180 player flavor, it would be much faster than a normal tournament with 15 minute limits. Also in going for TLB points it makes sense to play against the weaker competition at the low levels.

I had a fair run of luck to start and when we got down to about 60 people (remember we started with almost 1,900 so 60 left is pretty far into it) my chip stack was about 2/3 of average. I caught a few breaks, made some good plays and before I knew it we were down to two tables. I caught some more breaks, busted a few people and found that with 14 players left I was in 2nd place overall and the chip leader at my table with about 300,000 chips (we started the tournament with 1,500 so this was a real accomplishment).

This is when I really went to work. No one else at my table had more than 200,000 and they were all doing whatever they could to just survive to the final table. I raised about half of the hands, gradually accumulated chips and ground down my opponents. I knew I couldn't go broke on any one hand and I had to do whatever I could to make it to the top few spots. 18-10th places only paid $140 and 9th was a paltry $250 while 4th was over $1,000, 3rd was $1,550, 2nd was $2,500 and 1st was $4,100. Clearly it's worth taking some chances for a shot a the top spots.

When we got down to 9 players I was in 3rd place and I did my best to keep the pressure on my opponents who were all trying to hang on since every time a player was eliminated they'd be guarenteed an extra few hundred dollars.

My chips stack went up and down a little more than I'd like, but when we made it to 6 handed I caught a MAJOR break. I was in the small blind with about 500,000 chips, the short stack was on the button with about 120,000 chips and the big stack was in the big blind with 700,000 chips. The blinds were something like 15,000/30,000 and the short stack moved all in from the button. I had JJ and moved all in over the top. The big stack instantly called and I figured I was screwed. Sure enough he had AA. SHIT!

The other player had 33 and I thinking about the fact that at least I'd finish in fifth (which paid about $900) if we both went broke. Then...BOOM! J on the flop! I was up to 1.2 million in chips and in total control. The player who I'd just crippled went broke on the next hand and we were down to 3 players.

We played 3 handed for what felt like forever. Myself and one of the other players wanted to make a deal and split up the remaining prize money based on chip count (if you e-mail support they'll come to the table and make any deal official and handle the money), but the third player wasn't interested.

In fact the third player was totally nuts. On one hand he just called in the small blind (the blinds were 25,000/50,000) and I moved all in for 550,000 in the big blind with A8. He instantly called with J7! Luckily I won that hand, but I wanted to lock up as much money as I could rather than play 3 handed for some serious bucks against a totally unpredictable opponent.

He was so unpredictable that I just decided to be crazy aggressive when I got a good hand and hoped he made a mistake. At one point I had about 1,000,000, the nut job had about 1,100,000 and the other guy had about 600,000. The blinds were still 25,000/50,000 and I was first to act. I picked up 77 and moved all in. Normally this would be a major over bet (in this case it was certainly a minor over bet), but I thought he might call with a weak ace or an under pair (he'd risked all of his chips earlier with KT so it wasn't too much of a stretch).

It turned out that he did have a pair and sadly it was 88. He called, I swore and I knew I was pretty much done. The flop came with 3 spades and I had the 7 of spades (while my opponent had no spades) which brought a glimmer of hope. And then the turn came a 4th spade! AH HA! Take that you bastard! The river was a 7 (which I didn't need) and I took down the pot. I busted him a few hands later.

Now it was time to talk deal. We e-mailed support and a person showed up at the table in less than a minute. I'm pretty sure as a supernova my e-mails are flagged and I get priority service because that is just amazing.

After a little back and forth we agreed to a split roughly based on chip count and since I had most of the chips I got most of the money. My end was $3,620!!!!! That's some serious dough for an $11 investment!

We had to play it out for TLB points and I won that part too. I picked up about 900 points for that one tournament and at the end of the day found myself in 7th place on the weekly TLB about 700 points out of 1st! Today I'm continuing to generate more points and I like my chances of winning the TLB. I have until the end of Saturday and I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Also WCOOP starts tomorrow at noon pacific with $215 NL Hold 'em 6-handed. I'll certainly let you know what happens as far as that goes.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Hijacking the Pokerstars Tournament Leader Board

Bear with me through a little background here, because the point of this post is VERY interesting (I think). Pokerstars has a weekly, monthly, and yearly tournament leader board (TLB) where the names of the players who have consistently done well in multitable tournaments are proudly displayed. While the monthly and yearly contests inexplicably have no prizes, the weekly winner gets a chance to play one of the "Team Pokerstars" celebrities (usually one of the 4 former world champions that endorse Pokerstars) heads up for a minimum of $1,000. If the celebrity wins the money carries over to the next week where another $1,000 is added. This continues until the TLB player wins and takes the cash.

So how do results in tournaments turn into the points with which the players are ranked on the TLB? It's really quite simple. Actually it's not. They use this ridiculous formula which spits out a point value for any result in the top 15% of finishers (I'll explain more below so don't bother trying to figure out what's going on with the formula).

Points = 10 * [sqrt(n)/sqrt(k)] * [1+log(b+0.25)]

Where:

n is the number of entrants
k is the place of finish (k=1 for the first-place finisher, and so on)
b is the buy-in amount in dollars (excluding administrative fee). For freerolls the buy-in is $0, and for FPP tournaments 1 FPP is counted as $0.05.

Basically what's going on is they use the tournament buy-in, the number of entrants and your finishing place to determine how many points you get. Bigger buy in or more entrants means more points.

You might think that since the best players play for the most money, buy in should be weighted most heavily. After all if you really want to know who the best players are, the best way to figure that out is to look at who has the best results at the highest levels. But it turns out that the effect of all those square roots and and logs is to make buy in much less significant than you might think. If it was linear you'd get 10 times as many points for winning a 100 player $200 buy in tournament than you would winning a 100 player $20 tournament. In fact you get 330 points for the former and 230 points for the latter. Clearly buy in is barely a factor at all.


The number of entrants makes a big impact, but it's also similarly deflated by the math. You get 230 for that 100 player $20 tournament, but you'd only get 729 for a $20 tournament with 1,000 players.

The place you finish is the last factor variable that determines how many points you get and while there's a drop off from 1st on down it's also not as big as you might guess. In our same $20 100 player tournament you'd get 230 for 1st, 163 for 2nd, 73 for 10th and 59 for 15th (out of the top 15% is zero).

If you put it all together you can see that the most important thing is to have a shit load of finishes in the top 15%.

So what does all this mean and what's the point? Well the point is if I play a slew of those $12 180 player turbo tournaments that I kicked ass in last Sunday I should be able to win the tournament leader board almost every week!

Pokerstars offers a little calculator that you can use to determine how many points you'd get for a given result in a given tournament and I looked at how many points every place in the top 15% (or the top 27 spots) generates. If I were to play 180 tournaments in a week and finish in places 1-27 exactly one time each I'd accumulate 2484 points. I'm certain I could do this much.

The tournaments take about an hour and 45 minutes to play to conclusion, but of course that's only if you take them all the way to the end. Conservatively, I would say on average each one might take me 45 minutes. So playing 6 at a time I could play 72 in an 8 hour day. But there's a little delay getting into 6 tournaments and a little down time at the end while you're waiting for your final tournaments to end and while they seem to be starting every 10 minutes there aren't as many as I want just waiting to be played so we'll call it 60 a day.

So if I play 60 a day, 6 days a week we've got 360 tournaments. If I was dead on average in terms of skill level (which we sure as hell know I'm not) and I had an average run of luck I'd generate 4968 points. The winner of the weekly TLB last week only had 3,293 points! In fact the person who had the most points in the entire month of August only had 6,980 points.

I suspect that since I'll usually be the absolute best and certainly always in the top 5 of the 180 players playing I can do quite a bit better than the average number of points I used for my calculations above.

So what now? Well this week the TLB leader from last week is playing the heads up match for $3,000. If he loses it means that next week, this weeks TLB winner will be playing for $4,000. Right now the weeks leader has 2,600 points, but what happens every week is the top players in the Sunday Million ($215 buy in, 7,000 players is a lot of points) jump to the top of the leader board and don't go much further. I've got about 1,000 points just from screwing around on Sunday and I've got 4 days left in the week, so I might go for it this week.

If everything I've calculated is correct I should be able to win almost every week until they stop running the $12 180 player tournaments or change the system. If either is the case I'll no doubt gain some degree of fame from the whole thing. At the very least I'm going to go balls to the wall tomorrow and see how many I can play and what my results are. I won another $500 today so I'm feeling pretty good about my play.

Monday, September 10, 2007

It's About Time!

A week ago my Pokerstars account was on total fumes and I was making plans to get my hands on some cash so I could switch to playing in person for a while. Then I actually ran into some good luck!

On Saturday I won about $700 playing a mix of SNG's and cash games and on Sunday I was planning to watch football all day and play a few low limit multitables. I saw that they just started running these turbo (meaning they have 5 minute limits and go three times as fast as the normal 15 minute limit tournaments) $12 buy in tournaments that start as soon as 180 players sign up.

One of these was going off about every 15 minutes and I thought they would be perfect since they were going to be low stress and require limited if any concentration. I was hoping to win something like $50 or $100. Nothing major, but enough money to pay for a dinner out. Anything would be a bonus since it felt like a day off sitting on the couch.

In the first one I played I dominated from the start (I'm great at beating players who totally suck) and when we made it to the money (with 18 players left) I was in 2nd place. I navigated my way through the rest of the field and found myself with a small chip lead playing three handed. I figured I'd have a good chance to finish it off, but with blinds of 5000/10,000 and only 270,000 chips total in play I knew it would be a bit of a crap shoot.

Before I knew it I lost two hands and I was out! Crap! 3rd place paid $235 which is a ton considering I only had to risk $12 to get it, but 2nd was about $400 and 1st paid $600 so I was still a little disappointed.

But all was not lost. I was in another tournament of the exact same style that I'd started about 45 minutes later. I picked up some good hands and made some strong plays and before I knew it I was in the chip lead with about 30 players left. Once again I made it to the final table and before I knew it I was playing 3 handed again! I thought to myself "I am going to be crazy pissed if I finish in third again!"

At one point I was forced to risk all of my chips on a marginal hand, but I managed to get the cards I needed and survive. Luckily I was up against two weak passive players and I managed to grind them into dust with little difficulty. By the time we were down to 2 players I had a 6 to 1 chip advantage and finished off my last opponent in about 5 hands.

But there's more! I made a third final table finishing in 8th place in my next attempt! If poker was all luck and everyone had an equal chance, the odds of finishing 1st, 3rd (or better) and 8th (or better) in three consecutive 180 player tournaments would be 1 in 243,000. It blows my mind that whenever the courts are called on to determine if poker is a game of luck or a game of skill the judges always listen to the one moron who says it's all luck and ignores the 4 experts who say it's skill. It makes me sick.

I actually managed to cash in 3 other tournaments of different styles including finishing 60th out of 1370 in a $55 tournament. This is all good for my confidence (and my bankroll) as we get closer to the WCOOP which starts on Friday. I know it's been a few weeks since my last post and I've been posting less often, but I'll be putting up plenty of details about my WCOOP results.

Today I kept the good streak rolling picking up at least another $700 (I'm still in a few multitables, but even if I go broke in all of them I'll still be ahead at least that much). Hopefully tomorrow will be another good day.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

The New Plan for September

I didn't play hand of poker during the stretch from August 5th to the August 19th. This is the longest I've gone without playing poker in the 7 years that I've been playing poker seriously. For those of you who may not have heard the reason why was my wife Jen and I had our first child (Peyton Wesley Huff) on August 9th (you can get all the details and look at pictures on our other blog www.thehuffs.wordpress.com).

I got back to work playing 3/4 days last week and started back with full time this week. So far I've had mixed results. The past few days I've ditched the cash games gone back to playing single table Sit-n-go tournaments (SNG's) which were my bread and butter for years. While I haven't exactly been smoking the competition I've done OK and at least I've felt in control and like I've been making good decisions.

And now, I have a plan! It's critical to have a plan when things haven't been going as well as you'd like. If nothing else having a plan will keep you from thinking "ACK! WHAT THE HELL AM I GOING TO DO!" If the plan doesn't work you come up with a new plan and keep trying until something else works.

My latest plan is to play sixty-five $60 SNG's a day (which should take about 8 hours playing 6 at a time), 20 days next month, which amounts to 1,300 tournaments. I know for a fact that pokerstars will give me 115,050 FPP's for my efforts which will be worth $1,835. If I can make another $2.50 per tournament that will be another $3,250 which along with the FPP money is enough to pay the bills. If I can make $4-$5 per tournament like I think I should realistically be able to do then there will be a few thousand bucks left over for a rainy day.

It sounds so easy when I think about it that way. Of course I am my own biggest enemy sometimes and the only reason why some of my past plans have failed. If I start to do really well early on I have a tendency to lose motivation to play enough volume and if I do really poorly I get frustrated and playing becomes torturous. I'm hoping to have a steady, solid winning month and if I don't I'm going to do my best to hurdle my classic pitfalls.

Another thing that could change the plan is the WCOOP which starts on September 14th and runs through the 30th. I'm still working out how many events I'm going to play (probably 5-8) and if I happen to do really well I'll probably scrap the latest SNG plan since I'll be swimming in dough.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

A Trip to the Oaks

Yesterday my good friend Jake and I made a trip to the Oaks to play a little low limit ($6/$12 limit) hold'em. We've made similar trips about once a month since the beginning of this year with the main purpose being to bull shit and have a few drinks. I am, however, undefeated on these trips so far and even though it's small stakes the wins are starting to add up.

What's amazing to me is how soft the games at the Oaks have gotten. I used to play $6/$12 at the Oaks when I was 21 and still dealing cards for a living. Back then there were a few nut jobs who would come in from time to time, but in general most of the players were OK if not good. In fact there were a few people who would qualify as semi pros (people who count on poker winnings for a significant piece of their income, but have another main source of income). Of course I still dominated, but it took a great deal of advanced strategy and concentration.

Now that we're in the post poker boom days there are two or three times as many players in general and it seems like almost none of them have a clue what they're doing. Players who would have been squashed and busted in no time 6 years ago find themselves winning without much difficulty.

So yesterday when Jake and I took our seats as they started a new $6/$12 game on table 10, we liked our chances of winning. As the day progressed it was as if the table was slightly tilted in our direction and all of the chips we're slowly flowing down into our stacks. After 6 hours we both found ourselves ahead over $500 (a sizable win for that limit) with huge towers of chips in front of us while all of the other players in the game were looking forlornly at the their tiny stacks. Even if they're only $2 chips it's nice to be at the cashier hoping the people in front of you will speed it up because the weight of all the chips you're holding is starting to bother you.

Also I have to say congrats to Jake on the biggest poker win of his life (I think his previous best was somewhere in the $300 range). Jake and I actually started playing poker at the exact same time back in August of 2000 in the Cloyne home game. That game and the long drives out to Cache Creek (an Indian casino about 100 miles from here where you only have to be 18 to play) are how we became such good friends.

Sadly Jake's poker career got sidetracked by a classic pitfall: going to class in college. Jake fell deeper into that hole when he spent the following years going to law school after he finished his undergrad degree. While he was going down that non traditional road, I of course did what every guidance counselor I'd ever had told me to do: stay out until all hours of the night associating with lowlifes while pursuing a job at which almost everyone fails that comes with no benefits and no guaranteed income! Stupid, stupid Jake.

In other news it took less than 36 hours for my $3,700 from Neteller to hit my bank account. Like I said before the timing on that couldn't have been better. I was planning on getting back to work today, but after picking up $500 on what I was planning as a day off, I think I'm going to spend another day unwinding and get back on the horse tomorrow.

My WSOP 2023 Plans and Missions

After four and a half years working for StubHub I wrapped up my time there in March. I've been at the poker tables 3-4 days a week since...