I'm Baaaaaaccckkkkkkkkk!!!!

After a long string of less than stellar tournament performances (or being the victim of massive donkouts, you decide), I spent last week away from poker. I watched a lot of TV, played with my radios (heard a navigation beacon from Colombia -- that was exciting), and just generally tried to not consider anything related to poker.

Yesterday I broke my abstinence by playing in the Internet Texas Hold'em poker league event at PokerStars. It was HORSE this week. Against all expectations and very much against indications after the first hour, I won! It was a cheap event so the money didn't amount to much, but this is about the competition and the thrill of victory.

The tournament is kind of a blur in my mind. I do remember I stayed basically even for quite a while. Then luck did it's usual thing and I hit a long string of very promising starts that did nothing but cost me chips.

Pardon the interruption, but while checking the hand histories I just noticed something very odd. PokerStars puts the various games of a HORSE tournament into separate hand history files and appends to those files when that game is played next. This makes it extremely difficult to follow the action by looking at the HH after the fact. Bad, PokerStars, very bad.

I was at the bottom of the active players on the leaderboard, just about resigned to it soon being all over. Then I tripled up. And doubled up after that. In the span of about three hands I went from the bottom of the leaderboard to second place, with a huge lead over the player in third. (Fortunately, the player in first was at another table.) I had more than twice as many chips as the next closest player at my table. And I took advantage of it.

At the final table there was one other player in the same vicinity stack-wise, with everyone else having significantly fewer chips. I was lucky to get some decent cards and was able to use my stack to my advantage on many occasions. I went into heads-up play at a very slight chip disadvantage. We see-sawed back and forth a few times. Eventually I got a well disguised monster. Having observed the other player the entire tournament, I was pretty sure he'd do the betting for me if I let him, and I was right. The blinds were high enough by this point that he bluffed himself out of most of his stack by the time I put in a raise on the river. He was seriously crippled after that hand and it was over a couple hands later.

In the WSOP HORSE event, at least the one I watched on TV last year, they switched to all hold'em at the final table. I'm conflicted on whether this is a good idea or not. On one hand, if you're playing HORSE then it seems like you should play HORSE all the way to the end. On the other hand, the RSE games, IMNSHO, are very heavily luck based, so it kind of makes sense to drop them when the blinds get huge. This, of course, is a good argument for leaving them out altogether, but then it isn't HORSE.

I guess what it comes down to is that I don't think Razz and Stud make good tournament games. They're okay as cash games, but not as tournament games. For that matter, I don't think limit games in general make for good tournament play, at least not at the level speed typical of online play. Maybe in a deep stack situation where you get an hour or two at each blind level. Then you have a bit more of a chance for skill to have an impact. But with 15 minute or shorter levels, the early rounds of limit play are almost meaningless. There is a round or two in the middle where there seems to be a good balance between stack size and blind level, then the blinds jump again and you're forced to commit a huge chunk of your stack to even see the flop.

The only limit tournament I've ever played that I thought was kind of reasonable was a deep stacks event at PokerStars. Eight hours after I started I finished in something like 27th. I'm not anxious to repeat that experience, particularly not without eating something first.

I'm not sure if I'm going to play any of the blogger tournaments this week or not. I had said before I was going to put my focus on cash games and I'm still leaning in that direction. We'll see how I feel before Mondays At The Hoy starts tonight.

Correction: In a post a couple weeks ago I said something about "Why You Lose at Poker" having examples that were next to impossible to follow. I mixed up my titles. I meant to slam "How Good Is Your Limit Hold'em?", which has the most difficult to follow example hands of any poker book I've ever read. I think I can even leave off the poker book qualifier and just leave it as the most difficult to follow examples in the history of mankind.

My apologies about the confusion. I have some criticisms about "Why You Lose At Poker", which I may get to in a future post, but not concerning their examples. They do just fine in that regard.