Pokerstars Blogger Freeroll

I played the blogger freeroll yesterday. My tablemates and I had the misfortune of being seated with an aggressive maniac. Fourth hand of the tournament there was a small raise, a call, and the maniac pushes all-in. Of course, nobody wants to risk their whole tournament this early, so everybody folds. He raised every single hand for about the next 40 hands. And won most of them uncontested.

One guy finally caught a hand he thought he could play sheriff with. Turns out the maniac flopped a set and turned a boat. Minus one player and now we had to deal with an aggressive maniac with more than twice as many chips as anyone else at the table. It wasn't pretty.

I ended up folding a number of hands I would have liked to have played, but wasn't willing to play at what I knew the cost would be. For the most part I wasn't getting cards anyway. The only hand worth mentioning was when I got pocket aces and flopped my set. I played it cool, waiting for Mr. Maniac to go crazy, but he was very restrained and even folded when the other guy in the hand put in a small bet. I did get the other guy to contribute to my cause, though not as much as I'd have liked.

After almost two hours of folding everything in sight, my M was under 10 and I decided to make my stand with pocket 9's. Unfortunately, the other big stack who I thought was just trying to push me around actually had aces. I went home somewhere in the low 800's. Not a good showing at all.

In retrospect, and particularly if Stars had posted the payout schedule early in the tournament, I probably should have picked a couple hands with any kind of promise and pushed back against the maniac. The prizes didn't start until fairly late and the bottom ones were the kind of thing that you wouldn't turn your nose up at but you probably wouldn't wait in a long line to get one either. I don't mean to be critical of the prizes -- it was very generous of Stars to do this -- I'm just trying to be realistic about the relative values of the prizes.

Anyway, thanks to Pokerstars for hosting this. If you do it again, please don't start me at a table with a maniac.