The Day After Tax Day

Monday night I was stuck doing taxes. I procrastinated as long as I could, but finally had to face the tax man. Toughest part was trying to sort through the few stock sales I made last year.

I don't keep the best of personal records in that regard, rather depending on my online brokerage to have the information available. They sent me a fancy statement at the end of the year showing how much my gross sales were, but the statement didn't say anything at all about profit or holding period. Thankfully, they did have the information online, though I had to dig more than I thought I should have to find it.

By the time it was all over I had to fork over another $188. Not too bad, all things considered. I'd like to send my personal thanks to George Bush for making the total tax bite a lot less than it would have been eight years ago. Let's hope certain members of Congress stop making asshats of themselves and make the tax cuts permanent.

The biggest surprise came on Tuesday when it took less than ten minutes at the post office. Even that would have gone a lot faster if they'd had more than two clerks behind the counter. I know they're the US Postal Service and obviously know their business better than I do, but it was what is historically one of the busiest postal days of the year. And they staffed fewer than half the windows. I'm just saying...

I didn't have too much time available last night and felt like just having some fun at the tables, so I tried to play some PLO8. Poker.com has been really slow and the only table with any action was a full ring $0.05/$0.10. As I discovered last night, full ring PLO8 is not the game to play when you're in a hurry for some action. At least not if you want to do something other than donate your buy-in.

At 6-max you can often win with rather mediocre hands. Full ring PLO8 is a game of the nuts. If you don't have the nuts, odds are very good that you'll not be taking any chips out of that pot. Being patient enough to wait for a hand likely to turn into the nuts does not fit well with being in a hurry for some action.

What I'm trying to say is, I got my ass kicked. It was mostly stupid play on my part. There was a bit of simply missing all of my 27 outs (or maybe I over-counted), but it was mostly stupidity and wishful thinking.

I gave up on PLO8 after a short while and went back to The Quest. It was a short but positive session, finishing up $1.67.

Full Tilt has long been running a series of posts from their poker pros on various aspects of poker. Howard Lederer recently posted something about SnG strategy. I realize I don't have much standing to question Howard's advice, after all, he's "The Professor" and I'm, well, nobody, but something about his column just had an odd feel to it.

Howard suggested many players use the wrong strategy, taking chances too early in an attempt to build a big stack and take a run at winning the whole thing. He recommended taking a tight, conservative stance until you've made the money. After that you can start taking much bigger chances.

The key point of his argument was that distribution of 60% of the prize pool is determined when you get to the final three. (He was speaking of single table SnGs where the money distribution goes 50-30-20. Since there are three of you and you're each guaranteed at least 20% of the prize pool, that's 60%.) He further argued that since there's only a 10% difference between third and second, making it to at least third is more important than positioning yourself to finish higher. Personally, I'd say the difference between third and second is 50% since second pays 50% more than third, but I'm probably using funny math.

When you deduct your cost from the payout the difference becomes even greater. For ease of calculation let's say it's a ten person tournament with a $10+$1 buy-in. The price pool is $100. Third pays $20. Subtract your $11 buy-in and your profit is $9, or 82%. Second pays $30, giving you a profit of $19, or 173%. Your profit for taking second is more than double the profit of taking third. Coming in first gives you a profit of $39, or 355% of your investment.

Each step up the payout ladder, beyond the first one, provides double the profit of the previous step.

I'm not sure exactly where this has brought us, but I'm glad I took the journey. I knew there was something about Howard's analysis that struck me as not quite right and now I've put my finger on what it was. Characterizing second place money as 10% more than third place is just wrong.

I'm not suggesting Howard's strategy advice is wrong, but I do think there are some major holes in his justification for the strategy. His suggested strategy is also rather simplistic. Admittedly, he's just writing a short column and proper SnG strategy could fill a book. Okay, maybe a big pamphlet. Or maybe a really big blog entry. Hmmmm....