Unfortunately, Poker Stars’ World Championship of Online Poker is timing out badly relative to my travel schedule: I was in Chicago much of this past weekend, missing the first few events, and I’ll be in New York this coming weekend and therefore missing the juicier weekend events then as well (including the Razz, HORSE, and 6-Max events!).
However, I did spend a painful 10 hours yesterday playing the $500 NLHE, ultimately finishing 182nd out of 6025 competitors. Usually, getting so close and yet so far is very frustrating for me, but last night I never got my hopes up. Frankly, I can’t believe I lasted as long as I did. From the get-go, I couldn’t get any traction, and it was only thanks to the very generous 30-minute blind levels that I was able to cling to life. That’s how I spent pretty much the entire tournament, never getting up an average-sized stack after the first hour but managing to win a few crucial all-in confrontations and steal blinds often enough to stay afloat.
There honestly were not many interesting hands at all, this is the best I could find:
PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em Tourney, Big Blind is t5000 (9 handed) Hand History converter Courtesy of PokerZion.com
MP1 (t184842)
MP2 (t126367)
Hero (t121000)
CO (t192770)
Button (t200256)
SB (t360699)
BB (t199586)
UTG (t243397)
UTG+1 (t633377)
Preflop: Hero is MP3 with Td, Ad.
4 folds, Hero raises to t13500, 2 folds, SB calls t11000, BB calls t8500.
Flop: (t45000) 6d, 8c, 8h (3 players)
SB checks, BB checks, Hero checks.
Turn: (t45000) Ac (3 players)
SB checks, BB checks, Hero checks.
River: (t45000) 6h (3 players)
SB bets t30000, BB folds, Hero folds.
I was fairly new to this table and didn’t have much of a read on the player in the SB. In general, there were a ton of sorta bad/inexperienced players in this event, and it’s generally profitable to assume that an unknown meets this description until he does something to suggest otherwise. Most people I think would say that river should be a call after playing the flop and turn so passively, but I really only beat a bluff, and this isn’t generally a pot where I expect an unknown player to bluff. He’s firing into two players, and he’s waiting until the river (the least bluffable street) to do it. Even the bad players in a $500 tournament aren’t calling the pre-flop raise with worse Aces in the SB, so I don’t think he’s value betting a worse hand very often at all. The fact that I don’t even chop with AJ moved me towards a fold.
So there you go, 10 hours of play, 620-some hands, and that was the most interesting thing that happened. You can imagine how painful it was to be playing mindless poker for such a long stretch, getting more and more tired and having no room for creative play or hands worth playing and just folding and praying and folding and praying. It was just shy of 2:30 AM when I busted, and I am at least glad that I didn’t last another two orbits, as that would have entailed sitting through a 30-minute break! The final table didn’t start until like 16 or 17 hours in, so I guess they needed to give people a substantial break at some point, but man it would have been so painful to wait that out on a short stack, knowing that I could easily go out just a few minutes after the break.
There’s a $200 FLHE WCOOP tomorrow. That’s far from my best game, but I may play it anyway, since I’ll have so few opportunities to play WCOOP events.