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Poker notes
Oct. 9th, 2006 01:27 pmWatching High Stakes Poker gives you the joy of Gabe Kaplan telling you that the buy-in is a minimum of $100,000. Wow, you might think, until you amble along to a real-man's game, $1,000-$2,000 limit short-handed on Full Tilt, where Texas Limit King seems to have sat down with anywhere between $1m and $2m for the past few days. Erik is of course accommodating him, albeit with a "mere" $150,000 or thereabouts.
Is Texas a bot, a brilliant player, or a billionaire? I dunno, but it certainly seems to put the cash reserves of nearly all the high-stakes players in LV to shame.
Needless to say there were a retinue of observers chirping up inane chatter, as if posting a comment on a table where people are putting up about $1,500 in blinds every two minutes gives them some kind of "association" with these stakes. Of course, if these observers were winners, they would be playing somewhere, rather than watching.
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Top kudos to Mike W, who turned an EV of about $40 when qualifying for the Bronze freeroll into an EV of about $7,000 when he won the darned thing (plus $800 in the pocket). Not fazed by this, he then promptly won his first-ever double-shootout, giving him an EV of, er, $12,000, plus a guaranteed $5,800 in the pocket. All he has to do now is to beat three "pros", who probably won't be trying too hard and will want to get it over quickly, and Mikey walks off with a nice $50K.
I would have sweated Mike in the 4-man, but, like him, I didn't realize it was a double-shootout. So winning the $5K took him all of half an hour. By the time I turned up to see how he was faring after three levels, he had won the darned thing.
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One of the more frightening experiences I had in LV was finding myself sitting next to a middle-aged bloke from Chingford who had never played live before and whose regular game on Pokerstars was a $2 sit-n-go. Even at this level I fear that he might have been outclassed. He dropped about $100 in three hours, I think, mainly because he was utterly useless. However, he was laughing away and saying "well, I can't fold that, can I?" This line was not based on the amount that was in the pot and the chance of the hand winning, but on the fact that it was two-pairs Aces-up, or something like that, and this was too good to fold, end of story. Frighteningly, he was right, he couldn't fold it, not for one bet at the end, but the reasoning by which he came to the conclusion was flawed in the extreme.
It's frightening to sit next to people like this and see that there are people out there, playing for real money, who literally have no poker brain whatsoever, and are unlikely ever to develop one.
I had one of these players at $3-$6 yesterday. Amazingly clueless and calling all the way to the end with anything. If he hit a pair at any point, he called the river bet as well. I've noted that some 40% of my profit this year has been made on a Sunday (which includes early Sunday morning). This might indicate that a good strategy would be to move up in stakes just on Sunday, when the weakest players seem to be about.
Is Texas a bot, a brilliant player, or a billionaire? I dunno, but it certainly seems to put the cash reserves of nearly all the high-stakes players in LV to shame.
Needless to say there were a retinue of observers chirping up inane chatter, as if posting a comment on a table where people are putting up about $1,500 in blinds every two minutes gives them some kind of "association" with these stakes. Of course, if these observers were winners, they would be playing somewhere, rather than watching.
+++++++
Top kudos to Mike W, who turned an EV of about $40 when qualifying for the Bronze freeroll into an EV of about $7,000 when he won the darned thing (plus $800 in the pocket). Not fazed by this, he then promptly won his first-ever double-shootout, giving him an EV of, er, $12,000, plus a guaranteed $5,800 in the pocket. All he has to do now is to beat three "pros", who probably won't be trying too hard and will want to get it over quickly, and Mikey walks off with a nice $50K.
I would have sweated Mike in the 4-man, but, like him, I didn't realize it was a double-shootout. So winning the $5K took him all of half an hour. By the time I turned up to see how he was faring after three levels, he had won the darned thing.
++++++++
One of the more frightening experiences I had in LV was finding myself sitting next to a middle-aged bloke from Chingford who had never played live before and whose regular game on Pokerstars was a $2 sit-n-go. Even at this level I fear that he might have been outclassed. He dropped about $100 in three hours, I think, mainly because he was utterly useless. However, he was laughing away and saying "well, I can't fold that, can I?" This line was not based on the amount that was in the pot and the chance of the hand winning, but on the fact that it was two-pairs Aces-up, or something like that, and this was too good to fold, end of story. Frighteningly, he was right, he couldn't fold it, not for one bet at the end, but the reasoning by which he came to the conclusion was flawed in the extreme.
It's frightening to sit next to people like this and see that there are people out there, playing for real money, who literally have no poker brain whatsoever, and are unlikely ever to develop one.
I had one of these players at $3-$6 yesterday. Amazingly clueless and calling all the way to the end with anything. If he hit a pair at any point, he called the river bet as well. I've noted that some 40% of my profit this year has been made on a Sunday (which includes early Sunday morning). This might indicate that a good strategy would be to move up in stakes just on Sunday, when the weakest players seem to be about.
