The biggest poker game of the year

Just had another moment on Full Tilt. 3 of us left in a 9 man sit and go. I am the short stack with 2400. I had lead most of the tournament before the suck outs started :p

I get AA in position and push after a large raise. He tanks and eventually calls with 44. One of which is a heart... Flop has two hearts, the turn and the river are also hearts....

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Ahem

:p

+1 for great cat. Bengal I think Rotty said in another thread.
 
Because in cheap/free entry games a lot of the players are these muppets so the odds of you surviving all of them without one of them taking you out is very slim.
Pray tell, why do you think your odds or surviving the same number of good players in a higher stakes tournament is better?

So my experience is that I quite often fail to make the bubble in these low value games as I taken out by some idiot call along the way but will consistantly make the bubble in the higher value games where the muppets won't stump up the £20+ entrance fee.
You don't play to make the bubble, you play to win. Only just making it into the money in most of your tournaments will tend to lose you money in the long run, because of the payout structure.

Don't get me wrong, I love it when I see what the bad player has sometimes, it's just that they get lucky too often and take you out. If you can run with the odds and get through the early rounds then you are safe from the muppets plus have a nice healthy pot and then play properly. A lot of the early rounds in the cheap/cheap satellite entrance tournies turn into too much of a bingo game for my liking.
But poker is much easier as a bingo game than it is as a game where you have to actually outwit someone who is better than you. Why can't anyone see that?

If you take the view to fold your hands if soembody else is allin including AA with an A on the flop, then you will ride through the early rounds but with insufficient chips to play with the high blinds later so no result that way either.
If you fold AA with a flopped ace, on the flop, regardless of who you're up against you're a fool :p

Why should we take the view to fold hands like that?
 
^^
when 3 clubs come down and you have AdAh, and someone goes all in


my experience is that in high stakes someone on every table will go all in with 2-3 off suit with about $500 every hour, i dont really want to play online anymore, i havent lost much but i find it booring

live games i find very fun, i always drink about 5+ pints or so, and i think drinking all that alchohol makes me play better..

because...i dont get bored and play rubbish hands when i can just lean back drink and have a smoke and chat to pass the time, i let people catch me bluffing a couple of times, they always end up calling me when i hit something good.
 
Pray tell, why do you think your odds or surviving the same number of good players in a higher stakes tournament is better?

I'm not claiming the odds are better, I am claiming that I pretty much finish in the top ten in high stakes tournaments and 100% of all my tourney wins are from high stakes whereas I tend to get killed off in the low stake tourneys due to the muppet fish. The chances are that a good player will not call your allin with a stupid no hope 5% hand or if it does happen occasionally then the odds are in your favour and you win. Don't forget that if you happen to say get dealt very good hands and there are two or three muppets allin each hand, it doesn't matter that your odds might be 95% preflop, the point is you might have to win 10 allin's like that in low stake tourneys which drops your odds of survival to under 60%.

You don't play to make the bubble, you play to win. Only just making it into the money in most of your tournaments will tend to lose you money in the long run, because of the payout structure.

Very true but I was using the "making the bubble" as a tool to compare success between tourneys. If comparing just wins my stats are 100% high stake touneys, 0% low stake tourneys.

But poker is much easier as a bingo game than it is as a game where you have to actually outwit someone who is better than you. Why can't anyone see that?

If I wanted to play bingo, I would go and play bingo :rolleyes: I seem to perform best when "playing" poker with other poker players. Perhaps that's just me.

If you fold AA with a flopped ace, on the flop, regardless of who you're up against you're a fool :p

In fact you're the fool. Knowing when the fold AA is a sign of a good player IMO. People continuing in the vain hope their AA is still good post flop are bad players :p. For example, if facing an allin from another player with an ace on the flop, you would need to have a damn good read on the player (unlikely online) to call him if the flop cards happen to be all one suit, a potential str8 on the flop for somebody etc.
 
I'm not claiming the odds are better, I am claiming that I pretty much finish in the top ten in high stakes tournaments and 100% of all my tourney wins are from high stakes whereas I tend to get killed off in the low stake tourneys due to the muppet fish. The chances are that a good player will not call your allin with a stupid no hope 5% hand or if it does happen occasionally then the odds are in your favour and you win. Don't forget that if you happen to say get dealt very good hands and there are two or three muppets allin each hand, it doesn't matter that your odds might be 95% preflop, the point is you might have to win 10 allin's like that in low stake tourneys which drops your odds of survival to under 60%.
I wish I could go all-in ten times in the same tournament with a 60% hope of winning ALL TEN. Why aren't you seeing that this is IDEAL?
Very true but I was using the "making the bubble" as a tool to compare success between tourneys. If comparing just wins my stats are 100% high stake touneys, 0% low stake tourneys.
How many tournaments? Sample size is paramount here.
If I wanted to play bingo, I would go and play bingo :rolleyes: I seem to perform best when "playing" poker with other poker players. Perhaps that's just me.
It must be just you, because every poker player in the world wants to maximise their edge over the competition... except for you :D
In fact you're the fool. Knowing when the fold AA is a sign of a good player IMO. People continuing in the vain hope their AA is still good post flop are bad players :p. For example, if facing an allin from another player with an ace on the flop, you would need to have a damn good read on the player (unlikely online) to call him if the flop cards happen to be all one suit, a potential str8 on the flop for somebody etc.
Holding AA with an ace on the flop (your example) gives you top three of a kind at the least (full house possible too ;)). On the flop, that is more or less the nuts, even if flushes and straights are possible - do you see why?

Either way this is all opponent and situation dependent.
 
Killerkebab has the right idea here. You want to be playing against people who dont know what they are doing. Ok it can be really frustrating if they keep sucking out on you but aslong as you play using proper bank roll management you will profit over all. (that is if your a winning player overall of course, most arn't!) :)
 
Killerkebab has the right idea here. You want to be playing against people who dont know what they are doing. Ok it can be really frustrating if they keep sucking out on you but aslong as you play using proper bank roll management you will profit over all. (that is if your a winning player overall of course, most arn't!) :)

What's proper bank roll management?

Blackvault
 
What's proper bank roll management?

Blackvault

Play on a level which you are a winning player overall and never stake more than 5% of your bank roll i.e if your a winning player on $0.10/$0.25 then you need a min bankroll of $500. Always have a min of 20 buy ins.

Did anyone else play the $200k tourny on Full Tilt last night by the way? Finished around 400th out of 11'000 in the end, sat around 16th for a while but then got rivered and knocked back to 160th and didn't pick a hand up for over 2 hours, good tourny though for anyone interested in a low buy in with high potential winnings ($22 buy in with 1st place $23k last night)
 
I wish I could go all-in ten times in the same tournament with a 60% hope of winning ALL TEN. Why aren't you seeing that this is IDEAL?
How many tournaments? Sample size is paramount here.
It must be just you, because every poker player in the world wants to maximise their edge over the competition... except for you :D
Holding AA with an ace on the flop (your example) gives you top three of a kind at the least (full house possible too ;)). On the flop, that is more or less the nuts, even if flushes and straights are possible - do you see why?

Either way this is all opponent and situation dependent.

Just how it goes down I reckon. You may well be right but I seem to keep losing to the improbable noob fish all the time. Hell I even lost an allin to 27 last week. :(

From a quick check of stats I have the following:

High stake tourneys won: 7
High stake tourneys top 10: 38
Low stake tourneys won: 0
Low stake tourney top 10: 1

Bubble on high stakes 97/147
Bubble on low stakes 7/256

% chance of winning some money on high stakes: 66% :D
% chance of winning money on low stakes: 2.7%:(
% chance of winning a high stake touney: 4.7%:D
% chance of winning a low stake tourney: 0%:(

I don't know, I may not have played enough low stake/cheap satellite tourneys yet for the odds to come may way and I am just dam unlucky in them????

And as for the aces, I wasn't talking about somebody needing another card for a str8 or a flush, I meant that they might have the str8 or the flush as soon as the flop goes down. Okay, a lot depends on how many players saw the flop but it is reasonable to expect a good player who goes allin to have a better hand than you with you needing another ace or a fh to win it. I have in high stake tourneys on later tables laid down AA in this situation which has proven to be the right fold after seeing the other persons card. As to whether any of the 7 cards I needed to win came out, I would never know.

The best example of my "bad luck" vs noobs is the following from a game last month where I had played well to get myself steadily into the top 10 when this happened.

Me: 10k chips
Donkey 2k chips

I had AA, flop no danger from the flop, end up allin with the donkey who had 97 clubs with one club on the flop, he got the flush.

Next hand I had KK, no immediate danger from the flop again, he had j10 suited and he won with the str8

Next hand I had QQ, again no immediate danger from the flop (all lower than me Queens, no str8 or flush possible. End up allin with the donkey for the third hand running and he had 77 and pulled another 7 on the river. That was me out of the tourney.

Tell me, would you have folded any of those hands? I suspect not.

Worse than that was 3 hands later the donkey lost all his chips with another stupid allin to somebody else where the better hand held up.
 
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Why the unlimited rebuys for all of the first day? I'm guessing you have good players who will not see it as a reason to gamble un-necessarily? When I've run multi-day tourneys I've always had to cap the number of rebuys per player because we always had a tool with too much money and not enough of an understanding of the game and people like that will always suck out once or twice per buy-in and it used to frustrate the hell out of the good players.

Erm it can be advantageous to loosen up and take advantage of the unlimited re-buys if your bank roll allows it. I'm completely with you in that I think unlimited rebuys are a bad idea but, given an event where they are present, I don't think that people who take advantage of that and initially play a very loose game are necessarily tools. Conversely you could say that the "good players" who are still treating the torny as though it is a freezeout are basically nits and if turning it into a shove fest at the start is going to get them to tilt a bit then surely thats even more +ev too.

FWIW Daniel Negreanu had 48 re-buys in one event @ the 2006 WSOP
 
"move up to where they respect your raises" lol :D

I cannot for the life of me work out why you'd want to be safe from bad players. Why aren't you happy you went all in as a 95% favourite? Why would you want to play a game where players don't want to put all their money in bad?

^^^ this tbh....
 
If you can't beat low stakes, you can't beat high stakes. Fact.

Sorry, all knowing god of poker, I forgot you're right on every count and know everything about me right :)

Re: folding AA on an Axx flop, I was faced with the horror flop of Ac 9c 8c the other day but I bet it, guy puts in a decent raise and I actually put it down because the way I was running I knew another club was coming. Turns out he actually flopped the nut flush, and although I wasn't drawing dead I still needed to re-draw. When you look at it, it's a stupid fold but sometimes instinct takes over...
 
Erm it can be advantageous to loosen up and take advantage of the unlimited re-buys if your bank roll allows it. I'm completely with you in that I think unlimited rebuys are a bad idea but, given an event where they are present, I don't think that people who take advantage of that and initially play a very loose game are necessarily tools. Conversely you could say that the "good players" who are still treating the torny as though it is a freezeout are basically nits and if turning it into a shove fest at the start is going to get them to tilt a bit then surely thats even more +ev too.

FWIW Daniel Negreanu had 48 re-buys in one event @ the 2006 WSOP

I should have been more specific actually and qualify my dislike of unlimited rebuys (or rebuys over half the tournament duration as was the case this time.) My dislike is bourne from having played with people with vastly different bankrolls.

Not one of my home games, but an extreme example was a club I used to frequent. It was advertised as a £5 rebuy tournament. Decent 20 minute blind levels with unlimited rebuys up to the first break (about an hour and twenty minutes if memory serves me correctly). Now some guys used to turn up with £300 to gamble on the tournament. They were used to playing at higher levels and could afford to gamble £300 and just fancied a punt. It ruined it for everyone else who did not have the same bankroll because:

a) They were gambling and would suck out occassionally. All-Ins blind every hand sometimes.
b) There were so many damn chips in play that if you hadn't accumulated some of theirs you'd not stand a chance in the latter stages.

Now in the long run, sure a good player will overcome this because they get their money in good, but it really is no fun watching/playing push/fold poker where you lose say £20 99 times and then win £2,500 on the 100th tournament. Sure you're a winning player overall but it is soul destroying to play, especially at a live venue you only frequent once a week. It'd be two years of poor poker before you see a +ve ROI !! These guys weren't tools. Indeed there were some very good card players, but their attitude to a low stakes game made them come across as tools.

I never had it this bad in my home games, but sometimes on a £50 buy in, one guy was coming to gamble £100 and another £500 and that frustrated some players who would see the guy with the bigger bankroll playing badly because he was prepared to lose more, create a loose image or whatever reason. If they wanted to play that sort of game we'd have had a cash game instead, where they could pick their spots without fear of being eaten up by the blinds. It was then that I decided that capping rebuys in my tournaments at the level that was affordable to most was a better way forward.

To those who say you should always want poor/noob players in their games I'd say they're always welcome in my cash games but not in my tournaments.
 
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