A New Year a New Idea

I made the crew all stand at midnight-ish and raise a stiffy to Gopher for sending us this nectar. Just the name of the drink brought constant snickers and giggling all evening, “who wants a stiffy?” and “where’s my stiffy gone?” and “wanna taste of my stiffy?” etc. I know very schoolboy humour but that is what alcohol does to adults isn’t it.

I actually managed to hide the last quarter bottle under the back seat of my car so I would have some left over for the next day.

I tumbled in the door at 3:45am, clutching a huge aluminium bowl of Dorito’s under one arm and half a dozen spicey ribs wrapped in tin foil in the other hand. Which I promptly tossed on the computer desk as I passed it on my way to the much needed bathroom. On my return to the desk, I sat down, flicked the mouse to kick the computer awake and was greeted by Lardog on Skype.

Man, you can all hear the dah dah daaaah Dah.. horror suspense music playing already eh? What a fateful moment, me smashed outta me brains and Lardog nicely spiced himself, waiting to pounce. I tried to type a happy new year message but after realising someone had switched the keys around on my keyboard, we went to audio. This was a very slight improvement in our attempts at communication.

There was a brief but pleasant exchange of mumbles by me and chuckling by Lardog and the next thing I knew we were in a $20 MTT of umm, erm 150 people? Oh heck, well I was still pumped from the party, so I grab a fresh beer and decide to go hardcore. After 15 minutes I am chip leader of the tourney, after 30 minutes I am chip leader of the tourney, several beers later and the break comes and I am either chip leader or 2nd there abouts.

I think Lardog is out by this time because I distinctly recall his playing the guitar and shouting stuff at me. (btw that dude can play, yah ever get a chance to audio with Lar get him to play yah summat) Between that first break and the end I really can not recall anything of the poker,

I just know suddenly it is 8:00am, we are down to the last 30 or so players, I am sitting with quite a healthy stack at around the low teens position and this big ol’ wall of blackness is rushing up at me at 100mph!

Rather weirdly it was at this point I noticed the Dorito’s and tin foil wrapped ribs on the desk and was totally baffled at the discovery.

“I can’t do it Dog” I mumbled pathetically into the mic, “do what” he slurs back at me, “Anything…not sure I can even handle the stairs to bed”.. The hard work is done, the 120 bingo players are out,

I am sitting healthily stacked with reasonable poker players, the sorta players you can really get stuck into because they know how to play ‘text book’ poker and I am looking at picking up at least a $100 for a final table and I think $700 for top spot and …….. suddenly I can not even hit the ashtray with my fizzled out smoke, I found the number pad on my keyboard with it ok though.

“Take over Dog, log in as me…I ammm melting..”…. Seconds pass.. “Dog you there?” … It’s then I realise the black wall of molasses has sneaked up on Dog also .. “Yurhh gotta be kiddin’ me man .. no way” comes back through my headset…

“Ok this hand then”… and in it all went and out I all went.. “night man”..”yeah night man happy new..oh ferk … see yah hic”… Grabbing the ribs in foil I stumbled to bed and awoke with them sitting on my chest, still wrapped in their foil thank goodness, can yah imagine the scene if I had actually managed to fumble the foil open!

Sheesh what a wasted opportunity, my first game of the year and I was cruising to a final table that paid from $700 down to $150..

The night previous Dog, Svcmgr, Lippy and I all headed off merrily to beat up on the fishes. And we did just that, first game saw three of us four, heads up and in the money. Next game I was sucked out by something and someone, early on.

I took the opportunity to nip up to bed and switch over to the bedside laptop. Where after about 15 minutes I drifted off to sleep with the headset on and the soothing sounds of laughter by two of the guys always accompanied by the outbursts of obscenities as the other guy got beat up by bingo player.

I awoke at 5am, somewhat alarmed with the headset tangled around my neck, it didn’t help I was absolutely busting to use the bathroom and hopping around nekkid in a cold room trying to disentangle myself with one hand and catching the jerking laptop with the other. I later learned that Dog had been whistling and shouting down the headset at me… musta been tired eh.

Umm ok that is as far back as I can go today.. maybe more will come back to me over the coming days, though don’t go holding your breath on it.

I’ll try to end on a poker observation, jeeze this is supposed to be a poker blog after all.

It may seem an obvious thing to many of you and it is something I had already theorised about, but this last couple of weeks I have witnessed it and I have chatted with some of my poker peers and they have validated the notion.

Regarding MTT’s;

As we all know, when in a MTT there will always be a certain percentage of ‘bingo players’. The tact employed by the experienced player is usually to sit tight for the first 30 minutes or even longer, not be drawn into mixing it with the maniacs who can be lurking at any seat on your table.

Leave them to it, let them knock each other out, is the advice and sound advice it is. By careful tight play and patience most any reasonable player can navigate their way through the game until the first 50% of the field are out, as the game moves on to the last 10-25% you start to open up and play some poker.

If you hit the cards and things go your way, this can be a very successful strategy. Yet oftentimes by the time you get down to the last 20 players there are a handful that have massive chip leads over the rest of the pack and your patient hard earned stack is not big enough for you to really open your game and get stuck in with a real chance of those big three paying places.

Sure you can make final table and some money but all too often you know when you sit at the final table you are in reality playing for the lower positions.

So what if we reversed the strategy? What if we open our game up early and selectively try to take on some of the maniacs? For sure you’ll get sucked out some of the time, but, some of the time you’ll also win and if it is against those loose early players you are going to win big.

What I am theorising here is that it is basically a numbers game, I’ll try to explain my theory..

Let’s say you regularly play SNG’s - 9 seaters, with $5 buy-ins. If you are good enough and lucky enough, we’ll say you hit the money 50% of the time. Payouts are 50%-30% and 20% of the pot.

• 10 buy-ins = $50 + $5 rake. Totalling to $55
• 5 times you hit the money 1st 1st 2nd 3rd 3rd
• That equates to, $22.50, $22.50, $13.50, $9.00,$9.00 Totalling $76.50
• So for an outlay of $55 you return $76.50, remember this is being quite generous in assuming you will hit the money 1 time in 2!

Now we’ll assume you play 10 MTT’s with a $5 buy-in and a 100 player field. This would probably pay 15 - 18 places with the positions 10 through to 18 basically returning your money with maybe a $2 profit. Final table finishers will obviously earn more and the real money usually starting at position four up to the winner.

If you play a MTT as described above (sit tight etc) you may hit some money 25% of the time. Your buy-ins stakes are $55 dollars again and if you hit the low teens you’ll get your stake back and maybe $5 profit and if make final table you should be looking at $50 minimum. You might get 1 final table and a couple of low money placingss.

On these (highly) assumptive figures you’ll see the difference in profit between playing the SNG’s and the MTT’s is negligible. Of course if you finish top 3 on an MTT you’ll be well in profit, that fact alone might convince you to play more MTT’s this year than SNG’s!

Ok, stay with me here folks I am going somewhere with this… I think

Over the last month or so I have either been involved in or watched a buddy or talked to a buddy about their MTT games. Many times I or a friend have managed to end in the money some where, many times we didn’t, the times we actually won or managed to be placed in the important top 3-4 and pocketed some decent profit, overwhelmingly we agreed we were very strong stacks very early on in the MTT.

So it seems we have a common denominator..

Here’s my take, the players (*cough* including myself) I watched or talked too are all pretty decent tight strong players, able to hold their own. Usually we will not be big chip stacks early on because experience has taught us to sit back, wait for the monkey’s to beat each other up with keyboard banana bashing, then around 70% into the game start making moves and playing real poker.

The times we have had early monster hands and be tempted into big pots against the monkey’s and won, we won big. Because we are all competent players we know when to reign it back in and be selectively strong and be selectively looser. This is key, knowing when to reign it back in after hitting big pots early.

After this we could move back into our more conservative MTT play, with the added bonus being, we could afford to make those more marginal moves that we probably couldn’t have done without the chip stack behind us.

So…. If we reverse that strategy and play harder in the first 30 minutes of a MTT, absolutely you’ll get sucked out by a bingo player now and then, but on average you should at least be 50-50 on taking the monkey’s money and it seems the added advantage for a normally strong tight player starting with an early large chip stack is expotential, because now you have a handy player with more ammunition than the common Joe’s.

You may not make the latter stages as often as you would playing very tight poker early, but if you can hit even 30% in these games early on and can get into the top 10 leaders early, you do have a far better chance of making some decent money.

• 10 $5 buy-ins MTT = $55
• 1 top 3 finish = minimum $75 with the better chance of tripling that figure, simply because you’re heads up with only 2 other players.
• 2 top 3 finishes and you are going to be 200% better off than the previous figures.

I am not advocating playing like a maniac early on or at any time in a game, nor are my figures or percentages worked out with a slide rule. What I am trying to do is convey an idea of possibilities.

You will get sucked out more and leave the game earlier more times, but if you can accept losing is a part of the game and play the numbers correctly, who knows it may just pay yah off.

I may be totally wrong, but yanno it doesn’t matter, as long as we keep analysing our games and keep trying to move forwards, sooner or later we’ll make a step in the right direction. Don’t stagnate keep thinking..

So take from it what you will, or shake yah head and laugh, but keep an eye out for the chip leaders in yah MTT’s early on .. when yah see Blagger’s name up there… be afraid… be very afraid….