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i played the East Coast Poker Championships main event this weekend. this is probably the best event of the year at turning stone, and i especially look forward to it because it was the scene of my first big win, in 2005.

this year, i started the tournament hot, caught some hands and hit some flops. built my stack through the day, and at dinner break on day 1 i was in good shape with about 80k and blinds going up to 500/1000. after dinner i had a long dry spell but kept mostly out of trouble for a couple hours. i got moved to a very soft table where i got to see a lot of flops cheap and accumulated some chips, only to give a bunch of them back losing a big race with AK vs 77.

the tournament had started with 234 entries, and 20 spots were on the pay scale. we were probably down to 25 or 30 when this bizzaro thing happened at my table. it was so weird it got its own blog post

we popped the money bubble and the 20 survivors finished for the night at about 12:00. i bagged up 133,000 chips — about 33 big blinds, a playable but precarious stack. with that size stack your tactical options are a bit limited, and losing 1 decent-size pot can put you in the danger zone.

it was 12:30 by the time i had my chips bagged up, and we were scheduled to restart at noon. the next 11 hours went coffee,drive,food,sleep,coffee,food,drive. i had been too wired to sleep well, but i felt pretty good when we started day 2.

two strong players had moved to my left when we went down to 2 tables, including tommy w who chopped this event last year. not good news for me, but i managed to win a pretty big pot from tom early on. i opened for a raise with 88 on the button and he called from the small blind. the flop was AQx he checked, i bet, hoping for the best. he called. ugh. the turn was a blank, he checked, and i checked behind. river was an 8! sweet! he checked, i bet pretty big, not really expecting a call, but he called. i showed the 3 eights and he made a really sour face.

a while later i had run into some hot water… twice i’d had to fold my opening raise to a 3-bet from my left, and i was down to about 19 big blinds. the chip leader in the 9 seat (the same guy that won the bizzaro pot mentioned earlier) was still two to my right and he was still playing aggressively and causing me some grief.

a conservative player in the 8 seat opens for 18k with blinds at 3k/6k and the 9 seat flat calls on the button. he hasn’t flatted much and i think he’s trying to see a cheap flop in position. i’m in the big blind and look down at 88. hmmm, my stack feels a bit too deep to reshove. i decide to reraise to 49k, with only 70k behind. the way i see this playing out in my head is that the opener will feel squeezed by having the chip leader behind him and fold, and the chip leader doesn’t have much so he’ll either fold or call. if he calls i have the option of jamming a safe-looking flop, or possibly folding with 11bb remaining in my stack if the flop looks scary and i have to bail out. instead, opener folds and chip leader jams. uh oh. but i can’t fold there. getting too good a price, so i call off the remaining 70k and he shows JJ. hmmm, wow, that was a tricky play. i guess he was hoping i’d do something foolish. mission accomplished. he’s a 4:1 favorite and i’m mentally on my way out the door. the dealer spreads an uneventful flop, a non-descript turn, and…. an 8. yeehaw! now i’m up over 250k, about average. in retrospect, i don’t like the way i played that hand at all. calling or jamming were both better options than the weird reraise to 49k. but it worked out ok. if you can’t be good, be lucky!

a while later we lose a few more contestants, and i’m at the final table with a decent stack. this is a pretty strong final table, with tommy w on my left again (rats!), hoss, and marvin who has a monster stack. the former chip leader from my old table still has a decent stack, but he’s been on a downward slide since i crushed his JJ w/ my 88.

after a while of drifting along, i win this weird huge pot. i’m in the big blind and there’s a raise from under the gun, and there are 4 callers before it gets to me. these big multiway raised pots just never happen at final tables with good players, but here it is. i look down at QT offsuit, a hand i’m not going to play for a raise under normal circumstances. but here i’m getting a great price and i come along for the ride. flop is AQT so i’ve flopped 2 pair, but i can’t be in love with it in a 6-way pot. could easily be up against KJ for the nut straight, AT, or a set of tens. i check, expecting a bet. i might raise or might just call depending on the action. but it checks all the way around. wtf? i’m almost definitely ahead here, nobody would have checked a better 2 pair or set on this super scary board. however, KJ (the nuts) might have checked so i’m not out of the woods yet. turn is a blank, and i fire 48k into the 70k(?) pot and get 4 callers. seriously???? wtf???? river is another blank (whew), and i check, praying for it to check around. i REALLY don’t want to face a 150k bet here. my prayers are answered. i table my QT, everyone mucks, and the dealer passes me the 300k+ pot. so weird.

with 7 or 8 players left, this dream hand happens: i’m sitting on over half a million chips, but marvin has over a million. i’m in the small blind. strong young kid 2 to my left moves in for maybe 10 big blinds. a conservative player at the other end of the table raises to isolate, which is a smart move with a variety of good but not great hands. then hoss on my right moves in for almost half a million! he’s a VERY solid player and i know he’s got QQ or AK minimum, and even then only if he has a read on the 2nd raiser. i look at my hand. it’s AA. unbelievable. i pretend to think for while just in case the 2nd raiser has QQ, which is really the only hand where he’d have a real decision to make (although i believe he’d fold QQ there). i call, other guy folds AQ. hoss flips up his kings but he already knows they’re no good before he even sees my hand. the short stack has JJ. my aces hold up and i scoop a million dollar pot and send 2 tough players to the rail.

when we get down to 4 handed it goes back and forth for a while. one of the other guys is not a very good player but he manages to hang in for a while. finally he goes out and counts are something like marvin 2M, me 1.2M, and the 3rd guy 300k. he plays well but it’s too deep a hole. marvin busts him and we’re heads up. he’s got me outchipped about 2.5M to 1M with blinds at 8k/16k. the official prize distribution is $30k for 1st and $16k for 2nd. we stop to make a “save” so the difference isn’t quite so big. we agree to take 20k each and play for the rest. we play 1 hand and he looks at his stack and says, wow we’ve got a lot of chips. true. i’ve got 70bb and he’s got a lot more than that. he’s thinking this is going to take forever. probably also true, and we’re both pretty tired. and although he’s a very good player he knows i have more experience. i say “make me an offer”. he does, and it’s a good one. he gets the win, but i lock up a bigger payday than my chip count would suggest. we both go away happy with the result.

this happened near the money bubble in the east coast poker championships

i wasn’t paying much attention to the beginning of this hand, but the flop had been KJ6 rainbow (all different suits) and 2 guys had put a bunch of money in on the flop.

the turn was a blank (card that didn’t look like it would help anyone). seat 4 bet out and seat 9, who was the chipleader at our table and maybe the whole tournament, raised him big, all in.

seat 4 started thinking, with his tournament life at stake. he’d still have a playable stack of 12 or 15 blinds if he folded, so it’s a tough spot to be in. he pondered for several minutes. finally he said “I call” and SLAMMED his cards down on the table. but somehow one of the cards bounced and flew into the muck, face down! it all happened so fast nobody even saw the card. it happened right in front of me, and i still can’t figure out how the card ended up face down. couldn’t do it on purpose in a million tries.

the rule on this is crystal clear: the hand is dead. the opponent turned over his hand (carefully), KJ for top 2 pair. seat 4 said the missing card was a J (which his neighbor corroborated), and the remaining card was a 6, for a lower 2 pair. so it didn’t much matter that his hand was dead, his only outs were the remaining 6′s, meaning he was about a 95% dog to win the hand anyway.

he tried to argue a bit that his hand had been “tabled” and so should still be live, but he knew he wasn’t going to win that battle. “ok”, he said, “show me the river and i’ll go”.

revealing the card that “woulda been” if the hand continued is called “rabbit hunting”, and it’s usually not allowed in tournaments. it serves no real purpose and slows the game down. but this was such a bizzare circumstance that the supervisor said “sure”, assuming that it might make the poor guy feel better to know he would have lost anyway.

so the dealer burned and turned… a 6

there are a lot of poker tournaments going on in las vegas during the world series. the WSOP has their bracelet events, plus two daily “deep stack” tournaments and two daily mega-satellites (for main event seats). then there’s the popular venetian “deepstack extravaganza”, caesar’s “mega stacks”, golden nugget “grand” series (plus the wynn series, aria dailies, and binion’s)

so which ones are “good”?

depends on how you define “good”… but i prefer structures that don’t become a complete “shove fest” after a couple hours. most low-buyin tournaments don’t meet that standard, and many mid-buyin tournaments (lets say 300 to 1500, which is the range i usually play) don’t either.

many tournament venues try to mask a lousy structure by starting with a ton of chips, but really all those extra chips buy you is a couple extra levels before things get silly. by the way, it’s completely understandable why tournament organizers love these “deep stack turbo” structures: a) it’s really hard to bust in the first couple hours, so the fish feel like they get their money’s worth, and b) the tournament won’t last that long (lower cost for dealer hours, etc.).

but from a skillful player’s perspective, a good structure for a mid-buyin tournament has a) “enough” starting chips, over 100 big blinds (“bb”) hopefully, b) “smooth” increases, (no big jumps), and c) longer levels (40 minutes minimum).

there are different ways to measure how good a structure is (see arnold snyder’s books, for example) but here’s an easy one: if you just maintain your starting stack, how deep will you be (in bb) after 4 hours? after 8 hours? this gives you some idea of whether you can afford to be patient if the cards aren’t running your way. the luxury of being patient is by far one of the most important things to a skilled player.

so… i made a spreadsheet and plugged in some numbers for several of the series running around vegas this summer, and for reference sake i included a few structures used at my “home”casino turning stone. here’s what we’ve got:

the dirty yellowish columns show how big your starting stack would be if you just tread water for 4 or 8 hours. a few observations:

1. there’s a widespread perception that the wsop $1000 and $1500 wsop bracelet events are pure crapshoots because they start with “only” 3000 or 4500 chips. it’s just not true. since the blinds start at 25/25 and the levels are long, these tournaments are on a par or better than the lower buyin “deepstack” events at venetian. there’s a little less play early, but a lot more play late — when the real money is on the line.
2. the venetian structure is quite a bit better than caesar’s
3. the wsop side events (daily deep stacks and mega sats) kinda suck. (no big surprise)
4. if you want good value in a low-buyin event in vegas this summer the golden nugget is easily the way to go.
5. the turning stone weekly events really really really really really suck. i LOVE playing tournaments, and turning stone is right down the road from where i live, but i can’t bring myself to play these things. i haven’t even mentioned the excessive rake or the mandatory dealer toke or the $2 “poker card” fee.

here’s my spreadsheet so you can add your own structures if you want. fill in the white columns and the blue and yellow columns will be automagically computed.

i chopped (i.e. tied for first-place money in) the main event of turning stone’s winter meltdown yesterday for a great start to my new poker year. the old saying goes “you gotta get lucky to win a poker tournament”. yeah, no kidding! yesterday:

• i made quads 3 times. unbelievable. and won important pots all 3 times. on one of those occasions i flopped quad fours and got paid by top pair, and on another one i flopped top set and got it all in behind a flopped flush, made quads on the turn to bust him. later made quad 4s again against a short stack all in, although he was already drawing dead against my set.
• flopped the nuts with a straight flush redraw — T8dd on 9d7d6c flop — and a guy 3-bet me all in on the flop for a lot of chips with a pair of black queens
• at the final table i reshoved tens into chipleader justin’s JJ and got saved on the turn
• also at final table i called tractor-hat don’s all-in with AK vs his A4 for most of my chips. flop T74 but no problem. turn Q, river J.

in addition to having way more than my fair share of luck, i played really well all day. i stole a tremendous number of pots without having to show hands. by the dinner break, i was the chip leader with about 150k chips and and 28 players left. but then came an seemingly endless draught of cards. i didn’t win a real pot for  2 hours and couldn’t find any opportunities to throw the weight of my big stack around. but i weathered the storm. by the time we were in the money i was an average stack but still in ok shape, and when we got to the final table i was one of the shorter stacks with 60k. justin the chip leader had a really big stack, probably like 350k of the 1,070,000 chips in play. the blinds at that point were probably 1500/3000. but after doubling up with TT vs JJ as mentioned above, and then busting a couple of the other shorter stacks, i was definitely back in contention.

when we got to 3 handed it was justin and me and a guy from canada. he played solidly but i could tell didn’t have much short-handed experience. justin was playing really well, but his stack wasn’t as imposing as it had been.

after playing a while 3-handed we stopped the clock to discuss a deal. the canadian guy had taken a couple big pots from the justin and they both had close to 400k, and i had 280k. we were probably at the 3000/6000  level at that point, so there was a lot of play left. an even chop would have got us over $9k each, and a chip-count deal looked like 10k for each of them and over 8k for me, which looked pretty good compared to the $5600 for 3rd. i would have probably taken it, but  justin wanted to play. fine with me… i had the canadian guy on my right, and as suspected he was not comfortable playing short handed at all. we leaned on him hard and dispatched him pretty quickly.

we played heads up for a little while and then stopped again to talk about a deal. at that point the score was 580k for justin and 490k for me, and i didn’t feel either of us had a skill edge. there was $6k real-money difference between 1st and 2nd. i proposed we make a “save” where we each take $10.5k or so and play for the couple grand left over. but the tournament director stepped in and said “you can’t make saves any more. the tournament coordinator says that once a deal is agreed on the tournament has to be over”. we both made a sour face at him, but decided to keep playing. we played for another 30 or 40 minutes  but we were still 50 bb deep (blinds at 5k/10k)  and neither one of us could make much headway. at this point we’d been playing about 15 hours. we got back to dead even, and justin said “ok, wanna chop it up?”. “sold.” but who gets the official “win”? we decided to high-card for it.  i drew a J and was looking good, but he pulled the A of hearts. that’s ok, i took home over $11k so i GUESS  i can live with a 2nd place finish

the heartland poker tour is in town. very well run, and they had a good turnout with 442 players in the $1650 buyin main event.

part of the reason for the good turnout is that turning stone “gave away” 100 seats (paid for by the jackpot drop). this is a pretty brilliant move by TS, and i hope they keep it up in the future.  a lot (most) of the giveaway seat recipients are dead money,  and the more dead money in a tournament the farther other people are willing to go out of their way to play it. and TS gets 150 juice on the 1650 free seat, so they’re getting a piece of their own jackpot drop. brilliant! this is a win/win/win for the lucky and grateful free seat recipients, for the good players who benefit from the dead money, and for the casino who gets a hefty fee for facilitating the transfer of wealth from the jackpot drop to the good tournament players.

about the structure: the structure was TOO good. 60 minute levels on day 1, with 75 minute levels after day 1, and a structure that started at 25/50 and included a 75/150 level, 2 150/300 levels (without and with 25 ante) and a 250/500 level.  the problem (if you can call it that!) was that despite this nice slow structure, we also started with 30,000 chips.  the published schedule said that they hoped to play down to 6 players on day 2. weeks ago i did some quick math based on a minimal 350 players (they needed 334 to meet the 500k guarantee) and a nominal final table average stack of 60 to 100bb, and calculated that they couldn’t possibly reach 6 players until several hours into day 3. i sent an email to a couple interested parties, warning them not to make any solid plans for early this week. sure enough, the tournament finished a full day behind schedule. c’mon guys, the math wasn’t that hard. if you want to keep it to 3 days, please consider reducing the starting stack and/ or eliminating  an early level or two, rather than reducing the length of the levels. 60 minute  levels rock!

as for my tournament, there’s not much to say. i kept my stack at a playable level through guile and deception for 11 hours, but it was a struggle. i never had any big pairs until late in the first day when i had QQ and had to fold on the turn, and KK when i reshoved my last 20bb preflop and got called by QQ. oops, there’s a Q on the flop. done. finis.

the most interesting hand of the day was one i lost. i called a raise on the button with 89. flop Q22 with 2 hearts and a spade, check check. turn 9 of spades, he checks, hmmm. i think i have the best hand, but it’s hard to get value out of it, because i feel like he  doesn’t have anything.  i check with intention of catching a river bluff  if a blank comes off.  river another 9, he leads out for 1000, about 2/3 of the pot.  i already decided on the turn he doesn’t have anything (would have bet a Q or any decent pair with 2 possible flush draws out) and this doesn’t change much, except now with my small boat i can beat something like TT. he might also have a 9 for a chop. i raise to 3000. the way i played the hand it doesn’t seem like i have anything either, so i’m hoping for a call from A high or maybe TT. to my surprise he makes it 6000. ugh. but i still like my read, he’s unlikely to have a Q. it’s either a weird bluff trying to get me to lay down an A, or a 9 for a chop. i ponder “i don’t see how i can be behind here”. i call. he shows QQ for flopped quads. “oh. well i guess you could have that” i say out loud. LOL