What happens in a big tournament if you don’t play at all? I had been curious about that question, but certainly not curious enough to pay money to find out. Even if no Online Casino Malaysia money was involved, I never signed up for a tournament that I didn’t feel like I had time to play in. It looked like I would simply stay curious.
Then, a stroke of bad luck served to satisfy my curiosity. A few useless hands into a 10,000 chip tournament, my server froze. I couldn’t get back in for another couple of hours, and by that time I was eliminated from the tournament. I, or at least my user name, finished in 375th place out of about 1400. Sadly, that was the best that I had done for close to a week at the time.
The 375th place finish gave me two points in the league, which means that maybe they should rethink their scoring system somewhat. In large real money tournaments, the payout structure is organized so that anyone sitting out the whole time will certainly be eliminated without getting paid. I think that the benchmark for scoring should be performance compared to how one would do if they sat out the whole time, but I have no idea how to construct a mathematical formula to make it so.
If you agree, or disagree, or are just confused please let me know by commenting.
Arriving Late to a Tournament
By late, I don’t mean a couple of minutes. I mean something like 45 minutes after the start of a freeplay game with a thousand players and a starting stack of ten thousand chips, which is what I did this afternoon.
When I got there, I still had over nine thousand chips left. I also had an ace and eight and paired both to get a bunch of chips. I did manage to increase my stack up to over 20,000 chips, but it was downhill from there. I couldn’t bring myself to call a large bet with top pair and a decent kicker, and it turned out that I would’ve won. By that point, the blinds were big relative to my stack and so were the opposing chip stacks and I got bullied out of some more chips. I eventually pushed in with pocket sixes, but I had waited for the flop – a flop that gave someone else a set of 2s while I would’ve beat the other person in the pot.
Would I have pushed my opponent with the deuces out of the pot if I’d pushed all in immediately? I don’t know, but I probably wouldn’t have had to bet those sixes if I had played earlier to build up my stack against the weaker players and then it wouldn’t have been so easily bullied.
I also might have lost in the first few hands. I haven’t done that yet, but it could happen eventually.
Fake Fortune Fading Fast
Full Tilt Poker has certainly upped the stakes for its play money games.
Until recently, becoming a play money billionaire would have been an incredibly time consuming endeavor even with perfect play. With the highest stakes no limit tables having a maximum buy-in of two hundred thousand chips and the highest stakes tournament being a 100,000 play money dollars sit & go, making a million every day would have been the most that anyone could reasonably expect. At that rate, reaching the billion dollar plateau would take at least three years.
Anyone who could win that consistently would be much better off playig for real money, since the game is the same. Unfortunately for me, I can’t win with that sort of consistency.
My performance a couple of days ago made that quite clear.
After a confidence boosting second place finish in a 100k sit & go, I dared venture into the uncharted waters of the million play chip sit & go. I was very lucky at first, and jumped out to an early lead that I kept for a while. Then I must’ve lost my life preserver, because I got outplayed and drowned with a useless 4th place finish. I was set up after a short stack showed the cards that I folded to were not a bluff but not quite as good as my pair of aces with a decent kicker. That made me think I had a good enough chance with top pair but a pair on the board after a similarly large late bet by the same player. That player had actually flopped trip 4s and I was suddenly the short stack. I tried to double up with AQ , but ran into AK against the same player and lost.
Instead of cutting my losses, I played another one of those million chip tournaments and finished in 5th place out of 9. That put me under 2 million chips for my account, but I won a few hundred thousand in the high stakes play money ring game. I haven’t played since but I will probably play for free somewhere tonight.
I still have a lot to learn. At least I’m not paying actual money to better players in my quest to improve my own game.
