I don't play well on Saturdays. Never have. Sundays, however, I am King of the Online Poker Universe. Saturday--didn't cash in a single tournament. Today I am undefeated. First place every time. (Oh shiat. Isn't the T2V tourney on a Saturday? Damn. Dead Money.)
Sometimes you just know you're in The Zone. During my last tournament, I was in first place for about 90% of the time, and when it came down to heads up, I had a $25000-to-$2000 chip lead. And the blinds were $300 and $600. My opponent lasted exactly four hands.
Most online no-limit players are complete donkeys when they have the goods. Risking $3000 to pick up $125 worth of blinds is one of the dumber moves I see happening on a regular basis. Following it up by showing your pocket Aces afterwards is just good comedy. That's taking the old maxim of "Better to win a small pot than to lose a big one" to the limit of reasonable-ness. Funny how none of those guys are ever left at the end.
People put way too much stock in the strength of having an Ace in the pocket. It doesn't do much good unless it has friends. And if I've got any kind of pair with less than two face cards on the board, my opponent is working with a three-outer. I'll take those odds every hand. Of course, it's even easier online because nobody wants to fold an ace, so even if I have three opponents, a lot of times they are all usually waiting for the case Ace.
Aggression is very useful, especially the deeper you go into a tournament. But over-using the All-In tool renders it ineffective. Like they say, when all you have is a hammer, every situation seems like a nail. I love playing against the guys that go all-in too early and too often. Sticky hates playing with them, and they always earn a stream of expletives from her, but I love having them at my table, especially on my right. They always bust out.
Blind-stealing is extremely effective later in a tournament. And you're much more successful at it when you have a big stack. Once we got to $200/$400 on the blinds and I had a monster chip lead, nobody even called my big blind again until we were down to in-the-cash with four players left. They didn't want to tangle with the big stack and risk getting knocked out.
Of course, in order to get to that point, you have to cultivate the image of a tight/aggressive player and fold stuff like Ace/junk, King/Ten, or suited connectors (really, how often to you get a straight flush?) early on in the tournament. When the blinds are low and everyone is just calling, most people like to see flops. Not me--that's when I'm the tightest. Last week I folded my way to fourth place before ever winning a single pot. Sometimes being card-dead is a good thing.
A lot of my opponents win the battles but lose the war. They take it personally when I raise their blinds, and when it happens a few times in a row, they think I'm gunning for them personally and that I really don't have a hand. So they go on tilt and start making huge raises or going all-in with any high card when I'm on the big blind. And I'll let them take a few off of me, and then they think they own me. But then they overplay their hand at the wrong time and get knocked out. People assume that when they go all in against a big stack they're either going to pick up the pot right then or double up. Sometimes the guy with a big stack actually has a hand.
I'm amazed at how many people will call an All-In raise after the flop when all they have is Ace high. I almost never do it unless I have at least a pair.
I think I finally understand what Doyle Brunson said about calling--Don't just call, either raise or fold. Great advice, especially pre-flop.
A couple of years ago, I bought a poker practice program called Turbo Texas Holdem. There's a setting on the software where you can have tricky boards--lots of pairs, possible straights and flushes, etc. I swear to God that PokerStars has their tournament software wired to do the same thing. Every board it seems has overcards, pairs, or three-to-a-straight or flush. Rarely do I see a raggy flop.
It is beyond the time to retire this shitty computer. It doesn't have enough RAM to allow me to play more than one tournament at a time, I can't use the T2V chat while I'm playing, and it only has 800 x 600 resolution on this 17" monitor. Sometimes I can watch another table if Sticky, Dougie, or Snert are playing at the same time, but it's like walking on thin ice whenever I do. Oh, and one of the "features" of Windows Millenium is that every so often the mouse and keyboard go unresponsive and you have to reboot the computer--and it's happened to me three times this weeked during tournaments. You have never seen Mikey angry until you've seen me go all-in on the bubble and have my computer lock up. It's not a pretty sight. If Bill Gates ever goes missing and they find him three days later all beat to shit with the letters "WinME" carved into his forehead, it's a fair bet that my name would be on the short list of suspects. Wait, what am I saying? I'm sure there are thousands of people out there who'd like to do the same thing. Maybe I should just sell a kidney and get a Mac.
Mikey
No comments:
Post a Comment