Sunday MTT Report

This past Sunday, I played another round of tournaments. Obviously, for me, a "round of tournaments" on Sundays doesn't mean the Sunday Million and Warmup and the Second Chance and the 750 and the Brawl and the Mulligan - it means the $5.50 GSOP and the BBT Freeroll.

I ran extremely hot and won the GSOP, which was PLO8 this week. I know nearly nothing about PLO8 and basically just coolered the hell out of everyone the entire way. Ship the $48 and 2nd GSOP bracelet this season to noted MTT specialist and excellent poker player, me.

Then in the BBT freeroll, I again managed to catch every card in the deck and made the final table, though I ended up busting in 5th. By far the most interesting hand I played the entire time was already posted as a comment in my previous blog entry by one of the villains, and I feel like it deserves some deeper analysis.

The Hand
Villains are two red pros. I had Ali something like 17/14 going into this hand and Jeremiah something like 30/23. Both are obviously competent and appear to be playing seriously, and both have seen me playing nothing but very straightforward poker and luckboxing my way to a huge stack. Preflop, I strongly consider squeezing but I think I fold all worse hands except pairs and I think Ali might even lay down 88 to me here, so I ultimately decide to take a flop in position. This reasoning might be wrong and I might just want to ship for value here - I don't know, I know nothing about MTTs.

On this somewhat drawy low flop, I think Ali bets a lot of his missed overcards this way. I think he makes a larger bet if he actually has the overpair that I think he is trying to represent, so I think his range is pretty weak and I basically decide to float and steal the pot on the turn. But then Jeremiah calls. I feel kind of the same way about Jeremiah's range here - I think he usually raises with top pair or better on a flop like this, so I don't think he's very strong most of time, and I think there are a lot of floats in his range because he also thinks that Ali's range is weak. I call getting 3:1, figuring that sometimes I can make a pair and have basically the nuts and sometimes when I miss the turn I can make a move and take it down. The fact that I have the ace of diamonds will give me some flexibility going into the turn and also militates in favor of floating.

When the turn misses me and checks through, I stick with my plan and bet to take the pot away. I'm basically trying to rep to these two good players that I'm even more of a fish than I actually am and that I flatted the flop against two opponents with a strong made hand. I think I can make these two red pros buy that story a lot of the time, since I think they know that a lot of the players in this tournament will do what I'm repping I did. So I put in a bet that I think a fish with the nuts would make. Ali folds but then Jeremiah shoves over me, and when he does, I basically hate everything and want to die.

I'm confused as hell and I have no clue what he could possibly have when he takes this line. I'm not sure if he would play a big made hand like 66, 22, 77, 76, or possibly slyly-flatted JJ+ like this - I feel like he would have raised on the flop with those holdings, but this is a tournament and I know nothing about tournament play and I feel like maybe slowplaying hands like that for value is something people do. His bluffs include hands like 33, 44, 55, and hands like mine that he still has because he had a plan similar to my own on the flop going into the turn and is now following through. If he has missed overcards, I'm ahead of him, and if he has any sort of draw, I'm ahead of him, but the thing that ultimately pushed me toward folding was that fact that a decent portion his bluffs are underpairs that are actually ahead of me.

Afterwards, Jeremiah claimed to have 54 and in the hand history he posted on the last entry of this blog, he has 5s4s. The possibility that he could have been semibluffing with a draw was a pretty remote consideration in my head during the hand. I think this is because I personally like to raise on the flop with strong draws to balance my value raising range, and I feel like this is a pretty standard policy and I expect a lot of other players to do this. I also feel like there are so many bad turn cards that can ruin the value of a draw on the flop that flatting with a draw is really dangerous. I guess I'm not really sold on the whole idea of semibluffing the turn, even though I've seen it advocated by a lot of people including Barry Greenstein, just because I feel like even with a strong draw, there's only one card coming so your equity when called can't be that fantastic. But I guess if I was willing to consider the possibility that he does this with a set, I should have been willing to consider that he would do it with a draw to balance.

Even if I had weighted his draws heavily, I still I think I probably would have folded, partially because of fear of the top of his range and partially because of MTT dynamics and fear of busting leading to reluctance to make extremely thin high-variance herocalls.

Finally, I briefly considered the possibility that I was being leveled, but quickly dismissed it because I didn't think I'd given Jeremiah any reason to think that I would be capable of thinking deeply enough to be leveled.

Hands like this basically make me feel like I'm hopeless at poker. I guess this is why Jeremiah is a pro and I'm just some random scrub-a-dub blogger.

Battle of the Bloggers Tournament

You may notice that in the sidebar of this blog, there is a little Battle of the Bloggers badge. This is because I have been playing in the BBT for the past few weeks. This blog got noticed by someone at Full Tilt and I got an invite to play in this series of freerolls, and, being the degenerate edgemonger that I am and salivating over the prospect of like $7 of equity, I've been playing in them almost every week. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to play tournaments and I haven't cashed a single one of them. But hopefully I can luckbox at least a few free dollars out of this before it's over, and maybe get some new readers for my blog.

However, I did manage to bink the $5.50 NLHE tournament in the Goon Series of Poker a couple of weeks ago - ship the $40. I ran really good at every crucial stage of the tournament and don't at all feel like I ever outplayed anyone the entire way and was generally clueless like I am in every tournament. Sometimes a monumental run of cards is all it takes.

I've given some serious consideration to switching from cash games to tournaments, largely based on the reasoning that tournaments attract more fish and are better propositions for a strong player in the long run even though they are much higher variance. I still have a few hundred Gold Chips and some Gold Cards left on Cake and I've been thinking about using them to play satellites and freerolls to learn tournaments. But I think that, at least for the time being, I am going to keep my primary focus on cash games. I feel like there are still a lot of things that I want to prove to myself in the cash game arena before tackling MTTs.