Satellite Saturday, and why people suck at Limit

After ending the last entry last night I checked on the Bay101 website to see the various tournaments that they run weekly. They have a WPT Satellite every day at 8:15 AM or 9:30 AM. A Satellite tournament basically is a tournament where the top seats get seats to a bigger tournament as well as cash from the prize pool. The remainder of my night was filled with delusions about playing in the WPT with all these 'poker celebs', and/or selling the $10k ticket voucher to the big WPT Bay101 Shooting Stars tournament in March. I plan on at least going and seeing the various poker pros in person.

Anyway, I instantly set my alarm to 7:30 AM because the Saturday tournament is at 8:15 AM, and I feel very excited actually to play this tournament. I haven't been excited to play poker in a LOONNGGG time. I would find out this morning that it was really nothing to be excited about and the delusions of selling the 2-3 tickets I would win, making mucho monies, dissapeared.

I had a hard time sleeping because of all the various strategies and thoughts about tournament play last night as I decided to play in this tournament, but I eventually fell asleep and got to the casino at 8:00 AM. There was a looooonnggg line to sign up for the tournament. I got the 142nd tournament entry that costs 105+15+5 (15 and 5 for entry fees), and couldn't even play because they did not have enough tables available for the tournament. So what happens is you have to wait til people get knocked out to accomodate. It's not THAT bad because you can enter with an addon and a rebuy for extra chips for 100$ for each. I play some 8/16 in which I lose with AA, QQ, AJs, and win a huge pot with 7c4c, and call a guy's bluff with King high to end up $40.

So I enter in the 3rd round when blinds are 100/200 starting with T3000 chips (T denotes tournament chips as not to be confused with $). I really didn't do anything special except steal a big blind who had just quit the tournament and was not there for a free T300 as the sb folded. After that much folding ensued, and here and there I got hands where at the point was a all-in or nothing. General rule of thumb is if you have 10x bigblind or less you should pretty much be pushing all-in or nothing at all.

I did this a few times with pocket pairs, big Aces, and what not and eventually had 99 UTG with 5300 chips, blinds were 300/600. I push and am insta-called on SB's turn who had KK and I lose. 85th place. Oh well, good play leads to 75 places away from the money and 82 places away from that 10k voucher. Always next weekend when I can play the morning tournaments with no classes.

Earlier when I knew I was pretty much all-in or nothing situation I had myself put up on the 20/40 list, and when I got knocked out I went over to play 20/40 at 11:15 AM. It'd be an understatement to say I ran sick hot. Everytime someone say checkraises my C-bet when I have overs and a gutshot straight draw, I hit my straight on the turn. The table was also very very weak. A regular, David, and another older Asian guy were the only other winners on the table and they play a more tight/uber conservative style for the most part. Well maybe not David, but he usually gets outta my way and I his. I was really tired as it got closer to 1:00 PM, but I couldn't leave until some of the terribad players went busto or else I'd be leaving too much opportunity at the table, not to mention my image was great for the style I like to play. Eventually the biggest of the donators had left, and I took my leave to go home and help clean up the house as we are having guests over.

I mentioned that I'd also talk about why people suck at limit hold'em. I gained a lot of insight from reading various poker blogs, specifically reading one from a well known limit hold'em specialist. Not much limit is really shown on TV to start with, but the biggest part of limit that makes players bad is the variance. A big portion of why poker in general is somewhat hard to learn is because of the way humans learn things. It is easy to make big mistakes and be rewarded winning feeding positive reinforcement about how you should call someone's all-in with a flush draw when you clearly do not have the odds to play it. Likewise, the opposite is obviously in place when someone might raise preflop with AA and lose to T8o, and decide its not a good idea to be raising with AA. Limit is the easiest form of poker that make people fall into this trap of reversal of reinforcements. When pros play limit, they do not win as many pots as say a NL player, but the pots they do win are big, and easily make up for the pots they lose. This makes for huge variance, and even the strongest pros can even go breakeven or worse for 150k hands at limit. Okay that is all, I can probably elaborate more if you ask me about it on AIM or in person or what not.

Dan Low