Hey Carmen!

I feel your pain. Been there; done that; have the scars. No, you don’t suck or at least not any worse than all the rest of us.

First off. You are in a freeroll. Who’s your competition?

• If it is after 4, middle schoolers who haven’t figure out how to steal their parents credit card. (On the net, it is always after 4 somewhere in the world.)
• Lunch hour Joe who can only play for a bit. So, he has no goal to last beyond the 15 minutes he has before work returns.
• Soccer Mom who has about 15 minutes more than Joe before she has to climb in the family’s mini-van.
• Timid ring guy who came to blow off steam and not look like Casper Milktoast for a few minutes.
• The new expert who picked it all up watching a season of Poker Shows. Mike and Vince gave him a game based on big pots, bluffing, and the power of any wired pair.

All that translates to VARIANCE. The suckouts early are huge and often.

If you are playing it seriously, you turn into a rock for the first hour. Play position and pot odds with a willingness to fold early top pairs. You are playing wimp poker for as small a pot as you can manufacture. There is no such thing as advanced plays in the first couple of hours.

As the second hour starts, you can open up a bit. You are still conservative but using your position more with some implied odds play. You are still looking to play small pot (post flop) poker. If you could chart the average freeroll player’s stack, that chart will typically look like a view of the Rockies. It is the prototype of the big pot player. Look at a pros chart and the good ones show a study rise. Now, the freeroll isn’t going to give you that easy a go at that but it is still the goal.

In the third hour, you start to play poker. Here’s where your read of Harrington Vol 1. kicks into full gear. Again we are trying to play small pot poker to build a stack but aren’t nearly as timid as in the past. There are enough big pot luckboxes still around to keep us thinking stack conservation. It is also the point you are bored out of your socks and can get bit by the boredom tilt.

Well into the 3^rd hour or maybe the 4^th, the bubble is approaching. Hopefully, you pick up good cards. If not, you play position and really vary your game. You want to avoid approaching an M = 10. When your stack is getting low you either become toast or a luckbox. The idea is to use your stack power in a prudent but advanced manner. Harrington Vol 1 and 2 has now become your god. There are any number of others but he started explaining it and still does it as well as we could hope. Until that is ingrained, reread rather than move on to something like “Kill Everyone”.

I’ve chatted with JBHarshaw – who has some nice articles on tournament play in our archives – and others and the consensus is that you still need 3 or more suckouts falling your way. You can do it all right and still end up with 4 hours that’d been more profitably spent asking if they want you to Supersize it. So, you can’t lose faith in your game and just run off and try another idea. Winning a freeroll is about as likely as winning the big one at the Rio. Failure isn’t to be embraced but it has to be expected in a rational manner.

I’ve approached all this building a lovely chart to success. Well, we all know that is a bunch of malarkey. You still have to trust yourself as much as the plan and be willing to back up your game. Yeah, I’m happy to see the big stack luckbox moved to my table – hopefully, to my right. I am going to ring the bell on that ATM if I get the chance. Suckout or not, he may just sideline me. But, I’m forced to play the game offered instead of the game I’m trying to manufacture. You plan. You adopt. You do it as well as you can. Win or lose there are no apologies necessary. It is all about adding experience to hopefully do better the next time out.

ADDENDUM:

Tis the season to want to raise taxes but not tell us the cost. Love those politicians thinking we don’t know anything about rake. Our economy has gone through a lot since 9/11 and we’ve managed to stay ahead of the curve. That was in no small part to tax relief that helped the economy expand. If you don’t fully understand the relationship, this article about wondrous equality and high standards for all will explain it to you. Heinlein said it suscinctly, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” or TANSTAFL.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 9:45 am and is filed under Tournaments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.