I won the Poker Stars $100 deep stack last night for about $7000. The structure on these is phenomenal: I had over 100 BB’s for more than half the tournament, including much of the final table. Playing a deep stacked final table is really a great experience, and a good player can have a tremendous edge. With fewer than ten attempts, I’ve won this tournament twice.
So why do I play it so infrequently? It’s at an inconvenient time (7 PM on Saturday night) and takes FOREVER. I didn’t get to sleep until 5AM last night, which of course I don’t mind when I win $7000, but had I gone out earlier, even at the final table, it would have been really annoying.
I may start playing it more often, however, because the play was just awful. Both times that I won, I felt extraordinarily confident even when dozens of players remained that it was really just a matter of time until I got all the chips. I’ve rarely felt that way in a regular online tournament, because the rapidly escalating blinds make it a crapshoot no matter how bad the opposition may be. But even successful tournament players have difficulty navigating the final table and final table bubble with deep stacks, because their favorite move of shoving all their chips in the middle and praying for the best is much less effective. There were players open shoving 120 BB’s on the final table bubble, which is just absurd. I once folded AQ to such a shove, knowing I was ahead of this idiot’s range, simply because I felt my edge against the field was way too large to jeopardize on a 60/40 for 250 BB’s.
I was so exhausted while playing that I don’t recall any particularly interesting hands. I’m probably going to post the hand history some time soon and when I review it I may even put together a summary, so hopefully that will make up for it.