Archive for September 8th, 2010

Today was the $300 Antes Up WCOOP event, which I think is just a fantastic tournament structure. For those who don’t know, the blinds stay at 5/5 for the entire tournament, but the antes increase with each level. So like the stakes could be 5/5/120, with a pre-flop pot of 1090 but blinds of just 5.

When you put players in unfamiliar situations like this, you can see quickly who is playing poker and who is just clicking buttons or parroting things they read in a book. Notice that in an unraised pot with the stakes I mentioned in the example above, a player will be getting 218:1 to limp into the pot pre-flop. There’s really no excuse for open folding ever, but people did it left and right. Likewise people had no idea how to size their pre-flop raises, how to play in multi-way pots, etc. It was awesome.

Here’s a big pot I won as a result of taking advantage of huge odds I was getting with a junk hand pre-flop:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 320 Tournament, 5/5 Blinds 40 Ante (9 handed) – Poker-Stars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

MP3 (t5725)
CO (t1471)
Hero (Button) (t5430)
SB (t7852)
BB (t4963)
UTG (t4855)
UTG+1 (t5175)
MP1 (t6062)
MP2 (t4005)

Hero’s M: 14.68  Read the complete post...

From yesterday’s $300 6-max shootout WCOOP:

I’m curious how you all would handle this river. The table generally had been pretty aggressive pre-flop, and believe it or not I’d been pretty well behaved. Villain was the most aggressive 3-better, with a 3B% of about 10.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 320 Tournament, 50/100 Blinds 10 Ante (5 handed) – Poker-Stars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

BB (t8552)
Hero (UTG) (t8895)
MP (t5126)
Button (t3522)
SB (t3905)

Hero’s M: 44.48

Preflop: Hero is UTG with A, Q
Hero bets t255, 1 fold, Button raises to t600, 2 folds, Hero calls t345

Flop: (t1400) Q, 9, 2 (2 players)
Hero checks, Button bets t588, Hero calls t588

Turn: (t2576) 5 (2 players)
Hero checks, Button checks

River: (t2576) 4 (2 players)
Hero bets t1111, Button raises to t2324 (All-In)

1213 for me to call, so I’m getting about 5-to -1.