Over the top

It's a wonderful thing to have a big stack in a tournament. Since everyone starts with the same size stack, it takes skill and luck to build yours up. If you can manage to do it, though, you've gained an incredible advantage over the rest of the table. This is tournament 101, of course. The funny thing is, when your stack gets big enough, it starts to act like a chip magnet. You start winning a lot of pots before the flop; people won't even take you on without a really good starting hand. You also start winning a lot of pots betting on the flop; people get scared that if they call, you'll put them all in on a later street. They're also scared that if they raise, you'll come over the top and put them all in on the current street. So they take the prudent course and fold. Of course, the more pots you win, the larger your stack grows, and the more frightening it becomes, causing your opponents to fold with even more alacrity. At some point you pass a tipping point, and your stack becomes an unstoppable juggernaut. Opponents won't be able to win by betting, since the size of your stack will put them all in on every serious confrontation, and the law of averages dictates that they'll lose. You only have to win one time to beat them, whereas they have to beat you multiple times. Opponents also won't be able to win by not betting, as their stacks will get eaten away by the ever escalating blinds. In short, at a certain point your victory is assured. That's exactly what happened to me in the final tournament I entered last night. Take it from me, it was sweet! 

This is an excerpt from my August 18, 2012 post. It perfectly describes what happened last night as well. There are two major differences between the two tournaments, however:

1. the earlier tournament was a six seat sit and go; last night's was a multiple table tournament with 184 entries

2. in the earlier tournament, the buy in was $150,000; in last night's, it was $5,000,000

Taken together, that means there was a colossal difference in the sizes of the prize pools - $750,000 vs. $809,600,000. That in turn meant there was a colossal difference in the sizes of the first place payouts: $585,000 vs. $161,110,000. The bottom line? I made a bigger profit in one night than in all of the previous nights combined, and am now resoundingly back in the blue :-)

style flavor  buy_in    entry players entries paid place   winnings

MTT   NLHE   4400000   600000       8     184   31     1  161110000

delta: $151,110,000
MTT NLHE balance: $244,571,468
2022 balance: $171,207,000
blue distance: $0
balance: $266,050,953