Two happy accidents

I had my best session ever last night, but it was due to the first of two happy accidents. I always pick the $50,000 buy in tournaments, since they're my sweet spot. However, I slipped a digit without realizing it, and selected a $500,000 tournament instead. I actually did this two times in a row. I never would have done that intentionally. Mirabile dictu, I made the money in both those super high roller tournaments! When it came time to pick a third tournament, I thought the lobby had somehow scrolled on me, since it was in the $500,000 buy in section; I scrolled down to the $50,000 tournaments and chose one. I hadn't realized my mistake yet. Finally, after playing my fourth tournament, I looked at my results for the session up to that point. I realized what a bone-headed thing I'd done, and how lucky I'd been not to drop a million play dollars in a matter of minutes!

The second happy accident was mistakenly selecting an 8-game tournament instead of a no limit hold'em one, then thinking I'd successfully cancelled my registration when I hadn't. It took a long time for that 8-game table to fill up, but it finally did. When it did, I was in the crucial final stage of a hold'em tournament, heads up, and was taken completely by surprise when another tournament window appeared on the screen. I had to divide my attention between the two tournaments for about 5 minutes, and ended up coming in second in the no limit hold'em one. For the next hour, I played the 8-game tournament, had a blast, and ended up winning it. I actually had to quickly look up how to play some of the games on Wikipedia, while I was playing!

I was very pleasantly surprised by two huge advantages the 8-game tournaments have over the no limit hold'em ones:

1. the starting stack is $1,500, triple the starting stack of the hold'em tournaments
2. the blinds don't escalate, for whatever reason

A nice bonus is that it's fun to play flavors other than hold'em once in a while. The two advantages taken together lead to longer tournaments, and to a higher premium on skill. The 8-game is my new favorite tournament type!

buy_in entry_fee num_players num_hands place winnings

450000     50000           6        24     2   945000
450000     50000           6        46     2   945000
 45000      5000           6        22     3        0
 45000      5000           6         6     6        0
 45000      5000           6        34     1   175500
 45000      5000           6         5     5        0
 45000      5000           6        56     2    94500
 45000      5000           6       175     1   175500

delta: $1,035,500
tournament balance: $1,824,590
balance: $8,707,289