You were never shovelier

This marks the third time I've used this blog post title. What can I say? I like it a lot. In case you missed those earlier posts, what I mean by a shovely hand is a hand which is good enough to shove (go all in) with. When you're at a certain stage in a tournament, you need to start looking for shovely hands. When you find one, you can silently say to it, "You were never shovelier" :-)

One thing about playing tournaments is that you end up playing significantly more hands per session than you do playing cash games. To illustrate, let's just run the numbers, shall we? In 841 sessions of cash game poker, I'm averaging 71.84 hands per session. In 124 sessions of tournament poker, I'm averaging 184.16 hands per session. With that many hands, you tend not to remember most of them. The ones you do remember, though, are quite likely to be hands you took bad beats on. That was the case with my most memorable hand of last night's session. I was dealt ace ten offsuit, went all in preflop, and got one caller. I was a 58.56 favorite before the flop, a 53.13 favorite after the flop, and a 70.45 favorite after the turn. However, it wasn't meant to be. My opponent hit a straight on the river, and I was gone from tournament in 3rd place.

buy_in entry_fee num_players num_hands place winnings

 45000      5000           6         9     4        0
 45000      5000           6        43     1   175500
 45000      5000           6        15     3        0
 45000      5000           6        18     4        0
 45000      5000           6         4     5        0
 45000      5000           6        32     3        0
 45000      5000           6        23     3        0
 45000      5000           6         8     5        0

delta: $-224,500
tournament balance: $2,108,090
balance: $8,990,789