The pride tax

When you have success at poker, it's easy to feel proud of yourself. All too easy, as it turns out. If you're not on your guard, you'll quickly fall into the trap of believing you're better than you really are. Fortunately, poker has a solution for that :-) I call it the pride tax. Poker makes sure you never get too big for your britches by giving you a recurring diet of humbling experiences. What could be more humbling than not winning a single hand in a tournament? That's happened to me 40 times in rebuy tournaments. Almost as humbling is only winning a single hand. That's happened to me 90 times in rebuys, including Wednesday night's. These experiences are speaking loudly and cleary, and what they're saying is, "You may think you're good, and you may even be a little bit good, but you're not that good. Get over yourself!" :-)

style flavor buy_in entry players hands entries paid place winnings

MTT-R NLHE    43500  6500       9    31      45    9    26        0

delta: $-200,000
MTT with rebuys NLHE balance: $46,621,000
2019 balance: $13,297,250
balance: $59,881,510

The highest chaparral

What I mean by the high chaparral ... is the number of positive deltas at the top of the list of a session's hand deltas, when this list has been sorted in descending order by absolute value.

This is an excerpt from my blog post of July 23, 2014. Now I want to introduce another term - the highest chaparral. This is when the high chaparral count is equal to the number of positive deltas in the session. In other words, every positive hand delta of the session is greater in magnitude than every negative hand delta of the session. In a losing cause last night, I achieved the highest chaparral. Of course, the fewer positive hand deltas you have, the easier it is to achieve, but even so, it ain't easy :-)

style flavor buy_in entry players hands entries paid place winnings

MTT-R NLHE    43500  6500       9    31      61   15    29        0

delta: $-100,000
MTT with rebuys NLHE balance: $46,821,000
2019 balance: $13,497,250
balance: $60,081,510

.29 is mighty fine

The gold standard for batting average in baseball is .400. Very few players have achieved it. Every sport has its gold standards, and poker is no exception. Yes, I just said that poker is a sport, and yes, I meant it :-) My guess is that the gold standard for making the money in tournament poker is somewhere in the .300 to .350 range. My average in MTT-R NLHEs is currently .296 (272 of 920). .29 is mighty fine :-)

style flavor buy_in entry players hands entries paid place winnings

MTT-R NLHE    43500  6500       9    56      62   15    24        0

delta: $-200,000
MTT with rebuys NLHE balance: $46,921,000
2019 balance: $13,597,250
balance: $60,181,510

The 60 million dollar man

Back in the 70's, when I was a teenager, one of the popular T.V. shows was "The Six Million Dollar Man". It starred Lee Majors as Steve Austin, a test pilot who has parts of his body cybernetically enhanced after a bad crash. Six million dollars was the cost of the enhancements. Last night, my career balance topped 60 million play dollars for the first time. Not taking inflation into account, I could pay for 10 play Steve Austins :-)

style flavor buy_in entry players hands entries paid place winnings

MTT-R NLHE    43500  6500       9   133      55   12     3  1492000

delta: $1,392,000
MTT with rebuys NLHE balance: $47,121,000
2019 balance: $13,797,250
balance: $60,381,510

Punctuated equilibrium

Two hands from last night's session really stand out. On hand 14, I tripled up with pocket nines. On hand 26, I lost 7,550 in chips to hit the felt with KQo (king queen offsuit). The rest of the hands were much ado about nothing :-)

style flavor buy_in entry players hands entries paid place winnings

MTT-R NLHE    43500  6500       9    43      47   12    30        0

delta: $-200,000
MTT with rebuys NLHE balance: $45,729,000
2019 balance: $12,405,250
balance: $58,989,510

The money up top

It's easy to kid yourself in poker, but eventually the truth will stare you in the face, as long as you don't have your eyes closed :-) Lately, I've been kidding myself that I'm perfectly happy playing 8-game. I'm not. I'm pining for MTT-R NLHEs. The reason is a tad shameful - I'm addicted to the gigantic up top money that only MTT-R NLHEs can provide. When you're used to seeing 3 to 5 million as the first place payout, 700 thousand sure feels like chump change :-)

style flavor buy_in entry players hands entries paid place winnings

MTT   8-Game  45000  5000       6    66      50    9    17        0

delta: $-50,000
MTT 8-game balance: $1,108,170
2019 balance: $12,605,250
balance: $59,189,510

Frisky late

It's time, once again, to crib from myself :-) Here's an excerpt of what I had to say on January 23:

It's okay to play friskily in a tournament sometimes, but the closer you get to the money, the less frisky you should be. To my detriment, I failed to follow that advice last night ...

When the field was two spots from the money, I played way too loosely on my penultimate hand, and lost 94% of my stack. If I'd just gone on a foldfest instead, I probably would have made the money. Oops!

style flavor buy_in entry players hands entries paid place winnings

MTT   8-Game  45000  5000       6    65      59   12    14        0

delta: $-50,000
MTT 8-game balance: $1,158,170
2019 balance: $12,655,250
balance: $59,239,510