Secrets of the Amateurs

On reflection, I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over a tournament in which the following happened :

- I lost 45K "Sklansky Chips" in preflop allin situations
- I flopped one set in 22 hours and didn't get on
- I had a net chip loss with AA over the tournament
- I had a ridiculously tough table on Day 1

Now, it's true that I had some "hidden luck". No one came over one of my 3-bets in 22 hours [1]. I had a couple of key pots on Day 2 when I was low and I would have been in big trouble if my opponent had hit the flop (with whatever he was holding). But it's a stretch to call my luck even average over the 3 days, and as I said before, you need a hell of a lot more than average luck to go deep.

If there's one thing I might have done it's make a couple or three river folds. Having said that, I played all the hands to induce on turn and river and when you do that it's really not a big leak to make those calls. Other players might well have lost the same amount and not even got to showdown, while losing value against any worse hands. I probably should have folded the Aces against the king of the nits on a TTxxK board, but the other two I can live with.

Overall, once I broke my 0/3 streak of unlucky table draws (counting 2007 and this year), I could see how much value this event really is. Amateurs just can't keep it together for 10 hours of poker, unless they're constantly increasing their stack. So many people fall apart once they lose a pot or two, or can't make anything happen for a level. You can almost see them thinking "I had 50K an hour ago .. jeez, got to get it back". Some of the plays I saw on Day 3 were so bad, generally when people were scared to play multiple streets and made overbets that would get called by a better hand and only a better hand. Or ludicrous river checks with big hands because people didn't want to get raised when they weren't holding the nuts.

I'm definitely going to stay till Friday, why not. Playing online tomorrow, we'll see how that goes, mostly in terms of physical comfort playing on a laptop without my space-age chair. Then I have the option of playing the Venetian $5K on Monday or online for the rest of the trip, or even having a couple of days off, it is allowed :-).

[1] Technically the old guy on Day 3 put his 25K in on top of my 15K 3-bet. Seeing as I was committed and I had the best hand though, I don't think that counts.