On Sunday afternoon, PocketFiver Nate Avenson authored a post entitled, “Playing 87 MTTs Today.” The thread simply began, “Anyone else close to that?” When the smoke cleared, Avenson had bought into a full slate of events for a total of $1,014 in buy-ins. The stakes ranged from a scant $2 all the way up to $150 and Avenson saw his bank account grow by $197, a 19.43% return on investment. So what does it take to play 87 multi-table tournaments in one day? Can the results be replicated in the future? What was the inspiration for this unique way to spend a Sunday? PocketFives.com sat down with Avenson to find out.
Avenson admitted that his typical Sunday consists of about 36 online poker tournaments. Last week, fellow PocketFiver Shaun shaundeeb Deeb (pictured at left) entered a colossal 100 multi-table tournaments in a single day, which gave Avenson the idea to “go big or go home,” as he told PocketFives.com. Avenson noted that textbook moves characterize play in micro-level tournaments: “I played 57 tournaments two weeks ago and it wasn’t that hard at all. A big part of that is the micro-stakes. When you’re playing mid- or high-stakes, you face a lot of decisions. There are also a lot more aggressive players. In micro-stakes games, people are constantly gifting you chips. You don’t have to worry about making bluffs.”The bulk of Avenson’s 87 tournaments came with price tags between $5 and $20. Roughly seven to eight new events kicked off every hour, starting at 11:00am and ending at Midnight. Talk about a full day! On how he accommodated up to 16 tables at a time during his feat, Avenson told PocketFives.com, “I have a 28 inch monitor and a 24 inch monitor. I usually put nine tables on the first one and expand onto second as needed. Tables don’t pop up, which makes it easier too. If you don’t overlap your tables, it’s much easier to keep track of the action.” In the end, he racked up $197 in earnings on the day.
Avenson took to the gamut of USA-friendly online poker sites in order to reach 87 multi-table tournaments. The bulk of the events were hosted on PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. However, Avenson could also be spotted on Bodog and Power Poker, which makes its home on the Cake Poker Network. On flipping back and forth between rooms, he recalled, “PokerStars’ and Full Tilt’s tables shrink down to the same size, which makes tiling them easy. Their layouts are also very similar. On Bodog, the table is a different size, but the buttons are about the same. Power Poker’s tables are impossible to read. I have problems seeing how many players are in a hand.” Guaranteed prize pools across his 87 tournaments varied from $1,000 to $250,000.
Prior to his career as an online poker player, Avenson had spent nine years working in the restaurant industry. In 2003, when a curiously-named player named Chris Moneymaker (pictured at right) took down the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event, a television in the kitchen was tuned into the festivities. Restaurant employees then began holding a recurring home game and Avenson’s love for poker grew. After depositing online, he explained, “I didn’t know what I was doing and I wasn’t beating the game. In 2007, I started getting into poker forums and realized that there were players out there consistently beating the game and making a living doing it. I started with freerolls and wanted to prove that I could build a bankroll from nothing. It took me three-and-a-half months to go from $0 to $1,000.” Six months later, his poker bankroll topped $10,000 and Avenson left the restaurant industry to pursue a career as a professional poker player.Now that playing on 87 tables is in the books, what’s next for Avenson? 100 tables? 200? He speculated, “Players in the thread were advising me not to waste my time and just move up in stakes, but to 12-table large stakes is a lot trickier. You’re getting played back at a lot more and that’s not true in micro-level games. Right now, it’d be difficult for me to play that many tournaments, so I think I’ll just stick with mass-tabling micros. The most I had going this weekend was 16 and I struggled a little during those times. Once I can effectively 18-table, maybe I’ll switch to nine-tabling some higher stakes.” In the meantime, he’ll be dominating his current stakes. On July 22nd and 23rd, he took third and first, respectively in the $11 buy-in $7,000 Guaranteed Six-Max on PokerStars for a combined $3,500. He has also enjoyed some recent live success, taking fourth in a Heartland Poker Tour event for $11,000.
He wanted to send a shout out to PocketFivers in Off Topic battling it out in Monopoly. May all your properties be live and hotels be monster. We’d also be amiss if we didn’t mention his new website, NateAvenson.com.
Congratulations from all of us here at PocketFives.com to Nate Avenson for his impressive 87 multi-table tournament day.
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