We have all heard this said at least once while playing, some of us have probably said it at the tables ourselves. It's an idea that is joking in nature but carries a twinge of truth to it. Every once in a while even the best players suck out to stay alive in a tournament. At one point or another, be it a coin flip or as a slight dog, you have to get lucky to win a massive field tournament. Last Thursday I managed to ship the $11 $12K Guaranteed on Stars for $2500, and boy was I lucky to get there.

The tournament was going pretty much as straight forward as it could have. I was stealing the blinds in late position with a very high percentage, I was winning my all ins and coin flips, and I was starting to accumulate a serious stack. With about 30 runners left I was the big stack in the tournament and was just having my way at the table. I was catch a lot of big hands and was using my stack to push people around. The only times my opponents started playing back at me was when I had big hands. Everything was going according to plan until I ran a bit card dead. I still had a ton of chips, but when we got to the final table I was 3/9 rather than the overall leader. It didn't take long for me to get that back.

On the third hand of the FT UTG raises to 36K, the blinds were 6K/12K/1500. UTG+1 makes the call and it folds around to me on the button with KK. I have both players covered, but UTG is the 4th chip stack at the table and I do not have him by much (roughly 80K). Starting the hand with 570K I made a raise to 136K. Action folded to the UTG raiser who shipped all in, UTG+1 folded and I snap called only to see him turn over AA. I was sick to my stomach. I used to think this was the type of spot I could get away from but after playing MTTs for a bit longer I've learned that AK, QQ, and even JJ do this move a lot, more than enough to justify making the call. I was just utterly deflated to see his hand as the board rolled out:

236 rainbow

8

[SIZE="6"]K[/SIZE]

I jumped out of my seat. I went from having about 7BBs left in my stack to nearly 1.1million and the chip lead at the final table with 8 players left. From there the FT was a snap, at least as far as final tables go. I had no trouble finishing the job from there.

After this win I started to wonder about my MTT approach. This tournament was a perfect example of an instance where I had a big chip stack for most of the final stages of the event. With the big chip lead I was able to get away with a lot more, push my weight around, maneuver more effectively. Normally my plan was always to fly under the radar, be near the middle of the pack in chips, and find spots to get the money in to take advantage of weaker players. I always felt like I didn't need a big stack to win, but having now seen a few major examples (including the $12K on Thursday) where a big stack made all the difference in my eventual result, it has made me rethink that plan of attack. I now understand why people gamble it up a lot more than I do in tournaments in order to, "Get a big stack." Phil Ivey said it best when talking about the main event, "When you put a lot of chips in the hands of a good player, those chips are hard to get back." Just something to think about when the World Poker Finals starts up in about a month.

I just sent this in earlier today and I figured I'd post it online and see what the community thinks about it. The following is the proposal for my poker MQP paper (a paper I need to write to finish my degree requirements). This lays out what I plan on talking about, main points and such. Any feedback appreciated, enjoy:

Poker is a game with a unique balance between skill and luck. Professional players will never deny that luck plays a factor in their day to day existence; however those players will be very quick to bring up certain terminology that “proves” that they are more than just the lucky few. Professional players will tell you things like, “In the short term anyone can win, but over a long stretch of time to better player will come out on top.” Professional poker players live by this golden rule of the game. It is where they believe their edge comes from. Poker is a numbers game, and the better you become the more likely you are to win each time you play, making it more likely that you will be profitable over a long career.

Professional players today differ even from the professionals that reigned supreme in the 1980s and 1990s. Today’s game has evolved to a point where math has taken center stage. More and more you hear professionals talk about the likelihood a player has a certain hand rather than try to put them on a particular holding. You’ll hear about pot odds, fold equity, and risk of ruin some of which never even factored into the decision making process of a professional player 30 years ago. Back then, players who were considered the best in the business would log countless hours with a relatively small number of players and would learn each person’s tendencies well enough to isolate the specific cards that person had. Players were looking more for patterns than pot odds, for physical tells more than figuring out hand ranges.

The old guard is still around today but the game has become so popular that it is nearly impossible to log enough hours with everyone. With the influx of people the style of play had to change along with it. Reads are still important and logging hours are crucial to the long term success of any professional, but now you need to have a strong baseline of play that is mathematically sound before you can truly succeed. Poker rooms that could hold upwards of 200 people were considered huge years ago, but those same rooms today have either expanded or been replaced by establishments that can hold three times that amount with some rooms skyrocketing to over 1000 people at capacity.

Online poker has played a large role in this process. Playing poker online has made it easier and cheaper for people to learn how to play poker. You don’t need to leave the comforts of your own home and you can play for free while you just learn the game. At any one point you can find over 100,000 players playing on some of the larger online poker sites.# With those kinds of numbers in the player pool the idea that you can just play long enough and figure out each player’s style and tendencies is just simply ridiculous. As a result, professionals start to generalize players and categorize them into varying degrees of the same few styles, “weak-tight”, “loose-aggressive”, etc.

This system will not produce specific answers to an opponent’s holding. The goal is to produce a “range of hands” that your opponent could have that will give the professional player a mathematical basis for what the best course of action will be. These hand ranges are pretty general until you start playing with particular players. While you may never see some of the players you are playing ever again after that first session, you might play against that person for 6 hours straight and during that time you should start to see some patterns immerge that tell more about his or her style of play. This information can then be put into use to further narrow or widen the range of hands that particular opponent will have in a certain spot. This makes the range of hands you assign to this player more accurate and makes it more likely that the decisions you make based on this range of hands is correct.

In short, poker is a game of skill and not luck. It’s a game where players put their minds to the test against other players rather than compete in losing efforts against the house. Professional players are simply better than the poker playing population at large. Using data tracking software, detailed statistical analysis, and hours upon hours of study and practice these professional players are able to make enough money to thrive our capitalist in society just like professional athletes or high states traders on Wall St. The goal of this paper is to delve further into the math behind the game, and to try and put the debate to rest that poker is a game of skill in which luck plays a part rather than just purely a game of chance.

Well the title seems pretty self explanatory, but just in case let me set the stage a bit. This past weekend was labor day weekend and Foxwoods was running a series of events. The buy ins were small, the structures sucked, but more importantly there were going to be a ton of people playing. With the big crowd it seemed like a great idea to head down and grind some cash early in the weekend and then maybe play in an event or two on Sunday and Monday.

I've been looking to get to Foxwoods more often and this weekend seemed like the perfect weekend to take a trip. I went and played some 1/2 on Friday night and had a very swingy session. At my low point, for the first few hours, I was stuck about $300 bucks. I had some big hands to save me from total ruin, but if I had Poker Tracker running on my live session my red line would be tanking. The deck caught up with me and I started winning some big pots and I stopped trying to run so many c-bets and started putting out more thin value bets. Before long I had about $1300 in front of me and was really starting to cruise at the table. I ended up leaving with about $1150 at the table, $550 of it profit. Most importantly, the place was packed and the action at the table was great. Friday seems like a pretty good night to hit the casino up.

Now a buddy of mine wanted to check out one of the special tournaments for the holiday weekend, the $230 "Deep Stack" event on Sunday at noon. To actually call this event deep stacked in anyway would be insulting to the intelligence of a poker player. The blinds were anything but standard, more or less doubling every level increase. Each level lasted for about 20 minutes so I was treating this like a turbo. There wasn't going to be a ton of play for long so even though we started with 20K in chips I wasn't messing around. I was playing sharp, making good reads, staying out of trouble, and it was working. I built up nicely and we were at 3K/6K/500 and I had about 87K in front of me. With 33 runners left and 15 getting paid I was a few nice pots away from getting into the money. That's when the blunder happened.

This is the last hand before break. UTG has been getting very frustrated with the past few hands and just needing to muck. He ships it for 27K and it folds around to the woman on the button. I look down at my hand in the BB and I see 88. Now I am in the one seat at a fairly new table and the button is in the 9 seat. I think I hear the dealer say "fold" and I see the dealer take in some cards and put them into the muck. I snap call with the 88, turn my hand over, and UTG flips over KTs. As the dealer is about to put up the flop, I notice AJo turned face up in front of the button. I ask what that is and he says, "That's her hand." Apparently she did in fact call and she has me well covered. Why she turned her hand over and why she never put chips into the middle I really have no idea. To make matters worse the board runs out A-high and I lose the whole pot (I would have beaten the KTs) and we both get a warning for exposing our hands with action still to come. Had I known this woman had called I either ship or fold in that spot, I never just call. I was supremely pissed off about it, and still kind of am. The downside is I'm pretty sure I turned up my hand first so if I did complain further I think it would just end worse. I let it go and busted 26th.

Overall it was a good weekend, and hell Phil Ivey folded the winning hand on TV in the Main Event, even the best make mistakes. I fucked up, learn from it and move on.