 Council Bluffs 02/2009 (WSOP Circuit) |
| A little commentary... |
| Last Updated: 2009-02-17 14:30:30 |
| I've decided to BLOG this morning because I have about 7 hrs to kill and, well, it keeps me away from the craps table where I blew through my daily "other than poker" bankroll in about 20 minutes last night. Ugh. If the noon hold'em tournament was something less than a $1500 buyin I'd probably do that, but I'm keeping that kind of buyin money for this summer at the "real" WSOP.
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| So today I'm going to talk about why it is that if this tournament is full of morons I didn't just coast to the money last night instead of being stressed out for 5 hours because I spent the whole time grinding out a short stack.
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| There are two factors in Omaha 8/b that aid bad players. The first is that the odds, unlike hold'em, are always closer. Unless someone has three of a kind or quads on the deal, even the worst hand against the best hand is much closer to even than in hold'em. (Those not familiar with 8/b, you can only use two from your hand so if you are dealt 4 aces you only have two aces and no aces left in the deck...not good) For example, in Hold'Em A-A vs 7-2 off is about a 9-1 favorite. According to Sammy Farha, one of the worst possible starting hands in Omaha 8/b (outside of having 3 or 4 of a kind in your hand) is 7-7-8-8 offsuit. That hand is only a 2-1 underdog for the high (though it is a massive underdog for low) against A-A-2-3 "double suited", which is the best possible starting hand in O8/b. Punching in my A-A-2-K single suited, double suited would make it a top-3 starting hand, against the really bad hand of J-4-4-5 that I faced last night they're about the same. I'm about 2-1 on the high, a little less than 2-1 favorite on the low and a little better than a 5-2 favorite to scoop. Unfortunately that's about as good as it gets.
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| If there are one or two bad players at the table, they will go one of two ways - either be quickly eliminated or they'll get some early big wins, build a stack and then give it all away.
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| BUT if you have a table full of bad players, usually what happens is they just push chips around and have big up and down swings - because 1/3 of the time they will all be rewarded for their bad decisions. And that was what happened last night. It took us an hour and a half to eliminate the first player in spite of the fact that we had about 15 all-ins because even the worst player playing the worst hands is going to hit something often enough to keep them alive.
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| The second factor in the favor of these guys is the fact that it's limit. If it was pot limit, we would have lost half our table in the first round. The fact that these bad players couldn't put all their chips in if they wanted to was the only thing that kept most of them alive long enough to get rewarded for their bad decisions.
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| Natural selection did take care of itself. It didn't do me any good, but by the time we were down to three tables almost all of the players remaining were good, solid players. At my new table where only one person was sitting that I had played with for any length of time I didn't see a single bad decision. I do know that Mr J-4-5 surely made the money but he was definitely the exception. And there will always be exceptions like that. But the bottom line was all those bad players eventually got what they deserved and I was just one of the unlucky ones who was the victim rather than the benefactor of bad decisions that got paid off.
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| Which is why I feel very confident going into HORSE today. Yes, it's still limit. But almost all of the people playing today will be specialists in one game or another. Very few will be good at all five games and today, with Stud, Razz and Hold'Em in the mix the bad players will be putting their chips in with much worse odds of success most of the time.
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| Well I'm going to go hit the treadmill for a little while since I'm not at home for my usual routine. Wish me luck! All I can do is outplay them, I can't make the cards come... :) |
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