Posted by Johnnymac 8:53 PM
It sure has been a long time since I posted anything here! I meant to make some posts this weekend, but I was running myself ragged with the pre-holiday madness, crazy newly-engaged wedding things, and a touch of the flu that showed up on Saturday night and is just now starting to go away.

As usual, I think I will mostly respond to Fro's posts: I have my own take on the NL game the other night and the numbers he has for the charity tournament only bolster my earlier arguments against it.

Friday Night's No Limit Game
Fro and I were the only winners. I won $316 and Fro won $184. There were five other players in the pot, so that means that everyone else lost $100 on average. I know that a couple of guys lost even more than that and the others just lost 2-3 $20 buyins. Two of the other players are very green (JJ and Todd B), one is an habitual bluffer (Baird), one is a relatively tight and cautious woman with a little bit of poker experience (Kim), and the other is Chris, who is a good player.

That said, while I think the results are little bit skewed in Fro's and my favor - for instance, I would have expected Chris to be a small winner - I don't think the results are all too unexpected. If you ask anyone who is knowledgable about poker, he will always say that No Limit and Pot Limit ("big bet") games are the games that most definitively separate the good players from the bad players. Fro and I love to play cards. We talk about poker often and we think about the game nearly all the time. This means that we are better at identifying situations where we have an edge, and then in the context of Friday's big bet game, we had the maximum means of exploiting those edges when they arose. For this very reason, no professonal cardroom in Vegas or LA ever spreads big bet games. The good players win too much and the bad players lose too much and that makes for action that will eventually dwindle out when the bad players run out of money. Limit poker is designed the limit the amount one can lose on any one hand. A badly played big hand in limit poker might only cost you 8-10 bets; a badly played big hand in big bet poker can cost you your entire stack.

When Fro played his first no-limit game back in October, the quality of the other players was much better than we had here on Friday. While this made for a very lucrative game, it also made for a less-competitive game.

One final thing on the game - I've been thinking about our structure of limiting the size of one's buy-in. Ostensibly, we do this to protect the players from abusive big stacks because it prevents any one person from buying into the game for a lot of chips and then bullying his way through the game. This is a fine idea at first, but I think it's inherently unfair because by limiting the buy-in of players who have lost their stack, we are automatically setting them at a disadvantage because they are still vulnerable to bullying from the players with big stacks. While these big stacks are not necessarily their "own" money, it's still a big stack and thus a weapon. In the future, it might be fairer to allow buy-ins to grow as the night progresses or perhaps to allow people to buy in for an amount equal to whatever they already have in the game.

The Charity Tournament
I noted this tournament about a month ago and said at the time that I wanted to think about it. I have thought about it and I think it's a bad proposition because of the portion that is donated to charity.

Using Fro's numbers below, the average prize size for the top eight players is $3125 ($25,000 / 8), but those eight players each have $5670 ($210 x 216 / 8) invested in the pot. This is a losing proposition in the long run, because the payout (16:1) does not match the odds of winning (26:1).

Granted, this is poker and the odds of winning are not always even money, they are usually better for more skilled players, especially in a ESPN-Wannabe situation like this. But I seriously doubt that one's edge would be so great so as to overcome the discrpancy in the payout. You might also make the point that having a chance to play for free in the WSOP or even a WSOP satellite is worth the gamble, but in that case, the grand prize is just an entry into another tournament against some of the best players in the world, and in that situation you're odds of winning are definitely less than even money! Getting the chance to be dead money to Chris Ferguson or Phil Ivey is not too appealing to me, but perhaps the opportunity simply to play is the appeal to many players here. But not to me.

Then again, it's for charity and perhaps that and all of the other intangibles are what make a difference in this situation.

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