Day 5 Continued: A Short Strange Commentary on a Long Awesome Day
In the last post I didn’t write everything I wanted to about day 5. There was, for example, a big hand against Enon—here’s what I wrote about it in a MTTc thread while the tournament was still ongoing:
Quote:
2+2'er hand from day 5: Enon raises the CO+1 and it folds to my BB. I defend 76s. There's 65k in the pot, Enon has 400k behind, and I cover by 75k or so. Flop is 652 with two diamonds, and I check-call a ~30k bet. Turn is the 7d. I decide to bet 81k and Enon jams. I call: I don't love it, but I don't think I should fold there. Enon has the nuts but I hit a 7 on the river. I couldn't help but remember that Enon's undertitle (if I recall correctly) used to be "BRAAA raise the turn." Enon played very well from what I could tell, which admittedly isn't much, but everything he turned over was well-played, and the one time I thought "gee, Enon should raise all-in on this river with most of his range here" he did indeed raise all in. For whatever that's worth, which might not be much.
When we got back from dinner, there were forms at each of our seats, so that we could each give information to ESPN. Many players just filled them out normally, but many others tried their best to hide them from view so that their opponents couldn’t read them. At this juncture the guy immediately to my left had recently busted, so I was trying to deal with an unknown medium-stacked European. I discovered that he was Spanish and that he played online as “_Mephisto_.” My most memorable hand against him was when I raised 99 in middle position and he reraised me. It folded back to me and I thought for a while. My eventual decision was very easy: he screamed strength—neck vein, posture, the indecision with which he raised—and I didn’t have the price to setmine. When I folded he showed me AA.
I remember that hand fondly not only because I’m happy with the decision I made but because it’s a good way to think about all some of the event’s challenges. It’s easy to see that there are more bad players in the Main Event than in any other big-buyin event; it’s easy to overlook that there are more
good players in the field, too. I’ll go the next 11.5 months without being in the same room as so many players who have superior technical skills to mine. All sorts of full-time tournament pros know more about four-betting ranges and sizes than I do. Keeping this fact firmly in mind motivates me to get my edges elsewhere: I have to beat them at picking up on physical information, focusing harder, and exploiting the bad players. I’m grateful for the fact that in this tournament there are remarkably few standard situations. People are stalling; people are playing badly; people are exposing cards and receiving penalties and practically falling out of their chairs when they check their hole cards and find something they like. All of this shifts the game from John Q. Online’s home field to mine.
Matt Maroon, whose name I haven’t seen around poker in a long time but who wrote an informative and thoughtful blog back in the Party Era, once said that his favorite kind of opponent is a bad player trying to play well. I think his reasons for that had to do with how straightforward and frightened such players tend to be; my own little addendum to Maroon’s point is that those players tend also to give away information for free. It can be easy to conflate sensitivity to the facts, on the one hand, with causing facts to make a difference, on the other. If you are writing or dancing, you want—roughly—all the relevant facts to make a difference; you want your words or your movements (I’m guessing here; I don’t dance) to be very finely tuned to the reality of the situation, and that means different words for different situations. In poker, however, fine-tuning (or sensitivity to the facts) does not dictate that differences in the relevant facts always make a difference to what you do. You have to hide information. But for many weaker players, fine-tuning means doing different things in different situations, and that means doing different things with different hands. They make so much information available to you because they are so desperate to make their behavior intelligible
to themselves.
That was a long and theoretically speculative way of saying: weak players have lots of bet-sizing tells in the Main Event. And they have lots of other tells too.
Digressions aside, there isn’t much more to say about the hands I played on day 5. The last level was as satisfying as the last chapter of a good book, though. The online guy in the 8-seat—the guy who had run the horrible bluff against Lars, lost a blind battle, and then started drinking and harassing the staller in seat 5—eventually shoved his last 18 big blinds with with A8 against a button raise, got called by KJ, and lost. He’d said that he would be angry to have to come back with a short stack the next day—he didn’t have to, but I bet he was angry about other things. That staller eventually stopped pretending that he was deliberating every hand. He started grinning as if he’d gotten away with a clever scam or a good prank. A Mediterranean cardroom manager with real diamond earrings, who was so happy when Jack Effel announced that there would be just four more hands that he left the table for two of them to celebrate, and who had desperately stalled and then rubbed it in our faces: halfway between the day’s villain and the fool.
There is a new rule this year stating the dealer has to verify the chip count of the biggest stack at the table. When the biggest stack at the table is Lars, this involves counting a mountain of ante chips. So there’s time to talk. That was good news for me, because I enjoyed his company but personal policy had prevented me from saying much of anything to him all day. We wished each other luck; the next day, we had a good laugh when in the first level he was moved right back into the 2-seat at my direct right.
Coming up (hopefully) soon: Day 6, and anything else I might remember from day 5.
Thanks for reading.
All my best,
--Nate
