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RE: What It Was Like to Win $1,500,000 in a Poker Tournament at Age 22
Brilliant bluff raise against Haxton, and brilliant re-raise by him.
When you started to get to the high end of the tournament, and things started to get to those crazy stakes, did you start to get nervous, panic or freak out at all? Do you have any background in breathing exercises, or meditation? Or had the amounts you played for online, and the amount of times you moved up stakes, prepared you for it?
Well played, sounds like a well-deserved win.
Leading up to this event, I played almost exclusively cash games. There was one tournament I went deep in a few months earlier, I want to say I finished in 12th place for 7k when 1st was a little over 200k. But in my cash games I'm not sure I ever had more than $5,000 on a table prior to playing PCA. So when the money started getting bigger I was initially very nervous.
I'm not sure what kind of background you have in math and poker (I hope this is followable), but everybody's stack has chip equity. At the start of the tournament, when everyone has the starting stack of 20k chips, everyone's equity is the buyin, or $8000. If two players are HU for the prize, first place is 1.5million and 2nd place is 800,000 (to make the numbers easier), and they have the same number of chips, then each person's stack is "worth" 1,150,000. If one player has 75% of the chips and the other player has 25%, then the player with 75% has a stack worth 800k + .75*700k = 1.325M and the other player has a stack worth 975k.
I bring this background up because when there were 30 players left, despite the next player busting out being paid $21,898, everyone's stack is worth more than that. Even if you are last in chips, you still have chances to double up, get lucky, and put yourself in a position to win the tournament. An average stack remaining is guaranteed $21,898, but his expected payout is probably closer to $150k. So there were moments from 36 players down to 6 players where my nerves were firing up because I was guaranteed a relatively small amount of money compared to my expectation. I stopped being nervous once I was guaranteed a large enough amount of money that I deemed life changing (250k), but from 16 down to 6 I was very on edge.
I've done some meditation in the past year, but back then I was just an unarmed kid thrown into the deep end of a pool and came out on the lucky end.
Very cool. Yes, I have a background in poker. I used to play at Crown in Melbourne every day, if you know it. I was semi-pro for a while, I guess you could say, playing low stakes cash games $2/$3.
That's interesting that your nerves settled down once you were getting closer to winning even more. But I suppose at that stage, it was difficult for you to contemplate what winning a million dollars even meant.
Yup I know the Crown. They run the Aussie Millions tournament series every January. Lots of players like to go down, play in the series, then watch the Australian Open. I've somehow never made it out, but if there was one distant spot I'd go for a tournament it would be there.
There's decent money to be made at 2/3, but the rake is generally ridiculous. Still beats private games, but there is incentive to try and move up stakes quickly to avoid the rake traps.
I tended to have better success at the private games, where the rake was lower. There are pros at that level, but there are also egos, and drama queens, tilt addicts, super nits... And even the pros make bizarre mistakes which you wouldn't expect.
Melbourne is a great town. Next time an opportunity comes up, definitely take it, go to the restaurants, the theatres, the art galleries, the street art especially. It's amazing.
Now I live in Guadalajara, Mexico. I've been living here for a couple of years, but I still haven't checked out the casinos here
can't reply to other comment, reached maximum depth level already. but interesting that the private games have lower rake there. In America, lots of times when you play a private game it's uncapped rake. The players are usually much worse, but it's still hard for many people to overcome playing 5k pots where they sometimes take out hundreds of dollars. Small stakes in a casino is rough too since not many pots exceed the rake cap. The rake is just always too high :(
Geez. The thing is, Crown has a near monopoly on legal games in Melbourne. Even Sydney only has two casinos, last time I counted anyway. So the private games sorta have to compete against Crown, so they lower their rake.
When decentralised poker becomes a reality, rake might get very close to zero
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/etherpoker-raising-stakes-ethereum-1551331
By the way, if you want more people to read your posts on here, there are a bunch of Steemit Facebook groups you can join.
Oh cool, yea I'm all for joining them. Have any specific recommendations?
I guess start with this one https://www.facebook.com/groups/SteemitGroup/?fref=ts
just because it has the most people. But just search for Steemit and press groups, and join everything which strikes your fancy
As a former poker player this was a great story to read. Sick hand aswell.
Look forward to your lifting blogs
One other thing I wanted to talk about is a poker concept called ICM, which stands for independent chip modeling.
So imagine I put you to the test in a poker hand, you are getting 2:1 odds to call and are trying to calculate what % your hand is against my range of hands. If you are > 1/3 to win you call and if you are less you fold. To illustrate this, imagine you are getting 2:1 and are 35% to win. when you lose you go -1 for calling the bet off. When you win, you gain the 2 out there. 35%2 +65%(-1) = .7-.65=.05, a positive overall gain.
But in poker tournaments, we can't do that. Since the payouts increase exponentially, players who are shorter stacked towards the end of a tournament have incentive to be more conservative when running into the big stack. So with 3 players left, say I have the chiplead, you are in 2nd place, and someone is in distant 3rd. Same scenario, I go all in and give you 2:1 odds to call. In this situation you probably have to be something like 55-60% to win rather than >33.3%.
But when players get down to HU there is no more ICM. Players revert back to making the standard best poker play and there is no worry about laddering up as other players bust out. So despite lots of conservative play before, once we got to HU our aggression levels went through the roof
This is what I am taking about @daut44!