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Target On My Back In Every Poker Game
Online Poker Rooms By Lou Krieger of Royal Vegas Poker, Mon, 22 Aug 2005Playing against a bountied expert on an online poker room actually offers situations in which your chances are better than you thought. As on, for instance, Royal Vegas Poker.
I'm wearing a target on my back and everyone in the room is planning to take potshots at me -- and at my invitation, too. They fire their bullets and I duck, dodge, and weave. Sometimes I evade them. Other times I fire back, killing them before they're able to kill me. But eventually the law of averages takes its inexorable toll and I'm mortally wounded. Everyone cheers the shooter while I'm crated off to be buried until the entire scenario repeats itself the same time next week.
We're not filming a remake of The Most Dangerous Game here, or playing paintball either. It's poker. And in my capacity as host for Royal Vegas Poker, I play once a week in their "Play the Experts" tournament. A $50 bounty is on my head, and it's on the heads of Royal Vegas Poker's stable of experts too. Barbara Enright, Max Shapiro, Mike Cappelletti, Rose Richie, Dr. Al Schoonmaker, and Matt Lessinger are all in the gunsights of the other players in this event.
It's not a large event; the price to play is $20 with unlimited $10 rebuys during the first hour and one optional add-on when the rebuy period ends. "Play the Experts" is held every Wednesday evening at 8PM Eastern time, and you have to kill an expert "all the way dead" to win a bounty.
Just like the other players, experts can rebuy during the first hour too, so if we go broke and decide to rebuy -- most experts always rebuy and take the add-on -- you won't win a bounty. But once the rebuy period ends, the real chase begins. The targets on our backs are illuminated, and anyone knocking out an expert has $50 credited to his account at Royal Vegas Poker and wins a T-shirt proclaiming "I Knocked Out the Expert." They also win one of my books, or a book by any of the other experts who also happen to be authors.
Playing with a bounty on your head is very different from just competing anonymously as another player in a tournament. For many of competitors, winning $50 along with the "I knocked out the expert" T-shirt and a book too, is a lot more exciting than grinding out a high placing in the event itself.
Here's the difference. With a bounty on your head, your opponents play differently against you than they do against anyone else. For me it means that I can count on being called nearly every time I go all-in after the rebuy period ends, even when I'm hoping that my opponent will think better of it and throw his marginal hand away, just as he would against any other player in this event.
Regardless of the hands I go all-in with -- even when I go all-in with the very best of them -- someone will probably call. Even when my opponent knows he is taking slightly the worst of it, he's really not. When you factor in his chances of winning a $50 bounty in addition to winning the pot, it may well tip the scales and turn what would have been a call with a negative expectation into a play that he really should make.
Although I figure to win most of these confrontations, someone eventually sends me to the rail. It's simple arithmetic. If I play a hand that has a 70% chance of winning, I'm a pretty big favorite. But if I were to play three hands where my chances of winning each individual confrontation was 70%, my chances of winning all three are substantially less. In fact, if you multiply 70 percent by 70 percent by 70 percent (.70 x .70 x .70 = .34) I figure to come out on top of three successive confrontations only 34% of the time. So even though I'm favored to win any one of these confrontations seven times out of ten, I've only got a slightly better than one-third chance of surviving all three of them.
In the past few weeks, I've been knocked out with K-K three times, a pair of queens once, and A-A once. Each time I had the best hand before the flop, and each time my opponent probably realized that too. But each opponent was after the bounty, and there's nothing I can do about it.
Two weeks ago I managed to hang around and finish in the top ten, and I don't even remember what hand ultimately did me in. It wasn't important. What was important was the penultimate hand, in which I went from an upper rung on the ladder to a very short stack in one decisive, desperate, and depressing hand in which my pocket pair of aces was destroyed before my eyes. The ultimate confrontation was actually anticlimactic, and the guy delivering the knockout blow was able to do so without even putting too many of his chips at risk.
I suppose the good thing about being a bounty is that you have a chance to really accumulate some chips, because if you bet, you will be called -- and sometimes by more than one opponent too. If you get lucky, you can generate a commanding chip lead. But what usually happens is an inevitable fall back to Earth when someone takes either all or most of your chips, and then you are short-stacked and even more appealing as a target.
The only way to survive when you have a target on your back is to build up a massive amount of chips early on, thereby enabling yourself to sit out any kind of marginal confrontations that might otherwise occur later. And it's later that's important. Because of the escalating blind structure, it's impossible not to get involved in some of these marginal situations. For most players, a propitious raise in a no-limit game always stands a good chance of stealing the blinds and surviving another round with your chip count intact. But when you are wearing a target on your back, attempting to steal the blinds always exposes you to the high likelihood of being called.
And even when you're a big favorite in any one of these confrontations, when you engage in two, three, four, or more of them, chances are someone will get lucky and beat you.
Playing as a marked man is very different from having the anonymity you would when no additional financial benefit will accrue to anyone taking you out. That's just the way it is. I always think it will be different next week. But it seldom is. If you want to take your shot at me, just log onto royalvegaspoker.com, download the software, and take your best shot. You might even succeed. Someone always does, or so it seems.~~
This article is compliments of Lou Krieger of Royal Vegas Poker, Mon, 22 Aug 2005
