The Biggest Little City

Reno has nicknamed itself "The Biggest Little City in the World." In March, tournaments in this big small town were the Bridge Winter Nationals (there are four major national bridge tournaments every year) and the World Poker Challenge. Both events were booked at the Reno Hilton for the same time period. Since I am a devotee of both games (and was still freezing parts of my anatomy off in Michigan during March), it seemed like a good place for The Coach to be at that time. Let me tell you about my week in Reno.

The World Poker Challenge is mainly a string of no-limit hold'em tournaments. It starts out with a bunch of events with $100 to $300 buy-ins, then escalates as it progresses. My first tournament was a $200 buy-in NLH event that drew more than 400 entrants, which was a major increase from last year's attendance. The NLH boom showed its effect in Northern Nevada, in addition to many other places.

Naturally, at a place where there is both bridge and poker, I ran into a number of people whom I had not seen in a while. One of them was Hal Kant, who once captured a gold bracelet in a pot-limit Omaha championship at Binion's Horseshoe when using my advice – and my chips. (He knocked me out of the event in a $280,000 pot, and I finished fourth). During my Reno trip, Hal offered me some interesting advice on teaching poker.

"Bob, I hear you are teaching a lot of students these days. If it were me teaching them, here is what I would have them do. During the first lesson, I would have them sit in a chair and watch the grass grow for two hours. The second lesson would be spent sitting and watching the grass grow for four hours." We know patience is a necessary part of becoming a good poker player. Hal's advice was, of course, tongue-in-cheek, but how should one teach patience?

The first event was a lucky one for me. Usually, if I have a good tournament showing, it means I have not run into any mammoth hands when holding a good one. I am seldom using a big drawout to get my chips, but this event was an exception. Fairly early in the event, when I was in the big blind, playing with $50-$100 blinds, a player on the button opened with a raise to $400. I held A-Q. This is not the kind of hand with which you want to get frisky when facing a likely solid raise from an early-position player, but it is a decent one against the button's open-raise – or so I thought. I reraised a grand, all in, and my opponent called so quickly that I knew trouble had arrived. In fact, he held two queens. The flop came A-Q-J, so he not only had the better starting hand, but also had flopped a set. The turn was a meaningless 8, but the river was an ace. I had hit a two-outer on the end to stay in the tournament and double up.

I do not usually hold lots of big hands (I just get a lot of mileage out of the moderately decent ones), but as I said, this tournament was different. At one point, during the middle of the event, I picked up A-A, Q-Q, and A-K in three consecutive hands, propelling me from 10K to 24K in a few minutes. Eventually, I finished third, for $7,200 in prize money. That is a nice way to start a week in Nevada.

As everyone knows, televised poker has fueled a poker boom. It is fine that we have big tournament fields and many weak opponents. There are many benefits to the boom, but as the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. A downside is that we seem to have quite a few people these days who do not know how to behave when playing poker. In particular, I see events taking much longer than they should because some people are using an inordinate amount of time to act on their hands.

In Tunica, we had one guy at the final table who took 20 to 40 seconds to fold his starting hand every single time. It is clear we are not talking about a rookie player who has a problem with hands that a veteran would not. We are talking about a discourteous jerk. Maybe he was one of 12 children and never got any attention, and now was seizing his opportunity to have all eyes upon him on center stage – and was not bothered that those eyes were glaring rather than admiring. I do not know what gets into the heads of such people; I am not a psychologist.

In the Reno tournament, at the final table, I again had to suffer long waits by a center-stage actor. This player would wait until the action reached him, then squeeze one of the two cards to see what he had. Perhaps not wanting to give any information away, he would then do the same thing with his other card every single time. At least 20 seconds got used up just from this guy figuring out what he had. Then, he would often take 30 to 90 more seconds to act on his hand.

Delaying the game was not the only way he was discourteous. When we were threehanded, he went into a monster huddle. Finally, I asked him to please act so I could use the bathroom. "Go ahead and use it," he said.

I did not want to leave a live hand, so I said, "I'll go when the hand is over." Finally, the hand ended and I went to the restroom, thinking the other two players were going to wait for me to return. When I got back, they were in the middle of playing a hand, and I had at least $10,000 less than when I had left. I complained to the tournament director, but he was new to directing and refused to do anything. I guess I was asking for trouble by not checking with the director before leaving the table, because I misinterpreted what "Go ahead" meant. I took it to mean, "OK, we will wait for you to get back," not, "OK, sucker, you can leave, and we will blind and ante off your stack while you are gone."

The next day, I talked to the head tournament director, Jimmy Sommerfeld, about the problem of horrendously slow players. I said, "It does no good to put a clock on these guys, because they have many pauses of a minute or so, not monstrously long huddles. I think you need to make an announcement before each tournament starts that this stalling around is discourteous to the other players, because it makes an event last much longer than it should." He agreed.

One of the Reno no-limit hold'em events was the Seniors Championship, hosted by Oklahoma Johnny Hale. This tournament had an interesting format. The buy-in was $200, which got you $800 in chips. There was also one rebuy and one add-on, each giving you $800 in chips. The catch was that the rebuy and add-on were only $50 each, an unbelievable bargain price. What should be your strategy? Obviously, it was automatic to rebuy. But the fact that you could not use the add-on unless you were still in the event after the first two structures meant you had to play "sane poker" instead of "rebuy poker." Maybe Johnny is on to something with this format.

Editor's note: Bob Ciaffone's latest book is Middle Limit Holdem Poker (332 pages, $25 plus $9.95 shipping and handling), co-authored with Jim Brier. This work and his other poker books, Pot-limit and No-limit Poker, Improve Your Poker, and Omaha Holdem Poker, can be ordered through Card Player. Ciaffone is available for poker lessons. E-mail [email protected] or call (989) 792-0884. His website is www.pokercoach.us, where you can download Robert's Rules of Poker for free. On the Internet, he is an "expert" on RoyalVegasPoker.com and an affiliate of PartyPoker.com.