To Buy or Not to Buy

All major tournaments, or tournaments that are ranked, should be freezeouts. Poker competitions are supposed to be about laying out a specified amount of money in the hope of striking it rich. They are not supposed to be about buying your way to success, just because you're well-heeled and on an ego trip. The reason that tournament prize pools have become so large is because vast numbers of people like the idea of winning a $50 satellite that can then lead to millions. It's much like playing a lottery, except that the odds are much better.



There are, of course, numerous players who can afford to buy in directly to these major tournaments, but I wonder if the fields would be so big if the entry fee was just the starting point, with no light at the end of the tunnel. Can you imagine a $10,000 rebuy World Series of Poker tournament with more than 5,500 players?



You have only to look at the numbers of Omaha entrants compared to hold'em to see what I mean. Why would you want to enter a $5,000 rebuy Omaha event to win half a million when you could enter a $10,000 hold'em competition with the chance of winning $7 million?



One year, I reluctantly entered a $1,500 Omaha rebuy event in Tunica, Mississippi, allowing myself one rebuy, and no more. I say reluctantly because whilst I love the game, I have neither the bankroll nor the inclination to commit to unlimited rebuys. I wish I had not bothered. To my left was the previous year's winner on a repeat mission, and to my right was a multimillionaire with something to prove. Stacked in front of them both were cash chips (dwarfing their tournament chips), so that they could have double rebuys as soon as possible. I was sandwiched between a rock and a hard place. It was impossible to see a flop without going all in at $1,500 a time, which was not much fun over the very long rebuy period of three or four levels. Once I said goodbye to my chips, there seemed little point in rebuying, so I threw in the towel and left the rich guys to fight it out.



The flip side of the coin is that rebuys swell the coffers and add value to the tournament. That's great news if you're lucky enough to be the recipient of all of this extra money. Like most poker players, you visualise yourself buried under a mountain of chips, and, of course, like most poker players, you start out with the intention of accumulating rather than donating, so you are quite happy to find yourself at a table with a few loose, well-heeled cannons. Invariably, however, the reality is quite different. In Omaha especially, even if you have a monster starting hand and get all of your chips in preflop, heads up, you are never that big a favorite, and, needless to say, the more players in with you to the bitter end, the smaller your chances of emerging victorious.



At my first foray into an Omaha $1,500 rebuy tournament in Vegas, Phil Hellmuth graced my table with his presence. In the first 10 minutes, he had already bought in four or five times before capturing a monster five-way pot with a rainbow Q-6-3-3, all in preflop. His wild, loose play had encouraged others to do the same with only marginally better hands, and the poor player with the aces who had started the raising war didn't have a prayer. I resolved not to rebuy if I lost my chips. It was impossible to play like a wimp and limp in hoping to catch a good flop, because even though Hellmuth was now sitting back behind his big stack, the other players were so "hotted" up that it was "full steam ahead" every hand!



Even in hold'em, you can become unstuck during the rebuys. Just recently, during the Northern Lights festival in Blackpool, in the £150 no-limit competition, two highly successful tournament players, Harry Demetriou and Ali Mallu, got involved in the following pot: With starting chips of £3,000, Harry has about £14,000 and Ali has about £10,500. Another player raises preflop, and the flop is K-6-5 rainbow. It's checked to Ali, in late position, who bets three-quarters of the pot. Harry, who's on the button, now decides to raise around £4,000. Everyone else passes and Ali sets himself in. Harry shrugs and doesn't like it, but feels he's pot-committed and reluctantly calls with the K 4, only to find Ali with bottom two pair. The turn brings a 4, and Harry is a lucky bunny who takes down a £22,000 pot. I am quite sure that this scenario would not have taken place in the very early stages of a freezeout.



Surely, the solution is to restrict the number of rebuys to one, or to have a "double chance" format in those tournaments so that players can have some form of a safety net. I once saw an excellent player rebuy 16 times in a $1,500 Omaha tournament with a very small field of about 50 players and only five prizes. He finished sixth. Justice was served, I suppose, but the end result is that Omaha competitions are few and far between and the fields are small, which is a pity, because there is a lot of dead money in Omaha tournaments.

Lucy "Golden Ovaries" Rokach has been one of the most successful tournament players in Europe, with more than 14 European titles to her name in the last five years alone. She hails from the Midlands in the UK, but can usually be found on the European tournament trail.