At the beginning of February, the Cherokee Casino and Resort in Tulsa, Oklahoma, hosted the 2007
Oklahoma Poker Championship, and I was happy to attend. First, I like this casino because they treat poker players so well. Second, I was a member of the e-PokerUSA team that was running the first duplicate-poker tournament in the history of the world. Ours was the last event of this tournament.
The duplicate-poker event started at 11 a.m. and was projected to end at midnight. The casino also had guaranteed the winner of every event a chance to win an entry into a
World Poker Tour tournament, a $25,000 value. This would be done by providing a one-table satellite for the event winners. As a result of a misunderstanding, this satellite was scheduled for 7 p.m. on the day of the duplicate tournament. There was no way that the duplicate-poker event winner could play in that satellite for the
WPT seat, so I discussed this with Rick O'Connell, director of table games.
Rick and I looked at moving the starting time for the
WPT satellite to midnight, but that would be too hard on the participating players. Then we discussed holding the satellite the following day. I pointed out that a number of the winners would already have booked travel plans conflicting with this, so that would not be a solution, either. I told Rick that it was obvious that the winner of the duplicate event simply would not be able to play in the
WPT satellite. Rick shrugged his shoulders, but said nothing committal.
The next day, Rick approached me when I was in the breakfast buffet line, and was smiling. He had gotten the casino to put up another $25,000, in order to give the duplicate-event winner an entry into a
WPT tournament! I could hardly believe my ears. There probably aren't many, if any, other casinos in America that would have handled this situation in such a generous manner. Later on in the day, I talked to Chris Province, the casino's manager of table games marketing. Chris said, simply, "Not providing all of the winners an opportunity to win a
WPT seat was never an option."
Duplicate poker is an idea that had been talked about by some of us poker players who also are bridge players, but until now, no one had ever implemented the idea. Duplicate bridge has everyone playing the same hands, with some sort of comparison at the end to see who has played them better. In bridge, these hands are each put into a metal holder that has all the hands in them. This holder, called a board, is played at each table, then passed on to another table after being completed. But the bridge method has a huge drawback for poker, because some players would know what the results of each hand were before others had played it. Internet duplicate poker can make sure that each hand is played by everyone at the same time, but what do you do for a group of live people? You need separate but identical hands for each table.
Just creating the hands to be played was a massive operation. With nine players at each table, our starting field was about 25 tables, meaning that each entire hand had to be replicated 24 more times. The cards initially were dealt by a mechanical dealer, and then replicated by a mechanical dealer. Next, the hands had to be put into a mechanical hand-holder, which could hold up to 10 hands. At the table, these cards were dealt by a human dealer. It is important to note that none of these hands were ever examined for their actual poker content (the only thing checked was that the hands had been duplicated without error). So, all of the hands were just as random as they would have been if the deck had been shuffled by a human being.
The week before our final event, we were running duplicate two-table 18-hand pot-limit hold'em satellite tournaments twice a day. You got a free entry into the main event if you did better with your cards than the person in your seat did on the same hand at the other table. I played in a couple of satellites myself, as a fill-in to equalize the tables. I erred in my first satellite, and you can learn something about duplicate-poker strategy from my mistake.
I was in the big blind with an offsuit 8-5. The pot was unraised, and six of us saw the flop, which came 8-5-2 with a two-flush, giving me top two pair. The small blind checked and I bet the size of the pot. One player called, and the small blind played. The turn was an offsuit king. The small blind checked again, I bet the full size of the pot, the next player folded, and the small blind called. The last card was an offsuit 6. He checked, and I showed my hand, winning the pot. My opponent had 6-4, for a double belly-buster draw. I figured that at this point, I was ahead of my opponent at the other table by at least the amount of my last bet, and probably more.
There was only one hand with which my opponent at the other table might have gained on me. I held A-Q offsuit in the big blind. The under-the-gun player opened with a raise, and everyone folded to me. I figured that if the raiser had big cards, I could easily get into trouble by being dominated. If he held a pocket pair, like jacks or tens, and I paired, I would not make much money, being out of position and having my opponent looking at an overcard on the board. So, I folded.
At the end of the session, when I compared scores with my opponent at the other table, it turned out that he had won $7,000 more than I had won. I had a $3,000 lead over him from the first hand, just as I had thought. But, he had doubled up for a $10,000 gain on the A-Q that I folded. An ace had come on the flop, he had a better kicker than the preflop raiser, and his opponent never folded his top-pair hand. The lesson here is, the right way to nurse a lead is not to fold all marginal hands, but to try to emulate what you think will be done by the others with your hand. I think most people would play A-Q for a raise, even though it is not good poker to do so when out of position against an early-position raiser.
I will tell you about the main event in my next column.
Bob Ciaffone has authored four poker books, Middle Limit Holdem Poker, Pot-limit and No-limit Poker, Improve Your Poker, and Omaha Poker. All can be ordered from Card Player. Ciaffone is available for poker lessons: e-mail [email protected]. His website is www.pokercoach.us, where you can get his rulebook, Robert's Rules of Poker, for free. Bob also has a website called www.fairlawsonpoker.org.
