My Confrontation With the Beast

It's the situation every supersatellite player dreads. He gets to the final table with a comfortable amount of chips, and with plenty of margin for error. He has an excellent chance to simply fold every hand and win his seat. He's cruising along without a worry, just waiting for the last player to bust out and the prizes to be awarded. Then, suddenly, the nightmare scenario unfolds.

Before we get to this nightmare, here's a quick explanation of how supersatellites work, in case you're unfamiliar with them. Dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of players buy into a supersatellite, hoping to win a seat into a bigger tournament. The supersatellite will give away as many seats as its prize pool will allow. So, if there's $30,000 in the prize pool, and players are trying to win their way into a $10,000 event, three seats will be awarded.

The agonizing part of supersatellites is the endgame, which often features a lot of waiting and hoping. For example, if a supersatellite is giving away six seats and there are 12 people left, it makes little sense to apply the usual multitable tournament approach of gathering more chips to prime for a top-three finish. Sixth place is the same thing as first! If you find yourself in a favorable chip position, you must cut down dramatically on your risks, just making sure that you survive to the final six.

It is because of this strategic adjustment that I despise supersatellites. I play poker to try to win chips, not to enter into some oddball game of chicken. Yet, it's impossible to deny the value of supersatellites to a thinking tournament player. Most players either don't adjust enough to the supersatellite situation or dramatically over-adjust and start playing too tight well before it's warranted. For this reason, I will play the occasional supersatellite if I need to kill time.

In Atlantic City last December, I needed to kill time. I had just busted out of a $2,000 no-limit hold'em event at Harrah's, and had no plans for the rest of the day. A supersatellite was starting ($500 plus $60 buy-in, awarding seats to the $5,150 WSOP Circuit main event two days later), so I figured I'd play.

We got 66 entrants, which translated to six seats awarded and $2,100 in cash for the seventh-place finisher. I marched to the final table with little incident. I even got down to seven-handed without breaking too much of a sweat. Six of the seven remaining players would get the same prize (a seat), and the seventh-place player would have to be satisfied with the cash, about a $3,000 difference in value.

Here were the stack sizes, to the best of my memory:

Seat 1 - 25,000
Seat 2 - 56,500
Seat 3 (Me) - 55,500
Seat 4 - 35,000
Seat 5 - 22,000
Seat 6 - 46,000
Seat 7 - 85,000

With blinds of 2,000-4,000 and a 500 ante, no one was desperately short, but no one was perfectly safe, either. Still, I was confident. As long as I stole the blinds once every 10 hands or so, I was in little danger of missing out on a seat. In fact, the Independent Chip Model says that I had about a 93.6 percent chance of getting a seat at that moment. Then, the nightmare came.

With Seat 4 on the button, the big stack folded under the gun and the short stack in Seat 1 followed suit. Inexplicably, Seat 2 then announced that he was all in. I looked at my cards, and cursed the poker gods. I had two aces. What now?

In any form of tournament poker, it's always a good idea to take a breath and think about the numbers. So, what do the numbers say? It's very hard to assign a range to my opponent, because the only hand with which it would make sense for him to move in is the other two aces. Given the two aces in my hand, and the alcohol that my opponent was drinking, that seemed unlikely. Yet, my opponent had not once opened all in at the final table, so he wasn't completely crazy. I put him on something like 7-7+ and A-Q+, and that's what I'll use for our calculations. Against that range, my aces have about 84 percent equity. If I win the hand, I essentially move to a 100 percent chance of getting a seat. But, the 84 percent chance that I have of winning the showdown is less than the 93.6 percent winning chance that ICM says that I have from folding. Furthermore, if I have a skill edge (and I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I clearly had a skill edge at this table), my chances probably go up another percentage point or two. The correct play, believe it or not, is folding.

Therefore, I folded, right? Umm, no. I should've taken a deep breath and thought about the numbers - but instead of doing that, I took two steps away from the table and thought about how I'd never forgive myself if I folded two aces at the final table of a supersatellite, only to end up busting out with some lesser hand later on. I also wanted to get things over with. I'd been playing poker for 12 hours on three hours of sleep, and I was willing to pay a bit of a premium to get a few more minutes of sleep. Furthermore, I felt some duty to drastically lower the EV [expected value] of the guy who moved in, even if it meant lowering my own in the process. How else can his horrible play be punished if the big stacks won't call him with two aces? Maybe in some future satellite, that guy will think twice about such reckless play (which, by the way, lowers the EV of the other big stacks as well as his own). Knowing even as I did it that it was probably the wrong move, I called all in with my aces. Everyone else quickly folded.

The happy ending is that my opponent had A-5 offsuit (!!!????!!!), was drawing dead by the turn, and busted out on the next hand. If I'd been able to see his cards, it would've been far more reasonable to call with my A-A, as I had 92 percent equity against him. But I never thought he would turn over something like A-5 offsuit, so I can't claim to have made a great read. Instead, I made a bad read, and based on that read, made a bad call, which then turned out to be nearly correct after all.

I survived my confrontation with the beast. I hope that you can manage to avoid him altogether, but if you end up seeing him in a future supersatellite, don't just cower and call, as I did. Try, instead, to defeat him with mathematics.

Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player, which is available online at www.CardPlayer.com. He is also a featured coach for stoxpoker.com.