Rush for the Action, and Avoid Deep Stacks

I recall an old joke about a man driving through the country. He sees a farmer under an apple tree with a pig in his arms. Every few minutes, the farmer lifts the pig higher so that it can grab an apple. The man asks the farmer what he’s doing.

The farmer replies, “Feeding my pig.”

The man asks, “But doesn’t it take a lot of time that way?”

The farmer answers, “What is time to a pig?”

That farmer thinks the same way that organizers of deep-stack tournaments think. They must say, “What is time to a poker player?”

Nothing is more boring than playing in a poker game with no action. Everybody is sitting and waiting for a good hand. Very few pots are contested. Big pots seldom occur.

Imagine a hold’em game with blinds of 5¢-10¢, but limits of $5 million-$10 million. It wouldn’t be a game. No one would play a hand until he got aces, and when he did, no one would call his $5 million bet without aces. Once every few days, there would be a call, and once every few months, one of the two players with aces would make a flush and win a pot. This is the ultimate deep-stack game, and it is boring as hell.

Yet, for some reason that I can’t fathom, players in tournaments want the early levels to be as close to the ultimate deep-stack game as they can get. Perhaps they think that their skill will have more opportunity to show. But there is the other side of a deep-stack tournament: Finally, after hours or even days of torturous boredom, you reach a point where the antes and blinds have risen enough to force the short stacks to play pots. These sensible levels last only a little while, and then everyone is suddenly a short stack. The shove-fest begins. Time spent in a typical tournament breaks down into 60 percent slow and boring, 20 percent perfect combination of skill and action, and finally, 20 percent shove with almost anything. No wonder so many top players enter tournaments at the last possible minute.

I can only guess that tournament organizers set up these structures because they think that’s what everyone wants. Sooner or later, some smart guy is going to figure out that players want action, and he’ll run tournaments that start off like a turbo (a short-stack tournament with quickly escalating blinds) and end slower. Give people more play when it really matters.

I was discussing this with some friends at the World Series of Poker, and one of them remarked that if I waited around for a smart tournament organizer, I’d grow old before I found one. I agreed that I already had grown old, and I hadn’t found one.

The nice thing about trying this strategy is that you will start to get a lot of customers quickly or the idea will fizzle, and you can go back to deep stacks. It is clear that turbo and even super-turbo events have built huge followings online, so they should be given a chance live.

All of the smart guys in the poker world are involved with online sites. The innovative geniuses at FullTiltPoker.net have come up with a really brilliant way to minimize the time that you spend sitting out after folding, thus enabling you to play a lot more hands per hour without multitabling [playing multiple tables simultaneously]. It is called Rush Poker. Whenever you fold or pre-fold (signify your intention to fold in turn), you are instantly moved to a new table and given a new hand. Imagine, you never have to wait patiently or curse the boredom of waiting for the next hand while slow opponents think forever.

In a future column, I will try to discuss some strategies for playing in a Rush Poker game. For now, I recommend that you try it. Also, nag your local tournament organizers to try some turbo tournaments. Maybe they will be a success and they’ll get rich.

Steve “Zee” Zolotow, aka The Bald Eagle, is a successful games player. He currently devotes most of his time to poker. He can be found at many major tournaments and playing on Full Tilt, as one of its pros. When escaping from poker, he hangs out in his New York City bars near Houston on Avenue A — Nice Guy Eddie’s and The Library. Almost every Friday, he ends up at Doc Holliday’s on Avenue A at 9th Street. He has promised to buy a drink for any Card Player reader who tracks him down at one of his bars.