Devo'’s Guide to the 2014 Main Event

If poker is a significant portion of your income or life, then you most likely will be in attendance for the World Series of Poker main event. If you’re not, then poker is not as important to you as you think. This two week festival is poker’s only major championship event. The main event started it all and has remained strong through the highs and lows of poker. It is the only tournament that generates public excitement anymore with its stable home on ESPN.

The main is a marathon. Three Day 1s this year, three Day 2s, and then nobody gets a day off for six more days. Nine lucky bastards will get to spend a few months as heroes until they finally play the final table on November 10 and 11. I’ve turned my 30,000 starting chips into a 20 million chip stack once, finishing in 12th place, and had an exhaustingly fun time in the process. Assuming I got all my chips in as an 80 percent favorite (which I didn’t) every time, then by the laws of probability I still should have busted four times over those eight days. It’s really hard to make a deep run in the main, but here’s some things I learned along the way that helped me out:

Rest is absolutely essential to making a deep run in the main event. I understand that it’s the 4th of July weekend just before Day 1. If you plan on going out and partying on the 4th of July, then you shouldn’t be playing on the 5th. Furthermore, you should be coming into the main with several days of excellent rest and on a regular sleep schedule. If you’re going to make a deep run, then you’re going to need to be sharp for the next two weeks straight.

The week before the main is generally a big party with everybody being in town and most organizations throwing their annual bash this week too. Although the days of high-dollar debauchery thrown by online sites have left us for the most part, there is still plenty of opportunity to go out and have a good time even if you never go anywhere besides Stony’s. It is good to network and be social, however it is more important to be fresh for the main. Be responsible and take care of yourself and your results will improve.

Any stack is a good stack at the end of Day 1. People regularly ask me what my chip stack goal is for various phases of tournaments, and the correct answer usually doesn’t exist, because my goal is to play my best. The main event is a different beast entirely though based on its excellent structure and extreme duration. Five levels will be played on Day 1, over ten hours of poker, ending after the 200-400 (50) level. This means that if you carry a starting stack into Day 2 of the main then you will have 60 big blinds (BB) and two hours to do something with them. If you fail to accumulate any chips on Day 2 also, then you will come back with almost 20 BBs on day three. Obviously you will be significantly behind the average stack, but the average stack rarely matters in tournament poker, especially massive events like the main. The point is that the entire first day and much of the second day of the main fall under the umbrella of the early stages of the tournament, and survival is much more important than chip accumulation during early stages. Keep pots small unless you want to make them big, don’t play a big pot unnecessarily, and for the love of pocket aces please don’t get 300 BBs in with them after the flop unimproved if you want to see Day 1 dinner break.

Homework is a decent portion of my edge on Day 2s and later. Table draws are posted on the Internet the night before, and this is when I put in time learning my opponents. I start with a blank sheet of paper, draw a table, label it with the day and event, and fill in all the blanks. I write down the full name of each opponent in their seat with chip stacks. Then I go to Google and learn everything I can. Sometimes they have $683 in career earnings and end up being a professional footballer. Other times they have millions in earnings and are somebody you recognize. Regardless of who your opponents are, the more time you put into learning them the better you will be able to handle them tomorrow.

Before Day 3 of the 2011 main, I learned I had Jeff Forest and Galen Hall at my table. Both had been involved in major televised final tables that year, and consequently I spent many hours before Day 3 watching tape on them. I ended up coolering Galen early so that tape never mattered, but I won a pot from Jeff that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I noticed a tell on him when he was bluffing at the WPT final table, and he put me in a spot at The Rio that usually would have gotten me to fold, but the same tell was there. I called and he was bluffing, and I patted myself on the back for hard work yesterday bearing fruit today.

Focus must be on the main for the duration of the event. The best way to accomplish this is to take care of everything that life might throw at you in the week before the main, after the preliminaries have wrapped up. This is nearly as important as getting rest that week because you simply won’t have the time to take care of life things while taking care of the main event. Pay all your bills, make sure that air-conditioning repair is taken care of, and call people who need calling. If there is something distracting you from poker then you are much more likely to implode as the days roll by, needing to do something about the outside pressure and caving from the pressure of high-stakes poker under the lights and cameras.

After you’ve prepared yourself sufficiently, the last important thing is to have fun. A deep run in the main is a once in a lifetime experience and those moments should be savored. Enjoy the ride and play your best, everything from here on out is out of your control. ♠

Bryan Devonshire has been a professional poker player for nearly a decade and has more than $2 million in tournament earnings. Follow him on Twitter @devopoker.