The Main Event

The last week of the World Series of Poker this year has a lot of good stuff going. There’s a $1,000 buy-in online tournament, the ladies’ event, the $1,500 razz, the finals of the $365 buy-in Giant tournament, the Little One for One Drop, and of course, the biggest tournament of the calendar year, the WSOP main event. I’ll, of course, be missing the ladies’ event, and most likely missing several of the others, but I’m definitely playing the main event.

The biggest tournament of the year on the biggest stage, and I got a taste of what it’s like to go deep in it last year. I learned some really good things from my experience making it to day 4 for my first time ever in this tournament. First of all, it stinks to make it to day 4 of a tournament and not win it. I hated it so much I decided to repeat it at this year’s Los Angeles Poker Classic!

Anyway, that’s enough bellyaching, let’s talk about what I really learned. I learned that quite a bit has to do with your table draw. I had very good tables on the first two days and one that let me get away with quite a bit on day three. My day four table draw was pretty decent but the players were definitely getting better by this point. Let’s just say that I would have been unhappy with it on day one, but I was happy with it for day four. Because I had such good tables throughout days one and two, I was able to pick up a pretty good amount of chips going into day three. And, since they were all relatively tight around bubble time, I could do the same as day three wore on, especially when my toughest opponent (the player who was on my direct left) busted. This was the first time in a couple of years that I felt I had a good table at any time on day one. It’s no surprise then, that I did better in 2016 than I had in any of the previous years I had played the main event.

The second thing I learned, I wish I had with me when I had those bad tables in previous years. It’s something people have been telling me for years and I know intuitively, but I still couldn’t accept it. The structure in this tournament is SO. DANG. GOOD. In most tournaments, if you have a bad table draw on day one, you have to hope for it to break soon or to run better than everyone else. Those things certainly help, but it’s also important to realize that even if you have a bad day one table, 1) You’re only there for 10 hours of playing time and 2) The blinds will be 250-500 with a 75 ante and the average stack will probably be about 63,000 chips. Even if you lose half of your starting stack on day one, you’ll have 50 big blinds and a new table!

I knew all of these facts logically going into last year, but they really became clear in my head in 2016. For whatever reason, I would find myself pressing hard to accumulate chips on day 1 if i had a favorable table, and if I had an unfavorable table, I would get frustrated and press bad spots to try to make something happen that didn’t need to. Which leads me to the final thing that I learned for good in last year’s main event: You can’t win the tournament on day 1, but you obviously can lose it.

Think about it this way: The chip leader at the end of all three day ones last year had eight starting stacks. He went on to finish in a respectable 263rd place. When he busted, the big blind was 24,000, one half of a starting stack. His end of day 1 stack was 80 percent of the big blind when the final table started, and one tenth of one percent of all of the chips in play in the tournament. I’m sure he played great that day, you pretty much have to in order to octuple your stack on a day one. However, all of the effort and great play in the world wasn’t going to make it that much of a difference in the overall tournament between finishing what he had, 394,000 and what I had 141,000 or what someone else who ended the day with the exact starting stack, 50,000 had.

The World Series of Poker main event is a unique tournament with a unique experience. It has the best structure in the world, some of the best players in the world, and also, some of the worst players in any $10,000 buy-in tournament of the year. It’s worth playing for the experience and the pageantry, even if you don’t expect to be terribly profitable in it. It’s certainly worth it for the lessons you can learn from playing it. Hopefully, my lessons in the 12 years I’ve played it will be a big help if you ever make it out for the big one. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG