Back in Europe…

I am now more then half way through my 2.5 month trip playing poker throughout Europe.  I have still yet to have any big breakthroughs in cashes, but am having an amazing time nevertheless with staying fit and healthy and seeing new and beautiful cities .

The month of April started with me going to Vienna, Austria for the $125k buy in Premier League.   This is a very unique event with 16 total entrants which are divided into 2 groups of 8 and those 2 groups play a total of 4 tournament style sit-n-go’s on a point system.  The deeper you finish, the more points you get and in order to make it to the final table you need to accumulate as many points as you can.  A very interesting dynamic arose by the time we finished 3 matches and were on our 4^th and final match before the final table.  I wasn’t able to accumulate very many points and needed to finish 1^st in the 4^th match in order to have a chance at the final table, there was one person (Luke Schwartz) who’s only chance of making the final table was to finish 1^st in the last heat, but also for Erik Seidel to finish precisely last (a real long shot) and the other 6 people were in an interesting position because neither one of them were safe enough to have a guaranteed seat and so couldn’t afford to bust in 8^th or 7^th place.  So essentially I realized that I had some unique advantages on the others in that I didn’t care when I would bust since I needed 1^st no matter what and since everyone else was in danger, no one could really afford to go up against me while there are still 8 or 7 people left.

The simple and yet effective strategy that I came up with was to shove all in absolutely every single hand from the beginning and to try to accumulate as many chips as I can by basically stealing all the blinds because no one can really call me with almost anything except Aces and even then only 2-3 people would call me with aces because the rest don’t need to gamble and could just wait it out for someone else to bust.  We started every match with 300k in chips and blinds at 1k/2k and 21 hands per level with the next few levels being 2k/4k, 3k/6k and 5k/10k.  Essentially I expected that statistically I would be able to win all the blinds in the first 2 levels and perhaps some in the 3^rd very often as long as no one went bust and I didn’t run into AA of Erik Seidel or another person, thereby accumulating over 200k in chips with little risk and potentially more and then once people would get desperate and start gambling and 1 or 2 would bust, we would go back to playing a somewhat more normal version of poker.  At that point I would have a very healthy chip stack and a decent chance at winning 1^st.

As far as the actual experience went, everything went as expected in the beginning and people around the table quickly understood and agreed that my strategy was optimal.   However, I got a little unlucky at the 15^th or so hand when I ran into Erik Seidel’s AA as he was one of the few people who actually had to call me with them as he needed to finish in the top 3 or so to get into the finals and so needed to gamble.  Overall it was an interesting experience to play poker this way as you would never see this in any normal tournament or cash game and I kind of wish I actually got to see it work as I had hoped.  Unfortunately I finished 8^th and missed out on the finals.

I have seen many new poker games become popular in the last few years and new ones seem to come out all the time such as win the button holdem (where the button always goes to whoever won the last pot) or big ante holdem (where blinds are always very small and only the ante goes up).  I think experiencing poker from different angles is very important because it makes you think about the game in different ways that you otherwise may not and thereby influence a greater understanding of the different fundamentals.  This I believe helps you learn other games more efficiently and take your current ‘specialty’ game to the next level of understanding.

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