Lover of trading, tacos, 3D/AR/VR, cryptos, and most things Japanese

So today was the big Alpha8 tournament at Club WPT that I won entry into earlier this week. The tournament prize pool was 13.9 million play chips, with a 100,000 chip buy-in. Since I won the satellite tourney, my entry was free. I’d been looking forward to this afternoon all week. Finally, I had a chance to see how I’d do against some pretty serious players. At least as serious as play chip players could be, methinks.

I started the day off playing in some cash games and making 100k in play chips at the 100/200 tables before registering for a freeroll tournament to practice and get ready for the big one. The freeroll had 162 entries and I played very well, making the final table and battling all the way to heads-up for the win. My opponent and I were fairly evenly stacked in chips and the battle raged for about 30 minutes, each of us trying to one-up the other. We got it all in several times, each time with the other proving the victor, so the lead changed back and forth at least four times before we came to the final hand. Unfortunately, he had the better hand and I finished in second place. Not a bad warm up.

Four p.m. rolled around and I sat down to play the Alpha8. I managed to win a few early hands, which put me in a chip positive position to play for a while. I opened up my game a bit while the blinds were low, but still played pretty tight, waiting for good cards and making the most of them when I had it. There was one time when I had KJ (King Jack) vs. AJ (Ace Jack) and a jack hit on the flop. After some furious raising, I had him all-in and I was almost all-in. The turn brought a blank, but I got lucky on the river and spiked a jack for two pair and victory in the hand.

I was making good decisions, capitalizing on my opportunities, and using my tight image to pull off the occasional well-timed bluff. In short, I was playing my A game, and it was proving successful. Out of the 139 entries, I was the chip leader with 50 players remaining, and prizes paid out to the top 20. Play continued for two hours and I was doing great – in third place with 12 players remaining – and then I ran into time odds.

Time odds are when a player has a time they have to leave by and, if the other players know it, mean the player has nothing to lose because they cannot stay for the rest of the tournament. I had a family dinner commitment at six, and the tournament was taking longer than expected. So there I was, sitting in third place, with one player to go out before the final table, and I had to dump my chips because I couldn’t stay any longer. I was dealt pocket jacks (JJ) and made a standard raise. I had one caller and the flop came 8-8-A. I made a pot-sized bet, figuring my opponent had at least an ace. He raised me, confirming my suspicion, so I went all in for the rest of my chips. He called and the board came blank-blank. He won the pot with trip 8s and I was out in eleventh, the bubble boy.

If I had had at least 10 more minutes, I would have just folded my way to the final table and felt a lot better about having to leave. As it stands, I just didn’t have the time to play any differently, and I was a bit cranky about it for a while. So close! At least I made the money, which was my first priority after all, and received 139k for my efforts. Next time, I’ll be sure that I don’t have any potential conflicts before entering tournaments, cuz it sucks to be playing so well and have to leave it prematurely. And hey, I didn’t bust out earlier, so things definitely could have gone worse. 🙂

I’ve been playing a lot of poker lately. Over the past months I’ve rediscovered my passion for the game and have been playing A LOT. I’ve taken the initial 1,000 chips given to players by the Pokerist app and turned it into over 1,000,000,000 in six months. That’s a billion with a big “B”, or a one million percent return on my initial investment. Sure it’s just play money, but I started at 2/4 games and have only played as big as 250/500k, so it’s not like I went big and got lucky – I earned every chip I made the hard way, by playing as if the chips were real and at levels that I was comfortable playing.

Not satisfied with playing just cash games, I started looking to get more tournament experience. When I started playing poker in 2003 I became a student of the game. I read every book I could get my hands on about the game and how to play it, the different strategies employed by players, and had gotten pretty good at the game. I was playing online tournaments and even winning them occasionally, with my best victory coming from defeating 54 other players. Now I was looking for tournament sites that weren’t the gambling sites, without much luck. I tried the WSOP app on Facebook, thinking it’d be the perfect solution, but alas, the app is not geared for tournaments. It only offers one-table sit-and-go tournaments, not the bigger ones I was looking for.

I had seen the ads during the World Poker Tour shows for ClubWPT and went looking for an app in Apple’s App Store, to no avail. They only have a web presence, built on java, and looking like it was designed by coders rather than designers. Booo WPT. As a public company, you should definitely invest in making apps and hire a good designer to rework your interface. I’m available, btw.

Despite it’s lackluster interface, ClubWPT does offer free, multi-table tournaments, so I started playing there. After a day or two of getting used to the interface and the intricacies of playing on my laptop, where the table background image barely fits, I started getting serious about the tourneys. I played my first satellite tournament. For those that don’t know, a satellite tournament is a lower cost way to win your way into a more expensive tournament. The top eight finishers in the satellite win a free entry into the Daily Double, and I made the cut from 42 players. Not a bad start, and I was looking forward to playing in the Daily Double for hopefully there would be a much bigger field. Sure enough, there were 152 people who had either won their way in or put up the 1,000 chip entry fee. This was more like it! I battled against the pack for almost two hours and ended up finishing eighth, taking home a nice 4,650 chip prize pool for my efforts.

Last night I made my daily sojourn to Starbucks to use their wifi, drink coffee, and play poker. I was hoping to get in some bigger tournaments again, and was happy to see another satellite was available. It was for entry into the big WPT Alpha8 tournament on Sunday. Surely there will be a ton of players vying for that prize pool! I entered the satellite and settled in to do battle again. After about an hour and a half, and making another final table, I realized that I was the chip leader and all I had to do was fold my hands and I’d win entry into the Alpha8, but I kept getting good cards. I wrestled briefly with playing it safe and just folding my way into the finals, but decided that I’d need the experience of continuing to play the final table when I was playing the big one. Plus, I was getting great cards, so I kept the pressure on my opponents. And, not only did I win my way into Sunday’s Alpha8, but I finished first, besting 41 other players on the way.

As of the time of this writing, Sunday is four days away, and I look forward to hopefully competing against a much bigger field. I think Sunday’s turn out for the tournament will be a good indicator of the overall popularity of ClubWPT, but given the number of players playing there and their painful interface, I shan’t be surprised to find myself back looking for bigger and better sites to play. Wish me luck! 🙂