Page 10 - November 2007 • Southern California Gaming Guide

Jim Mercurio: Poker
TIhe Waiting is the Hardest Part
know all of last year I wrote about tournaments. But this year I have stayed away from that subject for the most part focusing on cash games and working on my fundamentals.
All of the work I have been doing in cash games now compounds with the work I was doing in tournaments and voila. I was up $1,000 in satellites at Commerce last month and never even played an event. Wanna buy a $500 tournament lammer, anyone?
And then I parlayed a $30 rebuy tournament on Pokerstars into a $2,600 seat in the World Championship of Online Poker Main Event. I contemplated selling the tournament dollars, but the expected $6,000,000 prize pool, $1,200,000 rst prize and the fact that this was going to be the biggest online tournament in history convinced me to take a shot.
I hope in a year that playing in $2,000 tournaments isn’t above my bankroll, but now it is. But I know that even moderate success in it would mean a lot bigger things for my poker writing career (and the poker book proposal my agent has out to publishers). Ding, ding, Jim—epiphany alert: You know you are a poker player when you apply poker concepts like implied odds to your actual life.
More than 3,000 people entered and the prize pool ballooned to more than $7,000,000. e rounds were half an hour and the starting stacks were $20,000. It was a great structure. e tournament ended up lasting over 20 hours.
In the rst hour, I got all of my money in with a ush and, of course, the guy hit his 4-outer and took me down to 5k. Grrrr! But this was one of the few events all year online where I still had a lot of play yet. Blinds were only 50–100, so my M (read Harrington’s tournament books) was still in the 30 range or, another way to look at it, I still had 45 big blinds in my stack.
About half of the time that I have made nal tables in 300+ person events, there has been a point where I have been desperately low on chips. What happens is that I break a certain psychological barrier. I lose all fear. It’s like Bob Dylan says, “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” is could sound like a bad thing because it could lead to reckless behavior, but it’s not. It’s more like a certain uninhibted freedom to just go with my instinct and move some chips.
So a couple of double-ups and triple-ups later, I am back in the swing of things and I spend a few hours hovering in the 40–80k range. I have my table gured out and I am using position well to steal a few pots. I make some great decisions, but eventually a few bad beats bring my chip stack down to a measly twelve times the big blind.
ere were 700 people left and 400 people got paid (like I said, richest online tournament ever). I didn’t want to survive. I wanted to take a chance to get back in the thick of things. I took a coin ip that I lost. In retrospect, maybe I could have waited another ten hands to get in a slightly better position. But overall, I was happy with how I played and was proud that I fought back for ve hours after my stack was crippled in the rst hour.
If you play in tournaments where the chip stack allows for a few slip-ups and a lot of play, take advantage of it. Hang in there, be patient. And since I entitled this column with a Tom Petty quote, I will end with one for you to use as a mantra should a few bad-beats ever discourage you... repeat after me:“I won’t back down.”
Buy Jim’s lm Hard Scrambled at www.hardscrambled.com or if you like his column, contact him at jim@jamespmercurio.com.
Page 10
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
November 2007
Poker: Wired Aces and River Rats