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#290 – Strolling Past the FTOPS VI Graveyard at Midnight
FTOPS VI is officially done, and thank goodness. Here I am having one of the best months of my life on Full Tilt and I’m break-even in tournaments due to the four grand I blew on FTOPS. Not the two dimes I told you I was going to spend a month ago, or even the three thou I told you at the beginning of FTOPS I was ready to drop. Four thousand dollars.
I’m searching for explanations, as well as for the generally poor performance of the Full Tilt pros in yet another FTOPS.
Here are the raw numbers:
• 73 Full Tilt pros entered at least one event.
• Total buy-ins and juice added up to $207,517.
• Total payouts added up to $124,897, for a net loss of $82,620.
• The pros registered a total of 349 entries in the 16 events and cashed 28 times, only 8% of the time. In five events, no Full Tilt pro cashed.
[Note: a small component of these numbers is estimation. In the rebuy events, I assumed one rebuy and one add-on per player. That fits the average for those tournaments. For the knockout event, I assumed the 16 pros had a total of 30 knockouts for $900. The average for the field would be 1 and with no cashes and a lot of pros got knocked out early, so that’s probably too liberal. Even if some of those are off by a little, they are reasonable approximations and shouldn’t skew six-figure totals of cashes and costs.]
There isn’t much positive to take from this, and even less if Aaron Bartley hadn’t made the final table in the Big-Boy Two-Day. Without that one cash, the loss would have DOUBLED to over $161,000. And Aaron, who also cashed in the Main Event, played while he was taking prisoners in the $2,500 + $120, didn’t even play in FTOPS V. (In FTOPS V, for which I compiled similar stats, the pros cashed in 32 of 257 entries for payouts of $83,000, a cost of $179,000, and a loss of $95,000.) You could say our net loss is slightly less or our negative return on equity is less, but you’d also have to note that we’re worse than the field as a whole even at cashing, which we weren’t in FTOPS V.
You could say a lot of things, but you have to say we generally sucked.
But not everybody sucked. The MVP had to be Aaron Bartley. Aaron played 11 of the first 12 events without cashing and was nearly $4,000 underwater. But he finished fifth in the Two-Day, the only Full Tilt pro to make a final table in this FTOPS, earning $78,525. He also later on Sunday made the money in the Main Event.
Six other pros finished in the black – Eddie Scharf (on the strength of the best Full Tilt pro finish in the Main Event), Lynette Chan (with the best Full Tilt pro finish in the $1,000 + $60 NLHE), Clonie Gowen (who finished 10th in the PLO rebuy event), Adam Schoenfeld (who cashed in two NLHE events), Mark Vos (who had the second-best pro finish in the Main Event), and Jennifer Harman (who moneyed in the NLHE 6-handed rebuy, one of her two events).
Except for Aaron Bartley, no one who played a majority of the events finished in the black. Nineteen pros lost more than my $4,003 and fourteen of them, like me, never cashed in FTOPS VI.
I fear some of our stank rubbed off on Jon “PearlJammed” Turner. Turner, one of the best online tournament players in the world and a past successful player in FTOPS, cashed three times and on many occasions looked like our hope to shed the stereotype of the Full Tilt pro as unable to win a big Full Tilt tournament. But playing every event, his cashes totaled $1,737, and his estimated outlay was $8,605. Watching him play eight tournaments at a time and sticking around a long time in almost all of them, it’s hard not to be impressed. Win or lose, I still think he’s the Abominable Snowman.
So why are we doing so bad? That’s both a theoretical question and a personal one. I’ve done very well in Full Tilt tournaments, especially since returning from London in September. And I’ve done well in SnGs, especially FTOPS satellite SnGs. Why am I doing so bad? I can come up with two explanations.
First, online poker tournaments are a high-risk, high-return activity. You are SUPPOSED TO lose most of the time. You’d think after 600 tournaments – Full Tilt pro entries in FTOPS V and FTOPS VI events totaled 606 – that quality would come through but that’s just not the case. It’s not even a simple matter of saying, “I guess those Full Tilt pros are overrated” or “They just don’t know how to play online.”
Look at Huck Seed. Huck was the leading pro in event after event of the first FTOPS I covered back in February. And he’s subsequently gone on to kick some serious ass in online tournaments over the last few months. Huck burned through about $4,500 and never got a whiff of the money.
Or PearlJammed. Can’t claim he doesn’t know what he’s doing in online tournament, or even that he played poorly, having cashed in 3 of 16 events.
If you want to claim the Full Tilt pros as a group just aren’t very good, I don’t think you can use the results as automatic proof of that.
Second, there may be some adjustments we need to make to the online game. Obviously, I have an idea of how to do well in an online tournament, and you could say PearlJammed and Huck Seed know a lot more than me. But I’m starting to look at my results and wonder if there’s something I’m missing.
Here’s the theory. I don’t know if it’s even true for me and certainly don’t know if it’s true for other Full Tilt pros, but (a) there are differences between online and live tournaments, and (b) there are differences between super-big-field online tournaments and other online tournaments.
ONLINE V. LIVE
I can see with some confidence that I understand the differences between online and live NLHE tournaments. I play a completely different NLHE game online than I do live. I’m sure Jon Turner gets that and the Full Tilt pros who play a bunch online. But does Mark Vos? Or Allen Cunningham? I’m not going to match myself against their skills but I’d be surprised if their thinking is as advanced as mine about how certain plays work online. In addition, I know much more about individual players. Live, they probably dissect a table much better than I will. But those skills need to be adapted for online play. (Incidentally, I played with Allen Cunningham in the Monday $1k and he played very solid, with very conservative hand values. It’s not like I saw him putting moves on opponents every other hand. But I don’t know how he plays live. I’m not attacking his online play; it’s just hard for me to see how he can maintain his edge on the field if he’s deprived some of his live-game weapons and may have developed the equivalent online-game weapons.)
I have to say that I completely stunk for every minute I played in the three of the four limit events (Razz, LHE 6-handed, and HORSE). I consider myself very strong in limit poker, maybe (owing to how little limit poker is played in online tournaments these days) stronger in comparison to the field than I am in NLHE. But while I am very experienced in how to adapt to bad players in NLHE, I’m completely flummoxed by how bad they play the limit events.
For instance, in the LHE, I went for max raises with A-A before the flop and after a flop of 8-8-7. I know the guy with 9-9 is entitled to hit but when I lose to that guy, as I did when he caught the nine on the turn, I’m going to lose a lot more. Why does the guy with 9-9 want to keep making the pot bigger against someone else who apparently wants to keep making the pot bigger? I had the same thing happen when I flopped a pair of aces and there were three hearts on the board. I had it in my head that the other player had a naked king of hearts, and I was right. He went for max raises on the flop and turn. There’s no way he can get me to fold, whatever I’ve got. And whatever I’ve got has him beat unless he hits a heart. Why does he want to make the pot BIGGER while he’s drawing?
It’s key in these limit events to not lose any big pots early. There’s just not enough to be gained by winning them because the blinds go up so high later. But I lost lots of big pots early in all three of those events because I knew I had the best hand so I bet it and ran into players who were behind yet wanted to force the action. And I probably played worse after losing these hands, part-tilt and part scrambling with a short stack to come up with a way to combat this play.
Maybe some other pros had this trouble. But if I’m having it in the limit events, I figure they have to be experiencing some of this in NLHE. (Incidentally, I played very well in one of the limit events, SEOB. But I ran extremely well during the first hour and never really had an instance of a player making a bunch of bad moves and getting bailed out. Instead, they made a bunch of bad moves and I made MORE because I started ahead and caught even better.)
BIG FIELDS
I have occasionally done very well in huge-field online tournaments. But I’ve had a lot more success where the fields have been 150-800 players. I haven’t done any statistical analysis (not that I have the math chops to do so) but I think my results have been much better online in the “big” but not “gigantic” tournaments.
The odd thing is that I developed that aspect of my live tournament game tremendously over the summer. In live tournaments before the 2007 WSOP, I played like an online player. I had live tournaments (at the 2006 Series and a few other live big-buy-in events) where I built up some chips but I simply didn’t have the mindset to play over the long haul. I think I excelled at that during the Series last summer – patience, opportunism, understanding how to play different stack sizes as the tournament progresses, sensing other players’ flaws in handling what I call “the Big Sit”. And if I’m DEVELOPING these skills, certainly players like Allen Cunningham, Lee Watkinson, and Huckleberry Seed have mastered them.
Those skills are not as important in online tournaments. In a $69 + $6 tournament like the $18,000 Guarantee Double Stack, the tournament draws about 300 players and ends in 6 hours. It plays 36 and, yes, there is some virtue in understanding how to handle the bubble, the low money, dealing with bigger and smaller stacks (yours and opponents), and navigating yourself into position for the final table. But it is over a pretty limited period and it usually doesn’t come up until at least 80% of the field has been eliminated.
In the huge field tournaments, though, you need those skills, but they are somewhat different, both from smaller online tournaments and live tournaments. I’m struggling to adapt my “online patience” and “live patience” to this different situation. For instance, I’ve noticed that players frequently behave like they are short-stacked when they aren’t. If, say, blinds are 200-400 and I raise to 1,100. (I see lot of players raising to 1,800, though I don’t notice them getting more folds than I get with 1,100, by the way.) The guy with 10,000 who wants to play the hand moves all-in. In fact, the guy with 15,000 or 20,000 is moving all-in if he wants to play the hand.
There is a Russian Roulette aspect to these tournaments, which is at odds with two of my strengths in online tournaments: (1) I excel at the stealing game because I think players are too tight in the later stages of online tournaments; and (2) I’m pretty confident in the quality of my post-flop play, especially compared with online players. I’m not comfortable that I’ve figured out how to adapt, and I’d be surprised the Full Tilt pros have figured out how to adapt their range of skills such situations.
SUGGESTIONS FOR THE NEXT FTOPS
This is all going into my memo to Uncle Tilty.
First, they should run MTT SnG satellites. Right before the events, as well as before the Monday $1K, they run loads of turbo satellites. They should make those MTT SnGs so they can start as soon as they fill.
Second, they should have a Mixed Hold ‘Em event in the next FTOPS. Because I made a final table in this at the WSOP, I was thinking it would be my best shot at hosting one. But Greg Mueller finished second in the bigger buy-in Mixed Hold ‘Em event, so I’m really just pimping for greater glory for FBT. But he’s a good guy, so it’s cool.
Third, they should run an FTOPS turbo event. I’ve been harping on them to have regular turbo MTT SnGs to no effect. But people LOVE the turbo events everywhere else on Full Tilt – almost all the SnGs above $50 are turbos – and I’ve done well in them so it’s another shot at glory for me.
