#777 – 2009 WSOP #35 – Vegas on $2,000 a Day #5 – The Great Satellite Caper

I started my coverage of last year’s single-table satellite season at the WSOP  with the following recommendation:

The point of the story I am going to tell is this: Get the fuck to Las Vegas as soon as you can. Quit Full Tilt. Throw your computer in a dumpster. Cut off your girlfriend’s arm and sell the rings off the fingers. Do whatever you can to get to the World Series of Poker …. The opportunities provided in the satellite room are so lucrative as to justify any sort of mayhem necessary to get your ass there.

I will start this year’s satellite coverage with a shorter, more urgent message: Why aren’t you here yet? Hurry!

Full Tilt has promised to make good on all the money players tried withdrawing when it was seized in transit from that payment processor. Your money is secure, therefore, even if Full Tilt has to pay you out of Uncle Tilty’s own pocket. (Trust me, he can afford it.) But if you were concerned, come to the Brasilia Room and play single-table satellites. They’re that juicy.

Last year I played twenty $525 single-table satellites and made a profit in seven. In six of the seven, I won outright or received most of the chips in a chop. This year, the same numbers have held up. In ten of the $525s, I’ve won two and got a majority-chop in the third.

NINE DAYS IN THE TRAUMA CENTER

If you don’t like hearing about poker hands or bad players, skip from the end of this paragraph to the section heading “No Night at the Opera.” The play in these satellites defies generalization. At first, I nicknamed the room “The Twilight Zone” but am now calling it “The Trauma Center” because severe cranial injury is the only explanation I can come up with for it.

Not all satellites are made up of bad players. (You should in mind, however, that these are $525 buy-in satellites. They have satellites with values starting at $65 and going as high as $1,030, making this the second highest buy-in satellite in the room.) You will always find a few competent players and sometimes some very good ones. But for every good player there are at least two or three in every satellite who seem ready to self-immolate on any provocation.

[In the $525, players start with 2,000 chips. Blinds start at 25-25 and increase every twenty minutes. (Later levels have blinds of 25-50, 50-100, 100-200, 150-300, 200-400, and 300-600. Only once did one of my satellites make it past 200-400.)]

LIMPING INTO THE TRAUMA CENTER

Limping is endemic. It took until exactly the second hand of my first satellite to see my first seven-way limped pot. In my third satellite, the first two showdowns were won by limpers who called raises out of position to win showing Q-3s and 6-2s.

WHERE THE CALL BUTTON IS ALWAYS ON

If I could summarize the bad play in these satellites in one word, it’s “passive.” Players limp too much. They call raises too much. They call bets too much. Considering that they start with just 2,000 in chips and so many early pots are multi-way, a ridiculous number of players are routinely putting a quarter of their chips at risk just to keep seeing cards.

In the first level of my first satellite this year, I had 9-9 in the big blind. A player in early position min-raised to 50. Four players called. The small blind reraised to 275, so I folded my 9-9. The original raiser and a pair of his callers called the reraise. The small blind checked the K-K-3 flop, one of the other players bet 400, and the small blind showed me his A-A before mucking it.

Within ten hands, one of those same players limped for 25 then called my raise to 150. I had A-K and he check-called my bet after a J-6-4 flop. After we checked it down, he showed 7-5o.

In my second satellite, the next night, there was a similar call-fest during the first level. After a raise to 75, there was a call, a reraise to 275, calls by both blinds, and calls by the original raiser and the player who flat-called the original raise. Three hands into the satellite, five players are playing 275, nearly 15% of their starting stacks, to see the flop.

THIS STORY HAS NO NAME

Players in these satellites sometimes size their bets without regard for the blinds, the size of the pot, or their chip stacks. It’s like a poker game broke out in Nurse Ratched’s ward. This sequence of bets occurred while still in the first level of my first satellite. The button was in Seat 10, so Seat 1 had the first 25 blind, Seat 2 the second:

Seat 5 raises to 75.
Seat 7 calls 75.
Seat 9 reraises to 200. (Why 200? In addition to the two blinds, one player already showed strength by raising to 75 and another by flat-calling.)
Seat 10 calls the 200 reraise.
The blinds fold.
Seat 5 rereraises to 525. (Again, why so small? He already has a reraiser in the hand and another player who flat-called the reraise.)
Seat 7 folds.
Seat 9, the reraiser, folds. (Huh? Then why did he put in the small reraise?)
Seat 10, who called the original reraise, now calls the third raise to 525.

After a flop of A-4-6 rainbow, Seat 5 (who put in the first and third raises) leads out betting 625, and Seat 10, who called off a quarter of his stack to see the flop, folds.

And three hands later, Seat 9, who made that too-small reraise to 200, open-raised the 25 blinds to 175.

Still during the first level of this satellite, two players limped for 25 and someone raised to 150. One of the limpers reraised to 750, half his stack. The original raiser called. Mr. Limp-750 checked the flop of A-2-8, and then folded his Q-Q face-up after a bet from the original raiser. 

NO NIGHT AT THE OPERA

When I was in London covering WSOP-Europe, Tony Holden took me to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden to see the premiere of Iphigenie en Tauride. I never got around to writing about that experience, which is a shame because it would shed light on the atmosphere at the table during single-table satellites. Whatever you imagine an evening would be like in an historic opera house, playing poker with these guys is exactly the opposite.

A story making the rounds of the Brasilia Room one evening concerned a prostitute who took her fee in poker chips. I’m sure that goes on all the time, but in this particular instance, it worked out badly for the call girl. When she took the chips to the cage, she was told they were tournament chips and had no cash value.

I asked, “So how did she do?”

Responding to the quizzical expressions, I explained, “So she had to use them to enter a tournament. How did she do in the tournament?” I had the image of a pissed-off prostitute entering a poker tournament, busting the guy who paid her in tournament chips, and making the final table. But all these guys could do was speculate which female tournament player got her start that way – and the bias of this group was to conclude they all did.

Ogling the massage girls seems to be a regular hobby of the denizens of the satellite room. The activity reached a nadir when one dealer told us about a message girl who looked like she was thirteen. Then he added, “She was just beautiful. Unbelievable.” Several of my opponents nodded appreciatively and started scanning the room for her.

The player next to me in Seat 4 asked, “Is she blonde or brunette?”

I wanted to say, “Why the fuck does that matter?” but decided to remain non-judgmental and simply ask, “Why?”

“Because I only like brunettes,” he said. He was eying me as I wrote this in my notebook, so I covered it by saving, “I’ll make sure to note that if it’s ever relevant.”

So it’s a pretty fundamentally messed-up place, but if you want to be a professional poker player, these are the kind of work conditions you occasionally have to deal with. And unless you are so disgusted that you’re going to give up poker and put that college degree to some use, you might even succeed if you can devote enough time to the single-table satellites in the Brasilia Room.

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