$2,500 guaranteed tournament

Twice a week on Americas Cardroom there are $5.50 tournmaments with large prize pools.  Wednesday at 8 P.M. (US Eastern Time) is the $2,500 guarantee, and Sunday at 8 P.M. is the $3,500 guarantee.

I played fairly well last week in one of them and finished 28th for a small cash, and last night in the "$2,500 GTD" I finished 29th of 522 for a cash of $14.35.  As I made the money and got deep into the tournament, I got so nervous I was sweating and my hands were actually shaking.

I know that shaking hands are a "tell" when a poker player has a big hand, but I always thought that it was kind of silly that even very good players were unable to control their emotions and movements.  As one author put it, you need to have not only a "poker face", but a poker body.  No matter how hard I try to be inscrutable when I play live, I guess I'm human after all.

I definitley would have liked to go a lot deeper.  Several places at the final table paid over $100, and first was over $600 (first place generally pays about 25% of the prize pool.)  Even though I didn't go any deeper than last week, it seemed easier to get that deep.

Every tournament, because of various factors including the size of the prize pool, speed (how fast the blinds go up), buy-in level, and even the time of day, has it's own quirks.  In both tournaments, this week and last week, I had a lot of trouble at the beginning.  Yesterday I lost a lot of chips in the first 30 minutes.  I didn't get back to my starting stack until over an hour into the tournament.  From there it went well.  The way people play at the beginning of these tournaments is just crazy.  In poker terminology, I was playing against maniacs.

I was playing in a textbook manner, looking for situations where I could raise and be aggressive.  Almost every time I raised, it would go something like this:

We started level one with 2,500 chips and  blinds (forced minimum bets) were 15 and 30.  I would check my hand, raise to 90 or 120, someone would reraise to 600, and a third player would go all-in.  At this point I have two choices: fold to the pressure, or be prepared to put all my chips in by the end of the hand.  Since I didn't have any monster hands (and might not have risked my tournament life even if I did) I wound up folding a lot of hands.  I lost every hand that I played for the first 20 minutes or so.

There are two reasons that people play like this:

1. They are just having fun, and seeing if they can "get lucky" and double their chip stack.  They aren't playing optimally, and they don't care because they know they probably aren't going to make it into the money unless they get lucky.

2. Less likely, but possible, is that a serious player who values his time might take some big risks to double up early, so that he can be the "table captain,"  Once he has the biggest stack at the table, he can bully the players with shorter stacks and build his stack even more, putting himself in a great position to make it to the final table.  A common saying among such players is, "If I bust out, there's always another tournament."  A few of the pros play this way.

In this tournament, I'm sure that almost all of the maniacs are type #1.  Raising a lot and pushing players out of pots is one thing.  But with the hands I was seeing at showdown, these players were indeed mainacs.  A pro trying to double up early is taking a calculated risk.  If I was dealt aces early in the tournament with several players in the pot, I might just shove and see who comes along for the ride.

I just ran the numbers on Pokerstove, and aces win about 63% of the time against 3 players playing anything in the top 50% of hands.  For a chance to put myself instantly in the top 10 of the tournament, that's a gamble for all my chips that I would probably take.  But if it was any hand other than aces, or maybe kings, I would probably fold, depending on the situation.  There is nothing wrong with folding every hand for 30 minutes.  It's a lot better than spewing chips.

Now that I've finally figured that out, I'm already excited about playing the next big guarantee tournament.  It will be really nice if I can get through the first hour with at least an average stack.