Like thousands of other online poker players I am hopeful that this is the first article in a series. The second installment will be "How To Cash In The WSOP Main Event", and the third and final piece will be entitled "How To Win The WSOP Main Event". I know what you're thinking: He's delusional, or at best daydreaming like some sad slacker whose other grand scheme is to win the lottery. I know this because I've had the same thoughts, and yet lately I've come to realize that dreaming big is a vital component if you intend to make it big in poker. Playing in these online qualifiers is a fairly quixotic pursuit in the first place. But once you win a seat, as I was fortunate enough to do last weekend, it feels a lot less like tilting at windmills and a lot more like a cogent plan of action to take down $10 million.
Everyone who plays poker would like a seat at this year's Main Event, which could draw as many as 8000 players and should see the winner leave approximately $10 million richer for his efforts. Most of us, however, have no intention of laying out the $10,000 entry fee for a seat. That leaves us with satellite tournaments where 100 players for instance each put up $100 in order to provide the winner with a seat. These satellites are taking place right now, and will continue to do so up until the day before the Main Event starts on July 28. You can qualify online or you can wait until the last moment, fly down to Las Vegas and find plenty of single-table satellites with a buy-in of $1000 plus a small entry fee, which is exactly what I intended to do because it dawned on me that qualifying online was just too tough.
Believe me, I tried the online route. I played in tournaments where the odds of winning a seat were 135 to 1 against, but the entry fee was less than $100, and I played in tournaments where 1 in 26 received their magical ticket but it did cost each of us $535 to participate. In both cases the maths persuaded me to play, because there was a substantial overlay in my favor. The $535 tournament was incredible value if you think about it. There were 52 players competing for 2 WSOP packages, each valued at $13,000 (all online poker rooms that offer WSOP seats also include a stipend for travel and accommodation), but we'd only put in a total of $13,000 into the prize pool. The online poker room in question had added a second WSOP package as a sweetener. I didn't win either package, and instead managed to get knocked out in the low 40s.
All in all I spent $1,750 on entry fees for online qualifiers to the WSOP, and while that had little overall impact on my poker bankroll matters had clearly reached a point where it no longer seemed like such great value. My plan was to fly to Las Vegas, play in one of the smaller WSOP Events, say the $2,000 No-limit Hold'em event, and then take a stab at one of the $1,000 satellites. That way I could at least say that I had played in the WSOP, if not the actual Main Event.
Last weekend a colleague of mine who also writes about poker told me that there was a freeroll event at Doylesroom.com that would award three packages to the WSOP, each valued at $12,000, and that wouldn't be massively oversubscribed. If you've played online poker for any period of time you know that "freeroll" is a synonym for "complete and utter waste of my time". The typical online freeroll sees 3000 stampeding idiots going all-in against one another from the first hand onwards in a relentless attempt to win a whole $50 in real money. If it qualifies as poker at all it is only as poker for hillbillies.
I entered though, partly because I felt that winning my entry into the WSOP on a freeroll would make it a compelling story and partly because the sponsor of the tournament was pokernews.com. I once entered a writing contest on that website and my poker story won netting me $200, so I was confident that my association with them was somehow lucky. I'm silly that way after a lifetime of betting on horses and sports.
The freeroll only attracted 215 participants. That was very good news. One of the packages was given away to the player who knocked out the professional poker player Tony G, the only man who can make Mike Matusow's bottom lip quiver. I felt that unless we were drawn at the same table my chances of claiming that bounty would be very slim. It proved the case as Tony G was knocked out within the first hour at the same table that he started at, which unfortunately wasn't mine. Still, that left 2 seats for the remaining 213 players - not bad odds at all, especially for a freeroll.
I played smart poker for the first hour, and was fortunate that my initial table was extremely weak-tight. Stealing blinds was incredibly easy and lucrative, and after 30 minutes I had tripled my initial stack of 2,000 chips. I then gave most of those chips away when I flopped top pair with a good kicker and ran into a weak-tight opponent who had slow-played Kings in a heads-up pot. It happens, because even the tightest and weakest player has enough sense to slow-play Kings now and then. I built my stack back up to 5,000 and right before the first break caught a bit of a break (you need them in every tournament) when my AJ beat my opponent's AK to win a substantial pot.
I eventually made it to the final table of 9 with the second-smallest stack but noticed immediately that players were tightening up even though the blinds and antes were large enough to make everyone's situation urgent. I am indebted to Dan Harrington for pointing this out to me in his books, and for giving all of us who are serious about tournament poker a formula to calculate with some degree of accuracy how quickly we need to accumulate more chips. With that in mind I raised in the cut-off seat with a marginal hand, got one caller who stuck around to the river on a busted flush draw, and ended up padding my stack considerably thanks to a single pair.
The final hour of the tournament saw three of us battling for the two seats, and it was a draining experience. There can be no worse feeling than losing on the bubble in a tournament of this nature. To come third in a freeroll that offers two seats is a bitter pill, and what makes it worse is that the guy who did finish third was a very strong player who did little wrong under the circumstances.
There was one key hand where I was forced to go all-in with AK suited, heck I was happy to go all-in with that hand against two opponents, at least until my opponent (the guy who eventually finished 3rd) turned over KK. This time pocket Kings were no match for my hand as a miraculous Ace came on the turn (I had already stood up from my computer as he had me covered at the time in terms of chips).
If there is going to be a second article from me about how I cashed at the Main Event I know that there will have to be many of these sort of hands to relate. To get past 7000 poker players you need to win a lot of 50/50 races and several 25/75 races as well. But I'll tell you one thing: As unlikely as it may sound, it's definitely possible.
