WCOOP Day 1

It's always interesting to me to see how many people come out to play these big online tournaments. 7,000 people played in the NL 6-max yesterday. 7,000. That number is so big you don't even have to write it out, grammatically. I started off super hot, getting paid with AA, making straights, and generally getting my good luck out of the way in level one. I slowly chipped up after that and hung around for a few hours before losing KK to AJ and then short stack shoving AQ into AK a couple hundred away from the bubble. Nice.

I'm not a big fan of 6-max tournaments. It's not that I have a problem with the change of aggression that is needed, it's just annoying whenever everyone else is playing hyper aggressively. There were a couple of hands that I got 3bet and let the hand go where, in retrospect, I could have 4bet and more than likely taken it down. Unfortunately, by the time I realized that a 4bet might have worked, it was too late to do anything as the hand was 30 minutes in the past. I didn't make as many 3bets as I'd like to have, but that was more a case of timing then anything else. I'm not going to 3bet with air when the blinds are 15/30, and by the time the antes came in it seemed like nobody in front of me wanted to open any pots and I'm not going to start loose 3betting out of the SB or BB. That's a good way to kiss goodbye to 1/3rd of your stack. The two 3bets I did make were with AA and KK (back to back hands) and both got folds, so I;m def looking for situations in the upcoming NL tournaments to 3bet more.

Also yesterday was the five card draw tournament. Do you know how many people know how to play five card draw? Not many. Remember when you were in school, and the teacher would always tell your parents that you were "reading on a 5th grade level", and your parents would get stoked because you were only in 2nd grade and that was somehow a good compliment? Yeah. I'd say about 95% of the field yesterday were playing five card draw on a 5th grade level.

And I only think a few of them are actually in the 2nd grade.

I stuck to my plan from last year (where I got 23rd) and basically played my hands face up and squeaky tight, until I ran up against a thinking player at which time I loosened up a tad against them and bet/drew one with draws. Doubled up the second orbit and then started the seven hour grind which ended with me busting 82nd for a double-money back cash.

I can say that I'm really happy with my overall play. Against bad players in a game that is foreign to them you can't really start making a ton of plays. You pretty much have to sit back and let them shoot their stack off into you. With such long levels, these skill games pretty much become wars of attrition, and luckily I'm very used to sitting at a table for hours and hours and not getting bored. I think I'll see this kind of thing again soon, in the 2-7 tournament and so a lesser degree in the 8-game mix. As soon as you can discern who is thinking about what, you can take advantage of it. Got a smart player who knows the game? Make moves on him. Why would he mess with you when there is so much dead money to get. Got a bad player? Play tight against him. No need to make any moves since they aren't going to work anyway.