Anyone who has ever read my blog consistently will be aware that my history is not in playing poker tournaments. I have played in many tournaments down the years but nothing too heavy. The biggest online poker tournament that I have played was a $200 event last year and my success in that wasn’t too good. But sample size is key here of course and over the next few posts I want to discuss tournament poker.
So what better than to look at the main event final table of the 2008 World Series of Poker to wet your appetite! I know that this has little to do with online poker but these are two guys whose games I really respect. You will see the amazing psychological plays at work here and this is what I love about the game.
But as you know I have been in and around PokerLoco recently and this week I have been taking a look at some of their lower buy-in tournaments. The thing is that you don’t need thousands upon thousands of dollars to play online poker tournaments. You can buy in for as little as $1 in some of the events.
A while ago I wrote an e-book called Destination Final Table which looked at my philosophy of playing large MTT online poker events. I do feel that the majority of players sit back for too long in these tournaments and end up too short stacked. This then puts them into a situation where they have to get very lucky very quickly.
I am sure that Peter Eastgate or Ivan Demidov didn’t get down to heads up for the world title outlasting thousands of players by being cautious. Although the structure of the $10,000 event does mean that a solid player can get a big stack simply by exploiting the fish and when you are looking at 6000….7000 or even 8000 players then there are going to be plenty of them.
There is a huge amount of luck of course in the winning of any poker tournament and if you happen to get a poor table or seat then you could be swimming upstream before you even start.
Anyway catch you soon and take care
Carl “The Dean” Sampson recommends that you play poker online at PokerLoco
