4 ms·

>You can play great poker, sometimes over the span of a few days, and suddenly get hit with a cold deck or get unlucky and poof you are eliminated with nothing,

>You can play great poker, sometimes over the span of a few days, and suddenly get hit with a cold deck or get unlucky and poof you are eliminated with nothing, along with your chance at a 5 or 6 figure top prize. Then you have to suck it back up and move on to the next one. I specialized in small, quick tournaments for this reason. Live players still weren't used to the even faster pace of online play but with rapidly escalating blinds it was critical. They were lulled into indecision and procrastination by the low early blinds, not realizing that they escalated quickly to force stacking out of the small players. I could easily make $1k+ a day clearing Binion's tournaments. I tried playing in a couple of Venetian Deep Stack events and usually busted out. I finally adapted to the slower play, longer rounds, bigger field and frankly better players to leave after two days of play with the same payout from winning one three hour Binion's tournament. The biggest upside being able to say I got my name published in Card Player magazine. LOL. Since for me it was just entertainment and I could reliably pay for my vacation in the smaller tourneys I went back to small ball.

sokoloff 8y ago
When WSOP was in the early spring (when the weather is nice in Vegas and crappy in Boston), I used to go for a week and a bit every year and grind out the trip cost and then some on single table satellites. With the advent of online poker, televised NLHE, and the main event wins by Varkonyi, Raymer, Moneymaker, and Gold, it was like the universe provided an endless stream of avid, willing, timid, and fairly predictable poker players in the weeks leading up to the main event. Now that WSOP's in the summer, online poker is mostly dead in the US, televised poker mania has died down, and I have kids, I don't bother going anymore, but it was definitely fun and modestly lucrative for a while in my 30s.
- technofiend 8y ago
  Yeah the WSOP / WPT era is what I was talking about too. So many people there to play poker! Don't forget black Friday or whatever it was called when UIGEA murdered online poker. That was the feeder into tournament live play. Thanks, Sheldon. I haven't been back in at least 8 years. Vegas doesn't care about anything but whales and slots players anyway.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

sokoloff 8y ago

When WSOP was in the early spring (when the weather is nice in Vegas and crappy in Boston), I used to go for a week and a bit every year and grind out the trip cost and then some on single table satellites. With the advent of online poker, televised NLHE, and the main event wins by Varkonyi, Raymer, Moneymaker, and Gold, it was like the universe provided an endless stream of avid, willing, timid, and fairly predictable poker players in the weeks leading up to the main event. Now that WSOP's in the summer, online poker is mostly dead in the US, televised poker mania has died down, and I have kids, I don't bother going anymore, but it was definitely fun and modestly lucrative for a while in my 30s.

technofiend 8y ago
Yeah the WSOP / WPT era is what I was talking about too. So many people there to play poker! Don't forget black Friday or whatever it was called when UIGEA murdered online poker. That was the feeder into tournament live play. Thanks, Sheldon. I haven't been back in at least 8 years. Vegas doesn't care about anything but whales and slots players anyway.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]