Starting days, deep stacks, and Internet donkeys

So one thing that's interesting about the WSOP main event this year is that even if you do really well, you'll only be playing poker for 2 out of the first 7 days. There are 4 flights for day 1 (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday), 2 flights for day two (Tuesday, Wednesday), and then Thursday is a day off. That's nice because I'll get to enjoy Vegas even if I don't bust early.

It also creates the problem of picking which day you want to start.




You are allowed to "request" your preference order for starting day. If you read some poker internet forums, people are all crazy-serious about which day they start, figuring there is A)some stamina/nervousness advantage to picking the days, and B)some secret day all the good players are picking that you want to avoid. That's basically silly to me -any half-competent poli sci graduate student could show you enough game theory to disprove (B), and (A) takes about 15 seconds to wade through. I requested (in order): Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Friday. Mostly because i didn't want to play the day after I arrived, but I didn't want to wait around. Honestly, though, it really doesn't matter and I really don't care. It's far more important who is at your first table than which day you start.

Someone asked me what I was most nervous about heading into the WSOP, pokerwise.*** I'd have to say "making a huge blunder because I haven't adjusted properly for the deep stack nature of the tournament" is probably my most realistic concern. Most poker tournaments I've ever played in have you with less than 50bb by the time you're an hour into it, and soon after that the chipleader has something like 25-30bb. Not so at the WSOP. You start with 200bb and each level lasts 2 hours. When the stacks are that deep, strategy changes radically with cetain types of hands. For instance, an obvious example is that AK (or similar) doesn't exactly like to play a big pot with deep stacks, because its most likely good hand after the flop is 1 pair (top pair).

One pair (even AA in your hand) is not the hand you want to get into a raising war with after the flop when your stack is 200bb deep - you'll be beat every single time you get all the money in. So AK is really looking to play raise preflop, thin the field to a few opponents, hit top pair, and then either passively check-call to the river or take the lead and - hopefully - not get raised. But you sure as hell aren't throwing a third raise in with it post-flop if you hit a flop like K 8 2. Because it's just too likely you're against a set. And you can't give them those kind of implied odds when you are that deep.

Now, the one pair hands are kind of an obvious example - when the stacks are short, those hands become monsters, when the stacks are deep they aren't as good. That's pretty basic. But there are lots of other examples - like do you raise when you river top 2? - that I'm not very used to in a deep stack situation. Obviously, the answer is very situational and contextual, based on opponent, position, stack sizes, previous betting, and the like. But I'm still worried about making obvious errors because I lack experience playing at such depth.

This, of course, brings us to the "internet donkey" phenomenon. Most people who qualify for the WSOP on the internet do not have a lot of live poker experience. In fact, many of them have never even played live poker. Needless to say, quite a number of them would never even think about the deep stack / shallow stack issue, and many of them are quite bad at poker. I derive three conseuqneces of this:

1)Maybe what I said above is wrong - it's quite possibly that a lot of internet donkeys will overplay AK or overpairs after the flop. That doesn't mean I'm going to get my whole stack in on the flop if I have AA, but it does mean that you might not always be beat doing it.

2)There's clearly a stereotype that exists about internet players: they're generally weaker players than live players, either because they are too weak-tight or because they are far too aggressive.

3)I may benefit a bit from that stereotype, because I'll be wearing a pokerstars shirt despite having logged 98% of my lifetime poker hours not online. I'm not saying I'm clearly superior to the average internet player (although I think I probably am), but I'm saying that my weaknesses as a player are very different from the weaknesses of the average internet player. If I can get someone like Men the Master to make (incorrect) assumptions about my play based on that, that's a good thing.

And If I can get Men the Master to suck down a few Coronas with me at the TV table, well that's a great thing.
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***Yes, I know that's not a real word, Tom.