Pushing and pulling

So I'm playing in the WSOP stage 1 tourney. It's a dollar to play and it's the first step on a ladder that leads to the WSOP main event. Okay, it's very unlikely I'd get there but you gotta dream, right? (And anyway, the other day I was deep enough to smell a ticket to the online final in the stage 3 event when some guy laid a horrendous -- and I mean horrendous -- beat on me: runner runner flush to suck out on my set on the flop.)

Fourteen will get tickets to stage 2 and there are 15 still alive. The blinds are 400/800. I have 5K and will comfortably qualify. The shortest stack has 550 at the other table.

Here is what people do not understand who play these qualifiers: you win nothing more for coming first than you do for coming 14th. Nothing. Not a cent. No prize. Nada. Now I know people are too dim to grasp this, so I wasn't surprised when a guy with 3K called the blind of a guy with 20K, which is disastrously stupid with only one to die. I'm not even surprised when he bets the flop, and then pushes the turn. I've seen this a lot.

But what does surprise me is that when the shorty calls the BB at the other table, sitting at UTG+1, the rest of table does not call. There are guys with 20K stacks, and they fold! WTF? This is just crazy. There's no problem with doubling, tripling, quadrupling, quintupling the shorty. You just need to school him and cut his chances.

Something else struck me while playing the lucky dollar. I wake up with KK and a shorty in front of me puts it all in. The pot's decent so I pop it up big to discourage any but the really serious. The button calls for all his chips. He must have a big hand, right?

No. He has T9. So of course he sucks out to a one-card flush. I let him know that he's an idiot and he says, as fish often do in this situation, it's only a dollar.

But here's the thing: it's precisely because it's a dollar that this is so bad. You don't play the lucky dollar to make money. The prizes are tiny. I made the final table last night and scooped seven dollars! Obviously, you play the lucky dollar for fun, not money. But where's the fun in trying to get lucky? It's soulless, joyless. Playing well is its own reward. Outthinking the fish, outplaying the table. That feels good. But how can it feel good to make a terrible move and just get lucky? If the prizes were bigger, then maybe it would make some sense. You gamble to try to take down big dollars, okay. Now, I'm not complaining. I'm still in the tourney, and I've increased my stack at the expense of further idiots who called allins with very weak holdings. But I do wonder how people think. If they think.

Which I doubt. Here's another example. A guy calls the blind of 400. He has 5K. I call on the button with KJ. I have 11K. I'm willing to play this hand because there's a shorty allin and the limper is pretty loose, so I probably stand up okay against his range. The flop comes AJ2 with two diamonds. I'm going to bet at this if the other guy checks. But he doesn't check. He pushes.

WTF? Clearly he has an ace, I'm thinking, and quickly fold. In an unproteced pot, maybe he could have a flush draw, but I'm doubting it here. Because the shorty is all in, both guy's cards are shown. The pusher has A6s. In my view, pushing here is terrible. If he bets small, I might call (I mean, someone else might; I'm folding here). If I raise him big, he's probably beaten and doesn't get busted with a trash hand. But pushing means he gets called only by hands that beat him. Yeah, he denies me the chance to draw out, but he can bet enough to make it a mistake to try without committing his whole stack. It's not that I mind pushing. If he'd shown some balls and checked, maybe I would have bet and then he could have pushed, making some money on his hand. Anyway, I'm quite grateful to him. He let me get away from my hand very cheaply. This is the good side of playing the lowlimit idiots. When you have a big hand, they are often willing to pay you; and they all too often let you off a hook a better player would hang you from.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:46 am