Any tips for PokerStars' Sunday Million?

The Game Room
1

I got my ticket punched through a satellite, and it will be my first time. :slight_smile:

This is the highest buy-in tourney I’ve ever attempted, and I’m somewhat nervous.

I’m not really looking for poker advice, but if you have some, that would be great. :slight_smile: Right now, I’m probably playing the best poker in my life. My biggest leaks, folding when I know I’ve been beat and folding big pre-flop hands appears to be solved.

Mainly I’m looking for tips about dealing with nervousness. I know I suck when I get stressed. I’m a choker. Any tips for dealing with that would be great. :slight_smile:

2

I assume it’s online. How big is the field? Huge?

The only advice I’d give is take notes about the players and stay focused. In those long tournaments, one little mistake will send you to the rail, so try and get rid of distractions (don’t websurf while playing).

Best of luck. We’re rooting for you. Let us know how it’s going (but only on breaks, again, no distractions).

3

Two missions in big time poker. Number one is to last until the bad players eliminate themselves allowing you to cash. Then you play to win.
I saw a Hollywood type get Aces in the hole his first hand. He went all in and got out drawn. What might be right later, is not necessarily right at the beginning. You have to last. Careful conservative card playing should be the first action plan.

4

It’s in late registration now, 6.5k players so far.

5

SuperHal, what is you PS handle? I’d like to be your gallery!

6

Bleah. I got knocked out ~3k out of 7.5k.

I played well mostly. I had one bad call and one bad beat and that was it. Horrible run of cards. I played about 12% of hands dealt where I usually play 30%. Nothing but 8’s and j’s. The last hand, my AQ lost to KQ.

7

what gonzo said. play tight like son of gun early on. i mean if you get a draw you have to play it but no way playing q 9 suited early on.

8

why in the world are you not playing on thursdays?

9

There is no defense against bad beats. You can play perfectly and lose.

10

I tried to find it at PS in the “tourny-special” tab but didn’t see it. Threads here had no info either.

11

Superhal, a couple months I won a seat at a similar tournament, on Ultimate Bet. Annie Duke was giving away seats with trivia question via twitter, and I knew one of the answers and won the seat.

$200 +$15 entry, just like yours today. I recanted my experience in the 2nd qtr SDMB poker league thread. I got hit with a couple of bad beats. The one that hurt the most was when I flopped a wheel straight with A/5 off in the Big Blind. I checked, guy in middle position bet, I check raise, guy calls. I figure he has a pocket pair.

Five comes on the turn, and I go uh-oh, what if he has pocket 6’s? he has a bigger straight. I make a small bet, he raises all-in. I have him covered and pot odds say I should call.

Yep, instincts were right, he had pocket 6’s,

I gambled in casinos for hundreds of dollars, gambled on the golf course for hundreds of dollars, but I was never as nervous as playing on the computer on a freeroll.

IIRC, there was about 900 in this tournament, and I finished about 350th. I was amongst the chip leaders when the above hand happened.

12

The Thursday night game peeker is talking about isn’t on pokerstars. RedSkeezix has printed out detailed instructions how to play here.

It’s a freeroll sit n’ go, and the only prize is bragging rights; still, it’s a lot of fun. Takes about an hour and a half to get through. About 10-15 players most weeks. Not terribly sophisticated play, but people do take it seriously.

Sorry about your bust-out.

13

Getting in as a huge EV favorite is pretty much always a good move except for some very strange situations usually involving satellites. In fact, one of the best ways to quickly figure out if someone has a reasonable understanding of poker is to ask them:

First hand of the world series of poker - you are in the big blind. The first 8 players in the hand go all in, you look down and find aces, do you call?

The correct answer is obviously yes. People will argue this to death though, convinced that they have silly amounts of edge that will manifest if only they don’t risk busting early.

Anyway, there aren’t really any specific tips for this tournament that wouldn’t apply to all tournaments. Poker is very difficult to simplify into “tip” type bits of knowledge - reading books and getting a whole lot of information at once is usually required.

This does give me the chance to brag about winning this tournament once, about 6 years ago. Only it wasn’t the Sunday “million” then unfortunately - the prize pool was only about $450,000. Still, a good day.

14

senor beef. why in the world are you not playing on thursdays as well?

15

Judging from Senor Beef’s prior posts on the subject, it’s due to dissatisfaction with the structure of tournaments, vs cash games. (Dissatisfaction I tend to agree with, FWIW.) The blinds escalate so fast that the later, money-earning rounds are heavily luck driven.

Further, from additional reading, it seems that most small tournaments, like ours, turn into shove or fold fests. I was shocked reading up on Nash Equilibrium relating to NLHE, the Independent Chip Model of equity and short stacked play: my reading was that you are supposed to shove with damn near anything, heads-up, when your stack approaches 10X the BB. Perhaps I’m misreading the information. ‘Shove or fold’ pre-flop play is not very fun for me.

It’s too bad: I’d like knowledgeable players like, e.g. Beef, Turble and Gadarene to join our group; I learn a lot when I’m getting my head beat in.

16

Harsh it may sound, but poker is about detecting and exploiting weaknesses in your opponents. One of the basic tools of a serious poker player is his ability to cause his opponents to make mistakes.

I have posted a few tips on the board here … but basically because I don’t really expect that anybody will actually follow up and use them, and particularly, use them against me … and also a small altruistic factor, intended mainly to show that casual players who don’t intend to devote a great deal of time to learning to play poker should be sure to play for small enough stakes that they don’t get hurt financially by good players – I think most of the people who click the links to Nash and ICM will be surprised by how complex this easy game actually is … and then will quickly forget about it.

When I am playing, I don’t educate my opponents; I try to make them play worse, not better. I will heartily and sincerely congratulate the guy who sucked out with his two outs and tell him how well he played the hand, and I will tear into the guy who is berating him for his poor play. One of my favorite lines: “Just once I’d like to get a lesson from the guy who won the pot instead of from the loser.”

When a good player says “nh”, it does indeed frequently translate to “Please don’t leave while you still have money. I’ll do everything I can to make it fun for you to lose it all.”

You guys don’t really want somebody like me in your game … but if you start playing for money I’ll be glad to give you some lessons … just keep in mind that the lessons you learn may not be the ones you thought you had signed on for. :wink:
PS: It can be very difficult to get the correct “tone” across on the internet. Please keep in mind that this post is meant to be educational, not egotistical … I am not a world-class player, I am a workaday grinder and part of my skill set is the ability to identify players at the table who are better than I am so I can (do my best to) avoid being outplayed by them.

Oh, and yes, the “shove or fold” thing is one of the flaws of No Limit Hold 'em. It was a dead game for many years (because of its flaws) and only made a comeback because of the TV exposure. The only reason the pros play it now is because that is what the guys who see it on TV want to play

The big money working pros don’t sit around and play NLHE with each other, they play high Limit mixed games like HORSE or Triple Draw … but when a casino host calls the poker room and says “Mr. Whale is leaving LA on his private jet. He has wired in $500,000 and he wants to play No Limit.” the poker manager gets on the phone and by the time the plane lands there is a big NL game going with an empty seat. Limit Hold 'em is a much more “fair” game (a better balance of luck vs skill) so that an unskilled player has a decent chance to have a winning session now and then, whereas in NL he will just about always lose to the skilled players.

The TV show The Big Game PokerStars is putting on lately has some very interesting stuff going on. I recently saw Vanessa Rousso win a pot of around $90,000 and mention that it was the biggest pot she ever won. Also heard Daniel Negreanu talk about how he has been studying up on how to play NL cash games as opposed to tournaments – cash games and tournaments are very different animals. I think it’s the best poker on TV now … and you get to see just how the pros tear up the amateurs.

17

I use the strategy as outlined in Harrington’s Vol 2: Endgame book. It’s not about luck, it’s about pressure. As you get closer and closer to 10X BB, the amount of pressure you can apply to force other people to fold becomes lower and lower, and some people will call you at anything less just to get rid of you. At 10XBB, that’s the minimum amount of pressure you can use to make somebody fold. Your odds of staying in the game are much higher just because of pressure, regardless of what your cards are. by the time you get to 5X BB, you have no pressure at all.

In tournament play, your goal is to win, not to outdraw somebody.

However, if the stacks are near 20-100X BB, you still see good poker. I would recommend watching this past week’s Sunday Million replay on pokerstars with Johnny Lodden, although I was watching him on the way to the final table and it was brilliant.

18

I may be mistaken in this but shouldn’t the correct strategy be to play high variance early on and low variance late in the game? With a tournament, it makes no difference if you finish 100/100 or 11/100 if only the top 10 get cash so your goal should be to win as much money off the poor players early on so you have an edge in the late game against the good players.

19

Depends which book you read maybe. Brunson, Harrington, Ferguson, etc. all agree that in tournaments, you should play tight early and loosen up as you get to the bubble, although they also agree that playing the opposite style as everybody else on the table is the most profitable (if everybody is loose, you play tight…if everybody is tight, you play loose.)

Personally, I found the best way to cash in a tournament is to pay close attention to your reads and pot odds. If the pot odds are right, I have to call. If the pot odds are wrong, I have to fold. If their bets aren’t making sense, be wary. Regarding loose/tight, I found that shifting gears often, even in the middle of the hand, helps.

I usually play at a 17% ITM clip but I’ve been exceptionally hot this year. In the past month it has been ~20-25%.

20

Has High Stakes Poker really gone downhill that fast?