Here is the best WSOP blog if you want almost constant updates.
No real specific direction for this thread other than general thoughts on the WSOP.
Potential topics included but are not limited to:
[ul]
[li]The Donkulus Tournament. Stimulus + Donkament = Donkulus, courtesy of Pauly, author of aforementioned blog.[/li][li]40G Buy-in Mixed Event (Eight total variations of poker in one tournament).[/li][li]Over/Under on number of Main Event entrants.[/li][li]Anyone attending the WSOP at all? Perhaps anyone living in or near Vegas and can report random stuffs?[/li][li]Et cetera.[/li][/ul]
And so I don’t completely suck at getting discussion going, my own thoughts on the bulleted items:
[ul]
[li]The official name for this tournament, AFAICT is the Broke Dicks event. Hilarious![/li][li]That’s a lot of damn different poker for one tournament. I hope to see it on TV, no matter how badly it gets butchered thanks to editing.[/li][li]I’m estimating less than last year.[/li][li]Not attending and don’t live anywhere close enough to make any kinds of reports on the whole thing.[/li][/ul]
I’ll be there for a week and a half in mid-June, playing in at least two – and probably four or five – bracelet events, and some random stuff at the Venetian on off-days.
This will be my first time at the WSOP, and I’m looking forward to it. Feeling pretty good about my game, too.
Edit: Oh, and I’ve been following the events so far at Two Plus Two, which is fun because you get lots of the top (online) players themselves posting about how they’re doing and the interesting hands they’ve had.
Really? I have pretty much the exact opposite belief. That 2+2 would be way more exposed, for lack of a better term, than Pauly, to the general poker watching public.
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s fair to say. I wasn’t intending to imply that Dr. Pauly is particularly well-known (although my post could probably be read that way).
But in my experience it’s just flat wrong to say that “everyone knows about 2+2,” much less frequents it for their poker news. I’d even say that most people who play regularly online have never visited the Two Plus Two forums, let alone people who follow the live tournaments on a more casual basis.
Heck, I played in a $1K buy-in tournament in Atlantic City last month, and I’d bet a significant amount of money that the majority of that field – most of whom will be playing in one WSOP event or another, from the conversations I had – wasn’t familiar with Two Plus Two. Even among the online pros at the tables – I got into a conversation with one young guy who was very knowledgeable about online poker, and knew about Two Plus Two, but never visited it, opting instead to spend all his time at pocketfives.
Anyway. It’s an amazing resource, and its ground-level coverage of the WSOP – like Dani “Ansky” Stern asking for thoughts about a hand he played at the final table of the $40K buy-in event (complete with a contribution from durrrr, among others) – is unparalleled, but as I said earlier, I’m happy more people don’t know about it. It’s improved my game a thousandfold.
(Oh, and Pokernews is my one-stop shop for live reporting of the tournaments as they’re happening. Any WSOP discussion thread should link to their site. )
The 40k buyin event is NLH. There’s a $50k horse tournament but that’s not new (and doesn’t have eight games). I’m not sure where you’re getting that info from.
ESPN coverage is all no limit hold 'em this year in scaled back coverage. - ESPN’s coverage is pretty horrible. I remember they used their sponsorship clout to turn the first 50k HORSE event into no limit hold em on the final table. So you put in $50k, you play HORSE for the whole thing, then suddenly it becomes NLH tourney #2851825 when you hit the last 9, so that ESPN’s core audience of people who watch poker yet don’t know anything about poker don’t get confused. What a waste. That was the final straw for me in a long line of mostly terrible ESPN coverage - I don’t think I’ve seen more than 2 or 3 episodes in 3 years.
I’m too broke to be putting in big chunks into a donkament buyin. Too bad none of my poker buddies are rich at the moment to stake me - I’m way +ev in those things.
There is a tournament, that is probably over by now, that was only $1,000 to buy into, as opposed to usual cheapest of $1,500. It was specifically called a “stimulus” tournament. Economy is in the shitter, so to help out Joe Blow, the tournament organizers made a tourney cheaper than before and it got six-thousand entrants.
And if it wasn’t clear, “Donkament” is a combination of “tournament” and “donkey”, a common phrase among young serious players who view tournaments as something of a joke because of their lack of depth and complexity.
Which is, itself, something of a joke. There’s more truth to it if you confine it exclusively to tournaments with terrible structures (where starting stacks, blinds, and levels mean that if you haven’t been lucky enough to double up in the first hour or so, it’s push or fold time from there on out), but even with those it’s just a different skillset. And it’s certainly not true of slower, deeper tournaments.
There’s nothing inherently more nuanced or layered about cashgame play. It’s just a different animal.
Well, I disagree. There’s certainly a difference induced by the structure - some deep stacked, slow structures can be pretty good - but those are, what? maybe 2% of online tournaments and less of live tournaments? And you still end up in a situation where at the final table the average stack has 30 blinds or something - which by tournament standards is very deep, but by cash standards very shallow.
The top-heavy nature of the prizes is somewhat being changed over the last year or two, but the structure usually ends up being that the least amount of play (depths of stacks) occurs at the same time when the vast majority of the money is distributed (last half of the final table), meaning what determines where the majority of the money goes is the least skill-dependent part of the tournament.
I’m extremely good at tournaments - I understand the strategy very well, and I’m up a substantial amount of money on them - but I feel… not quite ashamed, but when I win them I usually think “oh whee I’m good at kiddie poker”.
