The Steinhorn Stare

As mentioned previously, my good friend Jason is playing in this year’s $10,000 World Series of Poker Main Event. He played day 1 — along with 1500 other people — last Friday.

After a roller-coaster first day — roller-coaster for both of us, as I was getting the updates every two hours — he finished the day solidly. For the most part, he hovered around his $20,000 in starting chips for much of the day, though at one point he took a big hit when his AQ ran into AK on an ace high uncoordinated board, dropping him to around $2000 in remaining chips. After that he went on a tear, building back up to over $23,000 by 2:00am when the final round started. By the end of the final round of the day, the $23K was up to over $70K, and Jason is now ready to enter day 2 in the top quarter of the field.

Day 2 starts tomorrow, and the approximately 2500 remaining players will likely approach, but not hit, the money by the end of the day.

Good luck Jason…hopefully this post will have many sequels…

Poker Tip of the Day: Jason’s situation above (losing a lot of chips with AQ vs. AK) reminds me of an important tip that should seem obvious, but oftentimes is not, especially to players just starting out. I know a lot of people who believe that they’re just plain unlucky; they continually get knocked out of tournaments when their AQ runs into AK, or their flopped sets get run down by runner-runner draws after getting all-in. They wonder why some players never seem to get knocked out of tournaments on bad beats like this, and assume that it’s just because other players are “luckier” than they are.

Believe me when I tell you that these kinds of beats happen to everyone (and everyone pretty much equally). The difference between those that seem “lucky” and those that seem “unlucky” is that the “lucky ones” recognize that this type of situation is bound to happen during the course of a tournament, and therefore they are very diligent in trying to build a big stack early.

If three hours into an event, you still have the same number of chips you started with, and you find yourself on the losing end of set-over-set, it’s likely the end of your day. But, if you were able to take down some early hands, and build your stack up, you likely have more chips than that opponent who cracks your aces or runs you down on the river, and are not out of the tournament after that “bad beat”.

In other words, the “lucky” players create that luck by preparing for the situations where the cards don’t fall their way. While tight, conservative play is always a good starting point, don’t fall into the situation of constantly letting the cards play you; if you can’t build a cushion into your stack early in an event, you’re risking ending your day on a single unlucky situation.

Case in point — the AQ story above was an interesting footnote in the first day of play for Jason; for a lot of players it would have been the end of the story. I guess that just makes Jason “a lucky player.”

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 9:21 am and is filed under Poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.