How to Tilt

Well I had an interesting weekend from a poker perspective to say the least. There were some really big special tournaments this weekend so I played a fair bit. On Saturday there was the sickest tournament ever, the Pacific $1000 buy-in $3 Million guaranteed. It got 2200ish runners meaning around $800K was donated to the prize pool by the site. The payout structure was really top heavy to try to attract players: 1st = $1 million, 2nd = $400K, and then more gradual from there. Also, basically everyone on Pacific is terribad so it's really awesome. Sadly it wasn't my time as I held on for a while on the short stack before losing AA to JJ around 5 hours in but still short of the money. I also busted everything else I played including the PokerRoom/Mansion grand which is also awesome, and I was even down slightly at my 10/20 and 25/50 cash games after a decent number of hands. Yup, it was time to tilt, and as people who have been reading this blog for a while will know, that usually means shortstacking high stakes pot-limit omaha.

Following the standard "move up to get even" theory of tilted shot-taking I sat at 200/400 PLO with my usual minimum $8K buy-in. Finally luck was on my side for once that day and I quickly doubled up. Success! Out of the hole and showing a small profit for the day, time to quit and go out for the night right? You must not be very good at tilted shot-taking. You see now I'm freerolling on my next $8K buy-in! And look how easy it was to randomly win that coinflip and make a bunch of money, surely I can just do that again no problem. So I bought into the other table and, sure enough, within a few hands I had doubled my buy-in again. Easy game, I thought, but now I couldn't sit back in for 30 minutes anyways so I quit and went to dinner. As it turned out not much was going on that night so I stayed home. When I got back I noticed 3 200/400 PLO tables going. Well, gotta play the rush right? In quick succession I won big pots on all 3 tables and quit for good this time. In total I played 34 hands of Omaha and made $53.5K. Here are the big pots I won, minimal comments on strategy because I probably still suck at omaha.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2533002

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2533004

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2533007

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2533011

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2533014 - MSampoerna is a billionaire that owns Mansion among other companies, and he had just taken a very bad beat on the previous hand so I figured he was just trying to tilt the rest off in this hand. As it turned out I looked it up and I had 35.8% equity all-in 3 ways preflop, and I outskilled them on the river card.

Sunday went similarly, I took some rough beats in the 3 tournaments I got deep in and busted everything, then played a bunch of PLO to try to get even. This time I swung up and down all over the place but luckily I came out ahead ~$10K in the end to put the day in the black. The PLO games seem really good right now, I imagine a good player with a sufficient bankroll could make a lot of money as there seemed to always be one or two players that were pretty weak. I guess I'll keep taking shots at them buying in for the minimum when they look good and see how things go. Anyways I'm back to Toronto tomorrow. Peace,

Mike