Adam and Poker: A Look Inside

All right, so a few days ago I played a couple of freeroll tournaments. A freeroll is where you enroll, along with 10,000 other players, to compete for 27 spots to another freeroll, which, if you win that, gets you like a thousand bucks. Everyone starts with 1500 chips and the winner ends up with something like 25 million. There are that many people.

There's like 50 of these freerolls a week.

I played in two of them one night, as well as a 500+30 No Limit Hold'em Tourney with about 6000 people.

Now, one of the freerolls I lost early, within the first half hour.

That leaves the play money (500+30) tourney and the other freeroll.

Now, in the play money tourney, I kept finding myself with more and more chips. Around the 50,000 mark, I check and found that I was chip leader. 1 out of 1000. Sweet. To show how rare it is to EVER be chip leader in a tourney, let me just say that I've played probably 200-250 freerolls/tourneys and have NEVER had the chip lead. This was my first time. It was an amazing feeling. Anyway, I kept getting chips until I had 350,000. By then I was like 7th. And I was playing the freeroll on the side, so the table wasn't getting the best of me. Finally, I went out on a hand of my choosing to a fellow who had me covered by about a hundred thousand. I finished in 35th. 35th out of 6,000. Sweet.

Let's get to the freeroll. This one's out of 10,000 people.

Ok, I've played for about 3 hours...let's see where I'm at.



(Click it - I'm the one on the far right with the Flash outfit)

Now, take a look at the bottom of the Poker window, to the left - in that little box called Stats. Check out my position.

That's right. Chip leader AGAIN. And this time, much further into a larger, more difficult tourney. I almost can't believe it. How come tonight, I become chip leader twice, when it's never happened to me before? Have I been playing poker wrong the whole time?

Well, kinda. Not wrong, just not right.
I used to only play cards I knew would win. But you can't win big pots like that. You can't take a hundred thousand chips from someone if they don't think they have it.

Let's just say this. I called an all in with Q10. My opponent had KK. I figured I'd lose, but that was ok. I had him quintupled in chip stack. (He had 90,000 chips, I had 450,000) On the flop there was a 10. I checked my e-mail real quick, and when I came back I found that both the turn and the river were Queens. I just sucked out with a full house. And added 100k to my chip stack.

I would have made the top 27 too, but I got too addicted to winning. I lost all of my chips on one hand - pair of tens, with a king kicker - to a pair of tens, with an ace kicker. Funny thing was, before I pushed all in, I knew I'd lost. But I just couldn't give up. (Also, I had to be up for class the next day and it was already pushing 3 in the morning...didn't know how much longer I could go before committing to an all-nighter.)

I finished in 77th place. 77th out of 10,000, and here's the thing. When I lost, I was in third place. THIRD. Think about that. 3 out of 10,000. That's the same as .03 out of a hundred. Not even one percent of one percent of the total amount of entrants. Wow. Just wow.

I don't know what happened to my poker game that made me start winning like this...but it must have been something. Because I wasn't just chip leader once...but twice - in the same night, in two different tournaments, when I hadn't even been chip leader EVER before. I'd always just tried to stay in the middle of the pack. That isn't good enough anymore. It's not for me, and it shouldn't be for you either.

I'm trying to figure out what this means...if it's a fluke, or what. I'll let you know when I have more experience.