1-million chip buy-in tournament report from WSOP--RP

Poker Strategy
#1

There were 25 players at the close of registration. There was a lot of very bad play in the early going, with players getting all-in with top pairs and draws, and a few players went out.

I was getting very good cards and winning most of my pots preflop, but just gradually going through the gears until I was in 3rd or 4th place, when I played a hand really, really stupidly, and lost most of my chips.

See if you can spot the error here:

https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/517630417

I guess I knew he must have the flush, but I didn’t want to let go my set of Queens and I had been running lucky and become overconfident and had won several pots against this guy, so there it was.

However, what pleased me was that I was able to fight right back and win back all my chips and then some with some judicial preflop raising, and snuck onto the final table where just 4 players out of the 9 would be paid. I still didn’t think I would get in the money, but stuff happens, and after a couple of lifetimes there were just 4 of us left. I was bottom stack and shoved with a pair of pocket 6s and was called by the tournament leader with 99. Naturally this being RP, I won the hand. and now I was the leader and the leader was the small stack.

I flattened my former flush tormentor with AQ vs his KJ, in this fun hand,

https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/517639967

Then another stack who had been crippled was dismembered, and we were just two survivors in the single-seater lifeboat.

It was two overcards vs a pair of 2s, and I lost. Once again injustice had been served on RP and the villain had won, as they nearly always do, and all I had for a consolation prize was 6 million chips.

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#2

Played another little 100K chip buy-in tournament last night. Usual result-finished in 2nd place–one hand after trying to get heads up with JuiceeLoot who was seated at my left hand, playing BB to my SB for a good part of the game and played a blinder, with hands like this (see below) and witty comments in the commentary box.

https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/517678576

Yikes!

But then took a bath with this bad beat, leaving me to deal with the villain alone.

https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/517681814

Anyway, this was a nice little addition of 900,000 chips, and got me across the 40 million chip line for the first time ever.

When the little announcement at your demise says "Congratulations. You finished in xth place and won y chips, this is not actually accurate as the number of chips paid for the buy-in should be deducted from the winnings total, and isn’t.

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#3

Flop either check or bet bigger. If you’re going to bet the flop make sure you’re at least not giving direct odds to flush draws.

Turn x/c, AP fold.

River x/f. He raised flop and shoved river I don’t know you’re ever beating here.

Juicee should shove over the blocker bet here. Just can not let Tiggy draw at that price.

Played itself.

This is not correct. Once you’ve put money into the pot it belongs to the pot. It isn’t yours anymore. If the message had said you finished in xth place and profited y chips without taking into account your buy in then your argument would be valid. Cheers

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#4

So there are two actually two pots, or multiple pots to be considered?

If the buy-in is 1 million, and there are 20 players, there is 20 million in the prize money pot (minus the rake and plus any guaranteed minimum), but if the players start with 5K chips, there are 100K chips in play in the game. However there is no direct equation so that you can convert the number of chips owned during the course of the game into prize money chips, because that wil vary all the time, depending on how many players left in and the rake.

Fortunately that is not how the IRS would see it. You would take your winnings and then deduct the buy-in as an expense to calculate your actual winnings. If you are at the bottom of the prize money table, you will get little more than a refund of your entry fee.

Betting on horses, which I used to do in my youth in England, you would bet $1* on a horse to win at 10/1, and if you won the bet, $11 would be returned to you–your stake plus your winnings. However it was not that simple, because there was an 8% betting tax at that time, if my memory is right, and you could choose to either pay the tax at the time of making the bet, so 8 cents tax, or pay it when and if the bet won, in which case you would pay 88 cents on tax.

If you were betting an accumulator, or some kind of combination bet like a Trixie, a Yankee, or a Heinz 57, it was definitely preferable to pay the tax up front in case you won a huge amount.

  • actually pounds, but just using dollar sign for sake of convenience as I have no pound sign on my keyboard.
#5

This is called ICM or independent chip model. There are a number of apps that you can plug these numbers into in order to find the monetary value of your tournament chips to dollars. This is why in tournaments, especially late when pay jumps are consideration you have to discern whether a play is going to be +cEV compared to +EV in dollars. Sometimes you’ll get a price that is +cEV and profitable for the chips in play but is -EV for the dollars in the prize pool because preservation of tournament life is more valuable in that moment.

These are two party bets that don’t involve prize pools and thus are not comparable to tournament prize pools. Additionally, the prize won is the taxable amount, you have to pay and file taxes on this number (the one that Replay gives you when you bust out of a tournament), the buy in or investment into the tournament is deductible but separate from the winnings.

Edited because the symbol for dollars is not showing and reading this back it was confusing.

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#6

Yeah, if you’re looking at a final table. There’s just too much noise in the system for ICM to do anything in early stages. If you know of an ICM tool that can solve with 100 players left, please link it.