Wednesday, May 14, 2008

HORSE event @ commerce

So last night was the HORSE event of the Heavenly Hold'em Poker series at Commerce. I was really looking forward to this event (and so far has been the only Heavenly Hold'em event I have played) because it is the first HORSE event Commerce has held since I started playing there. The struture was super interesting as well. The original structure that is. See, there were some big problems and even bigger complaints so it had to be restructured on the fly. The original structure had 8 hands of each game being played and then switched and limits raised. But the flop games and the board games maintained the same limits. I know the last two sentences were confusing so I will give you an example.


Ex:

Game Ante Bring-In/SB Complete/BB Limits

Hold'em -- 50 100 100-200

Omaha 8 -- 50 100 100-200

Razz 25 50 200 200-400

Stud Hi 25 50 200 200-400

Stud 8 25 50 200 200-400


Now this all sounds like a phenomenal structure except for the fact that at 8 hands an orbit, we would raise the levels twice every 40 hands (once after 16 hands for the flop games and once every 24 hands for the board games). To compensate for this, the management started us out with a whopping 10,000 in chips! The big problem was a miscalculated attempt
to arrange for everyone to be in the same game concurrently (for table breaking purposes) that after 8 hands each table had to wait for all other tables to finish that orbit. Well, needless to say after the first 8 hands there was a public riot. So, Cheri Doken, the chief TD at commerce decided to make the structure PHENOMENAL on the fly and eliminate the 8 hand rule and make each game orbit a 20 minute level. Combine this 20 minute level with the limits only being raised twice every 5 levels (100 minutes) and the fact that we start with 10,000 chips and you have a super deep, play filled structure.

Unfortunately, I was only able to place 95th out of the 168 entries but I busted 6 1/2 hours after the tournament started. 6 1/2 hours and only 70 people busted! In fact, when I went back up stairs around 4am while I was playing cash afterwards, they were just winding down for the day and they still had about 6 tables (~48 players) coming back for day 2!

My play during the tournament was pretty decent although it had some huge holes. My Limit Hold'em game is atrocious. People are just recklessly agressive in that game and you have to be to a degree with marginal hands in order to get full value. I probably have some residual apprehension from No Limit that is holding me back from playing AJoff for capping betting out of position and the like. I also leaked a ton of chips in Omaha 8/B. While I feel as though I can play that game well, today was not a shining example of it. I just couldn't make a decent two way hand. My lows got counterfeited alot and my draws missed while my weak high hands were either behind or got quartered. My razz game was good as I picked up alot of chips in that. My stud hi game was minimal as I just didn't play many of those hands based primarily on the fact that I only had a few good starting Stud Hi hands and I still have trouble reading hands in that game. I probably made the majority of my chip profit in Stud 8/B and that's just because im in practice with it and most people don't play enough of it to hide their hands. People just play so badly in that game that its easy to make reads.

Right now I am very tired and headed to bed so I don't have any interesting hands from the tournament to share but I might in the near future for an update. But all in all, I REALLY enjoyed this tournament and I will definetly be playing one if not more of the HORSE events in Vegas this summer.

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