After 62 tournaments, I was able to cash, coming in 20th place and earning a whopping $2.00. I would love to tell you that the strategy I outlined in part one is the secret to winning free money. However, I learned something even more interesting.
When it comes to poker, there are no systems, or full-proof schemes. For a while I believed that the system was going to work. But time after time I found myself banging my head against the wall, watching idiots and donkeys suck out over and over again. The harder I tried to prove that my system would work, the quicker I would lose my whole stack.
It seemed as though, with all the crazy people, calling crazy bets preflop with 94o, and pushing all-in on the river with nothing, that this was closer to a slot machine than a poker game. This is not far from the truth, but it doesn’t mean all is lost.
When trying to formulate a strategy, I failed to take into account is how quickly the blinds rise. I have played many online tournaments, but never any with a structure as fast and light as some of the freerolls I have played in the past few weeks. Most are so quick in levels that before the bubble was even reached, everyone in the tournament except the top 5 players only had between 2 and 10 rounds of chips. It didn’t matter if I saw every flop and built a huge stack, because that huge stack ended up being only 12 big blinds before the bubble.
Early in the process of proving my strategy I started getting frustrated, and found myself folding often from early position. And when I had a big hand, like QQ, I would re-raise, only to be called by three people. Even though the queens didn’t hold up, it was enlightening. The answer revealed itself to me as I played, slowly giving up on winning, giving up on my strategy, and just enjoying the game. I found myself playing poker again, assessing the situation, keeping an open mind every time I was moved to another table, and paying attention to all the crazy moves everyone was making.
Don’t get upset or go on tilt when you suffer a bad beat. This is easier said than done, because I have gone on tilt myself plenty of times. But this is something to strive for. Every time this happens now, I remind myself of this: Bad beats can only happen when your opponents play bad poker.
That’s why the word “bad” is in there. Getting your chips in the pot when you have an 85% advantage, and getting called by a terrible hand only to have them suck-out, is a wonderful thing. Bad beats happen because of bad players. Great players don’t call with bad hands. They might bet or raise with them, but even when they bluff, they believe they are making the play with the greatest positive expectation, not because they are a goof.
People complain about the same kinds of things in micro and small stakes cash games and tournaments. I have found myself saying the following more than a few times when I was first starting out. “These people are idiots. They call with anything. They don’t respect my raises. They don’t play real poker. It is impossible to push them off a hand. No one can make money at this level.”
I have already learned this lesson. Those games are beatable, and they aren’t even that hard to show a profit, because a lot of the people play so badly. However, what seldom works at the small-stakes level is the super-advanced, deep-stack small ball strategies, with three or four levels of thinking. If you are playing $0.01/0.02 and you find yourself thinking “What does he think I think he thinks I think he has?” you are giving your opponent WAY too much credit.
In fact, no strategy is going to work. By constraining yourself to a thought out strategy set in stone, you prevent yourself from being able to make the correct moves at the correct time. So relax. Don’t look at freeroll tournaments as anything more than what they are: A great learning tool that costs a few hours, and teaches many of the virtues that make a great poker player: patience, aggression, observation, and humility. If you can’t stop from tilting during a freeroll tournament, then maybe poker isn’t your game. Just wait until you suffer a bad beat with all of your money on the table.
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