Final Table

Guess I can run 5K in about 35 mins, 10K in about 65 mins, ran a half-marathon this year in a particularly sorry 3 hours, drive Bangalore to Madras in about 5 hours; and when I got busted early in the final table of a online Poker tournament it took about 6-1/2 hours.

The weight of these hours will, I hope, give enough credence to the said activity & make you read on!

It is pretty cool to be in a position to watch chairs being removed from the final table. Last visit, I managed to watch only one chair removal. For what I can only put down to be “the Indian attitude”, my decision making process settled me down to a 30 to 40x earning on the tournament buy-in. Not that bad in itself, until you lie down wondering that a 2nd place finish to a 8th place finish is a earnings factor of 10x. So, yes, when you say it is 30x instead of 300x – that is a kick in the teeth. Settling for this I suppose is what I call “the Indian attitude”.

I am not sure if these ratios hold in other pursuits as well. Getting into a “top” b-school takes an engineer’s annual earnings from about four hundred thousand rupees to say sixteen hundred thousand rupees(4x), whereas a top-notch campus job could rake in another 10x from there (total 40x). Surely, just being on Facebook, having a LinkedIn profile or a Gmail account form the ‘real life’ equivalent of making it to the ‘in-the-money’ tables. So, I am going to summarize the stuff that I hope I will remember to appreciate when the time comes. It is also my hope that it will get you a little interested in Hold’em, if not the entire gamut of Poker games.

1. AJ suited has more potential to make you money than a random hand, but when coupled with illusions of grandeur it will cause a lot more damage too. My sense is that most of us have AJ suited

2. Mid pairs, say walking sticks, are strong provided they are played with courage. If you don’t make the guys with top cards/ chip lead pay through their nose to stay in the hunt, they will most likely hurt you bad (they do tend to have luck running for 'em!). I look around my company at guys without fancy degrees but who add a lot of value for the organization – mid-pair guys; not sure if they realize it.

3. If you want to earn well from a killer hand, you have to give hope to the hopeful. It may mean leading them on, it might mean giving them a free turn or river. Most of time those around you will smell a rat, sometimes someone doesn’t. Most of the times he will pay up for being foolhardy, sometimes catch lucky cards. One way or the other, your work is not done the moment you open pocket rockets. On the otherhand, if you got a free turn and scored a pair – think about it a bit.

4. Think in terms of the number of ‘Big Blinds’. Deep into a tournament you might find yourself with 300x your starting bank roll(say $900k from a starting $3k), but you aren’t as far away from annihilation as it appears. That is because the blinds went up from$20 (so, you had 150 big blinds to start with) to $30k (30 big blinds). Guess that is like getting older, at a tournament everyone is hurtling toward running out of blinds and antes. When you reminisce about the days when your pay stub showed one-twentieth of what it does today, remember that you are probably closer to joblessness than you ever were in the past.

5. The tricks that you pulled at the start of the tournament are probably well worn on the guys sitting with you at the final table. Recognize that ‘standard good play’ early on is probably ‘dead duck’ play now. Things change, values become liabilities, murderers become saints, ilegal aliens write books that go to become best-sellers, education becomes dogma, maybe except sh*t, nothing remains the same. Adjust yourself.

6. I am no Mary Schmich and Poker is no Sunscreen – but recognize the role of chance in the best played hand or in the best played tournament; smile about it even if its only through a broken row of front teeth

I remember in SAP there were these chaps in the hostel who would have a cot out on the corridor (think it was there permanently, in fact) and play cards all night. Used to think "Cards all night?!?", now its changed to wondering "what could have been" if the internet was this big then and one of them chanced upon Hold'em - I could've been saying "well, XYZ, poker champ, we were in the same class for 5 years (although XYZ would have quit archi to go pro)!!". Thanks for reading the blog-post of guy who recently got busted (discovered) at a final table of a tiny stakes poker tournament.