Poker Blog and Poker Gossip

Last December Pokerstars set a new world record for most poker players in an online tournament.  Well, now Full Tilt Poker is trying to do them one better.  To celebrate Full Tilt Poker’s 5th birthday they are holding a 5 dollar buy-in tournament with $500,000 GUARANTEED!  The field has been limited to 50,000 players, which would crush the record of “Largest Online Poker Tournament” set by Pokerstars by 15,000 players (currently 35,000 players).

The tournament will run on July 19th at 15:05 ET and players can start qualifying now for as little $0.25 or 15 Player Points.  Or, if you really want, you can buy-in direct for just $5.  Whoever wins this thing will be laughing all the way to the bank as they will probably take home over $100,000 for their $5 investment.

Guinness Records will be verifying the record once the tournament is over using information provided to them by Full Tilt.  To play in the tournament you must agree to let Full Tilt provide your information to Guinness Records for veryfication purposes.

I am interested to see how well Full Tilt’s servers stand up to holding this tournament.  When Pokerstars went for the record they had several server issues and the site almost went down completely.  In the past Full Tilt has also had server issues related to high volumes of players.  Hopefully they went out and bought a few more servers before they announced this game!

The tournament is already live in the Full Tilt Poker lobby so you can register now.  If you don’t have a Full Tilt account, use Full Tilt Referral Code BRB600 to get a 100% up to $600 bonus on your first deposit.  This is one tournament that you don’t want to miss!

Any time now the World Series of Poker should be announcing the main event payouts schedule for the 2009 WSOP.  They have just announced that there are a total of 6,494 players and that whoever comes in first will receive $8,548,435.  In the main event (Event #57) there are 648 paid positions and a total prizepool of over $61 MILLION DOLLARS!!!

EDIT: It’s official, here are the numbers for the 2009 WSOP Payouts in Event #57 (The Main Event):

2009 WSOP Payouts

Buy In: $ 10,000 Entries: 6,494
Place     Prize
1st – $8,546,435
2nd – $5,182,601
3rd – $3,479,485
4th – $2,502,787
5th – $1,953,395
6th – $1,587,133
7th – $1,404,002
8th – $1,300,228
9th – $1,263,602
10th-12th – $896,730
13th-15th – $633,022
16th-18th – $500,557
19th-27th – $352,832
28th-36th – $253,941
37th-45th – $178,857
46th-54th – $138,568
55th-63rd – $108,047
64th-72nd – $90,344
73rd-81st – $68,979
82nd-90th – $57,991
91st-99th – $47,003
100 th-162nd – $40,288
163rd-225th – $36,626
226th-288th – $32,963
289th-360th – $29,911
361st-432nd – $27,469
433rd-504th – $25,027
505th-576th – $23,196
577th-648th – $21,365

These numbers are down a little from the 2008 WSOP Main Event Payouts where there were a total of 6844 players and a total prizepool was over $64 Million.  Last year the top finishers received the following payouts:

2008 WSOP Prize Pool and Payouts

The total prize pool generated by the 6,844 entrants was $64,333,600. That makes the prize pool break down as follows:

1: $9,119,517
2: $5,790,024
3: $4,503,352
4: $3,763,515
5: $3,088,012
6: $2,412,510
7: $1,769,174
8: $1,286,672
9: $900,670

Update, the 2009 WSOP Payouts have been added above!

Hey All,

I just wanted to tell you about this great game style they have on PokerStars.  It’s called the “Ante Up” tournaments.  These games are multi-table tournaments that you may or may not have seen, and they seem to run nightly.  Since I’m a bad poker player, I only play the $5.50 games, but I can say that these games are highly exploitable to anyone that has at least some knowledge of pot odds, and how to properly wager based on them as well as your opponents.

The hook to these games, is that start with a 5/5 small blind and big blind, as well as an ante.  Now, the blinds remain at 5/5 for the entirety of the game, but the antes continually increase.  I believe starting stack is 3000 in chips.  Now, considering the fact that everyone at the 9-player table chips in an ante, the pots immediately start higher than a regular blind-based structure would be (the first level, with 5/5/5 would have a starting pot of $55 rather than the $10).  However, I’ve played a few of these now, and people playing the game do not account for this, and make continual mistakes.  I have literally seen the game get to a point where the pot is $3000+ dollars pre-flop, and someone raise to $25.  This allows decent players to realize that your rougly 120:1 odds means you should be calling with literally any two cards.  There is nothing more delightful than stacking someone with AA with your 58o after flopping a straight because he didn’t understand betting based on pot sizes.

So, aside from playing a wide variety of hands, and allowing yourself plenty of suckout chances, how else can you exploit this?  Well, people see big numbers, and they immediately think that you’re betting too much, and will fold, thinking you’re insane.  Playing the other day, I decided that my standard raise pre-flop was going to be (about) 3/4 the pot.  My reasoning is that to get a 3k pot pre-flop, normally you would need blinds of 1k / 2k, so a bet of 2250 which was normally an impossible bet, however, the other people at my table were consistently folding, and this was not early in the tourney with all the bad players, but rather with less than 10% of the field remaining (hey, what can I say, even I get lucky!).  Basically, I was stealing pots with a raise of roughly 1.12x the BB.

A final thing that I noted was that players were overestimating the health of their stacks.  The small blinds are the only thing you see on the table from your own stack.  If they showed the antes coming out as well, maybe people would realize that they’re paying $500 per hand, and would realize that their stack of 6000 isn’t going to last quite long enough.

I guess the point of this article is that in this particular tournament, I was able to exploit a weakness in the other players based on what should be a very basic concept that anyone who plays the game should already know.  If you do not understand the concepts of pot odds, either calling based on them, or betting in order to remove them, I would suggest reading up on it ASAP!

(To get a $50 FREE Bonus, use Pokerstars Marketing Code: BRB500)

Mark

For those following the WSOP main event right now, who caught the entrance of the “Poker Douche” Phil Hellmuth yesterday?  Does this guy have his head so far up his own ass that he can’t see how much of a douchebag he really is?  Basically his entrance was designed to make him look like some kind of modern day Julius Caesar?  WTF, Caesar would probably turn over in his grave and stab Hellmuth for this, because after all Caesar was a military man, not some TV crybaby that only became famous because he was good at cards.

I think Dragomir said it best in that video above, “It cost me $10k to play this tournament, it cost you nothing!”, which Phil can’t argue as he is paid to play by one of poker’s shadiest online sites, Ultimate Bet.

Anyway, I love watching him blow up at other players for making stupid plays when he is the king of making stupid plays himself.

So, if you are a Hellmuth fanboy, or just want to see how dumb he looked going into the WSOP yesterday, here is the video of his entrance:

Well, not exactly, but President Barack Obama currently holds a 2009 WSOP Main Event buy-in in his hand.  According to poker player (and relatively unknown) Richard Sklar on PokerNews TV, he handed the president a WSOP buy-in at Ceasars Palace inviting him to play the event for free.

Nobody believed Sklar would be able to get Obama to play, and several poker players offered him ridiculous odds on prop bets.  Phil Gordon gave him 100,000 to 1 on a $1 bet for Sklar and Greg Mueller, and Chris Ferguson gave the 2 25,000 to 1 odds on a $20 bet.  So, if Obama ends up playing Sklar will receive $1,200,000 in prop bets.  He has even gone as far to email Obama and has promised to donate $1 Million to the charity of Obama’s choice.

I highly doubt the president will show as that would probably be a secret service nightmare, but regardless, it would be awsome for poker if Obama did come.  Here is the video with Sklar talking about Obama:

Rumour has it that Nelly will be singing at the Pokerstars WSOP Party.  According to NYC Rounders, semi-washed up hip hop star Nelly will be siging at the official Pokerstars WSOP Party July 9th at the Palms.

From their site:

Hip-Hop Star,  Pimp Juice & Apple Bottom Jeans entrepreneur Nelly will be headlining the PokerStars Party at the Palms during the 2009 World Series of Poker.

This has been rumored for a while now, but everyone was waiting for an official announcement.  NYC Rounders learned that an announcement isn’t coming, so it’s time to tell the world.  Nelly + Vegas + Free Drinks = Happy Dance. (Yes, Nelly hasn’t been big since 2005, but everyone at the WSOP remembers the glory days)

The party will take place on July 9 at Rain Night Club.  Doors open at 9pm.  You will need a pass to get in, but I don’t know where you get them.  They are not on the PokerStars Web site anymore.  I am sure all qualifiers will get them at the Palms and a few will circulate through the Rio.  If you don’t have a pass, general admission will start at 10 or 11pm.  Not sure when.

Nelly may possibly be playing the WSOP event also.  Apparently he was spotted playing at the WSOP last year.  Now I just need to talk to my Pokerstars rep and see if I can get some tickets.