Thursday, August 3rd: Tournaments are gay.

So I wrote before that one of the few misgivings I had about coming down to Australia was that the start of school down here conflicted with the World Series of Poker, where a few of my friends were playing this week (although to the best of my knowledge, they've all been knocked out of the main event by now, and they're only just now finishing day 2.) I really wish I could have played there, just for the fun experience, but -- in one of my few moments of life lucidity -- I chose school over poker.

I'm not all that bummed, though, because one of my long-standing beliefs is that tournament poker is one of the worst possible measures to assess actual poker skill, but we (or more accurately, the media) have put it up on this pedestal as the ultimate test of poker acumen. I have infinitely more respect for cash game players grinding out profits than I do for nearly anyone who pencils himself in as a poker shark on the basis of one or more big tourney scores. There's a myth out there, perpetuated over the last couple of years in the media, and it's the myth of the marquee poker professional; the one or two "name" players at every final table that TV poker commentators love to point to as evidence that, despite the luck factor in poker, the "cream" ultimately rises to the top. To quote Chris Rock in pretty much any stand-up set he's ever performed: "Please cut the f*@#!$% shit!" The fact of the matter is that the biggest reason for the presence of a few 'name players' at final tables these days is simply the law of large numbers. Think, for a moment, about how many pro poker players you could either name, or whose name/face you would recognize if you saw it...I think that number would probably be around 300 for me...hmmm...maybe that's a bit high...perhaps more like 200-250. Regardless, while TV commentators hurry to point out poker pro's X and Y at the 10-man final table, they discount altogether the hundreds -- yes HUNDREDS -- who have been knocked out to get the that point, whereas 8 complete donkeys remain.

It's easy, of course, to understand why the media has so much invested in perpetuating this myth: the viability of commercializing TV poker depends on it. Who, after all, wants to watch 10 complete unknowns play poker. No, much better to have a few professionals mixed in about whom you can really tell a story. After all, what makes a more compelling story line: Joe Blow, TV repairman battling and Bill Smith, insurance salesman, or Greg Raymer being seated with Mike Matusow, just a year removed from their memorable trash-talking / Matusow crying session in the 2004 WSOP. The popular media need us to believe in this myth of individual poker greatness in order to sell the people -- it's the people and the individual brands they create that boost ratings and sell advertising. I think it entirely possible that the best tournament poker player in the world today (the word "best" is somewhat ambiguous too, but let's just say it means the most technically proficient) has never won a major $5K+ tournament in his life. You may never have even heard of him/her. That's how much luck is involved in tournament poker.

Here's the problem. One of the most important (and at the same time difficult) concepts people need to grasp in order to play winning poker is variance, and just what constitutes the "long term". A popular question on poker bulletin boards is "Just how many hands do I need to play before I can trust my BB/100 number, or know that I'm definitely a winner or loser?" The answer given varies, but usually comes in somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000. I think one of the most insightful (and likely) responses, however, was given by the poster who claimed, somewhat controversially, that the actual number of hands one would need to play in order to establish one's "true" BB/100 was many, many times higher than the oft-quoted 50K - 100K. That poster actually had a sound mathematical basis for making that claim, which included considerations of standard deviation, risk of ruin, etc, etc, but the take-home point was that, in short, it simply takes a helluva lot of hands to reach "the long run". Nearly all poker players will die before ever coming close to approximating what their 'true BB/100' (that is, the BB/100 figure that their current playing skill/style would generate if continued to infinity) actually is. A lot of people have expressed admiration at the high BB/100 I've been able to sustain, but according to those calculations, my 'actual' BB/100 could vary by as much as 2 or 3 whole big bets / 100 from where it stands now (after 500K or so hands).

Anyway, why have I gotten distracted talking about all that long-run 'nonsense'? Because if you're suprised that 500,000 hands might still not yield all that precise a predictive future long-term winrate, do you honestly believe we can make any substantive determinations from the 1,000 or so that will determine this year's WSOP winner? 1,000 hands is nothing, and yet that's exactly what is going to decide who the media annoints as one of the best new poker players on the planet a week from now. How about the poker wunderkind-du-jour, Jeff Madsen who, at 21 years and 7 weeks just won 2 WSOP bracelets, and made 2 more final tables, out of the 6 WSOP events that he entered this year. Simply put, with fields as large as they are this year, that's probably the single most impressive feat in the history of the WSOP. Is Jeff good? Anyone want to drink the Kool-Aid? Not me. Again, I'm not picking on Jeff in particular, just on the folly of drawing conclusions from any time frame so short in duration. Had 1 or 2 of his all-in coin flips gone the other way, and he's back to community college, and you'd have never heard of him. Read his interview with Cardplayer Magazine here; actually an interesting read, if you ask me.
(First of all, I won't rag on the guy too hard, but "I also borrowed money from my college fund that my grandfather had put away for me. I got just enough money to play in six tournaments and make a run for the final event."?? What the F are that kid's parents thinking? -- alright, no more judgements for now.) This kid will now walk around the rest of his life -- yes the rest of his life -- believing he's a poker natural, because in his "long run", he simply had the exceptionally good fortune of having his "hot streak" come near the beginning of his poker career. Last year's WSOP winner, Joe Hachem, for example, will be a "winning poker player" the rest of his life. I'm not picking on him in particular (in fact, he seems like a really nice guy), but I cite him only because he's won the biggest single prize in the history of poker (until another unknown overtakes him in a couple weeks for $12Million). Does that make him good? How about the fact that he's now going to be seen sitting in the highest-stakes cash games at nearly every casino he visits? Are you impressed yet?

Long story short is it's pretty much impossible to ever reach the "long-run" in NL tournament play, and I'm just frustrated with the undue importance placed on individual tournament wins by the media and public at large. There are several very well-known poker pro's who have made a few big scores in NL tournaments, and thus have 7-figure bankrolls, who are, by all accounts, absolutely terrible players, from a technical standpoint. Whenever they sit in the "Big Game" at the Bellagio, the better cash game players lick their chops at the dead money that's sitting down. Is this post an indictment of all tournament professionals? I know it will be taken by some readers as such, but that's not the intention. A lot of the poker pro's themselves realize the razor thin +EV they actually have over even the worst of the worst in NL tournaments. How else do you explain the complaining that's coming more and more these days from pro's who lament that the WSOP fields are just getting "too big", and that the buy-in for the main event should be raised, or the # of entrants capped. From a purely EV standpoint, they should welcome each and every player who plays worse than they do in a given tournament field. But they don't. Instead a lot of them complain that it's becoming more or less impossible to navigate through the minefield of thousands of "internet donkeys." That counterintuitive line of reasoning is evidence of the relatively depressing realities of NL tournament play.