Hurry, Hurry, Hurry!!! Step right up! |
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Posted Sun May 28, 2006 1:24 pm GMT by mindgame
Gadfly and critic-at-large here, checking in after an extended hiatus.
Consider the latest travesty to be visited upon the poker-playing public: a $20, 000 charity Hold’em “Event” hosted by Northwest Indiana’s Fraternal Order of Police. I am almost ashamed to admit it is occuring in my own backyard--just 20 miles away--even as I write this. That yard may now be conceded to be home to some of the world’s most brain-dean poker players (thus explaining my continued success in local games?!??). They are gathering right now by the hundreds to poney up $100 to for the privilege of competing with 500+ others for the purse of 20 large.
Anyone who still believes the cops are the good guys may stop right here lest you be disabused of such nïaveté.
Okay, I’ll be honest. I didn’t do the math either. A friend invited me to join him several weeks ago for their last one, and off we went. I saw the sign outside the hall “$20, 000 Texas Hold’em Tourney Today” and I figured, like everyone else who pulled into the lot, “Hey, that could be mine.”
Well, no, not exactly. I plopped down $100 bucks and got a sandwich baggie with maybe 3 dozen chips in it and a table number and I threaded my way through the matrix to my seat. That’s when my brain suddenly started to function.
“Twenty grand!” I said to the guy next to me, “I guess I’ll give it a shot.”
“Can’t win all 20,” he said. “Dja even read the rules? It’s ten for first and the final table splits the rest. 5 thousand for second down to $300 for 10th.”
“Well that’s before they figure in the rebuys,” I countered, anxious to show him I wasn’t exactly a noobie.
“They keep the rebuys, friend. It’s for charity.”
Click.
That was the lightbulb going on. I was sitting at table forty-five. There were 57 other tables of ten. 58 x $1000. The math wouldn’t challenge most 3rd graders…how had I missed it? They were keeping almost 2/3rd’s of the dough. Ouch!
It got worse. A lot. I opened my little baggie and counted out 2 500’s, 4 100’s and 24 green 25’s. 2000. Not a lot to work with. The rules (now handed to me by a fellow grinning at my astonishment) said the blinds started at 50/100, and went up every 20 minutes. To 100/200; 200/400, 400/800 . . .you get the picture. It’s the kind of growth mathematicians call “exponential” but poker guys call “Out of your frigging mind.” Forty-one minutes into this tourney it was going to cost me 1200 chips—60% of my buy-in—just to see the blinds!!
It was a bad dream! It was a Kafka novel. It was poker a tournament conducted in the Cabinet of Dr Caligary—madness pretending to be normal. And there were 600+ other madmen sitting at the tables with me acting like nothing was amiss.
“Are you guys nuts?” I blurted out (rhetorically). Most of them, it turned out, were “regulars,” having played in this thing a few times.
“Quitcherbitchin’, Greenhorn. They let us have unlimited rebuys and you get the next 2000 chips for only $75!” This was confided to me with the slap on the back for the neophyte. I was being broken in to the “real” poker world by the older and wiser.
“Unlimited rebuys and the purse doesn’t go up??? Well no effing wonder you can have as many as you want!”
And they were going to need plenty because the whole damn charade was structured to require them. My estimate of the collective IQ of the room was dropping like the market on Black Tuesday. I wondered these guys had mastered speech enough to talk someone into driving them here—surely none could be trusted to operate a motor vehicle.
So the tournament starts and not seconds into it there are shouts on the floor for rebuys. Every hand seems to have a guy all-in and a couple to call him. This was surreal. I felt like a man lost in the Pacific, adrift in a lifeboat, but those those weren’t sharks around me—they were just corks bobbing in the waves being sucked into a whirlpool that was going to spit them back out into the parking lot in a hour or two, 3 or 4 hundred dollars poorer. The only winners in this thing were the guys counting the money. There was lots of it. After I busted out on QQ to T7o and staggered from the table amid the earnest advice of my fellow victims (“Hey, where ya going! Yer’ gonna lose your 100 bucks if you don’t rebuy!!!!), I just watched the action a while.
The rebuys occurred about every 10 or 15 seconds (I’m not making this up). 15 people were running chips and they were hustling as fast as they could. I was one of the very few who got up and left that first hour; almost everyone rebought a few times. Then at the end of the hour they announed only two more levels of rebuy and they were cutting these addicts off. But not before the “Grand Rebuy/Add-On” during the 10 minute break.
Yep! For those who were still in the tourney came the dubious opportunity of buying another 3000 chips for only another $100. I’m thinking this is the biggest sucker pitch of the day.
Say you’ve gotten hot (and dozens had, of course) and you were sitting in front of 10 or twenty thousand. Why would you double your money-at-risk for 3000 more chips? (Your chances of winning are theoretically proportional to your chip count. If you had 12,000 in front of you, your odds of winning rise a scant 25% when you increase your stack to 15,000. But winning this thing was like getting struck by lightning. So for an extra hundred bucks you go from a 200-1 dog to a 160-1 dog. And don’t forget that you only win $10,000 anyway—100-1 on your money, 50-1 if you rebuy.) But there wasn’t a whole lot of thinking going on because virtually everyone bought the chips. After all, they were getting them at a huge discount. It was almost as though they had money “on sale.”
The most jaded, ruthless sharks in Vegas would blanch at the gall it takes to run this tourney. Only the police could run it because anyone else would get arrested. I figure they took in somewhere between $160 to $190,000. And that payout NEVER changed. Twenty Grand. Take it or leave it. Can you imagine a Casino trying this?????
Oh, they WOULD! Oh yes! But where in hell could any casino find players in large numbers laughibly stupid enough to participate? Well, we’ve got ‘em. Northwest Indiana, folks (although guys drove in from Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio). These guys were repeat customers. But guess why they come. Are you ready for the supreme irony of the whole insane event?.
“’Cuz right here in this room are the dumbest poker players
in the whole YOU-KNEE-VERSE!”
That’s what somebody told me. Well I looked him as hard in the eye as I dared, (for it was difficult to miss that I was, indeed, right there in the room) and I ‘fessed up:
“By God, there’s no arguing with that.”
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Posted Sun May 28, 2006 2:49 pm GMT by Moon_Child
WOW!!!
not sure what to say.
Posted Sun May 28, 2006 3:08 pm GMT by crack
Haha, good read.
Posted Sun May 28, 2006 7:04 pm GMT by cayouche
Great read indeed!!
Welcome back mindgame!!
Posted Sun May 28, 2006 11:04 pm GMT by Icec0o1
I have to say, that's one of the best stories I've ever read. Very well written btw.
I thought about it and indeed there's no way to take advantage of all of that stupidity. Damn it, this is really angering me...
Posted Sun May 28, 2006 11:23 pm GMT by groton
the only way to win that is Get lucky a couple times get well past Ten K in chips then Play normal i mean onece no more rebuys i am sure the Fish just Drowned quilky ?
but man that is bad real bad
Posted Mon May 29, 2006 9:51 am GMT by Icec0o1
| groton wrote: | the only way to win that is Get lucky a couple times get well past Ten K in chips then Play normal i mean onece no more rebuys i am sure the Fish just Drowned quilky ?
but man that is bad real bad |
You'd have to get extremely lucky and it's not worth it for the prize money.
Posted Mon May 29, 2006 10:31 am GMT by jonesyb
hey there. great story.
welcome back, whoever you are. 
Posted Mon May 29, 2006 11:38 am GMT by Geno
God damn it's good to have you back
Posted Mon May 29, 2006 4:28 pm GMT by Dave B
That isnt poker, that is gambling!
Posted Mon May 29, 2006 4:42 pm GMT by mindgame
Dave!
The only thing I really never DID understand about that tournament is why you weren't IN it! I'm convinced it was the ideal venue for your "Dynamic" poker.
(How ya' been? White sox are looking tough lately, just in case that's escaped your notice. Tickets aren't all that easy to find--good ones, anyway.)
Posted Sun Jun 04, 2006 6:40 am GMT by BMiller1980
Well, the key there is it was for charity. That being said, it still sounds pretty stupid. It's amazing how many so-called "tournaments" I have been to where the format/blind structure is similiar to the situation you have described.
As crazy as the odds are, it seems like it would be worth a shot if the blind structure would allow you to be a little more patient with your chips.
Anyway, good read!
Posted Sun Jun 04, 2006 9:30 am GMT by kingetje
Hahaha, that story just cracked me up....
great read
Posted Sun Jun 04, 2006 1:38 pm GMT by suitedaces84
Show up for the next one and try to get a side game going.
Posted Sun Jun 04, 2006 4:13 pm GMT by Icec0o1
| BMiller1980 wrote: | | Well, the key there is it was for charity. |
That's fine but they can make it be like 25% of the purse goes to the tournament payout and the rest goes to charity. Or they should have at least said how much they collected for the charity...the predicted sum was 160-190k. The cops can give 10k to charity and do whatever they want with the rest. They have to be more upfront with people.
Posted Sun Jun 04, 2006 5:32 pm GMT by mindgame
I felt the same way Ice does. You can't rip people off wholesale and then excuse it because it's "charity." It was a whole bunch of charity for somebody, but I have no idea what the FOP does with the dough. One thing was obvious: they were paying a lot of people to work--and that's entirely legal. But my dealer had to be an octogenarian and she could barely get the cards out and had no idea at all what was going on: Some cop's great grandmother who showed up for an easy gig. Lot's of wives and gf's too, and who knows what they were being paid--but I asked, and they were all being paid. Well that's a pretty nice way to spread that "charity" money around.
SIDEGAME!
Well I see someone figured out my interest in subseqent events. They DO have side games in which the house takes a small rake and you tip the dealers. I might add that the only half-decent dealers were to be found in the side game room. THAT was fish city. Almost laughably so. Guys walked in from the main room and sat down at no limit games--with no limit btw on the buy-in. Ante's were 1/2. Most people bought in for 100 or less and were broke in about 15 minutes. They were basically clueless. I did win about $125/hr in the sidegame, worked a $200 stack to almost $700, got busted by a maniac who went all in on an inside straight draw and hit--then nailed him for about $500 of it back before they threw us out because the side games couldn't go longer than the tourney (about 9:30). I never made it over there on Memorial weekend, but my intent was to wait until the thing had been running about 2 hours and head right to the side games. Maybe July 4th.
Posted Sun Jun 04, 2006 7:57 pm GMT by Johny
They were getting paid at a CHARITY tournament? That's just wrong in my opinion. It blows my mind.
Posted Mon Jun 05, 2006 10:08 am GMT by mindgame
This whole thing blows my mind. But paying the help is legal in Indiana.
There have been huge scandals with that, so I think it would be great if it stopped. One such mess involved a local Church that "rented" out it's name to a charity Bingo run (we think) by the mob. Thousands of people were bussed in from as far away as Wisconsin. The local paper checked it out and figured they pulled in $15,000 to $20,000 each week. The church got $600 of it. The "help" was well paid. The members of the chuch--including the parish council--had no information on the Bingo at all. It wasn't even in the same city. The pastor made Time magazine when he went to federal prison--seems he wasn't going to talk about where the money went, so no one else was ever prosecuted. I guess you work with the mob, you play by their rules.
You don't suppose the mob has muscled in ont he FOP, do you??? Nothing would surprise me in Northwest Indiana.
Posted Thu Jun 08, 2006 9:38 pm GMT by JpForum
“Unlimited rebuys and the purse doesn’t go up??? Well no effing wonder you can have as many as you want!”
hahah thats great... im using that as my sig if u dont mind
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