Just as a caveat, I have no idea how this Royal's O/8 tourney is going to play out. We are using the same blind structure as we have before but with even deeper stacks of 5000 instead of the 4000-ish range that we've been using before. I wanted to allow for plenty of play and with as swingy as Pot Limit O/8 can be I figured the stack depth would allow for everyone to withstand high variance dents to their stack in the early stages. The other change is to make the blinds 25 minutes instead of the normal 20 minutes. That was to help compensate for the fact that we are likely going to get fewer hands in per round than in Hold'em due to the math of making pot sized bets and for chopping up high and low halves of the pots. I don't know how much of the variance is going to be mitigated by the occurrence of splitting pots hi/lo either. On top of all of those factors it looks like we will be a shorthanded table with T&I out and Jason and MB in Mexico. Ryan is also a tenth hour scratch.
We'll soon find out I guess! Look for a follow up post digesting the tourney this weekend.
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5 comments:
From my experience online, O8 isn't really as swingy as we like to think. Chopping up lots and lots of pots means that a lot of the time you don't really do much. Even if you are getting large parts of your stack in, you just chop up someones money who bailed on the flop or turn; pretty insignificant.
I think we should just go through this first one and then adjust from here. This group (like all poker players) isn't shy about feedback.
I think shorthandedness will make the chopped pots effect even more pronounced since it is decreases the likelihood of multiway pots. I also think that since we are lesser experienced O/8 players in general that there will be more variance than online among O/8 junkies but I definitely hear you about the chops cutting down on swings. But we will have plenty of chips to splash around with so we can all jump in with both feet and enjoy O/8 in '08.
Good luck guys, sorry I can't be there.
I will have my comments out on how to play about 7 or 8 different types of hands in O8 on Sunday. Check out the cakewithoutchris.blogspot.com. I wrote it in a similar style to hand to hand combat that is in Cardplayer magazine.
As always, I will value your comments.
As for the tourney, you may have a bit of a marathon event with this structure as I basically agree with Marsh. But I have absolutely zero tourney experience in O8 so I am unsure how it will go.
Well I even said it before the tournament started, we will not end up with anything conclusive about the structure from this tournament...and sure enough, I don't think we can really did get anything definitive.
* Tourney ended at the 500/1000 mark. A standard estimate of when a tourney will end is when the BB equals the original stack size. I had estimated that we would all burn through our stacks a level or two earlier though Marsh and Royal's heads up confrontation took a while to transfer 2/3 of the chips in play from Royal's stack to Marsh's.
* I think the combination of being short handed and having new players lead to too many hands being seen by all players. The limited amount of hand selection experience led to much limping which further added to how many flops were seen.
* Swingy? Joe went from 5000 > 75 > 1500 Before we were done with the third blind level (15/30!). Up until the heads up portion probably the biggest pot of the night was bigger than the size of a 5K starting stack which I took down with my Ace high. Those were the exceptions though. I wouldn't say that it was extraordinarily high variance and many of the big pots just got chopped up but I think that when there was a scooped pot that it was on average larger than a NLHE pot at the same stack/blind levels.
* Pot sized bets ruled the day. Even though it is not mandatory, players tended to pot it the majority of the time even it it meant digging out spare change to match the pot. Instead of betting an even 1500 there tended to go ahead and make it 1650 to go instead.
* Pre-flop raising. I think if Jason and Ryan were there then there would have been more pre-flop raising which would have lead to fewer overall hands being seen.
* Marsh thought the structure was too slow and I would agree that with a more experienced crowd using some semblance of pre-flop hand selection the tourney would likely have gone longer.
So what would I change for next time? Not really sure. Assuming we had a full table I think I would actually just leave things the same with the understanding that the tournament would run longer. I had figured this one for being high variance with the deep stacks available and the nature of PLO/8 but now that we have a tourney under our belts I think the next one will have less action.
And oh yeah, one more thing, I thought that Royal's idea for an O/8 tournament was a fantastic way to get in a lot of O/8 experience for only $20. There is no way that most of us would have gotten to play anywhere near that many hands for that kind of money in a .25/.50 ring game. With our costs fixed and the stacks deep we got the opportunity to see a ton of hands, play some of them to the river, and to even survive losing some big ones without going broke.
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