The Danger Zone

So the last week or so I've been playing tourneys and they're amazing. In ~5 years of playing poker I'd never really given them a chance, just thinking of them as a super simple form of poker, and whilst that's true they're pretty fun and far more lucractive than I expected. Also the rake is relatively low for small stakes, paying only 10+1 or even essentially 20+50c for a $5 2r1a is insane and I wish cash could be more equivalent to this rather than paying 50-150% of your winrate in rake.

Another cool (and in some ways terrible) thing about tourneys is it forces you to get in volume. Because you're hourly is low when you're loading up and finishing off tables sessions need to be long (8 hours+) and for someone who always had trouble getting in volume that's awesome for me. Also I seem to be able to put in 3x as many tourney hours as cash and feel the same tiredness.

So far I've been playing $10-20 freezouts and $5-10r on all the sites (stars, party, 888, ongame, ipoker). A few good scores in the rebuys have given me an ROI of ~80%, obv running super hot. I think for a cash player though you'll crush the early game and deep stuff, especially postflop, and short stack/late game play is pretty easy to work out. I've been watching a lot of jjyykk videos and IWEARGOGGLES. My goal with tourneys is to keep grinding them daily and use this to shoot out of small stakes, playing some cash on the side if I get bored. Eventually I expect I'll switch back to mainly cash, perhaps playing tourneys just on weekends, but for now I've got the tourney bug and I can see it's by far the best way to move up.

So TCOOP is startin tonight and it being my first tournament series is pretty exciting. I don't know how much bigger, juicier the other tourneys will get but I assume it'll be decent. For now I'll only be playing things $55 and lower, trying to sat into some bigger things or hit a big score sometime in the next few days. Living in GMT+8 is like the worst time zone in the world for peak time tourneys, most of the TCOOPs start 10pm - 6am my time so I'm waking up at 8pm like a degen and playing throughout the night. Which in a way is pretty cool.

Oh and the huge ego I have gets to compete in tournament rankings and what not which is super cool. In cash sure you have PTR and stuff but the P5 points system and scoreboard is amazing. Every time I hit a big score I'm probably more happy about the points than the cash and most mornings (or... afternoons...evenings?) I wake up and check how my ranking has changed from last night. Would be cool to be top 100 or get a triple crown one day.