Size matters
Posted by wolfger on June 16, 2009
I think I understand now why men love poker so much. Size matters. Oh, it’s not the only important thing… but a man with a large stack has a lot more power than a man with a short stack. This is the lesson I learned last night when I was playing a freeroll tournament on PokerStars (I’m wolfger88 if you care to look me up). Because I had a big stack, and boy was it going to my head. It changes the game. You can be more aggressive, and you can often get away with things that nobody else at the table can. Bluffing becomes very easy when you can force one or more of your opponents to choose between folding and going all-in. And when they do get gutsy and go all-in… if you win, your stack gets much bigger, and you can whack everybody else at the table with it that much more effectively.
I won round 1 at my table in a little over 30 minutes, and waited nearly 90 minutes for the rest of the tables to finish. Somewhere in round 2 of the tourney, I got too cocky, though. I crossed the line from aggressive to beligerent, started thinking with my stack instead of with my head… well, you can guess how that went. Size matters, but if you don’t know how to use it, you’ll lose it.
I wound up #364 out of 10,000. Not bad. And never again will I underestimate the amount of time I need to complete a tourney. If you keep winning, it’s an all-nighter.
