| 27 Feb | The art of slow playPosted by PokerBarney on 4:35PM, 27th Feb 2006Permalink |  Send to a friend |  RSS feed |
Slow playing
Now I know what you're thinking - slow playing good hands to induce bluffs. But actually I mean something quite different: playing as slowly as you can to finish higher in a large tournament. Scandalous.
Playing in the Maxim King of Poker tournaments is getting serious tedious. 2 a day, with an average of 275 people in each one, with each lasting upwards of 2 hours to finish. I really don't want to spend 6 hours a day playing poker and neither does anyone else in the top 15-20 places on the leaderboard, so we work together to slow down the table we're playing on so as to outlast the disconnected players, and the mentalists who go all in first hand. Getting beaten by a crazy call is what we fear the most, and it seems to be happening more and more.
As an example - the other day at 2pm five of us started on table 1. Since tables are closed from highest to lowest (with table 1 always being the final table), we knew that we were safe from being moved. The VC software client gives you ten seconds to think, then a warning that you only have ten seconds remaining. This means you can get at least 20 seconds out of every decision, and with five of us, each hand took at least a minute - even if we all just folded! If people called a hand could take anywhere up to 5 minutes, and anyone who plays online knows how ridiculously slow that is.
In the first hour of play, we got through 27 hands. That's 3 times round the table!! 150+ people went out, and we only had only had to pay the blinds 3 times each. In the second hour we managed 24 hands, and got down to the last 35 or so players, still having only paid 5-6 blinds each. Unfortunately, this ultra-ultra tight play meant that the blinds were rapidly eating us alive, so we were forced all in by around 30 players left. I finished around 30th (a bit unlucky, but nothing to complain about), while others finished between there and 20th, depending on the luck of the last all in hand.
All in all, although it was a bit dull, we all had a good laugh in the chat box, and it was the least risky poker I've ever seen. We were almost guaranteed to beat 200+ players and get some decent points. So... if you get on a table with us, my apologies!
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