The Game of Chicken and Range Estimation.

Posted by Vinay Suchede on 2012-05-08 at 12:00 AM

Wow! An amazing time I had railing Prabhat. (He won the Big 109 for a cool pay-day of 24K in addition to 3.5K chop for 1st in 22) I rail the results in OPR of PG team and other players I know. But this is one of the few times I railed someone playing online. It is difficult to rail these sickos as their work hours usually start at 10 pm and go into the wee hours of the morning. (I play 6-max cash during evenings/whenever I get time but will be firing up them MTT’s every now and then as I get a bit more confident with the learnings from the Mentorship program). Anyway I somehow woke up at 4 am-ish today not feeling well. Sugars were a bit haywire. Couldn’t get back to sleep. So went to Face-book as most of us who are addicted to it do. 95 billion! That company is seriously worth more than that. Anybody able to invest in Facebook IPO should definitely do so. Anyways so the first update I see is of Prabhat who is having a deep run in the Big 109. I wished him good luck on his status update and started railing. He was already on the FT of the 22.

I have usually found it boring to rail. But this time I somehow was getting a better understanding of how the game was being played and was noticing patterns. This deep into a tournament (at around 30-40-50BB) it is usually a mixture of a game of chicken, range estimation, balancing, stack maintenance and very few showdowns or even flops for that matter. The players who are better at range balancing and range estimation usually come out at the top. Of course there is the variance of chance. Prabhat won a few crucial hands where he was behind, the one I recollect was A10 against AK for his tournament life. No doubt he ran well. But he has run really badly in April after the double win in late March. Check his blog on the site. I am sure he would have been pretty disheartened by the April results. I know I would have been. I have played in 6 live tournaments since the PGT Feb win and have not cashed in any of them and I am already questioning myself and pretty disappointed about it all. But I know there are so many better players who have gone on cash-less runs for so much longer. Musing about 6 cash-less runs is a joke really to MTT grinders. (The problem, however, comes back to that in Goa tourneys you have to keep cashing otherwise a solitary win after a long bad run will not get you into profits due to small field sizes and small prize pools).

Anyway, the key I have realized is to keep plugging away. Having the belief and being stoic about results is as much a part of MTT player’s arsenal as is his range estimation skills and such. Many of us will get disheartened by bad runs which are definitely going to happen. But keep learning and improving and putting in the volume and I for one will remember the words that Adi told Prabhat in one forum entry after his deep run in one of the tournaments was cut short: “Chin up!”

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Vinay Suchede

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