Up All Night
2008-06-06 23:00:54
By:
Gene Bromberg
Ask the question "What abilities must you have in order to be a great poker player?" and you'll hear people talk about mathematical skill, card sense, an acute understanding of human nature, and that elusive quality known as "heart". And all that's true. But there's one aspect of poker that's often overlooked, especially among those who mostly experience poker by watching it on TV.
And that's endurance. It's one thing to look an opponent over and make a hero call with Ace-high because, darn it, you know he doesn't have anything. It's quite another to make a dozen such calls over the course of a long, long day, not to mentione the scores of checks, folds, raises, reraises, laydowns, and showdowns that take place during a marathon session.
That's a word that's in vogue at this year's WSOP--marathon. There have been some absurdly late nights for players at the Series this year, thanks in large part to the change in blind structure that was put in place. Players have had more chips relative to the blinds late in events, and that means you don't have folks blindly shoving for three hours as the field boils down to a final table. Players have the time and the chips to
play poker instead of feeling the pressure to gamble when they some semblence of a hand.
Slower blind structures definitely help better players, who are given more time to display their skills and reduce the luck factor to some extent. More play means the players have to make more decisions during the day, and if better players tend to make better decisions the cream will rise to the top. If you look at the final tables so far at the WSOP the majority of the players are well-known in either live- or online-poker circles (and sometimes both).
These final tables are going to make for fantastic TV when they air, but getting to one of those final tables has proven a grueling experience. Day 1 of most events start at noon and end after 10 levels of play, which is around 2AM. On Day 2 you have to play down to the final nine, and that can take a long, long, LONG time. One event I covered didn't set the final table untill 5AM; another wasn't done until a bit past three. The first $1,500 No-Limit event tried to play down from over 500 to nine--they finally quit with 18 players left at 6:30AM. They came back around 1:30 that afternoon and played until 6AM again.
You see players guzzling energy drinks, stretching, getting massages that last hours. But no matter what you do the body and the mind rebel at staying awake and alert for that many hours in a row. You might think you're operating at 100%...right up to the point where you call off all your chips with top pair because you didn't see that four-card straight on the board.
Some people handle the long hours better than others. Experience certainly helps in these circumstances, because you know how your body reacts. If you know the second day of tournaments tend to go long you might go home and straight to bed instead of spending a few hours partying because you made it past the first day. An old hand might also know how the pressures of playing all day and all night might affect an amateur's play.
It seems like just about all the changes to the World Series of Poker have been to the benefit of better, more experienced players. And perhaps that's as it should be--the WSOP is the ultimate test of poker skill. But just because you haven't won 11 bracelets or appeared on ESPN doesn't mean you can't take advantage of these changes. The better you know what to expect, the better you understand what it's like to go deep in an event, the better your chances of fulfilling your World Series dreams.
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