Crazy Game

Event 18 is the No Limit, Deuce-to-7 Lowball with Re-buys event. This event is for gamblers. There is only one draw, so two rounds of betting, but the betting is No Limit so people are pushing all the chips in to put maximum pressure on their opponent. This results in a lot of bust-outs and, consequently, a lot of re-buys.

How many re-buys is a lot? There were 85 players entered into the tournament. There were 272 re-buys. The total prize pool is over $1.7 million. The winner will get over $600k. The player that just squeaks into the money in fourteenth place will pocket over $26k. On average each player invested $21k into entry/re-buy fees. That is one entry and 3.2 re-buys per player.

I wish I would have seen some of it. It started on my day off and today, as it continues, I will be in the Satellite Room dealing Single Table Satellites all evening. On my day off, I stayed away from the Rio. My housemate, Tim and I headed up to the Stratosphere for their daily 1 PM tournament.

At one point in the tournament I was down to less than 25% of my starting stack, then things started to go right. I was all in under-the-gun (first to act) with Ace-King and got two callers. I caught a King and tripled up just before having to pay the blinds. After a few timely folds and a couple of double ups I found myself at the final table along with Tim. Three times I either went all in or called an all in bet before the flop and all three times my hand held up to bust the other player. At that point, I had a pretty massive chip lead and people started talking about chopping up the prize pool. Tim said something about $250 and then the player next to him said, "Hell, I'd be happy with $200 and give the rest to the chip leader." Tim then made a case to the table that this was a good deal and we should all take it.

Now, chip leads are good things, but in No Limit Poker they can disappear as fast as they were built. Without even doing the math on it, but knowing that "the rest" would be over three times the $200 I agreed - as long as everyone else agreed to leave $10 for the dealers. After some resistance from one single player who eventually capitulated, the deal was done. My share turned out to be even more than I thought as I got $790 and left $40 for the dealers. Later, I tossed Tim one of the $100 chips for negotiating such a good deal at the final table.

We also decided that in the future, when we played tournaments together, I would "buy" half of his entry and he would "buy" half of mine. That way if we cashed, we would split the profits. Stay tuned to see how this works out.