UNCLE TILTY

Awhile back, I was bitching to the blog and to the wife about having tables break at Full Tilt just when the opportunity to collect a bounty is presenting itself. Marci suggested that I write the Full Tilt brass and lodge a formal complaint/suggestion. The next day, Full Tilt's official blogger, Michael Craig, of The Professor, Banker, and the Suicide King fame, announced a contest for which entrants offer suggestions for policy changes they would implement if they were in charge of the site for a day. I decided to send my suggestion to Craig. Here is my original email:

I would make the tables break in numerical order, playing down to table one. I love that we are randomly assigned a table at the onset of an event, but I dislike when the table breaks seemingly randomly, so that we never know how long we will be playing at a specific table. If you know you will be there awhile, you may wish to play a loose style early to advertise certain tendencies before changing gears and tightening up later. It doesn’t always pay to advertise knowing that the table may break at any minute. It also kills me when there is one or more bountied players at the table and once s/he gets short-stacked, the table is broken and somebody else gets to collect the bounty by collecting that last chip. Redrawing at predefined stages is fine with me if the players are notified in advance, but the random breaking of tables is a flaw at the site that I would like to see fixed.

Craig was offering as prizes, two entries to the $216 FTOPS NLHE Turbo event which took place last night. A few days ago, he sent me this email:

You were the bubble boy, the third best entry in the contest. I thought your idea was something Full Tilt should 100% do and I can't believe they haven't done it already. For reasons I'll describe in the blog, I picked two entries ahead of it.

I'm trying to get Full Tilt to offer a third prize so there's a reasonable chance you'll be able to get something. I should let you know within the next day or so - sorry if this interferes with the Turbo FTOPS if you had your heart set on that, though we may know before then. And let me know if you get entered in the event or get tournament money in your account from Full Tilt because I told them your player ID in my request for a third prize.

In any event, nice work and great suggestion.

So, yesterday morning, Michael emailed me along with the other two winners to assure us that we would be staked for the tournament and he would be following our progress. I was having a good day over at PokerStars so I got excited to play the event and maybe continue my good fortune. I also got mentioned in my favorite blog:

Full Tilt allowed me to give a third prize for the contest and I decided to award it to Major General. His entry did not have the detail or imagination of SchaefPerro’s Offbeat Poker Series or the mission-extension of morningjames’s Pro Lobby. But it was the smartest and most logical alteration of operations out of all the entries.

Major General proposed the simple idea of breaking tournament tables in numerical order, something I can’t for the life of me figure out why Full Tilt has never done. As much as I enjoyed SchaefPerro’s entry about developing new tournaments, the core of what online poker should do is provide a real poker experience, better than live poker when the technology allows. The order of breaking tables is something that can signfiicantly affect poker strategy and major live tournaments break tables in an order that’s either disclosed or physically obvious. There’s no reason online poker shouldn’t do the same.

As it turned out, the staking never arrived, but Michael offered to reimburse me personally if I wanted to buy in outright, so I bought in a few minutes before game time. Here is the post-mortem I sent to my sponsor:

Of all the crazy, card-catching, coin-flipping tournaments I've ever been in, this one takes the cake. I figured I needed to get some chips early before the gambling began so I was very active in the first level. I made a big score when I re-raised holding A-K and one fella came along. The flop came 4-4-7 and I shoved when he checked to me. He made a liberal call with 8-6, with his four outs to my possible overpair. If he correctly put me on A-K, then he was still taking a 40% shot and lucky for me, everybody missed.

My next decent hand was Kd-Jd and I raised from two off the button. The cutoff went all-in and I had him covered by $1200 with a decent enough hand so I called, only to see Q-Q which held up. On the short-stack, I pushed from first position with Jh-3h and lucked out against 7-7 when I made a wheel on the river. I somehow made it past the first break, but soon after, I pushed K-7 from the button and fell to A-2, finishing 638 of 2140 for a total of negative $216 to my friends at Full Tilt Poker.