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I'm playing in the European Poker Open V this weekend and once again I'm happy to be sporting the Boylepoker colours for this event. I enjoy these TV tournaments; I have a very low patience threshold in live poker. So if you sit me down with a deep stack and a 12 hour session in front of me, then odds are I'm going to do something donktastic out of sheer boredom/impatience before the day is out. In the TV six-max games though, I only need to keep a lid on it for 3 or 4 hours and then come back again after a few days break, if I'm lucky!
I played two of these tournaments last year and what I find interesting is that, compared to other players, relatively few of my hands survived the edit to make the final broadcast. In the WPO IV last year, my friend Neil Channing was employed to pick the bones out of 2 or 3 interesting hands in each programme. Despite having been at the table for at least 8 hours all told, a grand total of none of my hands were subjected to Neil's in-depth analysis :-). I could see why though. The fact is, apart from the first level, when the players are generally just feeling each other out anyway, the players are generally all pretty short-stacked, with 25 blinds or less.
If you've seen my videos on Pokerswat,(http://www.pokerswat.com/) you'll know how I recommend playing in these spots. What should happen is, the first guy to enter the pot should raise, and then anyone else who wants to play should really either fold or jam all his chips in. Not very pretty, but needs must when the devil drives as I like to say. In practice, that's not what happens; people open-limp, call raises, get themselves into awkward spots and then go into massive dwell-ups trying to dig themselves out. TV loves an awkward spot and loves a dwell-up even more.
So the irony is, the better you play, the less face time you get, in my opinion. Which is fine by me! The first time I played a TV event, I did it for the experience and the novelty of being on the box, but now the cameras are almost an irrelevance and I'm playing because I think it's fun and should be good value, very good value to be honest! If you play solid poker with a good awareness of stack size and no reluctance to gamble when the time is right, then you have every chance of finishing second to Marty Smyth when the dust clears :-).
Comments (1)
well played Sir; obv the lucky badge worked its magic also