Outside of Vegas, and possibly London, Barcelona is the foreign place I have played the most poker. It’s hard not to love the place with its easy pace of life, excellent array of places to eat, and sun and sand.
Seniors
My first event was the Seniors: in fact, I timed my arrival to get there in time to play it from the start. As much as I love a late reg, I think there’s particular value in being there at the start of Seniors.
My record in Seniors is quite different from my record in other tournaments. It started abysmally, albeit over a small sample: I think I failed to cash my first ten. Small sample or not, I think I played those early ones very sub optimally, with a basic game plan of trying to run them over with or without the cooperation of the deck. I remember one in Barcelona after I’d learned the hard way patience and nut peddling are better strategies in these where I folded for three hours, before picking up kings in the big blind. By the time it got to me, under the gun had opened for 6x, and the entire table except for one player (nit) had called. With 50 big blinds out there already, I considered shoving my 100 big blinds, but eventually decided to raise to half my stack, reasoning that if anyone were to call such a ridiculous bet it would be the worst player at the table, and I could get the other 50 big blinds if he caught a piece (or thought I hadn’t : you heard a lot of “I put you on ace king” in those days). I still think that’s good strategy, but sometimes the worst player at the table in a seniors is….almost everyone. I watched in horror as they all called, an ace flopped, and now I have to check fold.
It may not have worked on that occasion, but my record in seniors since is insanely good. I cash most of the ones I play, and final table more of them than most people cash them. When I do make the final table, I usually make it to the final four, though I have yet to win one. That’s not to say they’re as insanely soft as they were when I first started playing them. Seniors these days study harder and smarter a lot more than they used to. If I were to characterise most seniors events these days, I’d say that the average recreational is a lot more studied than in non seniors events, but they also contain a lot less pros than non seniors events, so overall they’re still significantly softer.
On this occasion it was fairly smooth sailing until the final table, and I was reasonably pleased with my fourth place finish and cash for €19k that meant I was, in the words of Willie Elliot, “freerolling the festival”
A new format and missing the Seniors High Roller
Stars unveiled an interesting new format in Barcelona they’re calling “no bubble” tournaments. The idea is straightforward enough: it basically borrows the milestone concept and takes it into day one of a regular tournament. In this case, if a player reached 6x the starting stack at any point on day one, they bagged for day two and left. Simple enough, but one question it raises is “what happens when there aren’t enough chips left for anyone to reach 6x?”
David and I initially assumed the remaining players played on until one player had all the chips, and they bagged whatever amount that was and advanced into day two as the shortest remaining stack.
This, however, was not the case. What would actually happen (and I say would because what actually did happen is the last player to reach 180k was the last player in the flight, which will probably happen about half the time in practise) is that all the players would play on until one player had all the remaining chips but they would
(1) not be allowed to bag them and advanced into to day 2 (they would instead be eliminated from the tournament)
(2) not even receive a full min cash but only whatever fraction of it their stack divided by 6x starting represented
A chip and no chair
The idea of a player being eliminated when they still have chips seems like an anathema to me. One of the beauties of tournament poker is the whole “chip and a chair” concept: the idea that as long as you have even one chip left, you can still win the whole tournament. I played the event not realising this was the case and can tell you I would have been a very angry bunny if I was the last player standing with, say, only 4 starting stacks instead of the required six, and was told that not only was I eliminated from the tournament, but also my reward for multiplying my stack by 4 was to get less than the buyin back.
I spoke to a number of people whose opinion I respect like Tobias Leknes, Matt Savage, David Docherty and a few others who shall have to remain anonymous and they universally agreed the only sensible thing to do is less the player advance to day 2 with whatever stack they have. Tobias pointed out that the current rules incentivize the final remaining players to collude to ensure that one of them ends up with all the chips, as those chips are much more valuable still in the tournament than being cashed out at a heavily discounted rate.
That one concern notwithstanding, I think this is an interesting innovation I’d like to see tried again in the future (but I skipped the second one because abuse of this rule and wouldn’t play one that doesn’t allow the lady player standing to bag and advance).
In retrospect I was a bit annoyed with myself for having played this event which prevented me from playing the seniors high roller, which I feel is one of the best spots if not the very best for me personally at the festival.
Satellite success
It’s not exactly a secret I’m pretty good at satellites. My success rate in the new fangled milestones might not be as high as in the more traditional ones (I doubt anyone’s is: they don’t have the same possible skill edges) but it’s still pretty damn high. On this occasion I won two EPT main event satellites (and would have had a third if my Kings had held against tens). Although I don’t think I’ll be playing many EPTs going forward for reasons I’ll explain in a future blog post, when I do I’ll definitely be prioritising satellites.
PokerStars Open main event
This one I was very happy to bag on one bullet (I had two to fire from online satellites), and I actually got a good spin going on day 2 mainly thanks to a wild French player who I dubbed “the invisible man” because he showed up in a hoodie, sunglasses and a mask that left none of his face visible. There’s wild and there’s wild: to give you an idea of what wild meant in this case he
(1) open shoved almost half the hands he was dealt for 100 bbs+
(2) reshoved T3s over a UTG open in early position
(3) called a 20 bb jam in the small blind with 76o
(4) defended his big blind with 94o and jammed for 25 times pot on an AKJ board
I was lucky enough to be dealt JJ when he open jammed T9o UTG, and got some more donations. Unfortunately while he’d arrived at the table as one of the chipleaders in the whole tournament, he didn’t last very long even though he ran like God on the table. We were all sad to see him go, and after he left a series of bad outcomes saw me bust well into the money but well short of the big prizes.
EPT main event
After those early successes, I hit a mid festival slump with a lot of near bubble experiences. I fired my two satellite bubbles in the EPT main event. I decided to skip day 1A to concentrate on the satellites. My early reg bullet on day 1B was maybe the most uneventful of my career. I record all my hands in big events like this to post and dissect on Simplify Poker, but this thread won’t make for riveting reading. I won the very first hand with a cbet, but that would prove to be the only time I was above starting stack. I lost a chunk with second best hand in a 3 bet pot which knocked me back below 20k, and an unsuccessful river overbet bluff left me with less than 10k. I got it back up to 20k at dinner, but then basically got dealt out.
My second bullet was a max late reg Day 2 one. I got a pretty rough table draw with Brock Wilson to my immediate left and Matas Cimbolas to his immediate left, but still managed to get to 60k and beyond several times. Then I got dealt out for one entire 90 minute level, which pushed me back into jam or fold territory, and I ended up jamming KJs into JJ and not getting there despite flopping a flush draw.
Giving it back
Going into the last couple of days it was actually possible I could end up with a small losing trip (it shows how quickly buyins can mount up that even when you start with $30k in cashes you can end up down) due to a series of bricks that mostly resulted from people catching 1 to 3 outs against me on the river if I bricked everything I could play, but I had a good last full day. I cashed the mystery bounty on one max late reg bullet, then cashed the 1K freezeout also on one max late reg bullet. There’s a lot of nuance to max late regging a mystery bounty where the bounties are in play before ITM, and you have two considerations pulling you in different directions:
(1) you’re much more likely to be able to nit it to the money because of the high attrition rate
(2) you are however incentivised to gamble more even before the bounties come into play to put yourself in a position to chase them
Specifically in the Stars ones, the mystery bounties make up only a third of the prize pool, and are not massive because of this and the fact they come into play earlier than in most mystery bounties, meaning they’re worth in average not much more than a buyin (and therefore a starting stack). It’s probably impossible to solve for the different incentives so maybe it should just be a matter of personal style and preference whether to take a swashbuckling approach to gamble up a stack that lets you chase bounties, or a more cautious approach that will lock up at least the min cash a lot of the time. I decided to play a looser style at the start to try to be competitive for the bounties when they arrived, and got up to over 100k on a few occasions but then lost all ins to the point it was fairly clear I should probably just fold into the money (which I did) unless I got dealt premiums (which I didn’t).
Card death continued after the bubble broke, which is particularly frustrating in a mystery when you know for sure your shoves, light or otherwise, are getting called. My last two hands were unorthodox short stack play straight out of my three bigs and less playbook, which I will post on Simplify Poker and possibly here in a future blog.
The final crossbar
Making day 2 of the 1k freezeout gave me an unusual sweat in day two: if I lasted more than 5 hours I’d have to miss my flight. I had half average but made rapid progress, multiplying my stack by 4 in the first hour or so. At that stage I was eyeing up the 100k up top thinking that would be a good reason to have to book another flight, but I lost a massive one for double average with just over forty players left (AJ < A5) and never recovered.
Overall though, I was very happy with my performance and play at the festival, continuing a recent run of live form. The venue itself is class, maybe my favourite casino in the world. An Irish player commented to me that the energy is so much better than in Vegas casinos, and I completely agree. It’s hard to put a finger on why that is, but they seem to get the balance right between gambling and other activities like bars and the best casino restaurants I’ve seen anywhere. Toby Stone and his team of floor staff and dealers are the best in the business and create an efficient but friendly atmosphere. Everyone from the reg staff to security to the payouts play their part in a well oiled machine. I saw several dealers skilfully deescalate potentially explosive situations expertly, and each time I thought about how much worse these kinds of things are handled at, for example, the WSOP.
Generally, when I look back at trips years later, it's not so much how I did financially that I remember and more who I had fun meeting, and this trip will be no different. Particular shoutouts to Pargo, David Docherty, Jamie Burland (who I hadn't seen in years), Rania Nasreddine and all the players who stopped me to say how much my books had done for their games.
The attempted mugging incident
I won’t go into detail on this here as I put a video up on social media about it, but David and I were the victims of an attempted pickpocketing turned robbery with a physical assault element (David much more so than I). My video wasn’t well timed as it went up while David was still sleeping off the incident so he woke up to a flood of concerned messages from family members worried as to why they weren’t hearing from him, probably the last thing he wanted after the trauma of the night before. I may revisit it in a future blog focusing on the game theory aspect of the mugging and how they affected the decisions I made in the heat of the moment (cos that’s how my brain work: everything is GTO) but for now I will say
(1) both David and I are very grateful for all the concerned messages we received
(2) my reason for posting about it was just to warn people visiting Barcelona to be careful and pay attention to their surroundings particularly late at night near the casino, and hopefully learn from the mistakes we made on the night
(3) the incident while quite traumatic would not stop either of us from attending events in Barcelona in future. As I said at the start, Barcelona is a great city, and this is just one dark undercurrent to be aware of so as to reduce the risk in future
What next?
Next up for me on the live front is IPT Limerick on September 5th, and the next foreign trip is to Castellon in early October for the Party stop there. October will be a busy month live, with Killarney following hot on the heels of Castellon, and the IPO just after Killarney. Until then, I will be focusing mostly on online, content, coaching and writing. The next book with Barry Carter is currently being reviewed by beta readers and we hope to have it out sooner rather than later. Watch this space!
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