Cruise Ship Poker LOLs

I rarely play poker when I am on vacation because I usually try to make vacations about spending time with my wife and doing things that I don’t consider “job related.”   However, on the recent trip I trip I took there was a tournament on board the Royal Caribbean ship that was too hard to pass up.

The structure of the tournament was the following.  Each player buys in for $100 and gets 1,000 chips.  During the first three blind levels you can rebuy 1000 chips for $25 and at the end of the rebuy period there is an add on for $25 as well.  Seven players start the tournament and the winner of that table plays a final table of 7 where 2^nd and 3^rd places are cash prizes and 1^st place is a cruise (value $3500) plus a buyin to another Royal Caribbean tournament with bigger cash prizes. With the blinds starting at 25/50 and 10 minute blind levels this tournament plays a lot like a 6 max superturbo because you start out 20BB deep and are quickly short stacked.   Since I feel I have a pretty good edge in a tourney like this against a bunch of fun loving but armature cruise goers, I am definitely interested in playing.

Starting the tournament, I immediately got short stacked with a few decent hands that did not pan and I suddenly had about 600 chips.  At 500 chips you are allowed to rebuy so I quickly spewed off another 100 chips and rebought to 1500 chips.  From there I was pretty much off to the races.   I doubled my stack by stacking off with a set of 5’s.  After 30 minutes I added on and had a pretty healthy stack of about 5000 chips.  Play after the rebuy tightened considerably and I got lucky in two hands.  In one I made a standard resteal with AQ and got a call from the original raiser plus another limper.  Resteals that end up with 3 players are bad but I managed to hit top two pair to knock out two players.  A few hands later I shoved 99 from the CO and again got two callers.  Both had over cards but were sharing the J and none of us improved our hand allowing me to bust two more players.  So far so good except I hate tournaments where I am eliminating everyone at the table because I am increasing my risk and giving other people equity for my trouble.  3^rd place finisher got very short and was eliminated by me when he limped the SB and I shoved with A2o.  He called with aces but was mortified to see me hit a runner-runner flush with my Ace of clubs.  I got to heads up with a dominant stack and after losing a call with K high against a QT, I managed to eliminate my competition by catching an A-high type hand and getting a caller.  GG zero, eliminating all players in the tourney.  I finished with 22,000 chips which I could take to the final table.

I was checking with the casino throughout the cruise because they told me that if not enough tables ran they would just do the tournament with a cash prize.  Going into the last day only 3 of 6 tables had run and I figured if each table put in as much money as ours did we would have a prize pool of roughly $3000 and possibly only 3 players guaranteeing me a good payday.   The final day a fourth table ran with only six players and the total tournament take was $3800.  Not a great result since that meant that rather than playing for a payday of ~$600 guaranteed and $1500 for first place, the cruise would now be distributed and only $300 remained in cash.  I tried to get the table to make a deal to play for the cash but one guy was no interested.  He said the cruise left on his wife’s birthday and she would kill him for not going for it.   I had the big stack at the table with 22,000 chips and everyone else had about 15,000 to 17,500. Blinds started at 500/1000 and again escalated at 10 minute intervals.  I spewed off some chips early and then started to steal liberally when the I got to about 8BB deep.  Two of the players got very short as me and Mr. Gotta Play for the cruise absorbed the chips.  I started to get inkling that he was not a terrible player and soon we were heads up and I had a large stack (about 40K of 65K chips).  Once we got heads up I again tried to chop with him for the cash telling him he could buy a nice cruise for about $1500 but he said he wanted to play it out.  3 Hands later it was over and I was the loser. I made a 5BB shove from SB with J2s and ran into ATs.  Neither of us improved.  Next he had a very big stack and folded.  I made a 6BB shove from the SB with K6o and he snapped me again showing up with A8o for the win.  Game over.

One observation is to carefully analyze the structure of a tournament.   Professionally run tournaments are not usually this steep in payout and you should make sure you play tournaments where you have a good edge and also know what the outcome will be.  It’s hard to measure the value of a tournament if you don’t know the payout or the payout is not fixed ahead of time.

Overall it was a good experience.  I played 3 of the highest stakes hands of my career for $3500 and lost but those of you who play tournaments know that these kinds of things happen all the time.  If I look through my database I can find dozens of SNGs where I had a good chip lead and 2-3 hands later I took second place rather than first place.  Since my shoves were sound based on my expectation of his calling range and Nash equilibrium there is really nothing to do but throw up my hands and say “that’s poker.”

Good Luck at the Tables,

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