WCOOP Event #6 Preview

Event #6 is $215 NL hold 'em with rebuys. Some of you must be asking yourselves "what the hell is a rebuy?" The way rebuy tournaments work is when you have below a certain predetermined number of chips you can "rebuy" and pay more money to add more chips to your stack. Usually the number of chips you need to be at or under is the same amount you start with, so you can immediately rebuy when the tournament starts. Also at the end of the first hour you can "add on" more chips regardless of how many you have at that time.

For example if you're playing a $55 with rebuys tournament (my favorite level of rebuy tournament) and you start with 1500 chips, you can immediately rebuy for another $50 and add 1500 more chips to your stack. If you lose a hand and find yourself with zero chips you can rebuy 1500 for $50 more dollars or 3000 chips for a total of $100. Then if you managed to lose 1700 chips and found yourself with only 1300, you could rebuy again and add another 1500 to your stack (making it a total of 2800) for $50. But, if you only lost 1000 of your chips you'd be stuck at 2000 and unable to rebuy. At the end of the first hour regardless of how many chips you had you could add 2000 (you get more for the add on) additional chips to your stack for the same $50.

Rebuy tournaments have tremendous value because the house only makes money on the initial buy in. As a result you can find yourself in a tournament where players have put in an average of $200 per person, but you and everyone else have only paid $5 to the house (instead of $15 or $20). There is also value generated by people who over do the rebuys and people who under do them. Some people take the approach that they are just going to do the initial buy in and hope for the best. Almost all of these people go broke in the opening stages and leave their money behind to be split up. Other people go totally nuts during the rebuy period (especially in the $5.50 or $11 with rebuy tournaments) moving all in on almost every hand regardless of what cards they have, in an effort to accumulate chips while they can still rebuy. Neither of these strategies is optimal. One reason why some people don't like this flavor of tournament is "they take forever." The blinds move up in a standard fashion, but the rebuys and add ons add an insane number of chips to the tables so it takes MUCH longer to play rebuy events to their conclusion.

One interesting story involving a rebuy tournament is during the 2005 World Series of Poker (WSOP) $5,000 with rebuys Pot Limit Omaha event Daniel Negreanu (one of the best players in the world and 2004 WSOP player of the year) did 22 rebuys at $5000 a pop trying to pick up enough chips to take him to victory (it didn't work). For someone like him the WSOP bracelet is all that matters.

In WCOOP event #6 I'm looking at $215 plus rebuys. This is at least a $615 commitment and could easily run into the $1015 range. But, there will be tons of chips in play and I'll have plenty of time for my skill to come into play.

In other news, Jen and I have had a little bit of good fortue when it comes to free firewood. Jen saw this truck on the side of the road that said "free firewood, help yourself" so knowing about my insatiable love of a crackling hearth she pulled over to grab a few logs. The truck bed turned out to be about eye level, however, and she wasn't exactly in the best of neighborhoods, so she decided to jot down the phone number which promised a full truckload delivered to your home. So we called said number and got a shit load of wood delivered to our house for free. The catch is it's not nice fire wood, it's 50 pound cross sections of trees that need to be split. So I went to home depot and bought a "log splitting" axe (makes sense right?).

Being a fairly burly, lumber jack sized man I expected that when I swung said axe at said logs that they would go bursting apart in fear. Instead they just got pummeled and did little or no splitting. I think I might just need some practice and I really need to "go for it" with the axe. It turns out that swinging a full sized axe at full force seems dangerous. Who knew. Mom, if you're reading this I promise to use all due care in protecting my appendages first and foremost and actually think there is little or no danger (unlike in college when we decided to demolish perfectly good furniture with an axe for no good reason and then decided to see who could throw the axe the farthest, only to have the axe head fly off the handle. That was dangerous.).

After a few tries I managed to split one log nicely and gave up for the night because it was, in a word, "dark." I plan to try again tomorrow when certain neighbors won't be disturbed by the sounds of amature lumberjacking. For now here are some pictures of our pile of wood (it looks much smaller in the pictures) and of me crouching in front of a non split huge log in the fire, holding a piece of the log that I successfully split.

I'll let you know what happened in event #6.