My first razz tournament

Apologies in advance for putting up one of those posts that's of interest to very few people--how I did and specific hands from a tournament. I know--YAWN! You're all forgiven for stopping here and clicking on to your next read for the day. But playing a razz tournament on a whim was kind of exciting for me, so I need to document it.

This was part of the "Bloggament Skill Series" (see http://blogsrghey.blogspot.com/2008/03/tuesday-is-bloggament-night.html). I thought it would be fun to enter an event about which I know nothing. Well, that's not completely true. I know the rules. And I've heard that good advice is to never play a hand unless you start with three unpaired cards 8 or below. That's it. That's my complete fund of strategic knowledge. (And, of course, I couldn't bring myself to actually implement that advice, because that would mean playing so few hands that it just wouldn't be any fun!)

So naturally I played like a complete donkey. I have very little sense of where I am in a hand for the most part, so I did what any beginner does: check-call, check-call, check-call. Horrible, horrible way to play, as I am well aware. But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

It helps if you get cards like this, for the very first hand of tournament razz I ever played (OK, technically the second hand, but I just folded the first one, so it doesn't really count):



Let's analyze this: The best possible hand is 5-4-3-2-A, and I had, let's see, mmmmmmm, 5-4-3-2-A! Whee! This game is going to be easy!

The next big confrontation is shown below:




This earned me an "OMFG" in the chat box from Pushmonkey. Apparently she thought I should have folded. Note, though, that there was no point in the hand in which she was ahead, except with the first three cards. Her gripe, in other words, is that I called her bluffs with a mediocre hand. Obviously, then, the fault is mine for suspecting that her hand wasn't as good as she was representing, rather than being hers, for picking the wrong spot and the wrong opponent to bluff. And I really was suspicious of her; she was instabetting every street, not taking even a half a second to analyze the cards that hit, which suggested to me that she was just trying to push me off the hand. Whaddyaknow, I was right. So of course she has to bitch at me about it. Whiner. I hate whiners.


With that pot, we're only about 7 minutes into the tourney, and here are the standings:




So far so good.

Not too long after that came this hand:



This got more nasty comments in chat for me, including "disgusting but classic" from Emptyman. Notice, though, that I was ahead at EVERY point in this hand. I was definitely unsure whether I was ahead or behind, but I thought that the chance that I was ahead was great enough to be worth calling him down. Apparently he and others thought I was being an idiot. And maybe I was--I don't have anywhere near enough experience to make an objective evaluation of my own play here. But calling with the best hand on every street can't be all bad, can it?

The biggest moment for me was the following hand, which got completely out of control because Pushmonkey had declared in advance that she was tired of the way the game was going (apparently referring primarily to my bad but successful play). She bet, raised, capped at every opportunity, clearly just trying to lose all her chips and be gone. (Wouldn't it be easier just to click "sit out," then close the windows?) I had no difficulty believing that I was likely going to be able to beat her, but the situation was greatly complicated by one of the better players, crackinKK, being tangled up in it, too. I thought I was behind her, but the pot had grown so large from pushmonkey blindly getting it all in that I felt compelled to see it through:



In retrospect, I can see how incredibly lucky I got. Basically, both of my last two cards had to be 7 or under, without pairing me, in order for me to end up the winner, and that's what happened. To her credit, crackinKK didn't whine or fuss about it--at least not publicly. That enormous pot put me into the friggin' chip lead of the entire tournament:



Unbelievable, given that this is a game I've only played once before (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/03/mixing-it-up-just-little.html). I also picked up $2, because this was a knockout tournament. Pushmonkey was the first one out--at my hands, which was quite satisfying, since she was the first one to openly criticize my play.

At the first break, I still held the slimmest of leads:



I managed to stay one of the chip leaders for another 30 or 40 minutes, but then my donkish tactic of calling down opponents with mediocre hands predictably, inevitably caught up to me--as I knew it must, at some point. I harbored no fantasies of winning this thing, even after being a huge chip leader for a while.

It's really strange being the object of derision for my poker play. In hold'em, essentially the only times I get criticized are when weak, ABC players, who think they have a firm grasp on the One and Only True Method of Hold'em, can't see merit in something advanced or tricky that I tried (successfully or not). In such situations, the comments are more amusing than irritating, because I know that I have a deeper understanding of the game than they do, and their words reveal the narrow mindset with which they're approaching it. It's kind of like a third-grader, who has never heard of negative numbers, boldly and confidently announcing that you can't subtract a bigger number from a smaller number.

Here, though, I was well aware that I would be the least experienced razz player at the table. In fact, I almost announced that fact in the chat box at the beginning, but then decided against it--after all, they'll probably be able to deduce it on their own fairly quickly.

It's incredible how free people feel to post nasty remarks when they think an opponent plays badly, after all of the imploring that has been done in every possible forum and venue about how rude and harmful to the game such conduct is. If somebody is being an idiot, that is a Very Good Thing for the better players, and they should logically do all in their power to (1) keep the idiot playing, and (2) make sure he doesn't learn how to play better. That means being nice and friendly, telling him "nice hand" when he stumbles into a winner, etc.

But a huge percentage of players--especially online--just can't bring themselves to treating a bad player decently. Their blistering criticisms can only accomplish a couple of possible things: Making the fish feel bad enough that he picks up his chips and leaves, or making him see his mistakes and start playing better. Being overtly hostile to a bad player is the stupidest, most self-destructive thing you can to at a poker table, but still it happens all the time. I really don't understand how typing nasty remarks into the chat box can make the writer feel better about himself, unless he has significant "issues" that have nothing to do with poker.

Anyway, I understand that being a fish/donkey/live one/idiot is just part of the process of learning a new game, and I'm willing to accept the mantle for a while as I catch on to better strategy. Razz isn't something I'm going to try to excel in anytime soon, but it is definitely a fun and intriguing game, so completely different from hold'em that it's hard to believe that they can both be called "poker."

Addendum

Two commenters have already pointed out that the hands as shown are not in the order that they played out. This makes sense, because a couple of times when I checked the hand history immediately after the hand was over, I knew that they weren't in order (because, e.g., two of the first three cards made a pair, and I wouldn't have played it if that's how they had been dealt). But they're not in any obvious order, perhaps just random. Also, in some the down cards are indicated by slashes, and in others not, for reasons that I can't deduce.

So ignore everything I wrote above that has anything to do with the order in which the cards came. Maybe as a result my play was worse than what I thought, maybe in other spots not quite as bad. Impossible to know now, I suppose.

I don't know why FTP would scramble the cards in the hand histories. As far as I could tell, when there was a showdown I could see the order in which opponents' cards were dealt (although maybe that was an illusion, too), so why not in the hand histories? Also, in a live game you can certainly reconstruct what an opponent hand at any point along the way, so why not allow the same information out for an online game? Very odd.