The PokerStars invasion

A few days ago I read somewhere that the Palms hotel/casino is where PokerStars is putting up its hordes of online qualifiers for the WSOP Main Event. It occurred to me that this might be a good place to play for the next few days. Many of the online qualifiers will have very little experience playing live in a casino. And the dismally bad skill level of even the winners of those tournaments is legendary--especially, one would think, this year, when PS made a huge push to give away a couple hundred Main Event seats for free. You just had to survive a series of two huge all-in shovefest/luckfest/donkeyfest freeroll tournaments, open to all members of the site. (I didn't make it, obviously, or you would have heard about it before now.)

I had not expected to see, upon approaching the place, that PokerStars went so far as to buy the huge block of space you can see above on the outside of the Palms. (I think that's the Pearl theater, but I'm not sure.) Sorry for the cruddy picture quality; I had to snap it quickly with my cell phone camera while idling at the red light.

I also had not expected to see the big PokerStars posters dotting the poker room landscape. That's Daniel Negreanu above, with Joe Hachem just visible to the right.

Finally, I had not expected that PokerStars would have bought all new felt for the Palms poker tables, with the PS logo splashed across it. It's hard to see the point of all this advertising, since the main viewers of it are people who already play on the site. But it's their money, they can throw it around (or away) however they like.

I did expect to see legions of PS qualifiers festooned in PS gear, and they did not disappoint. PokerStars hats and shirts and jackets were everywhere. Some players were wearing more of that crap than Chris Moneymaker does.

As expected, the poker room was bustling, every table full and with waiting lists. I've never seen the place so busy.

And the games do indeed appear to be profitable. The players are not at all the brain-dead fish that one would expect to encounter at, say, Bill's--the kind who have to ask if you can use an ace as the low end of a straight as well as the high end. A few of them are pretty good, in fact. But as I predicted, many of them have zero familiarity with live casino play. Their newness to everything all by itself puts them at a substantial disadvantage. When you have to devote a decent amount of your attention to the basic mechanics of play (estimating opponents' chip stacks by eye, remembering your hole cards because suddenly they're not constantly displayed on the screen in front of you, paying attention to when it's your turn because nobody is going to go "beep" to signal you, counting out chips, trying not to give off tells, etc.), you have a lot less brain cells available for analyzing the poker situation.

Furthermore, most of the players engage in tournaments mostly, cash games less, even online. There are subtle but crucial differences in strategy. One difference is that it's often better to play "small-ball" poker in tournaments, trying to win lots of small pots and slowly but steadily increase one's stack, whereas in deep-stacked cash games you really aim to take an opponent's entire stack all at once. To accomplish that requires a lot more patience, waiting for all of the circumstances to line up just right to move in for the kill. Related to that is that it's often correct in tournaments to get your money in on 50/50 shots and hope to get lucky, because a big stack has a lot more relative power at the table than is the case in a cash game. (If going all in against me and losing means that your tournament is over, it's much more intimidating than if the only result is that you have to pull more cash out of your wallet and keep playing.) In a deep cash game, you generally don't want to flip a coin for all of your money, because with a bit of patience (which you can't always afford in a tournament as the blinds are increasing), you can usually find a substantially more advantageous place to get your chips in.

Anyway, players accustomed only to tournament play--especially ones with fast structures where you have to gamble a lot to make it into the payouts--will tend to bring that same style of play to cash games, where they will be prone to making serious and costly errors with decisions that might be correct in a fast-moving tournament.

Blah, blah, blah. I feel myself rambling. The above is a lot more than I planned to say. I'll just leave it at this: My estimation on all of the above points was correct, and I brought home more money than I had when I set out. I expect to hit up the place a couple more times this week.