Planet Mark's Blog. Thoughts, News And Strategy For Poker Tournaments Of All Size

Thoughts About Pressure In Poker

Working full time in the poker business does mean less time for playing these days, what I find is that I tend to play whichever games require articles - and this weekend was not exception.... With the WSOP Satellite Qualifiers season kicking off across the online poker sites, this time it was the turn of Titan.

Now, it is no secret that I'm a fan of iPoker... the games there just feel so much easier to beat than elsewhere, kind of loose-passive opponents mixed with the occasional crazy ones. Anyway, as regular readers will already know we do not write generic articles here at SNG Planet, we play, think and only then write... so my task this weekend was to check out the World Series qualifiers to do a Titan-specific article.

This would not normally be worthy of a blog post, however an interesting thought occurred. I tried out the 'Executive Jackpot SNGs', win 6 of these $10+$2 6-max SNG tournaments and you get a fantastic World Series package worth $25k. Now the fields are soft, and the payouts flat ($12 / $18 / $30 for 1 / 2 / 3). First time I got a 2nd, then 1st, then 1st then 1st... 3 in a row. Now, the 4th one was not so good, I failed to lay down a top 2-pair with A-k after betting all the way... a straight got there and I paid it off (doh, I'm still a fish after all these years!).

My thought process was to ask the question, what if I did win the 4th one... and even the 5th. Can you imagine playing a 6-max SNG knowing that 1st is worth $25,030 and second just $18 (as an aside it would be intestesting to see how these numbers affect the ICM calculations!). Ok, it would be a nice problem to have, no denying that, but hang on there... think of the pressure! I have been in many pressure situations in life, public speaking, career-determining meetings... that kind of thing.

Thinking about this scenario though - I'm just not sure I'd enjoy it... Well, maybe I'll have another go at them... maybe the multis are for me and maybe there just will not be time - after all we have some fantastic updates and changes in store for SNG Planet this month, though that is another subject for another post!

GL at the tables, Mark

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