That Familiar Feeling

I'm using some extra vacation to take today off. You know what that means.

I scored a $26 token the other night, somehow coming back from a stack of 345 with 12-13 left in the tournament ($8 2-table, 5 tokens awarded) to take down the whole thing. Admittedly, I was shocked because the whole occurrence was hard evidence disproving a slight superstition of mine (more on that in a second).

I used the token on the $17.5k DS tournament earlier today. I lost a good portion of my stack bluffing a scare card on the river that unfortunately gave my opponent the bottom end of a straight. Left with about 12x BB, I hung on until I got QQ in the SB. CO+1 raises 3x, I push, he shows A8. I'm fine until the A on the turn and I go home in the middle of the pack somewhere.

(Sidenote: I seriously contemplated a stop-n-go on this hand, but with such a low stack and little fold equity, I figured I was better off just getting it in preflop. Any thoughts on this idea are welcomed).

What's funny is, when that hand played out, as soon as I saw his hand, I thought "I'm gone". Even when the flop came out T high, with none of his suit, I knew I was gone. The ace on the turn looked like bad luck, but in my head, it was a known fact that an A was going to hit.

I don't claim to be a clairvoyant or anything, but I can't help to sometimes wonder if FTP is.....yes, rigged. I write this not actually believing that FTP is set up to reward certain players & punish others. In fact, I can actually say that I don't believe FTP is set up to be anything but random. However, if I was ever to suggest that FTP is rigged, it's by doing this: preventing short-stacks from doubling up & extending the length of tournaments.

At some point, the blinds will swallow up most stacks, and no tournament can go on forever. Plus, there's always your classic setup hands, AA vs KK, or your coinflips that end up in favor of the opponent who's slightly behind. But what I see so often are hand where a shortstack goes in with a, say, a mid pair like 66, flops trips against an opponent who's priced in, then loses to runner-runner straight or flush. Or the shorty who pushes with A6, gets called by A3, then loses when A3 pairs his 3. It just seems like shorties getting in as a decent favorite then losing in horrific fashion happens a lot more often then the math says it should.

(Disclaimer: I won't claim to know the math behind this concept, and it could turn out that what I'm seeing happen is a lot more likely than I think it is. If you've got the math to disprove my crackpot theory, please, use it).

Anyways, I won't waste any more words suggesting that online poker may, in fact, be kinda sorta rigged (because we all know it is, right?). But the next time you get your shortstack in with 88 against JT, see an 8 high flop, only to see a 7 then a 9 hit the board...well, I'll try not to say "I told ya so."