Saturday, I’m going to be in a $50 buy-in charity (well, a fundraising) No Limit Hold ‘Em Tournament for my nephew’s high school. It’s a totally –EV proposition since there is NO prize money, though they have some sponsor prizes, very few of which are worth $50. And they have it scheduled for seven freakin’ hours! Apparently, they haven’t seen many multi-table tournaments on PartyPoker recently. I expect it to be a freak fest of all-in bidding by Moneymaker wannabes with most of the field busting out in hour number one.

Poker Fundraiser

Also note that there is a Hold ‘Em tutorial that runs for an hour before the tournament begins. I plan to be there for the tutorial so I can better gauge the competition and find out how they’re being told to play. I realize that I have virtually no chance to win the tournament because I’ll be in multiple pots with 80-20 odds in my favor and I’ll eventually get sucked out. Put it this way, if you have just three pots with AA vs. 77, your odds on winning all three are 50-50. If you lose your first showdown with AA, you’re probably done for the tournament. If you have a chance to build a bit of stack, you might survive one or two bad beats, but it’s going to look more like ESPN’s Blindman’s Bluff game than it’ll look like Celebrity Poker.

Of course, it might also be an extremely tight game. After all, most of these players ponied up $50 to play, and they might not want to bust out in the first orbit, so I’ll have to play it cagey in the beginning. Stealing blinds and bluffing might have to wait a couple of orbits until I get a feel for the table. I asked for and received the blind structure, which looks like it’s straight from the Home Poker Tour handbook with blinds starting at one and two chips, so there should be plenty of time for play.

As far as online poker goes, I’m still treading water. I got down to $.52 at UltimateBet earlier in the week. Yes, that’s a decimal point in between the dollar sign and the 52. But it gave me an excuse to go to some of my favorite tables in the world, the .01/..02 NL tables. I told myself I would try to build the “bankroll” up to $5.50 so I could play another SnG. When I actually cashed out an hour later, I had over $9! Just think, if I had been playing the $1/$2 tables, I would’ve made over $900! Anyway, I went back to the table later and gave back $2 of it, losing with pocket Aces against a flopped set. With a little over $7, I went into a $5+.5 SnG last night and got third, busting out with A9s on a flop of AJ9 against AJ. So now I’m up over $11 and contemplating whether to “go for broke” with one $10 or two $5 at UB. What a high roller!