Called shot

You know the famous story of the baseball hero pointing to the fence he's going to hit the homerun over?

It's the same with my last post about the Guinness Record 35,000 player game on PokerStars.

Almost too good to be true, the very first big multi-player tourney that fits my schedule is the same draw lowball poker that I've been feasting on these past few weeks. I know the strategy. This is a 7,000 player freeroll that's probably a satellite to a game where you can win a couple of bucks real money. So, there is some vested interest in trying to win one of the 56 seats to the next round instead of throwing your chips all in every hand and moving on after losing.

The first hand. I've got monkey dung. I'm more than willing to fold it and just get on to the next hand. My what a surprise. Not only are there two sitters not even in on the hand, but one player sitting in on the hand that must have had the doorbell ring, got distracted, and timed out. The table would have 3 of 7 positions sitting out most of the night. Like I said, it's very curious and not human-like to register for a game and then just not play. But, just like 5 years ago this is a given on PokerFrauds.

Naturally, my table is one of the slowest in the tourney. A few hands later, another player used the time bank. My reward: After four hands I've broken even, and the chip leaders already have 20k. Unless I go berserk on an amazing lucky run, I'm hopelessly short stacked. Being patient, I finally get some good cards and build myself to over 15k, but this was near the end of the tourney. I never once hit the average chip stack size and finished in the 400's.

Also curious and unhuman. In my 2 1/2 hours -

One line of chat. Certainly not by me despite the three bad beats I've suffered. I've learned that it's just to be expected. (To be fair, I won two hands with miracle draws.) Somewhere along the way, a real human might have considered posting an "nh" along the way, but like myself these were tables full of cynics.

So, something like 2 humans and 54 bots move on to the next round. Good luck humans.