Confidence is a necessary part of a poker player’s tool kit and the lack of confidence can be devastating. I have been wanting to play in a large payout tourney for some time now. I have had some success at smaller MTT’s, multi-table tourneys, and wanted to take a crack at a larger tourney. The tourneys that I have won at recently have had 45 people or less and the one that I was considering playing in was the Sunday PokerStars Tourneys.
These tourneys are run every Sunday and there are at least three major No Limit Hold ‘Em tourneys with guaranteed payouts of $1,000,000, $750,000, $250,000. Of course you don’t get to win the whole amount, just a percentage, anywhere from 6 to 25 percent of the top prize goes to the first place finisher. The percentages vary with the number of players registered for the game. Details are on the PokerStars web site. Most of these tourneys have more than 10,000 players registered on them.
The tourney I decided that I wanted to play in was the “Sunday 1/4 Million” played at 3:30 pm EST. I had won my entry fee of $11.00 through a satellite that cost 210 Frequent Player Points which I had accumulated as the result of playing in cash games and other Sit N Go tourneys. Prior to registering for this event, I noticed that the number of players enrolled had reached over 22,000. This started to cause me some concern. I have played in about a dozen of these larger tourneys before and have done poorly in them. I was concerned about what my approach would be to out lasting over 22,000 players.
This was when I developed a lack of confidence in myself. I was torn between playing in this tourney or another one that had only 1,500 registered players. In the end, I decided to go with my original plan and play in the Sunday 1/4 Million Tourney. My lack of confidence in my ability enabled me to play very badly, making poor playing decisions on the table I was assigned and within 22 minutes I was out of the tourney. I finished in 24,093rd place out of 27,540 other players. Only the top 4,500 players won prizes. Below are the top five finishers.
PokerStars Tournament #157110461, No Limit Hold'em
Buy-In: $10.00/$1.00
27540 players
Total Prize Pool: $275400.00
Tournament started 2009/04/26 15:30:00 ET
Tournament finished 2009/04/27 0:31:18 ET
1: ImTheDubs (North Port), $24786.01 (9%)
2: horryclutch (valley village), $17047.27 (6.19%)
3: IndianKobra (München), $12393.01 (4.50%)
4: otnorot66 (toronto), $9639.01 (3.50%)
5: ram55443322 (Barcelona), $6885.01 (2.50%)
My lack of confidence came at a bad time for me, but had I read my son’s blog, I might have changed my approach to the game. On that very same day, Chris Brogan wrote a blog entitled “Confidence and The Next Move” that contained many great ideas that would have motivated me to play up to my ability. In my next attempt at a large, my plan will be to play it hand by hand, table by table as I have in the past.
Have you every played in a tourney or game and felt a lack of confidence in your ability to play at that table or tourney? How did you go about turning this around? What helps you to build up your confidence?