Patrick Leonard is a successful professional poker player, WSOP bracelet winner and ambassador for CoinPoker. He has picked up major wins both live and online, where he has 10 WCOOP and 8 SCOOP titles, among many other accolades. This week, Pads shares his thoughts on re-entries, late reg, antes and the optimal number of players to have at the table...
Another week down, it's nearly Christmas. The years feel like they go so fast, but then again it feels like forever since I was going to Dubai in January to do my annual bootcamp. I guess that means the time is going just as it's going! Speaking of time, I did a 12-year time-jump back to my poker roots this week.... CASH GAMES!
I was always a cash game player, it actually suits my style a lot more than tournaments, especially deep stack. I like the idea of playing really, really big pots. I like the idea of flatting 3-bets and either making good hands, or pretending I have a good hand.
Whenever I come back to the UK I usually switch from MTTs to cash games because of the brutal time zone for European MTTs. So for the last week or so I've been playing a mixture of heads-up and 6-max (100bb), and then 9-handed ANTE! I have really enjoyed it and it gets the brain thinking of some different ideas for tournaments, too.
My prediction is that 8-handed cash tables with an ANTE will be THE GAME on CoinPoker, and hopefully the internet! There are so many good reasons:
- It’s tougher for people to cheat you with GTOwizard because there are more multiway pots (PLEASE DONT RELEASE MULTIWAY NO DELAY!)
- More postflop play because of dead money with the ante structure. One of the things I hate about online cash vs playing in Bellagio is the effects rake has on the game. At the Bellagio we just pay an hourly or half-hourly fee; online it's whenever you go postflop, so if a pro has a close EV decision between flatting and 3-betting, then 3-betting is always better because you aren't ‘penalized’ with rake by seeing a flop (SUPER IMPORTANT FOR AMATEURS!)
- Less nitty play - an aggro/loose style works. If you play 7-5 suited in a normal cash game you get eaten alive either preflop (squeezed and you don't have enough implied odds to call) or post-flop you get blown out of the pot by the turn. When you are this deep, the threshold for stacking off after the flop is usually ‘better than aces’ (i.e you need 2pair+ to get all 200/300/400/500bbs in the middle).
More flops, more turns, more rivers, more BIG hands rather than just overpair vs top-pair-top-kicker. It's a really fun format. Right now online sites do 9-handed, but I think that 8-handed actually makes more sense because we've seen with tournaments and live cash games that everybody prefers it. For a long time people thought we needed gimmicks to stop GTOw killing the game, but I think stuff like taking one card out of the deck, adding a joker, etc. isn't real poker. People will never buy into this.
The only way we succeed is either with a delay to the look-up tools, or with a format that encourages multiway play and deep stacks (more variable and tougher to build libraries and databases). At CoinPoker we do 7-handed already which is a little different to the industry and pretty cool, so we're already going in the right direction.
Some thoughts on re-entries
Maria Konnikova is great, she should be treasured and celebrated. Seeing her achievements being diminished is insane. This is the arena that we play in, re-entries are a thing. Whether she won on her 1st or 4th bullet, it doesn't dilute the achievement at all.
Speaking of re-entries, GGPoker has shown already with GG Masters that the biggest tournaments CAN be freezeouts. Sites’ approach to data is so lazy, late reg to 10bbs is silly. Studies across regs around a year ago showed that it's +EV to enter with 35bbs and more, then once you drop under 35bbs it's better to max late register in terms of ROI and hourly. So usually, once I bust, if I have more than 35bbs I re-enter and re-enter, then once I cross 35bbs, I check the late reg and say "Alexa, remind me in 47 minutes to register this donkament" and register at the latest point. A lot of others do the same.
For bounties, people enter with 50bb+, so if you want re-entries, letting it late reg doesn't actually help the site; if they repeated the 50bb level multiple times instead, they'd get our money for longer. But the approach to data in the industry is done without consulting players, which is so frustrating. Just ask us: ‘Hi, why do you re-enter and what makes you re-enter?’ With just a few questions you can get answers to help players, your tournaments and your bottom line.
It's also not very fun for amateurs for the average stack to drop so low because everybody’s registering with 10bbs; people’s EV comes from getting in the money, not winning the tournament when you have 10bbs as a max late reg, so you're incentivised to tank, stall and then just jam/fold preflop. Amateurs wait for seven pros in a row to take their 20 seconds and then the last one to shove/fold as well. No flops, no fun. Tanking, no fun. Regs will be blamed, but as they say, ‘play silly games, win silly prizes’.
Next up, Vegas.
You can follow Pads on X and Instagram, or find him on the tables at CoinPoker.
Images courtesy of Rational Intellectual Holdings, Ltd.
