Pokerstars are so much bigger than their rivals these days that they can throw around the odd million or two just for fun. With the inaugural ‘Red Spade Open’ due to kick off at 15:00 ET on the 31st July – Pokerstars have laid down that million to see if they can get more than 20,000 fish to compete at any one time – and beat their own guaranteed prize pool.
Knocking the entry price down to $55 still leaves out a lot of potential fish, you know the ones who get really angry in 1c / 2c games when the black aces they slowplayed to the river get beaten on a 4-5-6-7-K board with 4 hearts. Ensuring that as many fish as aquatically possible get into the game, satellite qualifiers are already running starting at just $1.
Twisted Gambler has to ask – what will a deep stacked tournament with more than 20,000 fish look like?
Well, for a start getting anywhere near deep is going to involve a lot of holding up, dodging bullets and hitting big draws. It is pretty safe to say that the huge majority of the field will eventually go out while holding the best hand when the chips went in. This is great for Pokerstars of course, the more players who believe that they are really very good – just unlucky – will increase the number for future tournaments.
A number of players will undoubtedly blind away, having joined before realizing it was their anniversary dinner that night and not being able to raise interest from any friends to play the game for them.
There will of course be a huge number of clever moves made in this game, based on intelligent reads, a high level of situational awareness and the math worked out to 3 decimal places. Unfortunately these will go straight over the heads of the other players in the hand who will call half of their stack on the turn anyway – because, well, if they river is a club they will have a 9-high flush – and probably win a big pot.
Looking deeper into the crystal ball we predict more than 22 instances of short stacked players complaining that late all-ins are just ‘bingo’ and that nobody really wants to play any real poker anymore. With your 8 big blinds we look forward to some exciting post flop play, with a 2.5 raise pre, 2/3rds pot continuation bet and, ah, damn it, you have no chips left for the turn.
With more than 10k of the field from Europe likely to completely mess up their sleeping patterns for a disappointing double-up, we look forward to the Red Spade open with baited breath… or do we?
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