The Race is On!  [12.14.2005]
As most of you are aware, PokerStars has a Tournament Leader Board. Basically, if you do well in a tournament, you get a certain number of points. At the end of each week, the person with the most points gets their picture put in the PokerStars lobby, and they get to play Tom McEvoy in a heads up freeroll. If the player wins, he gets $1,000 plus another $1,000 for every previous consecutive week that the challenger lost. There�s also a lot of pride associated with the whole thing.

The truth is that the leader board is not at all a good indicator of skill. In order to do well, you need volume, quantity over quality. You need to play as many tournaments as possible. In any given week, Stars only has a dozen tournaments with buyins over $150, so if you want a lot of points, you have to go slumming. The best players simply have better games to play than the small buyin MTT�s on Stars, so they rarely win.

I have the advantage of winning the big Sunday Tournament this week and starting off with almost 1950 points. In an average week, 2400 points is usually good enough to win the weekly TLB race (last weeks winner won with 2394 points and a 240 point lead over 2nd). This week is no average week. It is only Wednesday, and bdubs373 is putting up a hell of a fight. He already has 2477 points which as very impressive.

Not to be outdone, I spent my Wednesday multitabling the Stars multi table tournaments. Now I�m not talking about a little 4 tabling action. I�m talking, �Holy multitabling Jehovah�s Witnesses Batman!� Across my two 21 inch monitors, I had as many as 18 tables up at one time. I did ok and was able to take my tally from 1900 points all the way to 2715, giving me a decent, but not huge lead over bdubs. Note that I already have over 300 more points than last week�s winner. I only played 1 tournament on Sunday, and didn�t get any points on either Monday or Tuesday, so these 2700 points are all from the Sunday 215, and my Wednesday multitabling session.

Well I don�t think bdubs is going to stop, so I say, bring it on! I�ll have to check my sources, but this week could very well be the highest scoring week ever for the TLB winner.

I probably won�t be able to play at all on Thursday, so if you see that bdubs takes the lead, don�t give it a second thought. I�m going to win in the end.

If you want to see some crazy 16 tabling action, search for me on Friday and/or Saturday. 18 tables was a bit too hectic, so I think I�m going to cut the Omaha and Stud tables from the lineup. That should make things a bit easier for me, especially since I don�t have to worry about whether a table is hi-lo or not. Keeping track of which tables were rebuy tables was also a pain in the ass, but I can�t really cut those from the lineup since they are great point sources. And just a word of warning, if you see me making some crazy all-ins early on, it's because I have too many tables open and am doing some gambling until I'm back down to 16 tables, or however many I feel up to playing at the time.

Long story short: bdubs wants to throw down, and he is going down. And now a word from our sponsor:

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