Tournaments are fun...and unprofitable.

Today's terms: Ring game, rake, bubble, coin-flip.

I like tournaments. Being a lover of fiction, I relate to their narrative arch. Tournaments have beginnings, middles and ends. They often have heroes (you) and villains (other people). Bravery, cowardice, chance and skill - all the regular dramatic elements of poker are set on a time-line. As the number of players dwindle, the layers of thought behind every decision increase. Bold moves, which might never be attempted in a ring game (the regular tables where players come and go and the blinds stay constant) may have sufficient up-side to be attempted when the stakes get high enough. In a tournament, although many might finish in the money, there is only one winner. If you have a strong competitive nature (and what poker player doesn't?) these survival-of-the-fittest contests are very attractive. But if you approach poker as a business, they don't make financial sense.

I dropped into a casino one morning, hoping to find bleary-eyed players who had been up all night, and instead found the poker room empty save for a lone employee. I asked when the games started up.

"Usually we don't get games going until around noon," she said. "But we have a tournament starting in half an hour."

I was itchy to play poker and didn't have the time to wait until noon, so I signed up for the tourney. It was a small affair - only 18 players were competing. Each of us paid an entry fee of $60 and only the top three got paid. I can't recall the exact pay-outs, but I think it was something like $380 for first, $260 for second and $145 for third. This structure is the first clue that tournaments don't make financial sense - the total prize pool was $785, whereas the casino took in $1080 in entry fees. Granted the casino has overhead to pay to run a tournament - most notably the have to pay the dealers - but I'm pretty sure that the $295 they kept is more than the they'd make in the rake ( a small amount taken out of the pots - this is how the casino makes money running the game) over the same length of time. The whole tourney just took less than four hours.

Anyway, I took my seat. We started out with $5,000 in tournament chips each, and the blinds started at $25/$50. I won't bore you with the details, but I played well and got a lot of good cards. By the first break I had the most chips at my table - exactly $14,000. Instead of being elated I felt a little depressed. I had sat at the table for 90 minutes and had nearly tripled my starting chips, and I had nothing to show for it. Sure I was a front-runner, but there was still fourteen people left in this thing. I had to out last eleven more players just to make any profit at all. I was depressed because I knew that if I had been playing a regular ring game and had gotten those same cards, I would have made at least $200 by now. Instead I had to play a lot more poker before I could even get a sniff at $200.

Yeah, yeah. Breaks' over. Stop crying and get back to the table.

The blinds had come up to $250/$125 - five times what we started at. With the blinds so high, the smaller stacks had to start looking for a spot to go all in - either double up or go home. So the number of players started dropping of quickly. My hot card streak continued, and I even managed to knock out two players myself. Sooner than I had expected we were down to ten players, and the two tables merged into one.

Looking at the stacks in front of the players from the other table, I see that I have more than anybody. Can I just cruise into the money by folding everything? Not quite. The blinds are $1000/$500 so even my $18,000 could get whittled away pretty fast. I decide to bluff a little, push the little guys around. Not nice, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Unfortunately a lady with a stack just a little smaller than mine has got the same idea, and what's more she's a much more effective bully than I am. She seems to be betting and raising everything! Does this woman know she's allowed to fold now and again? Still, I'm able to pick up enough small pots that my stack stays about the same.

We get down to four: The aggressive lady, a tight guy who I believe would love to just make it to third, a loose guy who is very short stacked, and yours truly. With one player still to go before we are "in the money", we are now "on the bubble". The next guy out bears the ignominy of being the "bubble boy". In the logic of poker, it is better to be the first guy knocked out of a tournament and get nothing than to sit at the table for hours only to get knocked out on the bubble and still get nothing. Mr. Tight suggests we all kick in $20 for the bubble to take, so that the bubble at least gets his or her entry fee back. This seems fair to me, so even though I'm unlikely to go out next I agree. That's $80 I've put into the tourney now.

A couple hands later I'm dealt AQ off-suit. Loosey Short Stack raises and I call and the flop comes 9h Qd 5s. Loosey goes all in, I make the no-brainer call. Loosey shows his K9 and says, "I had to go all-in. I had no choice," and really he didn't. The blinds wound have wiped him out. This doesn't make me feel sorry for him when he fails to improve on the turn or the river however. So long Loosey. Now I'm in the money with about the same number chips of chips as Lady Pushalot. Tighty is far back in third.

Next hand I get Q 10s, not a good hand normally but when you are down to three it's just fine. I raise, Tighty folds (of course) and Lady P. calls (of course). Flop is Kc 4d 5d. I missed, but what the hell, she probably missed too. I make a massive raise - about one third of my remaining chips. That should scare her!

She immediately goes all in.

Shit. I pretend to agonize over my position for a long time before folding. No sense letting on I had nothing right? I am pissed off though. Mad at myself. Mad that this lady showed no respect at all for my raise.

This anger leads to my demise a few hands later. I get dealt AJ off suit and Lady P. makes a very big raise ahead of me. A very ungentlemanly thought passes through my head and I decide to take my stand right here and announce all-in. Lady P. calls (of course). I show my hand and she shows 99. We are in the classic coin-flip situation; a pair vs. two over cards. She is a 52% favourite - close enough odds that this is called a coin-flip.

No Ace or Jack hit the board for me, and that's that. I finish third, go to the cage where I'm given $145. I subtract the $80 I put in and see that for my 3 1/2 hours of really good poker I've only made $65. Maybe I'm being a sore-head, but that kinda sucks.

One can never say how things would have gone if, in an alternate universe, I'd played a ring game. But in my guts I know I would have made much, much more.

Tournaments are fun. Making money is even more fun.