Considering My First WSOPC $365 Event

[weewayz]

If you can afford it, then by all means go for it. It will be difficult though to do well in a tournament with this big of a buy in unless you have a lot of experience playing in live tournaments at smaller buy ins.

My advice would be to try and find out the exact structure of the tournament you are planning to play in. They usually have a printout available that shows starting stack sizes, number of players per table (it should be 9 but in some casinos they will have 10 players at the start and then change to 9 handed once players get knocked out), the length of the levels as well as any planned breaks.

With regards to having 10 players instead of 9 is so that more players can get into the tournament. A ten handed game does play tighter and there is a slightly higher probability of a pair of kings running into a pair of aces. As well as Kings vs. Queens and so on. There is also a slightly higher risk of other hands being dealt. It does take some getting used to though.

Once you have the structure available I would try to find some online mtts of same structure and number of players in the tournament. Even better would be to play in smaller live buy in tournaments with a similar structure, but that is very hard to find in smaller locations.

Even if you cannot find any games live, the experience of playing in a larger buy in live tournament is well worth the money if the buy in would not be missed if you fail to cash. Playing in large buy in tournaments have been some of the best moments in my life. Having played in several 10k buy in tournaments was a rush ( I won 3 seats in big buy in mtts, one was the wsop main event in 2004, one was in a WPT10k event in 2005 where I went out in 60th place or so out of 600 players, and one was a 5k WPT event in 2005 where I went out in 32nd place and cashed for $11k and change.

I cannot tell you how many smaller buy in events I played but there were a fair number of 200-1,500 buy in tournaments over the years. Even have a bracelet that I won in 2001 at a WPO event (it was the 2nd largest tournament event at the time. They called it the Jack Binion World Poker Open (hence the wpo) and ran in Mississippi for a number of years at the Gold Strike Casino and the Horseshoe Casino. Only wish I had was to win a real bracelet at the WSOP> Otherwise I enjoyed the time I was able to play in these tournaments.

If you want some helpful tips about playing in a bigger Live tournament I would be happy to assist you in any way I can assist you (other than how to actually win them, lol). Me I seemed to always end up going out in 2nd-5th at the final tables when I made it that far.