Poker Expert Reveals the Secrets of the Big Game
Barry Greenstein Is Your Guide to the Biggest Cash Game in the World
Question: Who decides where and when a game is going to happen?
Answer: For any poker game there are catalysts, although in the big game, they are not as weak as they are in smaller games. In smaller games, people usually want to know when the "live" players are going to play and often talk to them and make arrangements to show up, and the game often starts when one of the live players shows up.
Question: What about in your game?
Answer: In our game, there are a few people who usually play earlier than others. Doyle Brunson is one of the game starters. He is a strong player, but he likes to start around noon. So, normally for my game, Doyle and Lyle Berman, and possibly Bobby Baldwin, we will say we are going to meet at 12 or 1 p.m. The rest of us call one of them just to check when the game is starting, or call down to the place we are playing, the Bellagio, or sometimes the Aladdin. So, we know starting early in the afternoon, and we check to see if there is a game going on; then the rest of us show up.
Sometimes we know there will be a seat open because there are only six or seven players who play at that limit. There are other times… for instance, during the last Bellagio tournament. We had a pool of about 15 players, so I would have to call down to the poker room, possibly several times during the day, to check when the game was starting, because if I waited an hour or two after the game started, I would get locked out.
Question: Can anyone play? If you have the money, could you just sit down and play?
Answer: Yeah, anyone can play. We would rather have people we don't know play, because at the higher stakes, the new faces generally aren't going to be experienced enough, or are never going to be experienced enough to be favored initially. Some players will get better over time, will stick with game, but any new face is going to be at a disadvantage, because we play so many games, and the structure is different. There may be people who are good players, but it's not just about being a good player. It's being a good player at the structure we play and the different games we play. I was a good player when I first started going to games, but that doesn't necessarily mean I was a favorite over those people playing games who were used to playing for many years.
Question: What was the most you ever won or lost? Answer: Well, when we play $4,000-$8,000, a big win is approaching a million dollars, and the same for a big loss. For almost everyone who's played in the game for a while at $4,000-$8,000, their biggest win is about a million, and their biggest loss is around a million, that's pretty typical. Some of the players, Phil Ivey and Gus Hansen are more volatile, so their biggest wins are 1.3, 1.4 million dollars, possibly even bigger, and their bigger losses might be more than a million, also, just because they are faster players.
Question: And that's in a session?
Answer: One session.
Question: Who decided on the $100,000 cap?
Answer: I'm not sure it can be attributed to an individual person. Depending on what stakes we play, normally when we play $2,000-$4,000 limit, the cap is $75,000. When we play $4,000-$8,000, it's $100,000. We used to have a bigger cash game, with the cap sometimes as much as $200,000. Sometimes we play the pot-limit Omaha without a cap, but the problem with playing without a cap is that the games seem to break up earlier. If someone hits the big score and wins a hand, he may quit, or if someone loses a lot, he is out of money. A $100,000 cap (maximum loss per hand) seems to be an amount that most of the players can afford to comfortably lose and keep playing. Most of us sit down with maybe only $100,000 in front of us, but with easy access to at least $500,000, so that seems to be a reasonable cap to have.
Question: How long do the games last?
Answer: It varies. The $100,000 cap helps the game go longer, but we all know that there are certain players who, when they are stuck, won't quit, and some of those players may even play 48 hours when they are losing. So what happens is that I'll have to manage my rest accordingly. I don't want to play 24 hours. I have the stamina to play with that guy, but my game's going to deteriorate after 16 hours. So a normal session is 12 hours; 16 hours is stretching it, and I'm certainly going to be tired and not playing as well. But if I see that there are some players who are losing and tired, and everyone in the game has been up as I have been, I don't mind playing 20 hours to 24 hours but that's not usually the way things go, though.
Question: Generally, how many players sit in?
Answer: We max it out at eight. We don't play more than eight-handed. We used to actually hold it to seven in past years, but now it seems like eight is where we max it out. The smallest number is heads-up. I don't play that much heads-up anymore. It's pretty personal if you beat a guy heads-up. I may start heads-up, knowing that other people are going to fill in, just to get the game going. The only times I seem to play heads-up anymore is if it's really someone whom I feel I have a good advantage over, and they have been up for a long time, and they are losing. Then I will keep going. And sometimes I'm stuck and I'll want to keep playing, too, but it just doesn't seem like they play that much heads-up poker anymore, which is funny. When I used to play smaller stakes, I used to play heads-up almost every night. I would stay until the game broke, and I would play the last guy standing. I would play $80/$160, and maybe $400/$800.
It seemed like I would never quit. I would be the last one to quit every day, but that doesn't seem to be the case now.