Tunica Sheraton MM Update
I played the Millionaire Maker qualifier at the Tunica Sheraton this past weekend and thought I would share this report.
The format was thus. The first round was accumulation with all players taking a 1,000 bankroll and playing 25 hands. Minimum bet was $5, max was $1,000. The top 36 scores would advance to play in the final round. Note that this was a single round to determine the finalists. The 36 finalists would repeat the procedure to determine the winners. They were paying 9 spots but only the top 3 won the trip to LV for the MM national tournament.
I played in the earliest session and had the second highest score in the first round. (6,700) They played 5 sessions in the first round. The cutoff was 1,200 with about half the field finishing with 0. They were scheduled for 240 participants but the last session of the day was not full. I guess due to no-shows or some other reason. I would guess between 210-230 played.
Since I had won my trip the week before, I was going for broke with first (10K) or second (5K) as my only goals. Unfortunately, deciding to accept a higher level of risk in an attempt to outdistance the field comes with consequences when the cards don't come.
I zeroed out after running into a 6 hand losing streak. I was much too generous in trying to figure my target number because I felt that there would be a good portion of the field being very aggressive also. It turned out that way more of them played conservatively in an effort to at least cash something. If I had hit my target of 5,000, I would have been over 1,000 ahead of second place. I didn't go to the awards ceremony but the best I could tell from watching the counts was that a little less than 4K won.
Still, the tournament was run pretty well and I don't have any complaints with anything. The only thing I could nit-pick is that they annonced to the following sessions the top score of the day. (my 6,700 until the 4th round when a 7,600 went up) On one hand, that gave them information unavailable to those of us who played in the first round. On the other hand, some might have believed that they needed to get close to that score and wound up busting out trying. Saw some familar faces from the week before and a couple of regulars from the Pearl River tournaments.
Also saw a glaring example of one of the reasons many people complain about accumulation tournaments. Four of the top five scores in the first round came from the same table in the same session. ( I was the only exception) I think all 6 players on that table advanced with 4 of the scores above 3K. If you are lucky enough to find yourself on that table, great! If not, you are facing an uphill battle.
