WSOP: Who is Joe Cada?

So the 2009 World Series of Poker has finally concluded with Joe Cada winning the $10,000 main event, the bracelet and the title. But just how do you go about winning the $10,000 main event? Well you sure do need an awful lot of luck for a start! In fact you simply cannot win any large MTT tournament without luck being the overriding dominant factor.

But the early stages of the main event are going to be populated by legions of online qualifiers who are going to have their own goals and objectives. Quite often these are to cash in the main event just so they can go home with bragging rights. They can turn a few dollars into a few thousand dollars and also have serious bragging rights about which star names they outlasted.

In no other area can the very best in the world rub shoulders with complete and utter novices on a serious competitive basis. My own personal style would be to go after as much dead money as I possibly could and to try to feel the table out so I could make as many moves as possible.

In essence, I would be trying to constantly build my stack and looking for opportunities is the best way to do it. You simply will not see that many hands before the blinds rise to a level where you are no longer playing deep stacked poker. This means that you either have to gamble or get lucky to accumulate chips.

If you think about this for a minute, you can be nowhere near the chip leaders and yet everything has been out of your control. You cannot stop players on other tables getting all-in against each other and someone doubling up. You cannot prevent this happening numerous times all over the playing arena and the leaders getting lucky and amassing 40k and 50k stacks while your own stack has dwindled to 9k.

If you want to win the event and have an element of control over your ability to win then you have to be proactive. Sitting back and being rock like may allow you to outlast many star names and it may with the help of a few hands along the way get you into the payoff seats. But for me personally that wouldn’t be enough. I have never played in the WSOP but there is just no way that I could travel thousands of miles to then have an objective of merely cashing.

I would rather be out and getting on a plane home on the first day knowing that I gave myself every chance to go very deep.