Structured environment

After another 5-6 hours of playing on Full Contact, I need to soften some of my criticisms of the site. It's ... okay, once you get used to navigating it. It has some quirks, like the fact you have to click "Sit Out" to add chips to your stack at a table and then sit back in. Still don't like the web-based hand histories, but I'm guessing that Poker Tracker will eventually add FCP. The Great Brains at FCP ought to consider creating a detailed FAQ like other sites that covers all the things I FREAKIN' WANT TO KNOW. One cool accessory, though, is that during tournament all-ins, the percentages pop up on the screen. It doesn't do you any good to know your 5-7o is a 5-1 'dog against those pocket aces, but it's still kind of cool.

Another quirk is FCP's tournament structure. Home sick with the flu, I piled on the covers and fired up the laptop. Lost a buy-in at .50 NL thanks to another flea-bitten draw monkey and entered an $11 freezeout. There were 182 starters. But instead of paying 18 places, they paid ust 10. FCP sets payouts based on increments of 100 players. Thus a 299-player tournament pays as many players as a 201-player MTT. FCP also structures its payouts to be top heavy. First place in the tournament paid $546 -- 30 percent of the purse, which is higher than other sites. Hard to argue with that. Tournament purses should be weighted more heavily toward the top finishers.

It would have been nice, however, if they had paid 18. After nearly an hour of folding and shivering, I went on a nice rush over the next half-hour and got myself into the top 5 with about 60 players left. Went mostly card dead again and failed to get action from a min-raised pair of red aces from early position. Down to the last two tables, I found a pair of jacks with just over 9,000 in chips. With blinds at 400-800, I pushed with pocket jacks after a 2,800-chip raise by a bigger stack and got called by the gutless bastard's pocket queens. The nerve. No jack appeared and I was out in 16th place, sick and penniless.