I like to play the small tournaments. In fact, the site I play at has bonuses if you are one of the better players in the small tournaments. Well, the first day of this month, I played in four of these tournaments. I won 2 of them and placed second in one and third in the other. So then I was curious to see how I ranked. I just spend five hours and did very well, so I thought I should rank in the top ten. To my surpise, I didn't even rank in the top 250.

On about the 18th of the month, I noticed that the leader in that category had about 16,000 pts. When you win one of those little tournaments, you get 18 pts and second gets 14 pts., so I could work backward and see how much he'd played. I determined that it took 1.25 hrs to finished either first or second on the average. This means he had to placed 1st or second in 1000 tournaments (and 1250 hours) to get that many points. I figured out that if he slept four hours each night I and played three tournaments at a time (coming in first or second in all of them), then he could have gotten that many points. My edge is really figuring out the players and using logic and expectancy. And even then I only come in first or 2nd or about 1/3 of them. If I played in three at a time, all I could do is play expectancy and not have any particular edge.

Anyway, I thought something SMELLED and I wrote the site about it. The answer back was even more shocking. They said that some people play as many as 12 simultaneous tournaments. So if he played 16 hrs a day in 12 tournaments and won more than half of them, he could get that many points. But I can't even imagine playing that much. You are basically be making a decision every few seconds. But apparently that is what some people do. And I personally think it is insane.

And if people do insane things in poker, it really would amaze me to see what they do in the markets.