Player Interview: Andy Ward

Andy Ward wins the $100 rebuys on Stars

By Hugo Martin 25 January 2008

On Thursday night (24 January) Andy Ward, (GetItQuietly) won $20,280 in the $100 rebuys tournament on Stars which has long been considered one of the tougher tournaments on the internet.

Poker Verdict: Congrats on another great result Andy. I couldn’t help noticing that it said you had cracked the $100 rebuys on your Facebook status.

Andy Ward: Thanks, I was sort of joking when I said I had cracked it, but I do feel as if I have had a slight breakthrough. Having said that I did have quite a soft table for a lot of the time, which is unusual as a lot of good players play in this comp, so maybe it was just the luck of the draw. I’ve played it about 30 times and only cashed it in twice before.

PV: Did you alter your approach or the way you played in it at all?

AW: Yeah, I was limping a lot more in the rebuy period. I’ve found in the past if you make your standard 3x BB raise with say, pocket kings, you’re just inviting the good players to call and out-flop you with a set or whatever because of the implied odds and so on. In the smaller rebuy tournaments, opponents will just blast it in over the top with hands like 66, but a lot of the players who tend to populate this tournament are cleverer than those in other smaller rebuy tournaments. After the rebuy period, it’s really important not to play big pots out of position with weak or moderate hands in this tournament. Of course that’s true about a lot of poker games.

PV: When you sit down to play in this do you give yourself a budget of a certain amount of rebuys?

AW: Well, I used to and maybe that held me back a bit. I think if you have a good table you have to be willing to maybe rebuy more than you normally would. I always take the automatic rebuy to double my stack immediately and then hopefully I double that up to 6,000 and then take the add-on to get it up to 8,000. This is a very playable stack. You’ve got to not worry if other players around you have 20-30k in front of them; you need about a million to win the thing anyway.

Some players get sucked in to that jamming with any two and double up at any cost mentality a bit too easily and this is what you have to avoid. For instance the hand that got me going was that I limped with AQ, the button limped and a high profile player shoved from the big blind with what turned out to be 7 2! Obviously I called and the button called (he had 9 8 off). My hand stood up and I never looked back really.

PV: I know you’re always studying the game; what have you found that has helped you to improve?

AW: I watched quite a lot of the animated hand histories on Poker X-Factor and found it really boosted my confidence in the sense that it showed me I was doing the right thing.

PV: Such as?

AW: Well for instance just watching Annette_15 I could see that while now and again she might do some flairy play like four-bet somebody with air, 95% of the way she plays is how I play, so it just confirmed a lot of what I thought was right.

PV: What about books?

AW: I’ve just read Kill Everyone by Lee Nelson which I think is the best book on tournament poker I’ve ever read. What’s important is to try and stay ahead of the “trends” and adjust accordingly. The Harrington books, which I thought were very good by the way, are a good example because all of a sudden everyone, and I mean everyone, was just continuation betting all the time, so you have to always be adapting. Just the fact that I’ve ordered Kill Everyone from the states and have read it already is a big edge.

PV: Yeah I can see that. I imagine you have read many of the books, why does this one stand out?

AW: It’s just right, the maths, everything, that’s all I can say really. One area it’s already helped me is that I was making final tables and stupidly going out 7th when I didn’t need to. It’s shown me, and maybe this is obvious to other players, but in the past I’ve always been a play-to-win-the-tournament player as opposed to surviving and going up the cash ladder and I would take this philosophy into the final table where this book has shown me that’s not always mathematically correct.

PV: How many hours or tournaments a week are you playing? Do you play anything else such as sngs or cash?

AW: I tend to play about three or four days a week and what I like to do is fire up around 8 or 9 tourneys at once from around 7pm and see what happens. I very rarely play cash and I don’t bother with sngs any more as there tend to be subtle differences between them and MTTs and then it sort of fucks up my play. Of course if I went on a disastrous downswing I’m prepared to go back grinding by playing those.

PV: Talking about downswing you were having a rough old time at the World Series last year before you came 2nd to Ram in the $1,500 Limit Holdem Shootout.

AW: Yeah I was around $20k down before that. But I had gone there prepared to lose if I had to. In May I had had my biggest result online when I won $60k in Party’s $300k, so I had gone to Vegas to spin it up, as they say.

PV: So in light of another good result are we going to see you playing bigger buy-ins etc?

AW: No probably not. It takes me ages to move up in limits because I’m a giant nit really! But now the $100 rebuy is pretty much the biggest tournament you can play in the week, unless you want to play all through the night. I play most Sundays now as well, but even so I steer clear of the biggest field tournaments like the Sunday Million just because with 6000 runners you can go like forever without a top three result. Stuff like the WCOOP as well, the fields are really too big to manage and you're just taking a shot. There's nothing wrong with that once in a while, but it's not such a good idea to keep pounding away in these massive field tournaments. You have to find the right balance don’t you? If you play too big you can go broke and if you’re playing too small you’re leaving money out there. I’ll definitely still be playing the $100 and $50 rebuys. I think the $50 rebuys is the best tourney on Stars at a convenient time for Europeans for the amount of money you can win compared to the standard of the field.

25/01/08