PokerStars Blog has an inauspicious history in team poker events. During one such tournament in London about eight years ago, two of this manor's writers took to the felt as a partnership and lasted a grand total of two hands combined. Stephen Bartley carefully folded the first hand, as is his wont, then I someone unknown sat down and punted the entire stack with a pair of jacks. I He had no way of knowing about the set of fours.
As a rule, Team PokerStars Pro has a better roster of players than Team PokerStars Blog. It couldn't get much worse. And two of its finest players have joined forces to attack the team event here in Macau. Celina Lin and Raymond Wu are taking on 39 other teams in a HKD $5,000 event, and thankfully the structure here safeguards against the kind of idiocy that put paid to those Blog writers' exploits all those years ago.
Each of the two players here in Macau gets 2,500 chips. The first player (Lin, in this case) plays level one, then the second (Wu) adds his total to that of his partner when he sits down for level two. If Lin had gone broke in the first level, then Wu would have just sat down with his stack and played through with that.
From three onwards, the players simply rotate every hour, sitting down behind the same stack and attempting to steer it through to the final table. When only three teams remain, all six players are allowed to sit down and break the "one player to a hand" rule. Each can peek at the cards and make a joint decision.
With a relatively small buy in -- HKD $5,000 is about US $643 -- the event seems like really good fun and is being played with an atmosphere of general high spirits. The players waiting to play are nattering among themselves on the sidelines as their partners put the stack to work at the tables. And no doubt small errors will be ruthlessly orally punished.
Wu is certainly pretty clear of the team PokerStars strategy. "Just crush, I guess," he said. "People are a little bit intimidated that we're working together. Probably going to steal some more blinds."
After two levels, it hasn't yet become apparent when the crushing is actually going to start. Team PokerStars is nursing a short stack. But they're in, they're still in, so who am I to cast aspersions? Sorry, I mean, he.
A reminder on how to follow our coverage from Macau. There is hand-by-hand coverage at the top of the main APPT Macau page, which includes chip counts. Feature coverage will filter in beneath the panel. All the information about the Asia Pacific Poker Tour is on the APPT site, and PokerStars Macau also has its own home.