Life in the Fast Lane: 2004 WSOP Champ Greg Raymer Takes On Colossus II

When 2004 World Series of Poker Main Event champ Greg Raymer fired his first bullet into the 2016 WSOP $565 Colossus II on Thursday, he played relatively tight for the first four levels.

But before he knew it, he was suddenly in shove-or-fold territory.

“I lost half my stack before the first break on my first flight and the most chips I lost in one hand was six blinds,” he told PokerNews. “The next most I lost was two and a half blinds. Suddenly, I had half my stack at the break, and I won a couple of small pots as well.

“It wasn’t like I was limping in every hand and losing at least one big blind every hand either. I was folding 80 percent of my hands, and lost a handful of pots, but suddenly I had half my stack. It was almost as if I had forgotten a big hand that I lost, but no. It just seemed a little strange that I could spend most of two hours folding and lose half my chips.”

What Raymer had discovered, like many other players have, is that the revised structure for this second edition of Colossus, is rather fast on Day 1, and after he busted, he took to Twitter saying the structure is “way too fast” and asking the WSOP to consider giving entrants a little more play next time around.

“I suspect it is even faster than they meant it to be,” Raymer said on a break after firing a second bullet in the event Friday. “They’re paying 15 percent of the field and I think they designed the structure to make sure they get well below 15 percent on every flight. You can’t not get to 15 percent on every flight, because that would obviously be a big mess. But I think they just went a little too far in making sure they got there. They got to like three or four percent in flights A and B.

“Even if play gets a little tighter at the end of the last flight because players don’t have another chance, I’d be shocked if they don’t get below 10 percent. So in hindsight, and hopefully what they will do for next year, is put a couple of levels back. There’s at least one jump that more than doubles the blinds. Certainly they can give us a couple more levels at some point.”

WSOP Vice President, Corporate Communications Seth Palansky said the new Colossus …

continue reading in source www.pokernews.com