Up to the Challenge?

I have a fever and, apparently, the only cure is more challenges. While prop bets and poker have gone together like peanut butter and jelly for some time, the recent rash of prop bet “challenges” has brought them into the spotlight and it seems as though they are all everyone is talking about these days.

Tom “durrrr” Dwan can take the bulk of the credit for making challenges the trendy thing to do. His Full Tilt Poker challenge lays 3 to 1 odds that he can beat any opponent 4-tabling $200/$400 PLO or No Limit Hold’em heads-up over the course of 50,000 hands and has the poker world abuzz despite long gaps in the first stage of Challenge play against Patrik Antonius. Perhaps it is because there is so much money on the line. Most avid railbirds agree that the bet itself, worth $1.5 million for anyone who can defeat Dwan, is small potatoes compared to the potential millions at stake in the game itself.

Durrrr’s challenge may be getting the bulk of the buzz, but it is not the only challenge bet drumming up attention. The PocketFives poker forum spent two weeks closely monitoring the progress of Thomas “Boku” Boekhoff who aimed to grind $100 into $10,000 over the course of 15 days by playing small stakes Sit N’ Gos at Pokerstars. He laid himself 3 to 1 odds and accepted around $35,000 worth of bets from people who believed he could not do it.

Not only did he accomplish his goal, he did so with a day to spare. Playing nearly round the clock, often on 40 tables at a time, Boku completed a feat that numerous people claimed was impossible. In the wake of his success, a number of forum threads have popped up talking about how others have been inspired by Boku’s success and are setting personal goals in the same vein in an attempt to improve their game.

Now, for every durrrr or Boku, there are people who formulate prop challenges that are woefully ill-conceived. Another forum thread proposed a challenge in which the player would do nothing but play online round the clock, allowing no time for sleeping or even using the restroom. I think I speak for the rest of the poker community when I say that we are probably all better off that this bet, which had a stipulation for a webcam to monitor the player, never really got off the ground.

These stories of prop bet challenges are fascinating in their own right, but recreational and small stakes players can learn a lot from durrrr, Boku or the current Bluff Poker Challenge, which will reward the player who builds the largest bankroll in 30 days with a starting balance of $200. Not only do the latter two challenges afford us the opportunity to watch skilled players take on the low and micro stakes that many of us get so frustrated with at times, but they also can help us to try to devise a bet or challenge to issue ourselves in an attempt to get better.

New Year’s resolutions are great, but there is a reason most of them fail: nothing is at stake. If you don’t lose that ten pounds you promised yourself, nothing is going to change for the worse. Your self-esteem may take a small hit, but your bank account won’t. Bluff Challenge aside, these high profile challenges effectively motivated their participants because some serious money was at stake. Even the Bluff Challenge has something big at stake—a magazine cover and media hype for the winning player. If you’re thinking about creating a challenge between you and your friends, be sure to pick a monetary amount that is meaningful to you. Don’t put your entire bankroll on the line, but risk enough to make the effort to achieve your goal worthwhile.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you don’t want to issue a challenge you don’t have an edge in. One of the cardinal rules of prop betting is never taking a bet where you don’t think you have the best of it. Boku’s challenge may have sounded outlandish and crazy to several forum posters, but he knew that it was well within the realm of possibility that he would succeed. He had plenty of practice playing dozens of tables at a time prior to the challenge and also knew he was capable of playing long, arduous sessions without getting too tired and making bad decisions. While the forums debated, Boku was able to sit back and relax, knowing he had an advantage where others believed he didn’t.

We all aren’t going to be running $100 into $10,000 in the next couple of weeks, but that doesn’t mean we don’t gain something from these challenges. They inspire us, teach us, and help us to think about how we can challenge ourselves. Most importantly, during a time when the interest in poker feels like it is waning, they make the game exciting again, even for those who are watching and learning.