Ah -- actually, I'm not talking about online. I've played in two live, largish-scale poker tournaments before, both with notional but limited money. One was at Dexcon: 50 person tournament, ante doubling every 20 minutes or so. The other was part of the Four Aces LARP. In both cases, it was a true tournament: play badly, and you'll get knocked out. That concentrates minds a lot more than casual online does, I suspect.
(I came in fourth in the Dexcon tournament, just out of the money. I won the Four Aces one, apparently because I decided that, for story purposes, my character *had* to win -- there's nothing quite so dangerous as a writer/player who is confident that story karma is with him. Totally not what the GMs had intended, but it was required to give my character a satisfactory arc...)
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(I came in fourth in the Dexcon tournament, just out of the money. I won the Four Aces one, apparently because I decided that, for story purposes, my character *had* to win -- there's nothing quite so dangerous as a writer/player who is confident that story karma is with him. Totally not what the GMs had intended, but it was required to give my character a satisfactory arc...)