Life as a Professional Poker Player

Blog moving to CardRunners

2007-12-11T03:47:00.000-08:00

I'm gonna try moving my blog to the new CardRunners site for awhile since that's what so much of my life revolves around these days. Link to my new blog -- you might need to sign up for a free basic account to view it, but hopefully not.

I'm gonna try to dual-post here and on CR for awhile, but I hope to eventually only post to one of the two. Let me know if you guys run into problems trying to view the CR blog.

If I were homeless...

2007-12-10T12:48:00.000-08:00

...my ass definitely wouldn't be anywhere near Chicago during the winter. Or ever, for that matter, since it gets REALLY FREAKING COLD up here. Not to be a dick about it or anything, but the first priority in my mind if I were homeless in a big city like NYC or Chicago would be to get the hell down south to somewhere warm. I'm sure I could scrape together like $40 for a Greyhound ticket to Miami in a few days by panhandling, stealing from tourists, or selling non-vital organs on the black market. Get creative people!

I just got back from a (failed) downtown excursion, the sole purpose of which was to get my iPhone replaced because it doesn't ring anymore. It still vibrates but the ring is almost inaudible. This happened to me a few weeks back too, and it magically fixed itself after I did a restore on it. Problem solved? Nope -- just a few days later the same thing happened, so I restored it again. This time it took about two weeks before screwing itself up again, so I took it to the Apple store downtown and they said they had to do a restore on it before looking at the hardware itself for defects. Whaddya know, it worked just fine afterwards and they basically told me that it was a problem with iTunes and not my phone. So apparently uninstalling and then re-installing iTunes will solve all of my problems, which sounds like a bunch of BS to me. I told the guy I'd be back in a week when it stops ringing again, and he said to make sure I tried re-installing iTunes before coming back in. Obv I'll give it a shot, but I'm not optimistic...

On a side note, this was my first time inside an Apple store, and I must say I'm very impressed at how the company is run. Everything is well thought out, and it's a great sales environment; I can see why their stock is doing so well. They even have a big seminar area which runs their "getting a Mac will solve all of your computing problems forever" propaganda / TV ads on a loop between informative seminars on how to use various features in bundled Mac software.

Don't get me wrong: Apple makes some really great products. I came very, very close to buying a 15" Macbook Pro last month (on which I would have run XP MCE); the primary reason I chose Dell over Apple was because I could get a higher resolution screen with the Dell (1680x1050) vs the Mac's fixed 1440x900. Once you go to high-res monitors you can't go back, and I've been spoiled by my 24" LCD @ 1920x1200 for almost 3 years now.

So after failing at the Apple store, I headed to Filene's Basement to pick up some new corduroys, and they only had one pair in my size in the whole freaking store. I also needed to pick up some long underwear for my upcoming ski trip to Canada, but once again I sifted through the hoards of Large, XL, & XXL to come up short in my quest for a medium. God I run bad @ clothes.

...and the damn clothes manufacturers never learn either. There's *always* huge stockpiles of Large, XL, & XXL and rarely any mediums or smalls. I swear, if I didn't already have some great business ideas in the works I'd open a sweatshop and hire a bunch of Vietnamese children for $.12/hr to make nothing but clothes in adult small and medium sizes. I'd be a multi-millionaire in no time!

Time for a nap

Baking soda is overrated

2007-12-09T01:18:00.000-08:00

Yeah, you heard me. It's time people found out the truth about keeping a box of baking soda in the fridge to make it smell good: baking soda can't hold a candle to leftover Margherita pizza when it comes to making your fridge smell awesome. Plus, you can eat the pizza when you get hungry, whereas baking soda is totally disgusting. Try to tell me I'm wrong here.

Poker-wise, I'm having a good month so far. I've been running about average of late, and I'm trying to put in a bunch of hands early in the month since I'll be traveling during the latter half of December. Since leaving Accenture, I've been trying to play about 2hrs every day, even if it's at lower stakes than 5/10. The games are so much easier at 3/6 and 2/4 that I've preferred playing a bunch of tables at those stakes as of late instead of grinding it out with a table full of regulars at 5/10 all day. I still feel like I have an edge on most of the regulars at 5/10, but I just don't enjoy it as much unless the games are good. I'm pretty sure I have one of the highest winrates at 5/10 over the past few months (just over 7.1ptbb/100 in my last ~40k hands), however I think it's more important for me to play games that I enjoy instead of simply playing the highest stakes I can consistently beat.

A few interesting hands I haven't blogged about yet:
Ace high is the nuts -- whitelime is a very good, aggressive player and I wasn't about to fold this monster to him. This was from the CR / "Bad Beat on Cancer" Foundation freeroll SNG that I won in November. I donated the $200 I won from this SNG to charity. :)
I got owned pretty hard here, even though this guy's play is atrocious. I was pretty sure this guy was a donkey, but WTF?!
Just because I check behind doesn't mean I don't have a hand -- this guy cursed me in the chat, then proceeded to tilt off his stack by cold 4-shoving JTo from the button for ~50bb the very next hand. :(
I sucked out pretty bad here. It felt nice to finally dish out a horrendous beat. :)

I did a sweat session with Derric last night while he 12-tabled 2/4NL full ring, and holy crap he's such a nit. Maybe you just have to be to play full ring, but I was constantly surprised at how tight he was playing. So he returned the favor this afternoon by watching me play 3/6 & 5/10 on FTP for about two hours. Unfortunately I ran like absolute dogshit the entire time and was down about $4k at one point, finishing down about $1600 overall. I really enjoy having other good players sweat me and discuss hands while I'm playing; this process is how I learn best.

My plans for the night fell through, so after a few hours' break I headed back to the tables. Here are the interesting/big hands:
Derric didn't like this shove, but I was pretty sure my opponent didn't have anything.
Sigh, I still run bad against donks. Luckily things turned around later in the sesh :)
Kids at home: this is why you don't slowplay. This guy was a pretty big donkey though, and he snap-called my river shove. This hand was important to in allowing me to take a good amount of his stack later on (see next hand).
My turn shove really was for value, I swear. It's obviously pretty thin, but this guy was a huge donk (although he was quite aggressive) who led very big OOP (often for full pot) on the next street every time you 3-bet or raised him. There were a ton of hands he could have here, and I really didn't think an ace made up much of his range, so luckily I got him to put most of the money in on his own (donkish) accord.
There are few things in life I hate more than shortstackers. These rat-holers ruin the game, and I hate them with a passion.
Could this guy have played his hand any worse? I guess check/calling every street constitutes a slow-play...
My first "misclick" -- damn keyboard added an extra digit cost me $700 :(
Slow-playing is contagious (but it's still a really bad idea)
Dunno if shoving here is correct, but he could totally have a worse jack right?
Tough fold here, but I think I'm drawing dead pretty often here against this villain. He was a total nit (~12/9 or so), and I'm definitely behind when he shoves. I was extremely close to checking this behind because: 1) my hand can't stand a raise from a player like this, and 2) I got a bad feeling about the way he checked on the turn.
Yes, I do 4-shove AA and KK. Some people only 4-shove their bluffs (Ace-X), AK, and sometimes QQ, but I think it's important to 4-shove with aces & kings too if you 4-shove at all.
Ugh, so sick. Seeing that T on the turn always makes you cringe.
I get coolered for a big pot against an aggressive player. Nothing I can do here; I was obv planning to take the pot away on lots of flops that I missed.
I don't like this guy's call w/QQ at all. I was quite sure of a few things in this hand before I called before the flop: 1) here2win had an overpair, but was reasonably solid; 2) rattlenbite was a donkey and could have just about anything; and 3) I could use these two pieces of information to my advantage to take lots of pots away post-flop. When ratt donk led, I was pretty sure I had good FE against him (and obviously plenty of equity against his calling range too), and I honestly expected to take the pot down on the flop without going to showdown. here2win's call on the flop is quite bad without a very specific read on me -- which I'm pretty sure he didn't have since I'd been playing pretty solid thus far. Against my range here, he's going to be about a coinflip at best most of the time and a huge underdog a lot of the time.
Donks like to bluff when you check to them. It's a well-documented impulse that they often cannot control.
This was a snap-call preflop. Too bad 99 couldn't hold up; villain here was super LAG-spewy, so 99 is the nuts here.
No idea wtf this guy was thinking
The plan here was to bet/3-bet allin against this super-LAG jokester, but that plan went to hell when s/he straight-up shoved. Too bad I didn't have an ace to snap-call with :(
Flop the nuts, lose a big pot. I really wanted to fold the river here, and I might have if Doomer and Derric weren't screaming at me to call on vent :(
Bluffing nits is not a good idea. Had to try it once though.
Smooth called the flop here to give an aggro player behind me the chance to make a big mistake. I wasn't worried about either draw out there to hit the donkish villain in this hand, but he proved me wrong.
Tough call for me here -- villain was pretty standard/TAG and I could definitely fold this against a lot of players, but my gut said to call here and I did.
Lots of players value-bet the river here, but I prefer check/calling for exactly this reason.
Run good one time! Open-ended straight flush draws are always fun, and I got lucky to win our little coinflip this time.
I raise floaters, and they're everywhere nowdays :(
River bet FTW! Villain in this hand was pretty donkish, and I was almost certain he had a draw that missed. I think betting the river in spots like these when a bad player checks to you is absolutely imperative with any two cards, especially when you don't have showdown value. If I had the A-high flush draw I think my hand might have been best anyway (but I still would have made the bet). Derric didn't like this bet at the time, but he agreed with me once I explained my reasoning (and after the guy folded obv!).

The rest of these hands happened during a 4-hour session I had against a very deepstacked donk who could be pretty aggressive:
I found myself a big donk sitting extremely deep on PS. He hated folding -- I'm 100% sure that he still would have called me even if the river didn't pair the king.
He's an aggressive donkey -- I love how when you flop the nut straight sitting deep against an aggro donkey the turn and river are always the two worst cards in the deck for your hand. Thank God he didn't have anything. (Note the similarity to this hand posted above; guess I just run bad when flopping straights)
He really likes to bluff -- am I playing this too passively?
This guy doesn't fold, so idk why I even tried to bluff him
Note to self: DO NOT BLUFF THIS GUY! He loved doing stuff like this.
Pretty sure my pair outs were good here too
You knew it was coming -- thankfully I won the massive pot that you knew was inevitable. The table broke shortly thereafter for obvious reasons, but I truly enjoyed the 4hrs I spent at the table playing against this guy.

Whew, that was a lot of hands. I played nearly 3500 hands today, which is very high for me in a single day, netting me about $4500 on the day. Needless to say, my second session today was much better than the first. I plan to start doing daily (or at least semi-weekly) posts like these as part of my session reviews, so keep checking back for more hot poker action. In the meantime, I've got a Margherita pizza calling my name from the fridge...

Post-Aruba Life

2007-12-08T23:35:00.000-08:00

Well it's been forever since I updated this blog, and a *lot* has changed in my life since Aruba. My trip to the island was amazing -- we stayed in this really awesome house about 5min from the casinos. It was very very hot the whole time we were there; unfortunately the A/C in the house wasn't quite up to the task of keeping our living areas cool. Luckily each room also had an A/C unit, and the one in my room kept me nice and cool at night.

Apparently when you have a big pool, a separate hot tub connected to said pool via waterfall, and a huge patio area, Aruban law requires you to host at least one party per week. It's a strange law for sure, but seeing as how we didn't want to cause any trouble we threw a big bash my last night on the island. Some crazy stuff happened during both the party and in the casino during my 5 days there, but I know all of you read this blog for the poker stuff so I'll spare you all of the boring (awesome) details. My roommates Derric, Clay, TC, and Doomer were awesome -- we've gotta do that again sometime guys.

At the poker tables, I dropped about $2500 at 5/10 pretty quickly getting 2-outed and then 5-outed in almost consecutive hands during my second orbit. The games were very soft, as usual, but unfortunatly I didn't get to play much during my stay on the island. I made most of my losses back in a very good 10/20 game, but that was short-lived as well. All in all, I ended the trip about even at poker. Some poker room highlights I remember:
- Andrew getting thrown out of the poker room
- Andrew sneaking back in, hanging out for a second, then getting thrown out again by 4 huge security guards
- Top boat losing to rivered quads for ~$8k at 5/10 after getting allin on the turn
- Making a value check/raise on Annette_15 with king high, no draw on the turn of some hand one night
- Taylor being took drunk to read his hand at PLO, yet still insisting on playing at our table (me, a few other CR guys, Annette, and a random live donk)
- Some chick at the above table leaves to go to the bathroom, and I look over a second later to see Andrew sitting in her seat next to Taylor playing the girl's hand for her with her chips. She came back a minute or two later and had him escorted out again. (Note to Wiggins: 6'4" guys in bright yellow shirts stand out very boldly in just about any crowd)

While in Aruba, I talked to a bunch of my poker buddies who had gone pro about their experiences being self-employed. Just about everyone I talked to about my situation agreed with me that it simply didn't make sense to continue working at Accenture, so I left the company shortly after returning from my vacation. It's crazy and kind of scary, but I'm totally up for the challenge.

The one factor I forgot to consider was that life is a bitch, and as such, as soon as I left my job I went on the biggest downswing of my life. To be blunt, I dropped $17k in my first four days as a professional, nearly all of it from running really bad at 3/6 and 5/10. I'd get my money in as a favorite and lose every time. It just kept happening over and over and over again, and it really wore me down. Here's two perfect examples of how my October went:

This was at the final table of a $50 tournament -- losing this hand cost me at least $2k and possibly as much as $8k
OMG HOW DO I RUN THIS BAD?! -- dean06 said in the chat that he folded KK preflop after 3-betting my UTG raise, and based on how nitty he was playing I believe him.

So I did what I always do when I run bad: I bought some cool stuff for myself. I got some new games for the 360 and bought an entire winter wardrobe (a good move on my part). I was very concerned about having a losing month (which hadn't happened to me in over 18 months), and somehow I rallied back by the end of the month to finish up a hair over $2k. This was a huge victory for my self-confidence, and I was pumped to take on November.

As soon as October ended, I went back to running normal. This meant that I'd usually win when I got my money in as a huge favorite -- awesome! I'm sure there was some interesting stuff in November, but aside from meeting a really awesome girl at my sister's deb party back home and my birthday at the end of the month, it was pretty standard on the whole. That's not to say I didn't lose some retarded hands, but it was nothing compared to what I went through in October. I made about $15k at NLH in November, so I netted about $10k after my PLO losses (see below).

I tried learning PLO in November, even going so far as to hire one of my Vegas roommates to coach me through beating the 2/4PLO games, but I ran into some absolutely SICK variance (yeah, I know) and gave up after dropping ~$5500 in my first 3 or 4 days. Some of this was from tilt or dumb plays on my part, but the majority of it was from sick variance, coolers, and running bad. It made me really angry losing so much when the average skill level of my opponent was so incredibly low; people did absolutely retarded shit like defending their BB w/K863 rainbow against a button raise, then stacking off 50bb on a K-high flop with no other draws! PLO is a sick, sick game with massive variance; I'm sure I'll give it another shot later on down the road.

I started coaching again, and I've currently got three students, all of whom I think have the potential to become excellent players. I really enjoy teaching the game to others who are similarly motivated to learn, and in addition to the videos I make for CR, I feel like this is my way of giving back to the poker community. On a similar note, I'm working with a few of the CR guys on some really cool stuff that I can hopefully talk about more in January, but for now that's all I can really say. We should have two really huge announcements for CR coming pretty soon, this being one of them, so keep your ears open!

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm an avid Guitar Hero & Rock Band junkie, and I've come a long way at both games recently. In GH3, I'm two songs away from having 5 stars on every song on Hard -- only Knights of Cydonia (which is an awesome song) and the Slayer song (which is a really shitty song) remain. The Slayer song is also the only song I can't beat on Expert, mostly because it's a terrible song and I have no motivation to practice it. I've also managed to crack 200k points on Through the Fire and Flames a few times, an achievement of which I'm damn proud.

On the Rock Band side, I beat drums on Hard yesterday. On my way to doing this, I only failed two songs: (Don't Fear) The Reaper and Run to the Hills. I beat the Blue Oyster Cult song on my second try (the bridge part is awesome), but the Iron Maiden song took a *lot* of practice to beat. The Who's Don't Get Fooled Again is a pretty awesome song for every instrument and is definitely one of my favorites in the game. Expert will be pretty much impossible to beat on drums, but I'll give it a shot. I've already beaten guitar and vocals on Expert, so here's hoping for the trifecta.

Anyway, that pretty much does it for my long-overdue update. I had a pretty crazy day at poker today/tonight, but I'll put all of that in its own post shortly.

Life update + Aruba tomorrow!

2007-09-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

The new CR site finally launched, and it looks like I'll be moving this blog over there in the coming weeks (where it probably belonged in the first place). If and when this happens, I'll post here with a link to the new blog so you guys can continue to read about my boring life. I had been beta testing the site for a week or two to help test things out before launch, and I'm excited to see the way in which all of these new tools & features will improve CardRunners as a community. Cool stuff!

Anyway, I'm really pumped about leaving for Aruba tomorrow. I'm staying with Derric and a few of his buddies in a house down there from Friday until Tuesday, and I can already tell that it's gonna be very hard for me to leave the island -- especially since I'm leaving early (the tourney lasts until next Saturday!). Chicago has cooled down a lot recently, and it's getting to be about that time of year where you can't walk outside without a jacket anymore. The ~2 months I've been living up here have been beautiful and sunny for the most part, and I'm really going to miss being able to hit up the beach for a pick-up game of volleyball on the weekends. San Antonio was awesome for stuff like that almost year-round. At least I'll get one final weekend in paradise before it gets freezing in the windy city...

On a personal note, I'm still pretty bored with work. I really hope things will change, but it's been a full month since I finished my five weeks of training, and I've been applying to projects like a madman in an effort to get staffed. Unfortunately, the subgroup I was assigned to within the company does things much differently than every other subgroup: we don't get to directly apply for roles ourselves, we are under relatively strict supervision every day, and we all basically just sit around staring at our desks pumping out any remedial busywork handed down to us by our supervisors. In short, everything that's hilarious about Office Space applies to my work life right now. This is lightyears from what I expected from a career in consulting...I'm a very intelligent + motivated person, and my talents are being utterly wasted on a daily basis.

Like I said above, any project we wish to submit an application to must be approved by our HR rep. She then removes the roles that either she or the subgroup's policies deem "inappropriate" for a person from our subgroup to fill (which typically shortens my list of roles significantly), adds other roles that are "appropriate," and then applies us to the remaining roles on her own instead of letting us do it ourselves. This is apparently the standard policy for all employees in the subgroup to which I was assigned. The problems with this are as follows: this creates an unnecessarily excessive workload for our HR reps, who are already very very busy; I have no way of verifying that my internal resume was actually submitted to all of the roles I wanted; I end up being proposed for roles I don't want; and, most importantly, I don't get to choose my own career path.

This final point was actually the most important concept they drilled into our heads during our final two weeks of training: your career path in this company is entirely in your hands, and you are strongly encouraged to choose projects which will help you develop the skills you wish to acquire to further your career goals. Nearly everyone else from my start group has been encouraged to exercise their freedom of choice -- the only people deprived of this ability are myself and the four others from my start group who were also assigned to this specific internal group. It's extremely disheartening to see all of your other friends taking control of their own careers while we're stuck in the office all day waiting for staffing opportunities on projects we (typically) didn't choose ourselves.

Many of the projects I applied for sound really awesome and would certainly allow me to utilize all the skills I have developed in school and from other experiences, but unfortunately I've found that most of these are not deemed "appropriate", and I get stuck applying for boring roles as a tester for newly implemented IT systems. The words remedial and monotonous can only begin to describe how boring a testing role would be, so hopefully things will work out soon so I can stop ranting about dumb stuff in this blog that noone wants to read about anyway.

Poker-wise, I've been playing a lot of PLO lately. I got burned out after a long day of NLHE about a week ago and decided to give PLO another shot. 2/4 PLO seemed like a good place to start since I've historically done well (and spotted tons of poor players) when dabbling in the .5/1 & 1/2 PLO games for fun. It's rare for me to find many tough players at the games when I sit, but the amount of variance inherent in the game makes it extremely frustrating to play against these bad players when they keep winning. I probably have some leaks in my game still, but I think my game is reasonably solid -- even now I'm certain that my current level of skill is sufficient to show a significant longterm profit at 2/4 PLO (if I could find the time to put in enough hands). I plan on playing 2/4 & 3/6 until I feel very comfortable with the game and have played enough hands to prove to myself that I'm a solid winner at PLO. Besides, it's a nice change of pace for me, and it's always fun to learn a new game.

PLO does have some nasty swings though, and I started off with a 9 buyin downswing my second full session. I'll post some hands later, but I got coolered a few times and this one opponent kept outdrawing me every time I either flopped or turned a strong hand. It was just sick how hot this guy was running -- especially against me! My past couple of sessions have helped me crawl out of this hole, and as it stands right now I'm only down $700 on the month at PLO. Hopefully I can get this out of the red before the month ends, but it's not a big deal if I can't.

NLHE has been a crazy rollercoaster ride since my last blog entry where I took 10 buyins off that guy @ HU in under an hour. For the most part, I've been playing very well but running terribly, but I honestly expected something like this to happen after making >$20k in the first 10 days of September. 5/10NL has been good to me overall, but I'm struggling with a few players at 10/20. I've studied a bunch of hands and had lots of discussions about hands with friends, and I'm feeling confident that I can make the transition to 10/20 full time (with good game selection, of course) in the near future. I still play 3/6NL too when the bigger games aren't good, and I'm pleasantly surprised at how bad the play still is. If all goes well, this month will top August as my biggest month ever. My goal for September was $25k; I barely scraped past this mark as of last night, so as long as I don't post a big losing session before Sunday I should be good. I'm hoping to have a $30k month before the year ends, but I'd honestly be just as happy proving to myself that I can make a consistent ~$20k/month at poker.

Aruba here I come!

Another Exciting Sunday

2007-09-10T01:50:00.000-07:00

I went deep in the Sunday Million again today. After getting a lucky double-up early on with AK vs QQ, I went on a nice tear through the soft field to accumulate a really nice stack. I stayed consistently in the top 10 or 20 on the leaderboard from about the first hour until the 4th hour; here's the sick hand that knocked me down quite a bit: AQ owns me (that's me getting it in as a 70/30 favorite for a MASSIVE chiplead). Shortly after that, I lost another 200k coinflip and was basically shortstacked the rest of the time until I busted. My bust out hand was pretty standard, and I would have been in great shape for the late stages of the tourney had I won the coinflip. I finished 280th or so for a small profit of ~$550, but it definitely sucks getting so deep two weeks in a row and missing out on the really big $$ :(

The ring games were unusually soft this afternoon too. I was 5-tabling 5/10NL during the early stages of the Million and the games were just awesome. There were at least 2 very loose-passive donkeys at each of my five tables who were playing >=40vpip (!), but unfortunately I was running pretty bad and they were killing me. I never really lost any big pots, just lots of small- to medium-sized pots. Some hands:

I honestly wanted to fold this on the turn
Value tooooowwwwwnnnnnnn
Don't try to bluff me you donkey
I run so bad :(
It's always nice when you have aces and someone 4-bets you
HU: Bluff or value shove? (this was against some other guy who sat with me while I was playing the spewtard I describe below)

I finished down about $3k in my first session, but I came back after the tourney and flipped my results to +$3k on the day. So I watched some CR videos, browsed the internet for awhile, then decided to play some HU before bed. I saw this guy at 3/6NL HU sitting with about $6k (10 buyins), which is an extraordinary amount of money to be sitting with at a heads-up table -- the most you can sit down with is $600, so he was probably a pretty good player. I've been working on my HU game a lot recently, so I decided to sit and see just how good he was. Turns out he was actually terrible at poker, and in less than an hour he lost everything he was sitting with to me. This guy was really bad. Here are some highlights from our little HU session:

Soooooo he doesn't like to fold -- this was very early in the match, and I didn't realize how light his calling range was. Made a quick adjustment after this hand :)
He calls down very light -- this would turn out to be the theme of our match
I'm a bluffer -- first time I'd 3-bet all match and I was pretty sure he didn't have much. Good luck calling me with like 66 here...
Such a sick beat...did I mention he doesn't like to fold? It was after this hand that I realized just how bad he was and that there was no way in hell I could leave the table until I had all of his chips.
I mentioned he calls down light, right?
My first preflop 4-bet -- he was 3-betting pretty light, so I tried a 4-bet and was met with insta-calls preflop and on the flop. I put him on a small to mid pair and actually should have shoved the river here, but this guy never, ever folds.
Nuts on the river -- I was planning to bluff the river regardless, but hitting the nuts helps. I guess this guy folds on the river, but he definitely doesn't fold preflop or on the flop. Ever.
He really doesn't like folding -- if he's calling with A4o on this flop, you know his calling range might as well be any two.
Remember: he never folds! I was really hoping (and expecting) for him to call the river, but I guess he realized that T6 probably wasn't good by the river :(
Tried for a river check/raise (but failed)

Here's our first really big pot -- our stacks were starting to get pretty deep, so this was a pretty tough call for me since I hadn't seen him do anything like this yet. I called because 1) I didn't think he'd take this line with a boat; 2) I felt like he'd make this play with an A9-type hand; 3) I was pretty sure he had me on an overpair, so the actual strength of my hand was greatly underrepresented; and 4) I knew that if I was wrong I could easily rebuy and build my stack back up.

After that hand, he started going kinda crazy -- he started 3-betting like a maniac, but he also (correctly) adjusted his 3-bet sizes for our now super-deep stacks, which surprised me since basically everything else he was doing was wrong. On with the hand histories!

Pretty sure I missed out on a ton of G-bucks here (if you don't know what G-Bucks are, you really need to read this article). I def shoulda bet the turn again, and I really wanted to raise the river for value, but I was being cautious playing so deepstacked because I obviously couldn't call if he re-raised allin.
He started going nuts, and I knew that a happy ending to this story was eminent.
Some loose calls from me, but my implied odds were enormous, and I honestly felt like Ks and Qs were outs too. Also, checking the river here was a huge mistake.

...and so it ends (with a 1200bb pot!) -- I just called on the flop because he doesn't like to fold and would probably call down with something retarded like ace high. My gin card hit on the turn, and I kept betting knowing he would call super light. I also knew that when I bet the river that there was a chance he would shove over my bet, so I made the bet fully intending to call a shove allin. I actually instantly called his $2300 raise on the river because I was 100% certain I had the best hand. I won't lie though: I was pretty nervous to play a 1300bb pot!

I wrote all of this having just finished off a $10k session, which puts me at +$22k for the month already...huzzah! I had a great night, and I'm wondering once again why I have a day job that pays 25% of the amount of money I made tonight per month. I'm really enjoying Chicago and most of the guys I'm hanging out with here are smart, solid people, but work just isn't doing it for me at all. Everyone always says to follow your passions in life, and mine are poker, music, and extreme sports. IMO, there's nothing wrong with leaving the company and still living in Wrigleyville to pursue other opportunities -- especially considering how favorable these opportunities are right now. Bleh, I'm starting to ramble now...this is a lot to think about, and I need sleep so I can be at my desk in 4 hours.

Sunday Million Blues

2007-09-03T01:10:00.000-07:00

I got 17th in this week's Sunday Million on PS for just over $5500 tonight, and I'm on total monkey-tilt. I'm so utterly disappointed that I couldn't have a better showing...I was playing really great poker and was running decently well too (which is a lethal combination) until I couldn't get my hand to hold up AIPF 3-way with ~43% equity for a top-4 stack and only 17 players left (from a field of >6500). Sigh...

On the upside, Andrew and a bunch of other people were sweating me, and he took me out for drinks / shots after I busted out. Met some cool guys and had a ton of drinks in like an hour and a half. All in all it was a fun night, and although I'm sure you non-poker readers won't understand why I'm pissed for having a >$5k day, I can assure you that I'm still really upset at my core. First was a whopping $173,000 (!), and had I won that hand, I feel that I would have had a very, very good shot at taking home a 6-figure payday. My shorthanded game is superb, and I had some really smart people sweating me that I could turn to for advice in tough spots. SIGHHHHHH............time for sleep

Best. Month. Ever.

2007-09-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

It's September 1st, and I just posted my best month ever at poker. I've said it before: I feel that I'm playing the best poker of my life right now, and I'm glad the results I achieved in August reflect this (nearly 21k!). I did run decently well this month, but most of the time I felt that I was unquestionably the best player at my tables. Too bad I couldn't put in more hands this month...I only played ~13k hands, which is slightly below the number of hands/month I averaged in college.

My videos for CardRunners have also gotten much better IMO; the latest video I made (1/2NL heads-up) is probably my best one yet. All in all, I'm very confident in (and happy with) my poker life right now, and I'm constantly trying to find time in my schedule to put in sessions. I'm starting to regret my decision to start a real career downtown because poker motivates me a LOT more than my consulting work so far, and I'm also making substantially more money at poker in my spare time! I'm still putting forth my best effort at work, but my real passion lies elsewhere...

Anyway, it's time to celebrate in Wrigleyville. Ryan, David and I are gonna go hit the bars on Clark; Andrew is gonna be out tonight with some of his buddies too, so we might all meet up and take on the bar scene together. Here's to August!

Done w/SDF training & a poker update

2007-08-17T11:43:00.001-07:00

It's been way too long since my last entry, and a lot of stuff has happened. My start group at work is pretty large (~40 people), and I've met some really great people here so far. We completed our third week of training today, which concludes our Chicago SDF new consultant training. Two weeks of training remain before each of us gets staffed on our first project; the final training sessions are held in St Charles, and every employee I've talked to so far has raved about how much fun their experiences were at St Charles. I'm catching a ride down there with David, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Life in Chicago is great too. Nate, Meyvis, and their Yale friend Robert came to visit a few weeks ago and I had a great time with them bar hopping, playing guitar hero, and going to my first Cubs game at Wrigley. I also went home to see my Great Uncle Nelson from Peru last weekend. Richard, Laura, and Jennifer came to town as well, and we all managed to get in some really good skiing & wakeboarding time at the lake, which was nice. I know you guys are reading this, so come visit me in Chicago sometime.

Poker has been going pretty well lately too. I've been playing lots of very short sessions this month, most of which are under an hour, and I'm on track to have a really great month (my goal is 20k). I'm playing the best poker of my life right now, so hopefully i can keep it up and post my best month ever.

My last video for CardRunners was posted on Monday, and I was pretty nervous about the feedback it would receive from the membership. The goal of the video was to show how to play deepstacked against the "tough" regulars at 100NL. Unfortunately, things didnt go as planned, and I ended up losing over $300 (>3 buyins!) during the video, making it my biggest loss ever in a video by far. Most of the hands I lost were due to running bad or just getting into some really bad spots (obviously nothing I have control over), but I felt that I gave some really good commentary throughout and played pretty well for the most part.

Still, I was worried that I'd get hammered in the feedback for not putting up better results, but luckily my assumption couldn't have been more wrong. This video garnered some of the best feedback I've ever gotten, probably because every serious poker player has had many many bad sessions like the one I had in my video. I went out of my way to describe how one should handle these situations when they (inevitably) happen: you have to stop playing *immediately* and take a break at least 15min long before playing again. And when you do return, you MUST find completely new tables to sit at, preferably with all different people at them.

After introducing this concept in detail, I proceeded to take my own advice and paused the video for 15min to take a break of my own. I closed all of my tables and found new ones to play at for the remainder of the video. I think this really drove my point home and was probably the reason my video got such great reviews.

I really wish I had more time for poker; like I said above I feel that I'm playing the best I have ever played, and I'm still very committed to improving my game. It also sucks that I had to stop giving private lessons since I really enjoy teaching the game and it was a great, consistent way to earn a good amount of money. Unfortunately I don't forsee myself having enough free time for this anytime soon. :(

That's it for now...hopefully I'll start posting more than twice per month again.

The Real World Begins...

2007-07-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

It's official: I have become another faceless working stiff in the American workforce. As I write this blog post from a cafe near the office in downtown Chicago, my mind keeps wandering back to Vegas. I had a great time this summer, and I'm really sad that it ended so quickly.

Anyway, I finally moved up to Chicago last week and I'm loving it so far. Brandon and I drove a 26' moving truck up from Austin on Wednesday, stopping only in Little Rock to say a quick hello to James and Kelsey. Our place in Wrigleyville is in a great neighborhood with lots of young people; most of the people I've met have been very open and friendly. The summer weather up here is beautiful, and I think I'm gonna really like living in Chicago.

I met Andrew at their new CardRunners office on Division St yesterday afternoon to see the place and record a video (which I subsequently forgot to upload last night). The office is HUGE and even has its own full-sized kitchen -- it's more than big enough for CR's needs and will likely double as a nice staging area for pre-partying.

Nate, Meyvis, and another friend of theirs from Yale are coming up this weekend for a quiz bowl competition, but Nate said they ran into some problems registering at the last minute and might just forget about it and enjoy themselves up here instead.

Sent from my iPhone

Main Event Trip Report, part 1

2007-07-15T06:03:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't updated this blog in awhile -- things have been crazy
in Vegas (as usual). I played the WSOP Main Event on Monday, and here's what
happened:

The table I was started at was a lot more aggressive than I expected it to be;
people were 3-betting regularly, and it was extremely rare to see a
flop in an unraised pot. Everyone started with 20k chips with blinds of 50/100, which was great. I lost a few big pots early on, made most of
it back when I flopped the nuts one hand, then dropped back down to ~11k on a
failed bluff. This went on for the first 4-5hrs or so, then I
thankfully got moved to a new table after the dinner break.

My new table was soft as hell. All my raises got respect, and I was
able to accumulate a bunch of chips quickly. Within 2 hours my stack
was healthy again at around 20k; then the table broke and I got moved
again.

My third table was the best of them all. I arrived with just under
20k chips, and within two orbits I broke 30k without a single
showdown! One big hand I played early in my stay at the table went
thusly:

I open 99 from the hijack seat for 2k and get called by the SB (an seemingly
eccentric guy who has ~35k).
Flop: T65r. Checks to me, I bet 2800, and he thinks for a sec before
minraising. Bleh, not a good spot, but I've seen him do some stupid,
weird shit already so I thought for a bit before calling.
Turn: A. Great card for me to bluff. He checks, and I actually
decided to check behind because that's how I would usually play an ace
here. In retrospect, betting the turn was probably a better line against most opponents.
River: 3. He checks, I bet 5k, and he insta-folds.

At the time, I had no idea how insane this guy
was, but this became increasingly more apparent as the session
progressed. He was mentally unstable to the point where I was actually concerned
for his mental health. For example, he had a ~5"x5" piece of
construction paper in his pocket that he would bring out and set on
the table every time he won a pot. On it was handwritten something to
the tone of, "All online poker sites are rigged! They cheat and scam
you out of your money and cannot he trusted. They are all dirty liars;
don't believe their propaganda!" Our friend was certainly a few cards
short of a full deck, and the antics he performed later on confirmed my
suspicions.

Although the lunatic was certainly an entertaining character (and I'll
share some hilarious stories in a future post), lemme get to the
important hands I played in the tournament. I had worked my stack up to
around 40k by stealing the blinds and antes a bunch of times, which
was made possible by the other players at my table playing strictly
"by the book" poker.

For instance, I'd raise Q8o from MP with two of these basic-level
players in the blinds; one time, the BB laughed when it was folded to
him as he flipped up A9s and exclaimed, "Man, the book says to fold
here...I don't like my kicker very much." He folded, and I laughed to
myself about how easy it was to accumulate chips at this table. This was just too easy for a tournament with a $10k buyin!

Towards the end of the 300/600-100 (blind-ante) level I noticed that the
player to the left of the lunatic was visibly frustrated that he
hadn't won a pot in awhile, and he recently failed at an attempt to
steal the blinds which angered him even more. He had about 35k to
start the following hand:

The guy I just described opened for 2400 third to act, and it folded
around to me on the button. I looked down to see JJ and decided to
just smooth call in position. Both blinds folded their hands behind me.
Flop: T54r. Pretty good flop for me; he leads for 6k, which was very
unusually large for both him and for the standard table c-bet size. I
really felt like he had overcards and wanted me to fold, so I raised
to 16k. He instantly shoved the rest of his chips in the pot, which made me go into the tank for awhile to think. He had about the same number of chips as me to start the hand, so this decision
was essentially for my tournament life. After a bit over a minute of
thought, I didn't feel that he had an overpair or a set and decided to call his
~15k allin raise. He proudly turned over ATo, convinced he had the
beat hand, and looked very sullen when he saw my jacks.
The turn was a blank, but the river was another ten to basically seal my
fate in this tourney. I was obviously furious to see that river card,
and I jumped to my feet and smacked my hands together a few times in an attempt to release the massive rage inside my soul. An ESPN camera crew
happened to be right behind me when this all unfolded, so I'm sure
they got a great reaction shot of me when the ten hit on the river.
Ugh, I hate tournaments SO MUCH.

So the dealer counted out the chips, and I was left with 725 chips to
play with. After paying the 100 ante, I was allin next hand for
slightly over one BB. My A3 held up against the blinds' two
hands to more than triple me up! I more than doubled again in my BB
the subsequent orbit when a bad player with an already smallish stack
raised my blind with junk and lost to my A7s. After more stealing, I
worked my way back up to a nice 18k stack! I'M ALIVE!

Just over an hour into the 400/800-100 level, I finally decided to
stand up to the player on my right who was consostently overbetting
the pot preflop (he'd open for like 3.2k at the 300/600 level or 4000
at 400/800). He made it 4k to go from MP one round, and I 3-bet him
to 13k with KQh. He asked for a count of my remaining chips, then
thought for about 30 seconds before folding. Nice pot for me -- my
stack was now around 28k which was terrific considering my chip
position after losing that JJ hand about an hour beforehand.

The very next hand, the same guy opened for 5k from MP. I looked down
and saw two queens in my hand, so I moved all-in for about 28k. He
again asked for a chip count, then thought for ~20 seconds before
calling with aces. What a slowrolling asshole; stalling like that
before calling with the best possible hand breaks the most fundamental
rule of poker ettiquite and is strongly looked down upon by all poker
players.

My play here was correct -- he shows up here with hands like 99, TT,
JJ, or AJ almost 100% of the time -- and I was utterly shocked to
see AA played this way. I was excited, however, when the flop
came QTT! Ship it baby! The turn was a blank, and I was so excited
that I didn't notice the ace on the river to end my run in the
2007 Main Event. Oh well, gg me; I had a great time playing anyway.

There are some more really awesome/hilarious stories from the Main Event that I'll share with everyone in the coming days, but for now it's time for sleeeeep.

Ready for the Main Event

2007-07-09T00:30:00.001-07:00

I'm so pumped about playing the ME. Aside from partying with Nath and crew to celebrate his big win last night, I've been mentally preparing myself for the (hopefully) long road ahead of me in this tournament.

I've been looking to sell pieces of my action in the ME recently as well, and I think I'm gonna close the doors with 40% of my action now sold. I'm still thrilled to play for 60% of myself, and it feels good to know that other people see me as a profitable investment. I certainly think I'm a good investment, and hopefully I can prove us all right with a nice showing in the coming week(s). All I can hope for is to play well and keep myself focused, and I'm ready to do both.

Bill (Zimba) from CardRunners will update the CR WSOP blog with chip counts for me and other CR members/pros throughout the day, so checking there is the best way to keep track of me. Wish me luck!

Our house is sick at poker

2007-07-08T00:44:00.000-07:00

Nath just won the PokerStars nightly $150 for $24k. Most of the guys at his final table were pretty bad players too, and the guy he was heads-up with at the end was super weak until they got HU. I'd swear it was a different person playing once HU started.

Off to the strip to celebrate -- I'm probably gonna crash at Kush and Aaron's place since we're all gonna meet over there tomorrow anyway to play the Million together. It's party time in Vegas baby!

$10k is a LOT of money

2007-07-07T04:27:00.000-07:00

It really is. We poker players train ourselves to disassociate the chips we play with with their actual monetary value, but I'm sorry: $10k is a LOT of money that can be used to buy a ton of awesome stuff. It was hard laying down all those benjamins to the cashier at the Rio, but I know that my entry is +EV. But even so, I realized that this was the 2nd most expensive purchase I've ever made (second only to my car), and I'm totally fine with that. I'm registered to play on Day 1-D, which is Monday.

I finally met Brian Townsend yesterday afternoon at our CardRunners booth at the gaming expo inside the Rio. We'd been trying to get together for dinner or drinks for a few weeks without success, so it was nice to finally get to talk to him about a lot of the ideas I have for CR.

We met later that night for dinner at a sushi place inside the Wynn along with a friend of his from college named Amy, and Brian introduced me to a bunch of interesting sushi/Japanese delicacies. I'm not usually a big seafood guy (I only have cravings for sushi about once per year), but I'm always open to trying new things, and most of what Brian ordered for us was pretty good. I still prefer a good steak to any type of seafood, but it was a great experience. We also had some really great discussions about the future of CR and this type of business model in general. Brian is an extremely intelligent person; there's no doubt in my mind that he would be wildly successful in any line of work outside the poker world.

After dinner, we headed over to the CR/Bluff Magazine party at the Sapphire Lounge. The whole CR crew was there, as were a bunch of my other friends (Kush, Aaron, Lyric). Stinger got a great picture of Zimba getting a lapdance, and we all partied there for the rest of the night. I ducked out a little early with an upset stomach to go register for the Main Event (the line during the day was apparently >3hrs long), then headed home for some much-needed sleep.

I hit up the Bellagio poker room at around 4pm today and jumped into a $5/10 game. The first hand I played came a little more than orbit into my session: ~3 limps, button raises to $60, I look down to see JJ in the BB and bump it up to $210, folds to the button who instantly 4-bets to $480. Nobody 4-bets with less than KK live, so that was an easy laydown. I flipped up my jacks as I folded.

The very next hand, a few people limp to the CO who raises to $50. I pick up JJ again and make it $180 to go on the button, and the CO is the only caller. Flop: AK4r, he leads for $200 and I fold. Well played sir.

I get dealt JJ again the very next hand. WTF, who is shuffling? This time, a guy who appears to be a bad player raises from MP. I 3-bet to $200 for the third fucking time in a row, and this time the button looks down at his cards and announces he is all in for about $1k, which makes this yet another easy fold. It's sick how good I run.

I played 5/10 for another hour or so before deciding to jump into one of the $10/20 games running close by. After 3-4hrs of being completely card dead, I finally get my ~$2500 in with 9h8c vs KdTs on a 7h8hTh board. Somehow I brick out on the turn & river, so this villain took about $2400 of my stack. What can I say...when you're hot, you're hot!

The table was pretty soft, and I felt like I had a big edge on almost everyone at the table, so I reloaded for my final ~$2500. I had no idea how much amazing action there was gonna be at this table -- here are some examples:

Seat 3 was a pretty bad player who raised/played waaaaay too many hands and paid off far too often (and lightly)
Seat 4 played even worse, but he was generally very passive
Seat 5 was a player that obviously was regarded by pretty much everyone else at the table as a good, solid player, but IMO he wasn't anything special
Seat 6 = me. My table image for all of these hands was very solid/TAG. I had only shown down good hands that I bet strongly for value. This is a great table image to have since it is so easily abused. :)
Seat 7 was a solid player
Seat 8 could be solid at times, but he was much too loose in his hand selection both pre- and post-flop

Hand #1:
Button is in Seat 5
Seat 3 (stack = ~$10k) opens for $120 (pretty standard for him), Seat 4 (stack = ~$4k) calls, Seat 5 (stack = ~$3500) calls, and I pick up AA in the SB and raise to about $500 (my stack was ~$3500), Seat 7 was sitting out, Seat 8 (stack = ~$7k) cold calls from the BB, and everyone else calls too. So 5 players to the flop for ~$500 each.
Flop: Qs8hQc. This is not a great flop for AA playing multi-way -- especially from OOP -- and I decided to take an alternate line on this hand. Seat 8 loooooves to bet/bluff when he has position on the preflop aggressor, and I figured that I could get some really great value from him if I checked and let him do the betting for me. Plus, this way I have great relative position on the flop bettor and I find out if someone else has a Queen cheaply. So I check, and unfortunately he checks behind me after thinking for a sec; Seats 3&4 both check, and Seat 5 bet $360. This was such a strange/tiny bet and I had no idea what it meant. So I called, and Seat 8
quickly raised to $800. Seat 3 folds, and to everyone's surprise Seat 4 cold calls the $800, as does Seat 5. The pot is huge now, and even though it's pretty obvious that AA is no good here, the pot was too large and the bet was too small for me to fold. Hell, I think I even had odds to draw to my two Aces here, so I called.
Turn: 6d. Total brick; sigh...I'm ready to check/fold. I check, Seat 8 checks, Seat 4 checks, and I couldn't believe what was happening when Seat 5 checked behind too.
River: Kc. I didn't know what to think about the turn action, but I still don't think my hand is good here and I probably can't get anyone to lay down a Queen, so I have to check again. Seat 8 checks, as does Seat 4, and Seat 5 checks as well. AA is good; WTF?! All that was going through my mind during this time was "Wow....just.....wow." Seriously, how does nobody (esp Seat 4!) have a Queen or 88 there. Seriously.

Hand #2:
Button was in Seat 5 again
Stack sizes are about the same, except mine was about $8k now. Seat 8 straddles to $40, Seat 3 opens for $160, Seat 5 calls, I make it $560 to go with JJ from the SB, Seat 8 cold calls again (what is up with this guy?), and the other two call as well.
Flop: 8d5c4h. Sigh, this is such a crappy spot to be in (especially OOP!); I decided to bet/fold to a raise. I put in ~$1200, Seat 8 insta-calls, Seat 3 folds, and Seat 4 thinks for over a minute before finally folding his hand. He told me later he folded A8o (nice fold buddy)...it's utterly ridiculous how bad people are at poker.
Turn: Ah. It's pretty obvious that I don't have the best hand, but this is a great scare card for me to bluff at with my tight/nitty table image, so I decided to take one final stab at the pot and bet $2500. Seat 8 sighs loudly before folding QQ face-up. Hooray!

I ended the session a few orbits later after Seat 4 went busto and Seat 3 left to get food. From there, I headed over to Kush and Aaron's place at the Towers by the strip and we discussed a bunch of hands from my session, including the ones above. Among other things, we all agreed that 1) my 3-bets in both hands were way too small and offered more implied odds to the others in the hand than I wished to give them, 2) my table was insanely soft and gave massive action, and 3) I shouldn't have left the game until Seat 3 went busto too. Oh well.

Kush finally paid up the $400 he owed me on UB, so I challenged him to a HU match at PLO on Full Tilt. Neither of us is particularly skilled at PLO, but he agreed and we played two tables of 1/2 PLO HU for a little under an hour. I started off really badly (was down almost 4 buyins really quick), but I battled back like the machine I am to finish as a big winner. Check out the sickest hand of the match. I got my money in pretty bad there, but there's no way I'm ever not stacking off on this flop for ~100bb. Red deuce for the win!

That's it for now -- I'm very pumped about playing the Sunday Tourney with Kush/Aaron/etc on Sunday and then the Main Event on Monday. The next few days should be a blast!

Main Event, Here I Come!

2007-07-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

The past few days have been pretty awesome, especially last night.

Since my last update, I've successfully completed all of the required jumps with my skydiving instructor Kevin, and I have now been cleared for truly solo jumps. I can't even begin to describe how awesome the sensation is when you spot everything on a skydive by yourself and are entirely in control of your own jump. I learned how to "track" in the air too (which is positioning your body in such a way to significantly reduce drag, thus making you fly a LOT faster), and it's a freaking blast. I can't wait to jump again!

I've been running a lot better live recently too (aside from a bad 10/20 session a few days ago where I dropped about 5-6k), including winning one really nice $6k pot vs a really bad player to end my session at the Wynn on Tuesday morning.

Anyway, I decided to do some laundry and play a few tourneys online yesterday morning + afternoon instead of going skydiving or heading back to the strip, and I'm glad I did. I bubbled the $50+Rebuy+Addon on Stars in an unavoidable situation, but I got pretty deep in the afternoon $50 freezeout. Here are a few screenshots I took:
- Final Table About to Start
- New Chipleader!
- Start of HU
- A Winnar is Me!

Big thanks to Nath, Meyvis, and Ben for helping me out when I had questions. When I was in good shape with about 18 left in the tournament, I told Nath that I'd play the Main Event if I won. Hopefully I can be the next Jamie Gold, minus the douchebaggery and bad play overall. Oh and because this house is full of sick tournament players, Nath just had to show me up last night by taking 2nd in the Full Tilt $100+Rebuy tourney for ~$15k. Sick stuff.

So to celebrate my win, I met up with some CardRunners friends at Tao in the Venetian. Derric (SixPeppers) and Lyric were both really cool guys, and a few random CR members were there as well. The upstairs pool area is freaking gorgeous, and we had a table to hang out at where we each consumed our fair share of tasty beverages. As I was scoping out the pool area for some girls, I noticed that Andrew (from CR) and his crew were there as well. Our two groups merged and we had a blast drinking and hanging out all night (and occasionally trying to get Stinger to do something crazy).

Kush and Aaron showed up a few hours later to hang out, and after the party died down I left with them to try and hit up Ghost Bar at the Palms. Unfortunately it closed like 15min before we got there, and we ran similarly bad trying to get into the Voodoo Lounge at the top of the Rio. So sick to have such a cooler after the nasty beat the Palms dished out on us. I crashed at Kush and Aaron's place for the night -- their condo is pretty sweet and is right next to the strip. Vegas is so awesome.

There's apparently a CR / Bluff Magazine party tonight at the Stratosphere that should be fun, so I'm gonna go meet the whole CR crew at their booth at the Rio in a few minutes and see what happens from there. Should be fun!

Long Time No See

2007-06-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

It’s been far too long since I updated this blog, and a lot of stuff has happened. I’m writing this from my laptop on the way back to Vegas from Chicago, so here goes.

On the skydiving front, I’ve completed two of my four required solo skydives (and will hopefully get a shot at #3 tomorrow). It’s going great and is a lot of fun. Skydiving is something that I highly recommend everybody try at least once in their lifetime.

Job/Life-wise, I’m getting pumped about moving to Chicago next month. I met Brandon, my future roommate, in Chicago yesterday to go apartment hunting, and he seems like a really great guy. He told me the third person we were planning on living with was flaking out on him, and we decided to just get a 2-bedroom place together instead. Most of the places we spent the day looking at either sucked or were nice but had a few flaws that turned out to be deal-breakers for us.

Day turned into evening, and I stumbled across a craigslist listing that looked amazing and had only been posted for slightly more than 12 hours. I called the realtor, and we were lucky she could squeeze us into her schedule for a 5pm walkthrough. Honestly, the pictures in the ad on craigslist sold me on the place on their own, and the apartment was just as great in person as it appeared online, so we took it. Our apartment is in a great neighborhood right in the heart of Wrigleyville (literally 3 blocks from the stadium), and I really couldn’t be more excited about moving in. The realtor was also able to let us move in a week early (since our start date in Chicago is July 30), so having everything work out so perfectly really lifts a burden off my shoulders. Chicago is gonna be awesome!

Poker-wise, I’ve been on a bit of a downswing lately. After a really great start to the weekend last Thurs-Fri-Sat, I had a terrible session this past Sunday which lasted from late Saturday night through the next day’s early afternoon. Although my luck was certainly extraordinarily bad, the downswing I’m currently on is relatively standard as far as variance goes.

Some of you who are not familiar with the swings associated with poker may not know this, but downswings are a necessary and unavoidable part of the game since there is an element of luck in poker. This is the same reason why unskilled players can be winners themselves from time to time, but in the long run everyone’s luck evens out and the highest skilled players end up with all the money. Variance is a necessary evil in this game which all winning players must accept in order to tolerate the swings. Anyway, I’m still up about 10k since coming to Vegas, and I hope to at least triple that by the time I leave.

Speaking of last Sunday, when I walked into the house from the casinos to end my losing day, Leo and a few of my other roommates were all on their laptops. Leo told me to come sweat him at the final table of a $100+Rebuy tourney on PokerStars, which is a pretty freaking difficult tournament. After dodging a few bullets and winning some key hands, he emerged victorious for a first place win of over $31k. We were all pretty happy for him, and before going to take a nap I checked to see how some friends were doing in the quarterly $1000 buy-in Sunday Million tournament. A few people I knew were still in, including our former roommate Matt who was one of the chipleaders a few hours into the tourney. I railed him for about an hour and then went to bed.

I woke up about 6hrs later and walked downstairs to see everyone still on their laptops: Matt and another friend of ours (Thay3r) both still had healthy stacks with only 25 players left in the tournament! They both made the final table, and Thay3r finished 5^th for a nice $88k score. Not to be outdone by Leo earlier today, Matt (mlagoo) went on to win the tournament outright for $315k. We all went nuts, and it was time to party!

Matt played the tournament at another house with a bunch of other friends of ours who were also playing in it, so all of us headed over there to celebrate. The crew I’ve been hanging out with the most is comprised of myself, Leo, Nath, Meyvis, Ben, Matt, Kush, Serge (adanthar), Bond (who is a total baller btw), gobboboy, ActionJeff, RandALLin, EC10, Aaron Been, Vivick, Clayton, and a few others I’m probably forgetting now. At around 6am, someone suggested we hit up the Rhino (and how could you not?!), so a group of us headed over there until about noon. We were all completely exhausted and ended our crazy day soon thereafter.

Congrats again to Matt – this couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy or to a more deserving player. I still think it’s awesome that he’s never had a 5-figure score. Hopefully it’s my turn next!

Busted Barry G, shot at 10/20, and.....possible eviction?

2007-06-16T04:04:00.000-07:00

I find that the time I'm spending in our house is becoming increasingly more rare, and the number of updates to this blog is a direct result. Here's the condensed version of today's drama:

- Barry Greenstein gets moved to my table about an hour into the $2k NLHE WSOP event, and I get my JJ against his 77 allin preflop to bust him in the second hour. Barry is a great guy and a total class act; he gave me a signed copy of his book (which deals with lifestyle and bankroll management for poker players) and even wrote down the details of the hand I busted him on inside the front cover. Today Barry became the standard by which I now judge every "famous" poker pro. The guy is awesome all around.

- I built up a nice stack in the first four hours, then lost most of it in a marginal spot taking a stand against a very LAG player who happened to flop a big hand. This hand somewhat crippled me (more mentally than actually), and I busted soon thereafter.

- Took my first shot at the 10/20NL game at the Bellagio today, which has an uncapped buyin. Most of my table was either solid/TAG or solid/slightly-LAG, but two players clearly stood out from the rest. The first was an extremely passive calling station fish with a $15k stack, and the other was a maniacally aggressive asian guy in his late 40s who was playing about 60/55 in our 9-handed ring game. This guy was crazy and would raise almost every hand while never folding to any size 3-bet preflop -- the only hand he entered preflop and folded without seeing the flop was to a $10k limp/raise/reshove over his $1800 4-bet; he folded QQ face up after almost 3 minutes of thought. Did I mention he was sitting with >$35k? I took a stand against him a few times and ended up about $1600 by the end of the session.

- I registered for the $1500 NLHE WSOP event starting Saturday @ noon (which is in 7,5hrs btw). I don't really like tournaments, but my anti-tournament front folded to the peer pressure from Meyvis, Serge, and others. GL me!

- Our landlord basically says he wants to evict us for bullshit reasons that are entirely his problem; there is/was literally nothing we could do about it and there were no terms in the lease agreement we signed which describe the reasons he's giving to try to kick us out. Our house is in a nice neighborhood (but not a gated community) which apparently doesn't allow its property owners to lease any houses in the area. Our landlord told us to lie to anyone who asked, saying we were personal friends of his staying there for a short period of time, but somehow one of our neighbors found out about us and complained. Again, none of this was in the lease agreement we signed, and NV state law apparently allows us to sue for custody of the house for the duration of the agreed upon leasing period if he tries to do anything rash like evict us. Two of my housemates are law students, and this may prove beneficial in the near future. All of this drama is only about 5hrs old anyway, so we'll see what happens. GL us?

My first WSOP event

2007-06-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

So I'm playing in my first WSOP event today (Event #25: $2k NLHE) , which starts in about an hour. I'm not a big tourney player, so wish me luck because I'll probably need it. The player pool is just so bad and the potential ROI is too good for me to pass up. Run good one time please!

And yes, I know I owe this blog a lengthy report on both my 10-buyin day and on my crappy day at the tables yesterday. Maybe when I get back from the tourney tonight.

Best live session ever

2007-06-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

Just got back from the Bellagio where I booked my biggest winning ring session ever. I'm pretty tired from the 12 hours I spent at the tables, but the short of it is that I bought in for the standard $1k at 5/10NL and left about an hour ago with just over $10.6k. Almost everybody I played with the entire night was incredibly bad at poker, and they all totally misunderstand the fundamental, rudimentary concepts of the game.

A word to the wise: don't come to Vegas to play poker unless you actually know what you're doing. And even if you don't, chances are that you're still probably better off than half of the donating population that sits at the low- to mid-stakes games in casinos. More details in the next post when I'm not tired as hell.

Private Coaching + Wakeboarding = Awesomeness

2007-06-11T21:55:00.000-07:00

I'm driving back to Vegas with Jason and his wife right now; I had a great time helping them both with .5/1NL and 1/2NL on FTP and talking about other general poker stuff. Between sessions, they took me out on their boat for some crazy wakeboarding action. I'm pretty out of shape and got tired much too quickly after a few nice jumps and almost landing a backflip, but Jason and his son both did well on the board as well.

During a random conversation, I found out that they had an old kneeboard with them on the boat, so I had them find a really smooth patch of water for me to try a barefoot run. They both enjoyed watching me sit on the kneeboard and stand up off of it onto the water barefoot, and it felt pretty good to get a quick barefoot run in since I'm reasonably sure I hadn't had a successful one yet this year. We headed back to the house, played some more poker, then jumped in the car back to Vegas.

Jason and his wife were both very kind, and I'd like to thank them for treating me to a fun day on the lake. Tomorrow morning I get to do my first solo skydive, so I think I'm gonna hit the sack to be ready for that.

Saturday/Sunday stuff

2007-06-11T21:53:00.000-07:00

Been awhile since my last update, and I've been pretty busy. Saturday night started out a little crazy: Ben wanted to see Ocean's 13 at the Palms, so I tagged along to check out the poker room there. Their room was pretty small and didn't spread anything over 2/5, so I walked over to the Rio and found a nice 5/10 table to sit at. I came in a few hands before the BB, so I waited to post my blind. As soon as I posted my BB, the 40-yr-old drunk lady in seat 1 started puking all over the table. Crap, time for a new table.

I moved my chips off the table quickly and found a new, soft table full of deepstacked loose-passive players. Highlight of this table was Marcel Luske coming over to serenade a friend of his in seat 9 with a song. Marcel is such a badass, if I could go out for drinks with any poker pro it would definitely be him. The table started to break after about 2hrs of play, at which point I was up about $300 as we moved to 5-handed play. Unfortunately none of the other guys wanted to play shorthanded, so we all got reassigned new tables.

My new table had some good action. I sat in the 7 seat since I noticed that the young guy in seat 5 had a massive stack of ~$8k and seemed like a solid player. There was a crazy asian dude in seat 1 with a decent stack, and the rest of the table seemed pretty standard/weak. I didn't get very many hands to play with during my time at the table, and the hands I did get weren't met with much action, so the only hand that really stood out on the session was this:
Stacks: Asian guy had about $800, I cover
Preflop: Asian guy straddles UTG, 2 calls to me, I call with 86c, Asian guy puts in $60 more and only one other limper and I call.
Flop: 9h9d7d. Checks to me, and I bet $100; only the Asian guy calls.
Turn: 7s. Asian guy checks, I should have bet again here but I checked behind.
River: 6s. Asian guy checks, I accidentally misread this river to be a 5 (giving me the straight) and bet $300 for value. He thinks for a sec before making an obvious crying call with ace high, but as he called he held his hand over the muck to throw it away as soon as I showed a winner. So I felted my hand (which was effectively 8 high) and he discarded his into the muck, saying "Oh fuck!" as soon as he realized that I showed down 8 high. Fortunately for me, his hand was dead once he released his hand into the muck, and I took down a nice pot with 8 high. May this be a lesson to you all: felt your hand at any showdown in which you are unsure who holds the best hand and let the dealer sort it all out.

The table broke down to 4-handed play not much long thereafter, and all the big stacks left so I decided to call it a night and head home.

Sunday brought some excitement as Nath, Serge (adanthar), and I all lined up side by side to play the Sunday Million together. Nath is a maniac LAG-tard, and I wanted to witness his crazy style first-hand. We all had some good laughs at how utterly atrocious most of the field in the Mil is at poker, and all of us survived with healthy stacks into the 3rd hour.

I built a nice stack for myself at ~82k coming into the third hour (blinds were like 400/800), but my soft table broke about 15min into the hour and I was reseated at a new table full of people who didn't let me win a single damn hand. I eventually busted on a cooler hand, flopping the K-high straight vs the flopped A-high straight, but it was with a hand I shouldn't have even played in the first place. I busto'd about 500 places out of the money and was pretty mad about it. I watched some of the Spurs game (how awesome are we?) before going to bed early -- a CR member named Jason was driving me to his house in Lake Havanu for a private sweat session and some wakeboarding tomorrow morning. Should be fun!

Session summary (Palms, Rio, Venetian)

2007-06-09T06:18:00.000-07:00

Just got back from the strip where I posted a great session at the tables with a net of about $2500. Ben went to see Ocean's 13 at the Palms and dropped me at the poker room there; unfortunately they only had like 6 NL tables total with nothing over 2/5NL, so I headed over to the Rio in search of 5/10 goodness.

After wading through the jumbled mess of disorganization that Harrah's casinos are known for, I finally got a seat at a great 5/10 game. There was a crazy asian guy in seat 2 that was sitting with about 3500 and was spicing the game up a ton -- he especially loved to overbet bluff the river when he thought you didn't have anything. The player to his left also had a big stack and was playing too many hands as well. I sat with 2k and eventually this hand came up:

Preflop: 3 limps to me, i make it $35 to go with 85d in the hijack seat (a total sweetener bet designed to inflate the pot instead of force people out), button calls, asian guy calls from the BB, and the limpers all call.
Flop: Jh7d4c. Checks to me, I put in $85 with my gutshot, folds to the asian guy and the other loose player who both call. Everyone else folds.
Turn: 9d. Great card -- gives me a double gutshot straight draw plus a diamond draw now, both of which are perfectly hidden if they hit. Checks to me again, and I bet $300. The asian guy asks me how much I'm playing, and I announce that I have about $1600 behind. He calls, and seat 3 folds. C'mon T,6,5, or diamond!
River: Th. Bingo. I was honestly very surprised that he checked to me instead of taking a stab at the pot himself, and my mind was working furiously to figure out how much he would either call or a good bet size to induce him to re-raise me allin. I decided to bet $500 for value here, and unfortunately he folded after thinking for a very long time. In hindsight, I'm interested to see what either a $200 river bet (to induce an allin reraise) or a flat shove might have accomplished.

I later busted the other loose player for his last ~$1k on a pretty standard hand (pair + open ended vs his TPTK) when the table was breaking down. Ben picked me up after this, and we headed to the Venetian poker room to meet Nate and his Yale friend Jason.

Meyvis greeted us at the poker room entrance saying, "I'm sitting at a really good game, you should give it a shot." So I sat at the empty seat at his table right when the next hand was being dealt, and was there just in time to get a hand. I sent the chip runner off to bring me $1k (which was the max buyin for Venetian 2/5 games), and looked down to see 97c in LP. I overlimped and couldn't believe my eyes when the flop came down.
Flop: 5h6c8c. I flop the nuts with the straight flush redraw on my first hand...pretty standard really. Checks to me, and I bet about $20 into the $25 pot. Guy to my left quickly reraises me to $65 (he was sitting with just under $1k), and it folds back around to me. I borrow $200 in chips from the player to my right (chip runner wasn't back yet) and decide to smooth call since a raise would kill my action from all one pair hands and most two pair hands.
Turn: Kd. I check, he bets $100, and I think for a second before announcing I was moving allin. Now this is quite a massive overbet raise, and I didn't even have chips to push into the pot, but I felt that there was a decent chance I'd be called by a set, flush draw, or possibly a combo draw type of hand. Also, about half of the deck would kill my action on the river, so I wanted to get the money in now. The guy goes into the tank (aka he thinks about his decision) for a long time, during which my chips finally arrive. I tell the chip runner not to run off just yet since, "I might have to buy more chips from you if I bust on my first hand here." My opponent turns his hand over, showing K8o, in an attempt to get some sort of read on my reaction to seeing his hand. I didn't flinch, and he finally decided to make a terrible call.
River: Tc. Straight flushes are pretty good, but they're a lot better when the poker room you hit one at has a "high hand" bonus to go along with the pot you win. Oh well, I'll take a quick double up on my first hand. Nothing else too interesting happened for the rest of the session; the play was about as poor as other 2/5 games elsewhere, and I cashed out of the Venetian for about $2300 before heading back to the house with Nate and Jason.

I hope to go out on the town tomorrow night and have some fun away from the tables. That's it for now, time for sleep.

Ready to jump solo

2007-06-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

I got back from my skydiving training class a few hours ago, and I can't wait to try my first solo jump on Tuesday. There was a lot of information to absorb and emergency procedures to practice, but I'm feeling confident in my ability to respond to any of the situations we practiced for today. Kevin explains things well and is a fairly straightforward guy -- exactly what you'd want from a skydiving instructor. Tuesday can't arrive fast enough!

Upon walking through the door on my return to the house, I was greeted by shouts of excitement from the dining room table where a game of Chinese poker was being played. Ben, Nate, and another friend of his from Yale who's staying with us for a few days were all playing a lively game that I simply had to join (even though I didn't know anything about Chinese poker). Here are the rules in a nutshell:
- each player gets 13 cards
- you arrange your cards to make three different hands: one regular 5-card poker hand, one deuce-to-seven lowball hand (a 5-card game where the best possible hand is 23457), and one 3-card poker hand (best possible hand is AAA)
- the 3-card poker hand you choose to play must be lower in value than the 5-card hand you arranged
- cards cannot be used in more than one hand
- the game is scored with 'points' similar to gin rummy; each player scores how many points he is up against every other player. money is involved by setting the stakes wagered per point.
- there is almost zero skill involved in Chinese poker -- it's a total gambler's game

We played $5/point for about an hour, and I killed everybody. I was +11 points at the end of the session, and everybody else was down. Victory is mine!

After that, I went upstairs to record my 12th video for CardRunners. This one covered how to make the transition from playing a TAG game to a LAG game. I think I introduced some great concepts, and hopefully the membership will get a lot out of the video.

If any of you don't read Brian Townsend's blog, you should really start reading it. The guy is so sickeningly good at poker; when you talk to him you can instantly tell that he's an extremely bright individual who approaches everything he does with a very deliberate, focused mindset. My game has improved a ton from watching his videos, and I'm lucky enough to have him help me with tricky hands that I encounter from time to time. Unfortunately, I never got to meet him in person (he was too busy cleaning out the pros at the Bellagio), and he's heading back to Santa Barbara tomorrow morning. Brian told me he'd be back in town towards the end of next week though, so hopefully we'll be able to meet up then.

Anyway, I feel like playing some cards so I'm gonna try to find a ride to the strip. More updates later.

Covering loose ends + full analysis of a hand

2007-06-08T04:39:00.000-07:00

The way last night ended annoyed me too much to really talk about the good things that happened earlier in the day. I met with Andrew and Taylor at their house to discuss a bunch of stuff for CardRunners. We discussed re-focusing the SSNL video series I made as well as how to enhance its efficacy for new players. They showed me a few of the design drafts for the new website to get my feedback, and I think I had some great ideas for the site. The CR product as a whole will improve tremendously when the new site is launched in August.

I woke up this afternoon ready for my skydiving ground training class only to hear that it was delayed (again) until tomorrow at 2pm. Sigh, I really want to knock this thing out so I can start my solo jumps. Let's hope it actually happens tomorrow.

After hearing this news, I drove to the Bellagio to eat at my favorite restaurant (Noodles) and play some cards. Lunch was delicious, but my high was killed when I saw the massive waiting list for both 2/5 and 5/10. The list to get seated at a table was easily 2hrs long -- possibly longer -- so I went to the sports book to see the over/under for the Spurs/Cavs game was 180.5 . I felt that over was a pretty solid bet so I put down $50 and lost (hey, at least we won the game). This reminded me why I never bet on sports.

So I drove over to the Wynn and played the 5/10 game there. And even though I found myself seated to the left of two friends of mine who are both solid internet players, it was actually a pretty soft table. Clayton, Taylor, and I messed around with each other a little, but other than that nobody else really put up a fight when one of us tried to take down a pot. Taylor was opening a ton of hands from every position, and I wasn't picking up or making very many hands, so I had some fun 3-betting him light from time to time. The most interesting hand of the session went thusly:

Stacks: Taylor has ~$5k (there is no maximum buyin for any of the NL games at the Wynn), Clayton ~$2k, I just lost a pot and was down to ~$600.
Preflop: One limp in EP, Taylor opens for $40 from MP, Clayton calls, one fold, I make it $170 on the button with QJo, folds to Taylor who thinks and then folds, but Clayton thinks for awhile and (to my great surprise) calls!
Flop: A64r. Clayton checks, and I decided to bet $200 on this flop, leaving myself with only $225 behind. Clayton sat and thought for a very long time before reluctantly folding his hand. I told him I'd let him see one of my two cards, and he picked the Q. This sparked a really interesting discussion between us three about the hand and about how poker theory relates to situations like these in general.

Here's my analysis of the hand; I've tried to explain my thoughts as simply as possible for the novice poker player reading this blog:

I decided to make a move in this hand before the flop because I knew that Taylor was opening lots of hands, most of which couldn't call a preflop re-raise (aka "3-bet") from me. When Clayton just calls Taylor's bet instead of raising it, he's saying that he has an OK hand but not a great hand. I took advantage of this by raising with a non-premium hand in position, expecting to take the pot down preflop a large % of the time. It is very abnormal for a solid player to be the only caller of my 3-bet preflop when he was not the initial preflop raiser, so Clayton's call raised a few flags in my mind. However, the most likely holding when a player makes a non-standard call like this is a mid-strength pocket pair (77/88/99/TT) hoping to flop a set or possibly an overpair. Given this knowledge, I was rooting for at least one big card on the flop to either pair me or for me to bluff at.

When the flop came, I obviously I didn't have anything, but as I explained above it's extremely unlikely that this flop hit Clayton in any way whatsoever. The key to this hand is that he cold called Taylor's raise preflop before calling my 3-bet, and since he's a solid player, this basically rules out the possibility of his having a hand with an ace in it. This flop is also awesome because a large part of the range of hands I 3-bet with preflop is something like AK/AQ/AJ. So, even though I don't have anything right now, I know that:
-- he almost certainly doesn't have an ace
-- he knows I'm a solid player
-- he knows that a large portion of the hands I play this way will flop top pair on this board
-- he has no way of knowing that I don't have anything, and he has to be worried that I have an ace if I bet here.

Given all of these factors, I think that I played the hand almost perfectly. Clayton told me later that he actually had KK this hand, which came as a total surprise to me. If I had a hand like KK or QQ myself instead of having air (aka nothing) on that flop, I would have checked behind since the only hands that would call me on the flop would have me beat. However, since I did have air, I wanted him to fold and decided to bet the flop. I would bet it with all of my ace-x hands though, and this is why he had to fold his hand.

During our discussion after he revealed to me he had kings, we talked about how he approached the hand. He knew Taylor was raising a wide range of hands and wanted to trap him. He also knew that I was picking up on this as well and that I was capable of making a move on both of them without a strong hand if given the right opportunity. So, he essentially tried to trap both of us by cold calling with KK preflop. He also knew that by just calling again preflop, I would put him on a hand like 88 or TT, which was not the case! So basically, he could check/raise me allin on any flop and take me for everything (or at least most of what) I had.

My problem with how he played it is that his hand was significantly underrepresented and he knew that there was a reasonable chance I might not have an ace. But, if I did have the ace, he was in big trouble. Obviously he smooth called twice preflop to trap me, but if he does this, I think he has to commit to taking the hand all the way regardless of what comes on the flop. By underrepresenting his hand and then check/folding, he let me get away with a bluff I shouldn't have gotten away with, making all situations like these extremely profitable for me. It's not easy to check/call or check/raise with KK on an ace-high flop, but given the way he played the hand preflop, I think he has to commit himself to the hand on the flop even with the ace showing. I hope some of you who don't have much experience with the game enjoyed this lengthy overview of the thought processes that went into this hand.

Whew, that was long. The only other thing that happened today was that I finally found somebody to trade me $7k in cash for $7k on PokerStars. Feels good to finally have a cash bankroll to back up my play. Time for sleep!

Poker terms defined

2007-06-08T04:16:00.000-07:00

I had a couple of people mention to me that they are reading my blog but don't understand many of the poker terms I use. If this applies to you, here are two great resources to help you figure out what I'm talking about: Wikipedia on Hold'em and Lingo & Abbreviations Defined.

And just to clarify, I am playing no-limit hold'em (NLHE) cash games almost exclusively while the World Series of Poker (a series of over 50 tournaments covering all poker variants) is running at the Rio in Vegas. Hopefully this post will provide those of you unfamiliar with the game with a basic idea of how it works. Without this basic understanding, it will be difficult to comprehend most of this blog. :)

Bad night

2007-06-07T03:35:00.000-07:00

I had a really bad night at the tables tonight. Strassa was chipleader with 3 tables left in the $1k+rebuys event at the Rio (and I *hate* the Rio), so we headed over there to sweat + grind instead of the Bellagio. What a huge mistake this was.

I don't really feel like going into the details right now because I'm absolutely furious, but basically I ran a $1300 bluff at 2/5 which did not succeed. Maybe if people at 2/5 understood things like table image and relative hand strength it would have worked, but alas...

I was totally card dead all night -- almost none of my hands paired, very few draws ever came up for me, and I missed every single draw that I did pick up (seriously). In my ~8hr session at this one 2/5 table, I had at least two streaks of 90min or longer during which I didn't win a single pot. Nothing was going my way until I coolered another guy to double up, but after that it was back to putting money into pots and never getting any back. Also, the Rio and Harrah's need to die a painful death.

And to top it off, I wasn't playing well. I felt like I was a tremendously better player than everyone at the table, and this led to my becoming complacent with my play; I felt like I could play my C- game and still come out on top, which is probably what makes me the most angry right now.

So, I've decided that I will not be playing 2/5 again on this trip. The play is just too bad, and that in turn causes me to play poorly. I will only be playing 5/10 or 10/20 from here on out, assuming I can actually get someone to fucking trade me cash for online money. If I had a cash bankroll on hand, I'm confident that I could play my A game every day and thusly be tremendously successful. But without the confidence that having a bankroll gives me, I feel like I'm doomed to repeat this cycle of mediocrity for a long time.
Have I mentioned that I hate Harrah's and the Rio?

Bellagio session

2007-06-06T06:18:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a session at the Bellagio. Nath got into town earlier in the evening, so he, Matt and I went to the Bellagio to meet yellowsub and a few of his friends to talk about stakes for WSOP events. We had dinner at Noodles, which is one of my favorite places to eat, and split up from there.

2/5 at the Bellagio was soft as usual, but I was very card-dead and ran into a few unfortunate situations. This caused me to start playing poorly, and I instantly recognized that the main reason for this was because everyone else was so bad. I was essentially letting my guard down, so I remedied this by moving to 5/10.

5/10 was also soft (as usual), but I could actually get a few basic plays to work, and this kept me alert and focused. Interesting hands: UTG straddles for $20, I call UTG+1 with JTs, another caller, tight player makes it $100 to go, angry dude next to him calls, folds around to me and I call, guy between us calls too. 4 to the flop for $100 each (I started the hand with ~$2100).
Flop: Qs3s2x
Checks to the tight player who puts in $450 (leaving himself with ~$385), angry guy INSTAcalls (he has me covered), I decided to fold (since I might not be drawing to the winning flush, I'm out of position and will have to call the guy's $385 on the turn hit or miss, and calling basically turns my hand face-up), guy between us folds too. As soon as that guy folds, the tight player announces he is allin blind; the dealer counts out his $385 in chips before dealing the turn card, and the angry guy gives his usual scowling face for awhile before FOLDING HIS HAND WITHOUT EVEN SEEING THE TURN CARD. WTF??!@! Needless to say, I couldn't believe what I just saw; what the hell was this guy thinking?!

An orbit or two later, the angry guy won a few big pots in a row without going to a single showdown and had me covered again. I started this hand with ~$2k. Angry guy limps UTG, MP limps, I make it $60 on the button with KK, only the angry guy calls.
Flop: Qd2d2x
He checks to me, I put in $90, and he quickly calls.
Turn: Jo
He quickly checks to me again, I think for a sec before putting in $200, he instacalls.
River: 6d
He practically checked to me before even seeing the river, then showed his cards to the player sitting next to him. At this point, I'm positive he doesn't have a flush and am trying to figure out how much he's willing to call on the river. In retrospect, I should have bet about $500-$600 for value, but instead I only put in $250. He called quickly and flipped over two red aces to win the pot.

Honestly, I think I lose that pot maybe once in a hundred times, and I'm pretty upset that I didn't bet more on every street -- especially the river. Fortunately, this guy had no idea how to play poker because he could have taken at least another $1k from me, if not my whole stack. It always sucks ending your session on hands like these, but at least I netted a few hundo on the session.

Forgot to mention that I played some 5/10 online before we headed to town. That didn't go so well -- every play I tried to make failed, every bluff was called, every legitimate hand was outdrawn or ran into a bigger one. Sucks to drop ~3k in under 500 hands, including this gem. Totally fucking ridiculous...I hate sessions like these. Hope to run better tomorrow.

Still haven't made it to the strip today...

2007-06-05T18:10:00.000-07:00

It's 6:30pm and I still haven't made it to the strip yet today. I'm really in the mood to play some cards and build my tiny cash bankroll up from minutia to baller status.

I woke up a little before 7am to call Kevin about the skydiving class today, and he said he wasn't gonna be able to do it today so we rescheduled for Thurs. This was awesome because I had under 2hrs of sleep in me at the time and wasn't looking forward to sitting through a 6hr class over a topic as important as skydiving safety. Things probably worked out for the better in this department.

Woke up again around 1:30 to see that my HTPC, Xbox 360 (w/Guitar Hero!), and 24" monitor had arrived from FedEx. Matt and I went to Whole Foods to get some food for the house + lunch first, then I started setting everything up. I became distracted when I did a brief test to make sure Guitar Hero was working -- have I mentioned that GH is the greatest game of all time? Matt, Ben, and I jammed for awhile, then we split up to do other miscellaneous errands.

I just read about Brian Townsend's HU "grudge match" with Sammy Farha in Bobby's Room at the Bellagio, and I can't wait to either watch for myself or at least ask Brian about it. They're playing $500/1k mix of PLO and NLHE, which must be absolutely sick to watch. I know that Sammy doesn't care for Brian much, and I know Brian is a significantly better player at both games, so hopefully he comes out on top a good amount.

Matt is calling for a challenger at pool, so I'm gonna go put him in his place (read: lose) right now.

My first FT sweat

2007-06-05T03:44:00.000-07:00

What a surprise, Alex made another final table. The guy is just sick at tournament poker. He came into the FT of Event #3 with a sizeable chiplead and held it until they got down to about 5-handed play. He ran into some unfortunate situations, then lost a few hands, and found himself with about 2.6m chips when 3-handed play started. The hand he busted on was pretty sick; check CardPlayer for the details here ("Alex Jacob Eliminated in 3rd Place") if you don't already know them. Still, $282k is a nice payday for 3rd in a $1500 buyin event.

After that, Nate, Ben, Strasser, his friend Mike and I went to Fix at the Bellagio for dinner. Alex and his girlfriend met us there; he and Jason insisted on whoring the appetizers, which resulted in 7 total appetizer orders. Between those and the main course, everyone stuffed themselves. Al thanked us for sweating his FT by picking up the tab -- what a great guy.

Jason headed to the Bellagio poker room to play some 50/100NL, but since the list for 2/5 was over an hour's wait long, Nate, Ben and I headed to Caesar's. As previously mentioned, I'm pretty cash-broke right now, so I sat at 2/5 (uncapped buyin at CP) with my last ~$1100. There was another typical loud, super friendly drunk guy playing every hand with a nice stack, and I couldn't win against this guy. For example, 3 limps to me on the button, I overlimp QJo, BB makes it $30, maniac and one other guy call, and I call. Flop 9sTsKh (awesome). Checks to me, which I felt was very odd, so I put in $85; only the drunk guy calls. Turn 6d, checks to me, I'm positive he's on a spade draw and bet $225, he quickly calls. River is the 4s (sigh), he checks, and I check behind to lose to his AJs. Whatever.

So, after running bad some more, I found myself sitting with under $400. Very frustrating. However, I hit a few hands and made some nice plays against the two plain-vanilla LAG asians sitting to my right to build my stack over $1400 by the end of the session. I felt I was by far the best player at the table, and it really really sucks playing 2/5 because it's such a boring game. Even 5/10 live is just "meh" since you can't make any cool/interesting plays (because your opponents wouldn't understand them and react accordingly). Oh well...suffice it to say that I badly need an online --> cash transfer soon. I'm losing so much money in opportunity costs by not playing at least 5/10 live, and hopefully this problem will be resolved very soon.

Ground training for skydiving is tomorrow, but I forgot to call Kevin to find out what time to be there. Looks like I'm gonna have to wake up at 6:30am (aka 2 hours from now) to call and see if it's a morning or afternoon class. Ugh, time for sleep.

Sunday Slouch

2007-06-04T11:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a pretty disappointing day. Nate played the $1500 PLHE WSOP event, and I wanted to play the two big Main Event satellites on Stars + the Sunday Million before heading to the strip.

I drove Meyvis to the Rio around 10am, then ran some errands to get back just in time for the 500fpp sat (which awarded 5 ME seats) at 11:30. I pulled up the window for the 10kfpp sat, which awarded 9 ME seats and started an hour later, but somehow distracted myself and forgot to register for it. I was PISSED.

Matt was up too, so we both played the Million and a $50+5 freezeout together. He's a much more serious tournament player than I am, and I got some great advice from him throughout my run in both tourneys in exchange for letting him watch me play 5/10. I pulled up two tables of 3/6 and 3 or 4 tables of 5/10 to play concurrently with the Mil.

Strangely enough, PokerStars' server crapped out or something about 10min into the Mil, which caused mass disconnections from almost everyone at all of my tables -- ring games included. This lasted at least 20 minutes, and when the tournament resumed we had already essentially skipped the entire 50/100 level. I was very disappointed that PS didn't either restart the tourney or at least pause the tournament clock during this time. It is a rare occasion for Stars' support or their software to piss me off; server crashes happen, but the way in which events unfolded yesterday (and their lack of an appropriate response to the issue at hand) was utterly unacceptable.

I ended up busting about 2hrs into the 500fpp sat, but I picked up some cards and made a few nice plays in both the $50 MTT and the Mil. Unfortunately, I made an amateur-ish shove from MP with an ~8.5BB stack in the $50 and busted to AQ on the bubble, but I cleared the Million bubble with a slightly below-avg stack. My table position and relative stack size (players to my right had push/fold stacks so I couldn't resteal) in this tourney were pretty bad for the table I was at, so I couldn't really do anything besides wait for a good hand for quite awhile. I eventually lost a coinflip with AK to JJ to finish about 650th for ~$450. UTG used almost his entire clock before calling with JJ -- Matt thinks it should have been an easy call for him and couldn't believe how long the guy took before making the call. 4.5hrs down the drain, bleh.

Some of the 5/10 games were unbelievably soft during this time -- one of my tables featured two passive donkeys playing about 50/11 for a couple of hours, and another had a 44/6 fish and another awesome donator who played an incredible 78/2 game for >200 hands before busting! I played ok for the session, could have (and should have) been focusing more to play better, and my results reflected this by finishing up less than a buyin at each game. Granted, I did lose a ~$2.3k pot as a 60/40 favorite allin on the flop, but that's some pretty standard variance which comes with the territory.

After that, I went upstairs to take a much-needed nap (I was still up from the day before) until 10 or 11pm before going to meet Nate and Ben at the Wynn. I woke up after about 5 hours but was still very tired, so I decided to just sleep through the night instead of driving to the strip to play tired poker (which is often losing poker).

All in all, I was up on the day (which is nice), but I felt like I missed an opportunity to have a really big winning day by not going to sleep the night before. This would have allowed me to make it to the strip to enjoy a few juicy games at the Wynn. Hopefully today will work out better for me.

Welcome to Bustoville

2007-06-03T06:35:00.000-07:00

...population me! After 2 more jumps with Kevin in the morning (AFP-3 & -4), we went to lunch before I met Nate at the Bellagio so I could borrow his car to drive myself home for a badly needed nap. We have to skydive in the morning since the air thins out when it gets hotter in the afternoons (which makes landing more difficult), so I had to wake up at 6:30am again for the second day in a row.

I woke up from my nap just in time to see the Cavs eliminate the Pistons. I'm happy LeBron won so he can get this whole 'winning' thing out of his system; the Cavs won't be doing much of that in the Finals (GO SPURS!)

Ben was just moving in as I finished watching the game, so we hung out for a bit before I drove back to the Rio to check on Meyvis and Strassa. The Rio poker room was packed, just like yesterday. Nate was playing 2/5NL, but I didn't see Jason at any of the tables; oh well, on to 5/10.

The table I sat down at was pretty loose-passive at first, but I quickly realized it was due to a loud, friendly French guy sitting with >3k who was clearly at least a few beers into his night. He was your stereotypical whale: friendly, personable, funny, disliked players and dealers who wouldn't converse with him, very loose-passive, and he was sitting with a big stack. Even though the Rio 5/10 game is uncapped, I chose to buyin for only $1k because I'm short on cash. Aside from him, the table was still very juicy. First interesting hand: (I have ~1100, villain (SB) covers)

1 limp to me in MP, i raise to $50 w/red aces, SB calls, BB French guy calls, limper folds.
Flop: QdJx9d
Blinds both check to me. I've been playing pretty TAG; SB (villain) seems like a somewhat solid player who is capable of c/r perceived position bets on "scary" boards, so I decided to check behind.
Turn: 5c
Great card. Both players check to me again, so I put in $110. SB calls, BB folds.
River: 5s
Another great card for my hand. SB leads for $200, and I take awhile to think about calling or raising. Since I have him pegged as a somewhat solid player, I ruled out a flopped straight or set since he wouldn't have checked these hands TWICE with such a loose-passive player behind him in the BB. I think he would have probably bet to protect his 2pr hands as well, but I can see him checking them at times too. He certainly does not slowplay a straight or flopped set, though. So, given all of that, I decided to put in a small value raise to $500. Villain called pretty quickly and flipped up Kh5h to scoop the pot. I like my play in this hand overall, including the raise on the river. I think I get some nice value from smaller 2pr hands here much of the time when called.

The only other hand of interest was 2-3 hands later, just after I had reloaded my stack to $1k:

I raise QhQd UTG to $40, folds to our French buddy who 3-bets me to $145, folds back around to me. He starts talking it up again about how I should call with my 55/66/77 but the dealer better not flop me a set. I haven't seen this guy 3-bet once preflop before, so some serious warning bells went off. I elected to call and CRAI on any flop that wasn't Ace-high.
Flop: 5h6h7h
The whole table erupts with laughter as I check. French guy bets $300, I shove, he calls and flips up AhKd.
Turn: 8h :(
River: 3c

That left me with about $120 in cash, so I borrowed 1k from Nate to get back in the game. I was pretty much stuck in idle the entire rest of the night, even though the French guy was practically begging me to double through him. When the tournaments broke for the night, so did most of the ring games (including ours), so I repaid Nate and we drove home.

I was still dying to play when we got home, so I decided to play a little online while setting up this blog. Pulled up FTP and found only two active 5/10NL tables (both full ring), which seemed very odd to me, so I decided to grind the 2/4 & 3/6 games there and on PS. In the meantime, Meyvis was kind enough to swap me 1k in cash for 1k online, so I'll get to try my hand at 2/5 tomorrow until I can find someone to trade me more cash for online$.

Interesting hands from tonight:
Hero call vs a big donkey, too bad I'm wrong. If you happened to have read that 2+2 post about player types, this chick was totally an L-P SOOT (54/9/0.65-ish).
Q3c owns me tonight
Finally stacked the donk
Stacked her again!
Protecting my squeeze vs. an obvious re-steal attempt
Another nice pot

Made just over $1850 at 3/6 and $856 at 2/4 in under 900 total hands, so it was a pretty good session. Despite the results, I don't think I ran any hotter or colder than normal; I just felt I was playing really well and that the tables were very soft (which they absolutely were). Always nice to do well in at least one session per day.

That pretty much does it for today (er, technically yesterday). So tired....

First real day in Vegas

2007-06-03T04:17:00.000-07:00

So I'm starting a blog. I've never kept a journal or anything similar before, so who knows if I'll be responsible enough to keep it up to date. Let's do yesterday's entry before we get to today's stuff:

I'm living in Vegas for the summer, sharing a house with ~4 other guys. Right now we have 3 people living here other than myself: Nate (Meyvis), Ben (2+2 guy), and Matt (another 2+2 guy sub-letting for 1wk from future roommate Nath). Meyvis, Ben, and I moved in yesterday I realized recently that I know too many people named Nate/Nathan/Nathaniel, all of whom share the same hobby of poker with me.

Before we get to poker, I started along the path to becoming a certified skydiver on June 1st. I successfully completed two tandem jumps (AFP-1 & -2) with my instructor Kevin that day, and I completed my AFP-3 & -4 jumps this morning. For AFP-4, I did two controlled 360s in the sky -- one right and one left -- then guided/controlled the canopy to the landing zone with almost zero assistance from Kevin. Next step is completing a ground school course on Tuesday, after which I have 4 solo jumps (supervised, but solo!) to pass before I get my certification. I'm really excited for my first solo jump next week, especially because I felt surprisingly zero adrenaline during all 4 of my tandem jumps.

As for poker, I came to Vegas pretty short on cash unfortunately. I have a very comfortable bankroll online, but my bank account balances certainly do not reflect this. My game of choice in Vegas is 5/10NL, especially at the Bellagio, so Nate and I headed over for an early afternoon session yesterday. Nate didn't find much success at 2/5NL, and I dropped a buyin at 5/10 within 5 orbits after stacking off with AK to 66 on KhJh6x flop. This crippled my live roll (I *badly* need to trade PS$/FTP$ for cash) to ~$700, but I had good reads on everyone at the table + position on a very loose-passive fish. The fish finally stacked off to me (I barely had him covered) with 78o to my QQ on a 67Jr flop -- turn 8 (asdfgrstfgsrdfcdcsf), river 6 (ship it!). Finished the session -400 or so.

Nate and I went home to drop our bags off, then headed to the Rio to meet up with Strasser, who was getting deep in Event #1 ($5k Limit/NLHE mix). I railed him for a bit and noticed quite a few big names still in the tourney trying their best to concentrate while the barrage of fans madly snapped photos of their favorite celeb from as close as the ropes would allow. Jason had direct position on Juanda, and the table got a lot more interesting when Max Pescatori was moved to his left.

After a 2-3 rounds on the rail, I left Meyvis to find a 5/10 game. The game I joined was comprised of a mix between some stereotypical live loose-passive players and a couple of young, aggressive, oh-so-obviously-from-the-internet players. These aggro donkeys were far too LAG for their own good though, as many small- to mid-stakes internet players are, and I exploited this in the following hand:

[i had ~$1100 to start the hand, and button (villain) covers]

UTG straddles ($20), 2 calls, i call w/J8c in the CO, button (a LAG internet player) makes it $70 to go, 1 calls and i call.

Flop: Tc8s4c

checks to me, i plan to check/raise, and the button puts in $140. limper folds, i raise to $400, villain looks kinda shocked that i would c/r him but announces a re-raise to $400 nonetheless. i shove my last ~$200 in the pot, which makes the guy immediately start cursing as he counts out the chips to make the call.

Turn: 7o
River: Qc , which completes my flush, and villain resumes cursing as i show my cards to beat his... A8o??!! Are you serious?! "I *knew* you were on a draw, at least I made the right call." Explosive laughter ensues in my head because these people are SO BAD!

That's about it for my first day in Vegas; I think I'll start a new entry for today's events.