Busto (Updated with Details)

OK let's do a quick recap of Day 2. I quickly chipped up to about 27K winning small pots and picking up the blinds, unfortunately most of the hands I picked up the blinds with were monsters that I definitely would have preferred to get action with. Then this hand happens to set me back where I started.

Hand 1: 300/600 a75 Folds to this Russian guy on my right in a PokerStars Supernova Elite shirt who shoves 7Kish. I reshove AQ and lose to 44. Back to 17K. From there I manage to chip back up to around 22K when this absurd hand happens.

Hand 2: This LAGgy French guy raises to 1500 in MP, and he basically does this a lot with likely all sorts of stupid hands, but raises bigger with legitimiate hands. He seemed but bad but I didn't realize what a complete nutcase he was until after this hand. I decide to just reraise and pick up the pot. I find A3o and make it 5K. He insta-calls. OK I still definitely think he has a weak hand. Flop T94r, I bet 7K, he instacalls. I only have 10K left so I give up on the 6 turn and fold to his bet. He turns over his hand and I expect it to be QJ and put me on lifetilt but he actually has the nizzles, 87o. From this point on he just keeps playing crazier and crazier.

Hand 3: 400/800 a100 PokerStars shirt raises to 2100, I shove 11K w/ 66 in the SB he calls with ATo and I hold to double.

Hand 4: Just after this it folds to me in the CO and I raise to 2200 with 99. The BB is not back from break yet and Luca Pagano on my left starts counting chips and I'm praying he reraises me. He obliges and makes it 8200, I ship for 22K and he folds getting over 2:1 yay.

Hand 5: Maniac limps and all fold to me in the BB with 34K now. I make it 3300 with KTo for value and he obv instacalls. Flop T84 two spades, I bet 4600 he makes it 10K I call. I'm not worried about spades because he'd make a huge raise with a flush draw. I really think he's on a complete bluff or has like 54s or 33 because I've seen him miniraise as a pure bluff before. I'm just letting him hang himself. Turn 8, not the best card but whatever. I check, he bets 13K I shove for 7K more he calls. T6s for him I've got him dead to a chop, river A no 70K stack for me.

Hand 6: 500/1000 a100. I get moved to a new table and chip up to 48K winning a few small pots and mixing in a resteal. I open to 2700 with JTo in the HJ, guy on my left calls and old Italian guy in the SB calls. Flop 942r, old guy leads out 3900. Looks like the standard trying to figure out where he's at bet so I inform him that he is losing by making it 12K. Guy on my left folds but he instacalls. Turn 6 he checks and I consider shoving since I only have about a pot size bet left and I still don't think he has much but I'm not cool enough to pull the trigger on something like that so I give up. River 7 chk/chk he tables J9s I muck. I remembered a hand afterwards where I saw him completely station a guy and realized I shouldn't have even bothered bluffing the flop. Discussing afterwards while drinking someone made the interesting generalization that in the US or UK against the nitty grinders there they always love to "play good" by "finding out where they're at" and folding to a raise on the flop so my bluff is good against them, but against an Italian, Frenchman, or Spaniard I'm basically lighting money on fire because they just don't play that sophisticated yet.

Hand 7: 600/1200 a100 So for once I definitely do not have my typical "SirNit" table image which is pretty awesome as it gets me lots of action here. Old guy limps in EP, SB completes, I find AA in the BB with my 30K stack and make it 4800. Limper folds and I'm thinking 'damn that was unexpected, now the SB obv has nothing and folds and I don't get paid off with AA again.' "How much do you have?" Speaking of unexpcted... I push out my chips where he can see them. He pushes in a stack of brown 5k chips and I do one of my typical instacall and turn by hand over immediately. He dejectedly tables 55 and the door card is obv a 5. 952 two clubs though so I have some backdoor draws, and I even turn a flush draw but brick the river.

So overall the day actually went pretty well except for when I got in pots that would have given me an average or better stack, in those I just got crushed. I'll probably play the 2K event tomorrow though I guess.

Mike

16.7K on to Day 2

It was a pretty frustrating day. I more than doubled my stack at my first table to 32K but then got moved to a new table that was pretty tough and didn't make any more hands. I bled down to 16.7K without losing any real substantial pot which was even less fun than it sounds. However blinds are still only 200/400 a50 when we return tomorrow so I have lots of time to pick up some hands. Hopefully I get a better table draw, there are so many bad players I definitely got extremely unlucky with table draws today. I don't feel like recounting all my hands, here's one that describes the 2nd half of my day:

150/300 a25 I raise AQs to 900 in EMP, one of the decent aggro players across the table calls. Flop JT5r, I bet 1600 he calls. Turn 7 chk/chk. River A. omg I finally made the top pair!!!! So I'm trying to figure out how to get value out of the hand, only to realize that not only can I not value bet, I have to check and fold to a bet because his entire range basically just got there way harder than I got there and the stuff that didn't is almost never bluffing. So I check, he bets 5200 and I sigh and fold because he has the nuts.

Mike

EPT Monte Carlo Day 1B

So I play tomorrow (Sunday). Looks like there's going to be around 800 players so probably over 2 million euros for first. I'm not ready to do tell you all about Monte Carlo yet because I didn't leave my room today. Last night was the PokerStars cocktail party which was a lot of fun. It seems like everyone is here, this tournament is just big. Anyways I ended up having a bit too much fun trying to take advantage of free drinks as opposed to $10+ drinks like anywhere else here. So today I just lied around and did nothing all afternoon. In the evening I played the Saturday afternoon EST tournaments to get my mind back on poker for tomorrow but had little luck. I also mixed in some cash games though and ran really well at those. I was up $22K at one point ($20K on one 25/50 table) but I lost a few big pots at the end to finish up only $13K. I haven't posted any cash hands in a while so here are some of the big pots from today:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2425185 - I decided to slowplay preflop. It should still be fairly obvious I need a biggish hand to call here so I was pretty surprised to get paid off by such a weak hand.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2425213 - His little minireraise was scary and I almost decided to play the hand more passively by just calling it. He was an unknown player to me who bought in fairly short and had run it up and on this site that usually means a fish. He didn't seem to be that bad though and passive players can definitely have AA or KK here a lot. I decided that it was likely enough he was just doing something stupid and would give me lots of money so I opted to just try to get it in preflop.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2425200 - A very skillful hand on my part. Notice how I can win from either side of these races, with the AK or the pair, the sign of a real expert.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2425254 - Here I mixed in a 3-bet bluff. It's hard to get action from worse hands on the flop having overrepresented my hand preflop so I check behind for pot control. This gives him the chance to bluff with worse hands and also lets me see some more cards to try to improve my hand if I happen to be beat. If he's slowplaying a big pair which is not all that unlikely and I make 2 pair or better I may win a huge pot instead of getting checkraised off my hand if I bet. I backdoor my flush and win a nice pot.

So I'm rolling along unable to lose a pot until these two hands at the very end of the session:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2425308 - I'm never sure how to play the turn here. I usually just lead out but then if he raises me it's really ugly. I probably have to fold but it's not a fold I'm entirely comfortable making since it feels so weak. I decided to just check/call down and give him the chance to run a big multi-street bluff trying to represent a hand like AK. In particular once he bets big on the turn I'm very concerned he has a huge hand and I definitely am not going to raise him, but I certainly can't fold at any point.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2425343 - Just one of those gross hands. I don't think I can play it any other way but the queen is such a bad turn card, as soon as it hit I just had that feeling that I was about to lose a lot of money.

Anyways time to get some rest before I play tomorrow. Play starts at 1pm here so 7am EST. CardPlayer is here doing live coverage (www.cardplayer.com) so if you're bored that's probably the best place to check and see if they happen to have any updates about me.

Mike

Pisa, Florence, and Monte Carlo!

Hello, bonjour! I am now settled in the Monte Carlo Bay Hotel and Resort, and it is pretty much the best place ever. I'll have lots of time to rave about it in the coming week though once I've seen and done more here, for now I want to talk about the last few days doing the tourist thing in Italy. So timex, ch0ppy (Matt), and I stayed in San Remo Sunday night and played online tournaments until 7am or whatever because of the time difference. Our plan was then to check out Pisa and Florence before heading to Monte Carlo for the EPT grand final, but at the last minute while we were looking for hotel/finalizing our plans before leaving timex dropped out and decided to just stay in San Remo and be a degenerate, so only ch0ppy and I ended up going. We decided to try to keep the trip cheap so we ended up booking a cheap hotel in Pisa for 3 nights. The first night we arrived and crashed almost immediately after a quick wander around town and bite to eat. The second day we went to see the leaning tower as well as checking out the rest of "Piazza dei Miracoli", or Square of Miracles as it is called. The third day we went to Florence for the day and did one of those open top bus tours all around the city.

So day 1 ch0ppy and I leave timex passed out and hop on the train towards Pisa. We transfer in Genova and arrive in Pisa around 4 or 5pm after a 5 and a half hour journey counting wait time for our transfer. It's a short cab ride to our hotel from Pisa Centrale but as tired as we are it's still too early to sleep. We decide to kill some time wandering around Pisa looking for a decent place to eat and end up at a pizzeria by our hotel. Our server looks like the stereoypical Italian pizza man from North American tv/movies which amuses ch0ppy greatly. We're so tired we can't even finish our pizzas and we're passed out in our uncomfortable 45 Euro/night beds by 8:30.

We sleep in until just before 10am and miss breakfast, but we're feeling refreshed and ready to do the tourist thing. We get a cab to the Square of Miracles and after grabbing lunch at a place the cab driver recommended nearby (the only cab driver we had in Pisa that spoke any english beyond "leaning tower" or "train station") we see the tower for the first time. It really is a pretty remarkable building to see first hand. The lean is quite pronounced (approximately 5 degrees, though it was even more than that in the 1990s before it was closed and scientists had to figure out a way to straighten it up a bit and prevent its collapse), and the white marble with which it is built is quite striking. We paid our 15 Euros each to go inside and climb the ~295 steps to the top, and it really is a spectacular view down on the city, the cathedral, and the rest of the square. We next paid our 10 Euros to check out the rest of the buildings of the square. The cathedral was quite nice as well. I've never been inside one before so I was very impressed, though the Duomo in Florence the next day blew it away, but the rest of the square was quite underwhelming, though we did end up learning a lot about the history of Pisa and the Square of Miracles. I also paid 30 Euro-cents to take a piss. Go figure.

The next day was a quick hour long train ride to Florence where we met skier_5 (Tommy) at his hotel and went for lunch. The three of us then got on one of those hope on hop off open roof bus tours of Florence. We went around on the first line seeing some of the sights, only hopping off on a terrace across the river from the main part of the city where there was a statue by Michelangelo and a great view down on Florence. We then all went to the Duomo (cathedral) which was really nice. Most impressive was the huge mural way way up high on the ceiling. We paid to go all the way up to the top of the building and get a closer look at that mural on the way up to really appreciate how huge it is, as well as an incredible view down on to the city. ch0ppy and I then went around on the 2nd bus line which took us way out into Fiesole. We then met back up with skier and Ben Straate (straate on Stars, when I first started playing cash games seriously we were both 3/6 NL regulars on Stars and he was probably the first really aggressive really good player I ran into regularly. Most regs were nits and the few LAGs were terribly spewy. We both moved up to the bigger games fairly quickly.) for dinner. We tried to join them for drinks after but we ran out of time looking for a good bar and ch0ppy and I had to get back to the train station so we could crash back in Pisa for the night.

Yesterday ch0ppy and I checked out of our cheap hotel with no tv or internet and hopped on the train towards Monte Carlo. There were some delays and decently long waits for transfers so the trip took a lot longer than it was supposed to but we finally arrived in Monte Carlo around 9pm. So far I have nothing bad to say about the place. Most of the people we've met speak both english and french very well (french being the official language here), the city looks gorgeous, and the hotel/resort is amazing. More on that note once I've been here longer. I'm sorry no pictures for now. I took a lot in Pisa but my camera battery died and I don't seem to have the charger with me so you'll have to wait on those. ch0ppy got a lot of pictures of everything I missed though. Time to stop sitting in my room and go check this place out. A bien tot,

Mike

Quick update from San Remo

Yo, so I had no luck in the 2K Euro event. In fact it was a complete disaster and I was out before the end of the third level. We ended up staying here an extra night to play Sunday tournaments. I had a few close calls including 5th in the UB $500 for ~$5200 to finish up a little on the day I think. Anyways now that poker is over with ch0ppy and I are heading to Pisa to check out the ol leaning tower and such, and we're also going to spend at least one day in Florence. It seems like most of our friends have already left for Florence but we were behind on the planning with wanting to play Sundays and all. timex is being a biatch though and not coming with us. He's probably just going to head to Monte Carlo early or something lame like that. So I probably won't be posting on here again until I get to Monte Carlo but I'll try to make sure I get some good pictures for the next update. I know I usually slack on the sight-seeing and picture taking so hopefully I can redeem myself a little.

Mike

Damn you Shaun Deeb

Could have saved me 5K Euros by not getting sick but instead I had to play the EPT. It was a pretty short day, I doubled up with AKo 4-flushing AKs in a very skillful hand. Then I called a 4xBB shove with K7o and beat his A9o. Now at 36K blinds 600/1200 a100 I get moved to Schaefer's table. He raises UTG 7-handed to 3200, I call with JJ on the button and the BB makes it 11.2K. Schaefer folds, I'm not thrilled about it but shove and BB has QQ. I'd probably fold TT but I think JJ is just good enough I shouldn't be folding. Anyways the 2K Euro event is tomorrow so I'll get in that now I guess.

I haven't talked about San Remo at all, basically the whole area is gorgeous. When I flew into Nice the runway is right next to the sea so it's a pretty sick view of the Mediterranean as you land. The water is that beautiful bright blue rippling calmly. From Nice timex and I got a cab to San Remo, and the entire trip is winding through hills by the coast. There are houses built on the sides of all these hills by the sea that timex claims would just slide down into the sea if he were to give them a little push. The weather has been very nice like 15-20C every day so we've been chilling by the pool a lot. The casino here is kind of small but it's fairly nice and the hotel we're staying at is pretty nice as well. It looked really small from outside but the rooms are actually fairly spacious. We've been going to some good Italian restaurants, lots of pizza and pasta obviously. Speaking of food it's dinner time. Later,

Mike

I got into the EPT!

I was a last minute entry into EPT San Remo today when Shaun effing Deeb had to withdraw because he was really sick. I was able to buy-in and take his spot which was pretty awesome, though obviously I feel bad for Shaun and hope he's feeling better soon. I did my best to make the most of the opportunity though. I didn't run especially good today and it was an up and down session. I probably made some small mistakes but all-in-all I'm happy enough with how I played. I was pretty exhasusted all day because I woke up really early this morning and didn't bother trying to get back to sleep since I wasn't supposed to have to do anything today. I ended the day with 17K which is a bit short with blinds starting at 500/1000 tomorrow but it'll do. I was going to write a quick summary of key hands but I'm really just too tired. My stack basically went 10K ---->15K ----> 3K ----> 14K -----> 6K ----->17K throughout the day is the short version. Hopefully I can catch some cards tomorrow and make a little run. Bed time,

Mike

I won a donkament!!!....

...and it was so much fun I went ahead and won another one. With no $100K sponsorship package and still a little pissed about the whole ordeal it was clear I had to take matters into my own hands and go get paid. Of course seeing as it was Sunday that meant trying to luckbox some donkaments. Unfortunately all the US-based sites tournaments start super late here and I have a flight at 8am so I didn't really want to bother playing all the late ones and risk having to miss my flight if I was at a final table or something (unless it was a really big final table). Fortunately there are a lot of Euro-donkaments that start at more Euro-friendly times so I just played everything that started from 12pm EST to 5pm EST (6pm-11pm here). Timex told me about a $550 tournament on Betfair that had a $100K guarantee so I made an account there and gave that a shot as well. Lucky he did, because that was where I finally broke my ~9 month slump. It only had 156 players so there was a nice overlay and after a roller coaster final table I finally ran (really) good at the end for once and took it down for $30K.

I guess when it rains it pours though. One tournament I've finished 2nd in at least twice without winning (possibly 3 times not sure) is the Full Tilt $163 tournament. I usually only play the evening one but they now have the usual 3pm one on Sundays as well and it gets a big field. 699 players meant first paid just over $25K and I ran insanely good in this one as well (the first 3 times I got all-in preflop in this tournament in the early-mid stages I was dominated but got there). I cardracked pretty hard at the final table again and shipped this one too. No luck in the other donkaments but +$50k is definitely one of my best days ever and easily my best ever Sunday. Not bad considering I stopped registering 4 hours earlier than usual. Anyways my flight leaves pretty soon so I better go. Peace,

Mike

Sigh.....

Well I'm out of the Everest contest. I don't imagine I ever actually had a chance. The day went pretty well, we played a few sit n gos and I finished 4th and 2nd which is reasonably solid. The interview was two questions, one about Everest and one about poker in general. You get 5 minutes to prepare your thoughts then go in and do a 5 min interview. I got a couple tricky questions but I think I actually handled them pretty well. Anyways then they narrow it down to 20 people at the end of the day. I wasn't selected, but I kind of wasn't surprised. It seemed pretty obvious that their objective point system they claimed would be used was complete bs. Choose one/all of these reasons: I'm Canadian and they're concentrating on the European market. I only recently joined the site mainly for this contest and they wanted to reward their regulars more. They wanted people who were legitimate amateurs to give a shot to "Live the Dream" like the contest name, not someone who was kind of already doing that. Whatever the case, I don't think anything I said could have given me much of a chance as it turns out. I guess I still got paid to hang out in Vienna for a few days which is alright. Vienna seems like a really nice city, but I'm still probably not going to get to seeing much of it with tomorrow being the last Sunday of the quarter hence $1K buy-in Sunday million. I'm pretty much planning to watch March Madness all night, sleep forever because I'm tired and jetlagged as hell, then get up and play Sundays all night. Next up is EPT San Remo which I head to on Monday, I really wish I was playing but it's sold out. Despite the disappointment I somehow still feel really good about this trip, for whatever the hell that's worth.

Mike

Everest Contest Preview

I didn't play at all this weekend hence the absence of blog updates. I spent Thursday-Sunday visiting family and friends in the area and enjoying that special holy weekend that comes but once a year: the first weekend of March Madness, when anything can and invariably does happen. Today I played a nice long session to make up for it a little bit though, and made two final tables. I finished 5th in Party Super Monday for ~$1700 and 2nd (siiiiiiiiiigh) in the iPoker (Titan) network $50 rebuy for ~$8K. So I finished up about $6K at tournaments but lost the same amount playing cash so the day was more or less a wash. I'm leaving for Europe on Thursday, with the first stop being Vienna for the Everest Poker live casting (March 28-31). I haven't really gone through what this involves on here yet so I'll take the time to do so now. The 200 players invited compete for 10 sponsorship packages. We are judged in 7 categories:

Blogging Skills: 10

This category was basically just graded on how many entries you write during the last 4 weeks. I wrote more than required so presumably I received 10/10 points.

Internet Voting: 10%

This is the part where all of you came in. We were divided into the groups of 10 players at the final tables we qualified from. I finished 2nd in my group (the winner had ~8500 hits, I got around 6000, and the next guy had under 3000) for 9 points. Thanks!

Online Poker Skill: 20%
Live Poker Skill: 20%

Presumably these are my strongest categories. Very few if any players in the competition will have the kind of poker resume I've built up in both live and online events over the last year or two. There will also be some tournaments played between us at the live casting which will have some weight on the live portion but I don't imagine that will weigh very heavily compared to results in major tournaments.

Personality: 15%

This is the part where you guys deliver your best one-liners. I'm certainly not the biggest personality out there but I'm fairly certain I'm not too big of a douchebag either.

Everest Poker Knowledge: 15%

I've been doing some studying. I'm not really sure how they will test this category or what types of things they expect me to know but I've been absorbing whatever information I can find.

Speaking Skills: 10%

Perhaps not my strongest category but the experience from being on TV for the World Cup of Poker and doing the interviews for that will help a lot as well as experience giving academic presentations and such. Again nothing I'm too concerned about.

So overall I definitely like my chances and I think it'll be a fun weekend in Austria.

After that it's off to EPT San Remo (April 1-5) which has unfortunately sold out. I hadn't bought in yet so I'll probably have to miss the main event, but there's a 2K Euro 2nd chance event and having to just hang out in Italy isn't a terrible fate. Then there's a week to travel around a bit before EPT Monte Carlo (April 11-18) which I've won a package for already. This is the big one. 10K Euro buy-in, last year first was over $2M USD/CAD and it's looking even bigger this year. Winning this would be a pretty good birthday present to myself. As always blog updates should be more frequent when I'm on the road so check back often starting this weekend.

Mike

I'm Back!

So the Everest competition ends this Friday and my position in the online popularity contest part is unlikely to change so I've decided to start cross-posting back here again. I'm sorry I was away for so long but the Everest competition is obviously a pretty big deal for me and even though I like my chances I have to take it seriously and do everything I can to try to win. On to the blog.

It might seem like this a copy/paste of last weekend's blog but I assure you that's not the case. I slept really poorly this weekend for some reason even though I was exhausted. Still, being the hard worker/addict that I am I just grabbed some caffeine and played the usual schedule. On Saturday I busted out of everything super fast except for the Absolute $500 tourney. Again this week I managed some key suckouts and survived pushbotting my shortstack for quite a while as we neared the final table (the structure gets really bad towards the end in this tournament). I held on until the final table slowly increasing my stack. More of the same at the final table as I played very patient (but not passing on any good spots myself) watching the other shortstacks around me bust out and moved up several spots. I managed to win a couple key pots all-in preflop where I had the best hand for a change and get heads up with around 40% of the chips. Unfortunately I then lost a coinflip to finish 2nd for the second week in a row. Another $24K certainly doesn't hurt, but I kinda wonder if I'll ever win one of these things again.

Sunday was a typical disaster so I won't waste too much time on it. I cashed the warmup on Stars but I'm pretty sure that was the only one. I just slept for 15 hours though so I'm feeling pretty good and ready for St. Paddy's day etc... On that note I must go get ready. Even though I'm crossposting here please take the time to continue to visit me over at http://www.everestpoker.com/video/user/?d=799 and click on all my blog entries until this weekend when the contest is over. Thanks again for all your support.

Mike

LAPC Day 5

Hey I'm 6th/18 in LAPC Main Event heading into Day 5 with 987K chips. Just a spot for you to post your comments here since you can't afaik on Everest's site.

Mike

Help me win a $100K Sponsorship!

Sorry to do this but a part of the competition for the Everest Poker sponsorship is getting a lot of hits on my blogs and any videos I might post over on their website. So please go check out my profile and read my blogs over there for a while! (and tell all your friends!)

http://www.everestpoker.com/video/user/?d=799

Trip Report: Box Seats at the Lakers

First of all, huuuuuuuuge thanks to Scot and Kyle at TwoRags and Dave and everyone else at the Commerce Casino for making this happen. It was a great time, and very much appreciated. One of my favourite parts of traveling for poker is going to different sporting events around the world. So the deal was that the Commerce had arranged for a limo to pick us up and drive us to and from the game, and we had VIP tickets for the Commerce's box. Myself, Thayer, Vivek, and Ray ended up going.

The limo was set to pick us up at 7 at the casino. We had a little trouble finding the driver but we still managed toget to the Staples Center in time for tipoff. As we're walking around the side of the stadium to the VIP entrance we get a little taste of Hollywood. Some perfect 10 blonde girl is walking up to the gate and paparazis are going crazy snapping photos of her. Unfortunately I never got a good enough look to see who she was, but it was definitely one of those things you just don't really see anywhere else. So we get up to the booth and find Scot, and meet Dave from the Commerce (thanks again guys). The booth is nothing overly spectacular, but there's lots of free food and drink so I'm quite happy with it. The first half of the game is probably the biggest annihalation I have ever seen in professional basketball. LA was pressing hard on defense and Atlanta couldn't hold on to the ball for 10 seconds at a time. It took a string of miracle threes before the end of the half for Atlanta to not finish down 40. When coach was teaching them to beat the press during timeout they must have been as distracted by this as I was:


Anyways around half time Norm McDonald came up to the booth and he was a lot of fun to hang out with, definitely a funny guy in person. Here's a shot of everyone in the booth:


And another shot of the Laker girls just because. Unfortunately we were a bit too high up and I didn't quite have enough zoom on my camera to get a real good shot. This time they're wearing the traditional Laker gold.


So all-in-all it was a great night. VIP treatment, basketball, free beer, Laker girls, and celebrities. What more could you ask for? Back on the grind with the $1500 LAPC event tomorrow.

Mike

Another good day

I'm running so hot online since I arrived in LA. Today I played a tournament on Everest Poker. $100 freezeout and I finished 7th for $1100. So what you ask? Check this out:

http://www.everestpoker.com/en/livethedream/

If you read through all the information on that page and then realize that most of the people that have qualified seem to be $5 satellite winners you'll understand why I think I should hopefully be a lock to sign a $100K sponsorship deal with Everest Poker at the end of March. I'm looking forward to hearing more details about the live casting from them. Strange as it seems this may very likely be my biggest tournament score ever.

Right after this tournament ended I met Scot from TwoRags and got a ride to the studio for the single table tournament. The lineup was me, Thayer, Deeb, Serge (adanthar), Nath, Vivek (psyduck), Shane (shaniac), Todd Brunson, Layne Flack, and Jose Canseco. It was definitely an interesting mix of players and the table was a lot of fun for the short time I spent at it. Sadly, I was the first person to bust, and I was eliminated by none other than Jose Conseco. I basically played 3 hands.

Hand 1: 4K starting chips, 25/25 blinds. Shaniac raised UTG to 100, Nath calls UTG+1, I make it 400 2 seats later with AKss. Todd Brunson in MP thinks for a bit and then cold calls which is really confusing, I know he has a huge hand but I don't really think he'd play AA this way, even KK I think he reraises a lot. Shane folds but Nath comes along as well. Flop K87 2 diamonds. Nath checks, I bet 800, Todd shoves for 1450 more, Nath folds, and I call. Todd has the AKdd and I'm getting freerolled. He catches a diamond on the river and I'm left with 1300.

Hand 2: Jose Canseco opens to 200 in MP, I shove 1225 in the SB with AKo and pick it up.

Hand 3: 25/50 now. Canseco opens to 200 in MP, Nath calls in late position, I shove 88 in the BB for 1400, Canseco instacalls which forces Nath to fold 99. Canseco has ATo (not exactly the best call), and flops an A to bust me.

After I busted though I got to go in the other room and watch the hole card cameras and do some commentary on the tournament. It definitely took some getting used to but I think I actually did a fairly decent job, and it was a fun experience. They hooked us up with all sorts of snacks and alcohol too so it was a good time despite the early bustout. So, what am I going to do tomorow to follow a day like this you ask? Probably just relax all day, maybe play a little bit of live cash or something, and then Scot came through with the hookup for box seats at the Lakers game in the evening. Life is going pretty ok right now.

Mike

I must be the greatest!

This title would have worked a lot better if I was able to win a tournament today, but I'm going to use it anyways. I managed to save my Sunday with a 3rd place finish in the $150 tournament on Full Tilt for $11.6K. I was also chipleader in the $200 rebuy as we reached the money but I lost some small pots somehow and then lost a coinflip so I only cashed for $1800. Before those tournaments the day was going pretty terribly. I was busting every tournament I played in record time, which wasn't so bad because it's relatively painless compared to going deep in everything then bubbling. The biggest success of the weekend though was finally winning my EPT Monte Carlo package. I had finished 2nd in two of the Step 6 STT Monte Carlo satellites when only first gets the seat, including one where I lost A8o to A6s all-in preflop for almost all the chips. This time I managed not to bubble the $1000 MTT supersatellite after having the chiplead for a decent amount of the middle stages of the tournament. The package includes the $10K Euro buy-in, hotel for the week, and $1500 for travel expenses. I'm also planning to play EPT San Remo in Italy a couple weeks before Monte Carlo and then figure out some plans for hanging out in Europe for the week in-between the tournaments. I haven't won a seat for that one yet though.

So tomorrow the guys from TwoRags are organizing a single table tournament that will be filmed by the Live at the Bike guys with hole cards and everything to put on their new website I'm told they're working on. It's going to be a $1000 buy-in, with a line-up of mostly TwoRags bloggers and online guys, but I think Vanessa Rousso is also going to play, and there is one other special player: Jose Canseco. Yup, that Jose Canseco. I'm looking forward to this one for sure, it should be a lot of fun and a good experience. Check the blog tomorrow to find out if Roger did it.

So far the guys from TwoRags have been great. I met Kyle the other night and he took a bunch of us for dinner during the $1K event. Definitely seems like a real nice guy with a lot of good ideas. I finally get to meet Scot tomorrow before the tournament, he's been the guy I've mostly talked to on AIM about all the different ideas and things they have going on with the site, and is at least partly responsible for getting me to haul my lazy ass out here. They definitely do have some connections in the city, and it's nice to finally be able to put faces to names to screennames. A lot more online players I know are arriving this week for the main event so there should be a lot of fun times ahead. Now that FTOPS is over I'll be leaving the hotel room a lot more.

Mike

I must be the worst ever

OK not really but the stuff I do sometimes makes me wonder. I fucked up really bad today in the $2500 NL LAPC event. I'm not going to tell you the hand because it's too embarassing and you'd lose any respect you may happen to have for me as a poker player, but the cliffs notes is I made a terrible laydown preflop with 16 players left. To rub it in I obviously had the best hand and would have held up to give me an average stack which would be pretty sweet so deep in the tournament, espeically considering I'd been struggling on a shortstack for a while. Then I shoved TT over a raise 2 hands later and a guy behind me obv woke up with aces to punish me for my idiocy. So anyways I cashed for a bit under $6k or something. I guess fatigue probably was a factor playing for 11 hours but that's part of the game and no excuse. Seriously I'm really bad at poker stop reading this blog. Anyways tomorrow is the big $2500 FTOPS event which I get to play now at least. Hopefully I can sleep off my tilt. I mean seriously good players are supposed to capitalize on these few opportunities we get late in tournaments not do stupid shit and blow every chance at a 6-figure win. Sorry for the swearing mom. I'm done now.

Mike

I just won $42,500 and I'm incredibly disappointed

I know that's an enormous amount of money. To be able to win that much in a day I should be ecstatic. Lots of people probably don't make that in a year and just think I'm an asshole for not appreciating how lucky I am. I guess you'd have to be a poker player, in particular a tournament player, to really understand. That's just the game. I just finished 6th in the FTOPS Event #12, a $300 rebuy tournament with 6-handed tables and over 1300 players, for $42.5K. I played for 9 hours, generally getting very lucky, overcoming the few times I got unlucky, and for the most part playing some pretty damn good poker, especially towards the end. But then I ran into an unfortunate spot at the final table where I got put to a tough decision, and in retrospect, not because of the results of the hand but because of all the factors I failed to consider, I think I made a mistake which cost me tens of thousands of dollars in equity. I was so focused on just playing well and winning, and to fall short is incredibly disappointing. 1st place paid over a quarter million dollars, it was the biggest final table I've ever made, and to screw it up after getting so close is just a huge letdown.

Anyways here's the hand. It's obviously a spot that can go either way based on so many situational factors. I feel like the key factor I missed is that the villian doesn't really know much about me, and from what he's likely seen of my play probably does not think I'm very good as I've gotten my money in bad and drawn out a few times leading up to the final table when he likely had my table open to watch. He's therefore significantly less likely to be bluffing when he makes the large turn bet and I think I should have gotten away from my hand.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2100640

For some reason I seem to go through these stretches where instead of making a lot of these good but tough folds like I usually do I just start calling everything. I had several hands like this today where I paid off big bets in spots I typically get away from, though everything is so situational some of those calls may have been correct. Anyways I'm off to replay these hands in my head a few thousand more times before I can get to sleep. Next live tournament will be the $2500 NL event on Friday, probably play some more online stuff today I guess.

Mike

LA Days 1&2

Hey hey, I got in safely yesterday in time to play Sunday tournaments online. No luck in the tournaments but I had a profitable day because of a good cash session. Cash has continued to go well overall. I've been playing a lot of 25/50 NL so the swings are pretty solid, I had a +$44k day and -$26K day last week, but overall I seem to be moving in the right direction. The games I've been playing have been really good, and I've been putting in a decent amount of hands lately, it kind of reminds of the good ol Cake Poker days of last summer. Anyways today I played my first event of the LAPC, a $2500 event with 167 players. It went a little something like this.H

Hand 1: A bunch of small pots have happened and I'im up to 6K from 5K starting stack. I've opened a few pots but nothing particularly exciting. In one hand I opened UTG to 200 at 25/50 with AKo, a donk calls, and the SB makes it 700, I reluctantly fold. Now in this hand I make it 300 UTG @ 50/100 with AKs. Donk makes it 900, I decide screw these guys I don't really want to fold again (notice the expert thought process and decision making skills used here) even though he seems to be the loose passive type who wouldn't reraise without a huge hand, so I make 2K more and call his instashove. His AA is good and I have 900 left, looks like I'm going to make it back to the hotel in time for the $1K FTOPS event online.

Hand 2: Shove 725 UTG with A3cc. Get called by AT and 66 so I'm basically drawing dead but flop trip threes.

Hand 3: Jason (JP_OSU) opens to 450 UTG, I shove 2250ish with AK and he said he miscounted the pot and called with AQs so I'm back around starting chips when I hold.

Hand 4: I raise TT in the CO to 450, SB calls. Flop A56 two spades, he checks and I decide to check behind. Turn T, he bets 250 and I make it 1000. He calls. Turn Js. He bets 3000, I tank for a bit and call. He says "2 pair" and I table the winner.

Hand 5: I'm not in this hand but it was pretty hilarious. Middle-aged Asian guy who limps a fair bit and loves angle-shooting and giving reverse tells limps UTG and says something about how he always miss the flop, try one more time. Another guy limps, Jason has recently bluffed off his stack and shoves his last 800. BelowAbove is in the BB and raises to 2200 to isolate. UTG now makes it 3600 more. Folds to below who tanks for a while and calls. Flop KTx, below shoves 13K, asian guy beats him into the pot and obv shows AA. Below has QJo???!!! and misses. Jason has KQ and rivers trips to get back in the game.

Hand 6: I raise AJs with 6 players behind me. Guy on my left who seems to always call my raises calls, and now below on his left shoves 5K more. It folds back to me and I figure it's got to be really unlikely that he'd shove on me light there since I usually have a pretty big hand and I'm not going to give him any credit. But on the other hand he is belowbove.... I finally decide to fold but I'm not entirely sure it's right.

Hand 7: I have around 8300 now. Open the HJ to 600 with TT, guy on my left calls yet again. Now the asian guy from before very quickly makes it 2600 on the button without saying anything. I figure this is far too good a spot for him to squeeze, and as much as I hate putting much faith in my live reads, the speed of his action and the fact he didn't try to Hollywood at all makes me think he's weak. I think for a bit and decide I just can't fold, so I stick it in and he tanks for a bit and eventually folds.

Hand 8: I now have about 11.3K, and a very solid table image. Folds to the CO who seems not overly loose or overly tight so far, he hasn't really showed any hands since he got moved here, who open to 625 at 100/200 a25, his standard open size. I reraise to 1825 in the BB with 76o, but he quickly calls. Flop 542r, I check intending to checkraise all-in, but he bets only 1200. I sense a trap and decide to call. Turn Qc starting a backdoor flushdraw, I check he bets 2500. This time I just can't resist the temptation to shove on him, but he instacalls and table the nuts and more: 63cc. I don't get there and that's that. It would be fair to say most people at the table were a little surprised when the hands got turned over. I overheard him make some comment about how he thought I had a monster preflop but I "priced him in if I could hit the right flop". lol.

Anyways tomorrow is a $1k tourney which I guess I'll play. I'm a bit unimpressed by the size of the field today though and it's kind of tempting to skip some of these prelims and just grind online if they're not going to be very big, or maybe even play some live cash. Anyways I'll be blogging more regularly for the next couple weeks as always when I'm on the road. Talk to y'all later,

Mike

Timex is the sickest

He won EPT Dortmund yesterday for 933K Euro or just shy of $1.4M USD. He's just been on a tear to start the year. Sadly I didn't have any of his action for this. I'm taking a rare Sunday off today to go to a Super Bowl party. I figure I'm probably saving around $6K this way anyways so it's all good. I guess there should be some kind of content in this post. Here is my January graph where I crush over an insignificant number of hands.

Almost $8/hand, wish it was always that easy.

Mike

lol I lied

It all started when Scot from TwoRags IM'd me to ask if I was going to the LA Poker Classic. I explained to him, as I wrote 2 days ago in my last entry, that I most likely was not. He said that was too bad as TwoRags has some connections in the area with the Commerce etc (I'm pretty sure he lives in LA)... and he had some special events planned. This was somehwat enticing but I still wasn't too interested. Nonetheless I checked the schedule of events again on the CardPlayer website and it turned out it was much better than I remembered. I thought it was basically all $1000 buy-ins with one $2500 and one $1500 mixed in or something. It turns out there are three $2500 events though (one is limit holdem but that's ok), a couple $1500s, and then several smaller ones. Not so bad I thought....

Kyle (grafyx) had asked me if I was going since he needed a roommate. I'd of course said no at the time but I messaged him back and he was still looking for one and had already done the work looking into hotel rooms. So I then decided to go ahead and have a look at flights just in case. It turns out Air Canada has a seat sale on and I could book a round trip flight for just $400. Well now... It seemed like everything was just falling into place but I still wasn't sure. I had to check how this fit my schedule. Ideally I would show up for the $2500 event on Monday the 11th, the first of the big events, and then stay until the end. I have Raptors tickets for the 8th and had made plans a while ago with a friend for that night. Perfect timing there. I also have tickets for the game on the 20th, but Scot said he might be able to hookup a Lakers game for us there, so that's at least an even tradeoff. Damn, I guess someone out there really wants me in LA. And finally, I'm up around $40K so far this month online, so even if I 0-for another series losing 20-30K down there wouldn't be the end of the world. LA, here I come.

Anyways to add some poker to this here are some cash hands. I realize I haven't posted any cash game stuff in a while and that's one thing I want to do more of. I'm going to concentrate on some hands from my best session of the month. I'm playing two 25/50 NL full ring tables with this fish VARBED. When there's a big fish playing way too many hands it basically becomes a big fight among the other players to try to get his money. I'm going to be raising almost anything playable to try to isolate him when he limps in, or sometimes limping behind speculative hands hoping to flop big on him. That's the dynamic that is important in these hands.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2020495 - The session actually got off to a poor start with this cooler. I think the lead on the flop is the best way to get max value from AK or AQ.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2020483 - He liked to minraise with all sorts of garbage so I put in a reraise here to isolate him in position with the best hand. Postflop I have to figure I have the nuts against a player like this, especially given his weak little lead, so no slowing down to control pot size here, I want to get stacks in.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2020506 - This biggest pot I won was actually not from VARBED but resulted because of the dynamic he created. As I'd been isolating him a lot with weakish hands trying to keep him to myself, the other players obviously pick up on what I'm doing and want to stop me so that they can play more pots with him too, so the obvious idea is to just reraise me. I'd had to fold to these reraises a couple times but this time I have a hand I can make a stand with. I make a smallish reraise to $2250 to make it look like I have room to fold if he moves in on me, and give him the chance to make a bad bluff. Fortunately that's exactly what happened and I won a big pot.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2020523 - I got really lucky here. He telegraphs his hand as a big one preflop and gives everyone the odds to try hit a flop on him and crack it. Luckily I'm able to do just that. I guess either leading or checkrasing here are both good options on the flop, I went for the lead again.

Mike

A decent little week capped off with some rare Sunday success

Hey everyone, I'm back safely in Toronto just chilling. Really it was a super lazy week. Anyways my plan for the next couple months is to get back to really griding online and putting in some hands. I've had a lot of fun lately travelling around, and while I play a lot of poker on those trips, if I really want to make some money I'm much more profitable online. Even though the games are tougher on average, being able to play 4-8 tables at once just lets me play so many more hands that live can't really compete. Also, being able to table select across multiple sites allows me to find the best games to help offset the generally tougher opponents. Also, it's important for me to play a lot more cash game hands since my hourly rate is much higher in those than in almost any tournament assuming I can find good games.

Tthis week I put in a decent number of hours playing both tournaments and cash games, and was lucky to run pretty well so I turned a nice profit. I've been playing 10/20 and 25/50 on mostly some of the smaller sites, and the games have been pretty good. I've also been playing the usual evening and weekend tournaments, and after a ton of close calls and a lot of frustration I finally broke through for a nice score in a major Sunday tournament, the new "Sunday Brawl" on Full Tilt. It's a $240 buy-in where $200 goes to the prize pool like usual and $40 goes towards your bounty, meaning whoever busts you gets your $40. Of course whenever you bust anyone you get their $40 bounty, so it's a nice little twist added to the usual tournament format. It certainly adds a little incentive to go out of your way to try to bust people, though the strategic adjustments required are nothing major as the bounties are not too big compared to the prize pool. This week's tournament had almost 1600 runners.

I managed to finish 5th for $19K, plus I believe 8 bounties ($320) to top it off. The final table was both lucky and unlucky for me. I picked up more premium hands than I ever have in such a short period at a final table, but unfortunately they did not hold up in some key pots. I lost a big coinflip with TT vs AKs, and then on the very next hand I slowplayed KK by just calling a raise. A shortstack moved in behind me with AK, the raiser folded and I called, but an ace flopped for the 2nd hand in a row. Fortunately as I'd been picking up so many hands I still had some chips left and managed to double up and hang around for a while, but eventually I lost another all-in preflop as a decent favourite (KQs vs JTo) on the shortstack to bust 5th. Still, it was nice to make a major final table and book a nice win for the weekend. The 1600ish players was the biggest field I've ever gotten through to the final table since my $10 freezeout days. Like I mentioned I had close calls in several other tournaments, in particular the late $100 rebuy where I finished 16th for $2K.

So the plan for coming weeks is to keep putting in a lot of hands and get myself nicely into the black on the year. There's a small chance I may decide to go to the LA Poker Classic for the main event and the legendarily soft cash games at the Commerce towards the end of February, but most likely I won't be playing any more live events until EPT Monte Carlo (the one in Europe not the one that was on fire in Vegas) in April, and possibly the EPT in Italy just before Monte Carlo. Well I'm out. Take it easy,

Mike

$5K HU and $2K 6-max

So I bubbled both of these. I played pretty well though, there were some sweet hands. In the first round of the HU I played Doug Lee. As far as I know he's basically a terrible spewbox, but I didn't play very well against him and didn't make many hands. Fortunately I luckboxed some coinflips to scrape by after losing the first game in the best of 3. In the next round I played Anna Wroblewski. I thought she was spewy aggro too but she was actually kind of solid but on the passive side. Anyways in this match I stopped being a pussy like I was against Lee and started trusting my hand reading to make some good river calls.

Hand 1: She limps and I check T3o in the BB. Flop J73 chk/chk. Turn Kc starting a possible flush draw. I check/call her bet. River K, I check, she bets and I figure enough draws and stuff missed that I should call and beat her 45.

Hand 2: She limps I check 96o. Flop 644, both check. Turn 5, I bet 3/4 pot she calls. River 2, I check and she bets some normal amount. I don't think she'd call the turn with just a 3, but probably would with a 7 which she'd be likely to bluff with here, so I call and win again.

I ran pretty good against Anna and made some hands at key times to win the match 2-0. In the third round I played timex though and he kicked my ass. I got behind in both, then won key races to get the lead, then lost really key races to lose. Fortunately we had traded a lot of % so I still got some money out of this tournament.

Today was the $2K 6-max which had a really great structure. I was doing really well for a while, and played some pretty interesting hands, unfortunately I busted 29th when 24 paid in the end though.

Hand 1: There's an aggressive player on my left who's 3-bet light already preflop against other players but not me. I can tell from the way he's played other hands though that he really knows what he's doing, he's not just some crazy spewtard. At 75/150 I open A6s UTG 5-handed to 450 with about 12K. I've been semi-active and as Im putting the chips for my raise in the pot I'm thinking this guy is going to 3-bet me soon, possibly this hand in fact. He quickly makes it 1350 and it folds back to me. It's a lot easier to trust your read and make a biggish move in a situation like this when you can predict his move, so I make it a goofy 3350 representing a monster but leaving room to fold to a push and he folds.

Hand 2: I've since 4-bet the same guy again, this time with AK, and had him fold again, and also been raising a ton of pots since I keep picking up pretty good hands and opening. It folds to me in the SB, I now have 15K and the BB covers, and I raise to 450 with A4ss. BB calls and we see a flop of 663 2 spades. I bet 600 and he makes it 1600. I don't really believe him because he's some middle aged guy and they would almost always slowplay trips here to trap the young overaggressive kid, but we're deep enough that I don't really want to pop him back since if he does happen to have a big hand I would pot-commit myself in a bad spot. Also my ace-hi can easily be the best hand if he's bluffing so I don't necessarily need to bluff him back. The turn is an offsuit 8, I check and call 2500, still hoping to make my hand but also thinking my ace may well be the best hand. The river is another 6, I check and he bets 3500. At this point he's representing basically nothing. It's so unlikely he has quads (he was already unlikely to have a 6 because he didn't slowplay, and now with 3 of them on the board and his small bets it's almost certain he doesn't), and he wouldn't play a 3 or 8 this way, he'd check at least one of the turn and river probably. So A-hi basically looks like the nuts to me here, pretty sure he has to be bluffing, so I call and he taps the table and says nice call. Then turns over his ATo. Damn.

Hand 3: So I'm down to around 7K, then get down to 4K. Still 75/150, CO, button and SB all limp. I check Q3o in the BB. Flop QT3 2 clubs. I lead 450 and the CO calls. Turn K, I bet 1K and he calls. River T, counterfeiting my hand. I check with 2850 left and he quickly put me all-in. I'm pretty frustrated, but then start thinking about what could he possibly have. I dont think he'd bet a king this big. If he was ahead on the turn he would have raised. How can he have a ten? JT maybe makes sense. So does busted clubs though. Eventually I stick it in, and he taps the table (he didn't accidentally have a better hand this time). Nice.


Hand 4: I win a race with KQ vs A8 aipf to get some chips, then pick up KK and AA and bust players on consecutive hands to get to 55K at 200/400 a50, around a twice average stack. Then I donk a bunch off though at 300/600 a50. It folds to the HJ who is pretty new table. As far as I can tell he just plays every pot. I can't recall a time in the 3 or so orbits he's been here that it folded to him and he didn't raise. He makes it 1700, and I find 66 in the CO and decide to just reraise to 5100 and take my chances since it seems like he's so ridiculously out of line. Instead he moves all-in for 20K more and I'm getting too good a price to fold against a guy who as far as I know could just be a psycho. He has JJ though and I lose half my pretty stack. I really hate playing for so many chips prelop with 66 I would never normally do this, but as far as I could tell he was raising practically any 2 cards.

From there less interesting stuff happened. I got into shortstack ninja mode and did my thang. Eventually with 30 left, 24 getting paid, Joe Sebok limped UTG at 800/1600 a200, CO limped, and the button raised to 8500. He was very aggressive so I figured he could easily be raising pretty light. I found 99 in the SB and shoved my 29K stack, and he called with J9s. Door card J, fun way to spend a day. Tomorrow is my last day here in Australia. There's a $1k event. I'll see how many players it gets, decent chance I'll play I suppose but I may just pass on it and make the most of my last day here instead. I did get around to going to watch some Australian Open tennis a few days ago which was really fun. We didn't get to see any big names, but watched some pretty competitive matches and I got a nice sun burn. OK bed time for me I guess. Later,

Mike

Sigh...

Yet another early bustout for me in a major tournament. Considering how conservative I tend to play this is getting kind of ridiculous. My table draw wasn't especially good even though there was only one good player and he busted very early (Brandon Adams). I had terrible relative position though, the two maniacs were on my left and three nits on my right. After the maniacs was an aggressive young Norwegian player so I was basically forced to play pretty ABC poker. Anyways I won and lost some small pots for the first 2 levels. Got up to 22K but then started bleeding off some chips when the maniacs on my left reraised me a few times or I missed flops and either gave up or fired once and then gave up.

I was down to about 15K in level 3, 100/200 a25, when I found QQ in the hijack and made it 600. The Norwegian kid made it 2000 from the SB. I considered my options and decided to just shove to make my hand look like AK or a frustrated bluff since he'd reraised me a few times before. He called after a short think with JJ and I was looking good for a double up until a jack turned. Anyways, there are some more events here later in the week and I do really like this city so things could be worse. I think the Australian Open tennis has started too so I definitely want to go check that out at some point.


Mike

Edit: I'm on the TV in Canada on The Score right now apparently, World Cup of Poker from Barcelona is on.

Day 1A I guess?

Yoooooooooooo. So I was playing some drunk kickball with the rest of the poker nerds today. Team Goggles kicked some ass imo. After that great victory all hands headed to the Belgian beer garden to continue the good times. I don't think I should have to explain why drinking Belgian beer surrounded by gorgoeus landscape and Australian women with all my homies was one of the best times ever, but in case it's not obvious I loved that place. Then we went for a great meal at the Meat and Wine Co. After that we went to a bar where a seemingly low key night took a turn for the potentially epic when Mark Vos showed up. Several shots later we were headed to the infamous Spearmint Rhino, but they wouldn't let us some of us in due to our kickball attire. Despite our best efforts to bribe the bouncers several of us could not get in. The bouncers were being dicks, so I finally just told them to **** themselves and walked back to Crown by myself. Pokerstars had already bought me into the main event so I stopped by the poker room just to register, planning to play day 1B because I'm kind of drunk right now. As it turns out I was signed up for Day 1A by default at the feature table. I'm not sure if that means TV coverage or not, but I know the table is next to the rail at least so friends here can sweat me. I could have changed my Day 1 but that seemed worth keeping I guess. So I'm going to bed now so I can be ready to ship it crucial tomorrow. I suspect Day 1A will be the softest day 1 so I don't mind playing tomorrow anyways. Table 31, seat 7. Holla back,

Mike

$1K rebuy tournament report

I promised a tourney report and today had some interesting hands so it should make a decent one.

Rebuy period: I usually clown around a bit in live rebuy tournaments in the rebuy period. I kept my 4 $1K chips to rebuy with on the table, and then try to make a few "crazy" image plays. Most people in these tournaments aren't planning to really rebuy at all, maybe if they bust or something, so you can get away with a lot knowing you can always rebuy if something backfires. One of my favourites is to shove from the binds when a bunch of players limp with any two cards since they basically never have a hand to call. Then you show your rags and start setting up an image. So I did that a few times today which was ok. The best hand was when I limped 44 UTG and announced I was setting the trap. Mark Goodman raised my limp and he was the only guy who seemed to not be averse to gambling a little. The BB called his raise and he has nothing approximately always. I now sprung the trap and moved in, Goodman called with KTo and I won the race. From there people didn't fold when I bet, but I never had a hand so I lost the chips I had won. Double add-on and on to the real poker, I'm in for the "minimum", $4K.

Hand 1: I had won a small flip with 99 vs AJ but then lost some back as my bets still weren't getting much respect and I wasn't making pairs. with around 6600 I raise UTG with T9dd to 300 at 50/100. Probably a somewhat questionable raise but whatever. A late position player calls and the BB who is pretty bad calls. Flop TT5, I bet 650 and the BB calls. Turn 5, I bet 1250 hoping to induce a bluff shove and the BB calls. River 7, he checks again, I bet 2750, he moves me in for 1700 more, I obviously call and he has 66 for some reason.

Hand 2: I went on a bit of a rush from here but I can't really remember all the hands. I know i busted Mark Goodman when he called my position raise and checkraised all-in with a flush draw on the flop. He was short though so I had an easy call with top pair which held. I'm now up to about 22K.

Hand 3: I have a semi-active image but have mostly shown down good hands lately and I've never reraised anyone. It folds to a young Aussie guy in MP who raised to 600 at 100/200 a25. He's been pretty active and seems to know what he's doing, and he also has a pretty decent sized stack. I decide to make it 1850 in the CO with Q9o, but he calls. Not sure what he has here, could be trapping with a big hand, could have small pair or suited connector hoping to flop big and bust me, or maybe some random big cards he doesn't want to fold if he's worse than I think he is. Flop A87, he checks and I have to bet this flop as it he shouldn't usually like the ace. I bet 2750, he hums and haws about how unlucky it he is that an ace flopped and calls. The turn is an A, I obviously don't put any more money in. It checks down, and a key point in Australia is that the last aggressor always has to show their hand first. So I roll my Q9o so I can see his hand, and he the AA for quads. Anyways now my image obviously sucks, which is important for this hand.

Hand 4: A young German player Daniel Zink makes it 550 in EP. I still have around 16K and he covers me, and I find T9dd in the SB. I figure with my new bad table image I should get some action if I flop big and call. The flop comes 875 two diamonds, and I lead 1150, intending to reraise all-in if he raises my bet. He just calls though and the tuen is the 8d completing my flush b ut pairing the board. I bet 2675 and he calls. The river is a 5. I really think he has a big pair that he's playing pot control with, and given my new bad image I just might get a river bet paid off. It seems very unlikely he has a fullhouse given he didn't raise the flop, and a bigger flush is only a little worrisome. I make a fairly big bet of 6425, and he thinks for a bit and moves me in for 4250 more. I think I thought for 3 minutes or so, though most of my energy was probably dedicated to being angry and hating my life more than figuring out what to do. I really didn't see how it made sense for him to have a big hand here unless he slowplayed a monster on the flop, which on such a draw heavy board should be less likely. Anyways eventually I just talked some sense into myself and realized that he probably played his hand poorly on some street, but it's impossible for him to be bluffing and this is an easy fold. So I folded angrily.

Hand 5: Steveol7 raises to 800 at 150/300 a 25 on my right. I move in with 66, the button shoves over the top and I outflip his AK to get back to 10Kish. OK maybe I have a chance again.

Hand 6: From here not much happened. I blinded down a bit, I tried to raise the blinds twice butgot reraised both times despite they were the only two times I put chips in the pot during the 200/400 level. I got into pushbot mode to stay afloat. Eventually I got moved tables with 7500 at 300/600 a75. A player who Bond had told me is rkruok from online shoved his very short stack on my BB. I found AQ and instacalled but lost to his T6o. I then beat JJ with KT0 the next hand though to get right back where I was. My bustout hand was when I shoved 66 in EP with around 7K at 300/600 a75. The BB called with 88 and that was that.

Tomorrow is a $1500 bounty tournament that has a kind of weird structure I need to check out. In other news, the Full Tilt plane from LAX got in today with all the Full Tilt pros and people who won seats to the main event on their site, as well as some others who hitched a ride, so pretty much everyone is here now. I crashed the Full Tilt party for a bit tonight with Leo and a couple others which was alright. I also had kangaroo for dinner tonight, and it was actually pretty good. Still haven't headbutted or boxed any kangaroos yet though. They're avoiding me imo.

Mike

Aussie Update

Hey, we're 4 events into the Aussie Millions now and I'm still having a blast. I haven't had too much success myself so far, but friends have already put up some good finishes. timex got 2nd in the opening $1K NL event after chopping for $90K. For some reason he thought it was a good idea to trade 10% with me for the entire series so that has me in good shape thus far. Also, Jimmy "gobboboy" Fricke won Event 3, the mixed stud tournament, for $17K. gobbo finished 2nd in the main event here last year for $1 million AUD, so he was definitely very pleased to come back and win an event this year. I had my first cash in the $1K limit holdem event today. I was min-betting along pretty well, but then I got caught making a move on the bubble which cut into my stack. After that I went card dead, and finally made a stand with ATo in my BB. Unfortunately I ran into the CO raiser's 93s, and that was that. I finished 15th for $1230. So once the $1100 buy-in is accounted for and the $123 I owe timex for our 10% swap, I finished ahead $7 on the day. Then I drank a $9 Crown Lager from the mini-bar in our hotel room. Sigh.

Outside of poker Melbourne has been a lot of fun. I've been hanging out with all the other online players that are already here a lot. We usually just end up going for dinner, having some drinks, and then end up back at Tony's place for Wii, chinese poker, more drinks, etc.... Tomorrow is the $1K rebuy, which should be a great tournament. It's the biggest effective buy-in preliminary event that I plan to play. Playing rebuy tournaments live is always a lot of fun because you get to do crazy stuff and laugh at the silly live nits who don't even rebuy off the start. Also, I'm 2/2 lifetime in cashing $1K rebuys, so I have a record to maintain. I haven't really given any tournament reports yet, but I'll get around to doing more of those at some point. The last thing anyone wants is to listen to me try to give limit holdem strategy, considering I was a losing 5/10 player on Party before I switched to mostly tournaments. It doesn't really matter though, because everywhere you go people are just awful at limit holdem. Keep in mind that limit holdem was the main game played in most casinos before the poker boom, so you'd think at least some of the old time players might be decent. Again, you would be wrong. Almost everyone has so many glaring fundamental leaks that it's ridiculous. Anyways, going to get some rest and hopefully put in a good showing in the rebuy tomorrow. Peace,

Mike

G'day from Melbourne

So I've arrived in Melbourne for the Aussie Millions. Today was the first event, a $1K NL event with 537 players. I just busted out after losing a flip, but I'll talk about that in a bit. The trip down here took much longer than any other I've been on. I believe it was around 22 hours in the air and close to 30 hours total. Despite not feeling well for most of the trip I managed to sleep a bit and arrive in relatively good shape. However, in the future I won't be booking any 14 hour flights with United, they just don't offer very much in terms of TV/movies and I can't sleep 14 hours straight on a plane. My bags arrived with no problems, however I was still missing a lot of stuff because Air Canada had lost my bag on my flight from St. John's to Toronto earlier in the week, and failed to deliver it before I left for Australia. So while I did have all my shorts and sandals that don't play so well in the several feet of snow in Newfoundland, I was rather low on some essentials such as socks and underwear. This meant the first order of business once getting checked into the hotel and cleaned up a bit would have to be Australian shopping spree.

Timex's bags did not arrive in Melbourne unfortunately, so after a brief delay for that we got a cab to Crowne Plaza Hotel where we are staying for the duration of the trip. Unfortunately the Crown Casino was sold out when I got around to booking, but the Plaza is still a very nice hotel just across the street, and our room is quite acceptable, though I'm told the rooms over at the Crown are incredible. As luck would have it, I was able to get a hold of Tony aka Bond18, another online player/friend/TwoRags blogger who lives in Melbourne now, and he and his girlfriend Celina were already planning to do some shopping that afternoon. A quick cab ride later and I met up with them. We ran around Melbourne all afternoon/evening for various errands such as food, shopping, and Crown Lager. I bought a bunch of clothes, though I may actually need more before the end of the trip. Between the travel, heat, beer, and my stomach not feeling so well, I was exhausted by 8:00, when we met some other poker players for more asian food. The following story is completely irrelevant, but was so bizarre I feel have to share it.

I decide to just order a coke since I've got no appetite, and they give me a glass with some ice to pour it in. As I said I'm completely exhausted and basically just trying to make it through the meal so I can get a ride back to the hotel. So I pour the coke into the glass, and as I'm putting the can down I hear the sound of ice and coke spilling out all over the table and feel coke dripping down onto my shorts. As exhausted as I am it takes a moment for me to process what is happening, and I am particularly confused because I am fairly certain I did not knock over the glass, nor can I remember hearing the sound of it smashing against the table. Finally I react to stand up and move out of the way of the spill, and as I do I notice that the glass has split right in half directly down the middle. As far as I can tell this seems like something that should basically be physically impossible, but all I can really muster as a reaction is to stare with a blank look of bewilderment on my face and point at it. In the end everyone has a good laugh, at my reaction as much as what happened, and I got another Coke and glass which did not explode.

After dinner I got dropped back at the hotel. My final errand of the day went smoothly fortunately. Instead of wiring money down, I was able to arrange to trade online money for Australian cash here with an Australian pro named Gary Benson at a reasonable rate. He has a cashout service for Aussie players on Pokerstars, but during tournaments here he also trades cash for online $$ for foreign players coming into town. I must say it's sure is a lot more convenient than dealing with a bank. Just send the transfer online, meet him down in the poker room to pick up the cash, and you're already over there to register for the tournament the next day. No annoying paper work and waiting periods like with banks. Anyways so far I love Melbourne. The people seem friendly, the accent is pretty cool, the women are gorgeous, the weather is beautiful, and what I've seen of the city so far is great, though I think I've mostly been in the nicer parts. What an awesome place to come lose $30K.

Oh yeah tournament report. I got my money in as a 2:1 dog twice and won, then got in as a coinflip twice and lost. I also made one rather awful fold preflop which I'm kinda pissed with myself about, but whatever. So I guess I'm not going to get around to that tournament report after all. If that's all you were looking for and I tricked you into reading all this then good, at least someone got through all my ramblings.

Mike

Quick 2007 Year in Review

I kind of don't feel like writing a big long year in review, so I'm going to do the cliffs notes version instead. I started the year with basically a $50K roll online not counting the money I won live over WSOP that I didn't want to touch, and a PCA seat. In 2006 I had pretty decent success at the bigger tournaments online and had started learning 3/6 and 5/10 NL cash games online with a lot of initial success. Enter 2007, here's a post I made from 2+2 in an end of year reflection thread with some grammar fixed and extra details added:

Man what a sick year I had.... I started the year playing most of the big online tournaments and having a lot of success learning cash games playing 3/6 and 5/10 NL on like a 50K roll. I continued to do well in those games and also started shortstacking 25/50 and killing it. I was running good and winning pretty big, and I also had a few 20-25K tournament scores. Then I began taking shots with timex shortstacking nosebleed cash games on Full Tilt. Initially we just crushed the games, but we eventually went on a big downswing and quit as the players were adjusting, but still finished up pretty huge overall. During this time I had also moved up to fullstacking 10/20 and 25/50 cash games when they were good and continued to run really hot. Next, the World Series came and I didn't do anything great despite having a bunch of cashes, but I won Super Tuesday online for $75K while I was there.

When I got home from WSOP I decided I just couldn't deal with grad school anymore and there was no way I could finish. I dropped out and grinded 25/50 on Cake back before all the 2+2ers invaded when the games were really soft. I immediately put in a +$200K month, and decided this going pro thing was pretty ok. Since then I've basically just been losing a lot, but I'm still so far ahead of where I ever thought I'd be on the year that it's hard to be too upset. My goals for 2008 include breaking out of 0/17 slump in 5K+ buy-in events, first 6-figure tournament score, win anything on a Sunday, get back to putting in more cash hands, and the usual trying to live a bit more healthily. Monetary goals are kind of foolish since all you can really control is how well you play and the variance is pretty big (especially playing so many big buy-in live events). Also, you never how good the online games will stay as time progresses, but that being said, I'd like to make a million this year.

Mike

Sunday: $100K bubbles and Aussie sats

This week's Sunday heartbreak comes from a new source! Pokerstars added a $5K 20-player winner-take-all tournament which I decided to give a shot. I'm an idiot and haven't fixed my laptop so I couldn't play Party Poker, and I couldn't deposit money onto some of the European sites I've started playing on either since I was in the US. That left a lot of open screen space early in the day when I'd usually play Eurodonkaments so this seemed to fit in the schedule pretty well. The field didn't look too bad, it was definitely pretty tough but there were some soft spots and most of the real top tier players weren't in it. I got off to a very slow start but as we closed in on the final 10 players I started making some hands and picking up a lot of chips. I won a couple huge pots against JCarver (taknapotin) when I flopped big hands. In the first he mistimed a big bluff and in the 2nd he ended up folding the river after putting in a fair number of chips against my flopped set.

Things were going well as we got to 4-handed play but I lost a key pot where I slowplayed QQ preflop just calling a reraise from TheCleaner, who would prove to be my nemesis. An A flopped, and when he checked the flop to me I knew I was in trouble. He bet the turn blank pretty strong and although I had expected him to bluff the flop with most hands I beat, I didn't really know his game that well and I decided folding such a strong hand for one barrel was too weak, and called. He decided to check the river so I got to see his AT. This hand really killed my momentum and I was shortstacked shortly thereafter as he was really attacking my blinds hard and I couldn't find much to defend with. I got lucky to suck out on the river with my KJ vs his KQ and then finally got action on a couple of my bigger hands against the other player (Rickiee I think?), winning AT vs A8 and AK vs A2 all-in preflop. I was still way behind heads up though and never got much going. I got as close as 35K to 65K but he played very well and I was probably a little unlucky also to not get much action when I had a hand. He ground me down and I ended up resorting to some really risky bluffs to try to hold my ground. In the end I moved in on one of his raises with KTs even though I felt he had switched gears and was not planning to fold to my push. I figured I wasn't in too bad shape against his range and I was so far behind and nothing was working that I'd rather just gamble to try to get some chips (of course my read could always be wrong also). He called with AQ and I outflopped him but he rivered an A for the win. Tough guy to run into HU, I'm told he's a very good Dutch midstakes HU cash player and he got the best of me. Anyways the exciting part of for me and all of you I guess is that the final table of this tournament will be replayed with hole cards of all players exposed, presumably some time during this week. So keep an eye out for that and we'll find out how badly I got owned or if he was just running good.

I had a few deep runs in some of the Sunday majors but no major cashes. I did however finally win a seat to the Aussie Millions main event. I've been playing the satellites on Full Tilt and Cake every Sunday for this and Stars finally started running some this week as well. I still run pretty ok in major satellites on Stars apparently as I won the seat on my first try. The play was really incredibly bad, it was kind of shocking. I'm used to playing against weak players who have won seats into these bigger buy-in satellites through small stakes subsatellites, but a lot of these guys were just on a whole different level of bad. Open shoving 10 times the pot with Q9o preflop in MP fairly late in the tournament bad (I obviously luckboxed into picking up KK to take the donation). So this saved my day more or less. Anyways I'm stranded in the airport for now, my flight is super late because of all the snow in Toronto. I thought it was only 5 hours late but it's actually going to be at least 7. Vegas was a lot of fun as always, but I think Australia is going to be even better.

Mike

Busto

Spent more time on the colour up to start the day than I actually played in the tournament. I folded a bit, moved in once, and was down to 7700 when the CO open shoved for 10K (still 400/800 a100). I called with AQo OTB and then the BB overcalled. CO had KQo, BB 99 and the nines held. Oh well I'm Vegas for the weekend, could be worse. I'll probably party a bit and play online. Home for Christmas soon!

Mike

12.3K for Day 2

Today was up and down, but overall pretty poor. I don't feel like running through all the hands again right now. My level by level chip count went 30K--->22K--->11K--->22K--->20K--->12K. I got dealt a ton of premium pairs but either got them beat or won small pots with them mostly, and I think every time I put chips in the pot preflop once the antes kicked in without a premium hand it got reraised behind me, it was really frustrating. I likely made several smallish mistakes throughout the day but avoided any outright blunders, so at least I still have some chips.

Mike

"No, we're brother and sister"

I haven't played at all the last 3 days, my sister came down to visit me when she finished up with school for the term so I've just been hanging out with her. We saw a few shows, Wayne Brady on Monday night and KA by Cirque du Soleil on Tuesday. Wayne Brady was pretty good, if you're a fan of his you'd obviously like it, he did a lot of the usual stuff though, I wasn't overly impressed but it was fun. KA was great, the only other Cirque show I'd seen before was Love, the Beatles one, and I liked this one a lot more, I'm going to have to make sure to see the others when I get a chance. We also had some nice meals. Social House, the Japanese/sushi place at Treasure Island was the best meal we had by far. Unfortunately she left this evening so it's back to work for me with the $15K main event. I play Day 1B tomorrow.

In previous events I played the $5K tournament on Saturday. I grinded for 11 hours, never really getting much going. I peaked at around 22K chips (10K starting) when I sucked out on Roy Winston when I moved in on his blind with 87o and he found AKs. I couldn't do much with those chips and eventually had to push A8s which got called by TT and lost. I can't remember much from the $3K anymore other than a few key hands:

Hand 1: 200/400 a25. EP big stack limps, I complete T8dd in the SB and the BB checks. Flop Q82 one diamond, checks to limper who bets 1000. I call and the turn is the 3d. I check, he bets 2500, and I move in for 8200 total. He quickly calls with AQ but I river a diamond.

Hand 2: I somehow have around 35K now. I open in EP to 2200 at 400/800 a75 with QQ. The SB with about the same calls and we see a J64 2 club flop. He checks, I bet 4K and he raises to 10K. I don't know anything about the guy, and I can't really see folding this hand so I call and let him fire the turn if he's bluffing. Turn bricks and he shoves, I call and he says "nice call" and tables the AJo. What, you really thought you were bluffing? Looks more like he has no idea what he's trying to do but he had top top so he had to wager all his chips. I dunno people play bad. Now I have a really big stack, and I managed to build it as high as 85K winning small pots/

Hand 3: Unfortunately from there things didn't go well. I went a little card dead and was down around 60K when we got in the money. Now at 1500/3000 a500 it folds to the SB who is a tight guy and he makes it a suspicious 7500. I find AQs though so whatever, I make it a third of my stack or something and he instashoves so I call and lose to his KK. TRICKY RAISE SIZE SIR YOU GOT ME.

I'll probably call in some voice updates on TwoRags tomorrow during the breaks if people want to follow my progress live. Assuming I make it out of level 1 for a change that is.

Mike

A Final Table and Another Cash

So I finished 2nd for $26.5K in one of the nightly $1K 2nd chance tournaments, and then 23rd in the $3K the next day for $5K. Let's see if I can remember how I managed to pull that off...

$1K 2nd Chance

Hand 1: I managed to double my stack to 10K by the first break. One hand that was sort of interesting was when I saw a flop with T9o in the SB at 25/50 after 2 limpers. Flop AJ8 2 spades, EP limper bets 200, button calls, and I call as well. Turn is a low spade and I lead for 500 and take it down.


Hand 2: I just got seated at a new table and arrive just in time to post my ante @ 100/200 a25. I'm still unracking my chips as it goes raise to 650 from EP, next to act calls, and I look at AA and make it 2050. Both call, the flop comes ten-high, original raiser bets 1K with 1100 behind (lol). Next guy folds I ship it and lose to his JJ that backdoors a flush to drop to 5800.

Hand 3: I open AJs in the CO to 1100 at 200/400 a25 with another 4K behind. Button ships on me and I decide to fold because he hasn't really done anything and it's live poker. As it turns out I definitely should have called this guy because he knew what he was doing but I think it was kind of a close decision.

Hand 4: 2 hands later open to 1100 with JJ, SB ships it on me with A5o for some reason even though he has no fold equity and I hold.

Hand 5: UTG ships around 5K at 300/600 a50 and he has shown he doesn't need a monster to move in already. 3 players later moves in for just under 9K, it fold to me in the BB and I find 99. I think for a while and decide their ranges should be wide enough that I should call. They have AT and AQ and I flop quads to get to 25Kish.

Hand 6: With 14 left a seemingly very tight player opens for 23K with 12K behind at 800/1600 a200 in MP. I really thought he had something like JJ or AK here given how much he shoved and how close to the final table we were and decided to pass TT in the SB. As it turns out this guy was not exactly a nit.

Hand 7: Guy from last hand now has a ton of chips. grafyx told me a hand he played with him that let me know he's far from a nit like I thought. He opens to 6K at 1k/2k a300 in EP. We're now playing 10-handed at the final table, 9 spots pay. I find AKo in LP and ship 35K, he instacalls with JJ and I luckbox the flip to not bubble.

Hand 8: After that hand I didn't do a whole lot. I was fairly card dead but made it down to 4-handed. The guy from last two hands has gone psycho. He is raising like every hand. I don't know what happened. The way he was playing and acting at the table I seriously thought he must have got high on the last break or something. He was spite calling any time someone pushed on his raises and drawing out on tons of players. Anyways I open TT to 11K at 2k/4k a500 in the CO with maybe 40K behind, he shoves from the SB and I call and outflip him again, he had AK this time.

Hand 9: I'm still really card dead and 2 of the other 3 guys are insane so I'm just staying out of the way, occasionally shoving on the guy opening every pot when I find an ace or something. Finally the guy on my left busts and we get to 3 handed. The crazy guy is just running over the guy in the middle and he's clearly not going to do anything about it except wait for a big hand. I'm treading water still by moving in on his raises from time to time, mostly card dead though. Crazy guy folds one hand and guy in the middle is now short and shoves his SB for like 65K at 4k/8k a1k. I find ATo and call but lose to his J9o.

Hand 10: I'm now pretty short and move in with some random SB hand to pick up the blinds and antes and increase my stack to 70K still at 4k/8k a1k. I find ATs on the button and ship it in. BB thinks and calls with A4s which has to be correct against my range but I hold.

Hand 11: I open AA on the button to 20K. This is the first button I opened 3-handed in a long time. Crazy guy folds, BB ships in his shortish stack and I hold vs his KQo.

Hand 12: 6k/12K a1K. I limp the button with 9s6h and he checks. Flop JT8 2 spades, he checks and I check. Turn Ks he bets 13K, I make it 40K and he folds.

Hand 13: I'm now around even in chips. He limps the button and I check Q8o. Flop AA4, I check/call a 12K bet because Q-hi is going to be the best hand here an awful lot. Turn is another A and we both check. River is a 5, I check and he bets 40K. I've seen him make a big river bet like this once and he showed the goods when the guy folded. I really felt like he had rivered a 5 or he had nothing, and he might be using the fact that he had it last time to make a bluff more credible. Or he might just have it again. I decide to call and lose to his 42o :-(, not sure if I like this one.

Hand 14: I open 66 to 30K, he reraises and I ship it and lose to his QQ, flop Q6x for extra spite.

Oh well still a pretty good score and it was good to make a deep run live again, and have a final table go reasonbly well again for once. Bed time, $5K event tomorrow I'll do the $3K report another time I guess.

Mike

Quick Cliffs Notes of last Couple Days

I went semi-deep in the $2K NL event on Tuesday busting 37th when 27 paid. Then I played drunken 2/4 mixed games at TI for 12 hours straight which was a blast. I didn't want to play the $2500 on no sleep up for 24 hours already so I crashed for 5 hours and then played the $1K 2nd chance at 7:15. 11 hours later I finished second in that tournament for 28.5K, managed to get home and get a couple hours sleep, and now I'm off to play the $3K event today. There's only a senior's event tomorrow so drunken mixed games are likely to follow tonight, but I'll write a tourney report for these eventually.

Mike

Venetian $15K Report

That was probably the worst 2 levels of poker ever. I didn't win a single pot that had anything in it. My table was actually pretty good. Other than Greenstein, Juanda and a couple good internet players, the other guys were awful. Here is what I can remember from the trainwreck, sorry if I leave out details I'm trying to do this quickly so I can move on to pretending today never happened.

Hand 1: 100/100 30K chips. I'm sure I've spewed off a bit already. Beth Shak limps in MP, I make it 500 with KQo and she calls. Flop KQT 2 spades, she leads for 1200 I call. Turn 2c making a backdoor flush draw, she bets 3K I call. River Ac, she bets 6K I fold. Given that she bet this river I'm guessing there's a pretty good chance she flopped the straight, either that or she had like KJ I guess. I didn't really feel like bloating the pot earlier since her line seemed strong and even she might fold a lot of worse hands to too much action.

Hand 2: There's like a million hands where I call once and fold to further action which are pretty sick. I basically always flopped something marginal that I just couldn't call down with and lost my stack a bit at a time. Either that or I fire the flop with nothing and get called then give up. It was basically awesome.

Hand 3: AllusivePinkBunny shoves 6600 at 200/400, I call with JJ and 5700 in the SB, terrible old guy on my left obv has AA in the BB and we both get to go home. Back to Bellagio tomorrow I guess. Weeeeeeee.

Mike

Bellagio $5K report

Yo. My 0-for streak continues in $5k+ buy-in events. Here's how it went down.

Hand 1: I made the nuts against David Pham a few times and managed to basically win the minimum by trying to play way too fancy. Oops. Still chip up to 17K from 10K starting stack by first break.

Hand 2: I got moved from my original table with Greenstein, Pham, etc... to a new table with a bunch of good online players on my left but it didn't really matter because I never played a hand anyways. My 3rd table is awesome though and I win an ok pot here: 300/600 a50. Spewy guy on my right raises to 2K in MP, I call with KK and gigabet (darrell dicken) unfortunately does not squeeze, just making the call on the button. Flop is an ugly QQ2, and it checks around. Turn is a blank, raiser bets 3K, I call, and gigablocks calls. Turn blank, raiser now checks, I check, and gigablocks checks and shows 88, raiser has AJ and I win a decent pot, but not a great flop.

Hand 3: At this point I just nit it up for a while as I'm pretty card dead. Finally, at 1k/2k a300 Max Pescatori opens to 5500 in the CO, I shove 25K on the button with AJo, and he calls and wins with 55 to bust me 30th (18 pay). Fun 11 hours. I'm sure there were other interesting hands I'm forgetting but so much poker it's all blending together.

Tomorrow I'm planning to play Sundays online, and then most likely I'll still play the 15k at Venetian on Monday even though it's probably going to have a small, tough field.


Mike

Vegas in the winter is wierd

Something just seems off here.... I have only ever been to Vegas in the summer during the WSOP. It's scorching hot every day, and the very thought of a cloud in the sky, let alone a raindrop falling from one, is laughable. While it's certainly much warmer here than Canada this time of the year, it's actually pretty cool out. Not only that, it rained all day today. I was in shock. However, one constant remains to let me know the world is alright. Me losing money in poker tournaments.

I was originally planning to play the $5K event at the Venetian today but their events have been getting basically no attendance. So instead I played the $3K tournament at the Bellagio. I still expect the $15K at Venetian to at least get a playable turnout on Monday, but that's the only tournament I'll be playing there now. The Bellagio tournament today attracted 220ish players iirc, so it was a pretty nice sized field. Unfortunately things didn't go very well for me, though it was partly my fault for sucking.

Hand 1: 25/50 I have 5750. Raise to 200 with AKo, 3 callers, BB makes it 650, I am extremely confused and call, only the last limper calls who is a seemingly aggressive but competent looking asian guy. The flop comes AK6 all spades. The reraiser now leads for 1K, I'm still confused as hell so I call and the overcaller instashoves. Reraiser now folds (wtf could you have had?), and I ended up tankng and folding. Pretty sure it's really clear that I should shove the first time around and then call. I was tired of calling and having live players show me the nuts over and over again, and I'm sure not wanting to bustout in the first level AGAIN came to mind, but I can't justify folding here at all getting big odds on the call. I figured it made way more sense for him to have 66 or some kind of suited connector preflop than a hand like QJo with the Ks, and it does, but whatever it's not like people don't play awful preflop, especially live.

Hand 2: Skip to bustout hand, I took a bunch of chips back off the aggro asian guy but then went card dead and got moved to a new table. 100/200 a 25, I have 7500. A seemingly tight/straightforward guy opens to 600 UTG. 2 people who basically never have a hand call, and I find JJ OTB. I'm torn between just calling and taking a flop and reraising. If I reraise I basically have to call a shove so long as AK is in his reshove range, but it's really not clear that's the case. In fact I'm sure a lot of live players wouldn't have to think too hard about laying down AK in his spot, but it's still pretty awful to reraise and then fold. In that case the fact that I have JJ is almost irrelevant if I do that. I'm basically just bluffing and I might as well have any two cards. If the two callers weren't there I would just call, but with their dead money in the pot it makes reraising a lot better, and calling a lot worse. So I made it 2500, UTG moved in pretty quickly. I really didn't think he'd be so confident with AK, but getting over 2.5:1 I call and lose to AA.

I then went to dinner at Mesa Grill I think it ws called in Caesar's Palace with Kyle (grafyx) and Jason (JP_OSU) because Kyle said it was really good. The waiter began by asking us if we knew about who their chef is. Ummm nope. It's [name]. OK... You've probably heard of him as the Iron Chef. Oooooh, I've heard of that show, cool. Anyways, he told us about how he uses a lot of southwest style spices, combining "sweet and heat" to bring out the flavour in the chiles and other hot spices he uses. At this point I was already getting pretty excited about the meal because I love those types of sauces, a bit spicy but with a lot of flavour, not just burning. And the meal delivered. My main course was a ribeye steak in a chipotle glaze with two kinds of chile sauces. Also, mixing mashed potatoes with a pesto was a delicious twist, and shrimp in corn-based sauce as an appetizer was also excellent. So kudos to the Iron Chef. I'm still not going to watch your show though.

After dinner we headed back to Bellagio and registered for the $1k 2nd chance tournament. We had some time to kill so Kyle and I played a shoe of blackjack and ran insanely good, I made $100. Perhaps i should just stick to -EV gambling. The $1K tournament was relatively uninteresting. The play was really really bad, and I got off to a good start but then went card dead and eventually pushed into the aces. $5k at Bellagio tomorrow should be a fun one though. Gonna get some sleep now.

Mike