In two weeks Neteller will cease Canadian transfers to gambling sites.
http://www.neteller-group.com/press/en/127.htm
For people who've never used it, Neteller basically works like an online bank account. I can move large amounts of money to and from my Neteller account to the poker sites in just a few clicks. It's also attached to my real bank account so I can cash out from Neteller or move money back online very quickly also.
This came as a very big surprise to me, I really don't know where the pressure on them came from to take this decision. Being Canadian I've so far been somewhat shielded from the effects of all the bullshit going on with the UIGEA in the States, and it hasn't really affected me in a major way other than the games probably getting a bit tougher. But even that effect hasn't been particulaly noticable, especially since I've been running so well and on the biggest winning streak of my life.
This is going to make cashing out more of a hassle. As a MTT player I play accross a lot of sites so I can play all the biggest tournaments and I'm now going to have to keep money on all of them since I can't just reload from my neteller account whenever I have to. I'll probably have to keep a lot more money online than I wanted to now which means I can't invest as much. Also this will make it harder for Canadians to get money online to play poker which can only be a bad thing for the poker economy in general. Anyways I think online poker will be very profitable in the coming years, but this is another step in the wrong direction in the big picture.
Mike
Monday, March 26, 2007
A winning Sunday!!??
I won money at poker tournaments today. It was so fun I may switch my normal Sunday routine from losing money at poker tournaments. I had a few smallish cashes in the majors including the $1000 Stars million (despite my best efforts to bubble). That was enough for me to finish second in a $1000 sidebet based on performance in Sunday majors against some guys on PocketFives for $3900. I also finished second in the UB $530 for $13K. It was disappointing to lose heads up, I started out behind in chips but turned it around to build a chiplead as big as 3:1 before losing a few pots in a row that I may have misplayed somewhat to get back to even. Then I played a big pot preflop which I was hoping to avoid since I was having a lot of success stealing the small pots postflop. I had started raising more on the button and he had 3-bet me a few times earlier, so I figured another 3-bet was coming soon against one my raises whether he had a hand or not to keep me in line. The next hand I raised AJ on the button and he reraised just as I was expecting. I moved in but he called with AQ instantly, and while the AQJ flop was exciting it didn't help me at all. I didn't play much cash today. I lost a buy-in at 10/20 on Party when I misplayed a hand. Oh I just remembered I also final tabled the $200 tourney on Dise again, and finished 4th again. So overall it was a pretty good day.
Mike
Mike
Monday, March 19, 2007
Cash game heater continues
As does the tournament losing streak. I made the money in exactly zero tournaments today, which basically sucked. However, I also made 13K playing cash games before I got too many tournament windows going. I've never run anywhere close to this good for any kind of extended period before in my 2 and a half or so years playing poker. I've already easily surpassed my success from last year in 2 months. I know eventually this will have to stop and I'm trying to stay as level headed as possible because at these stakes when I eventually go on a losing streak, especially after getting used to winning big, it's going be really hard on me. I'm definitely enjoying the rush for now though. I guess I'll post some more of the biggest pots or something.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?917879 - Flop the monster draw and catch the perfect turn card. He decides to make the big semibluff checkraise since he picked up a flush draw.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?917884 - I played this kind of weird. The guy seemed bad but we hadn't been playing long so I really didn't know how bad. On the river I was just thinking how can he possibly call with a worse hand here in an unraised pot? It seemed quite possible he could have exactly KJ or a weird slowplayed set or something. Also, he might have a busted draw of some sort like J9 or a spade draw that could bluff so I went for a check planning to just call a reasonable sized bet. As it turns out against this guy I should have just bombed the river. When he made the ridiculously small river bet it seemed pretty unlikely he had me beat, along with my impression that he seemed bad was enough to convince me to just shove the rest in. My line is confusing and people always talk to themselves into calling anyways there because it looks like I just think his small bet is weak and I am making a move.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?917890 - A big hand I lost against the infamous stevesbets. A lot of people think this guy is a fish even though he plays nosebleed stakes because he makes some really bizarre plays. He used to play the 5K HU matches all the time and I heard of some people who would play him all the time thinking he's terrible, but I don't think anyone ever really beat him consistently. From what I saw today his preflop play is horrendous, but he's actually quite good postflop which really confuses people. Still, I can't see him beating the toughest online games if he doesn't clean up his preflop play some. He was killing this table though including this hand where he stacks me. I go ahead and squeeze preflop because stevesbets basically can have almost anything and the other guy also has a pretty huge range. I didn't have a good idea how he played yet so I decided to just check behind the flop. I really had no idea how loose he would call my reraise preflop at this point, and in general his call of my big reraise looks awfully scary. The turn was a nice card for me and he checked again. I figured I prboably have the best hand and made a smallish bet for value. When he just called I was pretty sure I had the best hand. The river is the 4 and he instashoved. His line basically just looks like a bluff now. It certainly doesn't look like he flopped a set or has AA/KK given the turn action, and obviously I didn't think he could have a 4 so I quickly called.
Mike
http://www.pokerhand.org/?917879 - Flop the monster draw and catch the perfect turn card. He decides to make the big semibluff checkraise since he picked up a flush draw.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?917884 - I played this kind of weird. The guy seemed bad but we hadn't been playing long so I really didn't know how bad. On the river I was just thinking how can he possibly call with a worse hand here in an unraised pot? It seemed quite possible he could have exactly KJ or a weird slowplayed set or something. Also, he might have a busted draw of some sort like J9 or a spade draw that could bluff so I went for a check planning to just call a reasonable sized bet. As it turns out against this guy I should have just bombed the river. When he made the ridiculously small river bet it seemed pretty unlikely he had me beat, along with my impression that he seemed bad was enough to convince me to just shove the rest in. My line is confusing and people always talk to themselves into calling anyways there because it looks like I just think his small bet is weak and I am making a move.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?917890 - A big hand I lost against the infamous stevesbets. A lot of people think this guy is a fish even though he plays nosebleed stakes because he makes some really bizarre plays. He used to play the 5K HU matches all the time and I heard of some people who would play him all the time thinking he's terrible, but I don't think anyone ever really beat him consistently. From what I saw today his preflop play is horrendous, but he's actually quite good postflop which really confuses people. Still, I can't see him beating the toughest online games if he doesn't clean up his preflop play some. He was killing this table though including this hand where he stacks me. I go ahead and squeeze preflop because stevesbets basically can have almost anything and the other guy also has a pretty huge range. I didn't have a good idea how he played yet so I decided to just check behind the flop. I really had no idea how loose he would call my reraise preflop at this point, and in general his call of my big reraise looks awfully scary. The turn was a nice card for me and he checked again. I figured I prboably have the best hand and made a smallish bet for value. When he just called I was pretty sure I had the best hand. The river is the 4 and he instashoved. His line basically just looks like a bluff now. It certainly doesn't look like he flopped a set or has AA/KK given the turn action, and obviously I didn't think he could have a 4 so I quickly called.
Mike
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
The only time I really get mad playing poker...
(Warning: actual strategy content)
...is when I make a mistake that ends up costing me. Bad beats don't really get to me, even when they happen in important situations. I can't ignore them completely of course and sometimes I react momentarily when they're particularly costly but after a few seconds that passes. When I donk up an important hand though it definitely can stay in my head for a while and at times this has effected my play negatively. Obviously there is a story to explain this post. I finally made the final table of a faily big tournament, the $100 rebuy on Stars. I was a short stack but I was starting to gain momentum with a series of blind steals moving me back towards a playable stack. Then this hand happened:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?900678
This is a really tricky hand because my table image is now pretty bad and my raise is unlikely to get a lot of respect, meaning I may get put to a really tough decision either preflop or on the flop if he elects to call. The problem is that the other options kind of suck too. Stacks are too big for a big overbet raise allin to be really appealing. My M is over 7 so going allin is probably marginally profitable at best assuming some reasonable calling range on his part (it may even be -cEV I haven't looked at the math closely). Compare this to making a normal raise but then calling an all-in: On the one hand he'll fold hands like K7 that he might reraise me with if he thinks he has some fold equity, but he'll also fold all his trash hands that he might bluff with if I make a normal raise thinking he can get me to fold. Raising and folding to his push also sucks because we're going to get bluffed a fair bit or at least fold when we had the pot odds to call. So basically none of the raising options is all that good.
The other option that I generally take a lot in this situation is the limp. The problem was that given our history I felt it was very likely he would raise me big if I tried to limp and then I'm basically in the same situation as above. Still, he may find the limp suspicious enough that he decides to take a flop with me so this may still have been the best option. Folding to avoid the confrontation is probably not as bad as it seems but it's definitely a weak play.
cEV vs $EV. cEV refers to the expected size of your chip stack where as $EV refers to the real money expected value of a decision based on the payout structure. The difference between the two is generally reserved for discussions of STT bubbles or satellites. Harrington tells us that in general it is fine to assume cEV=$EV, and for the most part I agree with this. However, to risk sounding like a fish worried about his "tournament life", there is a real difference between the two at a final table, and the value of moving up the payout ladder can not be ignored entirely. At some point I will have to actually do some of the math to find out in what types of situations this difference is actually relevant. In the situation in the hand with the 5 shortstacks all about even in chips it is intuitively obvious that we would really prefer to let the other guys be the first ones to get into big confrontations before we do. On the other hand we can't let ourselves get pushed around too much. Anyways I won't say anymore on this because I don't entirely understand if/when it's actually important, but it's relevant to my thought process in the hand.
OK so I decide to make a normal raise. Probably not the best option but hardly a big mistake. Like I said my table image was terrible and jcamby is a pretty strong player who can make adjustments. He moves in on me pretty quickly. Almost a little too quickly maybe but there's not enough there for me to put any real value in it. I'm getting 1.5:1 with a lousy QTo. The problem is that his range here could be huge. He'd almost certainly shove any ace, any pair, and any two paint. Still, PokerStove says calling is -cEV:
equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 38.005% 37.47% 00.54% 197590579 2845172.00 { QdTc }
Hand 1: 61.995% 61.46% 00.54% 324108709 2845172.00 { 22+, A2s+, KTs+, QJs, A2o+, KTo+, QJo }
However it's pretty close and as soon as we throw in some complete bluffs it's easy to see that will sway it to a call. I didn't know the exact odds obviously but I had a general idea that it's pretty unlikely I'm dominated and if there's any reasonable chance I could have the best hand then I should be calling. The next step was well, would he really move all-in with a hand that couldn't beat QT? Given that jcamby is a strong player who had almost certainly had enough of me taking his blinds I decided it was a definite possibility. So I concluded that calling was +cEV and I was about to go do that when this thought popped in my head: sure it might be very marginally +cEV, but is it +$EV? Almost near the end of my timebank now this swayed me back to folding. Obviously when he showed the hand I regretted the decision, but in retrospect it was a small mistake at worst. Probably the biggest mistake was opening for my standard raise without a clear plan what to do when reraised. It's not like I can stare him down and use that to sway my decision one way or the other. This got really long and it may turn out that Im just wrong about the cEV vs $EV thing mattering at all but something to think about anyways.
Mike
...is when I make a mistake that ends up costing me. Bad beats don't really get to me, even when they happen in important situations. I can't ignore them completely of course and sometimes I react momentarily when they're particularly costly but after a few seconds that passes. When I donk up an important hand though it definitely can stay in my head for a while and at times this has effected my play negatively. Obviously there is a story to explain this post. I finally made the final table of a faily big tournament, the $100 rebuy on Stars. I was a short stack but I was starting to gain momentum with a series of blind steals moving me back towards a playable stack. Then this hand happened:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?900678
This is a really tricky hand because my table image is now pretty bad and my raise is unlikely to get a lot of respect, meaning I may get put to a really tough decision either preflop or on the flop if he elects to call. The problem is that the other options kind of suck too. Stacks are too big for a big overbet raise allin to be really appealing. My M is over 7 so going allin is probably marginally profitable at best assuming some reasonable calling range on his part (it may even be -cEV I haven't looked at the math closely). Compare this to making a normal raise but then calling an all-in: On the one hand he'll fold hands like K7 that he might reraise me with if he thinks he has some fold equity, but he'll also fold all his trash hands that he might bluff with if I make a normal raise thinking he can get me to fold. Raising and folding to his push also sucks because we're going to get bluffed a fair bit or at least fold when we had the pot odds to call. So basically none of the raising options is all that good.
The other option that I generally take a lot in this situation is the limp. The problem was that given our history I felt it was very likely he would raise me big if I tried to limp and then I'm basically in the same situation as above. Still, he may find the limp suspicious enough that he decides to take a flop with me so this may still have been the best option. Folding to avoid the confrontation is probably not as bad as it seems but it's definitely a weak play.
cEV vs $EV. cEV refers to the expected size of your chip stack where as $EV refers to the real money expected value of a decision based on the payout structure. The difference between the two is generally reserved for discussions of STT bubbles or satellites. Harrington tells us that in general it is fine to assume cEV=$EV, and for the most part I agree with this. However, to risk sounding like a fish worried about his "tournament life", there is a real difference between the two at a final table, and the value of moving up the payout ladder can not be ignored entirely. At some point I will have to actually do some of the math to find out in what types of situations this difference is actually relevant. In the situation in the hand with the 5 shortstacks all about even in chips it is intuitively obvious that we would really prefer to let the other guys be the first ones to get into big confrontations before we do. On the other hand we can't let ourselves get pushed around too much. Anyways I won't say anymore on this because I don't entirely understand if/when it's actually important, but it's relevant to my thought process in the hand.
OK so I decide to make a normal raise. Probably not the best option but hardly a big mistake. Like I said my table image was terrible and jcamby is a pretty strong player who can make adjustments. He moves in on me pretty quickly. Almost a little too quickly maybe but there's not enough there for me to put any real value in it. I'm getting 1.5:1 with a lousy QTo. The problem is that his range here could be huge. He'd almost certainly shove any ace, any pair, and any two paint. Still, PokerStove says calling is -cEV:
equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 38.005% 37.47% 00.54% 197590579 2845172.00 { QdTc }
Hand 1: 61.995% 61.46% 00.54% 324108709 2845172.00 { 22+, A2s+, KTs+, QJs, A2o+, KTo+, QJo }
However it's pretty close and as soon as we throw in some complete bluffs it's easy to see that will sway it to a call. I didn't know the exact odds obviously but I had a general idea that it's pretty unlikely I'm dominated and if there's any reasonable chance I could have the best hand then I should be calling. The next step was well, would he really move all-in with a hand that couldn't beat QT? Given that jcamby is a strong player who had almost certainly had enough of me taking his blinds I decided it was a definite possibility. So I concluded that calling was +cEV and I was about to go do that when this thought popped in my head: sure it might be very marginally +cEV, but is it +$EV? Almost near the end of my timebank now this swayed me back to folding. Obviously when he showed the hand I regretted the decision, but in retrospect it was a small mistake at worst. Probably the biggest mistake was opening for my standard raise without a clear plan what to do when reraised. It's not like I can stare him down and use that to sway my decision one way or the other. This got really long and it may turn out that Im just wrong about the cEV vs $EV thing mattering at all but something to think about anyways.
Mike
Monday, March 12, 2007
Boring Sunday
I only played the early tournaments today because I had a basketball game. I went fairly deep in the Stars Warmup but that was about it for tournaments. I did manage to make some money at cash games again though so it was a winning Sunday. Waterloo people took down a couple big tournaments today so I mostly played the role of cheerleader.
Mike
Mike
Monday, March 05, 2007
Quick Update
Just a quick update to keep with the routine of writing Sunday reports. Yesterday was a more typical Sunday, ie one where I lose a lot. I came very close to making a big final table though. Titan Poker ran a $540 250K guaranteed tournament yesterday that I finished 13th in ($2500). The structure was bad so everyone was shortstacked and one of my all-ins with garbage ran into a couple monsters. I also finished 13th on Mansion on Saturday and 4th in the Full Tilt $322 for $5600. So Saturday and Sunday probably about cancelled each other out.
Mike
Mike
Friday, March 02, 2007
February graph
I dunno what to say about this graph... I wasn't even sure if I wanted to post it because it's such a ridiculous shameless brag. Anyways... when you move up limits and run hotter than ever I guess this is what happens. The 45K rush at the end was all last week. Yeah, I know....
What's the secret you ask? Mostly this:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?869081
Sometimes this on consecutive hands shortstacking:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?869082
http://www.pokerhand.org/?869083
Sometimes you see a fish sitting down when you're shortstacking 25/50 so you get your underage friend to take half your action so you can take a shot. Then you obviously end up flipping coins for $9K with a different guy on your last lap after the fish left (I guess he coulda folded the flop but it was kinda clear the money was probably going in regardless after the preflop action).
http://www.pokerhand.org/?869093
Oh and try not to get outflopped and pay off the guy very often, who's been reraising you every hand so you put a jillion bets in preflop with AQo like your name is Grimstarr (2+2/BBV inside joke), but then still be up a buy-in at the table:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?869098
Finally a detailed strategy post!
Mike
What's the secret you ask? Mostly this:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?869081
Sometimes this on consecutive hands shortstacking:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?869082
http://www.pokerhand.org/?869083
Sometimes you see a fish sitting down when you're shortstacking 25/50 so you get your underage friend to take half your action so you can take a shot. Then you obviously end up flipping coins for $9K with a different guy on your last lap after the fish left (I guess he coulda folded the flop but it was kinda clear the money was probably going in regardless after the preflop action).
http://www.pokerhand.org/?869093
Oh and try not to get outflopped and pay off the guy very often, who's been reraising you every hand so you put a jillion bets in preflop with AQo like your name is Grimstarr (2+2/BBV inside joke), but then still be up a buy-in at the table:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?869098
Finally a detailed strategy post!
Mike
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
A few random things
A couple small things I thought I'd make a post about. First, Mike's friend Will (yet another UW student owning at poker) won the Pokerstars tournament leader board last week. His picture is there when you load up the client and is basically the awesomest TLB winner picture ever (yes, that's actually him). In other news, Harrah's has announced a new WSOP - Europe in September of this year. The main event, a $10K Euro buy-in, is scheduled to begin on Sept. 10. Guess who turns 18 on Sept. 11? At like 2:00am too. If only he wasn't such a procrastinator. Seriously, I will never grow tired of needling him about this, it's so good. Finally, for season 3 of High Stakes Poker, the 2+2 community pledged to all chip in and donate at least $10K to Barry Greenstein's favourite charity if he said "lol donkaments" during one of the shows. That part of the show came up last night (and was pretty sweet), so the pledge drive has begun in this thread. I pitched in $250 to the cause, it doesn't look like there will be any trouble recahing the goal. Barry's post in the thread was pretty cool:
"Hi friends in BBV,One of the producers of HSP suggested that I post in the forums to get people to donate ahead of time or they might not include lol donkaments in the show. I told them, "The word of a gambler is good, and many of them said they would make a small donation, if they weren't broke at the time."Of course, if I were dealing with politicians or some other groups, I would want a contract, witnesses, and video.Thanks for proving me right, and I'm glad everyone has had fun with this. Please don't send me any money on Pokerstars or anywhere else. This isn't my charity. It's just the main one I support and trust. Barry"
Edit: Link to a news story.
Mike
"Hi friends in BBV,One of the producers of HSP suggested that I post in the forums to get people to donate ahead of time or they might not include lol donkaments in the show. I told them, "The word of a gambler is good, and many of them said they would make a small donation, if they weren't broke at the time."Of course, if I were dealing with politicians or some other groups, I would want a contract, witnesses, and video.Thanks for proving me right, and I'm glad everyone has had fun with this. Please don't send me any money on Pokerstars or anywhere else. This isn't my charity. It's just the main one I support and trust. Barry"
Edit: Link to a news story.
Mike
Monday, February 26, 2007
I run really, really, good.
The first two months of 2007 have been incredible. Despite cutting back my hours playing (still not enough, I will really not be able to play much at all until the of April) I am on by the biggest rush of my poker career. In the past, whenever I moved up in limits I tended to get greeted by big losing streaks. Lately, every shot I've taken has been hugely successful. I've been killing the 25/50 games I'm shortstacking, I've had some tournament scores, and this week, filled with confidence, I decided to move up and take a shot at 10/20 NL with a full stack. Other than losing the biggest pot of my life today I've run insanely good and am up a substantial amount. Obviously this can't last but I think that as long as I exercise good game selection I'll be a winner in these games. I've even sat at 25/50 NL with a full stack a couple times when I noticed there was a really big fish in the game while shortstacking (though I had people take half my action). I showed my tournament player skills by getting all-in preflop and winning a $9000 coinflip.
What makes this even more ridiculous is that I've been close to some huge tournament scores the last two weekends but fell short. If I'd been able to close one of those... wow, isn't online poker supposed to be dying? I had probably my best Sunday ever today in terms of tournaments despite my inability to finish. First, I finished 3rd in the $200 on Paradise for $3K (the same as I did 2 weeks ago). I had a big stack in the 2:00 100r on Stars also but lost a big pot to ocrowe where I got caught making a move with a flush and gutshot straight draw on the turn, and then lost all-in preflop with K7 vs K5 for the chips I had left to finish 14th, instead of doubling back into contention.
I then had a huge stack in the $215 Mulligan on Full Tilt and was in good shape heading into a tough final table (w/ Scott Fischman and some other top online guys). Things were going well until I lost a big coinflip, and then lost more when a shortstack pushrf over my raise and I was committed to call with a dominated hand. With 5xBB left I picked up KK and shoved it in, only to get called by 22 and QQ! Several bricks rolled off and I was about to triple up and get my stack back when a deuce rolled off on the river. 5th paid $6600.
Finally, I had the chiplead in the $200 rebuy on Stars, which has a huuuuge prize pool, with 2 tables left. I basically treaded water until we were down to 10 players and I was in the bottom half but with a very playable stack of 100K at 3k/6k blinds. I was in the BB with A8o, and it folded to the SB who raised to 18K. He had me covered and given the final table bubble situation it seemed like an obvious spot for him to be raising basically any two cards, even though he had been playing fairly tight. So I made I think is basically a no-brainer all-in but he happened to have a big hand this time and his AK held. Overall I cashed for around 13K in tournaments on the day to show probably a 6Kish profit, but it's always somewhat frustrating when you're that close to the big money. Still, counting the cash game winnings I booked a huge win today.
When I started playing poker I never had any serious aspirations of playing for these kinds of stakes. I figured if I could get good enough to make $20 or $30 an hour it'd save me from ever having to worry about getting a crappy job and let me put some extra money in my pocket to do something fun from time to time. Maybe I could get lucky and satellite into the World Series one year. It'd be fun to play in one of these big tournaments on the TV. On the other hand I always thought I was exactly the type of person that could be really good at this game. I had a sharp analytical mind, I had always been good at games and math. It was always fairly easy for me to be detached from the value of the money I was betting at the table and just make the best decisions possible. There's always that bit of hesitation when you move up limits and start losing money faster then you ever have before, but I adjust pretty quickly. On the other hand away from the table I had good money management. I rarely ever tilt, and when I do it's not in a major way. I'm in very good control of my emotions (maybe too much so at times?). I protect my bankroll and don't play over my head (underplaying my bankroll may well have slowed my progress). I'm also really not interested in a lot of material things so almost all my poker money stayed in my bankroll. When I get out of school in the summer I'll probably find something fun to blow some money on though. I'm not sure what the point of this paragraph is, just some reflecting I guess. It may have something to do with the fact that I won and lost $9K and $10K pots this weekend respectively and my only real reaction after the momentary "holy crap dude you just lost a $10K pot" was to make sure I was happy with how I played the hand (I'm still not entirely sure, I'm not exactly used to playing with 440xBB effective stacks).
Anyways that's a lot of rambling, it's time to shut this down. Hopefully there was something insightful or interesting in there.
Mike
What makes this even more ridiculous is that I've been close to some huge tournament scores the last two weekends but fell short. If I'd been able to close one of those... wow, isn't online poker supposed to be dying? I had probably my best Sunday ever today in terms of tournaments despite my inability to finish. First, I finished 3rd in the $200 on Paradise for $3K (the same as I did 2 weeks ago). I had a big stack in the 2:00 100r on Stars also but lost a big pot to ocrowe where I got caught making a move with a flush and gutshot straight draw on the turn, and then lost all-in preflop with K7 vs K5 for the chips I had left to finish 14th, instead of doubling back into contention.
I then had a huge stack in the $215 Mulligan on Full Tilt and was in good shape heading into a tough final table (w/ Scott Fischman and some other top online guys). Things were going well until I lost a big coinflip, and then lost more when a shortstack pushrf over my raise and I was committed to call with a dominated hand. With 5xBB left I picked up KK and shoved it in, only to get called by 22 and QQ! Several bricks rolled off and I was about to triple up and get my stack back when a deuce rolled off on the river. 5th paid $6600.
Finally, I had the chiplead in the $200 rebuy on Stars, which has a huuuuge prize pool, with 2 tables left. I basically treaded water until we were down to 10 players and I was in the bottom half but with a very playable stack of 100K at 3k/6k blinds. I was in the BB with A8o, and it folded to the SB who raised to 18K. He had me covered and given the final table bubble situation it seemed like an obvious spot for him to be raising basically any two cards, even though he had been playing fairly tight. So I made I think is basically a no-brainer all-in but he happened to have a big hand this time and his AK held. Overall I cashed for around 13K in tournaments on the day to show probably a 6Kish profit, but it's always somewhat frustrating when you're that close to the big money. Still, counting the cash game winnings I booked a huge win today.
When I started playing poker I never had any serious aspirations of playing for these kinds of stakes. I figured if I could get good enough to make $20 or $30 an hour it'd save me from ever having to worry about getting a crappy job and let me put some extra money in my pocket to do something fun from time to time. Maybe I could get lucky and satellite into the World Series one year. It'd be fun to play in one of these big tournaments on the TV. On the other hand I always thought I was exactly the type of person that could be really good at this game. I had a sharp analytical mind, I had always been good at games and math. It was always fairly easy for me to be detached from the value of the money I was betting at the table and just make the best decisions possible. There's always that bit of hesitation when you move up limits and start losing money faster then you ever have before, but I adjust pretty quickly. On the other hand away from the table I had good money management. I rarely ever tilt, and when I do it's not in a major way. I'm in very good control of my emotions (maybe too much so at times?). I protect my bankroll and don't play over my head (underplaying my bankroll may well have slowed my progress). I'm also really not interested in a lot of material things so almost all my poker money stayed in my bankroll. When I get out of school in the summer I'll probably find something fun to blow some money on though. I'm not sure what the point of this paragraph is, just some reflecting I guess. It may have something to do with the fact that I won and lost $9K and $10K pots this weekend respectively and my only real reaction after the momentary "holy crap dude you just lost a $10K pot" was to make sure I was happy with how I played the hand (I'm still not entirely sure, I'm not exactly used to playing with 440xBB effective stacks).
Anyways that's a lot of rambling, it's time to shut this down. Hopefully there was something insightful or interesting in there.
Mike
Monday, February 19, 2007
Sigh...
I had my most successful Sunday as far as tournaments are concerned in quite some time. It was also the most frustrating. My first deep finish was in the $530 tournament on Party. I survived into the money fighting with a shortstack the entire time, but finally busted on the final table bubble 11/103 for $867. Next up, the Mansion tournament and the Doyle's Room 54 rebuy. Both had 20K+ first prizes and I was top 5 in chips in both as we made the money (63 places). I quickly took two terrible beats on Doyle's Room and busted in the 30s for $400ish, and Mansion went badly also and I finished 21st for $600. However, as it was Sunday there was still a lot of poker to be played.
I went on a heater in the Stars 2nd chance and built a monster stack after winning a coinflip against another top 10 stack. I had a substantial chiplead in the tournament with around 150-200 people left. At the same time I rebounded from an awful start in the Full Tilt Online Poker Series $535 main event to build a 2nd place stack with 600 left. My AK beating AA all-in preflop was the highlight. As if these two weren't enough, I sucked out badly twice in the 100 rebuy on Stars and had a top 5 stack with 40 left. Unfortunately this is where things unravel. I lost a big pot to JohnnyBax in the 100r and busted 39th (36 paid). I treaded water in the 2nd chance for a while and finally found a spot to get my now short stack in with the best of it, but the river was not kind and I busted 30th for yet another whopping score of $760. Mike's friend Will ended up finishing 2nd for 25K in this tournament though, so congrats to him!
So that left me with just the biggest of all the Sunday tournaments. The Full Tilt main event exceeded its 1.5 million guaranteed prize pool with over 3200 players at $500 a head, and I still had a top 15 stack as we reached the money with 450 players left. Unfortunately I went incredibly card dead from this point on. I hung around stealing as many chips as possible to stay afloat, and I managed to survive for quite some time. One of my all-ins was eventually called, but as it turned out my QTs was in fine shape against 55 to get me back into contention. I flopped a Q but there was a 5 next to it, and another Sunday ended with a 70th place finish for $2400. Between playing tons of tournaments and having a bad day shortstacking the big cash games I still managed to lose lots of money despite my plethora of mediocre tournament cashes.
The shortstacking hasn't been going as well lately. People seem to be adjusting and I'm not running as well. I'm not ready to give up on it yet as my overall winrate is still extremely solid, but the huge swings may be more trouble than they're worth. It can also be a pretty boring grind at times playing mechanical preflop poker (without the excitement of going deep or playing a final table like in tournaments). Anyways that's enough ramblings for one post. Hopefully next Sunday will end better for me.
Mike
I went on a heater in the Stars 2nd chance and built a monster stack after winning a coinflip against another top 10 stack. I had a substantial chiplead in the tournament with around 150-200 people left. At the same time I rebounded from an awful start in the Full Tilt Online Poker Series $535 main event to build a 2nd place stack with 600 left. My AK beating AA all-in preflop was the highlight. As if these two weren't enough, I sucked out badly twice in the 100 rebuy on Stars and had a top 5 stack with 40 left. Unfortunately this is where things unravel. I lost a big pot to JohnnyBax in the 100r and busted 39th (36 paid). I treaded water in the 2nd chance for a while and finally found a spot to get my now short stack in with the best of it, but the river was not kind and I busted 30th for yet another whopping score of $760. Mike's friend Will ended up finishing 2nd for 25K in this tournament though, so congrats to him!
So that left me with just the biggest of all the Sunday tournaments. The Full Tilt main event exceeded its 1.5 million guaranteed prize pool with over 3200 players at $500 a head, and I still had a top 15 stack as we reached the money with 450 players left. Unfortunately I went incredibly card dead from this point on. I hung around stealing as many chips as possible to stay afloat, and I managed to survive for quite some time. One of my all-ins was eventually called, but as it turned out my QTs was in fine shape against 55 to get me back into contention. I flopped a Q but there was a 5 next to it, and another Sunday ended with a 70th place finish for $2400. Between playing tons of tournaments and having a bad day shortstacking the big cash games I still managed to lose lots of money despite my plethora of mediocre tournament cashes.
The shortstacking hasn't been going as well lately. People seem to be adjusting and I'm not running as well. I'm not ready to give up on it yet as my overall winrate is still extremely solid, but the huge swings may be more trouble than they're worth. It can also be a pretty boring grind at times playing mechanical preflop poker (without the excitement of going deep or playing a final table like in tournaments). Anyways that's enough ramblings for one post. Hopefully next Sunday will end better for me.
Mike
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Heart mansion poker
Mansion is a relatively new site in the online poker racket. They're the same people that offered the free $1000 bet on the first week of the NFL season this year to try to draw people to their sportsbook (I was too stupid to do this despite hearing from several people that it was legit. Yes, the Steelers covered and everyone got drunk). They also sponsor the "Poker Dome" show that you might have seen on TV. Their latest poker promotion is their daily $100K guaranteed tournament with a $100 buy-in throughout the month of January and at least the first week of February. The overlay is enormous and the players are terrible. Also, earlier this week US players were cut-off from the site so the overlay got even more out of hand. Today there were 456 players, meaning they paid well over half the prize people out of their own pocket, and that's even ignoring that the rake is counted in the $100 buy-in. Anyways, I won the tournament today for $24K. The play at the end was so bad, people basically folded every hand hoping to move up the prize ladder. I got lucky a couple times to get some chips and then ran over the table. A brief scare heads up when I lost 3 consecutive races, but my luck turned just in time to win a coinflip which regained me the chiplead, and then hold all-in preflop with a dominating hand to end it. A few beers and UFC pay-per-view tonight to celebrate.
Mike
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
January Graph
+17K shortstacking 25/50 NL and +6K at 5/10NL (full buy-in). If only anything close to this was sustainable. I even managed to not lose too much of this back playing tournaments.
Mike
Monday, January 29, 2007
Sunday report
Tournaments: -(sum of all buy-ins/rebuys) (this is a lot)
Shortstacking 25/50 NL: +5500
5/10 NL 6-max: +500
I think I see a pattern.
Shortstacking 25/50 NL: +5500
5/10 NL 6-max: +500
I think I see a pattern.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Quick Sunday Report
Hey all, not much luck in the tournaments tonight. I final tabled the UB 100r again but finished either 7th or 8th, I forget. I also had one small cash. On the plus side cash games ahve been going really well lately. I've moved back up to 5/10 with good results so far, and I took another shot at shortstacking 25/50 NL on Stars this weekend. This time I actually ran good and made a quick $7500 in 200 hands. I don't plan to make a habit of this because the swings are ridiculous, but it's definitely profitable for me. I'm better off playing 5/10 though with a full stack and getting better at that. I'm basically planning to only play poker on weekends for a while because I have to get my thesis done this term and I'm behind where I need to be. I'm sure I will make exceptions for the occasional cash session when I need a break, or possibly playing tournaments one weeknight some weeks if things are going well with school. Finally, HUGE props to my buddy "gobboboy" for finishing 2nd in the Aussie Millions tournament in Melbourne for 1 million Australian dollars ($800K US). Also, congratulations to certain friends of mine who bought a nice piece of his action. OK I'm off, I'll probably keep doing the Sunday updates thing throughout the term, at least when something interesting happens.
Mike
Mike
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Good night on UB
Other plans for the evening fell through, so I played some tournaments tonight. I ran well and won the 100r on UB for $7500, and finished 2nd in the 30r on UB for $3200. In the $30r I got heads up even in chips with my friend Adam Junglen, so we decided to just go all in blind and flip the coin for $2200 or so. He won the all-in on the river card and took down the tournament. I can't play as many tournaments as usual tomorrow because I have a basketball game at 4:30, but I'll play everything from 6:00 on, starting with the $535 tournament on Full Tilt.
Mike
Mike
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
PCA Trip Report: Part 2
One thing I forgot from yesterday. A guy that lives in residence with Mike won the Stars Million for $200K. So jealous. He's not even that experienced a player, though he played pretty well at the final table. There was another kid in the hotel lobby playing at that final table on his laptop, with like 75 people around him cheering him on. I was up in our hotel room with Aaron and Mike forming the 3 person ch0ppy fan club. He basically single-handedly took out the kid playing in the lobby, it was actually pretty funny how badly he outplayed him. It's kind of scary to think how good Mike and a few of his friends could get, because they're all super smart young kids.
Day 5
Today I got up and headed down to the poker room to play the $1000 tournament. The structure was pretty awful and I never really got many chips. However, Aaron was owning it from the very start and I was running around the room trying to watch how Steve and gobbo were doing, and also keeping an eye on Aaron. Steve and gobbo's day are pretty well covered elsewhere. They came up short finishing in the low 20s for like 30K or something.
For dinner we went to the buffet with aaronbeen, actionjeff, and some others. I'm pretty sure aaronbeen lost credit card roulette, though I don't remember mocking him so I might have days mixed up. The dinner buffet was good, and I basically tried almost everything. Also, Mike is a huge luckbox. He had already won like $2000 on the trip gambling on coinflips, and at dinner he added to that. He flipped jonlewis for $100 twice, splitting those flips. He then won 2 consecutive flips for $200, the next for $400, and another double or nothing for $800. Jon quit at this point down only $1600.
***
I ended up going to play the big nightly tournaments online, and went on a sick run in every tournament I was playing. Unfortunately I bubbled the $1000 tournament on Full Tilt and donked out of the $129 tournament on UB in 3rd place in spectacular fashion:
We're 3 handed. I've been playing pretty aggressively. The guy on my right has 320K and I have around 280K, and GB2005 has 150K on my left.
Hand 1: I'm in the SB and the button folds. Blinds are 4K/8k and I limp in with 86o. GB checks his BB. The flop comes K55 and I autobet 12K. GB quickly calls. Something about the timing of his call and the fact that I'd been very aggressive made me really think he was floating me with nothing here planning to try to take the pot away later, since I figured to have nothing either.
The turn was a Q, completing the rainbow. Going with my read I decided not to give up on the pot and bet 24K. Unfortunately, this might not have been the best way to fight for the pot, a checkraise all-in was probably a better plan. GB2005 went ahead and raised to 65K. My first instinct was that I still didn't really believe him, and I thought he was leaving himself room to fold if I pushed. My second thought was that pushing allin with 8-hi, no draw, here was completely suicidal, what the hell was I thinking. But I talked myself into going with my read and pushed him in for his last 65K. He instamucked and berated me in chat for "never being able to fold". I told him I had a big hand for some reason.
Hand 2: After the last hand I decided that I was, in fact, invincible. I raise to 24K with AQo and the other guy calls in his BB. The flop comes TTx. He checks and I continuation bet 30K. He min-checkraises to 60K. Unlike in the last hand where I had actual reasons to think he was bluffing, I randomly decided to call and take this pot away too. I finish the hand with like 50-60K in chips.
Hand 3: Folded to me in the SB and I autoshove 73o. GB beats me into the pot with 99. GG.
After donking out of my other tournaments I headed down to watch Aaron. There are 5 players left and he has the chiplead. The funny thing about Steve and Aaron, is that they play nothing like their personalities. Both are fairly quiet, unassuming guys. They're not the least bit cocky and they're both pretty nitty with the money they've made, and you might expect them to be similar at the table, playing a careful, tight style. But in reality, they are two of the LAGiest LAGtards ever when they play live. Aaron had to be raising at least 75% of the hands it was folded to him in any position. The players on his left simply did not know how to adjust and he was dominating the table. Unfortunately I brought my bad luck down to him and he finished 3rd for $20K, after taking a tough river beat, and losing a flip.
***
Day 6
This was by far the best day of the trip. Mike left this morning. Lol, that's only a small part of why though. The plan for today was to lie out in the sun all afternoon and get our burn on. But first, waterslides!! I'd never done the water slide thing before, so I had no idea what I was in for. So I get on the first one, and you actually get moving pretty fast! OK so that was fun! Now we go do the big one. Aaron warns me that I'll actually lose contact with the slide for a split second on this one. Hmm, ok that sounds fine. I was thinking maybe you'd go for a little bit and then there'd be this drop, because I couldn't actually see much without my glasses on. Well, no. As soon as you get moving there's a huge drop. And it's not a split second, I'd say I was off the slide for closer to a full second, and you get moving fast in a hurry. It definitely got the blood pumping, but was really fun, so we did that again and also the tube one before going to lie down in the sun all day. Unfortunately, by this time our beautiful sunny day had clouded over and it was spitting rain. On the plus side it was still early enough to go play the $1500 tournament, so we did that instead.
***
Unfortunately, I busted in the first level with KK vs AA but decided I wanted to play live more. I was trying to get a seat in the 5/10 NL game but it was full so I had to wait. As I was waiting they started a 10/20 NL game, so I figured why not, and got in on that one. Just as the game was about to start a seat opened at the 5/10 table, but the 10/20 game actually looked way softer so I decided to stay there. And what a game it was. 3-4 to every flop for a raise, and while most people seemed to know how to play fairly well postflop, there were a few that were complete maniacs. I ended up making $3K by winning a few small to medium sized pots along with this big one:
Hand 1: I'm UTG and and place a live straddle to 40 before looking at my cards. There is a raise to 125 and 2 callers before it gets back to me. I now look down and find KK, and make it 600 to go. The raiser folds but the first caller pushes me all-in for around $2000. I quickly call and say I hope it isn't happening for the 2nd time today, but he has 99 and my hand holds.
***
I find some other 2+2ers in the card room and learn that they've got a table for 12 booked at Nobu, the expensive Japanese/sushi place in the casino. Fortunately there were a couple extra seats, so Aaron and I could join them. To make things simple we all decided to get the chefs specialty 7 course meal at $150 a head. Throw in some sake and wine and we paid almost $200 each. The food was pretty good, and the service was actually fine (everyone else I've talked to complained the service was awful). Each of the 7 rounds was really small, but it added up to a satisfying meal. It definitely wasn't a $200-good meal though, I've had much fresher sushi in Toronto for example, but after running so good at credit card roulette we needed a big meal to knock some money off my room card anyways so that it wouldn't go to waste.
After the meal we got some more drinking in before heading to Senor Frogs, a bar in Nassau. We bumped into a few of the Ship it Holla Ballas on our way to find cabs, and instead we shared a limo with them. They're actually nice guys, people get the wrong idea from the awful name and their website, but they're just trying to have some fun and get some publicity. The night got even better when we arrived, as apparently several cruise ships were docked at Nassau that night, and the bar was packed. Not just of nerdy poker guys, but also some attractive ladies who weren't dating said poker players for a change. Lots of drinks, good reggae and hip hop playing, a (female) booty shaking contest up on the stage, and a bit of dancing. Not a bad night at all. After Senor Frogs closed we went to some other late night place and partied until around 5am. Great night.
Day 7
When I come to it's after 12:30 and we need to get cleaned up and head down to sign up for the $2500 tournament. I know it's going to be a rough day after last night, but I'm getting backed in the tournament, and I don't want to miss out on my last chance to make some money down here.
***
The tournament went a lot better today, but again I fell short of cashing. This is long as hell already so I'll go with the short version: AK vs TT aipf bingo A on river. AQ vs AA aipf turns broadway obv. I basically lost every other pot I played though and I wonder why I ever bother cont. betting the flop because I swear they raise me every time. Anyways I get moved to a new table and belowabove is on my right so I'm just waiting for a chance to reraise him. He opens on the button and I jam A3o from the SB. Unfortunately I don't have enough chips to get him to fold QTs and he decides to call and pwn me.
***
After this I went to the Stars closing cocktail party, but I didn't have it in me to drink anymore so I left early and went to a comedy show Steve + family, Aaron, and davidross + wife. I really enjoyed two of the three comedians, and even the guy in the middle wasn't bad. We say goodbye to some people and get our stuff ready to leave in the morning.
Day 8
Get up in time to go kill the last $50 on the room card at breakfast and get checked out by 11. Aaron leaves for his earlier flight and I'm on a flight with Steve and family at 3. The trip back is uneventful, Steve drops me home, and it was pretty awesome to see a bunch of people I hadn't seen in a while over at the house for one of Dave's dinner parties. Maybe Waterloo isn't so bad.
Mike
Day 5
Today I got up and headed down to the poker room to play the $1000 tournament. The structure was pretty awful and I never really got many chips. However, Aaron was owning it from the very start and I was running around the room trying to watch how Steve and gobbo were doing, and also keeping an eye on Aaron. Steve and gobbo's day are pretty well covered elsewhere. They came up short finishing in the low 20s for like 30K or something.
For dinner we went to the buffet with aaronbeen, actionjeff, and some others. I'm pretty sure aaronbeen lost credit card roulette, though I don't remember mocking him so I might have days mixed up. The dinner buffet was good, and I basically tried almost everything. Also, Mike is a huge luckbox. He had already won like $2000 on the trip gambling on coinflips, and at dinner he added to that. He flipped jonlewis for $100 twice, splitting those flips. He then won 2 consecutive flips for $200, the next for $400, and another double or nothing for $800. Jon quit at this point down only $1600.
***
I ended up going to play the big nightly tournaments online, and went on a sick run in every tournament I was playing. Unfortunately I bubbled the $1000 tournament on Full Tilt and donked out of the $129 tournament on UB in 3rd place in spectacular fashion:
We're 3 handed. I've been playing pretty aggressively. The guy on my right has 320K and I have around 280K, and GB2005 has 150K on my left.
Hand 1: I'm in the SB and the button folds. Blinds are 4K/8k and I limp in with 86o. GB checks his BB. The flop comes K55 and I autobet 12K. GB quickly calls. Something about the timing of his call and the fact that I'd been very aggressive made me really think he was floating me with nothing here planning to try to take the pot away later, since I figured to have nothing either.
The turn was a Q, completing the rainbow. Going with my read I decided not to give up on the pot and bet 24K. Unfortunately, this might not have been the best way to fight for the pot, a checkraise all-in was probably a better plan. GB2005 went ahead and raised to 65K. My first instinct was that I still didn't really believe him, and I thought he was leaving himself room to fold if I pushed. My second thought was that pushing allin with 8-hi, no draw, here was completely suicidal, what the hell was I thinking. But I talked myself into going with my read and pushed him in for his last 65K. He instamucked and berated me in chat for "never being able to fold". I told him I had a big hand for some reason.
Hand 2: After the last hand I decided that I was, in fact, invincible. I raise to 24K with AQo and the other guy calls in his BB. The flop comes TTx. He checks and I continuation bet 30K. He min-checkraises to 60K. Unlike in the last hand where I had actual reasons to think he was bluffing, I randomly decided to call and take this pot away too. I finish the hand with like 50-60K in chips.
Hand 3: Folded to me in the SB and I autoshove 73o. GB beats me into the pot with 99. GG.
After donking out of my other tournaments I headed down to watch Aaron. There are 5 players left and he has the chiplead. The funny thing about Steve and Aaron, is that they play nothing like their personalities. Both are fairly quiet, unassuming guys. They're not the least bit cocky and they're both pretty nitty with the money they've made, and you might expect them to be similar at the table, playing a careful, tight style. But in reality, they are two of the LAGiest LAGtards ever when they play live. Aaron had to be raising at least 75% of the hands it was folded to him in any position. The players on his left simply did not know how to adjust and he was dominating the table. Unfortunately I brought my bad luck down to him and he finished 3rd for $20K, after taking a tough river beat, and losing a flip.
***
Day 6
This was by far the best day of the trip. Mike left this morning. Lol, that's only a small part of why though. The plan for today was to lie out in the sun all afternoon and get our burn on. But first, waterslides!! I'd never done the water slide thing before, so I had no idea what I was in for. So I get on the first one, and you actually get moving pretty fast! OK so that was fun! Now we go do the big one. Aaron warns me that I'll actually lose contact with the slide for a split second on this one. Hmm, ok that sounds fine. I was thinking maybe you'd go for a little bit and then there'd be this drop, because I couldn't actually see much without my glasses on. Well, no. As soon as you get moving there's a huge drop. And it's not a split second, I'd say I was off the slide for closer to a full second, and you get moving fast in a hurry. It definitely got the blood pumping, but was really fun, so we did that again and also the tube one before going to lie down in the sun all day. Unfortunately, by this time our beautiful sunny day had clouded over and it was spitting rain. On the plus side it was still early enough to go play the $1500 tournament, so we did that instead.
***
Unfortunately, I busted in the first level with KK vs AA but decided I wanted to play live more. I was trying to get a seat in the 5/10 NL game but it was full so I had to wait. As I was waiting they started a 10/20 NL game, so I figured why not, and got in on that one. Just as the game was about to start a seat opened at the 5/10 table, but the 10/20 game actually looked way softer so I decided to stay there. And what a game it was. 3-4 to every flop for a raise, and while most people seemed to know how to play fairly well postflop, there were a few that were complete maniacs. I ended up making $3K by winning a few small to medium sized pots along with this big one:
Hand 1: I'm UTG and and place a live straddle to 40 before looking at my cards. There is a raise to 125 and 2 callers before it gets back to me. I now look down and find KK, and make it 600 to go. The raiser folds but the first caller pushes me all-in for around $2000. I quickly call and say I hope it isn't happening for the 2nd time today, but he has 99 and my hand holds.
***
I find some other 2+2ers in the card room and learn that they've got a table for 12 booked at Nobu, the expensive Japanese/sushi place in the casino. Fortunately there were a couple extra seats, so Aaron and I could join them. To make things simple we all decided to get the chefs specialty 7 course meal at $150 a head. Throw in some sake and wine and we paid almost $200 each. The food was pretty good, and the service was actually fine (everyone else I've talked to complained the service was awful). Each of the 7 rounds was really small, but it added up to a satisfying meal. It definitely wasn't a $200-good meal though, I've had much fresher sushi in Toronto for example, but after running so good at credit card roulette we needed a big meal to knock some money off my room card anyways so that it wouldn't go to waste.
After the meal we got some more drinking in before heading to Senor Frogs, a bar in Nassau. We bumped into a few of the Ship it Holla Ballas on our way to find cabs, and instead we shared a limo with them. They're actually nice guys, people get the wrong idea from the awful name and their website, but they're just trying to have some fun and get some publicity. The night got even better when we arrived, as apparently several cruise ships were docked at Nassau that night, and the bar was packed. Not just of nerdy poker guys, but also some attractive ladies who weren't dating said poker players for a change. Lots of drinks, good reggae and hip hop playing, a (female) booty shaking contest up on the stage, and a bit of dancing. Not a bad night at all. After Senor Frogs closed we went to some other late night place and partied until around 5am. Great night.
Day 7
When I come to it's after 12:30 and we need to get cleaned up and head down to sign up for the $2500 tournament. I know it's going to be a rough day after last night, but I'm getting backed in the tournament, and I don't want to miss out on my last chance to make some money down here.
***
The tournament went a lot better today, but again I fell short of cashing. This is long as hell already so I'll go with the short version: AK vs TT aipf bingo A on river. AQ vs AA aipf turns broadway obv. I basically lost every other pot I played though and I wonder why I ever bother cont. betting the flop because I swear they raise me every time. Anyways I get moved to a new table and belowabove is on my right so I'm just waiting for a chance to reraise him. He opens on the button and I jam A3o from the SB. Unfortunately I don't have enough chips to get him to fold QTs and he decides to call and pwn me.
***
After this I went to the Stars closing cocktail party, but I didn't have it in me to drink anymore so I left early and went to a comedy show Steve + family, Aaron, and davidross + wife. I really enjoyed two of the three comedians, and even the guy in the middle wasn't bad. We say goodbye to some people and get our stuff ready to leave in the morning.
Day 8
Get up in time to go kill the last $50 on the room card at breakfast and get checked out by 11. Aaron leaves for his earlier flight and I'm on a flight with Steve and family at 3. The trip back is uneventful, Steve drops me home, and it was pretty awesome to see a bunch of people I hadn't seen in a while over at the house for one of Dave's dinner parties. Maybe Waterloo isn't so bad.
Mike
Friday, January 12, 2007
PCA Trip Report: Part 1
I've tried to make this post more readable for non-poker players. There's a few terms explained at the bottom with a * next to them. Super poker-nerd content is separated by ***. The 2nd part will come shortly, I do a lot more fun non-poker stuff in that part.
Day 1
My flight in is uneventful, though I met a couple other poker players. I meet timex (Mike) and PacMann (Aaron) at the airport and cab it back to the hotel, those 2 guys are crashing in my room. In one of the e-mails from Stars they say a cab to Atlantis from the airport should cost around $25. But they don't have meters or anything in the cabs so it's basically negotiable. Being intelligent, we talk in the back about the usual high roller poker stuff the whole way. "That's $40 mon." Let the overpaying for everything begin. We get checked in and the room is fairly nice, basically exactly what I expected and very comparable to the room I had in Vegas. We check on 2+2* to find people and go downstairs and meet up with Junglen, exitonly, Jurollo, coxquinn, etc... to go grab food and drinks before the cocktail party. We check out the bar and grill in the casino. I try the local beer Kalik but it kinda sucks. For the bill we play credit card roulette (or in this case room card roulette since PokerStars credited $1150 to our room cards as part of the package), a pretty standard tradition when people who like to gamble too much grab a meal together. The game is very simple and avoids the hassle of splitting up the bill. It's best when everyone's meals are reasonably close in price so no one has a big edge. Everyone puts their roomcard in the middle, the cards are shuffled together, and you get the waitress to pick one card at random. The card picked pays for the entire meal. aaronbeen loses and I improve to 2-0 lifetime, with Aaron losing both those games (what a fish*).
Stars cocktail party is pretty awesome. I meet up with all the same 2+2ers and a ton more (way too many to try to name like I was going to). The bartender is mixing me 80:20 rum and cokes... Hang out with Steve and his family/gf for a bit with the rest of the Waterloo guys. Some people actually recognize Steve here. lol. (this is the tournament he won last year)
More 80:20 rum and cokes but they stop serving at 9 so I go find people to continue partying with (other day 1B guys). Meet up with aaronbeen, ActionJeff, and the rest of the GIFAFI guys. They've managed to score a ton of booze from one of the bartenders so we drink that. Once we finish that up we head back to the hotel bar and continue the partying.... Suffice it to say I don't remember the night that well and didn't feel great in the morning.
Day 2
The plan for today was to rest up and recover from the previous night's events, so I'd be ready to play Day 1B the next day. I just went out and laid in the sun all afternoon and drank some fruity energy drinks, then came in and played the supersatellite* to the main event to try to win $8000 (people who already had a seat in the tournament got $8000 instead of the seat) and get used to live play again. It was a $200 rebuy tournament so I ended up in for $600. I can't remember any specific hands, but it was fairly uneventful and I never got a hold of many chips and busted fairly early. I met up Jurollo and some othere 2+2ers after they finished their day and went to the Bar & Grill again for a late dinner. Credit card roulette is hilarious when Jurollo states from the very beginning of the meal that he'll almost certainly lose. We're all cheering for his card to be picked and sure enough, the waitress says "Justin!" and there's high fives all around. 3-0 lifetime I'm so good at this game. I ducked out after the meal when they went partying to get some sleep. Steve had an excellent first day in the main event finishing with around 75K, and another friend, Jimmy "gobboboy" Fricke, finished with 122K, among the chipleaders.
Day 3
I got up and went to the MarketPlace buffet with Aaron for breakfast before heading down to the poker room. I hadn't slept particularly well the night before but I was excited enough to get playing that it didn't really matter. I posted a report of Day 1 earlier so I won't rehash it here. In summary, I won a big pot early to get to 30K (we started with 20K chips) and then got whittled down to 16K by the end of the day. I went back to the room and grabbed some room service, then crashed for Day 2 of the tournament. Aaron went out fairly early today and him and Mike woke me up at 4am when they came back from the poker room. I hate them.
Day 4
Once again I woke up early and met Steve and his family (it's easier to just write this even though Natalie isn't family... yet) at MarketPlace for the buffet. I got down to the poker room early to find out where I was sitting. My table draw looked a lot better today, there were no names I recognized and no one had too many chips. There were a few guys who may have been big name online players but I didn't know their real names. My plan coming into the day was to move all-in over a middle position or late position raise the first chance I got regardless of my hole cards since my stack size was perfect so that I wasn't risking too much, but big enough that it would be really difficult for them to call me without a big hand.
***
Hand 1: 500/1000 a100. I'm on the button and it's folded to the guy on my right (I think he plays as CrazyMarco online) who makes it 3500. I decide this is a suspiciously large raise and I don't have enough fold equity to move in without a hand. However I find KK and move in, but he quickly folds.
Hand 2: Same level, I now have 20K. A guy raises in middle position to 3K. It's the first hand he's raised but he could easily have been card dead for the first couple orbits. I move in with AQ and he folds.
Hands 3/4: I get dealy KK and QQ and open raise but get no action :-(.
Hand 5: I get dealt 55 2 before the button and raise to 3K. Obviously I get a caller this time on the button. The flop comes K87 with 2 clubs and I contintuation bet 5K. He moves in and I fold. Sigh, back down to 17K where I started.
Hands >5: I move all-in a few times with not much to steal the blinds once an orbit until I do it with A6o and get called by AA. GG.
At some point in here the eventual winner, Ryan Daut, was moved to my table (I'm pretty sure it was him anyways). I saw him talking to some people I knew on break and introduced myself.
***
Being a poker addict I obviously go to grab my laptop but it's no longer in the room. I go find Mike and Aaron in the lobby already playing the big Sunday tournaments online, and of course Mike has mine. Despite being richer than all of us he still hasn't gotten around to buying a laptop that turns on in <5 minutes and has a working wireless card. The Coral Tower rooms most people were staying in don't have wireless internet, just one ethernet cable, though if you're smart you might bring a wireless router to hook that into. For this reason the lobby is generally crowded full of poker nerds on their laptops playing all sorts of games. I'm sitting at a table with Serge (adanthar), Aaron and Mike. It was cool to talk poker with adanthar for a bit because I really like his posts on 2+2 and I think we play a very similar style (though he probably plays it better). He was playing a $4K buy-in tournament on Cake Poker (I had never heard of it either), where there were only 11 players and first paid $22K and 1% of Cake Poker! The other 10 players all got in through promotions on the site and Serge was the only person to buy-in directly. So of course the other players were terrible and he absolutely destroyed the table (it was actually not that hard since 3 places got paid and the money obviously meant a lot to his opponents, so they played very weakly near the end to try to guarantee themselves some money and Serge just raised almost every hand and ran them over). So he now owns 1% of a poker site. Pretty cool stuff. As for my tournaments, I went really deep in the UB 200K but ran into overpairs a few too many times at the end and finished 21st for only $1100. At the end of the day Steve and Gobbo are still owning the main event. Steve is 2nd in chips with 400K, behind only ZeeJustin, and gobbo has a very healthy stack as well with ~290K I think.
Mike
supersatellite: A multi-table poker tournament where instead of the normal payout structure the prizes are seats in a bigger tournaments. In this case for $8000 in the prize pool one seat to the main event was awarded. So the top 14 players got seats and the tournament ends when only 14 players are left. This changes correct strategy drastically, especially near the end of the tournament.
2+2: The biggest/best poker book publishing company. They have an online poker strategy forum (linked on the right) where I post a fair bit. When I say 2+2er/2p2er I mean someone that posts on those forums, and I use screennames from there instead of real names a lot.
fish/donkey: A weak player. Donkey or "donk" can also be used as a verb or adjective to describe a poor play.
Day 1
My flight in is uneventful, though I met a couple other poker players. I meet timex (Mike) and PacMann (Aaron) at the airport and cab it back to the hotel, those 2 guys are crashing in my room. In one of the e-mails from Stars they say a cab to Atlantis from the airport should cost around $25. But they don't have meters or anything in the cabs so it's basically negotiable. Being intelligent, we talk in the back about the usual high roller poker stuff the whole way. "That's $40 mon." Let the overpaying for everything begin. We get checked in and the room is fairly nice, basically exactly what I expected and very comparable to the room I had in Vegas. We check on 2+2* to find people and go downstairs and meet up with Junglen, exitonly, Jurollo, coxquinn, etc... to go grab food and drinks before the cocktail party. We check out the bar and grill in the casino. I try the local beer Kalik but it kinda sucks. For the bill we play credit card roulette (or in this case room card roulette since PokerStars credited $1150 to our room cards as part of the package), a pretty standard tradition when people who like to gamble too much grab a meal together. The game is very simple and avoids the hassle of splitting up the bill. It's best when everyone's meals are reasonably close in price so no one has a big edge. Everyone puts their roomcard in the middle, the cards are shuffled together, and you get the waitress to pick one card at random. The card picked pays for the entire meal. aaronbeen loses and I improve to 2-0 lifetime, with Aaron losing both those games (what a fish*).
Stars cocktail party is pretty awesome. I meet up with all the same 2+2ers and a ton more (way too many to try to name like I was going to). The bartender is mixing me 80:20 rum and cokes... Hang out with Steve and his family/gf for a bit with the rest of the Waterloo guys. Some people actually recognize Steve here. lol. (this is the tournament he won last year)
More 80:20 rum and cokes but they stop serving at 9 so I go find people to continue partying with (other day 1B guys). Meet up with aaronbeen, ActionJeff, and the rest of the GIFAFI guys. They've managed to score a ton of booze from one of the bartenders so we drink that. Once we finish that up we head back to the hotel bar and continue the partying.... Suffice it to say I don't remember the night that well and didn't feel great in the morning.
Day 2
The plan for today was to rest up and recover from the previous night's events, so I'd be ready to play Day 1B the next day. I just went out and laid in the sun all afternoon and drank some fruity energy drinks, then came in and played the supersatellite* to the main event to try to win $8000 (people who already had a seat in the tournament got $8000 instead of the seat) and get used to live play again. It was a $200 rebuy tournament so I ended up in for $600. I can't remember any specific hands, but it was fairly uneventful and I never got a hold of many chips and busted fairly early. I met up Jurollo and some othere 2+2ers after they finished their day and went to the Bar & Grill again for a late dinner. Credit card roulette is hilarious when Jurollo states from the very beginning of the meal that he'll almost certainly lose. We're all cheering for his card to be picked and sure enough, the waitress says "Justin!" and there's high fives all around. 3-0 lifetime I'm so good at this game. I ducked out after the meal when they went partying to get some sleep. Steve had an excellent first day in the main event finishing with around 75K, and another friend, Jimmy "gobboboy" Fricke, finished with 122K, among the chipleaders.
Day 3
I got up and went to the MarketPlace buffet with Aaron for breakfast before heading down to the poker room. I hadn't slept particularly well the night before but I was excited enough to get playing that it didn't really matter. I posted a report of Day 1 earlier so I won't rehash it here. In summary, I won a big pot early to get to 30K (we started with 20K chips) and then got whittled down to 16K by the end of the day. I went back to the room and grabbed some room service, then crashed for Day 2 of the tournament. Aaron went out fairly early today and him and Mike woke me up at 4am when they came back from the poker room. I hate them.
Day 4
Once again I woke up early and met Steve and his family (it's easier to just write this even though Natalie isn't family... yet) at MarketPlace for the buffet. I got down to the poker room early to find out where I was sitting. My table draw looked a lot better today, there were no names I recognized and no one had too many chips. There were a few guys who may have been big name online players but I didn't know their real names. My plan coming into the day was to move all-in over a middle position or late position raise the first chance I got regardless of my hole cards since my stack size was perfect so that I wasn't risking too much, but big enough that it would be really difficult for them to call me without a big hand.
***
Hand 1: 500/1000 a100. I'm on the button and it's folded to the guy on my right (I think he plays as CrazyMarco online) who makes it 3500. I decide this is a suspiciously large raise and I don't have enough fold equity to move in without a hand. However I find KK and move in, but he quickly folds.
Hand 2: Same level, I now have 20K. A guy raises in middle position to 3K. It's the first hand he's raised but he could easily have been card dead for the first couple orbits. I move in with AQ and he folds.
Hands 3/4: I get dealy KK and QQ and open raise but get no action :-(.
Hand 5: I get dealt 55 2 before the button and raise to 3K. Obviously I get a caller this time on the button. The flop comes K87 with 2 clubs and I contintuation bet 5K. He moves in and I fold. Sigh, back down to 17K where I started.
Hands >5: I move all-in a few times with not much to steal the blinds once an orbit until I do it with A6o and get called by AA. GG.
At some point in here the eventual winner, Ryan Daut, was moved to my table (I'm pretty sure it was him anyways). I saw him talking to some people I knew on break and introduced myself.
***
Being a poker addict I obviously go to grab my laptop but it's no longer in the room. I go find Mike and Aaron in the lobby already playing the big Sunday tournaments online, and of course Mike has mine. Despite being richer than all of us he still hasn't gotten around to buying a laptop that turns on in <5 minutes and has a working wireless card. The Coral Tower rooms most people were staying in don't have wireless internet, just one ethernet cable, though if you're smart you might bring a wireless router to hook that into. For this reason the lobby is generally crowded full of poker nerds on their laptops playing all sorts of games. I'm sitting at a table with Serge (adanthar), Aaron and Mike. It was cool to talk poker with adanthar for a bit because I really like his posts on 2+2 and I think we play a very similar style (though he probably plays it better). He was playing a $4K buy-in tournament on Cake Poker (I had never heard of it either), where there were only 11 players and first paid $22K and 1% of Cake Poker! The other 10 players all got in through promotions on the site and Serge was the only person to buy-in directly. So of course the other players were terrible and he absolutely destroyed the table (it was actually not that hard since 3 places got paid and the money obviously meant a lot to his opponents, so they played very weakly near the end to try to guarantee themselves some money and Serge just raised almost every hand and ran them over). So he now owns 1% of a poker site. Pretty cool stuff. As for my tournaments, I went really deep in the UB 200K but ran into overpairs a few too many times at the end and finished 21st for only $1100. At the end of the day Steve and Gobbo are still owning the main event. Steve is 2nd in chips with 400K, behind only ZeeJustin, and gobbo has a very healthy stack as well with ~290K I think.
Mike
supersatellite: A multi-table poker tournament where instead of the normal payout structure the prizes are seats in a bigger tournaments. In this case for $8000 in the prize pool one seat to the main event was awarded. So the top 14 players got seats and the tournament ends when only 14 players are left. This changes correct strategy drastically, especially near the end of the tournament.
2+2: The biggest/best poker book publishing company. They have an online poker strategy forum (linked on the right) where I post a fair bit. When I say 2+2er/2p2er I mean someone that posts on those forums, and I use screennames from there instead of real names a lot.
fish/donkey: A weak player. Donkey or "donk" can also be used as a verb or adjective to describe a poor play.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Newspaper Article
While I was home I did an interview for the local newspaper. The article appeared a few days ago. Here's the link:
http://www.thetelegram.com/index.cfm?sid=914&sc=2
I haven't had much time to write anything but I'll do a big trip report when I get back to Waterloo. I played the $1000, $1500, and $2500 tournaments here but no cashes. However I made $3K playing 10/20 NL live to get my money back. I played online a couple nights too and had a few very deep finishes including a 3rd in the new UB $129 bounty tournament. Other than that there has been lots of partying and meeting people. It's going to be weird going back to the real world.
Mike
http://www.thetelegram.com/index.cfm?sid=914&sc=2
I haven't had much time to write anything but I'll do a big trip report when I get back to Waterloo. I played the $1000, $1500, and $2500 tournaments here but no cashes. However I made $3K playing 10/20 NL live to get my money back. I played online a couple nights too and had a few very deep finishes including a 3rd in the new UB $129 bounty tournament. Other than that there has been lots of partying and meeting people. It's going to be weird going back to the real world.
Mike
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Busto
I got as high as 26K after pushing over a couple raises but lost a pot to drop bacl to 17K. I pushbotted a bit to stay between 17K and 20K. On my bustout hand I was down to 17K at 600/1200 a200 (the 2nd level of the day) and shoved A6o from MP. I guess it's a marginal shove but I wanted to keep enough chips to push over a raise from the aggressive player on my right (and the antes are huge). So the guy on my left obviously wakes up with the aces and I somehow fail to suckout despite having 7% equity in the hand or something. Forunately I went out in time to play the Sunday tournaments online with the rest of the degenerates in the hotel lobby. WPT is so rigged.
Mike
Mike
PCA Day 1 Report
This report is probably going to suck because I didn't play any interesting hands today at all. i sit down and look at the list of names and recognize a lot more than I'd like. I'm in the 5 seat. The 1 seat is John Phan. The 2 seat is tnetter, who won the Stars yearly tournament leader board for 2006. 3 seat is some other young online player who is pretty good, and the 4 seat is Joe Pelton. 6 seat is Jason Sagle, who recently finished 2nd at WPT Niagara. The 7 seat was another younger guy who played pretty well, the 8 seat was a more aggressive player who was a bit of a call station at times but didn't play badly (and picked up a ton of hands to cover it up). The 9 seat was an aggressive young asian kid who got a little bit too far out of line a few times and was punished, but didn't really play badly. 10 seat was some weak-tight old guy. Not exactly my dream table.
We started with 20K chips and 50/100 blinds. As far as WPT events go I'm pretty sure the structure for this one was really bad. We played 50/100, 100/200, 100/200 a25, 200/400 a50, 300/600 a75 and 400/800 a100. My first and only interesting hand of the day occured early in level 1 when it was folded to Joe Pelton in the SB and he completed. I had A7o in the BB and made it 400 because that's how I roll. He called and we say a flop of 775 rainbow. He checked and I bet 600. He called and the turn came a 3. Again he checked and I bet 1250. This time he checkraised me to 3500 and I called. The turn came a 2 and he bet 6000. I just called and beat his T9o. Cool.
The next 5 and a half levels consisted of me never getting dealt any hands and occasionally stealing/restealing but getting reraised too often. Between John Phan and tnetter not many hands were getting folded to me so I started reraising them with air from time to time. At 300/600 I lost a decent % of my chips when it was folded to the online player in the 3 seat on the button and he made it 1800. He had been playing really tight but it was still a button raise and seemed like a good time to use his solid image to pick up a pot. I looked down to find AJo and made it 5600. After some deliberation he shoved 12K more and i had to fold despite getting 2:1. Oops. Shortly after this we reached 400/800 a100 and I had a bit under 15K which is a sweet stack size for restealing. So I randomly shoved over a tnetter raise with J9o, but didn't have any other good chances to try to lose all my chips and made it to the end of the level and day with 16,100.
John Phan finished the day with more chips than me despite being down to 450 chips really early (when the young asian kid didn't realize he was so short and just called Phan's river checkraise with a fullhouse instead of putting the last few chips in), and then again down to 2000 chips at 400/800 and being forced allin with J2o vs QQ in his BB. Anyways I'm going to have to double up early tomorrow or it will be a really short day for me. This seems to be a tougher field than most WPT events (day 1B in particular, 1A I heard about more soft tables). Hopefully tomorrow will go better, I'm still not really that far out of it.
Mike
We started with 20K chips and 50/100 blinds. As far as WPT events go I'm pretty sure the structure for this one was really bad. We played 50/100, 100/200, 100/200 a25, 200/400 a50, 300/600 a75 and 400/800 a100. My first and only interesting hand of the day occured early in level 1 when it was folded to Joe Pelton in the SB and he completed. I had A7o in the BB and made it 400 because that's how I roll. He called and we say a flop of 775 rainbow. He checked and I bet 600. He called and the turn came a 3. Again he checked and I bet 1250. This time he checkraised me to 3500 and I called. The turn came a 2 and he bet 6000. I just called and beat his T9o. Cool.
The next 5 and a half levels consisted of me never getting dealt any hands and occasionally stealing/restealing but getting reraised too often. Between John Phan and tnetter not many hands were getting folded to me so I started reraising them with air from time to time. At 300/600 I lost a decent % of my chips when it was folded to the online player in the 3 seat on the button and he made it 1800. He had been playing really tight but it was still a button raise and seemed like a good time to use his solid image to pick up a pot. I looked down to find AJo and made it 5600. After some deliberation he shoved 12K more and i had to fold despite getting 2:1. Oops. Shortly after this we reached 400/800 a100 and I had a bit under 15K which is a sweet stack size for restealing. So I randomly shoved over a tnetter raise with J9o, but didn't have any other good chances to try to lose all my chips and made it to the end of the level and day with 16,100.
John Phan finished the day with more chips than me despite being down to 450 chips really early (when the young asian kid didn't realize he was so short and just called Phan's river checkraise with a fullhouse instead of putting the last few chips in), and then again down to 2000 chips at 400/800 and being forced allin with J2o vs QQ in his BB. Anyways I'm going to have to double up early tomorrow or it will be a really short day for me. This seems to be a tougher field than most WPT events (day 1B in particular, 1A I heard about more soft tables). Hopefully tomorrow will go better, I'm still not really that far out of it.
Mike
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