HugePoker

As usual I’m way behind in my reporting, but there’s a quick bit of timely news – My friend Mark has finished the first day of the $2500 mixed Pot Limit Hold’em / Omaha event as one of the chip leaders. They started with 457 players at 5,000 chips each, and they’re down to 85 – Mark is listed in 7th place with 52,000 chips, though I thought I remembered him bagging 57,000 which would put him in 5th. Either way it’s a very strong showing against a tough field – aside from all the top pros who are already busted, remaining in the field are Howard Lederer, Johnny Chan, Joe Hachem, Erik Seidel, Allen Cunningham, and Ted Forrest.

Some of you know Mark, so I thought you’d appreciate the update. If you want to check on his progress tomorrow (aka today, aka Friday) you can see updates at POKERNEWS and CARDPLAYER

They’ll be restarting at 3PM Pacific, and I’ll be forgoing my own tournament schedule to take on support duties, as Mark did for me during my run in the main event last year. Mark made a final table in a PLO event last year before I arrived in Vegas – I’ll be very excited to be present for a repeat appearance. He’s put himself in an excellent spot to make a run at the final table, and from there it’s on to the bracelet.

A little hint at my own humble news that I’ve been neglecting: it involves some more serious Montel Williams ass-whoopin’.

-huge

So I show up for the gala reception before the charity tournament, and it’s not really so gala - a band playing and appetizers and cocktails - but I get a feel for the likely opposition, and some needed food, and Montel makes a nice speech about his foundation and MS research.

I pay my $1080 and get my seat assignment, and then a little while later I go back to registration to ask how many people are playing. There’s a woman in front of me signing up and she clearly doesn’t play poker, and she asks if she can be at Montel’s table along with her husband, who also doesn’t seem to have much poker knowledge. They tell her sure, which makes me think “hey! two seemingly not-even-a-little-experienced players just joined Montel’s table, maybe I should too. So I ask the same question, and they even let me pick my seat, so I go for two seats to Montel’s left - I figure he’s likely to be the only player I need to worry about, so I want position on him. I can’t believe they let me pick my seat.

We start playing and of course it’s a very sociable game, people are drinking, no-one is too concerned with strict adherence to the rules, and half the players at the table act like they’ve never played a tournament before. Montel and I build our stacks up a bit, from 5000 to 6000 chips, and after a while I see pocket Queens in early position and I raise, fold around to montel in the big blind who re-raises, and I figure he’s the only player at the table who might do that without a big hand, so I re-shove all-in, Montel says “well, I got to call” and turns over Kings. Argghhh - it’s going to be a quick exit for Huge - until a Queen comes on the flop. Oh well, sorry Montel. After they count all the chips it turns out he had 100 chips more than me, so he’s not out yet, but I finish him off a few hands later.

They’re paying the top 9 finishers, with first getting $9000. Several famous players are there - Robert Williamson III, Jamie Gold, Phil Laak and Jennifer Tilly, Paul “X22″ Magriel - but I don’t run into any celebrities other than Montel. I get moved to a new table 3 times, and each tine I get this mock-angry “you’re the guy who busted Montel” response.

I had a good stack with 20-ish left, but then this woman at my table doubled through me 4 (yes 4) times in a row. On the first one she was extremely short-stacked, but by the 4th she had a great stack and had nearly crippled me. Three of the four were either coinflips or heavily in my favor, but I lost them all. It didn’t take long after that for me to bust out.

We/they raised over $30000 for MS research.

-huge

I am, as I write this, throwing on my clothes in order to run down to the celebrity reception preceding the Montel Williams MS Foundation poker tournament. If any of you would like to buy a piece of my action for this event, which will in part be a donation to the foundation which supports MS research, let me know by entering a comment here or sending me email. Even though you will basically be donating half of your pledge to charity, it will still be a reasonably good investment because there will be a bunch of celebrities and other random non-poker-players in the field, so I’m still likely to be positive expected value. Maximum contribution is $100.

For those of you who are already on my investor list, you’ve already received my invitation to this, and unless you’ve told me not to, 20% of your balance with me is going towards this tournament.

If I get more than the $1080 buyin in pledges, I’ll put the overflow towards some other charity fundraiser tournament.

gotta go hang with the celebs…

-huge

June 4, daily tournament at the Wynn, 2PM, 62 players, $220 buyin. I had been planning on playing the $2000 event at the World Series, so this was kind of a downgrade, but I didn’t sleep well the night before and I just didn’t feel alert enough. At first I thought the extra hour of sleep didn’t do me that much good - I started off poorly and was getting pretty short towards the first break, but then a timely pair of Kings doubled me back to health. From there I just tried to exploit the plentiful weak spots in the field, and I found a lot of good opportunities for that. I have three hands and one negotiation to write about…

16 players left (2 tables), I’m sitting on a below-average stack, not quite desperate but I need to make something happen before the blinds go up. There’s a guy at my table I’ll call “Angry Guy” – he was at my table when I played this tournament last week (another final table but that time there were only 42 players so they only paid 5 places, and I finished 9th) and he would just glare and glare at people when he lost a pot, sometimes ranting about how badly his opponent had played the hand. Things aren’t going too well for him again today (though he has more chips than me) and the fuse seems to be on the burn. There seems to be a disconnect between all this anger brewing in him and any capacity to follow through with some aggressive poker. There’s a hand in which he limps, I make a raise from the small blind with Ace-Nine because I think he must be pretty weak and the big blind was short-stacked and my hand figures to be a lot better than the average hand the BB is holding. The big blind calls, hopefully just out of desperation, and Angry Guy starts fuming and glaring. It’s like I was strangling his dog. I smile back at him and he finally folds in a flood of muttering. When I turn over my A-9 and my opponent tables A-5 he goes ballistic – I guess he had a pair of sixes – and he can’t believe I would raise with that trash. Of course if he would just have the freaking cajones to raise with his pair of sixes the way he should, I fold in a heartbeat and he gets to be a big favorite to knock out the short stack himself. In the course of his jawing at me I casually mention that to him – that if he had raised I never would have been in the hand in the first place, and he seems pretty incensed that I would presume to advise him on how to play poker.

I didn’t mean to be setting him up with that comment (I just wanted to get under his skin in a general sort of way), but maybe I inadvertently did, as twenty minutes later a hand comes up at 500-1000 and he seems to take my advice. Angry Guy raises to 5000 from middle position. I’m thinking he has some sort of medium-strong hand that he just wants to take the blinds with – Ace-Jack, Eights, something like that. I look down at a pair of Threes in the big blind and I think “he’s not gonna want to call me if I shove, and at least if I’m wrong and he has AK or AQ I’ll be at the good end of a coinflip”. I shove for my 14000 chips, which would cripple him if he calls and loses. You know what’s coming – the fuming, the glaring, the clear expression of “how can these assholes be torturing me???”. He starts saying something like “you obviously don’t know me” over and over again. I’m not quite sure what he means by that, but I try to be helpful and put the question to rest by saying “You’re right, I absolutely … ummm … don’t”. He then asks me if I’ll show him my hand if he folds, and I decide it’s time to start some serious conversation. I say “well, see, I feel like it would be a mistake to answer that because that might influence your decision and I don’t know which way I want you to go because I don’t know what you have. I mean if you have a great hand then I really want you to fold but if you had a great hand then you would have called already, so maybe I want you to call, but then if you call maybe it’ll just be a coinflip and then I might lose and I really don’t want to lose. I mean if I said that I would show you my hand if you fold, would that make you fold or would that make you call?” [no answer but steam is coming out of all orifices now] “OK, I’ll probably show you if you fold but I’m not committing to that – I might change my mind” [no answer again, but he’s starting to shake his head vigorously in a pattern I don’t quite understand] “OK, what would make you happiest – if I tell you I’ll show you, or if I say I won’t show you – I’ll tell you whatever you want me to tell you” [this gets the biggest longest glare yet]. Finally he clenches his jaw really hard and says something inaudible and slams his pair of tens down on the table face up, folding them. As the dealer is pushing the nice pot to me I say “do you want me to show you?” and he says “yeah” and I say “do you really want me to show?” and he says “whatever” and I say “I mean, I’ll show you if you want, but you’re not gonna like it” and he says “go ahead, show me your A-K” [ummm, what? You think I have A-K and you folded Tens??] and I say “you obviously don’t know me” and I turn over my threes and Angry Guy pretty much has an aneurism. He goes back to his “you obviously don’t know me” refrain, which seems weird after I just taunted him with it, but he keeps saying it, and when I finally ask him what he means by that he says “because I never make moves – I never make moves - ask anyone who knows me” and I say “well, maybe you should try it once in a while – it might make you feel better”. That doesn’t seem to go over too well.

Angry Guy and I both make the final table, but he gets pretty short pretty quickly after a set of truly atrocious folds when he clearly should have been calling or shoving with any two cards – the players at my end of the table would all do this shocked double-take gesture and look at each other in disbelief. He has another meltdown when a player next to me shows his cards to his neighbor (who has already folded) and Angry Guy gets, well, angry and says that he wants to see that hand and there’s a whole brouhaha with the dealer and a floor person and it’s all just a circus. Angry Guy busts in 8th and keeps having an argument with the floorman. I feel sad for Angry Guy. Maybe he needs a hug.

My key hand of the tournament came with seven left at the final table. I’ve built my stack from below average to closely tailing the chip leader with a lot of small-ball aggression (picking up a lot of small pots without taking too much risk). It seems like the others at the table haven’t really made it to a final table too often, and they’re just terrified of busting out next. The massive chip leader at the start of the final table has fallen down a bit, but he generally just isn’t bullying the table the way he should, so someone had to pick up the slack, and it might as well be me. I even steal his blinds several times, always saying things like “you know I’m not going to tangle with you without a real hand, right?” and he seems to actually believe my ridiculous lie. I get into a hand with him that I maybe should have just avoided given how well I was doing at squeezing chips out of the table one small pot at a time, but it ended up being pretty exciting, so here it is…

Chip leader raises from mid position to 15,000, I call on the button with K-Q-suited. Flop comes A-Q-J, chip leader looks terrified, like the flop hit him enough that he’s scared he’ll really get himself into trouble. He bets 20,000 but it really seems like his heart’s not in it. I’m thinking he’s got an Ace but he doesn’t have two pair, so he’s ahead but he has to feel completely vulnerable, since AQ and AJ are dead-center in my range, not to mention QQ or JJ, so if he has A-T or even A-K he just can’t be all that happy. I have about 90,000 behind, and he has 110,000 or a little more. I call, thinking that I can take it away from him on the turn, or that a King, Queen or Ten on the turn may well give me the best hand. I definitely could be making a big fat mistake here, but it feels right. He clenches his jaw when I call, the turn is a blank and he just looks like he’s going to puke. Just like the other guys at the table, it just seems like he doesn’t like being here, he’s got himself into a big pot with the only guy at the table who can hurt him, he’s out of position, he knows he should probably keep betting but if he does we might get all the chips in and he has no idea where he is in the hand. I know how he feels – it’s gross. He finally checks the turn and I think I’ve got him – I think he’s just praying to have me check behind – I’ve got 70,000 chips and I think 30,000 will make it clear that if he calls here it’s all going in on the river (it won’t really - if he calls here I’ll slink away on the river unless I make my straight). I bet 30,000 and he just shrivels. He hates it and hates it and hates it and says “I don’t want to battle with you” and throws his cards in the muck. I lie and tell him I had two pair, because unlike Angry Guy I want this guy to feel like he’s making some quality folds against me – I don’t want him mad, I want him quiet and content to stay out of my way.

At the final table in tournaments like this there is always talk of a chop, with the shorter stacks saying things like “hey, let’s just split it 9 ways and go home!”, mostly as a joke but I’ve seen big stacks agree to even-split deals 6- or 7-handed when it was clearly a terrible financial deal to do so. There has been this kind of chatter at our table, with me and the other big stack mostly just not responding, making it clear that we’re not going to throw away a bunch of equity just to avoid the fear of playing poker for a few thousand dollars, which is after all what we came there to do in the first place. When we get down to 6-handed a clear pecking order has arisen – I have the big stack and I’m pounding on everyone, the former chip-leader has a little more than half my stack and is protecting it like it was his first-born, occasionally coming out of his shell only when he knows I’m not in the hand, and the other four players have desperately short stacks, short enough that they will have to just start closing their eyes and throwing their chips in. The pleas for a deal continue, and I casually mention that if they agree that I get first place money ($3008) and the former chip-leader gets second place money ($1800) the other four could just split the rest evenly. This would be a pretty bad deal for everyone but me, but you never know how much fear will dominate people’s reasoning. It was approaching 8PM and people were talking about being hungry, having dinner plans, and having to pee really bad. Two of the short stacks actually wanted to take my offer, but one of the others realized that I was hoodwinking them. Someone asked me how much I would give up from 1st place money to take a deal, and I started the bargaining stance by saying “I don’t know – not a whole lot – I mean I’m pretty sure I’m gonna win”, while thinking that I would happily give up $400. But instead of having to fight for that, they just offered $300, so that I would get $2708, the 2nd stack would get $1800, and the other 4 would split the rest. I mimicked a careful consideration and then said that I guess I could agree to that, and pretty quickly it was all agreed. Yikes. Anything can happen at a final table, and I had a substantial chip lead but nowhere near an invincible one. I could have (with pleasure) continued to threaten the other players with my big stack, playing on their fear of being the next one out in 6th place ($600 and change), and I probably would have won even though I didn’t have half of the chips in play (theoretically if you have half the chips you have a 50-50 chance of winning), but no matter how confident I was, there was nothing even close to a guarantee that I would win, or even take 2nd. Giving me 90% of first place money was just absurd, but that’s what they did. I was a little sad not to keep playing because it would have been fun, and good practice, but that was just too good a deal to pass up. Plus putting a good win in the books seemed like a smart move for my morale, which had been dipping a bit.

So knock up a first place finish for Huge – not much by WSOP standards, but I’ll take it - hopefully the touchstone of some much bigger bangs.

-huge

Something went wrong with my last attempt to post this - I’m going to break it into two parts and try again - if this post doesn’t end with my typical signoff of “- huge” then the whole thing didn’t get posted…

OK this is going to be a disjointed post – I’ve made three false starts at writing it, and then each time I got tired or ran off to do something else and then something else happened that I want to report on. And now today (Wednesday, June 4) I’ve had a good result that I have to write up, so I’m just going to pump it out there and let you decide if anything sticks…

I’ve been in Vegas for exactly a week now, and I’ve had lots of things that made me think “I should put that in the blog”, but not much time or mental space to sit down and write. I get back to my hotel room and I either want to immediately crash, take a bath, or vegetate in front of the TV. But in an unexpected turn of events, it appears that I will be playing in another WSOP event tomorrow, so I wanted to alert you all.

[May 29] I’ve been in Vegas for 48 hours, no big news but a few good little stories. The first real WSOP event is tomorrow ($10,000 Pot-Limit Hold’em championship – I won’t be playing that one), but the single-table satellites started yesterday and the first big mega-satellite was held today. I got off to a slow start yesterday, and things continued in a sad direction today until I scored in three single-tables in a row to close the night, leaving me moderately well into the black.

[June 3] OK so that was 5 days ago. Since then I’ve played in the $1500 event, several freezeout tournaments (regular multi-table tournaments awarding cash), a couple of mega-satellites (multi-table tournaments that award multiple $10,000 WSOP main event seats) and a whole lot of single-table satellites (ten-person tournaments that award a small handful of $500 tournament buyin chips to a single winner, although most of them end with two or three players agreeing to a deal or “chop”). I’ve made a decent bit of change in the single-tables, and absolutely nothing in any of the other tournaments I’ve played. Actually the $1500 WSOP event was the closest I’ve come to cashing in anything – other than that I’ve had some good starts, built up some pretty good stacks, made some good plays and made a couple of bad mistakes, but I’ve always so far either dwindled away or run head-first into a big nasty hand that knocked me out. My profit from the singles doesn’t cover my multi-table entry costs, so I’m in the losing column so far. It’s been frustrating, but not too bad – I’m starting to question why I’m not managing to hang on to good stacks once I build them, but I haven’t felt bad about my play in any of the tournaments I’ve played.

I’ve had several encounters with poker players of various levels of celebrity – of course the quintessential measure of poker success is a WSOP bracelet, but there are lots of famous poker players without bracelets and lots of near-nobodies who have stumbled into a bracelet, so maybe a better measure is whether they have a Wikipedia page – I’ll make their names into links to their wiki page if they have one. Maybe someday I’ll get my own.

I’ve played single-table satellites and fun conversations with “Minneapolis” Jim Meehan and Chris “the Armenian Express” Grigorian - unfortunately Minneapolis Jim busted me, but I managed to cripple the Armenian Express before someone else finished him off. I had a rematch with J.J. Liu, who I played with several times in Aruba. This time we faced off in the first mega-satellite I played – I had built my stack up nicely and J.J. had had a frustrating time, getting pushed around by an aggressive, maybe reckless, player who seemed willing to risk his entire stack at the drop of a hat just to push J.J. out of a pot. I could see her starting to steam, and I wondered if that might give me an opportunity. It certainly looked like I had my wish when J.J. limped in along with two other players and I checked my option in the big blind with 4-4. The flop came K-T-4 – bingo! – and I was just praying that J.J. might have a King, or joy of joys K-T to *really* get her into trouble. I wanted to let her do my betting for me so I checked the flop, and she obliged, firing 500 chips into the pot, and the other two players got out of our way. If the others had called I would have just shoved a pile of chips in, but with just J.J. I didn’t want to tip her off to the strength of my hand, so I just called. The turn brought another Ten, so now I’m hoping she *doesn’t* have K-T, but I’d love to be up against Ace-Ten, which seems very plausible, along with a good King. At this point if she has me beat all the chips are going in no matter how I play it, so I have to just maximize my gain if I’m ahead, and now there are straight and flush draws on the board, so she has to bet to protect her hand, so I check, and she throws her remaining 1500 into the pot and I insta-call. Then she knows she’s beat and she turns over K-J and starts to gather her belongings to leave, and then the river is a third Ten, counterfeiting my beautiful set of fours (meaning that I only get credit for two of them because the best hand I can make is three tens and two fours) and giving J.J. the better full house and the large pot. She laughed and apologized and I complained that we were old friends from Aruba and how could she do that to me? I wasn’t knocked out, but my stack was cut in half and in sad shape, and I was eliminated a half hour later.

Outside of my own poker playing, I’ve been hanging out with my poker pal Mark, much mentioned in these pages. Mark isn’t quite a celebrity in his own right, but he’s very well connected and chats away with all the big names in the VIP lounge (I was privileged to make my first ever visit to VIP today – only because it was basically empty so that there weren’t any bigshots in there to complain about a small-fry like me breathing the rarified air). For some time Mark has been friends with rising star Vanessa Rousso, aka “Lady Maverick” and her fiancé and long-time poker star Chad Brown. Mark and Vanessa are like sparring siblings, and when I hang around with the two of them Vanessa and I get to gang up on Mark, which is quite satisfying since he’s hard to pin down one-on-one, plus it’s just fun to chum around with a poker luminary. The funniest hanging-with-Vanessa story I have is meeting up with Mark and Vanessa at the Rio on my first day here to take the elevator up to the millionth floor Voodoo Lounge (a sky-high outdoor bar overlooking the strip) where ESPN was filming a segment of “The Nuts” in which they challenged Vanessa to solve a Rubik’s cube while Norman Chad asked her probing questions – the theme was something like strange talents of the pros, and I think they made Jennifer Harmon change her baby’s diaper under time pressure. I made the mistake of telling Mark that back when I was a serious nerd in high school I used to be able to solve a Rubik’s cube in a minute, which he then blew up to Vanessa, introducing me as the seven-time Washington State Rubik’s Cube Champion.

Hopefully I’ll have some more celebrity run-ins to report, most hopefully involving a very deep or final-table run at one of the events I play. And speaking of WSOP events, tonight Mark offered to buy half of my action in the $2,000 event tomorrow, which I wasn’t planning on playing since I haven’t made any money yet, but with Mark’s very supportive offer I feel more comfortable throwing my hat into the ring. So I’ll be at it again tomorrow on the big stage – certainly against a smaller field than in the $1500 event, but hopefully there will still be some soft spots at my tables for me to pick on.

As before, I’ll be sending updates on my progress to the PokerXFactor website, so you can check to see how I’m doing. Cross your fingers/toes/elbows/eyes.

[June 4] You might notice that that last bit of text was written June 3, and I haven’t posted this until June 5 (at best). I decided not to play in the $2000 WSOP event today, because I didn’t sleep well last night and when I got out of bed at 11AM I just didn’t feel like I was at my best, and it just didn’t seem like a great idea to throw $2000 into play, even if half of it was going to be someone else’s money. So I called Mark and told him I was chickening out, went back to bed and got a little more sleep, and headed over to the Wynn to play their 2PM tournament. I think I’ve written before about my history in the Wynn tournament – I’ve made the final table a lot but never made a whole lot of money – last time in Vegas I managed a 3rd place finish there to salvage an otherwise disappointing trip, but it still wasn’t anything to jump up and down about. Today’s might be worthy of a hop or two.

More about that in the next post…

-huge

I now know what it feels like to fail to cash in a World Series event. Strangely enough, it doesn’t feel good. I’m not sure whether it’s better or worse that I got pretty close. I guess it’s better, but it’s more draining. We started with over 2,000 players at noon and were playing down to 225. We had 300-ish at 9:30PM when I busted out with my A-K all-in against my opponent’s pair of Tens. If I win that coinflip I get up around an average stack and probably make it through the night and into the money.

I think I played well – maybe I was a little too cautious a couple of times, but I never donked off a big pile of chips with a stupid bluff or a spewy call. I don’t think I ever made a hand better than top pair. No sets, no flushes, straights or full houses … OK no, I did river two pair on one hand, but the same card put a flush on the board so I didn’t make a big score with it. I never got my money in bad except when the maniac short stack on my left flopped a set and I thought I was protecting my hand against a flush draw.

I’ll write more later – right now I’m a zombie and I’m headed for a midnight bath. Sorry I couldn’t bring home another win for Team Huge, but I’ll keep swinging tomorrow.

-huge