HugePoker

I’ve been meaning to write some sort of WSOP post-mortem – there are stories I haven’t written and it just seemed like some sort of summation was in order. But it’s been a weird process adjusting to life back in the real world after a month and a half in Las Vegas, and I’ve had family stress – mom fell and hurt her back, turned out to be a compression fracture, she’s been in the E.R., the hospital and a rehab facility for the past week. For those of you who know my mom, she’s been moving better after a procedure involving the injection of bone cement into one of her vertebrae, and she’ll return home tomorrow. OK OK back to the poker…

After a few days off I’ve been playing a fair amount of poker online, mostly in single-table tournaments because I’ve been hesitant to commit the time to a big multi-table tournament, and because PokerStars has started running single-table tournaments called “Steps” that are right up my alley. They start with a $7 Step 1 – win that and you get a ticket for $27 Step 2, then $82 Step 3, $215 Step 4, $700 Step 5, and $2100 for Step 6 (I’ve generally been starting at Step 3 or 4). In each one the last two players standing get the ticket to the next step, third place (and sometimes 4th or 5th) get a “do-over” ticket to the same Step, and usually one or two lower finishes get the booby prize – a ticket to the next lower step. In the ultimate crap prize, if you pay $215 for the privilege of playing a Step 4 tournament (or you fight your way through a Step 3 and come out on top), and you happen to finish 6th in the Step 4, you get the exciting prize of a $27 Step 2 ticket. At the end of the road, if you win or buy your way into a Step 6 tournament and you win it, you win entry into a major tournament, like the WSOP main event or a big European Poker Tour event. If the tournament is expensive ($10000 plus) then only the top finisher gets the seat and maybe a couple of others get a grand or two in cash. With a less expensive tournament the top three or even four finishers get seats. I played some of these before the WSOP, trying to win a WSOP main event package, and I did alright – I gathered a couple of Step 5 tickets and one Step 6, but I never played the Step 6. Since coming back from Vegas I’ve played more - I now have the distinction of having not very much money on PokerStars but several thousand dollars worth of Steps tickets.

But what about Aruba? Well I’m glad you asked that. The other focus I’ve had since coming back from Vegas has been to win a seat in the Ultimatebet Aruba Classic. As you may recall, I won an Aruba package last year and had a great (and lucrative) trip, so I’ve been eager to go back this year. I had pretty much decided to go even if I didn’t win a seat – it turns out that Rachel has some free time so she can actually join me this time around, so that made it seem like a must-go – but I hadn’t quite committed. They’ve been running $320 and $530 satellites three times a week and I’ve played a couple of those, getting very close to winning a seat in one before having Aces cracked by KQ in a huge pot. A few days ago I won a seat to the $530 super-mega-qualifier that will take place on August 16, in which they guarantee to award fifty $8500 packages ($3000 cash and $5500 tournament entry fee), so I was pinning my hopes there. I wasn’t quite as keen on the $320 tournaments because they’re basically winner-take-all: 2nd and 3rd might get some cash, but the $8500 top prize dominates all strategic considerations. And I prefer satellites that award multiple seats, because I think I’ve become something of an expert in handling the strategic decisions that come up near the end of those satellites. And this afternoon I fell asleep in the hammock and didn’t wake up until 5:45, 15 minutes past the start time of tonight’s $320 event. But UB lets you join a tournament late as an alternate, so I got out of the hammock and into the office to see how the field looked. I decided that a lot of the 47 players were players who had won their way in via satellites, and that even though it wasn’t my favorite payout structure I had to have a significant edge in that field, so I jumped in.

I folded my first two hands, and on the third I picked up JJ in early position. The blinds were 10-20 and my starting stack was 3000 chips. I raised to 60, and a very strong, very successful player re-raised to 500. 500? Really? WTF? So I’m thinking and trying to decipher that … He’s pretty much screaming at me “I HAVE ACES! If you have a pair and you’re trying to flop a set on me, I’m not giving you the odds to call, so get out of town now or make a mistake by calling.” That’s what he’s saying, but sometimes poker players “say” things with their actions that aren’t true, that are in fact designed to mislead. This guy knows me, probably enough to think that I’m capable of hearing the message he’s sending me, but I feel like if I just trust him and fold JJ or QQ here, then can’t anyone do the same to me and get me to fold 99% of the time? And does he *have* to have Aces here? If he’s messing around even 10% of the time it makes up for the odds I’m missing to try to flop a set … maybe? So I decide to call, perhaps foolishly, but I’m pretty happy with my choice when the flop comes J-9-2. I think that even if he doesn’t have Aces he’s going to have to try to represent them at least on the flop, so I check and he bets – I can’t remember exactly, but something like 900. I pause for a long time and then call – I want him to think I have Queens or Kings here. A King comes on the turn and I’m a little worried that either he has Kings or that he’ll be scared that I have them and fold his Aces, but I’m not worried enough to do anything other than get all my chips in. I check again and he bets 1200-ish, and now there’s no reason for me to slowplay anymore so I checkraise for the rest of my chips and he calls, and he has Aces. He had a few more chips than me so he’s still alive after I double up, and he goes ballistic in the chat window, ranting about how I wasn’t getting proper odds to call for a set and blahblahblah. He also kept saying “honest site”, implying that Ultimatebet is rigged somehow (but people say that whenever a bad beat happens on any site). I had a good time in the chat window with him – you can see the exchange HERE.

I’ll skip the middle of the tournament and get to the final table. Nine players remaining, first prize is $3000 cash plus $5500 tournament buyin, 2nd pays $2800, 3rd $1600, 4th $1100. I came to the FT as one of the leaders, but quickly crippled myself by shoving my Eights into another pair of Aces, and this time failing to flop (or turn, or river) a set. I malingered in the painful 8-10BB region for quite a while until winning a coin flip with AK vs TT (flop T-J-Q). After that I think I played well, punishing people who seemed to be trying to coast into the money and staying away from people who could hurt me too badly. With six players left, two short stacks busted on the same hand, so we were in the money, but with 1st prize worth 3 times as much as 2nd, we were all primarily wrestling over the Aruba package and not concerned with the piddly few thousand dollars lying on the floor. When 4th place busted we were left with two of us at 60,000 chips and the short stack at 20,000. Unfortunately the other big stack knocked out the short stack, so we went into heads-up play with Huge at 60k and villain at 80k. The blinds were only 800-1600, so there was a lot of room to maneuver, and we were clearly both trying to play small ball. My opponent’s screen name was “Beaver Fever” (yeah, classy) which kept sticking the song “Boogie Fever” in my head, which let me tell you right now was a real walk down memory lane for me

“Boogie Fever, got to boogie down, Boogie Fever, I think it’s goin’ around…”

Aside from the possible meanings and implications of his screen name, he was a very successful online player who I had played with before, and I couldn’t expect him to make too many mistakes. He had already won an Aruba package so he was just playing this for the $8500, and he didn’t agree when I suggested that he should just leave this one for me. I thought my best shot was to out-agress him, that he wouldn’t want to play big pots with me without a serious hand. This worked well at first, until I tried it one or two too many times and he decided to start calling me with bottom pair (actually once with King-High on the river). So first I turned the tables on him and had him 80-60, but then he caught me with my hand in the cookie jar a couple of times and we were about even. We jockeyed back and forth for quite a while, and then I stumbled, running head-first into situations where I was trying to either put pressure on him or protect what I thought was the best hand, only to get my head snapped back by my opponent checkraising or just leading for all the marbles. A couple of those hands and I was hurting, down to 40k against Beaver Fever’s 100k.

“doctor, doctor, please; I got this feeling rockin’ and a’reelin’; Tell me, what can it be, is it some new disease?; They call it boogie fever; You got to boogie down; Boogie fever, I think it’s going around…”

He clearly had decided that my bets were not to be trusted, and I thought that I knew how to bet to trick him into thinking I was bluffing if I had a strong hand … the problem was that I needed to find a strong hand to spring the trap with. But with my back against the wall I got what I needed – twice I turned a flush in situations where he couldn’t escape paying me off, not for all my chips but for significant pots each time. Those brought me back up close to even, and a couple more hands (again where he just couldn’t believe I wasn’t bluffing) put him in bad shape, with me over 100k and him in the 30’s. The coup de grâce came with (poetically enough given my first big hand of the tournament) another pair of Jacks on the button. He had been giving my button raises too much respect, so I had begun raising my crappy hands and limping with my strong ones. I followed the plan with the Jacks, hoping he might just shove on me, but he refused, and we saw a flop of 7-5-4 with two clubs. Good news: no overcards to my Jacks, bad news: scary as hell for Jacks against a guy who checked his option in the big blind. He checks the flop and I bet out for full pot (protecting my hand against a draw seems more important here than being afraid of a made hand) and he shoves all-in. I’m a little apprehensive but it’s not like I can fold an overpair heads up for 15 BB – mostly I’m afraid he has something like a pair and a flush draw and an overcard – so I call, and he has 7-10. He has five outs twice, but a 6 comes on the turn so now he can chop the pot with a 3 or an 8, but when the river bricks off, Beaver Fever is history.

“I got the boogie fever; (You) You got the boogie fever; (She’s) She’s got the boogie fever; Everybody’s got the boogie fever”

So I’m definitely going (with Mrs. Huge) to Aruba – the event dates are Sept 27 – Oct 4, but we’ll try to add some extra days for lounging on the beach, perhaps a trip to Curaçao or Venezuela. If anyone wants to join us in Aruba I highly recommend it.

-huge