2008 October

misclicks

by huge on Oct.25, 2008, under Poker

I stumbled out of bed at 10:20AM, and there’s a daily $109 satellite I often play that feeds into an $800 buyin EPT qualifier. But it’s pokerstars, so if I win the satellite I can just take the tournament dollars. I rummage up some breakfast (mmmm, pop tarts) and get to my computer just in time for the start of the tournament – actually I get there a minute or two after the start, but they let me sign up anyway and I jump in. I play a couple of hands and then I notice that something is funny. I notice that I’ve got 5000 chips, and so does everyone else. Hmmm, says I. Wtf? Of course what I forgot is that on Saturdays at 10:30AM it’s not the $109 super-satellite for the $800 qualifier, but the $800 qualifier itself, and I just didn’t notice because I was in a hurry to sign up.

I’m still in. Average stack with 42 left. Need to finish 3rd to win a trip to … wait for it … wait for it … did I mention it’s in mid-November? … so I can actually go if I win a seat, which is fortunate, although it would mean coming back from Costa Rica, staying in Seattle for a week and then turning around and flying to … I mentioned it was EPT, right? … you know that stands for European Poker Tour, right? … so where in Europe would you want to go in November? … Maybe Southern Italy or something right? … OK Paris would be fine … wait for it … wait for it … if I finish in the top three in this tournament I’m going to fabulous … wait for it … Warsaw.

I think I’ve forgotten to post here that I’m going to Costa Rica to play in the LAPT (Latin American Poker Tour). I still haven’t won a seat into the main event there, and if I’m not still playing in the Warsaw qualifier later this afternoon I’ll be taking one last shot at winning that online, and then there will be live satellites once I get to San Jose.

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poker no mas

by huge on Oct.11, 2008, under Poker

Something went wrong the first time I published this - if it seems like you’ve read it before, you have … if you previously got an empty screen when you opened the blog, here’s what you missed…

The Caribbean International Poker Tour (which consists of exactly one event in one location, so I’m not sure how it warrants the designation “tour”) did not fail to provide the entertainment and chaos that is its defining characteristic. Yesterday the schedule was that they would play the fourth and final qualifying round at 2PM, and then start the “finals” at 8PM. This schedule was problematic to begin with, because (A) nothing ever starts on time at the Excelsior Casino at the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort, and (B) when I won the first qualifying round on Wednesday night we had 19 players and it took 7.5 hours, and yesterday afternoon they had 44 players – you do the math.

At 7:30 we checked on the proceedings on our way to the Awards Banquet at the Radisson. I knew 8PM was completely unrealistic, but I wanted to get an estimate of when the finals might start. When we arrived the qualifying round was down to 24 players and they were playing down to 9, so they were nowhere near done. I couldn’t get anyone to promise a start time any later than 9PM, and I wouldn’t put it past them to start raising the blinds like crazy just to get the thing done in a hurry, so I figured we’d come back at 9 just to be safe. We had copious amounts of food and dessert and mojitos (Huge:1 Mrs Huge:3) at the banquet and apparently missed the part where Phil Hellmuth encouraged everyone to jump into the pool.

We made it back to the Excelsior a little after Nine, and it sure was lucky that we did that, because the qualifying round only had 5 more people to eliminate, and that only took another hour and a half. So the 8PM finals began at 10:30PM, and people were starting to place bets on whether the winner would emerge before or after 9AM.

I was expecting the same controversy as last year regarding the “English Only” rule. It’s pretty standard at major international poker tournaments to require players to only speak English at the table, and they clearly have a desire to have this be a major international tournament (which it clearly isn’t), so last year they tried to be serious about English Only, and it turned into complete melee verging on fist-fights. There was talk about enforcing the rule again this year, but the announcement and ensuing battle that I was expecting at the start of the tournament never came – perhaps with everyone already grumbling about the 10:30 start time they decided not to throw more kindling on the fire.

But that didn’t eliminate the chaos – we just needed a new thing to get all hot-blooded about (and by “we”, I mean the crazy Venezuelans). We started playing (34 of us), and nothing too dramatic happened to my stack – down to 9400, up to 11,000, back down to 10,000 … about 20 minutes in I asked Marta if we were ever going to hear the prize list, and she reacted as if to say “wow, what a novel idea to tell the players what they’re playing for! Thanks, Huge”. It still took another 20 minutes before anything came of my suggestion, but when she got the microphone and started listing the prizes I could sense trouble brewing. We already knew that all 34 of us were guaranteed some payout but we didn’t know what it would be – I think it was $2500 last year, covering the cost of one $1650 qualifying round entry plus one $825 add-on. So she says 21st-34th place will get $3000, fine, fine … and that 11th through 20th will get $4000 – I think to myself that seems sort of stupid – last year you had to make the final table to get more than the lowest prize, but whatever … and then she starts listing the final table prizes and you can just feel the tension in the room start to percolate (does tension percolate?). 10th and 9th place get $4500, 8th gets $5000, 7th $5500, 6th $6000, 5th $7000, 4th $9000, 3rd $24000, 2nd $44000 and 1st $100,000. There are various outbursts around the room – the problem with that payout structure is that it’s too top-heavy – you have to finish 5th to get more than double the prize you get for 34th, and the fact that 1st place is more than double 2nd and more than 10 times 4th is just too much of a jump. So people are up in arms. A lot of people are seriously suggesting that we just split the money evenly, take our $9000 each and go home, others are saying we should give more money to everyone and only have the top three or five spots pay more. Finally it gets so heated that they have to stop the tournament clock … the proposal that emerges with near-unanimous support is that we give everyone $6,000 and split the rest between 1st, 2nd and 3rd 50%-30%-20%, and that we cut the levels down from 40 to 20 minutes so that we won’t be there until noon the next day. I’m torn about this idea – on the one hand, locking in an extra three grand is nice after an as-yet unproductive trip, and I’m starting to get sick so staying up all night playing poker doesn’t seem all that appealing – but on the other hand this deal clearly loses me some equity, because I’m better than most of the players in the room and what they’re essentially proposing is to spread the money around much more evenly. There’s a Dutch/Indonesian kid on my right who has built his stack up to 16,000 who is clearly hesitant about the proposal as well (the bigger stacks shouldn’t like it in theory, but this early in the tournament a 60% gain in your stack size doesn’t really make that much difference), but in the end it gets enacted, with a little more controversy about what the levels should be (ending up at 25 minutes).

The kid on my right and I grumble to each other about the deal and how it was kind of hammered down our throats, and just from the way he’s talking about prize payouts makes me think he’s a solid, knowledgeable player. I’m glad he’s on my right but I’d rather just have him gone, and soon I get my wish when another player busts out and they move the kid to another table. My table is actually pretty tough given the weakness of the field as a whole. There’s one guy who clearly wants to be the table captain, and I decide that he’s the one I want to try to get chips from if I can pick up a legitimate hand when he’s splashing chips around. We get down to 27 players and combine to 3 tables … oh but wait, we’re not really down to 27, someone mis-counted (what a surprise) and we have 28, so one table has to play 10-handed until there’s another bust-out. It turns out it’s our table, and it turns out it’s the Dutch/Indonesian kid who returns to us, now across the table from me instead of on my right where I can keep an eye on (and act after) him. So that sucks. What sucks even worse is when we DO get to 27 players so someone from our table needs to move, and it turns out it’s the table captain who I had designated as my best target. So that’s about the worst player-trade possible from my point of view.

What sucks most of all is when the kid raises from late position, as he has done quite frequently, and I look down at pocket Jacks in the big blind, and I re-raise to 2700, and the kid thinks for a while and then re-raises all-in (for the rest of my 10,000 chip stack). The blinds are 200-400 with a 25 chip ante, so I have 25 big blinds (or had 25 big blinds at the start of the hand – 7 of them are already in the pot being held hostage by the gun pointed at my head). This is just an ugly ugly spot. With Tens here I think I can fold pretty easily. With Queens I’m not happy but I have to call. With Jacks and 8,000 chips I have to call. With Jacks and 15,000 chips I think it’s a pretty easy fold. With Jacks against a more predictable player I can fold, and against a wilder, weaker player I can probably call pretty easily. On all those axes I’m at the point of maximum pain in the difficult-decision dimension. Because of our earlier conversation I know that he knows that I’m a pretty good player, and that I’m not going to want to put my tournament life on the line with all these weak players waiting to give me their chips, which suggests that he might make this move on me with less than a premium hand. On the other hand, he’s right – I don’t want to put my tournament on the line. On the other hand, with the deal we’ve struck and the shorter levels, I’m going to have to accumulate chips now to make a run at the final three and the good money, and busting out now in 27th will get me exactly the same prize money as playing until 5AM and busting out in 4th. I convince myself that it’s possible that he could be making that move with AK, or Tens, in addition to the big pairs that crush me, and that there’s a small chance that he’s making that move as a pure steal. I’m getting less than 2:1 from the pot, but against that range of hands I don’t need 2:1, and I decide to gamble and make the call. I’ll never know if he conceivably *could* have made that move with some weaker hands, because in this particular instance he has Kings, and I don’t improve, and I’m out in 27th place. The Dutch guy on my left – strong player who I’ve met elsewhere and with whom I’ve been having pleasant poker chat so far – turns to shake my hand and says “you kind of knew it and you called anyway, right?” and I say “yeah, little bit”. I get up from the table, collect my $6,000, and head for home at 1AM, a lot earlier than I was supposed to.

So this has been overall an unsuccessful trip – with the prize money from the last tournament I’ll be returning home with a few more hundred-dollar-bills than I came with, but with the non-cash in the $5500 main event I have to log the trip as an overall loss. You can argue that I won the $5500 entry plus enough cash to pay for the trip online, and that’s true, so I basically got a trip to Aruba for free, and I’m not complaining about that, but from the standpoint of arrival-to-departure poker profits … not so great. I’m not sure if there will be another HugePoker international trip this year, and barring some stunning online success in the next couple of months, 2008 will end up as a disappointing poker year (not a disaster, just disappointing compared to the glow of 2007 and 2006). I’m not throwing in the towel or anything, maybe just pouting a little.

But it’s been a good trip nonetheless. Some good food, some beautiful sunsets, a new Caribbean island explored, a lot of laying on the beach and swimming in the ocean, and a lot of good poker even if the results weren’t what I would have hoped for. I’ll certainly be trying to make it back to Aruba in 2009.

I’m off to the beach for one last afternoon…

-huge

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return to the wild west

by huge on Oct.04, 2008, under Poker

Sorry I’ve been silent for a while – I’ve actually been playing a lot of poker even after my main event bustout, and I have a lot of small losses and one pretty substantial win logged.

The final hand of the main event at the Radisson was a tough one, and I think I misplayed it. I raised with Tens from middle position and got two callers. With two opponents I’m probably giving up on the hand if an overcard hits, which it will most of the time, but in this case the 9-6-3 flop looked pretty damn good. I bet the flop and got one caller, praying for another low card and getting my wish as the three paired on the turn. My opponent checked and I decided that pretty likely holdings for him would be 88 or 77, where he’s not so happy with his hand but has to call the flop in case I just have overcards. If I’m right about what he has, then he only has two outs to beat me on the river, so giving him a free card isn’t too dangerous, and he most likely will see my check behind as weak and bet the river. So I check behind, a harmless deuce lands on the river, and my opponent checks again. Now I think I must be good, but I think 88 or 77 will call a pretty healthy bet, so I bet 7,000,only to get checkraised all-in. I nearly hurl on the table, grudgingly made the call, hoping against hope that he has the lower pair, and unfortunately he had a slightly lower lower pair, 66 for a flopped set of sixes. Yuck. I should have just deemed my pair of Tens as a bluff catcher and then I would have been thanking my lucky stars that he let me get away so cheaply, but he trapped me good, and I fell in head first.

They’re down to the final table today, which they started playing on a stage over the swimming pool, but then a rainstorm blew inn (first real rain we’ve seen all week) and they had to move indoors.

My one bit of good news is pretty good and hopefully will get better tonight … I qualified for the Holiday Inn tournament in one of their weird “qualifying rounds” that are really just satellites in disguise. I already wrote about my mega-satellite win at the Holiday Inn, which awarded me a $1650 seat in one of the qualifying rounds. After busting out of the main event at the Radisson, I decided to check out the action at the Holiday Inn, not knowing whether or not I felt like playing poker well into the morning hours. But looking at the scruffy cast of crazy Venezuelans lining up to play, I just couldn’t resist. (No offense to Venezuelans, and a few of them can play quite well, but there just seems to be a high percentage of maniacs at this cardroom). So I played until 5AM, at which point we were down to 5 players with four of us to get seats in the “finals”, which will happen tonight. I made a deal with an enormous American named Jimmy, who along with me was the short stack, that if either of us busted out, the other would give the loser $500. He is a good player, but I think he made a mistake by letting himself get blinded down too far, while I was occasionally shoving my short stack in and getting the others with safe stacks to fold. He got down so short that he had no fold equity, and after doubling up once, he finally just ran into a race he couldn’t win, and it was over. (I happily paid him the $500, and he ended up winning a seat the next night)

Since then they’ve been running qualifiers every night. They only qualified 4 more players Thursday night, but last night was hopping and they got 12 more, and this afternoon was insane, so they’ll probably get 15-20 more. They’re guaranteeing a $300,000 prize pool, so even if we end up with 40 players, my seat is worth about $7500 (ignoring my massive skill advantage, of course). When I left at 3PM today they still hadn’t started the 2PM qualifier, so I’m not hopeful of the 8PM start time coming even close, nor of getting any sleep tonight. So it’s off to the beach, hopefully for a good afternoon nap, and then some high stakes poker with the crazy Venezuelans ….

Those of you who have been reading my exploits for over a year may remember that I played in this tournament last year as well, and finished 7th for an $8000 prize. Hoping to improve on that this year – this might be one my my best shots ever at taking down a six-digit prize.

-huge

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main event in the books

by huge on Oct.01, 2008, under Poker

I’m out. Received nasty bad beat 4th hand into the day, then delivered one of my own to double up, built stack up to 27,000, then down to 20,000, then my overpair ran into a set and I was cooked. Something like 190th out of 540. More details to follow…

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Day 2 to come

by huge on Oct.01, 2008, under Poker

My Day 2 of the main event in Aruba starts in 2 hours. I’ve seen my table lineup, and it looks OK: no big names, a couple of players with decent records but nothing stellar, big stack on my right, short stack on my left, all moderately good news. There are 4 big stacks, and 4 stacks shorter than my short-ish stack, and nothing in between. I have enough to wound the big stacks but not to cripple them:

Sitton John H 12,025 30 1
Choumanova Marina 13,325 30 2
Stewart George 57,775 30 3
Hughes Laurence R 17,600 30 4
Curtis Brad 4,975 30 5
VanAuken Eric 44,050 30 6
Henry James 4,175 30 7
McNeil Michael P 43,525 30 8
Miller Jeffrey 63,700 30 9

The guy from PocketFives apologized for not being around last night - apparently he couldn’t get a good internet connection so had to go back and forth to his room, but he promises to be covering us today, and he’s started a thread for Day 2 Coverage.

There’s no way my table today can be as slow-paced as yesterday with the big disparity between stack sizes and the higher blinds, so there should be a lot of fireworks. My readers who have known me long enough (i.e. more than 30 years, i.e. my sisters) may recall that that used to be my specialty. Hopefully Larry “Gunpowder” Hughes can blow some stuff up without singeing off his eyebrows (again).

-huge

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Archive for October, 2008

misclicks

poker no mas

return to the wild west

main event in the books

Day 2 to come

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