HugePoker

As my twitter-followers know, I’m out of the $1K stimulus package event. I’m not sure, but I think this was my fastest bust-out from a WSOP tournament - I know I had one last year where I busted before the first break, but I think this one was even shorter…

I caught some strong hands early on, but never got enough action on them to win a big pot. In the process I think I developed a pretty loose-aggressive image, when in fact I was playing pretty conservatively. But when I did try to get pushy I never got any respect, and drained away some chips with continuation bets. I lost a big chunk with A-K against a guy who called my limp-reraise out of position with sixes and then called a big flop bet with third pair. If I’d had the guts to 2-barrel him on the turn I probably could have pushed him out, but that would have committed my whole stack and I just assumed he must be stronger than sixes - I thought Jacks or Queens were likely when he called on the flop so I just shut down.

After that I bounced between 1500 and 2000 chips with the blinds at 25-50 (the started at 25-25). The player on my right raised to 150 and I looked at A-Q - I flat-called in position and everyone else folded. The flop came Q-4-4 with two spades, my opponent checked and I bet 300. He immediately checkraised to 825, which would have committed over a third of my remaining chips. I decided he had seen me bet the flop and then give up quite a bit, so he didn’t have to have a big hand, and that if he had me beat the money was going in anyway, so I reraised to 1650 all-in. He actually thought for a long time, which made me think my hand was good (or possibly chopping), but he finally called and turned over Kings. No suckout on the turn or river and Huge was out in a big fat hurry.

Not sure when the next big event will be, but I’ll keep reporting…

sadly,
-huge

My WSOP has had a slow start on many pokerish and non-pokerish levels … I didn’t play any poker for the first two days here largely because I was recuperating from a wee bit of the old food poisoning that I collected from some or other bite of junk food along the road trip – could have been the pizza hut in Southern Oregon, but my money’s on the greasy breakfast buffet in Twin Falls, Idaho. The ice in my cooler melted and leaked out onto my laptop, causing the screen to fade to near-invisibility, and the wireless internet system I was expecting to use has been a disaster, so I’ve had a lot of frustrating technology-wrestling going on. I’ve played 2 $250 mega-satellites, 2 $340 multi-table cash tournaments and an assortment of single table satellites ranging from $65 to $275, and I’ve won … zero dollars.

In one of the single-table tournaments I got down to the final 2 players with a 2-to-1 chip lead and the other guy suggested that I could take $700 and he would take $420, but that wasn’t quite good enough and I thought I could make better decisions than he could, and sure enough a few hands later we got all the chips in with his K-3 vs my A-6 … King on the flop, Three on the river for good measure and he sucked out to double up, later catching trips on the flop to knock me out with … zero dollars. But I don’t feel bad about my deal-refusal – in the long run I think I’ll make more than $700 in that spot, so turning it down made sense.

In other tournaments I…

- Flopped a flush and got all my chips in, only to be beaten on the river by a royal flush

- Got all my chips in pre-flop with Queens, lost to a set of deuces on the river

- Had this old codger give me a stern lecture about my reckless play after I shoved Ten-Three suited (with five big blinds mind you) and got lucky against A-K … then smugly laughed and taunted me about how beautifully he had trapped me when he raised with A-K and I reshoved with A-Q (9BB this time) and his hand held up to knock me out. Yep, nice trap sir – very sneaky – you totally outplayed me.

Today’s cash tournament at Caesars was my first pretty good run. I got off to a great start, nearly doubling up on the second hand, built a very healthy stack for several hours but then dwindled by the dinner break, quickly recovered from 10,000 chips to 35,000 but then ran my Jacks into Aces and was out in 55th out of 240 starters, with 27 making the money. Sigh.

Tomorrow is my Day 1 of the $1000 WSOP stimulus package event (Day 1a just finiehed). This will be the largest non-main-event tournament in history – it’s completely sold out at 5800 players and my first real WSOP event. They’ve improved the structure of the lower-buyin events this year, but because this is “only” a $1,000 buyin event, things will still be flying pretty quickly, and it’s likely that I will have busted or doubled up within the first hour or two.

There are various ways to follow the action if you are so inclined. I’ve just set up a “twitter” account (yes, my first social networking account of any kind – I overcame my paranoia since all the cool poker players are doing it) which you can get to by CLICKING HERE. If you don’t know how to use twitter, well, neither do I. I think the way it works is that I can text message in short posts, and if you’re “following” me you’ll get an update via the website, email or text message. If you’re twitter-versant and have advice for me or others trying to use it to follow my WSOP progress, post a comment on this thread.

There’s also the trusty old PXF live updates page. It doesn’t look like anyone else is posting WSOP news there yet, so I might have the page to myself.

More general coverage will be at PocketFives but they may have news of me because I’ve registered with them – in fact they’re supposed to be following my twitter account and re-broadcasting anything I post there.

I’m sure cardplayer.com and pokerpages.com and probably others will have more-or-less live coverage, mostly of the famous players’ progress and not so much of people like me, but who knows… You’ll have to find the exact pages yourself, as it’s past my bedtime.

So … Noon Pacific Time … May 31 … First shot at a 2009 WSOP bracelet … would be a good time to get back to some serious winning.

I’ll be in touch. Somehow.

-huge

I’m in Springdale, Utah, a mile from the South entrance to Zion National Park and 2.5 hours Northeast of Las Vegas. I’ll spend tomorrow hiking around Zion, one of the most surreal and most beautiful places on the planet, then a quick drive to one of the most surreal and … most … something other than beautiful places on the planet. I hadn’t realized Zion was so close - aside from the weird juxtaposition it’s nice to know that I can run away from Vegas for a day-hike in Zion.

Tomorrow is the official starting day of the 2009 World Series of Poker. They’ve added a clever gimmick this year, a $1000 buyin “stimulus package” event starting on May 30, which is the first bracelet event I’m likely to play (they’re calling it that because normally the cheapest bracelet event open to the general public is $1500 - so Harrahs is just looking out for the poor poker players feeling the pinch of the weak economy, like poker welfare).

I’ll keep you posted…

-huge

This will be a short post (I promise), and the video link is only one minute long.

Here’s the deal - it’s around 1AM on a Friday night, sometimes that’s a good time to play because people tend to act a little crazy. I busted out of one tournament and jumped into a $109 buyin turbo satellite that had already been running for a few minutes. Because I was joining late I had to wait until my big blind, so I waited several hands and was pleased to find Ace-Queen on my first hand. Keep in mind that this is a $109 tournament and not a $0.33 tournament…

Click Here to see the rest (I forgot to boost the volume, so you might need to turn up yours)

I’ve been working on fixing my blog installation so that I could start posting again. As you can see it has a different look to it, and the URL has changed from http://hugepoker.info/wordpress/ to http://hugepoker.info/blog/ (but if you enter the old URL it should redirect you to the right place).

There have been a few news items or tournament scores I’ve wanted to post, but I didn’t want to post them until I felt like the blog software was working properly. Hopefully it is now – please let me know if you run into any problems.

I leave for the World Series of Poker in about a week (I’m driving this year so I don’t know exactly when I’m leaving Seattle) so I’m trying to prepare, getting my mind and body ready for 5-6 weeks in Vegas. Once again, you’re all invited to join/visit me in Vegas any time, and the main thrust of Team Huge will be descending on Sin City from June 22 through June 26 (about a week before the main event starts - these are different dates from what I reported in my last post a few weeks ago). I have some good info on hot deals on hotel rooms, so let me know if you’re thinking of coming.

I’ve been playing a lot of satellites online in the past week, partly because it’s a good way for me to make money, and partly because I plan on playing a lot of satellites in Vegas. I’ve had a rollercoaster in the past few days … I had been playing almost exclusively on PokerStars, but then realized that FullTilt was running their “FTOPS” (Full Tilt Online Poker Series), so that some good satellites should be running over there. The first day I tested the waters I had tremendous success, winning 4 out of 4 of the satellites I played … well, maybe that’s stretching it. I should say 4 out of 4 of the satellites I entered. Confused? There was a satellite getting ready to start at 1:30AM with a $75 buyin, guaranteeing 2 seats into a $216 buyin tournament for the next day. I noticed that no-one was signed up for it with only a couple of minutes until start time and I assumed that it would just get canceled if they didn’t get 5 or 6 players, but I signed up anyway. In the final seconds before start time another player signed up, but that was it – 2 players. And they guaranteed 2 seats. So we both won. Without playing a single hand. Easiest $141 I’ve ever made. Weird.

In addition to that tournament/windfall, I did actually play hands in 3 others, scoring prizes of $216, $535 and $535, so I pulled in $1500 in prize money for a $300 investment, and I was feeling like this satellite stuff was as easy as pie, which it is sometimes.

In the past year or so I’ve started doing a funny thing with many of the tournaments I play online. I installed some screen-capture software on my computer so that I can record the tournament screen, along with my commentary that I speak into a microphone. I think I may have posted a brief snippet from a tournament several months ago, and it was always my intention to publish more here, but with my old blog and webhosting I didn’t have enough space online to publish anything substantial. The main reason I do it is not to publish them and glorify myself, in fact making them available on my blog seems about as terrifying as it does fun … but I think that when I’m recording it forces me to focus more, talking through each hand and how I’m thinking about it. If I pretend I’m doing it for an audience I’m hopefully a little less likely to make silly impulsive donkey plays without thinking about them. I’m not sure how well it works – I still make bad mistakes, but every once in a while I get all ready for a checkraise bluff and then talk myself down from the edge. The fact that until now I couldn’t actually publish a full video on my blog, plus the fact that I usually just deleted recordings of tournaments in which I lost, somewhat diminished the embarrassment-deterrent factor, but I still think it helped me to focus, at least sometimes. Maybe now that I actually can publish them it will force me to focus even more – in fact if I were really brave I’d force myself to publish the videos with my worst plays of the week. Yeah, umm, we’ll see.

Possibly worse than the embarrassment I might feel at publishing examples of my questionable poker play for public scrutiny is the sickening cringey feeling I have when I hear my own voice recorded – yeah I know everyone feels that way, and yeah acoustic difference between how your voice sounds from inside your head blah blah blah. And it’s especially bad when I get all excited or pissed off in an online tournament. Many of you may think of me as all composed and Mr. Logical and even-tempered and all that crap, and if you’ve seen me play poker live you probably have mostly witnessed the same thing (except maybe when I put a nasty bad beat on Dan in our home game and do a little “in your face” dance). But when I’m sitting in my basement office in front of my computer screens and someone puts a nasty beat on me (or vice versa) I tend to get a little animated. Or maybe a lot. If you’ve ever watched the show “24” you may be familiar with the Jack Bauer mantra/outburst whenever some witness he’s protecting gets shot or some other tragedy befalls him and he shouts out in his explosive gravelly man-voice “DAMN IT!”. I once suggested that we should have a drinking game in which everyone has to take a shot of tequila whenever Jack yells “DAMN IT!” … but I digress. My version of the Bauer rage-at-the-world exclamation tends to be this horrible strangled guttural growl at the moment that the bad card hits the table, a sort of “GRhrghgroOOOAAH … GOD … DAMNIT!!”, sort of like this (this one almost certainly cost me $2600):

CLICK HERE FOR HUGE PAIN

OK I just watched it again … that’s really embarrassing.

I did record the three tournaments I won that day, and I may publish them later, but that was several days ago and there’s been bigger action since then. After my big winning day, I decided to step up to the bigger games, playing in some $216 buyin satellites into the $2620 FTOPS big-buyin event. And on my first one it looked like I was golden, until I got down to 12 players left with 8 winning the $2620 prizes, with an average playable stack, and I got my Aces cracked by a horrible call from T9s (“hdsjfgsfjdgsf … GOD DAMNIT!”). After that followed the above published video suckout, and more and more losses (punctuated by one more $535 win) until I had pissed away almost all of the $1200 profit from my day of glory. This morning I was feeling that particular sense of disappointment after having a very pleasant success and then seeing it all slip away. There was another $216 satellite at 12:15PM, but I was going to just skip it – if I lost that it would wipe out all my gains from the week, and of course I shouldn’t be thinking about that, but I just wasn’t feeling very positive … but then I managed to rouse myself and talk myself into the idea that I’m good value in those satellites – it looked like it would be a big field (ended up with 114 players), and I jumped in. It ended up being a massive up-and-down battle, and in the end it turned out to be (I’m pretty sure) the biggest comeback victory I’ve ever had in a poker tournament of any significance. I present to you now, for your viewing pleasure and amusement, 75 minutes of poker thrills and spills, bluffs, monsters and suckouts. If you want to watch the whole thing, more power to you. If you just want to see/hear those embarrassing moments of lost emotional control on the part of yours hugely, check out the few minutes around 42:00 (the truly grizzly suck-and-resuck version of GRHHFGHHH, DAMNIT!) … after that watch me get to my lowpoint to start my Phoenix-from-the-ashes recovery. Actually the next 10 minutes after the 42 minute mark are pretty good, and then the best verbal poker-Turrett’s outburst comes at the 66 minute mark, involving several stages of denial, bargaining, anger, joy, relief, acceptance, all in the course of one poker hand. The audio’s not always great – let me know if you just can’t play the video at all (or if you can only view one of the videos I published here and not the other).

Huge makes miracle comeback in $2600 satellite
[may take some time to load, a long time if you have a slow connection - you can just set it loading and do something else while it's downloading - the video won't start until you click the start arrow.]

That was the 6th of those I played, so I put in $1300 before I won the $2600, not too bad. If life and poker were just, I would have won the first two I played and lost this one, but I can’t complain too much about doubling my money…

I welcome questions or criticism of anything in the videos I put up here – you can write them in the comments or email them to me. Just try not to be TOO abusive, or you’ll know I’m sitting here whining “daaaaammn iiiit”.

In addition to the other blog changes, the whole email subscription system has been upgraded and will hopefully be more consistent. If you didn’t get an email notification you probably won’t be reading this, but if at any time you realize that you’re not getting messages notifying you of a blog update, let me know and I’ll make sure you’re subscribed correctly.

-huge