HugePoker

It’s been an intense week and a half of online poker since my last blog post. In case any of you couldn’t or didn’t watch the video from my last post, I did indeed (after one very lucky hand) win myself an $8,500 Aruba prize package, including the $5,500 tournament seat and $3,000 in travel cash. That was Sunday, ten days ago. Fast forward to Friday, five days ago, and the real fun begins…

Friday night I logged on to my bodog account, for no apparent reason – I almost never play there anymore – and I happened to notice that there was a $55+5 tournament starting that looked like it might end up with a small overlay (guaranteed prize pool exceeding the actual buyin money, so that the site has to cough up some dough to live up to their guarantee), so I jumped in. 160 players, $3,000 for 1st place … and I won it. Woohoo! It’s always great to outright win a freezeout tournament. Sure, it’s great to win a multi-prize satellite too, but there’s nothing like being able to say “I won that tournament and no-one else did – I ended up with every single chip from every single table.” And when you don’t win, even if you make a lot of money for finishing 2nd or 8th or 285th, there’s still that voice saying “you didn’t really win, you lost, someone else beat you, and they’re going to make more money than you did”. The problem is that if you usually play tournaments with hundreds or thousands of players in them, you’re just not going to win very many of them no matter how good you are.

It has been decreed by pocketfives.com that any player who can achieve three outright wins, on three different poker sites, over the course of one week, shall be declared a “Triple Crown Winner”. The tournaments have to be of a certain size: 100 players minimum, $10,000 prize pool minimum, so you can’t win a triple crown playing in $3 tournaments. So winning a triple crown is hard. You have to be at least decent at poker and pretty good at tournament endgame. You probably have to be under 25 with a solid/obsessive video-game childhood so that you can play 15 tournaments at once so you can crank out at *LEAST* 100 tournaments in the week (though you’d have a better shot if you could do 200 or 250, like “moorman1”, the guy who’s won the triple crown 8 times – he literally plays as many tournaments in a week as I do in a year). It also helps a lot if you live outside the U.S. so that you can play on all the poker sites that have closed their doors to American players. It also would help a great deal not to have rehearsals scheduled every night from 6PM to 10PM Pacific time, which is pretty much prime time for good-sized higher-buyin tournaments.

So it was without a great deal of hope that I decided to take a small, half-hearted stab at poker immortality (maybe that’s stretching it – winning a triple crown is not like winning a WSOP bracelet, but it is one of those things you can point to and say “I did that”, and it sticks around for life, or as long as pocketfives.com doesn’t go out of business). I figured out which tournaments I could play that were not between the hours of 1PM and 10PM (I couldn’t play anything after about 1PM because if I did well in the tournament I wouldn’t make it to my rehearsal at 6), which was a pretty big obstacle. I also tried to find tournaments between 100 and 400 players – they needed to have 100 players to qualify, and if they have 1000 they’re just too hard to win. And there just weren’t very many tournaments that fit the bill, but I did my best.

[OK if you want to skip the poker blow-by-blow and jump to the exciting conclusion, scroll down to the last few paragraphs]

Complicating matters was the fact that this is WCOOP month on Pokerstars – WCOOP is the World Championship Of Online Poker, a series of big-buyin, massive-field tournaments that I want to be playing, and that I’ve already won two tickets into, but that offer no reasonable probability of an outright win, so they kind of suck time and resources away from the triple crown quest (again, since I’m not a 22-year-old who can play 18 tournaments at the same time). So on Sunday I played in the $215 WCOOP event (with 11131 players), made a decent run but busted out after 4 hours with no prize money, then played a couple of hyper-turbo satellites to win a seat in the next $530 buyin WCOOP event, not intending to play it, just to take the tournament dollars and run, but I failed to realize that I was playing the satellites within a couple of minutes of the event starting, and when I won the second one I played, it registered me for the target tournament and it was too late to unregister. Oh well, I guess I’m playing it … $530 buyin, 6219 players, $472,000 for first place. And … I played like crap. Actually I played OK for the first few hours and then I went through some sort of brain-dead phase where I just pissed away my chips and got very short-stacked. And then I doubled up on a coinflip, slapped myself (figuratively), and got my head back in the game. Strangely enough after that I think I played very well, and made it to the bubble (900 players) with an average stack. I made it into the money and a bit beyond, but ran into a miserable hour where nothing went right and I just kept bleeding off chunks of my stack. I busted out in 660th for a $932 prize after 9 hours, more like 13 if you include the first WCOOP tournament, and I had been playing since the moment I woke up, and in spite of my old pal Dan’s mathematically-challenged retort that I shouldn’t complain about sitting around in my pajamas making $100 per hour, it felt pretty disappointing and grueling.

I was in no mood to find triple-crown-positive tournaments to play that night, but when I woke up the next morning I checked out the schedules on the different sites and plotted a course. Played a $30 rebuy and managed to burn through 5 rebuys and an addon without going anywhere … so $213 down the drain, finished 103rd out of 190. I sort of gave up on the triple crown at that point – it was the last night before rehearsals started, so I could have played the evening tournaments, but Rachel had just returned from out of town and I was burned out, so we had dinner and watched a movie and then … Oh OK I’ll take one more stab at it, there’s a turbo tournament on Pokerstars at 11:40PM, and it’s a turbo so I won’t be up all night playing it … $109 buyin, 250 players … and I won it. $5,125 for first place.

So now I’m in a pickle. I’ve got 2/3 of a triple crown nailed down, which I’ve never done before. This is a pretty significant accomplishment in itself … in the past 6 years I’ve played 1248 non-satellite tournaments and won 27 of them outright (not including our regular $5 or $10 buyin home game which I don’t enter into my database, and not including satellites, even when I had to finish first to win them). 10 of those wins have been live, so that leaves 17 online outright victories. Two of those were from my early years when the buyin and/or the prize pool were too low to qualify for a triple crown, and 5 of them had fewer than 100 players in them, which would also disqualify them from consideration. OK now that I’ve actually done all that subtraction it’s a little depressing … in 6 years I’ve only booked 10 outright victories in triple crown qualifying tournaments, so the odds against winning two in a single week, let alone three, are daunting. The last time I won a TC-worthy tournament was January of 2008. (In fairness, I play a lot of satellite tournaments that don’t qualify, and I do well in them, so I shouldn’t get too sad about the freezeout dearth)

The next day is my first rehearsal, but I can play some tournaments in the morning and early afternoon. The third tournament needs to be on a third unique site, which pretty much leaves me to FullTilt and Ultimatebet, and with my rehearsal conflict there’s almost nothing on Ultimatebet that will work, so I concentrate on FullTilt.

10:30AM, $50 + 1 rebuy + 1 addon … I busted before I could even take the addon, in 171st out of 280.

The next one I could play is $100 with unlimited rebuys at 1PM, but that could be cutting it close with rehearsal, and the field is tough, and if I really go into it pursuing a win it could be a several-hundred-dollar escapade, and I bail. So I go to rehearsal and come back at 10PM…

10:30PM, $30 + 1 rebuy + 1 addon … not encouraging – I mess up and think that it’s an unlimited rebuy tournament, play it as such, bust out and don’t understand why I can’t take a second rebuy, and once again I’m out before I can take the addon, in 141st out of 190 players.

11:00PM, $75 buyin … no success, card-dead, busted in 201st out of 305

Midnight … $109 buyin, the “Turbo Hundo”, 270 players, finally some excitement. I start off well and have a good run, grabbing the chip lead approaching the bubble, but I lose a big coinflip and squeak into the money with a short stack, busting out in 25th with a pitiful $162.

Nothing more to play after that, sleep, one day down, only two more full days to go to win the crown.

Clearly the only good daytime choice is the 10:30AM tournament on FullTilt, so I play that the next day, vowing to be careful not to bust out before I can take the addon – if I want to maximize my chances of winning, then clearly buying as many chips as I can is the way to go. It turns out not to be a major concern, since on the 5th hand I flop a set and stack off against a guy with Aces, doubling up to 6,000 chips right off the bat. No major action for the next 100 hands or so (hence the old cliché that no-limit poker is hours of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror – not really true, but fun to quote) and then I get a repeat performance of the low pair flopping a set against Aces, this time with a guy with Ace-King going insane when he flopped a gutshot and two overcards so that I actually nearly tripled up to 18,000. Funnily enough the guy who went crazy with A-K is an online superstar with well over a million dollars in online winnings, and a holder of the triple crown himself – I really don’t understand the way he played the hand, but maybe he’s just so far beyond me that I can’t even grasp the subtleties that he’s processing.

Another 100 hands go by with only a slight increase to my stack … I resteal from the small blind with a pair of threes and the raiser calls, the flop comes Ace-King-Deuce, about as bad for my hand as it can be, but I figure it might look just as bad for him if he’s got something like a pair of nines, so I fire and he goes away, and I’m up to 28,000.

Just a few hands later I get a bit lucky … I raise with Ace Jack and get reraised by the big blind. I might sometimes fold here, but given the player and my position (cutoff) I don’t think he necessarily has to have a big hand, and I make a crying call for a third of his stack. The flop comes Ace-high with three hearts, and I have the Jack of hearts, and he doesn’t even match the pot with his stack, so there’s no way I’m folding. He has Ace-Queen with no hearts so I have 12 outs (any heart or any Jack will win it for me – I’m pretty close to a coin flip on the flop). A heart hits on the turn and I’m up to 40,000 chips.

From here on it’s pretty intense battling, no more 100 hand gaps without major action. I made it to the money (27 players) with a very strong stack, sometimes the chip leader but usually staying in the top 5. With 16 players left I go for a resteal-shove against an aggressive and obnoxious player with Q-5, and he calls on the button with Eights. Oops. I nail a Queen on the flop (Woohoo!) but he picks up a flush draw and a gutshot on the turn (uh oh) and hits his flush on the river (boooo!), at which point he starts jabbering on about “Justice!” and what an idiot I was for shoving with a queen and a five, etc etc. It’s not just his behavior towards me that has me maligning him – he kept mouthing off at anyone he played a pot with, and even taunted a couple of players when they busted out on the bubble – ugly. I’m knocked down to 50,000 and he doubles up to 44,000, and I’m not one of the chip leaders anymore. I build my way back up to 70,000, but bluff off most of it to the same asshole when he calls me down with 88 on a 9JJ55 board. He goes ballistic in the chat window again. At this point I’m short stacked (20k) and my nemesis is one of the chip leaders (with 140k). I double up with AQ against KQ somehow (avid fans will remember that that was the matchup that sent me packing in the 2007 WSOP). I pick up AQ again, this time suited, and this time against a solid player making a re-steal bluff with K-2, which has a much better chance to beat me than KQ did, and indeed he hits a King on the turn, but I spike the now-necessary Ace on the river and I’m back to 80,000 chips.

We get down to 10 players, the final table bubble, and I’m about average with 82,000, obnoxious nemesis has over 100k. We’re at two tables of five, so action is fast. There’s a decent money jump ($320) from 10th to 9th so no-one wants to bust out now, but I’m really playing for the win and the triple crown. Asshole raises under the gun, I flat on the button with Ace-Jack, flop comes Jack-high and I think BINGO. He bets 12,000 on the flop (of course) and there are two clubs on the board (I have the Ace of clubs) and there’s just nothing for me to do but fire, and I do, and he has Queens. DAMNIT!! Of all the guys in the tournament I have to bust out to this dick-wad. CRAPPPPP! Nine on the turn, not a club, things looking pretty dark for the triple crown until … Jack on the river. Bink!

The very next hand I pick up Ace-Queen, and the now-ranting obnoxious guy is in the big blind with his sad 21,000 chips (blinds are 1500-3000) and I think surely he’ll reraise me, but maybe he doesn’t want to bust out to me either, and he folds. The very NEXT hand I pick up Queens, and it’s not my nemesis this time who re-raises me, but it is the same hand matchup: A-J vs Q-Q, and this time the A-J does not suck out and we’re on to the final table, me with 270,000 chips and the next best stack at 175,000. In three hands I went from a 3:1 underdog to even make the final table, to being the dominant chip leader in the final nine, with fumes from the triple crown starting to waft off my computer screen.

The obnoxious guy continues to babble about how unlucky he is at the final table, and I can’t resist typing “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy” in the chat window. When he busts out a few hands later I type “gg” and he types “what do you mean, gg? Yours isn’t” and I reply “it’s a polite thing to say when someone busts out of a tournament … you wouldn’t understand”. I try not to get mixed up in chat-window pissing matches, but sometimes a little cattiness is just plain fun.

At the final table I find AKs, happy to flat call a raise in position until another player shoves for 65,000 and the initial early position raiser re-re-shoves for 160,000. People chided me for taking so long to call, but it did feel like a tough decision – it’s more than half my stack, either one could have Aces or Kings, at least one of them could have a pair, or worse yet one could have a pair and the other could have another Ace-King, taking away two of my outs and leaving me drawing to a chop. But again I think “I’m in this for the win” and I call, and they have JJ and QQ (best I could hope for short of both of them having A-Q) and a King on the flop settles it quickly. Now I have almost 500,000 chips, just over half the chips in play, the triple crown is floating ghostly in front of me like something out of Hamlet, and the short stack with 16,000 chips is ready to offer up sexual favors in exchange for me knocking out two players and securing an extra $800 in prize money for him.

So now I’m in a great tactical spot. The others don’t figure they have much chance of winning – they just want to move up the prize ladder by watching others bust out, and I just want to accumulate chips anywhere I can get them, so I can put pressure on everyone. I do so with extreme prejudice until we get down to 3-handed, me with over 600,000 chips, Borzini555 with 225,000 and LuckyRiver1 with 85,000. They’re measuring the crown for my head when disaster strikes - actually, first a mini-disaster and then a major one. The mini-disaster was that my computer crashed. It had been behaving strangely, and the screen-capture software that I use to record sessions was choking a lot, so I shut it off. But then email wasn’t working, so I couldn’t send out updates to my fans, and I couldn’t even bring up gmail on a web browser, but hey, at least the poker software is still running … and then the computer completely crashed with the dreaded blue-screen of death. I restarted my main computer and scrambled to another one but that one needed to download a new version of the poker software before I could play, and by the time it was ready I had my main computer back online, brought up the table and found that we were on our hourly break. Not sure how many hands I missed, or how much the break saved me, but it was pretty stressful, thinking “Those short stacks are STEALING MY BLINDS!!!”.

Computer running again we come back from the break, and then the major disaster … The button (inexplicably) limps and I take the discount in the small blind with J-7. The flop comes Jack-high with two clubs, I fire off a min-bet and the button raises. OK I don’t want to go crazy here, but I’ve got top pair in a three-handed game and I’m not folding to a small raise. The turn is a third club and I decide to make one stab at the pot and to give up if he doesn’t fold – if he’s got a Jack it will surely be better than mine and he’ll call, if he has clubs he’ll raise and I’ll fold, if he has a single club he might call and hopefully we’ll just check it down on the river and I’ll win … no big deal. He calls, OK, now I’m just hoping for no more clubs on the river, but the river brings … an off-suit Seven giving me two pair … the ONLY card that could get me into trouble. I consider betting but decide that inducing a bluff is better if he has a single club, he might value bet anyway if he has Ace-Jack, and if he has me beat somehow, my check will likely save me money. I check, he bets 160,000 (3/4 of his stack – not sure why he did that) and there’s no way I can fold here, and he has Ace-Jack after all (woohoo!) but they’re both clubs (booooo!). Borzini555 nearly doubles up to 544,000 and I get a severe tree-topping down to 315,000. If he had shoved all his chips in I still would have been forced to call and he would have taken 50k more of my chips – I can think of no sound reason for him not to shove there – there’s no way I would call 160k and not 210k - A very substantial mistake on his part.

But I’m still in sad (or at least sadder) shape, worrying that I may have just thrown away the only chance I’ll ever have at a triple crown (it really is quite likely that I’ll never get that close again even if I play poker for the next 30 years). I make matters worse by doubling up the short stack with my K9s vs his A3, but I knock him out a few hands later when my A9 holds up against his A6. So now it’s me and borzini: 370,000 chips to his 540,000, and I’ve got work to do.

I chip away at him steadily – he pretty clearly is not used to playing heads up, and I know from his online record that he’s generally inexperienced and has never made a final table before, let alone gotten heads up in a major tournament. He plays accordingly and I pick up a lot of small pots. I win a decent pot with two pair to pull ahead of him but he pushes me out of the next one and we’re even in chips. I flop trips with 8-3-off and get a lot of action from him before he folds the river – and I’m back in the lead, 555k to 360k. I run into another hand where I give up on trying to push him around but then the river has to go and hit me (with top pair this time) forcing me to call off a bet when he has trips, and damn it if he doesn’t have a slight lead again. He wins a good pot on the next hand when he flops top pair and I flop bottom pair with a gutshot and now he’s got me 530k to 385k … I can’t believe I’m LOSING to this guy.

I push him out of a pot with pocket deuces and it’s closer… 425k for me, 490k for borzini, and then the big blow comes…

I have Jack-Ten on the button and raise, he calls. The flop comes an eye-popping, angels-singing, drool-inducing 9-8-7 with two diamonds. He checks, I bet 16,000, small, hoping he might sense weakness and checkraise, but he only calls … now a Five hits on the turn, which either kills me or crowns me – if he has a Six he’s got a lower straight and will pay me off, if he had a good made hand on the flop it will kill my action because he’ll be afraid of the straight. He checks and I decide I need to maximize my earn if he’s got the straight (and charge him to draw if he’s got diamonds) so I bet 55,000 and he calls. The River is a meaningless King and borzini comes out of the woodwork, firing 112,000 at me. If he’s bluffing I’m not going to get any more money out of him anyway, so I shove and he calls, and he’s got 6-5 – he flopped the lower straight and we were trapping each other all the way – just a nasty cooler for him and a beautiful setup for me. He’s crippled down to 65k and it takes me three more hands to mop him up.

Ship me the $7,345, ship me the Triple Crown … actually in my mind (which is quite flexible in these matters) I’ll just extend it back a week and a half to include the Aruba package win and call it a quadruple crown. Definitely my best ten days of poker outside of the World Series, and an accomplishment I never really expected to achieve – poker version of lightning in a bottle.

I waited to post this until they had published my glory: CLICK HERE

I know I’m not the oldest guy to have won it - JohnnyBax has a year or two on me - but I have to scroll back to 2005 to get to his photo or any one else’s who looks older (and yes there is, as far as I know, only one female triple crown winner, and it is, of course, Annette15).

Better than my picture on “the wall” is that my profile page will always have that little “triple” icon under my photo, which may look small, but it’s a pretty big deal in “the community”.

I’ve just started playing a $320 WCOOP event with (so far) 2300 players … if I can just manage an outright victory in this one, that would be my first 6-figure score … cross fingers.

-triply huge