HugePoker

Finished 5th in the Wynn Summer Classic, out of 128 players, for $3443 cash. Josh cashed again as well, making him 2-out-of-3 and me 3-out-of-5. I may just keep playing it every day until the main event.

I played my first bracelet event of the 2011 World Series of Poker yesterday ($1000 buyin NL hold’em), and … things did not go well. I lost a big pot early while semi-bluffing with a flush and straight draw, and then had AA cracked to bust out, all in a little over half an hour. That’s two years in a row that I’ve busted from a $1K bracelet event in the first 40 minutes with AA - last year it was all-in preflop vs KK, this year the money went in on the turn, but after losing the previous pot I couldn’t get away from it.

I was feeling pretty crappy - things have not been going well in general, but the Wynn is running a great $200-rebuy tournament this year, every day for 20 days, with a $50K guaranteed prize pool, so total of a million in prizes. I had played it twice and min-cashed once for $1100, and it is super soft. I bought in and took the rebuy right away, and … things did not go well. I had to take three more rebuys to keep playing. To rub salt in the wound, on the last hand of the rebuy period, I pick up AA, which is like manna from heaven because people go crazy on the last hand, and I got it all-in on the flop 3-ways against top pair and against a flush draw. The flush hit on the river, but I barely had him covered so I was not quite busted, which meant that I was not allowed to take a double rebuy. So after the addon I had 2.1 buyins worth of chips, but had paid for 6 buyins ($1200) and was generally hating life and poker, not necessarily in that order. I was planning to bust out of the tournament and then take a couple of days off to clear the bad juju.

But that plan was not to come to fruition. I got a bit lucky to start the turnaround, when I jammed my short stack of 4800 from UTG with A6 and the chatterbox British dufus in the small blind says “1200 more” and puts out 1800 chips. It is explained to him that he can forfeit the 1800 or put in 3000 more to call me, and I swear to Key-Righst that he tanked for three minutes thinking about folding (which would have been unbelievably stupid). He finally grimaces and makes the call, turning over a dominating AT. The board is paired and I have a little hope for a chop (if the board pairs again his Ten will be counterfeited), but when the Queen hits on the turn I’m in such a bad mood that I don’t realize that any paint card on the river will also chop, so when the King falls, I get my backpack and start to walk away in disgust and abject misery. I’m NEVER that guy they have to call back to the table because he thinks he’s busted out, but I was yesterday.

I sat back down and said to myself “Self, you’ve still got chips, and these players are terrible, get your head in the game and slap this thing up!”

And slap I did. I won a coinflip and was off and running. I built up a big stack, lost most of it, built it up again, and made it to the money (10 players) in good shape.

Hand updates are on my twitter feed. If you follow me on twitter, you may want to follow @JoshDoody as well. Josh railed me through the whole way, and posted some commentary and even photos of me playing in my new Panama hat. He also posts about his own poker and other exploits, and he is doing well in the same tournament at the Wynn right now (I busted an hour ago and am repaying my karmic debt by railing him as he approaches the bubble, but also just using his iPad to type this). He also has his own blog, where he just posted an account of his arrival in Vegas and a couple of photos of my run at the Wynn: http://www.joshdoody.com/#!/entry/1018

When we got 6-handed I was the shortest stack, and we agreed to a 6-way “save” which seemed like a great deal for me. The other short stack and I locked up $4500, 2 middle stacks got $5000, and the big stacks got $5500 and $6000 locked up, and we would play for the remaining prize $, with first getting $8000 and second getting $5600.

On the first hand after the deal I picked up AK, looked up and said “everyone agreed, right? OK I’m all in” trying to make it look like I wanted to gamble it up once my likely prize had been determined. It didn’t work that hand, but on the next hand I was dealt TT, shoved again, and maybe my table talk enticed the guy to call with A6. Yikes! I hold and just like that I’m the chip leader. Not for long though - a couple hands later I pick up JJ against the open of a very aggro and very good Russian player and I’m thrilled to jam on him, but he wakes up with KK and doubles through me.

We battle on into the night, 5-handed, 4-handed, 3-handed, and now we’re on the new bubble (first gets $8k more, 2nd gets $5600, 3rd gets bupkus), so it’s tense. I have to play completely differently against my two opponents - the tough Russkie just won’t succumb to small-ball tactics, and the only way I can take chips from him is to put his whole stack in jeopardy. The other guy (older gent named Angelo) would just shove if he liked his hand, but would fold to small pressure if he didn’t. Battle some more, I take a pot off of the Russian and then Angelo finishes him off, which is doubly great - I just got $5600 richer, and I don’t have to play the Russian heads-up.

I whittle away at Angelo and then sometimes he shoves on me, and we dance back and forth. He keeps saying we should just split the remaining prize $ and take $6800 each, but I know that the dynamic favors me, if I can just maintain parity while I wait for a hand to trap him with. My hand is delivered on a platter when he shoves with AJ and I have AK, but the Jack on the flop is a $2400 bad beat, and he has me just barely covered, and I’m out in 2nd, with a total prize of $10,100 (4500 from the deal and 5600 for 2nd place). Always nice to book a 5-digit score (even if not 5-digit profit)

I can’t really whine too much about the bad beat - first of all I got pretty lucky a couple of times to get as far as I did, second of all, because of the deal we struck the difference between 1st and 2nd was only $2400, whereas with no deal it would have been more like $6000, and finally I was in such a sour mood after the rebuy period that I’m pretty pleased that I was able to settle down and focus and play good poker and grind out an excellent result. That was probably the best intraday reversal of fortune I’ve had in my poker career (day 1 of the main event last year was a much bigger turnaround in terms of money value, but I’m talking about more of a spiritual reversal, if you will).

I played at the Wynn again today, and sadly again got in for 4 rebuys, and more sadly did not cash. Josh managed a min cash on only one rebuy and no addon, so between us we have 3 cashes out of 6 entries, and over $12,000 in cash on about $4,000 in buyins - not too shabby. It really is a fantastic tournament, and I will be hard-pressed to play anything else during the day. I’ve talked to Kenny the Wynn tournament manager at some length twice now, and they are really trying to figure out what players want and give them a good product to compete with the Venetian and Caesars. I think they’ve done a very good job, and it seems like the word is getting around: today’s field had 158 payers, far exceeding the $50,000 guarantee.

Huge signing off, back on track…

I am off to a slow start in the 2011 WSOP. I had a long and tiring but gorgeous drive from Seattle to Lake Tahoe - I meant to leave on Tuesday during the day, but didn’t pull away from the curb until 1:45AM. I drove through the gross rainy night, taking naps in rest stops as needed, and then the sun came out for the day of driving (and more napping) and I had fantastic weather and scenery for the full day drive South, capped by driving straight into the most intense full-moonrise I’ve ever seen. I took photos and put them on my twitter feed, using the fabulous software product PhotoRocket, which you should all download and install on your Macs, PC’s and iPhones. (I’m an “angel investor” in the company, so I want them to do well, but it actually is true that they have a pretty great product, which aims to revolutionize and simplify the process of sharing photographs [/end shameless plug])

Here are the links to my trip photos:

first day driving Seattle-Tahoe

Hiking above Lake Tahoe

Hiking on the Rubicon trail

I got to Lake Tahoe almost midnight, and had three free nights there, free courtesy of Harrah’s - finally throwing me a bone or two after all of my patronage (I don’t gamble other than poker, so I don’t get any big bones, but this year I’m getting nine nights of free hotel during the WSOP). I spent two days hiking around and above the lake (photos below) and nights playing poker. The poker scene in Lake Tahoe is pretty anemic, but I played a couple of little tournaments and some no-limit cash games - no great scores but I tried to get back into live poker mode. Saturday I made the eight hour drive to Vegas, which turned out to be even more spectacular, driving past Yosemite and along this cool roller-coaster forest road which was super-fun in the Miata.

Drive Tahoe-Vegas

I drove straight to the Rio where Mark was playing in a mega-satellite, and it was like I was back in my second home, with the clatter of a thousand players shuffling chips, people sitting in cash games with big stacks of hundred-dollar bills in front of them, and flat-screen tournament monitors everywhere.

OK, so, poker … it’s been grim, but not catastrophic. No tournament cash. One cash game win, but one bigger cash loss (see “Aces cracked“, below), coin flips lost: 4, coin flips won: 1, Aces cracked: 3 times, massive three-way all-in pots that were pair-over-pair-over-pair and in which I lost: 2.

Two of the Aces-cracked stories are pretty fun, or funny, by which I mean sickening, or disgusting … in a 2-5NL cash game I saw before I sat down that the players had that “internet hotshot” look and decided to buy in for the minimum ($100), partly because I didn’t want to put more money in play if I was outmatched, and partly because I thought it would annoy them. After a while of nursing my short stack I managed to double up, and decided that I had a pretty good handle on these guys (two of whom were ordering and slamming shots of tequila repeatedly), so I bought up to the max buyin of $500, confident that they would try to run me over if I could just wait for the right spot. I thought I’d found it when the hyper-agro French guy on my right raised to $25 on the button and I just called with AhAs. The flop came J-10-2 with 2 spades, and I thought “well, if I’m beat I’m beat”, I checked, he bet $45, I check-raised to $110, and he threw out eight $100 bills to put me all-in. I had a moment of hesitation, but given that this was exactly what I was looking for, I called and just hoped he hadn’t outflopped me. In cash games you don’t have to expose your cards when players are all-in before the river, so I didn’t know what he had as the river brought another ten (scary in case he had AT), and when the river was a King I got a sick feeling - now AQ, AT, KT or Q9 have all pulled ahead of me. As I flipped over my Aces he casually threw out Q9o and scooped up the $1200 pot.

Today I played the Venetian Deep Stack event, $350 buyin, 820 players. I started off strong, then went card dead and drifted down to average chip stack and then lower. I got moved to a new table, and after two weak players busted out and were replaced, we decided that we were probably at the toughest table in the whole tournament. Normally I wouldn’t engage in that kind of conversation, but it just didn’t matter - everyone knew. Everyone was open-raising 2.2 or 2.3 times the BB, there was a lot of 3-betting, a couple of 4-bet-folds, a couple of strong hero-calls … it was like playing poker at a 2+2 convention (2+2 is the poker forums where all the cool kids discuss poker strategy). One hand the button opened for 2.3x, I 3-bet to 5.8x, and he said “this is so retarded, neither of us has anything, but if I 4-bet I can’t be sure you won’t just shove light on me” as he folded. I got very short-stacked at that table, probably because I couldn’t bring myself to 3-bet light 50% of the time. I got lucky to double up but was still below average, and when they finally broke the table someone said “you’re all a great bunch of guys and I don’t ever want to see you again”.

My new table looked a lot better. I worked my way up to 30K chips, my highest total of the event. A short stack pushed all-in for 15K, I looked down at AA in the cutoff, paused, asked how much the raise was for, and then pushed all my chips in, trying to double-fake the old “strong means weak” tell - I moved my chips in fast and thwacked them down on the table, hoping someone had a good pair to call me with if they suspected I was trying to isolate the short stack. Older Asian guy in the SB seemed like the best target for this maneuver - he had overplayed a couple of hands and I thought he might be unable to restrain himself if I could convince him that I was just trying to get rid of him. He hesitated a long time and finally called my 30K and I happily flipped over my AA. The short stack had KK and the Asian guy had JJ. The flop is T-7-2 … pretty damn good. The turn is a 9 and the Jacks have some new outs but I’m still a 5:1 favorite to win a 90K pot and be easily on the road to a cash and possibly a deep run (there were 180 players left and they were paying 81). The river is a miserable eight, giving the Jacks a perfect-runner-runner gutshot straight (OK he could have just hit a Jack to beat me, but this was more repulsive), and I let out with a very rare (for me) grunt/roar of disgust and slapped my hat on the table. Not all that dramatic as poker tantrums go, but for Luckbox “cool as a cucumber” Larry it was off the rails.

So things are not great … but I think I usually have a slow start here. Ready for turning on a dime now…