HugePoker

I went to the Tulalip Indian Reservation casino on Sunday to play in what I thought was a satellite for a WPT event coming up in Reno next month. It turned out not to be … well, sort of … they were giving three “seats” into the WPT event to the top three finishers, but in this case a “seat” meant $2500 in cash (which you could use to buy in to the Reno event *if you wanted to*) plus a $1500 travel voucher (which you could use to travel to Reno *if you want* and if you can somehow manage to spend $1500 traveling to *Reno*). So not really a satellite, but instead a regular cash tournament in which they have taken $12,000 out of the prize pool and divided it evenly between 1st, 2nd and 3rd (and in which they’ve collected some extra rake because they certainly didn’t pay $1500 in cash for those travel vouchers). In my defense over not knowing the real terms of the tournament, I can say that at least I figured out what the exact story was within about ten minutes of sitting down, whereas there were players *deep into the final table* who didn’t know and didn’t seem to care what exactly the prizes were, let alone have the faintest clue about how the prize distribution might impact strategy. For a while it looked like this ignorance might have a nasty impact on me, but in the end it worked to my advantage.

$400 buyin, 99 players, ten places paid (with the big extra payout for the top three), $4760+$4000 for first place, very good structure with 25,000 chips to start (!) and 30 minute levels and only a few ugly blind jumps. It took over 12 hours to play down to the end. You might wonder how I know that it took over 12 hours …

I had a very healthy stack with 16 players left, but made a mis-step calling a shorter stack’s shove with 99 when I really should have realized that he was too tight for my call to be good – he had TT and gave me a serious kidney punch. I had a chance to atone for my mistake in a blind vs blind battle with the same player, but he made a bizarre insta-check-raise bluff on the river and I actually folded A7 on an Ace-high board because I couldn’t imagine how he could be bluffing (I bet 25,000 and he shoved for 40,000 more) but he told me when he busted out in 3rd that he had “put me on a weak Ace” and thought I would fold it. I could write several pages about how ridiculous that is, but I won’t.

With 11 players left we agreed that $200 each would be taken out of 1st and 2nd place prizes so that the 11th place finisher would get their $400 back. At that point I was in serious danger of finishing 11th and not much danger of finishing 1st or 2nd, so I was happy with the deal. But very quickly the bubble boy busted and we had our final table. I think I was 9th out of 10 in chips for quite a while, and then 9th of 9, and then 8th of 8, but I kept hanging on.

I must confess that I ran well at the final table, with two mild suckouts and one serious one. The serious one came when I shoved my short stack with ATs and got called by a bigger stack with KK. Two other players immediately announced that they each had folded an Ace, which made my chances pretty slim – I thought I needed a bunch of spades or a couple of Tens to fall, but I wasn’t disappointed with the 89J flop, and the 7 on the river was just glorious.

When we were down to six players I was still short-stacked, and I was eager to do something that might smooth out the payout structure. This is something that players usually are desperate for (and I’m usually rejecting) but these players just didn’t seem to get it that there was such a huge jump from 4th to 3rd prize, plus the old guy on my right had more than 50% of the chips in play. So there was never any deal. There would come another brief moment when I would regret that fact, when we were 4-handed at 5,000-10,000 blinds and I shoved my 90,000 chip stack from the small blind with T9o into the woman in the big blind who had only a few more chips than me. She had been playing tight and decently, and her stack size made her a perfect target, so I would have shoved any two cards. When she paused I got worried, and when she said “I just have to take my chances” I thought she might have something like Ace-Jack (please not Ace-Ten!) or sevens, and when she said “I call” I thought surely I was in trouble. But when she turned over Ten-Eight-suited I was dumbfounded (as in I had found some serious dumb), and when a Nine fell on the flop I was the beneficiary of an inexplicable $4,000 gift. You see that on final tables sometimes (in fact I think it happened this year in the WSOP main event November-Nine-bubble, when already-forgotten-name made the obscenely bad call with KQ) where people have played conservatively and all of the sudden they just hit a wall or get stressed out or burned out and say “I guess I just have to gamble here and hope I get lucky – or at least I can go home and relax”. For those of you who know what ICM is, her call was one of the worst ICM mistakes I have ever seen (well, outside of WSOP main event satellite bubbles, I guess).

So she busted out a hand or two later and we were down to three. I still had fewer chips than the other two, but I quickly changed that. I flopped a set against weird-checkraise-bluff guy and doubled through him, making me the chip leader. When I finally knocked him out I had something like an 8:1 chip lead on the old guy on my right who had formerly had all the chips. I believe it was only the second time in my poker career that I’ve had over a million chips in a live tournament. I knew he didn’t stand much of a chance and in the end he 3-barrel-bluffed me when I was holding QT on a Q98A5 board, and it was over.

12.5 hours, 99 players, 1st place, $4560 plus $2500 plus $1500 travel voucher plus a “Tulalip Casino Poker Tournament Champion” card cover to add to my collection.

There’s a very bizarre coincidence here. It certainly doesn’t happen very often that I (or anyone) win back-to-back live tournaments (with more than a handful of players in them). I’ve posted about it once before in my blog:

2007:
August 15: Roxy’s, 1st of 35, $1360
August 28: Muckleshoot, 1st of 40 (Deb took 2nd), $1200

2011:
August 14: Muckleshoot, 1st of 60, $4200
August 28: Tulalip, 1st of 99, $8500

Weird. But I’ll take it. Hopefully I can continue the Seattle-area live poker streak into September. Muckleshoot has their end-of-Summer series happening September 9-10-11 with $300, $500 and $1000 buyin events, and I’m planning on playing all of them. Josh will be flying in for the event from Florida, so hopefully we can each final-table a couple of them (or I’ll just win all three and keep the streak alive).

It’s always hard coming back from the WSOP and attempting to re-integrate into whatever semblance of a normal life I have in Seattle (yes, I know my life is far from “normal”, but bear with me) - switching gears from being completely focused and immersed in poker, having to choose between the many different tournaments I could play on any given day, and the inexorable buildup to (and nearly inevitable letdown from) the ever-looming main event … back to humdrum pajama-clad layabout home-(and now dog-)owner married-guy life. In the past it has always been difficult to adjust back to playing poker online, but this year I don’t even have that struggle, since online poker is effectively dead, at least for the time being. I usually have a week or two of limbo/malaise and then get back into playing online and the rest of life, and last year I had a juicy acting gig to look forward to. But this year things are pretty empty & bleak on the poker front – online poker is gone, and for live poker I can drive 20 minutes to play in pathetic little cash games and tournaments or 40 minutes to play in decent-sized cash games and slightly less pathetic tournaments. Add to that my mom’s illness and my month back from Vegas has been unusually depressed & aimless (mom is actually doing surprisingly well given that she was given about a year … about a year ago – she shows some slow signs of deteriorating health but no dramatic downturns or obvious cancer symptoms, and her spirits are, all things considered, not too bad).

In spite of its deficiencies, I’ve been playing some live poker when I can – mostly playing $2-5 no-limit hold’em (cash game) at the Snoqualmie tribal casino (40 minutes East of Seattle). I’ve done well there, I think winning something like 7 out of 8 sessions including a few before the WSOP. That win-rate is probably not sustainable, but I feel good about my ability to churn a profit there. This past Friday I decided to mix it up and try playing at Muckleshoot (another tribal casino, 40 minutes South), thinking that the $3-5 game there might be weak because they run a $5-10 game on Friday nights, so the better players would hopefully be in that game. The game wasn’t really any softer than at Snoqualmie, and I suffered my worst cash game loss in a while, dropping almost $1,000 in a few hours. There was no way I was going to avoid losing money that night given how the cards were falling for me:

- I flopped an overpair with TT on 987 flop, turned the straight, but opponent rivered a full house
- I flopped a flush but (again) opponent rivered a full house
- I flopped the nut straight but lost to a turned flush
- I had AA cracked by 86s

…So I was pretty much doomed to lose money, but in each of those hands I think I could have possibly made a disciplined fold on the river and saved myself some pain – even if I could have found a fold in two of those spots I could have cut the loss in half. Disappointing.

I went back to Muckleshoot yesterday (Saturday) to play in a qualifier tournament for their big Summer Poker Series next month (a $375 buyin satellite that awarded entry into all three of their series events – a $300 buyin, $500 buyin, and $1000 buyin on consecutive days – that’s pretty big dollars for this part of the world), and the first hand dealt to me I had pocket Kings beat by pocket Queens (on a T98J board), and even though this time around I did manage to fold my hand on the turn and lose the minimum, it still hurt, and it was downhill from there for another $375 down the drain.

Refusing to heed the warning signs indicating a Muckleshoot curse, I returned today for their monthly 2nd-Sunday $215 buyin tournament. It’s hard to pass it up given that the only other 3-digit buyin tournaments around here are a weekly $130 and a weekly $100, and the $215 is only once a month. So I made the drive three days in a row and hoped to avoid an antimatter hat-trick.

The tournament started well, and after an hour or so I had run my 10K starting stack well over 20K. I hit a major road bump with AJ on a JT3 flop when a conservative woman donk-bet into me and called my raise, called me again when a 9 hit on the turn (leading me to think she had QJ or KJ) and then bet small into me when a second Ten hit on the river. All the sudden I had to add QT or KT to her range, but she could just as easily be making a blocking bet with my original hand estimate, so I had to call, and sure enough she showed me the KT. Blecchhh.

More ups and downs followed, and I was often well below average chip stack, but I stuck around and found some good spots and made it to the final table with a decent stack. There were 60 players to start, and they were paying the final 6, with $360 for 6th and $4200 for 1st. I played well at the final table, and actually never got my money in bad – I won one coin flip and then lost one … took a mild bad beat when I got all-in with a short stack with AJ vs his A6 and the board ran out KQ7 (OK) … Ten (YES!) … Jack (Booooo!) for a split pot. I accumulated chips on the bubble and was in 3rd when we made the money with six players. Short stacks busted, I did not. With three players left I was the shorter stack, but I ground away at them (the other two were at least decent – I would say they were the two best players I faced in the whole tournament, and one of them actually had some annoying tricks in his arsenal), and when I busted the tricky guy I was still behind but had some room to maneuver. The heads-up match was pretty good – my opponent was very consistently aggressive, maybe a little too consistent. He always raised 3x the big blind, which was a bit on the heavy side, and he seemed to give my smaller raises no respect. I mostly folded to his raises but would gain back the lost chips with an occasional big 3-bet, which he always folded to. I took over the chip lead with a 4-bet shove when he put in 100K chips with A9 and then folded to my shove for maybe 180K more (?). I had AJ so wouldn’t have minded him calling, but I still think it’s a pretty weak play on his part. He continued to play a pretty non-creative style and never really did anything to adapt to the fact that he was playing someone with some skill. He clearly knew that I knew what I was doing, but didn’t seem able to try to do anything different to throw me off balance (I would have had a harder time mopping up the tricky guy). I continued to grind him down and eventually he was short enough that he was forced to call my 3-bet shove holding KQ, and my A4 held up for the win.

1st place out of 60, $4200 prize. That’s my second victory at Muckleshoot – long-time readers will remember the event from August 2007 in which I ended up heads-up with Team Huge member Deb, and came from behind to eke out the victory. I’m pretty sure I haven’t played anywhere near ten events at the Muck, so two outright wins is not too shabby. Looking back at that blog post I am reminded that that win was on the heels of another small live tournament victory, which just happened to fall on this exact same date 4 years ago - funky coincidence. I titled the blog post “nothin’ like winning one live” – so true. Ahhh 2007 … those were the good old days.

-huge