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…

I spent a week in Paris last month – completely unplanned but there was a mistake airfare on Delta that I couldn’t resist: $450 round trip from Seattle, and the FF miles got me to Gold Elite status, so it was a total score (some people on the East coast got truly insane fares, like $129 RT to Copenhagen – some of the crazies on Flyertalk.com booked 5 or 6 weekend trips to Europe). I rented a nice little studio in the Marais, and I got to hang out with my dear old friend Patty from the Chateau days … I mean, not really “old” … I mean, still totally smokin’ … she was the original “cougar” in case you didn’t know (hi, Patty). We ate some good food – best meal was at a restaurant called “Pramil” in the 3rd arondissment, where Patty ordered (but I ate most of) a squash soup with a scoop of foie gras ice cream in the middle of it. You read that right … FOIE GRAS ICE CREAM - it was sublime.

I got to play some poker at the Aviation Club, which I’ve always wanted to do. They have a dress code, which I thought meant I needed to wear a jacket, but it turns out mostly to be about the shoes – don’t try to enter the Aviation Club with ratty shoes. They also have the most spook-like security of any card room (or any location, period) that I’ve ever entered … you have to get a magnetic membership card to play, and they take your right index fingerprint. Then when you arrive at the entrance on the Champs-Élysées (a couple hundred meters from the Arc de Triomphe), you hopefully gain the approval of the enormous bouncers and you climb the stairs and you push a buzzer so that the reception allows you to open the first of two heavy, slow, sealed glass doors and enter the airlock. When the (slow) door behind you closes (and only then) the reception looks you over to make sure you don’t look too dangerous or scruffy, and then they buzz you in to the reception area. You then walk up to the card reader on the wall and place your card against the reader, at which point it hopefully gives you a green light, signifying that you are now permitted to place your right index finger on the biometric scanner, at which point it hopefully gives you another green light, at which point you are allowed/required to check your bag or coat or anything else you’re carrying in the coatroom (you can’t carry anything into the club), after which you are permitted to walk down the hallway into the club.

I played a bunch of tournaments and a couple of cash game sessions. I meant to play more PLO cash, but sometimes there was a long waitlist to get into the game, and sometimes they were playing 5-card Omaha, which I’ve never played, and generally I was a little intimidated by the prospect of trying to play Omaha in a place where I don’t speak the language all that well – I can muddle along in French well enough for holdem, but I was afraid of getting into a sticky situation in Omaha and not being able to understand what was going on. I had one good tournament result – a three-way even chop in a 70-player tournament (where I had by far the smallest chip stack of the final three players – it was idiotic for the chip leader to agree to it) for 800 Euros and change ($1100) but unfortunately that was in the smallest buyin tournament I played. At the end of the trip I came out almost exactly breakeven for the poker.

The flight home was long but comfy – thanks to my elite status I got more or less the best coach seat on the plane (bulkhead with infinite legroom) on the int’l flight, and upgraded to first class on the domestic flight, and I didn’t notice any pressure/equalization problems on any of the takeoffs or landings, but the day after I got home I started feeling this nasty intermittent ear-canal pain. I figured it had to be related to the flight somehow, but it just wouldn’t go away. A couple of days later I noticed some bumps on the right side of my forehead and the corner of my eye started hurting a little. I almost called my doctor on Friday, but it seemed like the ear pain was maybe getting a little better. Over the weekend the bumps got worse and more plentiful, and obviously something very wrong was happening to me. I went in to the doctor’s office on Monday morning and the R.N. immediately said “Oh wow, that looks like shingles!”

I barely knew what shingles was (my friend Josh wrote “If you had asked me whether shingles is still a real thing that people get, I probably would’ve said no. For some reason I associate it with like Dickensian times or something” … I think I was perhaps 20% more knowledgeable than that), but I’m pretty much an expert now. Shingles is your friendly old chicken pox virus, which hides out in your nerve roots in your spine for decades and then jumps out and says “boo” when you least expect it. Actually most people might be able to half-expect it, because it often comes up when one has a weakened immune system or extreme stress or trauma or AIDS or chemotherapy or when one is a lot of years older than I am … none of which apply to me. So I have no idea why I was stricken, but stricken I was, and stricken hard. It’s been the nastiest, most disgusting, weirdest, most painful and just generally hardest sucking ailment I have ever experienced. The bumps turned into blisters or pustules on my forehead and up in my scalp, until I looked like a plague victim. After about a week they ruptured and scabbed over, and I woke up one morning with my eye nearly swollen shut. The pain was pretty much hideous – shingles attacks a nerve group, so in addition to the painful stuff going on on your actual skin, you get all kinds of pain signals firing randomly along your nerves. Sometimes it felt like my scalp was burning, and other times it felt like it was stretched way too tight over my skull – both unpleasant sensations. The R.N. gave me a prescription for Vicodin, and I told her that I had taken it before and that it didn’t really do much for me, but she said I could take two at bedtime and then if I couldn’t sleep after a few hours that I could take two more. So I thought OK, that’s permission to take more than I’ve ever taken before, so maybe that will do the trick. The pain was pretty bad by bedtime so I took two, they didn’t do anything, I lay in bed for a while and finally went to sleep, woke up after an hour hurting just as bad, tried to go back to sleep, failed, took two more Vicodin (so now that’s four within about two hours), lay in bed some more, finally fell back to sleep, woke up again after another hour with the pain *slightly* lessened, but now I’m itchy like crazy all over my body. Definitely the worst night of my life that didn’t involve death or a girlfriend dumping me.

The next day I called the doctor and described my night. She said that the itchiness was a reaction to Vicodin, and that it can happen the first time you take it or the 80th, and that from here on out it will always happen. No great loss, since it never seemed to do me much good anyway, but weird all the same. She upped the ante (got to work in a little poker talk in the middle of all this icky stuff) and gave me Percocet, which, combined with some “Tranquil Sleep” tablets – mixture of melatonin, L-theanine and 5-HTP – got me through the night without screaming or scratching. That next day I also went to see my ophthalmologist, who determined that my eye was not in too much danger – apparently the eyes are supported by the same nerve group that goes to the tip of your nose, and since I’ve never had any lesions on my nose, the eye should be safe, which is a relief, all things considered. He also warned me that the eye-swollen-shut thing might happen, so that didn’t cause too much terror. The pain was pretty awful for several days and then has been getting gradually better – my scalp still hurts sometimes, and having the wind in my hair when I put the top down in my car … hurts, which seems sort of pathetic. The blisters/lesions/pustules got a whole lot worse and then scabbed over and got very slowly better, and then the right side of my forehead felt rubbery and oily, and now there might be a little discoloration but I think I’m probably the only one who notices it. Deb is still squeamish about hugging me, though, and cranes her neck so that her head doesn’t get anywhere near mine.

They used to say that you had to be 60 to get the shingles vaccine (which cuts your chances of getting it by about 50%, and possibly lessens the symptoms if you end up in the unlucky half). Very recently some people have started saying you can get it at 50 – fat lot of good that did me. I recommend talking to your doctor about getting it as young as anyone will let you have it. JUST SAY NO TO SHINGLES!

So amidst all that pustulent fun I wasn’t playing much poker, in fact I even had to bail on two short theatre pieces that I was supposed to perform in Nebunele’s “TheatrePoems” (sorry Zach, Alissa). But a couple of weeks ago I started dipping my toe back in the poker water when my head wasn’t on fire. AbsolutePoker hasn’t ever shut out players from Washington State, so I started there, and in the first online tournament I had played in well over a month … I won. It was only a little satellite, but I did have to finish 1st out of 19 to get the $530 prize, and I did. Then the second tournament – another satellite but a bit bigger – I won again, for $1050. So I was off to a good start, and I made sure that the next thing I played would have a much bigger 5-digit prize for 1st, but I didn’t manage to put three in a row together. I did manage a few days later to make the final table in a pretty big event, sadly busting out in 7th on a massive coinflip, but pocketing $2350 for my trouble. I made another final table a few days ago, but that ended even more sadly – all-in preflop with my AK vs AQ, JJQ on the flop and no help on turn or river and I was out in 9th. I’ve also been having some modest success playing PLO online … all in all nothing spectacular but a decent bit of poker winnings while healing from my infirmity.

And then the swarm of locusts … on Friday April 15, the U.S. Department of Justice handed down indictments against Pokerstars, FullTiltPoker and AbsolutePoker for bank fraud and money laundering. They arrested a few executives that they could get their hands on and claim that they will try to extradite several more. They seized or froze several bank accounts and are claiming three billion dollars in damages. Pokerstars immediately shut down all access to U.S. players. Fulltilt was a little slower, but they have basically cut off access now as well. Absolute and Ultimatebet have stated that they aren’t going to cave in, and at least for the moment they are still slinging the internet poker same as it ever was (probably because they hope to pick up the traffic that FT and PS leave behind, and maybe because they would be devastated if they left the U.S. market, while the big two can probably survive).

As you would expect, the entire poker community is freaking out. Some people have hundreds of thousands of dollars in their online poker accounts, and now they don’t know if they’ll see it again, plus there are a lot of 20-year-old boys out there saying “how does one make money if not by internet poker?” I had nothing on Pokerstars, a few hundred on FullTilt and a few thousand on Absolute. I’ve transferred most of my Absolute money to a player in the UK, and I’m reasonably hopeful that it will be safe(r) there. I have managed through some computer trickery to play on my FullTilt account today, in hopes of either making a big tournament score or just busting the account so that I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Unfortunately the latter road was taken. I have about $100 worth of FullTilt points that I’ll convert into tournament entries and try to play out, but after that I’m felted (as in “down to the felt” or “no more chips”). I’ve pretty much been fired, or my job has been outsourced to “anywhere but here”.

No-one knows how this will play out. It could be the total death-blow to internet poker in the U.S., or it could be the start of a (slow) transition into legalized, taxed, regulated online poker. It is certainly the end of an era, for me and for the whole community. If someone asks me tomorrow, I’m not sure I’ll be able to say “I’m a professional poker player”. A good World Series could change that I guess, but for right now I don’t think I can really say that’s what I “do”. I don’t think I’ll be dusting off my software resumé just yet, but if anyone has any hot stock market tips, I’m all ears.

GG internet poker, RIP.

In my last post several eons ago, I reported that (A) my mom had cancer, (B) Pokerstars (the biggest online poker site) had banned players from Washington, and (C) I had just won a tournament on Fulltilt for $5500. I said then that if Fulltilt (2nd biggest site) followed suit, that my online poker career would effectively be over. They did, a couple months ago, and I am - almost entirely - done playing online poker, my primary source of income for the past 5 years. There are some smaller sites, and there are some possibilities of getting back into playing online, but for now it’s basically finito.

But live poker is still a possibility, and I was hit with a serious poker&travel itch recently, and now I’m in Vegas (arrived yesterday morning, here until the 27th). My visit coincides with the start of the Caesars Palace Winter Poker Classic, and I’ve played the noon events yesterday and today. Got off to good starts both days … yesterday I got pretty close to the money but busted out on the first hand after the dinner break. Today I made it into the money with a good stack, made it to the final table with a below-average stack, and busted in 9th (for $912) when I got all-in on the flop with AA vs QJ on a Q98 board, and ANOTHER STUPID TEN (reference to my last post from eons ago) knocked me out. If I win that pot I have 400,000 chips and am in with the chip leaders slugging it out for the $8K first prize. Sigh.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow. If anyone is in Vegas let me know. I’ll be here all week…

It’s been a long time since my last broadcast – which was a few hours after I busted out of the main event of the WSOP. I haven’t had a lot to report on the poker front, since I’ve been largely preoccupied with other things since returning from Vegas. I have been playing some poker, but not as much as usual, and I’ve had some successes, but nothing to write home about.

I did take one weird-ass bad beat that I was going to whine about here, but I got distracted. I’ll give you the abbreviated version … playing in a $2100 buyin Step 6 single-table tournament on Pokerstars: 9 players, 3 of us get $5200 in tournament dollars, 2 of us get $1200 in cash, and the other four get nothing. I play well and make the first cut when we get down to 5-handed, so I know I’ll get $1200 at least, but that would still be losing money on the deal. When we get to the true bubble at 4-handed, I battle & steal my way from being the short stack to being slight chip leader. I’m thrilled to see the two shortest stacks get all-in against each other, with AK and AJ. At this point the tournament is basically over – if the shortest stack is eliminated then we’re done, but even if the shortest stack doubles up, the other guy will have such a tiny stack as to have virtually no chance of recovering, and the tournament will likely be over after a hand or two. The flop brings a Jack, so it looks like a nasty suckout in the making … but I don’t give a crap who wins, as long as it’s me … and then the turn brings a King, so perhaps there’s some justice after all and the AK will emerge rightfully victorious … but again, I care not at all … oh but wait, there was also a Queen on the flop, and when the STUPIDEST TEN EVER lands on the river, they both make a straight and split the pot, and we’re back where we started. More scratching and clawing ensues, until I have an obvious shove with 88 and run straight into KK, and I’m pretty badly wounded but not dead. I get my remaining chips in on a pretty good spot to triple up and be right back in contention, but the board doesn’t help me and I’m out on the grossest bubble with $1200, a net loss of $900 in equity. That STUPID TEN cost me $4100.

OK so that’s some bad news. There’s some other bad news that I feel weird about slipping into a poker blog post, but some of you who read my blog don’t know about it and will want to, so here it is … apologies for the weirdness of reporting it this way … a couple weeks after I returned from Vegas, my mom was diagnosed with lung cancer. It is basically inoperable, and given her general condition and her philosophy, we are all in agreement that it doesn’t make sense to pursue options like chemotherapy or radiation. She is not experiencing major symptoms of the cancer yet, and all tests indicate that it has not spread to brain, spine, or other organs. The only real prognosis we’ve been given is that we’re looking at something in the ballpark of a year, but my sense is that that’s a very wide ballpark, and the phrase that keeps popping out of doctors’ mouths is “but you never know with cancer”. All things considered mom is in pretty good shape and spirits – my eldest sister has stepped up to the plate in a huge (no pun or self-reference intended) way and she and her husband are currently spending 5-6 nights a week at my mom’s house, and we’ve increased the caregivers’ schedule, and the other three siblings are doing what we can to support and give #1-sister a night off once in a while. So the silver lining in all of this is that mom now has someone with her 24/7, which she might pretend to be grumpy about sometimes, but is pretty clearly a good thing for her spirits, her health, and her safety. We’re all sad and scared sometimes, but after the initial panic of the diagnosis there is some calm now. It may be the calm before the storm, and the coming months are likely to bring a lot of challenges and some more sad-and-scared. My mom will turn 82 years old on Monday.

OK, so if it was a little freaky to put that bit of personal sadness into a poker blog, I guess it’s even more weird to follow it up with more poker news, but I’m doin’ it anyway. I’ll start with the sad/scary/aggravating poker news so as not to give you too much of a jolt and so I can end with the good stuff. About a week ago I got an email message from Pokerstars (the biggest online poker site, and where I have spent the majority of my online playing time in the last three years) saying that due to the recent State Supreme Court ruling, they will no longer allow residents of Washington State to play poker for money on Pokerstars. The policy change was effective immediately – when I got the message I was looking for tournaments to play on Pokerstars to nail down the necessary frequent player points to secure gold VIP status for the month, so I went from Gold VIP to persona-non-grata in the blink of an eye. This is a worrisome event, since playing online has been a significant source of income for me over the past four years, and playing on Pokerstars made up the bulk of that. Everyone is holding their breath right now to see if FullTilt and other sites follow in the gorilla’s footsteps. If Fulltilt leaves, my online poker career will effectively be over. So that sucks HARD.

OK, I’ve hinted at it, I’ve distracted you from it, you might not be in the mood for it, but there is some light at the end of the rainbow with the tunnel and the leprechaun. Last night, when I clearly would have been playing in the 11:40PM $109 turbo tournament on Pokerstars if the Washington legislature had not branded me a Class C Felon (same category as “Child selling” and “Rape in the third degree”), I was left with the only remaining option of playing in the Midnight “turbo hundo” on FullTilt. I mean, just because one den of iniquity has closed its doors to me doesn’t mean I’m going to just give up my degenerate life of crime! YOU CAN TAKE MY ONLINE POKER GAME AWAY FROM ME WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!!! OK, maybe that doesn’t quite work, but you get the drift. The turbo hundo on FullTilt is so named because it costs a hundred bucks (plus nine) to get in and it plays fast. I played it … I nailed it … I got lucky along the way, but I also played pretty well for the most part, and took advantage of some very weak, scared play once we got into the money. At the final table with four players left, a guy – I shit you not – with 80,000 chips and the blinds at 5,000-10,000 plus antes … he raised under the gun to 30,000, and then folded when I shoved (I had AQ and more chips than him, and I felt happy to tangle with his stack). He then with his remaining 50,000 posted the big blind and folded to a raise, and then with his 40,000 chip stack he GAVE ME A WALK. I wanted to kiss him, but instead I called him an idiot in my player notes and laughed heartily at his expense. The heads-up battle was a bit of a see-saw for a while, but I felt like I had a decent edge on the guy. The crucial hand came when I flopped a set of tens (OK, not all Tens are stupid) and trapped him into stacking off when he was drawing dead – and then wiped up the rest of him on the next hand.

$109 entry, 215 players, 1st place finish: $5590

This would normally trigger a scramble to try and win myself another triple crown, since this victory easily qualifies as the first of three, but with Pokerstars gone and me in rehearsal most nights, the number of $10K prize pool tournaments available to me anywhere other than FullTilt is pretty close to zero. I’ve got some time off this weekend so I’ll give it the old college half-assed try – but I’d basically have to win tournaments on both Ultimatebet and Bodog (both smaller sites with not a lot of higher buyin tournaments on their schedules) over the course of two days. I don’t like my chances, but I’ll try.

What am I rehearsing, you ask? I’ll put out another announcement and more info closer to our opening on October 22, but for now I’ll just leave you with the poster that just got finalized today … check it out:

As my twitter followers already know, I busted out of the main event several hours ago, in the middle of Day 5. I finished 341st out of 7319 players, for a cash prize of $36,431 (or something - can’t remember the exact number). I played the final day with Jean-Robert Bellande on my left and Cole South on his left - a daunting but exciting proposition. Things looked very good for most of the day, as I took my chips from 380,000 to over 600,000 (with Cole getting knocked out along the way), until I ran into a pair of nasty hands - one in which I faced a massive bet from Bellande and either made a smart fold or failed to snap off a big bluff, and the other in which I couldn’t find a fold with KK against a player who had flopped a set of Sevens. The first hand played into the second in a funny way, but I’ll hopefully write about that later - right now I should collapse to try and recover from the ugly cold that continues to torment me before my road trip back to Seattle.

It is a weird weird feeling to be so completely immersed in something and then in one moment have it just vaporize. After three consecutive days of making difficult decisions about tens of thousands of dollars worth of chips, I went to the wrong parking area to get my car, and then was nearly incapable of deciding where to go for dinner (ended up going back to Pho Kim Long, where I’ve gone for the last two dinner breaks - I guess I just wanted to pretend). It’s a major poker cliche that the worst day of the year is the day you bust out of the main event. I’m not sure that’s true for me, but it might be the emptiest day of the year. I feel great about how I played - with a few exceptions I think I played some of my best poker, and while there is obvious disappointment about not making a truly deep run or a six-digit score or bettering my 2007 cash or making the “November Nine”, at the end of the day I’ve got a check for over $36,000, and I’ve cashed in three out of the four main events I’ve played, and I’m pretty happy about all of that. Still kinda empty though.

Thank you all for your support, blog comments, tweets, text messages, internet research and spying, and actual physical in-the-room cheering. I have to confess that a big part of the thrill of the WSOP for me comes from knowing that a bunch of people - some I know and love, some I’ve never met - are watching my progress on twitter or in the blog or in person, getting excited as I get deeper in the tournament, groaning when I take a hit to my stack, cheering when I double up or pull off a big bluff, and maybe feeling a hint of my own deflation when I bust out. The last two WSOP’s it’s been disappointing to not give my fans anything to get all that excited about, and I’m really glad I got to create some good buzz again this year … partly because I’m such a giver and love to bring a little excitement into other peoples’ lives, but mostly because I just like all the attention. It’s fun to be a little bit of a star for a few days, I just wish I could have drug it out a few more.

My 2010 World Series of Poker is in the books - a small but solid success. I’ll take it.

huge

Day Four is in the books. I need to sleep, so I’m not going to write one of my usual epics. I’ll cut and paste my twitter posts instead. To read them in order you’ll have to scroll down to the bottom and read upwards…

(or you can search for the phrase “DAY 4 BEGINS”)

#

#

#

# 574 players left. $24,079 guaranteed. I have 382,000 chips. Average is … 382,526 17 minutes ago via web

#

got stuck on hold over half an hour to extend my room. Totally ruined my night. Life sucks. 44 minutes ago via web

#

damn! only 382k bagged and tagged. resisted urges to get frisky. very happy with my end-of-night play about 2 hours ago via dabr

#

playing 3 more hands, ending on my big blind. could it be another stretcher moment? feels familiar. about 2 hours ago via dabr

#

several nice pots, including attempted flat-float-bluff J7s accidentally turned 2pr. not sure, but think over 400k about 2 hours ago via dabr

#

while charging phone @ press table I blinded off, then lost two blind vs blind hands. 215k about 2 hours ago via dabr

#

sent us on break for color-up 500 chips. about to head back, then play an hour. done around 11:30. franticalLy charging phone about 3 hours ago via dabr

#

cell battery dying. spare may or may not work. we play 80 more minutes then we’re done. have to extend hotel reservation about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

287k after paying blinds. about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

money about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

I think it’s done? about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

massive crowd gathering one table away. about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

UTG raises I fold J4 he shows QQ. ESPN running again… about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

ESPN dispersed, but a hand must be happening somewhere … oops, no bustout. hand number 6. Im in BB about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

forgot to mention … 1 player left. about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

ESPN cameras running to a nearby table. we can’t leave our seats to look or we get a penalty. about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

nope couldn’t fold. stole with A7, short stack folded Tens. close to 300k. waiting for hand number 5. about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

lost 1 more, dealing hand number 4, just give me something I can fold! about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

he says he had QQ, makes sense. 285k. got my heart pounding there. he played it bad about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

I raise 12000 w/AK, dude makes it 24K, I call. flop K-high, I check he bet 24000, I checkraise to 65k, he says “Ace King?” and folds. about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

dealing hand number 3 about 4 hours ago via dabr

#

kido pham busted at next table over about 5 hours ago via dabr

#

back at table. grueling hand-for-hand commences momentarily. about 5 hours ago via dabr

#

4 players to go and they’re sending us on dinner break. massive chorus of boos when they announced that. time for some more pho… about 6 hours ago via dabr

#

6 players left. hand-for-hand about 7 hours ago via dabr

#

8 players. 225k. still not hand-for-hand (!?) about 7 hours ago via dabr

#

18 players to go. 200k about 7 hours ago via dabr

#

783 players. 36 to go. 212k. table probably thinks I’m maniac, but I’ve been catching cards. about 7 hours ago via dabr

#

woman shoves 60k w/77, I calL from BB with JJ and hold. back to 220k about 7 hours ago via dabr

#

165k about 8 hours ago via dabr

#

moved to new table (damn), lose coinflip w/TT vs AQs (he makes flush on river). 145k. about 8 hours ago via dabr

#

846 players. 99 to die before the money. about 8 hours ago via dabr

#

massive traffic jam at X-roads by Amazon room. break should be over but not letting us in. bubble sweat is overpowering. smells like victory about 8 hours ago via dabr

#

227k at break. could fold into the money now. not going to. about 9 hours ago via dabr

#

call raise with TT, flop is Q-high but he checks & I take it down. 205k. about 9 hours ago via dabr

#

small blind open shoves I have AK and call, he has KT. I hold. 185k about 9 hours ago via dabr

#

took small pot from Lodden w/AK, but then blinded off 2 orbits. 85k about 10 hours ago via dabr

#

under 1000 players from 7319. still a long way to go to make the money (747 of us will get at least $19k) about 11 hours ago via dabr

#

lost a couple, won a couple, then ugly leveling battle gone bad. 95K. Lodden claimed 1st victim cracking AA w/A3s in 300k pot. about 11 hours ago via dabr

#

at TGIF for breakfast of champioN all by myself (sniff). Johnny Lodden at my table today with mountain of chips. should be fun

DAY 4 BEGINS

I got my table draw this morning, and I have a weird poker celbrity at my table - sort of the Kevin Bacon of poker. Look up the wikipedia entry for Johnny Lodden to get the details of the game invented around him called “what does Lodden think?”

He has a mountain of chips, and he is thankfully 3 to my right. It should be exciting.

stay tuned on twitter.com/hugepoker

I bagged and tagged 130,300 chips at the end of Day 3, just over double what I started with at Noon. I’m still below average (170K) with 1400-ish players remaining our of 7300-ish starters. Tomorrow when we get down to 747 players, we’ll all be in the money (min cash is $19,000+).

I’m happy with my performance today - doubled my stack without ever winning a big pot, and without ever having a big hand with multistreet action. I flopped two sets, but one of them got no action and the other got counterfeited by a straight on the board.

No more days off until we get to the final 9 (and then we have months off). Day four is Noon tomorrow - time for Huge to sleep.