HugePoker

I’m laying in bed at Bellagio, laptop on my lap-top, propped up on pillows watching CNN, trying to shake the nasty cold that showed up 48 hours ago. It’s both good and bad timing - obviously it sucks to be sick for day 2 of the main event of the WSOP, but it didn’t really hurt my focus too badly yesterday, and I feel very fortunate that I don’t have to be playing poker today. I’m hoping that the peak of my illness was 4:00 this morning, and now I’ve got two days off to get over it before I go back for Day 3 at Noon on Monday.

I ended Day 2 with 63,900 chips, which will be a little below average going into Day 3, but a perfectly healthy, playable stack. I’ve got my seating assignment for Day 3 - I haven’t researched my opponents yet, but the chip lineup doesn’t look good - I have 4 much larger stacks on my left, so it’s going to be hard to raise through them. There’s a tiny 10,000 chip stack on my right, which is sort of good and bad - I’d rather have more chips on my right because chips tend to flow clockwise around the table, but at least I should be able to make good decisions when he shoves instead of having to worry every time I raise whether he will take a stand and shove over the top of me.

Yesterday was about as different from Day 1 for me as I could imagine. The table was relatively conservative, with not a lot of fireworks early in the day. Even later in the evening big pots generally were only played with big hands, and no-one really took on the mantle of table-captain. We only busted two players, and the chip leader coming into the day lost ground, so no-one built a massive stack. Given all that, and my sickness, I’m pretty happy to come out of the day with 63,900. I probably could have benefited from some more selective aggression, since I seemed to be getting a lot of respect from the table and had a good feel for who I should tangle with and who to avoid … it’s possible I could have extracted more from that setup (but it’s always possible that I would have just gotten myself into trouble trying).

The key hand for me early on was another full house … I’m in the BB with QT facing three limpers, and I’m happy but not crazed when I see a QJ3 flop. I check, one of the limpers bets, and two of us call. The turn is a nice but scary Ten. I’m not really worried about AK in a limped pot, but K9 or 98 are possible. I need to worry about draws more though - if someone has KQ or KJ or AT or 99 or A9 (the list goes on) I’m ahead of them but they have a lot of outs. I’m prepared to lay the hand down if it really looks like I’m beat, but I think I have to charge a solid admission price to anyone who wants to outdraw me. I bet 2/3 of the pot and only the UTG limper calls. I get ready to just check-call the river unless a 4th straight card falls (in which case I’m probably check-folding), and then BINGO! A Ten hits on the river, giving me a full house. I don’t know what UTG has, but he called the turn so I think I should go for value on the river. I bet 5200 and he tanks forever, finally calling and claiming he had AK. If true, he limped AK preflop and then slowplayed the nuts on the turn, and he deserves the bite I took out of him.

That hand took me up to 58K, and I got up as high as 75K before running TT into JJ and luckily only losing about 12K.

We started with 2412 players and finished with 1200. When today (2B) is finished we’ll have the total numbers and average chip count for Day 3. The tournament as a whole had 7300-ish entrants, and 1st prize will be $8,944,138 (actually I’ve heard ESPN is chipping in the extra dough to round it up to $9M). They will pay down to 747th place, who will receive $19,263.

While writing this I just received a scouting report from Chad, who knows a couple of the players at my Day 3 table - pretty nice to have a top pro giving me intel about my opponents.

Monday Noon, Day 3, stay tuned.

bagged and tagged 64,900 chips

still have nasty cold

must
enter
coma
now

It has come to my attention that a couple of you have tried to get through to me either by text message or using twitter, without success. I think that I need to be following your twitter account for a tweet from you to show up in my timeline. If you want me to follow your twitter account, send me an email message or text (see below) or leave a comment here.

My regular cell number won’t take text messages - if you want to send me a text message you need to send it to my google voice number. I don’t want to put the number in plain text here, but it’s the normal area code for Seattle, followed by the words JOY-TAXI (look on a phone keypad to figure out the numbers).

Yes, I’m up at 6:30AM. No, it’s not nerves over going back for day 2. Actually I wish it were just nerves - I woke up yesterday with a sore throat and I was hoping it was just Vegas dry air getting to me, but today the sore throat is back and I clearly have a head cold to go with it, and I’m having trouble sleeping. I can get them to bring me tea and honey at the table - if you have any great cold-symptom-reduction ideas for me, send them my way. I’ll try to get a little more sleep before meeting Team Huge for the old $4.99 breakfast of champions at TGIF at the Gold Coast.

Speaking of Team Huge, they’ve been making great runs in tournaments so far, with Dan and Deb coming close to the money, Pete with one min-cash, and Maya hitting her (by far) best cash ever for $1700 at the nightly Caesars $80 tournament. So proud of my Hugettes!!!

As usual, you can get my updates on Twitter.com (@hugepoker),

or the poker news live updates (click on the Day 2a tab if it doesn’t take you there automatically).

There’s also the pokerstars blog

I got my table assignments, and was amused to see a guy I know on my left for today, and Avery Cardoza (old time poker publisher & author) also will be at my table - will have to wait and see if that turns out to be good or bad news.

Sniffly-Coughy-Huge

I endured the most frustrating 8 hours of my poker career between the noon start time and 8:00 dinner break. I didn’t lose any massive pots, but everything went wrong - I had lots of good starting hands to see cheap flops with, but never hit anything more than marginal top pair hands. I lost two sizeable pots with AJ, once against J9 on a 932A9 board, and once against AQ on a AT3A9 board (pleased I didn’t lose a lot more on that one). I did win a couple of decent pots to stave off oblivion, but by the time dinner break rolled around, my 30K starting stack had been amputated down to 13K, and I was not happy.

I was pretty psyched about my table at first, as it seemed like the tougher players were on my right and the bad ones on my left. The prime example of the latter category was a little blonde bimbo who people kept coming over to photograph. After she busted (spectacularly) we learned that she was a Playboy model and wife of some famous rock-star. She busted on a KT9T board when a guy bet 7500, she put out 3 5000 chips, the dealer said “raise” and she argued that she was only calling and took back one of the chips(!) Of course it was ruled a raise, her opponent reraised all-in and she only had 8000 chips left and called, and her opponent had 99 for the boat. Sadly for the rest of the table a miracle queen did not materialize on the river, and our little cutie was gone.

The old codger on my left who loved to “reraise those internet kids!” also busted mid-day, in fairly stupidendous fashion. So the two best targets for me to shoot at got blasted by others, and I was left with the sharks.

The first hand after dinner I won a nice little pot with a flat-float-bluff maneuver, giving me a glimmer of hope for a comeback. about a half hour later, hope materialized. After 3-betting JJ and getting called in 2 spots, I didn’t like the King on the flop, but I really liked the Jack on the turn, and I especially liked the paired Ten on the river, giving me a full ouse. I played the turn cagily and got my opponent to stack off on the river, doubling me up to 30K. Indescribable sigh of relief.

TWO HANDS LATER, I flopped trips with T9s on a TT8 flop, and hit ANOTHER FULL HOUSE with a 9 on the turn, and got the very tough player to pay off a sizeable bet on the river when a Queen hit. I feel good about how I played both hands, extracting maximum value from both, and getting me up over 40K.

I finished the night with 40250 chips, right around average. There are more stories from the end of the night, but I’m sitting by the Bellagio pool, so I’m going to stop thumbing on my phone keyboard.

My Day 2A will start tomorrow at Noon (Day 2B is Saturday, Sunday is a day off for everyone, and the whole surviving fielf returns for Day 3 on Monday). Stay tuned…

huge

I’m playing Day 1C of the main event in about 10.5 hours.

Not much more to say as it’s time for sleep.

Follow my personal updates on twitter

Follow the general live updates on pokernews.

GO ME!

p.s. My friend Ace played his Day 1 already, and busted out with AA all-in preflop against KK. I told him that made me feel better about busting out in exactly the same way from the $1K event, and thanked him for that.

After my ugly Ace-whooping 10-minute blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in the $1000 bracelet event on Thursday, my frustration continued. The only apparent benefit of busting out after TEN MINUTES in the Noon event was that I could go ahead and play the 1PM $200 event (also at the Rio). As I was putting together a pretty good run in the 1PM, I thought it would be funny if making my (by far) fastest ever exit from a WSOP event would lead to my best cash for the year. But, as it turned out, what would be funnier still, according to some poker god with a sick sense of humor that I do not appreciate, would be to have me last six hours instead of ten minutes, and then have me bust out by HAVING MY ACES CRACKED AGAIN. The hand went a little differently, and this time the culprit was deuces instead of Kings, but still, I mean, COME ON!

Friday the sadness continued. I went back to the Wynn to try and salve my wounds by beating up on the idiots, but at first I played badly to lose half of my stack, and then I lost by turning a flush when someone else had a higher flush. I lost at the Wynn so fast that I could pop back over to the Rio for the 1PM deepstack, I had one fun hand there early on where I actually bluffed a guy off of a set (the river put a fourth club on the board) and then showed him my 4-2 of diamonds. I don’t usually show bluffs, but I thought this guy was weak and possibly drunk and that it might tilt him. It didn’t seem to - we ended up talking about the hand, and he started to seem not all that drunk or all that weak, and we became pretty chummy. So instead of tilting the guy and making him play bad, I figured out that he wasn’t as bad as I thought he was - not the benefit I was looking for, but helpful nonetheless. After that I never really built a big stack, and when the blinds got big enough I had to shove 65s, got called by AJ - not the worst thing I could see, and I said “OK, I like it”, and then the dealer laid down JJ3 and I said “I don’t like it” and I was crippled, and out soon thereafter. I finished 160th out of 500 - another sort of decent run but not really close to winning the money. After that I went for a third time to the cleverly named Pho Kim Long for Vietnamese food with Josh. I got a call from Mark that the numbers were good for the 9PM $550 mega satellite, which I was thinking about playing anyway, so we hustled back to the Rio and I got in about 20 minutes late. Compared to the other tournaments I’ve been playing the $550 mega is kind of a psycho-turbo - you start with only 4000 chips and the blinds go 25-50 50-100 100-200 100-200/25 200-400/50 yikes! This one was just dreary for me - I was card-dead from the start and barely played any hands until three hours in when I had to shove with 44, and lost a coin flip to A9. So yesterday was a triple-header bust.

Today I got up early enough to walk over to the Gold Coast to have my Breakfast of Champions - the TGI Fridays $4.99 breakfast special (eggs, hash browns, sausage and toast), and got back to the Rio almost in time to register in time for the 1PM $1060 mega satellite to take a second stab at a $10,000 main event seat. More dreariness, with just a slightly different flavor: In the first hour I had *seven* pocket pairs, all 66 or lower, saw flops with all of them, flopped no sets, and lost every pot. I somehow managed to get to the first break with 5000 of my 6000 starting chips, but soon drifted down as low as 4000 before hitting my first hand, turning a straight with KQ. When a third diamond fell on the river it gave me a little bit of a scare, but it may have just allowed my opponent to bluff at the pot - I called, he grimaced, I said “I have a straight”, and he mucked.

An even bigger thrill-ride came when the Pokerstars Pro on my right (not sure who he was, but he had the jersey and the patch) shoved from the cutoff with Q8-spades for most of my stack, and I was happy to look down and find KK. I was not so happy to see the flop of 85J with two spades. We’re pretty much flipping a coin, as he needs any eight, any Queen or any spade to beat me. Sure enough, Queen on the turn and he has two pair and it looks like I’m pretty much out. BUT WAIT! A Five on the river gives me a better two pair, and the Stars Pro makes his exit, and suddenly I’ve got a big stack.

From there I mostly treaded water for a while, getting down to 1/3 of the 480 entrants, by which point my big stack was a merely average 20K chips. I won a coin flip 77 vs. AQ to chip up to 27K, I bounced between 30K and 40K until we were down to 75 players, and the tension was starting to mount - 45 of us would get $10,200 and the slightly unlucky 46th place finisher would get $6600 in cash. It was here that I pulled off the first (and the milder) of my two luckbox moments. It was folded around to me in the small blind, and the short stack in the big blind started mumbling about how if he had anything at all we were going to tangle - a pretty clear attempt to send me the message that I’d better just give him a walk if I didn’t want to gamble. He had about 3.5 BB, so I was going to shove on him with any two cards, because honestly I knew that all his mumbling was just bluster and that he would fold if he didn’t have a pretty good hand. But when I saw A2s there was no thought required, and when he actually AGONIZED before calling with 99 I knew my assessment was right about his calling range, which didn’t much help with the fact that he had the better hand. The 445 flop brought a little hope, but the Ace on the turn was the real killer, and MAN was he pissed as he walked off.

As we got closer to the bubble I had another nail biter when I shoved with A4s and the SB thought forever before folding AQ face-up (WHY on earth do they do that??? I mean do they WANT me to ravage them over and over?? What does he POSSIBLY hope to gain by showing the table that he’ll fold a good hand in the blinds?). I told him “yeah we were racing - I had Jacks” and then followed up with “we both didn’t want you to call”.

With 53 players left I had blinded down to a very precarious 28K, and was about to get chewed down further in two more hands, and AQ looked more than good enough, setting up luckbox moment number two. I shoved, the button asked for my stack to be counted down and started a long process of deliberation. Now on the one hand if he’s thinking that hard he’s not likely to have me badly beaten, but on the other he’s likely to have a pair for a coin flip, and even if I’m ahead I’d rather just have him fold this close to a satellite bubble. When he finally calls I just pray he might have AJs, which would be a bad call but possible, or that I can win a coin flip against Eights or something like that, BUT WAIT! He has … pocket Queens! Yuck! So it’s actually to his credit that he had a card time calling with QQ that close to the money, and afterward he said that it might have been a bad call, and I agreed - it seems borderline … with KK I think he has to call and with JJ or AK I think he has to fold, but QQ is pretty tough. He wouldn’t be crippled if he lost the hand, but he would go from a very safe stack to a pretty vulnerable one. Oh, sorry, you want to know what happened. Well, that’s simple - Ace on the flop, and on the river for good measure, and I double up to 64K, eight spots away from the money. And now I’ve got a pretty safe stack.

There were a few tense moments when I got shorter and some super-short stacks tripled or quadrupled up, but after an orbit in which the big stack inexplicably gave me a walk, and then I stole the BB from a stack who couldn’t possibly call me with anything, I was pretty close to a lock. After a few minutes of the old hand-for-hand, and surprisingly little talk of trying to orchestrate a 46-way deal, the true bubble-boy busted out, and then the $6600 booby-prize-winner, and we were all in.

I collect $10,000 in buyin chips and $200 in cash. This doesn’t require me to play the main event (I could sell the chips for cash) but I will. I was feeling pretty confident of playing the main event after a few small successes lately and I’ve been feeling pretty good about my play for the most part, but it still would have been difficult to pony up the $10,000 if I were to burn through a few thousand bucks trying to win a seat without success. Now I just have to win two or three more so I can play the main event as a totally relaxed freeroll. This is the big mega-satellite weekend, so there will be lots of opportunities…

Oh yeah, the title of the post … in recent years all the cool internet kids started saying “Bink!” when a card would come to win them a hand, or they would win a tournament, or just generally anything good would happen. Then the *really* cool thing was to use it as a verb, as in “I binked the 5 on the turn for the gutshot and stacked the donkey” or in my case “I just binked a main event seat! How awesome is that?”. What could be cooler and hipper than bringing it back to nounhood with “binkage”? Answer: none cooler.

huge

I get to the table 13 minutes late. 1st hand I get AQ, lose a small pot. I lose another small one, I win a small one, I’ve got 2900 chips out of 3000 I started with. No big deal.

I pick up AA. Guy raises, I 3Bet, he 4Bets, I 5Bet, he 6Bets, I 7Bet shove. He says “shoot” and calls and I know he has KK before he turns it over. What I don’t know before I see it is that a King is the first card off the deck on vthe flop. I’m out 10 minutes after I sit down. Oh well.

Now I’m playing in the 1PM deepstack at the Rio. I told the story, everyone laughed, and a guy said “when I bust out of a tournament I always try to figure out something I learned”, and I said “yeah, I learned nothing from that”.

I don’t really feel all that bad. I mean it sucks I got unlucky, and that I’m out instead of having a double stack in the first half hour, but mostly it’s just funny. With the cards in that order in the deck, there’s just no other way that hand was going down.

Hopefully I’ll do a little better in the 1PM. I guess I’ve already lasted 3 times as long, and I’ve chipped up a bit.

Oh well.

noon start time. standing in long line to register, and I still haven’t had breakfast. I feel it’s a sign of maturity (or something) that I can be playing an actual WSOP event and not too worried that I won’t get to the table quite on time…

huge

Yesterday, after two intense days of playing, cashing, and getting bad-beat out of the $1K bracelet event, I decided to get out of Vegas and go hiking in the Mojave National Preserve, which was fantastic (and not even too crazy-hot - totally under 95 degrees).

I was pretty tired today and decided to play the low-stressed, bite-sized, donkey-filled Wynn tournament. My initial table may have been one of the most idiotic collections of poker players I have ever played with in a more-than-$50 tournament (the Wynn has a $225 buyin). I wouldn’t be surprised if the gentleman on my left had never played a tournament before. All around the table there were constant protocol violations, weird misunderstandings about the rules, players misreading their hands or thinking they won a pot because they didn’t understand that their bottom pair was counterfeited, etc. And as a result of the low caliber of play on the part of my opponents, I … ummmm … went from a starting stack of 10,000 chips to … ummm … well … 4000 chips … by the end of the … ummm … third level. Yeah. Can’t really explain that. Well, maybe I can. I played bad. The idiocy of my table-mates made me not take things very seriously. When I should have been seeing a bunch of cheap flops and waiting for great opportunities to stack someone with a big hand, I was instead splashing around, trying to push people out of hands (?!?) and just generally spewing my chips away. With 4000 chips at 200-400, shoving with 55 seemed pretty natural, and when I won the coinflip against AK, I refocused and tried to identify which players I could exploit in which ways, and I quickly built my stack up to 27,000.

One key lucky hand propelled me to the final table. With 17 players left (we started with 56, and the final 9 would get paid) I called a raise from an active player with KQs in the big blind. The flop came JT4, giving me a straight draw, two overcards, and a backdoor flush draw. This guy seemed to always continuation-bet, and the stack sizes were about right, so I waited for him to bet and checkraised all-in. He hemmed and hawed for a while and I thought maybe he had something like Ace-Ten, which wouldn’t even have me in too bad shape. I was surprised when he called and tabled AA, almost as bad as being up against a set - my overcards weren’t good anymore, and he had two of my straight outs in his hand. Yuck. But the turn brought a little more hope - a spade to give me a flush draw - and the river was a glorious Nine, giving me the straight.

I made it to the final table as one of the three chip leaders, and the poor sod whose Aces I cracked busted out on the tenth place bubble with a zero dollar prize - sorry buddy. I ran into a mishap when one of the chip-leaders rivered me by turning his third pair into trips, which knocked me down to an average stack, where I stayed as players busted out - I won some small pots to keep up with average stack size, but I never got back among the top stacks. By the time we got down to 4-handed, there was one massive chip leader and the other three of us were jockeying back and forth as the co-losers. Peopple started talking about a deal, but they wanted to give the chip leader too much money so I kept vetoing it. I got solidly into last place, but then the blinds went up and I had a perfectly efficient shoving stack, and I definitely understood push-fold dynamics better than these other guys. I shoved myself back into contention, but then another short stack doubled up, and the other one won a nice pot, and I was in last place again. Deal talk persisted, and the others crafted a deal that would give the leader $2800 and the rest of us $1750. That was getting pretty acceptable, but I decided to be a hard-ass and ask for $1800, even though that would require the other two shorts to accept less money than me when they had more chips . One of them wanted to do it, and the other one almost fell for it, but then he dug in his heels and said no - he would have been fine with taking $1725, but he just couldn’t stomach the idea of letting me have more. So we played one more hand, and then the blinds went up, the antes doubled, and I was in the big blind, with the chip leader on my left. All that meant that the deal I tried to stonewall one hand earlier was all of the sudden VERY attractive. They really should have retracted it - all those factors meant that my stack was really not worth as much as theirs, but I think they had had enough of me putting them in difficult spots and feared that I would keep doing it (even though I really wouldn’t have been able to - with the new blinds/antes my M was down to 3 and I was about to take the BB). They totally jumped at it, not even pausing for a moment to think about why I would have changed my tune after just one hand.

So another final table, another nice little score, and another vote of confirmation for the Wynn as the juiciest $200-ish tournament ever.

If I feel well-rested in the morning I’ll be playing Day 1A of the $1K bracelet event. If not I’ll play something else and play Day 1B on Friday. I’ll let you know…

-huge

I don’t often get the opportunity to come into a new day of a tournament as the chip leader at my table - in fact I’m not sure it’s ever happened to me before. To amplify the effect, because I won a few pots at the end of the night last night after they had colored up some of the green (25) chips but before they had colored up all of them, I ended up with an absurd number of green chips, so that not only did I have more chips than everyone else in terms of my chip count, I had probably three times as many physical chips as anyone else, and I speculated that I might be the tournament chip leader in terms of the weight of my stack. When I got to my table about 30 seconds before start time, everyone else had unbagged their chips and stacked them into a small number of neat little piles, but the dealer had just cut my bag open and dumped it in an unholy multi-colored mountain. In front of my seat. I walked up and said “oh, I think that’s me”, and spent the next ten minutes stacking them.

The very first hand I was dealt seemed like an auspicious beginning - guy on my right raises, I have AK in the hijack and reraise, everyone folds. I could almost feel everyone tense up, like “OK, so this is how it’s gonna be”. Unfortunately after that I didn’t pick up a decent hand for a while, so I couldn’t keep them on the ropes (or maybe I’m not quite ballsy enough to do so without a tolerable hand).

It was kind of a funny day, quite a contrast from yesterday … I got involved with a lot of pots, but very rarely played a big pot. I stole blinds, I occasionally 3-bet, I raise-folded, I made a few continuation bets, but I don’t think I played a single hand all day long that involved action on the flop AND on the turn or river. I bounced around between 30K and 40K until we got to the bubble. I didn’t get a lot of opportunity to play bubble terrorist, and after 7 hands od hand-for-hand we were in the money with 324 players remaining, all of us guaranteed to cash for at least $1800.

No big action until the short stack on my right, who had shoved on my big blind twice already, was unfortunate enough to do so a third time when I had AQ. I snap-called, he was live with KT, but an Ace on the turn doomed him - that took me up to 46k.

At the new table things continued in a similar manner, but I had stepped up to the 40k-50k range. And then disaster struck…

An active player in late position open-shoved his 31k stack, and I pretty much snap-called with JJ, believing htat it was nearly inconceivable that he would do that with Queens or better. I was right, he had A6o, and I was in good shape to make a nice jump up to a 75K stack … the 679 flop gave him two more outs but was otherwise acceptable to me … the 5 on the turn added four chop outs (an eight would make a straight on the board for a split pot) … but all of those extra outs were made irrelevant by the Ace on the river. YUCK!!! With that I was crippled, down to exactly 10,000.

On the very next hand another player raised to 5000 and my AK in the small blind was an obvious reshove. He turned over 66, and I lost the coin flip, and just like that in two hands I was gone.

I busted in 158th place out of 3106 players, for a prize of $2,589. Not what I was hoping for at the start of the day, but a WSOP cash is never anything to sneeze at, and this was my first bracelet event cash in a long time, and I might be bummed about how I busted out but I’ll take the $2,589 and not whine about it too much. I believe this result makes me mildly positive for the trip - just in terms of poker, I’m not talking about expenses or anything crazy like that.

Hopefully it’s just the first step.