HugePoker

It looks like I’m in exactly 50th place going into day 2. 324 of us will make the money, so I’m in good shape. I’ll be the chip leader at my new table:

Seat 1: Frank Calo - 15550
Seat 2: Braxton Dunaway - 26400
Seat 3: Matthew Sweeney - 15100
Seat 4: Robert Voit - 27000
Seat 5: Manuel Davidian - 9100
Seat 6: Dara Davey - 18850
Seat 7: Laurence Hughes - 37475
Seat 8: Joseph Ebanks - 11650
Seat 9: Matt Sterling - 18000

You can watch the action at:

http://www.pokernews.com/live-reporting/2010-wsop/event-47/

or get my personal updates on my twitter page:

http://twitter.com/hugepoker

must run, bracelet awaits…

I got up at 6AM to finish packing, Rachel took me to the airport at 7AM, flight at 8:30AM, landed Vegas 11AM, Mark collected me and took me to the Rio, where I checked in to my room … all the while debating whether I should play the $1K WSOP event at Noon. I decided that I was in pretty good shape, having slept for most of the flight, so I dumped my bags, put on my loud red Hawaiian shirt, grabbed my silver card protector and headed downstairs. I reg’d for the event a few minutes late and go to my table at about 12:20.

It was a wild day. It started off pretty badly, as I drifted down from the 3000 chip starting stack to just under 2000, then pulled in a few pots to get back above 3000, where I caught my first bolt of lightning. The button was very active, and at 100-200 he raised to 550. I looked down at 98s in the SB and decided to put him to the test, shoving my 3300 chips in, expecting him to fold. He did not fold, in fact he called pretty quickly, which made me think I was completely dead, but he turned over AJs and I had live cards at least. I was more than live on the 982 flop, and I was golden when the 9 hit on the turn.

Another beautiful hand when I called a small raise from the BB with A3s, flopped the nut flush draw, checkraised my opponent on the flop (again, mostly hoping he would just fold but knowing I had good outs if he didn’t) only to have him put me all-in. I was committed at that point, and I called, and he had KK. I had an overcard and the flush draw, so we were close to 50:50, and I nailed the diamond on the river to double up again, sending the “Pokerstars Team Pro” who I didn’t recognize into tilty fits. During the dinner break I went up to my room and opened up the Rizen/PearlJammer book to see if I could glean a little wisdom, and randomly opened to page 85, where I found PearlJammer playing almost the identical hand, check-raising on the flop with a flush draw, even with the same reasoning I had about trying to make the flop raise look stronger by not shoving all-in but still committing himself.

Lots of action after that, building my stack up to 26K, hitting a horrible slide down to 8K, moving around to 6 different tables, twice running into Jimmy “GobboBoy” Fricke, young online phenom who has turned into a live phenom (finishing 2nd to Gus Hansen in the Aussie Millions before he was 21) - very relieved to have him on my right both times. When I got down to 8K, I played a hand with him in the blinds in which I 3-bet shoved on him on the turn, he thought for a while and muttered “That’s very consistent with a good hand” but then called anyway doubling me up (I had AQ, he had A6, and we both hit our Ace). After the hand I asked him to clarify what he had muttered and he did, adding “I have trust issues - it started with my mother”.

That hand got me moving in the right direction again, and I soon doubled again with KK vs QQ, up to 33K. And on my last table of the night I grabbed a bunch of small pots, ending the night with 37475 chips, with average being around 21K. Between Day 1A and 1B we are down to 465 players (from 3128 starters), of which 324 will make the money. The chip leaders have 60-70K, so I’m in good shape.

Restart is at 2:30PM. Let’s hope for another huge day (maybe without some of the nasty downward swings).

I’m back in Seattle, giving my mind and body a break from poker and Vegas. On my last night (Monday) I played the Caesars “double stack turbo” and made a pretty good run. There were 138 players and they were paying 18. I made the final table, but unfortunately I was pretty short on chips by that time - I was probably 8th in chips by the time we got down to 10 players, and I was happy to make the money jump to 9th place (by knocking out the shortest stack myself), but after that there was no reason to be patient, and when the blinds went from 10,000-20,000 to 15,000-30,000 there wasn’t even the possibility of being patient (I had 240,000 at that point), and I shoved with T9o and got called by AK and I was out in 9th place for $733. I busted out around 1AM, and had to head for the airport in 5 hours, so I just stayed up all night packing and stashing my car … I’ve mostly been sleeping since my arrival in Seattle 48 hours ago.

I fly back to Vegas early Sunday morning, and I might play the $1000 WSOP event that day, depending on whether I feel rested enough.

-huge

My final table did not go well, I ended up finishing 7th for $1304, pretty disappointing given that I started the day third in chips and had a pretty good table draw (three shorter stacks to my left, big chip leader across the table from me). I went to Caesars 2 hours before the tournament restart to pick up the info sheet with everyone’s name and chip count so I could do some research and then walked over to the Mesa Grill for lunch (turns out it was brunch because it was Saturday, but that’s a good thing because they have this fantastic spicy chicken hash that … OK never mind, but the Mesa Grill is really good). While eating I was able to pull up everyone’s record on my phone, and I determined that there was only one player with more tournament cash than I have (an old-school European pro named Mark McLusky with $200k in live cashes - I have a little over $100k on record) and no-one else was even close. In fact there was an older gentleman two seats to my left with exactly one $300 cash from 4 years ago - but he was pretty short on chips so probably wouldn’t be around long (remember that thought for later). I looked into the massive chip leader first (he had 769k, 2nd in chips had 350k, I had 313k), determining that he had about $20k in cashes but then also finding that he had a twitter page. He had posted about the tournament all day Friday, and mentioned that he had a flight scheduled for Saturday morning so he was trying to “knock everyone out so that we wouldn’t have to play into Saturday”. As I’ve already reported, when we got down to 10 players there was a big brouhaha with some people wanting to play it out that night, and when it became clear that there were at least a couple of people who didn’t want to do that (me being one of them), then a few players started agitating for an even ten-way split of the prize money, which would be about $2500 each. It never ceases to amaze me that poker players will play for many hours to get down to the final few players, and then they’re all desperate to stop playing and split up the money evenly. The chip leader was so desperate, because of his flight in the morning, that he was willing to take an even chop even though he had more than double the next biggest chip stack. That’s just horrible poker, and entering a 2-day tournament when you have a flight the next morning is just brain-dead. I had a better-than-average chip stack, and I certainly believed that I had better-than-average poker skills at that table, so I wasn’t going to agree to an even chop, and I said so. On his twitter page he wrote “I have 769k and was willing to agree to an even chop, but one f’n guy wouldn’t chop!”. Ahhh, funny.

So the first development at the final table is that the older gentleman with $300 in tournament cash on his record made a bizarre play, raising for over ¼ of his stack with QJo and then just shoving all-in on a T93 board. The chip leader called him with QT, and it looked like I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of his weakness, but he spiked a King on the river to double up to 250k. I folded everything for a while, and when I tried to make a move or two, I got spanked, usually by the guy who had just doubled up and who I pegged as the weakest spot at the table. I don’t think I was wrong in my assessment, but either he was just catching great cards against me, or he was (as in his QJ hand) trigger-happy to get it all-in in any situation where he hit any piece of the flop. So I bled myself down to about 220k, while others gained ground and two of the short stacks busted out, so that with 8 players left I had slipped to 6th. My first real good news of the final table came when the agro player on my right got into a blind-vs.-blind tangle with me. He had stolen my BB three times when he tried it again and I picked up AJ. I flat-called and the flop came J73 all clubs (I had no clubs). I shoved all-in and he agonized for a very long time before finally folding, and I was up to 340k. But very soon after that I lot a big pot with AK when I raised and continuation bet, only to get insta-check raised by the old $300 guy, and I had to dump it. That and some lesser catastrophes brought me down under 200k. Another player busted out, and now I was 6th out of 7. When the very active chip-leader raised from mid position and I found a pair of Eighrs my stack and my hand looked pretty perfect for a reshove. The chip-leader thought for a while and finally called, turning over AQ. The flop was a bit of overkill - 3-Q-Q. So I was out in 7th, and our chip leader posted on twitter: “just busted the dbag who refused to chop”. So I’m a “f’n guy” AND a “dbag” … I must be doing something right.

I meant to write up more stories but this has gotten too long … Sunday I played online, as Pokerstars ran their big annual WSOP mega-qualifier, out of 9000 players I got down to 900th and then busted when I made a very difficult call that turned out to be correct - I had AK, my opponent had KQ and check-raised me all-in on a JT3 board. The only way he could win was to make the straight, and I had one of his Ace outs, but he found another one on the river to bust me (and I needed 252nd for the $12000 package). Sunday night I played a super weird single table satellite, in which I got it down to two players and got all-in with 83 vs. 75 on a A87 flop, and he spiked a 5 on the turn to beat me. And Vanessa made a great run in the $10k Heads-Up championship, making it to the round of 8 (they started with 256) and running a 5-hour marathon match yesterday, and also ultimately busting when she got her money in good. $90,000 is not a bad payday, but with such a good shot at a bracelet it really had to suck to go out that way.

I’m flying back to Seattle tomorrow for a 5-day break from Vegas. I’ll see some of you there… In spite of the title of this post, I’m actually feeling better about poker and the WSOP after my victory at the Wynn and good run at Caesars - obviously sad to finish 7th but I feel like I put myself in a good position for a much better cash, and just got unlucky to lose a coinflip.

-huge

This will be brief … Yesterday I played in the Caesars Palace Mega Stack tournament (actually I tried to play the 1PM tournament at the Rio, but it was sold out so I entered the Caesars noon tournament an hour and a half late). It was/is a two-day tournament with 168 players, and by 12:30AM this morning I had secured a seat at the final table, which will start play at 2PM today. 10 players, $7171 for first, $733 for tenth (they paid 18 spots). I have 313,000 chips, and the average is about 260,000 - I think I’m third in chips, but I might be wrong.

I ran well early in the tournament, ran into some trouble in the middle stages, and then closed very strong in the last few levels of the night. The final table should be interesting - we were playing at two tables of 5 and 6 players until the final table was determined, so I haven’t played with everyone, but my sense is that there are a few pretty decent players, but no internet superstars or anything. I’ll try to get the restart listing beforehand so I can do a little research.

2PM, Caesars Palace, wish me luck…

Tomorrow will mark a week in Vegas for me, and until today it has been a frustrating grind. I have only played one WSOP bracelet event (the $1k on Saturday), and it didn’t go well. I’ve had a couple of good runs where it looked like I had a good shot at a decent cash, but they have fizzled or exploded before making it to the bubble. In the $1k event I basically had three hands go wrong that I couldn’t really avoid, and with the shallow structure of that event, having three hands go wrong is pretty much fatal. The first blow came when I reraised from the small blind with AKs against a steal-ish looking button raise. When the flop came ragged I decided that a continuation bet was in order, but when my opponent raised me I knew I was pretty much cooked. Next was a hand in which I called a raise in position with T8s (reasonable), floated a continuation bet with middle pair (speculative, but I expected the tight woman in the BB to fold, leaving me alone with position on the raiser - she didn’t), and had to reluctantly call a small bet from aforementioned tight woman on the turn when I made two pair. Luckily the board got super scary on the river and she checked, but when I checked behind, she turned over top-two-pair. The final nail in the coffin (crucifix? too self-aggrandizing?) came with the blinds at 75-150 when I called a shove with my measly 1400 chips and a nice looking pair of Tens. My opponent had A-J, and the flop of 5-4-3 was not *too* bad, as I started muttering “no deuce”, but the turn was the dreaded deuce indeed (maybe I should have said it out loud instead of muttering) and there was no happy chop on the river (with an Ace or a Six), and I was out of the tournament four hours after it started (instead of doubling back up to an average stack and being back in the thick of things).

I had another opportunity for the “No Deuce!” cry, in the 1PM Deepstack tournament at the Rio. I had built up a nice stack but then ran into a nasty beat - a short stack limped for 200, middle position raise to 700, I find AA in the cutoff and make it 1850, wanting to play the hand heads-up with the raiser, but they both call, which is weird since the short stack now had about a third of his chips in the middle (I can’t even imagine what hand would make sense there). The flop comes 2-3-7 and I’m feeling pretty good about my Aces, but the limper surprises me again by shoving his remaining 4000, and the raiser makes the call. I raise enough to get him pretty well committed, and he agonizes for a long time before folding JJ face up (Crap!). The weird-playing short stack turns over 5-4-suited (REALLY??? Almost a third of your short stack flat-calling a reraise with 5-4-suited??) giving him a straight draw, but two of his outs are in my hand. He’s got 6 outs, but two of them give me good redraws … the turn is fine but of course he hits the Six on the river and more than triples up at my expense. So I no longer have a great stack, but I’m in decent shape. After that I make no progress though, and the blinds get high enough that shoving with JJ is a no-brainer. I get called by the big blind who turns over AK. Once again the flop looks pretty good even though it adds an extra ugly out for my opponent: 2-2-2. This time he’s gone from having 6 outs to 7 (instead of 10 outs on the 543 flop) and I feel more confident to call “No Deuce!” out loud, but this time, due to the possibly inferior quality of the players, two people look at me like I’m crazy because they actually don’t know why I wouldn’t want a deuce to come. The turn is some rag, and when the river is (of course) the last deuce, the other players still don’t get it and act surprised when I start packing up to leave and the dealer pushes my chips to the other player. One of them finally understands and says “Wow! I woudna even thought o’ that!”.

So things were not going well, and I was getting discouraged. I decided this morning to head over to the Wynn for their Noon $225 tournament, which has often been my fallback, my haven, my solace. The players there are about the worst I’ve ever seen in a $200+ buyin tournament, and I’ve won it or come in 2nd several times (they don’t get a lot of people, so winning it doesn’t yield a big box of hundreds, but a win is a win, and when you’ve been striking out over and over again, there’s nothing like rolling over a bunch of donkeys to get your confidence back). When in the first few minutes the unter-the-gun player said “I check” before the flop and got all embarrassed when the dealer said “you can’t check, sir - it’s 50 to call”, I knew I had come back home. They only had 16 players, so it was really a 2-table sit-and-go with the top three getting paid. I actually dropped some chips in the beginning, from 10000 down to 7200, and I thought I might be in for another frustrating day, and wondered where I could go for comfort if I couldn’t even win at the Wynn. But then I hit a couple of hands and maneuvered the donkeys into paying me, and I was a little above average in chips when we thinned down to 10 players at the final table. There were four guys from Russia at the final table, only one of whom spoke much English, so he could occasionally translate when the others didn’t understand what was happening. Things got a little comical after I busted him out, as there didn’t seem to be any chance of enforcing the “English Only” rule. The Russian goon on my left had a ton of chips and was pretty annoying until he doubled me up by putting in 45BB with A5 on an A4467 board (I had AQ) hurting his stack pretty badly and making me the chip leader with 6 players left. I must confess that I ran well at the final table, picking up AA and QQ several times, and never having them cracked. I lost the chip lead for a while to the crazy Hawaiian on my right, but took it back when my AA crushed his AQ on an AK79K board. He and I busted all the remaining Russians, and when it got down to the money with three players, it was me, the crazy Hawaiian, and an Iranian guy who kept saying “ahh, just you and me, my friend” whenever he would get into a pot with either one of us. We jousted back and forth for quite a while, and I bounced between being substantial chip leader to being roughly even with the other two, but I never really fell behind. When I knocked out the Iranian I had a 2:1 chip lead on the crazy Hawaiian dude, who didn’t seem to have a firm grasp of the concept of position, especially as it applied to heads-up play. I would whittle him down and then he would hit some weird hand with starting cards that he never should have been in there with in the first place, until I raised with A8 and he called, out of position, with J5o, and when the flop came AAJ he just couldn’t get away from it.

$1552 for first, which doesn’t get me even for the trip, but it does wipe away most of my losses, and puts me in a slightly better mood about this whole stupid poker thing.

I arrived in Vegas Wednesday after a three-day drive, played two tournaments on Thursday - the $350 Deep Stack Extravaganza at the Venetian and the $160 nightly at Caesar’s, both with sort of dreary results - never got much above starting stack, took a couple of routine bad beats, bled down enough that I had to start shoving marginal hands, and sooner or later ran into big hands. Today I went for the $550 “Mega Stack” series event at Caesar’s, similar to the Venetian’s “Deep Stack” events but with much smaller fields. Last year I decided that the tournaments at Caesar’s were softer than Venetian’s, partly because better players want to play with bigger fields to have a shot at a truly big score. I tend to like smaller fields because I think a big part of my edge over weaker players comes at the final table, and I’m much more likely to make a final table in a 100-player tournament than in a 700-player event.

So I went to Caesar’s, with somewhat excessive 25k starting stacks and 25-50 blinds, but they go up pretty fast after that. By the end of late-registration and re-registration (they’re so desperate for bigger fields that if you bust out of the tournament they let you buy back in for the first 4 hours and 40 minutes) we had a whopping 69 players. Things were mostly quiet for the first three hours or so, and I made slow progress up to around 30k. A hand came up where a player raised from middle position to 2400, super-loose Asian kid to his left flat-called, I look down and find AQ in the small blind. I’m out of position with a pretty good but not superpower hand, and I’d love to just take the pot down right away, so I raise to 8100. The initial raiser folds, but the S-L.A.K. immediately shoves for more than my 30k stack. So I’m in a weird spot … if the initial raiser had shoved I would have a pretty easy fold, but the S-L.A.K.’s play smells really weird. Of the 4 hands that beat me, if he had AK I’m pretty sure he would have 3-bet right away, likewise with QQ and probably KK. Maybe with KK or AA he flats to induce a squeeze, but maybe not. So why did he flat for 2400 and then shove for more than 30k? I don’t do this very often, but this was definitely a situation where a big bet really smelled fishy and made me more inclined to call. So in the end I think forever and then call off my stack and hold my breath until he turns over A-T-suited. I get in one breath and then hold it again until the board fills up with no Ten and no flush for my opponent, and I more-than-double up. I work my way up to 75k, which was about double average at the time, but I can’t get any more chips than that, and things started turning sour. I lost a big pot when my AK lost to KQ after we both flopped a King but my opponent made a one-card flush on the river - yuck. I made it to the dinner break - BBQ brisket is covered by the $10 food voucher you get with your tournament buy-in - yum. I get moved to a new table and it becomes clear pretty quickly that this is a much meeker bunch, and I commence immediate aggression, which makes me some progress, until I look down at AQ again, which is a lot better than all the other hands I’ve been shoving with, so I shove again with 40k (blinds 1k-2k-300). An old guy on my left agonizes for 3 or 4 minutes and finally calls, turning over 99. I’m hopeful that I might double up again with AQ, but that hope is dashed quickly when the flop contains no Ace, no Queen, and a big fat nine-ball. So I’m out in 24th (only 9 people got paid) on an annoying coin-flip, but at least I feel like I put together a decent run and got a flip away from a well-above average stack with 24 left.

Tomorrow is day 1A of the $1000 WSOP event at the Rio, and I’m about 80% sure I’m playing (if I don’t feel like playing tomorrow I can play day 1B on Sunday). It should be a massive donk-fest, and hopefully my tables will be filled with random tourists taking their one shot at WSOP glory.

Noon Pacific time … cross fingers (or whatever).

-huge

I busted out of the EPT San Remo main event about 20 minutes shy of the end of day 1B. It sucks not to make it to day 2, but in truth by the time I busted out I was so short-stacked that I really wanted to get my chips in and either double up or bust out before the end of the night, rather than coming back for day 2 with a miniscule stack - I would have preferred the former option, and I put myself in a good position to get it, but the latter, sadder option took me in the end.

I got off to a pretty good start in the first two hours, working my 30,000 chip starting stack up to almost 40,000, thanks largely to the generosity of an older Italian gentleman who didn’t seem to have a firm grasp of some basic poker tactics, like “if you don’t have a strong hand, you should usually fold”. Very early on he took a pot from me by check-raising my continuation bet when I didn’t really have anything (and before I had determined how bad he was). I decided he was a good person to play pots with, and that I should never ever bluff him under any circumstances. When he called a raise and I had position on both him and the initial raiser, QJs seemed good enough. The big blind also called and we saw the flop 4-handed. KQT, two suits. Not too shabby, but with three opponents I can’t go crazy with second pair. The raiser checks, Guido bets out 600, I call, BB folds, original raiser calls, so we’ve got a decent pot brewing. The turn is a beautiful Ace, giving me the nut straight but putting a second flush draw on the board. Now raiser and Guido both check, allowing me to dare to hope that neither of them have another Jack. I can’t slowplay anything here with two flush draws out there and either opponent perfectly likely to have one of the flush draws, two pair, or even both. I fire 1200, which should make my hand pretty transparent, and the raiser folds but Guido shakes his head and calls, like “OK, I know I’m beat, but I just can’t lay down top pair here, damn it”. The river is a perfectly brick-like offsuit deuce, and I know I’m not losing the hand, but before I can decide how much I can milk Guido for, he actually fires into me, for 3500. Hunh? Could he *possibly* have slow played a Jack on the turn with two flush draws on the board and another player in the hand? OK so that would be really weird, but he’s bad and might do something really weird (hold that thought for later). It doesn’t really matter though - I can’t lose the hand - the worst thing that can happen is that we’re chopping, in which case it doesn’t matter what I do, so I can completely ignore that possibility. If we’re not chopping and he has a weak hand, then no matter what I do he’ll fold, so I can completely ignore that possibility too. So the only thing to consider is that he has a pretty strong hand but not the Jack, and I need to decide whether to just min-raise him, tempting him to call for the size of the pot or shove out a big raise to make him think I’m trying to bluff him. I opt for the min raise, and he agonizes for a long time and I pray pray pray for him to call, and he ends up showing his cards to his heighbor before folding, which prompts another player to insist that he show his cards to the table (a rule known as “show one, show all”). He does, and he has AQ for two pair … I wonder if I had bet bigger if he might have suspected weakness and called me down, but I kind of doubt it. Anyway, nice pot for me, and more info on this Guido guy.

I tangle with him again a few hours later on a hand that brings back sickening memories of my bustout hand at the NAPT main event in Las Vegas in February. I have Tens and there is, once again, an early position raise and a call from Guido. No reason for me to reraise - I call in position to see what develops, ready to give up on the hand if overcards flop. But no … BANG! … The “door card” (the first card exposed by the dealer) is a secret-inner-fist-pump inducing Ten of Spades, and the other cards aren’t to shabby either - Seven of Hearts and Deuce of Spades. I have the best possible hand, but there are a couple of possible draws out there, and I’m up against a guy who’s not very skilled in the art of folding his cards, so there’s no reason to get tricky. Both players check and I bet 1600, almost the size of the pot. Non-Guido gets out of my way (a good player who knows that I know that Guido can’t fold, so he knows that I pretty much have to have a big hand here) but Guido does what’s expected of him and calls. He could have a lot of hands here given my read on the guy - flush draw, 88, 99, JJ, AK, AQ, AJ, AT, KQ, or maybe even (please let it be true) trapping with a lower set. I am of course crushing that range, and the only hand he can have with a decent chance to catch me is a flush draw. The turn is an off-suit King, which I think I like - if he happens to have a King I might win a big pot, and the flush didn’t come in - with the second nuts I’m sure I’m golden, and again, I’ve got a fish on the line who just doesn’t know how to fold. I bet 5500, again just about the size of the pot, enough to make it a mistake for him to call with a flush draw, but it’s a mistake he seems likely to make. And if I’m really lucky he’ll have a King in his hand and he’ll checkraise me. But he just calls, and the river is a Nine … of Spades. Damn It! But I’m not sure he has the flush, and when he checks to me again I’m confident he doesn’t have it (hold that thought for later). I mean, COME ON! … after the way the hand played out, he has to know that I think he might be on a flush draw, so if I have a hand like AT or AK or KT on that river it’s unlikely I’m going to bet it, and even if I did it’s dubious to hope I’m going to call a checkraise, so it’s completely idiotic for him to check if he has the flush, right? (hold that thought for later) He *HAS* to try to get some value out of the hand, and he can’t be confident that I’ll bet it for him. So I think I have to have him beat, and I want to milk him for just a little more money, and I decide it’s safe to do that, so I bet 4000, about a third of his remaining stack. He immediately shoves all his chips in and I groan inside. REALLY? Now I’m kicking myself for betting, but it’s 7,000 to call in a nearly 30,000 chip pot, and I just can’t lay down a set to this guy who I‘ve already seen make a ridiculous bluff at me, so I hold my nose and call and he turns over KJs for the flush, and I hand over more than half my stack, resisting the impulse to puke all over the table.

Another nasty river came up later with me holding JTs, calling a raise in position and seeing a flop of J-8-2. I called on the flop, not thrilled with my hand but certainly not folding. I got happier with the Ten on the turn, but when my good opponent bet strongly on the turn I felt like he either had an overpair or a set, and in either case it wouldn’t do me much good to raise - he might actually be able to fold an overpair, and I didn’t want to lose my whole stack to a set. The river Eight was another puker. Now whether he had an overpair or a set I’m beat, and the only decent hand he could have that I can beat is A-J, and when he bet half my stack on the river I just didn’t think he would do that with A-J, and I made a soul-crushing fold. He wouldn’t tell me, so I’ll never know whether the river was a bad beat, or whether I was behind all along, or whether he bluffed me or value-bet me off the best hand, but either way it was super painful.

So that made me pretty short … not quite desperate, but definitely uncomfortable. I went up and down for a while, but never doubled up or gained any real traction, and as the end of the night neared and the blinds went up I was in fact in desperate mode. I paid the blinds and realized that I would need to shove my chips in at some point that orbit, and just before I got to play my button the floor man came over and handed out chip racks, meaning that we were breaking our table. Horrible news, since I had just paid the blinds and was so short on chips. I got moved to a new table miles away, and luckily was in late position so I would get several hands before the blinds chewed into me, but there was a raise every hand in front of me and I never had a playable hand. When it finally happened that everyone before me folded, I was prepared to go all-in with any two cards, but I had to make a show of looking at my cards and trying to make it look like I was excited about them. It turned out that none of my (considerable) acting talent was required, as I was staring down at QQ, the best pair I had seen all day (the only other decent pair was TT, and we know how that turned out). So I push in my chips and actually hoped for someone to call, and when the small blind with a short stack (meaning only double mine) asked for a count and deliberated for a long time I was pretty sure I was in good shape. He finally shoved over the top of my shove, the big blind folded, and the small blind tabled AK. I don’t know what all his thinking was about, but we were off to the races. My misery was ended quickly with a King on the flop, and I made the walk of shame out of the poker room and back to our apartment.

That’s two big-buyin live tournaments in a row in which I’ve flopped top set and lost a massive pot, and two big-buyin tournaments in a row in which I’ve busted out of the event on pocket Queens. At least this time both events didn’t slap me on the same hand … I guess.

Vanessa and Chad both busted on day 1 as well, so it was a weak showing all around in San Remo for Team Rouge (get it?). There is a satellite tonight for the 2000 Euro event tomorrow, so I’ll try to win a seat for that (but probably won’t play the event if I don’t win a seat), and then there are 300 Euro turbo tournaments for the next few nights. So there’s a chance for some small bit of redemption, but the big event is finito.

Now on to the Italian vacation …

-huge

We’ve had a lovely 5 days in Nice (France) and 2 days in San Remo (Italy). I haven’t had time to write a blog entry, but it’s all been great, except for playing two satellites here and failing to win a seat into the main event. But I bought in with cash today (5300 Euros, about $7,000) and I’ll be playing tomorrow at noon. They had 585 players today for day 1A, and my day 1B will probably be a little bigger - so probably over 1200 players total.

We found out today that Chad and Vanessa are staying in the apartment next to ours (as in, we can bang on the wall if their TV is too loud). Chad played today and had three nasty coolers to bust out mid-day, and Vanessa will be playing with me on day 1B. We had a very nice dinner with them tonight at which we managed not to bore Rachel *too* much by talking about poker-poker-poker.

So if you’re up at 3AM west coast time (more like 3:30 because everything starts late here), say a little poker prayer for me. I don’t think I’ll have wifi access, so I’ll probably have to just post a report at the end of the day. There will be live coverage on the pokerstars blog, which I can’t get to because I get diverted to the Italian language version, so I can’t post a link. Maybe pokerpages has coverage too. If one of you is industrious enough to find it, perhaps you can post it in a comment here.

[edit: pokernews live coverage will be HERE]

we found the best gelato in Nice - still searching in San Remo…

ciao
-huge

[special note to my Seattle readers: my last post, from a few minutes ago, will be a time-sensitive announcement of a fundraiser poker tournament that I'm running tomorrow night, so if you might be interested make sure you read that]

I meant to write a post-mortem on my NAPT Venetian trip sooner than this, but by the time I left Vegas I was, in addition to being sick of the rotten luck I was having, also physically sick (with just the usual crud that’s going around). Here’s the post-mortem: nothing got any better. OK, that’s not entirely true … since my last report I didn’t have Aces cracked any more, and in fact I cracked other people’s Aces in two different tournaments, so I guess that’s a little better. In one of those, my last tournament at the Venetian, I put together a good run, ending up near the bubble with Chris Moneymaker on my left and Shawn Rice on his left (a pretty crappy position for me to be in, unless I caught some cards to trap Moneymaker with, which I never really did) … but in the end I fell short again. In my final day of poker for the trip I played a couple of single-table tournaments at the Wynn, and actually won the first one – my first and only cash of the entire trip. I put together another good run in the nightly Wynn tournament, and once again managed to crack someone else’s Aces, but once again busted out short of the cash – I think I busted out on some sort of nasty bad beat, but it wasn’t Aces and after the whole string of beats prior to that I don’t even remember the details.

To top it all off I bubbled *BOTH* first-class upgrade waiting lists on the flight back to Seattle – on both flights I was third in line for an upgrade and the first two people on the lists got first-class upgrades and I had to slum it in coach (yeah it was an exit row with extra leg room and all, but I really could have used the free drinks, AND on the second leg I had the largest human I have ever sat next to on a plane sitting in the middle seat, which meant that my back and shoulder were completely twisted and sore by the end of the flight from trying to avoid being crushed by him). For those of you who wonder what the hell I’m talking about when I say that I just “bubbled” a poker tournament – this upgrade list story is a pretty good non-poker parallel (without the extra-large human in the middle seat, though I guess that’s like the agony of bubbling a tournament).

So playing poker at the faux-Italian Venetian tournaments went about as badly as they possibly could have … but … I’m headed for the *actual* Italian Riviera next month to play in the European Poker Tour event at San Remo! I haven’t won a seat into the main event yet, and I guess it remains to be seen whether I would play the main event if I don’t win a seat (it’s a 7200 Euro buyin, so a hefty price tag), but many people talk about this being one of the weakest fields on the EPT trail, so I really hope I get to play the main event, and there are several smaller buyin events I can play in addition to the main. But I will be doing my best to win a seat in the next two weeks, so cross fingers for that. Rachel has some time off so she can join me for this trip (yay!) and we should get to do a little traveling for a few days on either side of the poker tournaments. If anyone has any favorite spots in or near the French/Italian Riviera let me know. We’ll be there from April 8 to April 29 … if you’ll be in the neighborhood, let me know that too.

In my last attempt to win a San Remo seat online, I had Aces cracked by Queens in a massive pot, so the badness continues playing online, but not quite so relentlessly. There’ve been some good results too … nothing significant enough to blog or crow about, but the onslaught of bad beats has at least diminished somewhat since returning from the Venetian.

In non-poker news … I’ve just landed two upcoming acting projects. The first is a very short piece that’s part of Stone Soup Theatre’s original playwright’s festival in mid-May – I’ll let you know more about that when I have the exact schedule. The second one is a bigger deal, and has been a long time coming (over a decade germinating in the fertile – some might say fecund & marshy – brain of Your Old Pal Dan, in fact). Dan had an idea back in the late 90’s to create and direct a play about a group of would-be bank-robbers who almost pulled off the 2nd biggest cash robbery in U.S. history until they got hilariously stupid and got caught. Two years ago when we were all at the World Series of Poker sitting at the pool at Bellagio, Dan brought up the idea as something that Rachel should write the script for and Deb and I should act in … and the idea caught hold. Rachel has indeed written a script, and we’ve had a couple of readings, but we were beginning to despair of ever being able to produce it, until a spot opened up in Annex Theatre’s fall schedule, and they chose us to fill it! We’re all pretty excited about that, and of course I’ll publish more details as things develop, but the performance dates should fall some time in October and November.

This means that I now have my year much more mapped out than is normal for me, bouncing from European Poker Tour to Stone Soup Theatre to World Series of Poker to perhaps a bit of a breather to Annex Theatre’s world premiere production of Rachel Atkins’ & director Dan Morris’ soon-to-be-given-a-new-title “Heist!” (for which I will probably have to pass up on my annual poker pilgrimage to Aruba – just one of the sacrifices one has to make as an artist I guess, sigh) to the Virgin Islands to our New Year’s Eve party and 2011. Those of you who know me know how freaky that is for me to have more than one thing scheduled more than a week in advance. Yikes. Next thing you know I’ll be getting a job or something insane like that. Maybe not.

-huge