HugePoker

I’ve been working on fixing my blog installation so that I could start posting again. As you can see it has a different look to it, and the URL has changed from http://hugepoker.info/wordpress/ to http://hugepoker.info/blog/ (but if you enter the old URL it should redirect you to the right place).

There have been a few news items or tournament scores I’ve wanted to post, but I didn’t want to post them until I felt like the blog software was working properly. Hopefully it is now – please let me know if you run into any problems.

I leave for the World Series of Poker in about a week (I’m driving this year so I don’t know exactly when I’m leaving Seattle) so I’m trying to prepare, getting my mind and body ready for 5-6 weeks in Vegas. Once again, you’re all invited to join/visit me in Vegas any time, and the main thrust of Team Huge will be descending on Sin City from June 22 through June 26 (about a week before the main event starts - these are different dates from what I reported in my last post a few weeks ago). I have some good info on hot deals on hotel rooms, so let me know if you’re thinking of coming.

I’ve been playing a lot of satellites online in the past week, partly because it’s a good way for me to make money, and partly because I plan on playing a lot of satellites in Vegas. I’ve had a rollercoaster in the past few days … I had been playing almost exclusively on PokerStars, but then realized that FullTilt was running their “FTOPS” (Full Tilt Online Poker Series), so that some good satellites should be running over there. The first day I tested the waters I had tremendous success, winning 4 out of 4 of the satellites I played … well, maybe that’s stretching it. I should say 4 out of 4 of the satellites I entered. Confused? There was a satellite getting ready to start at 1:30AM with a $75 buyin, guaranteeing 2 seats into a $216 buyin tournament for the next day. I noticed that no-one was signed up for it with only a couple of minutes until start time and I assumed that it would just get canceled if they didn’t get 5 or 6 players, but I signed up anyway. In the final seconds before start time another player signed up, but that was it – 2 players. And they guaranteed 2 seats. So we both won. Without playing a single hand. Easiest $141 I’ve ever made. Weird.

In addition to that tournament/windfall, I did actually play hands in 3 others, scoring prizes of $216, $535 and $535, so I pulled in $1500 in prize money for a $300 investment, and I was feeling like this satellite stuff was as easy as pie, which it is sometimes.

In the past year or so I’ve started doing a funny thing with many of the tournaments I play online. I installed some screen-capture software on my computer so that I can record the tournament screen, along with my commentary that I speak into a microphone. I think I may have posted a brief snippet from a tournament several months ago, and it was always my intention to publish more here, but with my old blog and webhosting I didn’t have enough space online to publish anything substantial. The main reason I do it is not to publish them and glorify myself, in fact making them available on my blog seems about as terrifying as it does fun … but I think that when I’m recording it forces me to focus more, talking through each hand and how I’m thinking about it. If I pretend I’m doing it for an audience I’m hopefully a little less likely to make silly impulsive donkey plays without thinking about them. I’m not sure how well it works – I still make bad mistakes, but every once in a while I get all ready for a checkraise bluff and then talk myself down from the edge. The fact that until now I couldn’t actually publish a full video on my blog, plus the fact that I usually just deleted recordings of tournaments in which I lost, somewhat diminished the embarrassment-deterrent factor, but I still think it helped me to focus, at least sometimes. Maybe now that I actually can publish them it will force me to focus even more – in fact if I were really brave I’d force myself to publish the videos with my worst plays of the week. Yeah, umm, we’ll see.

Possibly worse than the embarrassment I might feel at publishing examples of my questionable poker play for public scrutiny is the sickening cringey feeling I have when I hear my own voice recorded – yeah I know everyone feels that way, and yeah acoustic difference between how your voice sounds from inside your head blah blah blah. And it’s especially bad when I get all excited or pissed off in an online tournament. Many of you may think of me as all composed and Mr. Logical and even-tempered and all that crap, and if you’ve seen me play poker live you probably have mostly witnessed the same thing (except maybe when I put a nasty bad beat on Dan in our home game and do a little “in your face” dance). But when I’m sitting in my basement office in front of my computer screens and someone puts a nasty beat on me (or vice versa) I tend to get a little animated. Or maybe a lot. If you’ve ever watched the show “24” you may be familiar with the Jack Bauer mantra/outburst whenever some witness he’s protecting gets shot or some other tragedy befalls him and he shouts out in his explosive gravelly man-voice “DAMN IT!”. I once suggested that we should have a drinking game in which everyone has to take a shot of tequila whenever Jack yells “DAMN IT!” … but I digress. My version of the Bauer rage-at-the-world exclamation tends to be this horrible strangled guttural growl at the moment that the bad card hits the table, a sort of “GRhrghgroOOOAAH … GOD … DAMNIT!!”, sort of like this (this one almost certainly cost me $2600):

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OK I just watched it again … that’s really embarrassing.

I did record the three tournaments I won that day, and I may publish them later, but that was several days ago and there’s been bigger action since then. After my big winning day, I decided to step up to the bigger games, playing in some $216 buyin satellites into the $2620 FTOPS big-buyin event. And on my first one it looked like I was golden, until I got down to 12 players left with 8 winning the $2620 prizes, with an average playable stack, and I got my Aces cracked by a horrible call from T9s (“hdsjfgsfjdgsf … GOD DAMNIT!”). After that followed the above published video suckout, and more and more losses (punctuated by one more $535 win) until I had pissed away almost all of the $1200 profit from my day of glory. This morning I was feeling that particular sense of disappointment after having a very pleasant success and then seeing it all slip away. There was another $216 satellite at 12:15PM, but I was going to just skip it – if I lost that it would wipe out all my gains from the week, and of course I shouldn’t be thinking about that, but I just wasn’t feeling very positive … but then I managed to rouse myself and talk myself into the idea that I’m good value in those satellites – it looked like it would be a big field (ended up with 114 players), and I jumped in. It ended up being a massive up-and-down battle, and in the end it turned out to be (I’m pretty sure) the biggest comeback victory I’ve ever had in a poker tournament of any significance. I present to you now, for your viewing pleasure and amusement, 75 minutes of poker thrills and spills, bluffs, monsters and suckouts. If you want to watch the whole thing, more power to you. If you just want to see/hear those embarrassing moments of lost emotional control on the part of yours hugely, check out the few minutes around 42:00 (the truly grizzly suck-and-resuck version of GRHHFGHHH, DAMNIT!) … after that watch me get to my lowpoint to start my Phoenix-from-the-ashes recovery. Actually the next 10 minutes after the 42 minute mark are pretty good, and then the best verbal poker-Turrett’s outburst comes at the 66 minute mark, involving several stages of denial, bargaining, anger, joy, relief, acceptance, all in the course of one poker hand. The audio’s not always great – let me know if you just can’t play the video at all (or if you can only view one of the videos I published here and not the other).

Huge makes miracle comeback in $2600 satellite
[may take some time to load, a long time if you have a slow connection - you can just set it loading and do something else while it's downloading - the video won't start until you click the start arrow.]

That was the 6th of those I played, so I put in $1300 before I won the $2600, not too bad. If life and poker were just, I would have won the first two I played and lost this one, but I can’t complain too much about doubling my money…

I welcome questions or criticism of anything in the videos I put up here – you can write them in the comments or email them to me. Just try not to be TOO abusive, or you’ll know I’m sitting here whining “daaaaammn iiiit”.

In addition to the other blog changes, the whole email subscription system has been upgraded and will hopefully be more consistent. If you didn’t get an email notification you probably won’t be reading this, but if at any time you realize that you’re not getting messages notifying you of a blog update, let me know and I’ll make sure you’re subscribed correctly.

-huge