Huge Bails
20 November 2008 | Poker | 2 Comments
Once again something has gone wrong with my blogging software, which led to this post being sort of half-visible, or visible to some and not others. I don’t know if my editing it to add this preamble will cause you all to get a new email announcement or not. If you’ve already read about me sitting on a beach in Costa Rica, then you probably don’t need to read it again. If the whole beach scene sounds fresh, new and exciting, then read on…
I hope you won’t all be too disappointed, but I’ve elected to forego the Latin American Poker Tour events in San José because I’d rather sit on the beach, play in the ocean, hike around in the jungle and eat lots of rice and beans.
I’ve spent almost a week in Costa Rica, most of it in a little backpacker enclave called Montezuma. I like it here, and I figured out a couple of days ago that I just wasn’t feeling all that enthusiastic about leaving the beach for a big unknown city to play poker. What sealed the decision for me was the discovery that they’ve canceled the multi-table satellite for the main event and they’re only holding single-table satellites, which will only run tonight. Without the super-satellite I would have a few of the secondary tournaments to play but I probably wouldn’t feel like shelling out the $3500 to play the main event. So the beach is looking pretty good.
Instead of playing poker, today I walked down the beach, jumped around in the waves, which are just on the edge of being too scary to play with, hiked up a jungle trail to a massive waterfall & swimming hole, back to town for avocado sandwich and strawberry-banana smoothie, back into the ocean, finished the novel I was reading, picked up laundry which was becoming a desperate concern, shower, now typing this and deciding which restaurant I should pick for dinner.
Pura vida…
-huge
return to the wild west
4 October 2008 | Poker | 2 Comments
Sorry I’ve been silent for a while – I’ve actually been playing a lot of poker even after my main event bustout, and I have a lot of small losses and one pretty substantial win logged.
The final hand of the main event at the Radisson was a tough one, and I think I misplayed it. I raised with Tens from middle position and got two callers. With two opponents I’m probably giving up on the hand if an overcard hits, which it will most of the time, but in this case the 9-6-3 flop looked pretty damn good. I bet the flop and got one caller, praying for another low card and getting my wish as the three paired on the turn. My opponent checked and I decided that pretty likely holdings for him would be 88 or 77, where he’s not so happy with his hand but has to call the flop in case I just have overcards. If I’m right about what he has, then he only has two outs to beat me on the river, so giving him a free card isn’t too dangerous, and he most likely will see my check behind as weak and bet the river. So I check behind, a harmless deuce lands on the river, and my opponent checks again. Now I think I must be good, but I think 88 or 77 will call a pretty healthy bet, so I bet 7,000,only to get checkraised all-in. I nearly hurl on the table, grudgingly made the call, hoping against hope that he has the lower pair, and unfortunately he had a slightly lower lower pair, 66 for a flopped set of sixes. Yuck. I should have just deemed my pair of Tens as a bluff catcher and then I would have been thanking my lucky stars that he let me get away so cheaply, but he trapped me good, and I fell in head first.
They’re down to the final table today, which they started playing on a stage over the swimming pool, but then a rainstorm blew inn (first real rain we’ve seen all week) and they had to move indoors.
My one bit of good news is pretty good and hopefully will get better tonight … I qualified for the Holiday Inn tournament in one of their weird “qualifying rounds” that are really just satellites in disguise. I already wrote about my mega-satellite win at the Holiday Inn, which awarded me a $1650 seat in one of the qualifying rounds. After busting out of the main event at the Radisson, I decided to check out the action at the Holiday Inn, not knowing whether or not I felt like playing poker well into the morning hours. But looking at the scruffy cast of crazy Venezuelans lining up to play, I just couldn’t resist. (No offense to Venezuelans, and a few of them can play quite well, but there just seems to be a high percentage of maniacs at this cardroom). So I played until 5AM, at which point we were down to 5 players with four of us to get seats in the “finals”, which will happen tonight. I made a deal with an enormous American named Jimmy, who along with me was the short stack, that if either of us busted out, the other would give the loser $500. He is a good player, but I think he made a mistake by letting himself get blinded down too far, while I was occasionally shoving my short stack in and getting the others with safe stacks to fold. He got down so short that he had no fold equity, and after doubling up once, he finally just ran into a race he couldn’t win, and it was over. (I happily paid him the $500, and he ended up winning a seat the next night)
Since then they’ve been running qualifiers every night. They only qualified 4 more players Thursday night, but last night was hopping and they got 12 more, and this afternoon was insane, so they’ll probably get 15-20 more. They’re guaranteeing a $300,000 prize pool, so even if we end up with 40 players, my seat is worth about $7500 (ignoring my massive skill advantage, of course). When I left at 3PM today they still hadn’t started the 2PM qualifier, so I’m not hopeful of the 8PM start time coming even close, nor of getting any sleep tonight. So it’s off to the beach, hopefully for a good afternoon nap, and then some high stakes poker with the crazy Venezuelans ….
Those of you who have been reading my exploits for over a year may remember that I played in this tournament last year as well, and finished 7th for an $8000 prize. Hoping to improve on that this year – this might be one my my best shots ever at taking down a six-digit prize.
-huge
Day 2 to come
1 October 2008 | Poker | No Comments
My Day 2 of the main event in Aruba starts in 2 hours. I’ve seen my table lineup, and it looks OK: no big names, a couple of players with decent records but nothing stellar, big stack on my right, short stack on my left, all moderately good news. There are 4 big stacks, and 4 stacks shorter than my short-ish stack, and nothing in between. I have enough to wound the big stacks but not to cripple them:
Sitton John H 12,025 30 1
Choumanova Marina 13,325 30 2
Stewart George 57,775 30 3
Hughes Laurence R 17,600 30 4
Curtis Brad 4,975 30 5
VanAuken Eric 44,050 30 6
Henry James 4,175 30 7
McNeil Michael P 43,525 30 8
Miller Jeffrey 63,700 30 9
The guy from PocketFives apologized for not being around last night - apparently he couldn’t get a good internet connection so had to go back and forth to his room, but he promises to be covering us today, and he’s started a thread for Day 2 Coverage.
There’s no way my table today can be as slow-paced as yesterday with the big disparity between stack sizes and the higher blinds, so there should be a lot of fireworks. My readers who have known me long enough (i.e. more than 30 years, i.e. my sisters) may recall that that used to be my specialty. Hopefully Larry “Gunpowder” Hughes can blow some stuff up without singeing off his eyebrows (again).
-huge
Day 1 in the Bag
30 September 2008 | Poker | 1 Comment
After a truly grueling and bizarre Day 1, I have survived with 17,600 chips, just barely above my starting stack of 15,000, and well below the average stack (probably 26,000).
My table was the most conservative table I’ve ever seen at a major tournament, or any tournament, for that matter. We had exactly one all-in (mine, when I doubled up) in the first 6 hours of play, and then one more in the next 2 hours. We finally got our first and only elimination of the day less than an hour before the end, and that required QQ to beat a flopped set of Kings with a runner-runner flush. I’ve never seen a table like it in a major tournament - limping everywhere, check-check-check-check - we might as well have all gone to the beach and let them just pass our blinds around. I tried to get in and mix it up but that just got me into trouble.
Phil Hellmuth was “playing” today, but he never showed up. We got word that he was “en route” after busting out of the World Series of Poker Europe, and they put a broomstick with his photo on his chair. As we got to the end of the night it looked like he might survive, but [quoted from CardPlayer]:
Phil Hellmuth Eliminated in a Bad Beat
Phil Hellmuth, still absent, is all in on his big blind for 375. Action folds around to Sam Akiki in the cutoff and he raises to 2,000.
The button and small blind both fold and Hellmuth’s hand is declared dead. Matt Savage turns it up anyway and the crowd, who is rooting for an absent Hellmuth, cheers when they see JJ. Akiki shows A-10 and just for fun, the dealer runs out the board.
The flop comes J-10-6 and the rail cheers again as Hellmuth flops a set! The turn and river come out 92 and despite having the best hand, Hellmuth is eliminated from the tournament. Sadly, Akiki does not get to keep the pole holding up Phil’s head.
I’ll be back at it at Noon Eastern for Day 2, hopefully with a livelier table. I was never able to find the PocketFives guy to get myself on the list of covered players, but I’ll try to make sure they have me for Day 2.
-huge
14,000 at the dinner break
30 September 2008 | Poker | 1 Comment
started with 15,000, down as low as 6,000, doubled up with a set of Queens. It’s been a frustrating day, but I’m happy to be off of life support.
They apparently didn’t get my name in the pocketFives.com list, so they haven’t been reporting my chip count - not that there would have been much to report. When I go back I’ll try to check in so they know I’m out there.
I’m the only player at my table to ever have pushed all-in. Sigh.
back to the grind…
-huge
main event news coverage
30 September 2008 | Poker | No Comments
The donkeys bit back yesterday - I was doing reasonably well in a $200-rebuy super-satellite for the Aruba Classic main event (since I already have a seat, winning the satellite would have awarded $5500 in cash). We were down to 14 players and the final 5 would get seats, with 6th-8th getting some cash. I called a small raise with 88, saw a flop of 6-6-3, called a bet on the flop, called off all my chips on a raggedy turn - bad player with a pile of chips says “great call - you win” and turns over K-Q. King on the River and I’m out in 14th.
But that’s old news. In three hours I start the main event, $4 million prize pool, $1 million for first. I’m starting on Day 1B - they had 262 players yesterday and are expecting more than that for today. They played until 11:15PM Eastern, and got down to 151 players. I expect we’ll play the same amount of time today.
For HugePoker news junkies, you can find coverage during the day in a couple of places:
[They don’t have a “Day 1B coverage” link yet, but they should open it shortly. This is the place most likely to cover my progress, since I’m a member of PocketFives. Not sure how often they’ll check on me, but I’ll try to report in when I can]
[pretty self-explanatory. Lots of pictures and stories of funny or exciting events in the tournament]
[Click on “Live Updates” for news. If I’m a chip leader or I tangle with a famous player I might get in here, or if I’m sitting next to someone “notable” when they take their picture. But they should have more coverage of interesting hands/situations that come up.]
The Donkeys Pay it Back
29 September 2008 | Poker | 1 Comment
I went tonight to play in a super-satellite for the wacky tournament at the Holiday Inn that runs in parallel with the Aruba Classic. Everything about this whole event is just weird – the dealers aren’t very skilled or knowledgeable, the structure is like no other tournament I’ve ever seen, the printed schedule of events is more of a guideline really, and the rules are enforced in a sometimes … umm … creative way. I might find all of this frustrating except that (A) the players are some of the worst specimens of poker players I’ve ever seen, and (B) with most of these irregularities I’ve figured out a way to turn them to my advantage, if only by remaining calm when other players accustomed to a higher (i.e. existent) standard of organization start tearing their hair out. This is all in contrast to the events at the Radisson, where Ultimatebet has imported experienced dealers from the U.S. and hired one of the best-known tournament directors in the business.
So I decided to play in the $75-rebuy super-satellite at the Holiday Inn rather than the $200-rebuy super-satellite at the Radisson. I’m not sure that it was theoretically the best financial decision – I’m confident of being better than the field in each tournament, and while the players at the Holiday Inn are much weaker, I’m not sure that gives me triple the edge I would need to put that tournament on even footing on a dollars-per-hour basis, but after my poor start yesterday I felt like a lower-risk, higher-possibility-of-win effort.
So the printed schedule says it starts at 4PM, but when I get there at 3:55 the white board says *Sign-ups* are at 4, and when I ask when the tournament will actually start the answer is a pensive “probably in about half an hour”. So I sign up, go sit on the beach for half an hour and then come back in, wait another 20 minutes and then start playing. I make an immediate mistake because we start with 1000 chips for $75 and can rebuy 1000 chips for $50 any time our stacks are 1000 or less, but I don’t want to draw attention to myself by being the only guy at the table to rebuy before the first hand is dealt and I’m almost sad to win a few hundred chips on the first hand because it means I can’t rebuy any more. I actually sort of try to lose my way back down to 1000 but the other players literally won’t let me, and pretty soon I’m up over 2000 and don’t need to think about trying to rebuy any more. I never look back, and by the end of the rebuy period I’ve got about 9000, and I take the $50 addon for 3000 more chips, which several people declined. Let’s think about that. You paid $75 for your first 1000 chips, plus however many lots of 1000 you elected to buy at $50 a pop, and now I’m offering you 3000 chips for $50 and you say “nahhhh – I’ll just stick with what I’ve got”. Ummm, OK then. Please come to my special rebuy tournament for the analytically and strategically challenged – you and your dead-money chips are welcome any time.
After all the addons they can announce the prize pool, and it turns out we’ve got about $7000, so four players will get the $1650 seats into the target tournament and 5th place will get $400 cash. I’ve got only $125 invested so it will be a nice little score, but also a difficult road. I’ve got one of the bigger stacks among the 27 remaining players (we started with 36, so nine players departed before the chance to buy triple the buyin stack for 2/3 the price – once again, Thank You Dead Money!). I’ve got 12,000-ish and I hover around there for quite a while. A very young tall lanky young-gun type moves to the seat on my left, and he’s pretty good, which is a big pain in my ass (he’ll make a couple of really stupid mistakes later on the bubble which I can’t really explain, but at first he just seems strong and aggressive and decisive and I’ve gotten so spoiled on these absolutely atrocious players that I’m really unhappy about his presence. Yet another pot is limped around to me in the small blind, and I know I shouldn’t do it but I can’t resist limping in with 9-5-hearts. Annoying young gun checks his option and the flop comes a joyous all hearts. With 5 players in the hand I can be pretty sure someone will bet at it so I check my little flush, young gun checks as well and the under-the-gun obliges me by betting 1000 (blinds at 300-600, 5 players, so he’s betting 1/3 the pot on an all-heart board – good luck protecting your hand like that, buddy). It’s folded to me and I think I probably can’t get UTG to fold any decent heart or maybe even top pair, so I might as well charge him the maximum, so I shove in my big stack and I get the nasty surprise of having now-super-annoying young gun call for all his (considerable) chips and UTG fold. Uhhh, wait. That’s not how that was supposed to work. The only suspense remaining is whether he has the nut flush or the second-nuts, but I’m pretty sure my 9-high flush is extra-crispy toast, and he turns over K-2-hearts for the second nuts. I’ve got about a 500:1 shot at making a straight flush with two perfect running cards, and I holler “One TIME!” but somehow that doesn’t work out for me and I’m knocked down from 13,000 to 2,000 with the blinds at 300-600, pretty grim indeed.
I manage to triple up a few hands later when I make the King-high flush this time and it miraculously holds up, and then I get all-in with A-Q vs A-5 (YES! A-5! Awesome hand … I mean it has an Ace in it, that’s good enough to call a 10BB reraise-shove with, right?) and double up and from death’s door I’m back to having a playable, probably about average, 12,000 chip stack.
By now we’re down to two tables and I really want to make sure I don’t piss away a bunch of chips before we make it to the final table, where I figure I’ll have a satellite bubble skill advantage over the other players of about … ohh … seven trillion percent. With any luck young gun will crash and burn somehow and I’ll be alone in the sheep-field, or at least he won’t be on my left any more. The former hope is too much to ask for, but when we move to the final table he’s three seats to my right, so that’s a significant improvement.
So we’re down to ten players, eight of them hideously, stupendously bad, and 4 of us will get the top prize and one will get $400. I’m a bit under average in chips but not in bad shape. I can’t be too aggressive because these donkeys will call me with anything when they “had a feeling you were bluffing”. The cream of the slop is a woman from Virginia who was nice enough to lend me her cell phone to call Rachel on the break, so I feel bad about maligning her, but oh my god she was bad. You could see her debating when facing a big bet, you could clearly see that she clearly knew she shouldn’t call, but there was that one time when someone bluffed her with a busted straight draw and her Ace-high no pair was good, and by god she wasn’t going to let that happen again, so she would sigh and reluctantly put her chips into the pot. To her credit (well, not really, but at least to her credit relative to the other stupid people) people still tried to bluff her even after it was completely obvious that she just wasn’t capable of folding, which really makes them the stupid ones, it’s just that her play was so dramatically bad. Anyway, she got lucky a couple of times and built up a big stack at the final table, probably big enough that she could have gone out and had dinner and come back and collected the $1650 seat, but just as quickly she flamed out in a string of spectacular calls when she was practically drawing dead. A couple of short stacks had busted already, so we were down to seven, and unfortunately none of her chip-spewage landed in my stack, so I was getting pretty short. Two big stacks collided (YAY! Way to go for it with a coin flip fellas!) and we were at six players and on the bubble. A young Dutch guy who actually wasn’t bad from what I saw was short stacked as well, and the other four were way ahead of us. At that point it looked like one of us would bust and the other one would get the consolation prize of $400. I was in a quandary about how to play – with my 4-5BB stack I would normally be going into Kamikaze mode and just hoping for other people to fold or to get lucky and double up, but with these players and another short stack playing tight I felt like there was enough chance of someone else making a monumental mistake that there was added value in sitting back and praying for a train wreck. The other short stack was either thinking the same thing or just didn’t understand that he had to get aggressive before he lost all his fold equity, because while I managed to steal blinds a couple of times to pull ahead of him, he just kept folding until he had about 4500 with the blinds at 1000-2000, at which point he finally had to just shove and pray. I was happy to see two of the big stacks gang up to try and bust him, but his Q-3 caught a 3 on the board and he tripled up, and now I couldn’t be patient anymore. I got lucky only once the whole tournament, when I shoved with K-6, got called by K-8 … Flop Q-Q-6, Turn 6, River doesn’t matter unless it’s a Queen and it’s not, and I more than double up. Dutch guy then doubles up again on a hand where I missed the straight he made on the river so I thought he had lost and I stupidly got up to shake his hand in consolation – I think I covered it well though, since it could have been a congratulatory handshake and there’s often a sort of solidarity among the short stacks even when we’re rooting for the other to bust out. I said “let’s keep doubling up and bust them all” and he laughed, but soon thereafter he finally ran into a big stack with a big hand and he was out on the bubble.
I had stolen the blinds a couple of times to get to a half-way manageable stack of 9 or 10 big blinds, and another player had fallen down around my level, so I felt I could afford to be patient again. In a thrillingly idiotic meltdown – the other short stack, an older guy who seemed to be playing pretty tight until then, all of the sudden made a small raise from the small blind (weird for him to raise instead of shoving his whole stack in – I thought he was trapping with a monster). The big blind called and I was scared that I was going to see another short stack double up … Flop A-6-6 and the old guy instantly shoves the rest of his chips in and I think “he’s got Ace-King”, and the big blind calls pretty quickly and I think “Hey! Maybe he has a Six!”. Neither of my brilliant deductions proved true. The old guy groans disgustedly when the big blind calls and I think I’m golden. Old guy Ten-Three (!), big blind Ace-Eight (bad call but good news for me). I don’t mind if the old guy shoves all his chips in preflop, but the small raise followed by the shove that will only get called if he’s beat is just a travesty. The Aces hold, the old guy curses some more, and I squeeeaaak into the money, a $1650 ticket to play in one of the “qualifying heats” starting on Wednesday.
So a nailbiting good result after a poor start. I’ll try to play at the Holiday Inn as much as I can, because, well, I’ve slashed at the players enough – you get the picture.
My start in the Main Event at the Radisson is tomorrow at Noon (Eastern) - $5500 buyin, $4 million prize pool, first prize guaranteed to be $1 million. Cross ‘em if you got ‘em.
-huge
Aruba Day One-donkeys: 3 huge: 0
27 September 2008 | Poker | 4 Comments
After 4 lovely relaxing days on Curacao (Iguana stew for lunch yesterday) involving no poker whatsoever, Mrs Huge and I took the half hour morning flight back to Aruba. We got settled in to our rental condo, did some grocery shopping for the week ahead, and then I headed off for the opening tournament of the Aruba Classic.
I paid my $540 to enter, and when I sat down I was amused to see a guy I got to know a little last year in Aruba. We played together a few times last year, and at one point I didn’t quite have enough money in my pocket to enter the afternoon tournament (I had just busted out of the main event, cashing for $13,200, but they didn’t pay in cash so I didn’t have the $300 I needed), so I asked Bret if he could loan me a couple hundred and I swear I’m good for it and it’s totally fine if you don’t want to etc. He looked at me like I was crazy for even hesitating to ask, practically threw the two hundreds at me and acted like he didn’t really care whether I paid him back or not (I did though). So today when I ran into him again and we figured out each others’ names I brought the story up to him and we laughed, and then when we started playing he raised twice from late position and both times I re-raised, forcing him to fold. We joked about what an ungrateful bastard I was, picking on the guy who had been so trustign and gracious towards me only a year ago, but when he raised again from the cutoff and I looked down at Queens in the small blind, what am I gonna do, fold? I re-raised him again, an amount small enough that he might just barely think he had fold equity against me if he pushed in the rest of his chips. He fell for the trap perfectly and shoved, and I insta-called, and he had Ace-Four-offsuit. Really? He looked pretty well caught until an Ace on the flop turned the trapper into a chinchilla stole. Oh well. I actually battled back from that point, but didn’t manage to cash, finishing 40th out of 127.
I then headed over to the Excelsior Casino at the Holiday Inn, where they had the insane tournament last year that I final-tabled. They’re running the same event again this year and I wanted to see what was happening. They didn’t have any single-table satellites available, but I decided to play a little cash game since the players there (if last year was any indication) are truly terrible. It’s time for bed now, so I’ll make this brief…
limp-limp-limp Huge has QQ and raises from $5 to $45, thinking that might succeed in narrowing the field, but no - three people call. Flop is 6-7-9 two spades. Villain goes all in for $240-ish and maybe he flopped a set but he’s a terrible loose bluffy player and I just can’t put him on a great hand. I call and he turns over 8-5-off for the straight. I got to give him this: he certainly was successful in deceiving me by CALLING $45 WITH 8-5 OFFSUIT! Yeah, that wasn’t quite in the range I put him on.
Later in same game I join the limp parade with KJs and am pleased to see a flop of J-J-3 rainbow. More pleased to see the big blind betting into me. There are no draws to worry about, so I feel OK about just flat-calling to try to get all the money in on the Turn. I check, turn is an Ace, and I know he didn’t limp with AJ so I’m pretty sure I’m good. He bets $60 or so and I wish I had more chips but I shove my $25o-ish stack and he instantly calls. I have KJs he has J8o and the river is an Eight and I don’t have any more money in my pocket to play with, so I roll my eyes and drive home to type this.
Tomorrow morning is a pro poker seminar with Phil Helmuth and Annie Duke and some other Ultimatebet pros. If I can get myself out of bed in time I’m going to try to soak up some poker pearls of wisdom…
Day One, one tournament one cash game net loss $1,076.
It can only get better from here, right?
-huge
yes it’s a bad-beat post
15 September 2008 | Poker | 2 Comments
I just can’t keep it to myself. A few minutes ago I entered a $700 buyin “Step 5″ tournament. I folded the first junky hand I was dealt, but then on the second hand of the tournament I saw Aces. Here’s the rest:
broadcast news
8 September 2008 | Poker | 2 Comments
In all the time I’ve been playing poker seriously, I’ve read a lot of books, learned a lot of poker theory, watched a lot of opponents to decipher their patterns and tendencies and tells, and sometimes I’m able to convince myself that I’ve become a decent poker player, but there’s a hurdle I can’t seem to clear which seems like the simplest stupidest thing until I actually set my mind to fixing it. I’ll be sailing along, maybe with a big chip stack, maybe only average, but certainly in healthy shape … an opponent checks to me on the flop and I don’t really have anything but his check seems weak so I take a stab and bet the flop. OK that’s fine - I win a lot of pots that way. But this time my opponent calls and the turn doesn’t help me and the guy checks again. So now the guy HAS to be weak, right? If I bet 2/3 of the pot here surely he’ll fold, yes? And anyway I only have to be right 1/2 the time for this to be a clearly profitable move … So I bet, and he calls again. CRAP! But then he checks the river, too. OK now COME ON! He can’t have a big hand, can he?? Actually he probably has a busted flush draw … YEAH! That’s it! He called me on the flop and the turn with a flush draw, and he missed on the river, and now OF COURSE he’ll fold when I bet, right? In fact I don’t have to even bet all that much - half the pot should do it - and if I bet half the pot he only needs to fold a little more than 1/3 of the time for it to be a profitable play on my part. And absolutely he’s going to fold way more than 1/3 of the time here, right? Right? So I fire half pot, he calls with second pair or something, and at the end of the hand I’ve pissed away 3 big blinds before the flop, 5BB on the flop, 12BB on the turn and 20BB on the river … bye bye 40BB … and my once healthy stack is now in the ICU with an itchy catheter.
Now I’m all in favor of bluffing … bluffing is fun and profitable and makes you feel like a total badass and it’s what makes poker poker and all that. And I don’t mind so much if I think through what my opponent’s hand range ought to be, make a guess at how much of that range can’t possibly call my bet, and then fire off the bet … even if I’m wrong (or I’m right about his hand but wrong about his ability to fold it). If I think things through, play the hand back in my head, see what makes sense and what doesn’t, consider what sort of table-image I have and try to guess at whether my opponent is too dim-witted to fold third pair … and then decide bluffing is the best option … and then get called and lose a big pot … I can live with that. But when my thought process is almost as non-existent as what I described in the previous paragraph, then I start kicking myself.
I’ve tried lots of tricks to avoid this self-sabotage … I’ve put the mouse out of reach in between hands so I would have to make a deliberate physical move in order to play the hand … I’ve put post-it notes on my monitor – actually once I tried putting a post-it note over my cards, again so that every hand would involve a conscious act … I’ve kept a journal while playing, forcing myself to write down every time I bet a hand that isn’t legitimately strong enough to warrant the bet, whether I win or lose the hand. A while ago I tried talking to myself out loud, describing every hand in the tournament, forcing myself to talk through every decision as if I were explaining it to someone. This made me feel a little like a crazy person, but it also seemed like the best idea yet, and it felt like it helped … but like so many things, I just couldn’t stick with it. More recently I’ve landed on a more elaborate version of the same idea. I’ve found a piece of screen recording software which I turn on when I start the tournament, and I clip a microphone to my shirt and speak into it, as if I’m recording one of those instructional videos that I watch so often on PokerXFactor.com. I have some thought that if I were to win a big tournament or run into some unusual hands, I might post them here, or give them to friends, but most of my brain knows that they’re likely to just sit on my hard drive until I do some spring cleaning and delete them. In addition to forcing me to talk through each hand, recording has an added benefit – shame and embarrassment! When I record, even though I know that the recording probably won’t ever see the light of day, it still feels like I have an audience that I’m explaining myself to, who will surely feel disappointed (disillusioned? Crestfallen? Betrayed?) if I do something stupid that I can’t even explain.
There’s gotta be a self-help book in here somewhere: “How I made a million dollars exploiting my own fear of shame and humiliation.” Catchy title, no?
So it seems to help my play. I don’t think I’ve made any of those crazy multi-barrel bluffs while recording a video, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t had to say anything like “Oh my god, how could I do that? What an idiotic play I just made. Sorry. Wow I really suck.” Not that I haven’t made (and talked about) mistakes – quite often I make a play and then pretty quickly say “yeah that probably wasn’t the right choice … I didn’t think about the fact that blah blah blah blah…”, and there are worse moments where in the heat of battle I mutter into the microphone “I just don’t know what to do here”, which carries with it its own little sting of embarrassment. But all that is part of playing poker more thoughtfully and less impulsively/compulsively/knee-jerkily. If I talk about a mistake or pronounce that I don’t know what to do in a particular situation, hopefully I’ll think about that situation and try to have a better plan the next time it comes up.
I had a pretty good day yesterday – in the morning I played and won 2 “Step 4” single-table tournaments ($215 buyin), pulling in about $1000, lost a Step 4 in the afternoon, but then won a Step 5 in the evening for a $2100 prize “ticket”. I recorded all of them and I think they came out OK. I’m still figuring out how to use the software, and I don’t have a ton of webspace to host these things, so I’m not going to throw a bunch of streaming video at you, but something funny happened when I was recording a big tournament today, so I’ll experiment with posting a two-minute snippet for your amusement. This won’t be all that high on the poker content, so even non-poker players might be amused by it, if only to see a small slice of this ridiculous thing I do for a living. Plus I’ll get a feel for whether it actually works to publish a video here for other people to watch … Let me know if you have trouble getting it to work on your computer.
A little setup is in order … a couple of days ago Pokerstars began their World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP). I hadn’t played any of the events, but today was event #6, $530 buyin, $3 million guaranteed prize pool. This tournament was going to have a *LOT* of satellite players and seemed like something I really should play. When I woke up this morning I was a little alarmed to discover that our cable internet was down – pretty horrible news for me on a Sunday. I scrambled around trying to set things up so that I could use my cell phone as a modem to connect my computer to the internet, but I decided that would just be too risky to play a $530 tournament relying on my cell phone to keep me connected possibly for 12 hours. Just when I’d given up hope the cable came back on and I was back in business. My tournament was starting at 1:30, but at 11:30AM was the high-roller event #5 - $10,000 buyin, $3 Million guaranteed prize pool, possibly the biggest buyin online event ever. I certainly wasn’t playing that, but I knew that my new poker-celeb friends Vanessa Rousso and Chad Brown would be in it (as well as in my little $530 event – they’re both sponsored pros with PokerStars, so Pokerstars buys them in to all the events). As it was starting I got email from my friend Mark saying that he was in Vanessa and Chad’s hotel room in Barcelona and that he was playing the $530 event, and that they were all watching my tournament table as well. All of them played in the APPT tournament in Macau a couple of days ago, and then hopped on planes from Macau to Barcelona to hit the European Poker tour event there, just in time to check in to their hotel rooms and play poker on the internet on their laptops. Glamorous.
So the tournament starts and I’m doing pretty well, up and down but nothing too drastic. 7351 players, 1st place is $452,000. In all the emailing with Mark and Vanessa and fiddling with the internet connection I somehow don’t even think about recording the tournament, and at any rate I make it through to the first break in decent shape. But in the second hour … I misplace my brain somewhere and … I do it again. The massive triple-barrel gratuitous bluff, crippling my stack. Hanging on by my fingernails I somehow survive to the second break, during which I remember that the massive triple-barrel gratuitous bluff is exactly what my new recording regimen is supposed to help me avoid. So I fire up the SW a few minutes into level three, and immediately I get involved in a big hand. It’s ironic after all this talk of avoiding big bluffs, that the only hand I’m going to show you is one I recorded, and one in which my play basically amounts to a semi-bluff…
Again, if you try to watch this and it doesn’t work, let me know. If you have problems viewing, you might need to make sure that you have the latest version of “Flash” (video player software) on your computer. And for some reason the audio volume levels are never high enough, so you may need to turn up your computer speakers.
Without further ado, CLICK HERE
And then, for bonus irony value, here’s my final hand of the tournament (I wasn’t recording, so this is just the plain old hand replayer)…
Live by the diamond flush, die by the diamond flush…
-huge