The Curse Rolls On, and Live on Wednesday Night

Wow. What a night. Three of my favorite things happened in conjunction with each other on Wednesday night during my regular poker travels. First and of the least significance, I won another $75 token in the 9:45pm ET token frenzy on full tilt. This was by far the longest token frenzy I have ever played in (and I've played in many, believe you me), with the token bubble not bursting at the 23-players threshold until nearly 11:30pm ET. Usually these things are over maybe 15, maybe 20 minutes tops into Hour #2, but for whatever reason last night things conspired to make this thing just roll on and on and on. I don't think it was short stacks sucking out or anything, and in fact at least from my own personal table experience it seemed to be a preponderance of mega-stalling and table collaboration more than anything else that was the culprit. But whatever the reason, by the time the smoke had finally cleared just a shade before 11:30pm on the East Coast, myself, chitwood and Smokkee had all prevailed and won ourselves a $75 token to get donked out of a larger-buyin tournament with one day soon.

Speaking of which, why does full tilt insist on playing these multi-seat satellites out once all of the tokens or seats or whatever have been awarded? In other words, I know from my return to pokerstars this week that when they run a multi-seat sattelite such as the regular ones into their nightly 50-50 copycat tournament that also runs at 9:30pm ET just like full tilt's, once the bubble breaks, the tournament automatically ends, and everyone left is declared the 1st place winner. And yet, on full tilt, they make you sit there and have everyone push every hand until there is one lucksack left standing at the end, and only then do they award the tokens to all the winners. Why do this? Why take the time from everyone else, when they could instead be moving on a few minutes sooner to the cash tables, another sng or an mtt and paying that valuable rake to full tilt that much quicker? And why take up the additional bandwith from full tilt's perspective, which although is not much in the greater scheme of things, surely has some marginal cost associated with it from an infrastructure and variable cost perspective? And then of course there are guys like me who, when presented with the opportunity, cannot help but piss everyone else off by folding for several hands once the bubble bursts, simply because I can and it is fun to have everyone go monkey-crazy in the chat. But why even allow me to do this? It's meaningless to anyone, has no discernible benefits, and has some marginal cost increases and revenue delays or losses to full tilt as a result. Why, full tilt, why?

Anyways, back to last night. The second super fun thing that happened to me on Wednesday night was running KK into flopped quads in the Mookie. Yes, the Mookie curse rolled on and how on the evening, as I received my only hand even close to a premium at the very last hand of the first hour, pocket Kings, and knowing that this will be my one premium hand of the next month in this thing, I opted to just smooth call Rake Feeder's middle position raise rather than reraise it myself, figuring I will ensure that I win a bigger pot as well as being able to fold when the inevitable Ace hits the flop as soon as my chips are in the middle. Nice Wonka also called the raise behind me, and three of us saw a flop of 886 with two hearts. Other than flopping a set of course, this was just about the perfect flop for my Kings. A paired board, so only two cards instead of the normal three that could have hit either of my opponents. And since I was a bit short and we were already an hour in to the tournament, what I really needed was a double-up, which meant that I was actually happy to have the possible straight and possible flush draws on the board too, figuring this would increase my chances of being called. So Rake Feeder led out on the continuation bet on this raggy flop, which I immediately pushed allin on with my last chips that were probably about twice the size of the current pot. Wonka folded what turned out to be pocket 7s, and Rake Feeder wasted no time in calling and flipping up pocket 8s for the quadsflop. Gotta love it. I take KK up against 88, get close to the perfect flop for me and get it allin, and BOOOooooooooom! Quad eights. Wonderful. That is at least the second time in the past few months that I have gotten KK allin against a lower pocket pair in the Mookie and then ran into flopped quads. It's like full tilt is sticking it to me. I mean, isn't it enough to just dish out the set to the guy? Do you have to quad his ass up just to make me look and feel that small? Come on now. So from there I was crippled, and although I did manage to more than quarduple from there using my mad skillz, I eventually ran 99 into QQ and since I haven't beaten an opponent's QQ since early in the first Bush administration, we knew that one was done. I was sure I would flop quad 9s, but somehow that was just not meant to be and IGH in the middle of the Mookie pack once again. So that was the second thing that I loved about my Wednesday night poker action at the virtual tables.

But the best part of all about Wednesday night for me was definitely Buddydank radio. As those of you who listened know, I made my virgin appearance on the show this week and I have to say, I had a fucking blast. I really don't know how good of a job I did or how interesting I was, although I did get some positive feeback from people over the girly but you know how it is a lot of people are afraid I will rant about them or something if they don't say nice things like that about me. It sure felt like we were doing a fun show, though I do regret somewhat that we kinda got a little bit away from the Mookie at the very end of the tournament, which btw was one by poser New England fan Byron after a run to the final table and then a strong performance when down to the last few players to take it down. I watch these guys and it's so obvious why I will never win a Mookie -- these guys suck out like champions! And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to cheapen bdidde's or anyone else's performance last night. But it took Byron a mega river suckout to even make it to the final table, and I believe I saw one more setuppy kind of hand (QQ and JJ 5-handed or something like that) along the way at the final table to get him a huge stack. I just don't ever have that happen to me deep in the Mookie. Ever. If anything I am the exact opposite -- always the victim of the cooler beat, the setup hand, whatever it takes to prevent me from ever winning this fucking thing. I'm the guy who gets AQ against KK when 4-handed. I'm the guy who gets AQ against 99 and can't win a race 4-handed. I'm the guy who suffers the 13% resuck at the river when allin heads-up with the chip lead. And the guy (or gal) who wins the Mookie every week is pretty much always the opposite. It's the person who called the pot-sized bet with just the open-end straight draw on the turn and then hits it. It's the sucker-outer. And none of those things are ever me, not in the Mookie anyways. I've been that guy in every other blonkament from time to time, including my most recent Riverchasers win when I hit a ton of draws all through the night on my way to victory, but simply never in the Mookie. And I never will.

Anyways, so being on Buddydank radio was a really fun highlight of my poker blogging career, and I only hope it was as much fun to listen to as it was for me to be a part of this week. I absolutely loved the group of Don, Chad, Scott and Buddy, and I think in the end we all share the same sense of humor and sensibility about poker and about blogging in general. I also think it helps that we are all pretty good poker players in our own right as well, which adds to the analysis and some of the poker decisions we can discuss on line. But I got to be interviewed by Buddy and answer some questions for the first time about the genesis of my blog that I always thought I would be answering in a Mookie champion's profile that at this point will obviously never come. I spoke a little bit about my outlook on poker and about my love for and dedication to blogging regularly about the game. I talked a little bit about the kind of games that I am focusing on these days in my poker play. And we all had a great time playing "Lucky or Not?" about some of our favorite poker bloggers and their penchant for hitting big cards at big times at the tables. Like I said, one thing I found out yesterday is that when you are on Buddydank radio, you don't get to listen to Buddydank radio, so I really have no clue how it all went over to the audience, but from my perspective I had an absolute blast.

In the end, I understand that the number of listeners for the radio show last night was right up there with the highest it has ever been, so that I guess can be taken as a good sign that people were interested in the team that was on last night and that is a good thing. And I recall at some points during the broadcast receiving updates from Buddy about the numbers of listeners, which almost all through the night were even higher than the number of people still remaining in the Mookie, including at the very end of the night when Pokerfool lucksacked his way to not one but two consecutive allin-pushfest wins against 16 and 12 fellow bloggers, respectively, to the tune of $308.02 won in two consecutive 50 FPP supersatellites to the 750k. Last I recall there were still 20-something people online even after 1am as the Mookie came to a close, so again I will say I had a blast on air, it was much harder than I thought it would be to keep up with everything, and just a big thank you to Buddy and to Don for having me on their show for the entire night's run. Good times.

OK that's all I got for ya today. Don't forget tonight's Riverchasers event at 9pm ET on full tilt (password as always is "riverchasers"). And tonight is gonna be a fun one -- Razz.

Ugh. I just threw up in my mouth as I typed that word. See you tonight anyways though at 9pm !