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 !

New Year, Housekeeping, MATH Pimp and Another Shot at the Big Time

Back in the office on a Monday for the first full week of the new year, so that can only mean one thing:



Mondays at the Hoy is back again on full tilt! 10pm ET every Monday night, password as always is "hammer". Any and all are welcome, whether you've played in 10,000 Hoy tournaments before or if tonight is your night to lose your Hoy virginity. We love n00bs in the MATH tournament, and as I've mentioned here before first-timers have had an uncanny amount of luck or skill in finishing high up the leaderboard in this tournament, so come one and come all to try your skill against the best of the best in the world of poker blogging. The buyin as always is $26 or a tier I token on full tilt, and the game is 6-max no-limit holdem. And since it's a new year, that means we will start up a brand new MATH moneyboard for 2008. 2007's moneyboard was won by Columbo in a stunning performance fueled by several big cashes late in the year including in the large-field BBT events. Columbo eked out cash and tournament player cmitch as well Bayne who crushed the first BBT earlier in 2007, so kudos out to Columbo for a truly impressive performance and the well-deserved of King of the MATH for the past year. Tonight we start a whole new moneyboard for a whole new year, so here is your chance to make a name for yourself early and often in the first blogger tournament of the new week every week.

Btw I am still working with full tilt on a possible reward for the top finishers on the 2007 MATH moneyboard. I will be back within a week or two with the details of that but there may (and I repeat, may) be a little something in the works on that front. It won't be anything huge but I would like to give something back to the guys who performed the best and helped make the MATH the fun tournament that it was during 2007. I'm looking at a small freeroll tournament for the top portion of finishers or something similar, but a few of the details are still to be worked out so we'll see what happens. I will let everyone know right here as soon as I know anything on that front.

So, today I was going to start my new turbo sitngo strategy post, but I'm not quite ready for that yet so that will have to wait another day or two. Hopefully when it comes it will be applicable to most of you and written in such a way that most of you will be able to make use of it if you so choose. But in the end I was up a little too late last night playing these turbo sngs and a few satellite tournaments as well. More on that in a minute.

So our boy jeciimd is off to Australia today for his two-week package that will culminate in his playing in the Aussie Millions nlh tournament starting on Monday the 14th. For those of you who don't know, this is a 7500 AUD buyin tournament, and it is a 5-day affair, plus three Day Ones split into three days. So the whole tournament runs from Monday the 14th to Sunbday the 20th if memory serves. I think I mentioned this earlier, but jec has literally never played a live tournament in a casino in his life, and in fact has never even stepped foot in a casino at all other than one short evening jaunt during college to Atlantic City. That in my view is not good and creates a number of additional issues for jec as far as feeling comfortable at the tournament that I wish did not exist, but we all have to deal with the cards we are dealt and this is jec's situation. I spent some time this weekend and gave jec my last-minute pep talk. My advice essentially amounted to be comfortable, dress comfortable, bring snacks and drinks you like if you can. And play tight. Not that jec of all people needs it, but this is a fucking 5-day event. I told him there is no excuse for him all of people, who rarely to never makes moves early as it is, to get allin on any flop without at least top two pairs. Period. I told him this is true for Day 1 at least, and maybe Day 2 as well. Jec bought part of me for my run in the World Series of Poker last year, and I went ahead to cash, so I have returned the favor and bought a similar-sized piece of him this year for his run at the Aussie Millions. And never fear, the biggest instruction I have jec was to blog blog blog godammit. As I mentioned the tournament doesn't start until next Monday Australia time, but jec says he plans to be online by this coming Wednesday. I will of course post any updates I hear here about him here as well.

So, I am off to a pretty good start with my goals for this year. First and foremost, one primary goal of my blog, something that I did not even list in my 2008 goals post but which has always been pretty much the reason I am here doing what I do every day, is sharing poker information and experiences. While I think I've done a fine job of doing so in my own right on the blog, my blogroll over there on the left is sorely out of date. So later today, I will be correcting that problem by adding a bunch of new links to the roll, in no particular order. A number of these are blogs I read with some frequency but just have never added them to my roll for some reason, a few of which I could have sworn were there in fact but I was surprised to see they were not. Some of them are old bloggers taking a new stab at writing regularly about poker, and some of them have been doing this for some time and have started doing a great job of regularly updating, so I am adding them here. I apologize to those whom I have left off for all this time, as well as to those I of course am forgetting with this new update. I've never been the type to just list every single blog out there, as I really want my readers to be able to click any link on my blogroll and be able to get reasonably current, regularly updated poker stuff, but it is high time to expand things quite a bit and today is the day that finally happens. I will be adding those links throughout the day on Monday, and I will probably even mention them specifically over the next couple days once I get all the new links up over there.

One of my other big goals for 2008 that I did write about the other day is giving myself a shot in some more of the big-buyin tournaments. This is another one I am off to a solid start in so far this year. For starters, I played in this past Sunday's 750k guaranteed tournament, qualifying in on Saturday night via a sweet $75 buyin turbo sitngo where the top 3 finishers won their seats. I would win my way in to this thing every weekend in that very same turbo sng if I could play every Sunday evening. Overall I spent more than I would like getting in to this thing, but less than the $216 buyin so that's all good overall. I won't have much time to play at 6pm ET on Sundays for the most part as that is prime dinner/bath/bed time in the Hammer household, but I was happy to get in on the first 750k of the year, and I had a nice experience playing in it.

Since writing down last week about my unsatisfactory cash-payout mtt performance during the second half of 2006, I have noticed that I am playing more focused in the few mtt's I have played. Hopefully that continues for a little while here at least, and I think it is sad and very telling that I could so easily notice the difference that a little more focus and tightness has meant for my large tournament game, but that is still a good thing for the present and near future overall so I'll take it. I have been lasting longer in my few large mtts this year, and that extended to the 750k as well on Sunday where I got nothing early, but instead of pushing things I waited around with the double starting stacks of 3000 chips until I found some favorable situations. Never dropping below around 60th percentile in the remaining field from the starting size of over 4100 runners, eventually I doubled up when a shorty pushed TT into my QQ around the middle of the second hour, and then I chipped up nicely again around the end of Hour 2 when I won a big pot against top pair with pocket Aces. From there I managed to drop a little, gain a little back, drop a little and gain a little back, mostly holding ground as the number of players remaining continued to drop. Sometime either late in Hour 3 we crossed the 1000 players remaining threshold, with me sitting in around 600th place after having made a large laydown on a resteal. Basically, the button on a big stack open-raised the size of the pot before the flop, and I repopped it 3x more to around a quarter of my existing stack with AQo. The button thought, asked for time and eventually pushed allin. I spent maybe 10 seconds before folding. No way I go out here with AQ. I kept asking myself, what are the chances that this guy is pushing here with something like AJ or AT? He had a nice big healthy stack, and he knows I can basically knock him out if I have AK or something, let alone any pocket pair which I would be ahead if not significantly ahead of him with. Why would he take the chance this early with this big a stack of ruining his entire run? Answer: highly unlikely that he would. So then the question became, with just under a quarter of my stack already in the pot, was it worth me calling his allin in the hopes that he did not have AK, AA, KK or QQ -- all hands easily representative of the strength he was showing here -- just to be a slight dog in a race situation? Answer: not to me, not with still a just around average stack left over even if I folded. I never asked the guy what he had and in the end I don't really care. What I am concerned with is the process to my thinking, and I feel confident that my thinking was sound in that spot. This is a way of thinking about chip stacks and big decisions for most of your stack in tournaments that I see as key for anyone serious about running deep in these things. The primary goal is always to survive, and to survive with enough chips to make it worth your while to continue. I still had it, and the chance of me being up against QQ-AA or AK, and thus having a very poor shot of remaining alive in the tournament, or almost surely being against a lower pocket pair and still being less than 50% to remain alive, it was just not the right spot for me at that time.

Sadly, with just under 1000 players remaining, and my stack at the lowest it had been in a good hour or so, I made a bad play following up on what I think was a solid tournament play in laying down the restolen AQ preflop that I described above. I called from the blinds with QTs into a five-way pot, and the flop came down JT4 with two hearts. The action checked around into what was already a large pot thanks to the big blinds four hours in to the 750k and the 5 players in, and then the guy on the button put in a smallish bet, which to me just reeked of weakness and an attempt to steal a big pot. But I made the mistake of forgetting all the other three players in the pot other than the button and myself, and the fact that there were eight other hidden cards in their four other hands, and I went ahead and raised it allin with my middle pair and Queen kicker. In a 2- or even maybe 3-handed pot I think this is a fine if not strong tournament move, in particular when I don't have a medium-large stack. But with five players in the hand, I should have known that (1) the odds of someone in the hand having made top pair were somewhat high -- gotta be better than 50% though I have no calculations to back that up (any of you pokerstovey or mathy donks want to give that one a try?), and (2) none of these guys were going to lay down top pair to my allin reraise. So I raised it to allin, and one of the guys who had checked the flop to begin with to my left went and called my bet. The original bettor was in fact weak and folded, but I knew I was behind even before he flipped up the KJ for top pair King kicker. I did not hit a miracle and IGH in 900-somethingth place, about 500 spots from the cash in the 4100-some runner tournament. This was yet another example of a bad tournament poker decision and is exactly what I was talking about in my goals post from the other day as far as needing to get my late-stage tournament game in order. Final tables, I feel supremely confident after killing the sitngos these past few months. But getting from the late stages to the cash, normally a strong situation for me, has seen me plagued with bad decisionmaking and that is why I need to play some more of these things to get back that experience that I have been missing so much from only playing these multi-seat satellites which generally offer a very different balance of decisions heading into the bubble time.

So after my nice performance but then bustout in the 750k, among other things I decided to continue to pursue my big-buyin tournament goal and play in the $100 buyin satellite to the Monday 1k on full tilt. This one has 24 runners, awarding 2 seats plus $280 cash for third place. The tournament took more than three hours overall, and there was a lot of shit in the middle there including me getting sucked out on three times including a real beauty on a 3-outer with just one card to come in the first hour to knock me down to under half of my starting stack early on. Nonetheless, I perservered, and here was the result of it all:



BOOOOOooooooom!!! So I will be playing again in the Monday 1k this evening at 9pm ET on full tilt, which I am once again very excited about as it is a $1000 buyin tournament. This will be my 4th attempt in this tournament in the year or so it's been run on Monday evenings, with a couple of poor performances and one hideous suckout just short of the money in my first three runs in this thing. But I said I wanted to play more of the big buyin tournaments, so here I am with a solid start to that in 2008 so far with the 750k this past weekend and now the Monday 1k tonight. And the way this satellite to the 1k ended was pretty sick too -- check this out:

So after leading the entire way from 7 players left down to the bubble with 3 players left, I finally took the inevitable bad beat, moving allin on an Ace-high flop with a slow-played A9 and being called by a slow-played AT, which had me down to just over 5k in chips while the other two players had more than twice my chip stack. Then, after I had chipped up a bit but was still in 3rd place of 3 remaining with about 8k to the other two players' roughly 12k in chips, this flop and turn came up:



Obviously, with the huge raise up there from the big stack for almost all his chips, he's got to have a 2, right? And I'm thinking the guy on the bottom also had to have a 2 to be betting 5100 chips to begin with in this spot. Don't you think? Well, take a look at this setup hand:



Boooom! I would like to feel bad for DIAMONDJIM555 there at the bottom of the screen, but after watching him call allins within the last four or five players with J4o and JTo on two separate occasions from a good-sized stack, he had it coming and I am quite sure that the best two players left won the 1k seats. Of course then this guy at the top right of the screen who won the 1k seat with me kept telling me I had to thank him. He wouldn't even push allin for a while, he just kept folding preflop and demanding thanks from me for busting the other larger stack to get me into the top 2 and winning my seat. Of course I had to be a dick so I just kept typing in "thank you full tilt" instead of thanking him directly, as if it was him somehow who created that wonderful setup hand for me, enabling me to play in my fourth lifetime Monday 1k tournament tonight on full tilt.

And this is where the rubber meets the road with my goals for 2008. In 2007, I won plenty of satellites, but I did a piss poor job for the most part of turning them into actual cash winnings. I have gotten sucked out on recockulously in many key spots for sure, but still. Monday night will be my second big chance already of 2008 in a large-buyin tournament with a huge prize pool, and in a relatively small field. Like I wrote about in my goals post last Friday, this is where I either start turning all these satellite wins I seem to be able to generate with relative ease into some actual cold hard fucking cashish, or I keep wallowing in the mire of lots of satellite wins and little cash wins to show for it. So not only is Monday night my night to get a head start at the top of the 2008 MATH moneyboard just like it is for the rest of you, but it also is my time to shine in a nlh tournament where any cash at all will mean a nice four-digit payout to me. Feel free to come and rail me in that starting at 9pm ET, but otherwise I'll see you tonight at 10pm ET for Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt!

Merry Christmas, MATH is ON, as is the Monday 1k

Merry Erev Christmas everybody! In case you're wondering, that is "Jew" for Christmas Eve, and I do hope everyone has a wonderful holiday for those of you celebrating this evening and tomorrow. I know it's a sort-of holiday so many of you won't be around and reading blogs on the day, but I wanted to mention a couple of quick things. First and foremost, for those of you who will be around and online on Monday evening, I am running the second-to-last Mondays at the Hoy of the year in its regularly scheduled slot of 10pm ET tonight on full tilt:



As I mentioned last week, tonight's MATH will be a special format in honor of the smaller field and holiday celebration for many of you Christ worshippers out there. Specifically, tonight we will be playing full tilt's standard evening turbo rebuy satellite structure, which a $6 buyin. I did this #1 to mix things up on an otherwise slow night, and #2 in response to comments to last month's $10 rebuy that an even smaller buyin might be better for most bloggers. Now, being Christmas Eve, I don't expect most bloggers to be online tonight at all, but for those who come, the idea tonight is to just relax, have some fun and donk it up for the 30-minute rebuy period followed by the remaining hour or so that I would expect a turbo event to take. And again tonight's MATH tournament will follow full tilt's own standard turbo rebuy structure, so there shouldn't be any surprises for anyone who does come out and play. For me, Christmas Eve is the perfect night to be playing on full tilt, because nothing else is open anyways, there's not much of interest to me and my kind on tv (none of the weekly prime time shows are new, that's for sure), and most of all, the crowds are likely to be smaller than usual on a night when I highly doubt full tilt will otherwise be lowering the guarantees for its usual nightly guaranteed tournaments. So come out tonight at 10pm ET on full tilt to play Mondays at the Hoy, with a password as always of "hammer", and I hope to see you there, whether you are a long time blogger or a "Hoy virgin" as we always seem to come up with most weeks these days.

In other poker news, I'm excited to report that last night I qualified once again for the Monday 1k, a $1000 + $60 buyin tournament on Monday nights at 9pm ET that carries with it a $150k guarantee. This will equal the largest buyin tournament I have ever participated in on full tilt, which I have done now three times, all three of them being this Monday 1k event (this week being the third), so that aspect of things is exciting if nothing else. I made an actual effort to qualify for this on Sunday, not something that is usually on my radar screen, but I did so because again, as I mentioned above, if nothing else I expect this field to be a little lighter than usual, and that is all good when there's already a 150k guarantee going and when the general level of skill in this thing is somewhere north of "uber donk", something I would not normally say about the games I most often frequent on full tilt. For $1060 a pop, if you're expecting stellar play then you are going to be sorely disappointed, but at least people won't donk allin on the first hand with top pair no kicker, won't call with just oesd's on the turn and similar nonsense that over the long term will just throw their buyins away.

So with all this in mind, first I played the 10:45pm ET $26 buyin satellite into the Monday 1k on Sunday night, but in that one I believe I was literally the first player out out of 26 runners when my AK ran into KK on a King-high board just a few hands in. Yay me, see even I play far more donkishly for $26 than I ever would for $1060. So then I did the unthinkable and registered for an 11:30pm ET mtt satellite for the Monday 1k with a $75 buyin, using one of my constant storehouse of tokens won from the nightly token frenzy tournament that I have so loved to frequent this year. In the end, there were only 11 runners in this thing, but due to the $1060 buyin of the underlying tournament, it still was winner-take-all (much like the early $26 buyin satellite) which is not my usual preference for such things. But I am a big fan of playing in tournaments with overlays, and in this case we had 11 players ponying up $69 apiece to the pool for a total prize pool of $759, while the tournament awarded exactly one $1060 seat. So for a total overlay of right around 40% of the actual cash prize pool, there was no way I could stay away from this one.

I got a little bit lucky very early in this 11-player satellite when within the first five hands, I was faced with this situation on the river:



I had played pretty slow given my meh stating cards, but being in the big blind I felt that K9s was surely playable. The Ace on the flop had scared me a bit, but then this river allin came kinda out of nowhere and I just couldn't find a fold to a guy I figured probably had some kind of low Ace. Obviously any two pairs with an Ace, or the obvious straights on the board had me beat, but I went ahead and made the call and saw this:



Setup hand for him, and well played on all streets by me. So this early doubleup basically took me to the final table as one of the two large stacks, but with a ton of low-M poker still to be played:



I won a nice pot with pocket Kings in the early stages of the final table, and I made some big folds like K8 on a KJ9 flop to a minraise on the flop against an aggressive player, figuring that with my big stack I had no reason to risk losing a lot of chips and my favorable chip position with such a mediocre hand in the hand. I moved allin over the top before the flop from the button against an early position short stack's allin with my 99, ended up racing against AQ, and my 9s mercifully held up which is always nice early at a final table that you really want to win. I won a top pair hand with KQ as well against this flush-chasing donkey to my left who simply could not lay down a flush draw to save his life, and kept hitting them against myself and other players which was super annoying, but with five players left at the final table here was the situation:



So I was still looking good, though I had another similar sized stack across the table from me, and this guy LegacyRik on my left, the flush chasing soooted donk, who somehow has actually won close to 100k lifetime from full tilt on mtts. He was the guy who scared me the most because of his penchant for betting and calling with flush draws and seeming to hit them far more often than the 35% flop odds would dictate.

Speaking of which, I actually had this fucker eliminated shortly after this point here when I made the unlikely backdoor flush on the turn, which I had bet my top pair with on the flop and the soooted donk had called me so I knew he wasn't on another flush draw as well. So I raised him allin quickly on the river, trying to act like an overconfident bluffer:



Unfortunately LegacyRik beat me into the pot with this:



Fucking unreal. Have I mentioned how often I lose with made two-card flushes in this game? My lifetime record is so negative with made flushes and no pair on the board that it's not even funny guys. Dammit if I can understand how I lose so often with made freaking backdoor flushes even, but somehow I find a way. I bet this guy just about the size of the pot on the turn too, which he called instantly being the flush chasing donk ("FCD") that he is. Dam him and dam full tilt for continually rewarding the fukdonkery.

Anyways, one lucky hand later where he called a preflop allin with the jackace of all things -- sooooted of course, and he was up to 8570 chips, the guy across the table with 4670, and me up top with 2365, with the short stack at under 700 chips to my immediate right. God that sucked. But the short stack doubled through the guy across the table shortly afterwards, and then he thankfully called my allin reraise preflop with his A6o against my TT, and somehow I dodged the other 16 aces in the deck to get back up to 4300 chips for myself and the guy across the table, and still 8200 chips for the FCD to my left, down to three-handed for a winner-take-all shot in tonight's Monday 1k. I knew I needed to be the one to eliminate the guy across the table with his nice stack if I were to have any realistic shot to beat FCD, but then this hand went down where across-the-table guy raised allin on the flop with top pair King kicker, and FCD called almost his entire leading chipstack with, well, you guessed it, another naked flush draw:



Worst. Call. Ever. Coming from the big stack with just 3 players left and winner take all, this was just about the worst move imaginable for that clown with 100k in lifetime mtt winnings to make. But he did it anyways. And full tilt said thank you in its customary way as well:



Sick. This made me about a 3.8-to-1 chip dog heading into heads-up play, and I knew my chances were slim. Just about the only weapon I had against this donkey was that I knew he was an FCD and I guess had to hope he would chase in some dumb situations like he clearly had done here since I don't ever get strong cards at the end of tournaments it seems. The heads-up match with this guy ended up lasting over 40 minutes, which was brutal but I guess in the end should not be too surprising since even I in the short stack heads-up had more tan 35 big blinds when we sat down to settle our differences mano a mano. I did get KK once and did not get my reraise called preflop. I found QQ early as well, but an Ace on the flop and a King on the turn (of course) led me to lose just a small pot to FCD's K8 after the river came down. At the first break I was down exactly 13,000 to 3500 chips, and still feeling pretty pissy about the way this whole thing had shaken out.

Shortly into hour 2, I raised preflop with AT, and FCD called. Flop came KT6 with two diamonds. I figured the odds were high that I had the best hand, so I bet out 660 chips into the 720-chip pot, about a fifth of my remaining stack at the time, and he reraised me pretty quick allin here:



I decided the quick bet and the allin sizing just didn't sound like a King to me, and that I knew I had 5 outs against even a King-high hand anyways. He hadn't reraised me preflop so I wasn't concerned about AK or even really KQ, but KJ, KT, etc. were always possible. In the back of my mind I knew that flush draw was there too, and having seen him dump off a significant chip lead already once tonight on nothing more than a naked flush draw, and with me sitting on second pair top kicker, I decided to go for it. I was already down so much in chips I figured I wasn't losing much if he did in fact have big slick or something. I called and he showed this:



FCD!! FCD!! FCD!! Seriously. This is such horrible big stack poker I just cannot believe that this guy has won nearly a hundy large playing mtt's on full tilt. When you're the prohibitive big stack in a tournament and down to just a few players left, the last thing you should ever want to do is get it in with a draw against a guy who's already bet before and after the flop. Why would you ever want to jeopardize a nice chip lead on a 35% shot against a guy who's already shown strength and is therefore not likely to fold his short stack at this point in the hand? With just 9 outs? Makes no sense at all. For the record, I think pushing with a fairly short stack in this spot -- as long as there is some fold equity given the amounts of chips involved -- makes some sense. That guy has not nearly as much to lose and a lot more to gain. But to risk your entire 4-to-1 chip lead on just a naked flush draw against me having bet preflop and on the flop already, that is pure suicide and is the exact opposite of how you should want to be playing your large stack shorthanded in any tournament or sng. Anyways, miraculously he did not hit, and suddenly I was back in this thing, down only 9620 to 6880 in chips. Dam what a bad play, I can't even believe it now as I review the screenshots today.

Maybe 15 hands later, I checked preflop with K8o, he minraised to 240 chips, and I called. The flop came a delicious K84, this time with two hearts. Knowing this guy was an FCD even on the turn card, I checked here, because I had top two pairs, the only two pairs I will ever normally slow play with in nlh as I have mentioned here several times. He checked behind, I bet 2/3 the pot on the turn when an offsuit Queen came, which he called. The river then brough an offsuit 6, where I went for the massive overbet for value and pushed allin in this spot:



He instacalled with this:



Now that is just a cooler hand right there for him, though he should probably have bet his top pair shit kicker on the flop, where I would have likely raised and he might have gotten away from his hand. He should probably have raised his top pair shitty kicker on the turn, opting instead to just call, and I give myself a lot of credit for slow playing top two pairs on the flop to perfection. That said, this particular river card is I'm sure the only reason he called me down, and suddenly it was I with the chip lead, 13,400 to 3100 chips, determined not to give that lead back up to this guy who had played bad and gotten lucky so many times during a short tournament.

I would love to say that from here I just dominated, but that's just not how the cards are. I lost a medium-small pot with top pair to his flopped two pairs. I chased a couple of flush draws -- unable to give up the possible irony of busting the FCD by hitting a flush draw of my own -- and lost small pots as a result. I had a few railers at this point and they would have seen me get back down to around even with the guy over the next 15 or 20 minutes once or twice, but each time I came storming back, all the while just waiting for another good starting hand with which to hopefully trap this chasedon of a player. But for all his donkchasery, he was simply not much of a bluffer, and that made it difficult for me to get paid big with my big hands unless he also happened to make a big hand, or a big draw, which was pretty infrequent. I tried stalling him out for a while once I got the big chip lead, I tried playing fast, but basically nothing could get this guy off his game.

I have to say again, all of the hundreds of sngs I have played over the past couple of months really came in handy again at a time like this, as I am just super super comfortable when shorthanded at tournament final tables of all sizes these days. I simply cannot overemphasize enough the importance to anyone interested in final tabling and winning large mtt's of playing a lot of sngs to hone and practice your final table and shorthanded play. There is just no substitute for hundreds of sngs of experience in playing shorthanded with a big chip lead, shorthanded as the small stack, shorthanded as a desperately small stack, shorthanded with even stacks, etc. Go out and play some sngs, at any buyin level you are comfortable with, really, if you are truly interested in bettering your end game in mtts. You will not be disappointed. It was these very skills that I relied on in playing from the small stack at first, and then on maintaining my chip lead and even fighting my way back from even once again in what turned out to be a real marathon heads-up battle with this flush-chasing donkey.

Anyways, I played Aces with kickers higher than 8s pretty hard before the flop against the FCD, and I tended to play any top pair fairly strongly as well which is pretty usual for me in heads-up play. Knowing what an FCD LegacyRik was firsthand, I ended up calling a lot of his bets on the flop, and then betting out or raising his smallish bets on the turn when the likely draws on the board had not come in, and all of these moves worked out well for me and enabled me to climb back up to around a 3.5-to-1 chip lead. Eventually, with me up to 12,430 to 4070 in chips, I saw a free flop from the button with 85s, which came down 952 all clubs. I had no clubs in my hand, but I sensed that this might be my chance to get the FCD to show his true colors and chase just about any decent one-card club flush draw in his hand. Figuring my middle pair was likely best at this point in an unraised pot preflop, I checked, waiting to see if a club fell on the turn before committing any substantial part of my stack, and just hoping he might have happen to have te Ace, King or Queen of clubs in his hand and be unable to let it go due to his FCD ways. He checked behind pretty quickly. Hmmmm. So far so good on the flush draw read, and hopefully he doesn't just have a 9 for top pair on the board. Well, those concerns disappeared when a beautiful offsuit 8 fell on the turn, making me now two pairs on a completely raggy board, and yet still that pesky one-card flush draw out there as well. So here I bet out around 2/3 the pot, 440 chips into the 530-chip pot, and my opponent thought briefly before raising me to 1440 chips, more than a third of his existing stack. Clearly he was committed here, and with my two pairs and the unlikelihood of him having flopped a flush in this spot, I had to push it on the assumption that he might very much call with just the one-card flush draw based on several examples I had seen at the table during the night:



He called for the rest of his chips, and showed this:



Bingo! FCD strikes again. It's amazing how consistent some people's poor play can be, and therefore how exploitable. The river ragged off:



and that's how I got into tonight's Monday 1k Christmas Eve special on full tilt!



So I'll see you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy, the $6 turbo rebuy special, on full tilt, and if you're around, feel free to rail me in the Monday 1k this evening as well!

All About the FTOPS Sats

It's Monday again! And that means it's time for the Battle of the Blogger Tournaments to take over your psyche and rule you for another week, starting with tonight's Mondays at the Hoy tournament on full tilt!



I plan to play well in tonight's MATH after a very solid weekend of poker in Hammer Land. Who knows, maybe I won't be displaced at the top of the Hoy moneylist for 2007 tonight after all. There were already a bunch of people signed up over the weekend as I recall, so come in there early and let's see if we can take down the previous record of 53 entrants. At just a tier I token or $26 cash to play, it's a very playable tournament for most of your rolls out there. Think about it -- you can play the $6 2-table sng token satellites where the top 5 finishers out of 18 win a tier 1 token. You can play the $8 token sngs, also with two tables, but that run in turbo format so you can make it to the top 5 token winner in just over an hour in most cases. You can also play the $6 buyin Tier One Token Frenzy mtts that run every few hours daily on full tilt and which award the tier 1 tokens to the top 23% or so of finishers. Or, if like me you don't even want to commit a full hour to winning a $26 token, you can play my personal favorite, the $13.75 heads-up token sngs. These things will run you probably 10 minutes on average, and if you know what you're doing in heads-up play, they are very, very winnable. I am winning almost exactly 2 out of 3 of these now over a sample size of around 60 tournaments, so these games are beatable, and they'll take you anywhere from 1 hand to 10 or 15 minutes on average. All of these are cheaper ways to get your token to play in tonight's MATH tournament if you don't have the cash in your roll to buy in directly for $26, and all of the above satellites are very winnable for a skilled player. So hopefully you can all find your way in to the MATH tonight at 10pm ET on full tilt, password is "hammer" as always.

Speaking of satellites, man the FTOPS satellite bubblage has been killing me over the past couple of weeks. I mean, I think before this weekend I had played in a total of 16 ftops satellites, and had final tabled like 13 of them, but only won a seat in three of them (one was a super sat to the $1000 buyin Event #4 and not a regular sat), and I won cash in I think two more. But overall it's been incredibly frustrating. Sure, final tabling is great, and it always helps my confidence to do well in an mtt, but in the end the results are the results, and I don't really care about anything else, right? Well, suddenly this weekend, it was like the dam finally burst.

Friday was nothing special, really, although it was clear I was playing a bit better than I had been in the FTOPS satellites I was entering, which was basically my sole focus over the weekend other than winning another buyin+ or so at the 1-2 tables and playing profitably in another blogger cash table as well. Although I do find $50 nl a bit hard to take seriously. Now I'm not trying to demean or say anything negative whatsoever about people playing those stakes. I used to play those stakes, not too long ago. All I'm saying is that when you've recorded thousands of hands of $200 nl, getting "stacked" at $50 nl is more like me just folding to a flop raise after I raised preflop and then c-bet the flop in my usual 1-2 game. And that just happens far too often to be too concerned at $50 a pop. Still I've managed to play positive in every single session I've played at $50 nl over the past couple of months, most but not all with bloggers, as occasionally I like to pop in on tables where guys like Waffles or a guy I know from work are playing and see what's up.

Anyways, back to the FTOPS satellites. So on Friday I played for the second straight night in the 23:45pm ET $14 rebuy sat into the FTOPS Main Event. If you read here then you know how much I love rebuy satellites. And $14 is the perfect level of buyin -- guys playing a $14 sat into the main event aren't going to be good. If they were good they'd be playing the $69 buyin FTOPS ME sat that runs every single night. They'd at least play in the $24 buyin ME sat that runs earlier in the 11 o'clock hour East Coast time every night. The $14 sat is populated about half with a bunch of donks who honestly hope not to rebuy and to play their way in to the main event for $14. And yet, $14 is enough that, if you get a little lucky with the size and the number of rebuys, it can award two seats to the FTOPS ME, although often it settles on just one as it is difficult to build up a $1070 prize pool required to award two ME seats on $14 buyins (that's 76 buyins required, so you basically need about 25 people to rebuy an average of twice including the addon). Do-able but not always attained. Anyways I played in this thing the first time I saw it this past Thursday night. I ended up taking an awful beat when I was dominating and allin preflop to go out in 4th place for a small cash payment. But I had played well, and if my favorite had held up there I would have been way out in front.

Then on Friday I played it again because I quickly identified that specific tournament as a very winnable one for me, and I played even better, this time taking a significant chip lead into three-handed play with all three of us already getting a decent cash payout but with only the overall tournament winner winning the FTOPS ME seat. There were a couple of bloggers there on the rail so maybe they remember, but I don't really remember exactly what happened but in two hands I went from prohibitive chip leader to short and then to out, and my recollection was that it was a setup and a bad beat mixed in together that did me in. A "setup" as in I'm dealt TT in the blinds, UTG raises preflop, I move allin and he instacalls, flipping up JJ. Or, being dealt AJ or AQ in this spot 3-handed and with a big chip lead against a short stack when he is dealt AK would also qualify as a setup. No real man is getting away from either of those hands in this situation, so the cards just kinda "set you up" to lose. Anyways, suffice it to say I was very disappointed to have failed to qualify for the FTOPS ME in my second straight rebuy satellite attempt on Friday and after having run deep into the final table and putting myself in position to win in both, but at least I won enough cash on Friday to fund my entire night of mtts so I can't complain about that. And I already knew what I would be doing on Saturday night just before midnight with the rest of the Hammer Family all fast asleep.

Right off the bat the Saturday night FTOPS ME $14 rebuy sat started off poorly for me, as I ran AQs into AK early and had to rebuy. I won a few small pots with very little to work with during Monkey Hour -- actually it's only a half-hour rebuy period in the full tilt turbo mtt satellites, which is great btw -- but in the end was nursing a stack of 1290 chips, just over the starting level of 1000 chips as the warning came up that the break would begin and rebuy time would end after that hand. I had Q2o and decided to raise it up to 290 chips, just so if I lost I would have 1000 chips or under and therefore be able to rebuy myself up to 2000 to end the rebuy period. I got called, the flop had a 2 and three rags total, and I just went allin to try to make something happen or rebuy. I got called, ran into middle pair (ha!) and was busted. I immediately double-rebought for 2000 chips, and then took the 1500-chip add-on for a stack of 3500 chips, good for 7th place out of 16 players remaining heading into the "real" tournament with no more rebuys. So out of 22 players who originally started in this event, I was about to begin the freezeout portion of the tournament in 7th place, despite gone having completely busto on the very last hand I'd played before the break, and I was only in to this thing for $70 total. Now that's a lot of money, but #1 it's the aberration and not the rule for me to spend this much on a cheap rebuy, and #2 frankly, I am more than happy to do this on the few occasions where I do get stacked late. It's one of my strategies in cheap rebuy events like this. If I'm on a short stack going in, why not try for the quick double at the end of monkey hour, and if not, you can spend a little more money and get right back into the top of the leaderboard for just 3 more cheap buyins. I love these satellites for that exact reason, and here I was still able to start freezeout time in good chip position and with a shot to at least cash once again, all for $70 to try to win a $535 seat. I'll take it.

I plan to put up screenshots of all of these hands sometime later on Monday, but for now the text will do, as I will just mention my three biggest hands of the tournament that tell the story of my play. I played very solid poker, got some good cards and did a good job getting paid with them or getting away from the losers. I had to lay down Kings to an Ace-high flop which I absolutely hate to do after raising and getting called before the flop, but otherwise I made the most of my good cards and did a whole of stealing and aggressive pushing as per my usual tournament strategies.

My first nice chip-up of almost the entire satellite came when I raised AJs UTG at a 5-handed table with 10 players remaining, found two callers and then a flop of J97 with two suits. I opted for the allin push on this flop, both callers folded what I assume were middle pairs or non-Jacked Aces and I nearly doubled up in the process.

In third place overall out of 10 remaining, I saw a cheap flop from late position in a multi-way pot with A6s, flopped a flush draw and smooth called a cheap poorly-sized lead bet from my opponent. On the turn I made my nut flush, no pair on the board, and he led out again, which I just smooth called to get him off the idea that I had flushed this board, because I could tell he liked his hand and was going to pay me more. On the river an Ace fell, leaving me with the nuts but I figured likely helping him in some way as well, so I moved allin for my last 2k in chips or so, and he agonized a while before calling as well, with what turned out to be QQ. Yeeech that is some bad playing of QQ right there. At least be like me and get it allin preflop against AA or KK, come on with that. So that hand vaulted me way up to 14k in chips, and I entered final table play in 3rd place of 9, with my 14k compared to 19k held by both first and second place at the final table.

I played very aggressive poker over the next half hour or so, and when the short stacks starting the open-pushing with their any-Aces in middle position, either I or one of the other big stacks was usually there to answer the call. In fact I did just that in two consecutive hands to get it down from 5-handed to 3-handed, after which I found myself with a 35k to 28k to 6k chip lead, and when I reraised allin preflop with TT, the 6k short stack calls my allin with AJs and my TT held up! So I start heads-up play with a 41k to 28k chip lead, winner gets the seat and loser something like $138 for 2nd place. Not something either of us is interested in, especially me since I have a nice lead to start.

Disaster struck about 20 hands later when I reraised allin preflop with AQs and a nice chip lead and got called by 55. I don't hit an Ace or a Queen and suddenly I'm the guy who's down 41k to 27k. I was pissed although in retrospect I don't think I had much good reason to, and as a result I reraised allin preflop with K7o a short while later, got called by the hugely-donkish-even-in-heads-up-play KJo, and then I amazingly hit a 7 on the river to pin the nail on the donkey's ass, taking a 53k-15k chip lead once again.

Four hands later, I get my second chance to eliminate this KingJackoff-calling asshat when I called his allin preflop raise with my ATo. What does he show? QJo. Niiiiice. Nothing bad on the flop, no problem on the turn, and blammo! Jack on the river and my lead is back down to just 37k-32k. We've been playing heads-up for about 12 minutes at this point, and that was when I just turned into a hardcore stealmonkey. I won 5 of the next 10 hands preflop, which with big blinds at that point was a couple thou per hand from his stack into mine, and 2 of the remaining 5 hands I also won by betting out on Ace-high flops even though I had nothing on either hand. All this time, I was representing strong cards without really being dealt much to speak of, but I knew I was laying a trap for my opponent who had to be pretty sick of me betting every preflop and on every flop. I just needed to find one big hand here and he was going to call off his chips to me.

Finally I find an actual pocket pair, raising it up preflop with 22, not a great hand to see a flop with with deep stacks still behind, but a perfectly acceptable raising hand in heads-up play in my book. He calls and we see a flop of K42. Bingo!! He bets out on the King-high flop for about a third of his short stack. I minraise him. Not sure why I went with the minraise, but it seemed like it might make him think I was just trying to get him to lay down, and maybe trick him into moving in on my perceived bluff. He took the bait and pushed it all in for just his last third of a stack, I instacalled and he flipped up....

K5o. Top pair 5 kicker. Awesome. My set held up, and I took it down:





Let me just say again, if anyone wants to play the FTOPS ME, that 23:45 nightly rebuy sat for $14 a buyin is gold, Jerry, gold! The play is terrible, and if your roll can support a $14 rebuy event, you can be fine even if, like me, you get stacked on the very last hand of the first hour semi on purpose with a shitstack, just double-rebuy and add on, start off the *real" tournament in like 7th place out of 16 players. Awesome.

Anyways, to top it off, around the same time as this satellite was going on, I also won my way into FTOPS Event #8 in pot-limit holdem. This will be my third consecutive FTOPS PLH event, which is one that I won on my 5th attempt at $26 a crack into this nightly mtt satellite on full tilt. In the end this tournament had exactly 9 players, making for another of those sng-like mtt satellites which I don't really like, but once again I played awesomely, making it to heads-up almost exactly even. Each of myself and my hu opponent were down 8500-3500 in chips or worse at two separate times during a very see-saw heads-up session where the winner would win the FTOPS #8 seat and the loser wouldn't win shiat (this is exactly why I hate these 1-table mtt satellites, the payoff is just too shitty to reward the overall best players). Anyways, we played heads-up for 30 full minutes before my I finally called my opponent's allin preflop with my AJs against his QJs, and I won my seat into FTOPS #8:



OK so after a very productive weekend that saw me win over $700 in FTOPS satellite seatage, here's my updated FTOPS story as of right now. I'm already in to FTOPS 1 on Friday, May 11th. I don't plan to play Events 2 and 3 over that weekend, including that Sunday the 13th which is Mothers' Day (anybody else notice how full tilt always seems to run the FTOPS over significant holidays of some kind?). Event 4 on Monday the 14th is the bigass $1000 buyin nlh tournament, which I won't even pony up the $150 for the nightly satellties in, but where I am already in to the nightly super sat for that event, which I won with an $8 up front investment in an mtt super sat of 23 players I think. Event 5 on Tuesday is HOSE, which I'm already in. Event #6 on Wednesday the 16th is 6-max nlh, that is one that I fully intend to get in on before it goes off in the middle of next week. Event #7 on Thursday is O8, another event I would like to play my way into, but of all of them this is the I will mind missing the least, as I've always maintained that O8 is kindof a donkey game. Then, on Friday the 18th is PLH, which I won my way in to this weekend. Saturday I will not play Event #9, partially because it's on a Saturday, and mostly because it's a rebuy event which I am just not interested in since I don't have the roll or the mentality to make multiple $100 rebuys for an event like this, which as someone who excels in rebuy tournaments I can confirm is something you absolutely positively must have in order to play these things right. And now, I am also already in to the FTOPS Main Event, Event #10, on Sunday, May 20. Yay for me!!!

Now I'll see you tonight on full tilt at Mondays at the Hoy!!

MATH, Monday 1K and More Cash Games

Right off the bat, it's Monday again, and that means it BBT time again, and that means that tonight is the latest installment of Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt!



Come out and play in the first of the three BBT tournaments on the slate for you this week, as the leaderboard continues to take shape, but where it's easily still early enough in the schedule that anyone winning the MATH tonight will probably climb into the top 10 on the board if you've had any points success at all in the previous events. And there is always knocking me from the top of the list of 2007 MATH money winners, where I have floundered for several weeks despite my last Hoy cash coming late in the Triassic Period. Not to mention the $1200 prize pool all of this month in the Hoy since the move to full tilt and making the tournament buyin a Tier I token or $26 cash. So there are plenty of reasons to come out tonight and donkeysuck me out of the MATH at 10pm ET on full tilt!

Here's another thing for those of you out there who follow the NFL draft. Btw I would never have thought anybody would be interested in the NFL draft who also reads here, but I got a lot of commentary from a lot of people over the past week asking me who I thought my Eagles were going to take, who was going #2, etc. So here's my one lasting thought from the 2007 NFL draft:

Calvin Johnson. Repeat that name out loud once or twice to yourself right now. Now if that ain't the name of a star touchdown-making, showboatin' NFL wide receiver, I don't know what is. Calvin. Johnson. It just sounds like a pro-bowler, doesn't it?

And speaking of the NFL, so as of this weekend we now know one thing for sure about the AFC: The Colts and the Patriots will meet again in the AFC Championship game, and nobody else in the AFC is even worth following. My dumbass New York friends are saying the Jets are for real, I got other guys telling me the Chiefs or the Broncos or San Diego. No. Adding Randy Moss, dickhead though he is, is a disgusting turn of events for the rest of the AFC, for a team whose offense I heard this morning on Mike and Mike was already ranked #7 in the NFL last season. With a few key moves this off-season, the Pats have re-made themselves the Team to Beat in the AFC this year, and no way anyone passes these two teams heading into the 2007-2008 regular season. Pats-Colts baby. Get used to hearing it.

Now on to some poker Let me start for today by saying for the record that I lost it with my post on Saturday. That post was rude and more obnoxious than it ought to be. But man does it phuckin sting losing a full buyin like that, in front of the bloggers no less, when I had been nicely up before that already on the night. But I decided long ago (never to walk in anyone's shawows and) that I was not going to rant with people's specific names and links like that anymore. I mean, I am fine saying I think someone I respect made a bad play in my blog, but to just go and kill somebody in a feature-like piece like my last post, that just makes me a dickhead. There I said it. I debated taking the thing down entirely because it's rude and obnoxious and uncalled-for, but I'm just not in to self-censorship like that. Instead I will just say my peace here today, and hopefully these things will be read in conjunction by people who follow along with what I have to say.

In general this weekend, though, even despite the Friday night stackraping at the hands of Butch Howard, I had my best cash run ever, taking down a total of about 4 to 5 buyins over the weekend in about 10 hours of 1- and 2-tabling 1-2 6max nlh. It was awesome. I got some hands over the span of all those hours, and I pushed them just hard enough to get what I needed to get out of them. My biggest move of the weekend was raising with a lot of draws. I even had situations where 3 limpers checked the flop to me on the button, but rather than take the free card on the cheap round, I still went ahead and put in a smallish raise, getting more money into the pot and representing a strong hand, while also chasing out a few guys who might otherwise have runner runnered me along the way, and also usually buying me a free card on the turn, when things are typically more expensive, rather than on the flop which is typically a cheaper bet to pay for anyways. Of course you don't hit all your primary draws with two cards to come, but I found this weekend then when I did hit my draws after betting them on the flop, that was when a guy with TPTK, two pairs or even the same turned set that killed me on Friday with the bloggers, was likely to pay me off in a big way. Raising with my draws. For whatever reason, I find myself doing this more in cash games than I do in tournaments, I think maybe because my tournament chips are just so much more in short supply since I can't ever replenish, and so far it's been working for more profit when I hit my draws then it's been costing me when I miss 'em.

On the tournament front, things are kinda so-so for me. I think I played 8 FTOPS and other satellites this weekend all told. And in those 8 satellites, I final tabled 7 of them. These have all ranged between 9 and 40 players, and I've been playing very well in all of them, which is good. Throw in the Saturday 1:30pm ET bracelet race that I somehow found myself playing in as well, which I also final tabled out of I think 59 entrants, with just the top place winning the 2k WSOP prize package. So I played great tournament poker this weekend, in a sense. However, of those 8 final tables in two days, I ended up winning the seat or the prize in precisely one of them. I'll get to that one win in a minute, but otherwise, I bubbled out in 5th place in that bracelet race after being in 1st with 8 players remaining when my JJ ran into KK before the flop, and then on the very next hand my A9 could not hold up against 77 and IGH. In my FTOPS satellites, I have even made a small amount of cash in a couple of these final table runs, but othewise I am just the fucking bubble boy this weekend which really killed me. And more than that, all but one of my FTOPS final tables this weekend ended with me losing to an inferior hand when the money got in. That kills me even more. I'm talking about losing an FTOPS ME satellite in 3rd place with the top 2 winning seats when the fonkey in 2nd calls my preflop allin with his A6o against my pocket Kings. Ace on the flop after that recockulous move and I'm done, no seat. No I don't want the $126 cash or whatever it was, thank you very little.

This weekend I also lost in 4th or 5th place in multi-seat awarding satellites with 88 to 66 allin preflop (four-flush, of course), AA to KJs allin preflop (turned straight, you know how it is), and with QQ on a Jack-high flop to a guy who called my allin on the flop with nothing more than unimproved big slick (I don't have to tell you how that one ended up). And oh yeah let's not forget Sunday night's Blogger Bracelet Race, that Al was The Man enough to chip in out of his own pocket to ensure a winner-take-all $1500 buyin prize pool to play in a WSOP event, where I had the misfortune of having a somehow-even-at-8pm ET-tired Gracie at my table, who typed in "I'm tired, I just need to go to bed, gl everyone" or something similar before calling my allin (I had TT and had raised a bunch of limpers allin) preflop with her 33, and promptly nailing a 3 on the flop to do me in. Zoinks. Of course my last crumbs of chips were eliminated on the very next hand when my allin push with QT ran into TFG's Q7, and he promptly flopped a 7 and IGH. Now that right there btw is the best proof I know of that online poker is rigged -- how many times has this happened to you? You get redickulously sucked out on to be totally crippled in a tournament, and then you push allin on the very next hand, you have a big lead preflop but then boom! you're done. I can't count how many times I seem to get redickulously sucked out on to officially finish me in online poker tournaments, immediately following some huge crushing loss that unofficially finishes me first. Rigged I tell you. Anyways, congratulations to blogger brdweb for busting out with the victory and taking down the $1500 winner-take-all first prize (thanks again, Al!), who will be playing in Event #15 in the 2007 WSOP, $1500 nlh on Saturday of the WPBT weekend (I will also be in that event btw). Brdweb also graciously offered to swap out 1% of his action in WSOP Event #15 to all of his other final tablers in last night's event as part of the deal that paid the whole prize pool to first place, so kudos to everyone who scored there and especially to brdweb for taking down the prize and bringing another blogger to the WSOP! And of course kudos to Gracie for ending up in 6th place and getting her 1% of brdweb's WSOP action. Gotta love it -- hopefully that was worth staying up for another couple hours for. It will be when brd takes down 650k for first prize at the WSOP. And I expect at least my Blogger Bracelet Race buyin back from Gracie if that happens.

OK so back to me, the one big satellite win I did come up with this weekend was that I qualified for for the 1k Monday mtt on full tilt for the first time:



Again I played really great in this tournament, and for once of late I was able to hold on after my usual vicious suckout for the victory in what was a 23-player, $100 buyin satellite into the $1000 buyin Monday night event. It was sick because with me in 1st place out of 5 players remaining (top two won 1k seats), I actually got the guy in 2nd place to move allin preflop against me with his QQ against my KK, a move which would have given me a 4 to 1 chip lead over the guy in 2nd place with just 4 players remaining. Naturally with the way things ran for me at final tables this weekend, he turned a Queen and I was knocked back down to 4th place out of 5. Still I perservered, climbing my way back up and eventually winning a big pot to get back into 2nd place of 5 left, behind just the suckerouter, where I held on to take 2nd place and play my way in to the 1k Monday mtt for the first time ever. To be perfectly honest, I have looked at this tournament with jealousy many times over the past several weeks since full tilt starting running it, debating whether I could possibly justify buying in directly for $1060, but of course my answer has always been "Yes! Well.......maybe.......no what am I crazy?" and I've chickened out, I think wisely. But just last week I played my first satellite into this event, which at a 1k buyin I never have seen a sat for less than a $75 buyin for the sat, and this is my first win and something that I am really excited about.

So come rail me tonight at 9pm ET in my first ever Monday 1K on full tilt, where the prize pool usually ends up around 100k with around a hundred players, and where any cash will be a nice addition to my roll on full tilt. And remember, the BBT freeroll Tournament of Champions will award free seats to anyone who has played in at least 20 of the BBT events, so you have every reason to keep coming out and playing in these tournaments, even if you're more dead money than I am in these things. If I can get into the freeroll, I just need to get lucky one time and I can make some nice cash, so that's my plan and it should be yours too. So I'll see you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy!

A Little FTOPS Love, Cash Game Discussion, and Another Funny Cash Hand

Finally today I have a little bit of FTOPS love to report. To be honest, I have not been focusing on the FTOPS satellites nearly as much as I should have so far since they started maybe a week and a half ago. Normally I would have been all over qualifying for as many events as I can since the very first day they appeared on full tilt. But, I've had a lot of other things I've been focusing on with my poker play, not the least of which is my cash games (another very profitable night last night, more on that later), more bracelet races and the WSOP main event qualifiers since the large-buyin sats have such favorable payout structures, as well as my nightly 30k sats and other regular activities on the virtual felt. And I've also focused more time than I wish I had on the avatar races and related satellites, which would win me an entry into five FTOPS events at once -- at least one of which I cannot actually play in, mind you -- but where the play in the satellites and even in the avatar race itself has been so goddam awful that at times it's kinda like trying to win the WWdN or something. Painful. As a result, I have not been able to get anywhere significant with the avatar races, and since I've focused so much on those, I probably haven't played more than 5 or 6 individual-event FTOPS satellites, which in the past have been profitable plays for me. In the few that I have played before the last day or two, I've donked hard in a couple when I was actually playing on megatilt, and I've gotten donked by fonkeys on more than one occasion as well. In all, qualifying for the FTOPS in my half-assed way has proven to be highly frustrating for me, not to mention fruitless. I am highly competitive and driven, and my poker play has always been very goal-oriented. I want to play in as many FTOPS events as I can -- and I honestly believe that the entire online poker landscape is likely to be very, very different by the time the next FTOPS comes around, presumably in August, once the regulations under the UIGEA have been promulgated -- and so far, nothing good to report whatsoever.

All that finally changed for me late this week. Either Wednesday or Thursday night (it all blends together for me, especially as I've been sick this week thanks to the Hammer Girls and the wonders of contagious viruses), I took on a $26 buyin mtt sat to the FTOPS HOSE event #5, which ended up being more like an sng as only 9 players entered the event. Now let me say for the record that, despite how effing frustrating razz can be, I am better than most players I bump into out there, in particular most players in the HORSE events generally for sure, and I just find it lame and almost sacreligious to be arbitrarily removing razz from the normal HORSE rotation. I don't really think this hurts my chances so much of performing well in such a multi-game event, but that doesn't mean I think it's right to just take razz out because, well, I don't even know why someone would do that. To me it's lame lame lame. But whatever, so I played in this 1-table mtt, with the winner getting a seat into the FTOPS HOSE event, and 2nd place thru 9th place winning diock. I hate that structure, which is the whole reason I prefer the mtt satellites to the sng satellites, but it was the hand I was dealt this week (pun intended) so I went with it:



This satellite was sick as ballz as we neared the end. I had played very well, getting paid handsomely on a turned boat in holdem and on a spectacular nut flush-nut low in O8, and I was actually up about 10k to 1k to 1k with just three players remaining. It took me overcoming not one, not two but three stoopid suckouts to finally take out the guy in third place, with me once again up around 10k to 2k as heads-up play began. I was extremely card dead (we were just starting the latest O8 round as we got down to heads-up), and with such a large chip lead there was just no reason for me to play any starting hands that were not strong. Eventually he limped in preflop and I checked my option to see a free flop with AQ86. The flop came JT9, making me the second-nut straight with no low possible, and my opponent called my check-raise on the flop, getting most of his chips in in the process. Then when a rag fell on the turn, I bet out, and my opponent called off the rest of his chips, flipping up J9xx and wishing me luck in the FTOPS in the chat while he did so, leaving him dead to just four outs (the remaining two Jacks and two 9s) for me to win the seat. But the hideous 9 on the river suddenly brought him from the very brink of elimination back to basically even with my stack, and with me tilting out of my mind after a fourth or fifth suckout over just the past 10 minutes or so of play and about a 5-to-1 chip advantage at the beginning of heads-up play. After this latest suckout, we went back and forth several times, and with my tilt ever-increasing I was just about ready to kill somebody. Eventualy, luckily about two hands before I literally threw in the towel and just pushed with anything (we were playing stud high at this point), apparently my opponent got to his own towel-throwing point and pushed in his stack (about 70% the size of my stack at the time) progressively allin over 3rd, 4th and 5th streets with nothing more than a split pair of 2s. I had started with KQ(T), and eventually on fifth street just as my opponent moved in the last of his chips, I paired my Ten. I picked up two pair Kings over Tens on 6th, but he also picked up a runner-runner flush draw. With one eye closed and the other squinting tightly, I saw as he missed another big suckout at the river and I took down the winner-take-all satellite. So here is me registered for FTOPS Event #5 (HOSE):



On a related front, I also qualified for FTOPS Event #1 in nlh a night or two ago. This was another mtt satellite that paid the top two seats out of I think a 22- or 24-person field, and by the end I had managed to get into a dominant position, with about a 20k stack vs two sub-10k stacks in my last two opponents, with just two of us getting awarded seats to event #1. I eventually held on to make it in, although for some reason my screenshots from this event did not capture correctly, so all I have for you to see is me registered in FTOPS Event #1 as of now as well:



I guess it looks like I only managed to capture half of the FTOPS #1 window there. Well enjoy it cuz that's all I got for ya. So I am in to FTOPS Events #1 and #5, which will run on Friday night May 11 (#1) and Tuesday night May 15 (#5).

Looking at the other events I would like to play in, there are events #6 through #8, which are also on weekday evenings which is the optimal time for me, and also Event #4 on Monday the 14th is very attractive to me, in that it also has that 9pm ET start time that I like, but it carries a $1000 buyin. Now even though my roll could support me buying in directly to a 1k event, there is precisely zero chance that I would ever do that, especially with the fonkeys I run into regularly in online play. So, I did something on Thursday that I will only do for this particular event, which is play in a super satellite that awards seats to the $216-buyin satellite tournament on Monday, May 14 at 6:30pm ET, a few hours before the actual FTOPS Event #4 is scheduled to go off. Knowing this would require me to leave work early that day, I figured it is nonetheless my only realistic chance to play in the biggest buyin FTOPS event in FTOPS IV (including even the main event which sports a "mere" $535 buyin), since I do not foresee myself playing in the $165-buyin mtt satellite into FTOPS #4 that runs nightly at I think 11:15pm ET. So anyways, on Thursday I played in the mtt super sat to FTOPS Event #4 ($1000 nlh), which again was more like an sng than an mtt with just 8 players starting at one table:



Boooooom! The highlights here were me getting redickulously sucked out on twice at the river in the final 30 minutes, but then me laying one sickass bad beat of my own against one of these suckerouters when my tilt-allin with J7o four-flushed against my opponent's TT allin preflop. He can eat it, and I'll take the victory with the exact same pride as I do any other win I care about. J7o this, muthafucka. So I am now registered for that satellite to FTOPS #4 on Monday, May 14 at 6:30pm ET -- my only chance to play in the $1000 buyin tournament.

So that's it for my progress far on the FTOPS front, although I plan to play in more of these mtt satellites over the next few weeks to try to play my way in to whichever events I am able to get into. I did want to mention briefly here one new satellite full tilt has been running for the FTOPS over the past three days or so. It is called the FTOPS mega super satellite, and it is actually a satellite with a $75 buyin, that pays the winner(s) a $600 prize package consisting of seats into seven separate FTOPS satellites that occur the week of the FTOPS itself. Now, I can't play in this thing personally, because almost all of the FTOPS satellites that are awarded in this thing go off at 6:30pm ET on the day of the FTOPS events themselves, and I simply do not have the ability to play in a 6:30pm ET satellite. But, if you're interested in playing your way cheaply in to seven of the ten FTOPS event satellites that are held the night of the actual FTOPS events, then this thing could be for you. The FTOPS mega super satellite runs every night on full tilt at 10:30pm ET, and also I think around 7:30pm ET as well, and here is the actual schedule of the 7 FTOPS satellite tournaments that you will win your way in to if you take down one of these mega super sats:



OK, enough about the FTOPS for today. Now I wanted to discuss my cash game play of late, and some of the commentary I have received over the past few days about how I'm playing certain hands, because while most of the comments are really very helpful, some of what I'm reading just seems pretty silly. First and foremost, let me say again that I certainly appreciate every single comment I get on my blog about my cash game play. I recognize fully that I'm a cash beginner and that there are guys out there with 1000 times the experience and skill that I have in cash games. But I also want to say that I find it somewhat funny how tied on to their own specific styles of play some people seem to be, and how easy some people seem to find it to critique what I'm doing just because they don't play the game exactly like I do. When I'm out there reading hands, I can fend for myself and I'm doing quite well at it. I may not play exactly like you guys do. I may be on my way to eventually playing cash nlh exactly like you do as I continue to incorporate every tidbit that seems sensible to me that I pick up from your advice and from watching you guys play the game. And I certainly have my down days just like everyone else who plays cash regularly. But let's be honest here. This is the exact same group of guys who just commented in my blog within the past week that nobody good at nlh cash ever steals the blinds, that with no escalation of the blinds there is just no reason to fight hard over a dollar or two. Meanwhile, after maybe 5000 hands of 1-2 nlh 6-max over the past couple of weeks, I can probaby count on one hand -- literally now -- the number of times that the button and the sb have folded around to give a walk to the bb when I've been at the table to see it. The bottom line is that, regardless of the advice I received here a week ago or so, the fact still remains that not just a few guys, and not just some people, and not even most people, but everybody -- and I mean every. single. body. -- steals the blinds in 1-2 6max holdem on full tilt. So the advice for me not to play out of the blinds like that is not advice I can possibly adhere to, and I could not advocate anyone else doing that either. Stealing the blinds isn't just part of the game at 1-2 6max on full tilt -- it is the game.

Now, I'm not at all saying this to suggest that anyone who has commented here doesn't know what they're talking about with cash games. I said it above and I'll say it again here, I am getting better every single day at my cash games as a direct result of the conmentary I receive right here on the blog, and I could not be more thankful and appreciative of everyone's comments. But, what I am saying is that I think everyone can learn a little something about how to play these games from someone else, and that there really isn't any one "right" way to play the game, at least not at any level of specificity. A guy who is better at reading hands can play a little looser early in the hands like Negreanu does and make money. A guy who's better at getting value out of strong hands can play tighter than most like a Dan Harrington and make money. While I do believe there is a right way generally to succeed at poker in a general sense, there are simply a lot of different specific ways of getting there.

I also wanted to note here that in the comments to how I play specific hands in both tournaments and cash games, the most common overall commentary I get is for people to ask how I could not have put someone on a really strong hand, just because they were betting. Apparently a lot of people out there do not realize just how tight they play, and more importantly, just how exploitable that tightness is. If you're going to assume that a guy who steal-raised preflop has hit a board of 579Q hard just because he put in an automatic and meaningless c-bet on the flop and then called my raise of that c-bet, then your game will improve the sooner you realize that you are going to get exploited again and again and again by smart, observant players who see your game for what it is. Now, you can read this and get all pissed and think what a jerk I am if you want, that's completely fine with me of course, but that isn't going to change the truth of what I just wrote up there. If you're someone who puts a stealer on a hand that hits a board of 579Q hard just because he didn't fold to my raise of his automatic, make-it-every-single-time-regardless-of-the-cards c-bet on the flop, then you are exploitable. You're beyond exploitable in fact. Now this is me giving you people some good advice: If your play is so robotic that you automatically assume a preflop raiser hit a raggy board just because he doesn't fold to your flop raise, then good players will eat you alive. They'll kill you. I'll watch you at my table for 15 minutes, and then I'll be stealing pots from you by simply calling your raises and then betting strong on the turn. The single biggest mistake I see people make online -- after overvaluing shitty hands themselves, of course -- is being too timid and always fearing the nuts. A guy putting in an automatic steal-raise and then an automatic c-bet tells you absolutely nothing about what he holds in his hand. If all an opponent does in the entire hand that shows any strength at all is call my flop raise, something for which he will have some decent odds thanks to the money he's already put into the pot with his preflop steal-raise and then his flop c-bet, then IMO you want to get yourself to the point where you're not automatically assuming he has nailed a raggy board of Q975. In fact, to me that conclusion is just plain silly. He's barely shown any strength at all in the hand! Fearing the nuts or near-nuts just because of one raise-call on the flop where there's already decent pot odds to call with some things like draws, 2nd pair decent kickers, etc. is not the optimal way to play the game in my opinion.

And while I'm on a roll here, lets talk for a minute about some other funny stuff I've been reading and hearing people say. First of all, if you are someone who believes that "calling an allin with just one pair in cash game is donkey", then you as a matter of practical fact are too rigid to be great in your poker game. I don't care what you think of me, but when you're done thinking it, you're still not good. Period. Start facing it now. Or don't, actually. Cuz I've been stealing pots from people like you all night long over the past month. And you know what? I do occasionally get burned by people who hit 2 pairs or slow played a monster against me. So do people who don't call big bets with just one pair. You shouldn't need me to tell you this. The fact remains that I am probably up about 5 or 6 to 1 in chips in the times I've called with one pair and won, minus the chips I've lost when I've called with one pair. It's called hand reading, and for almost everyone reading this out there who thinks what I'm saying is wrong, I'm better at reading hands than you. If you read hands well and are willing to get away from one pair when you think you're behind, then being willing to go to the showdown with one pair where you objectively and honestly believe you're ahead can be quite profitable, at least at the donkey limits. I'm quite sure that calling big bets with one pair at 3-6 is not at all a winning strategy. But at 1-2, if used sparingly and appropriately, it can work. And at $.10-$.25 like the blogger cash game that I played in for a few hours on Thursday night at full tilt, it can be a very profitable strategy if done correctly against the caliber of players, and the caliber of bluffers, you will run into at that level.

This leads into my second point about the cash games (and this is just as true for tournaments as well btw) -- and this is an argument that's been hashed and rehashed on blogs and in poker rooms for as long as poker has been played, so it's not like I'm saying anything new here. But if you are someone who is going to try to run a huge bluff on the river in a hand where you have nothing, your opponent has played the hand strong since before the flop, and you've played like you've got nothing all the way through the hand as well, then the other guy -- factually speaking -- is not the donkey when you make the painfully obvious, everyone-at-the-table-knows-you-aint-got-shit allin bluff at the end, and he calls to stack your ass. You didn't even think about this bluff until the second you clicked "allin". And as a result, your bluff is more obvious than the baldness of that guy with the horrble combover. I don't care if the other guy calls you down with frigging Jack-high and beats you. If you don't lay the groundwork for your bluffs earlier in the hands such that a person with good hand reading skills can't be THAT sure that you're bluffing when you suddenly out of nowhere commit the rest of your stack to a hand where you've shown nothing but abject weakness from the moment the starting cards came out, then no matter what you may think, no matter what you may say, and no matter what the other abject donkeys at the table might tell you, you are the donkey. Again, start facing it now, because these my friends are facts. If you think the other guy has to automatically lay his hand down if it's only one pair, so you can run the dumbest looking bluff I've seen since I played 5-card-draw with Aces, Deuces and One-Eyed Jacks as wildcards for m&ms with my friends in 4th grade, then you are an abject donator. And I love having ya around my table, don't get me wrong. But just because some other blonkey supports you that the other guy shouldn't have called your blatantly obvious bluff, do yourself a favor and don't let that make you fail to question how you could make such a horrifically bad play. As many great poker bloggers have quite correctly observed, if you aren't willing to constantly analyze your own play and try to figure out why you got stacked 5 or 6 times in front of your blogger friends at that cash game table the other night, then you are absolutely doomed to repeat your suckiness. And I'll be there to call you again and again and again with Ace-high, one pair, or my monster and continually relieve you of your chips. Because I'm in your head. Accept it. I'm in there. I'm there right now as you read this. Keep telling yourself that the other guy is the donkey for calling your recockulously out-of-nowhere bluffs at the river. Keep letting the other jassack poker bloggers at the table tell you how horrible of a call the other guy made to stack you with his just one pair hand against your allin bluff with your Ten high. Just keep making those bluffs at me please.

I think that's enough of that mini-rant for today. I'm sure the better players out there disagree with a lot of what I've said above. I welcome that disagreement, and I can only assume this is because you guys play at a higher level than I do and a higher level than I am referring to here, because at those levels I'm sure a lot of how I've been playing over the past several weeks will not work. Well, I'm not playing at your levels. I'm playing at 1-2 or below, and this shit is working. Some days I get stacked. Some days I make ridiculous, horrible laughable allin calls with not-very-strong hands and lose a couple hundy to a guy with a monster. It's true. I bet it even happens to you on occasion, no matter what level you play at. But I can't argue with the fact that my roll is growing pretty consistently at 1-2, which I'm doing by taking stabs at lots of small pots, stealing the blinds when it makes sense, and sticking with my reads when I think I'm ahead. It actually sounds a lot like how I play in tournaments, to an extent. And at the donkey limits, this is working. I fully believe my higher-level-playing friends that this stuff won't work at all up there. If I ever move up, something which I'm not planning to do anytime soon right now, I look forward to having to re-learn how to beat that level. But for now, there are donkeys all the phuck over the place at 1-2 and below, and I'm beating them. Consistently. And I'm not doing it by assuming they have the nuts every time they call a raise of mine. The guy who plays that way, he's the guy whose money I'm taking consistently at the cash tables in fact. I love players like that.

OK so today I will just leave you with a sweet hand from last night at the 1-2 cash tables, where I recorded another solidly profitable session over maybe 2 or 3 hours of play. And this is a hand where I am going to specifically thank Fuel55 and Lucko for educating me that it is ok to play low connectors in a multiway pot at a cash game for a small bet.

And to Dr Zen from yesterday's comments, this one's for you! Ha ha.

So I'm in the big blind with 64o. A totally shite hand by any possible standards. But when middle position just min-raises my $2 big blind to $4, and then the small blind calls the raise as well, I'm looking at seeing a flop in a $12 pot for just $2. This is a hand which I would have insta-folded just a few weeks ago. But I specifically remembered as I played this hand both Lucko and Fuel making calls like this (not saying either of you would have necessarily made this specific call, just calls like this with low suited or connecting junk) at cash tables I was at, and then seeing them get lucky, hit a big flop and suddenly they're stacking someone else at the table. So I looked at those pot odds, and I made the call:



The flop comes down:



Not bad. Bottom two, it's not a great flop but obviously I hit it pretty good here, and since I called a preflop raise, nobody is really going to put me on this hand. I check it, because I know the guy up top, Mr. Formulaic, is gonna c-bet on this raggy flop. He obliges with a $7 bet into the $11.40 pot. Then the guy after him raises before the action even gets back to me:



Now I know here this was a bit of a tough decision. I think if I had put the guy up top on any kind of a hand at all with his c-bet, then I might have been a lot more tempted to fold. But to me, the guy up top I know for absolute certain fact is c-betting here with any two cards. Any. Two. Cards. That's just the way he plays, and I am 100% positive of that fact. So all I'm really looking at here is a guy raising on the flop, a raise that could easily mean just top pair decent kicker. In fact I'm putting him on something like JT, since he called the preflop raise with just one other player in the pot at the time, so I'm guessing he's on a Jack and a decently high card. Yes he could be on a set, but there is just no reason for me to believe he's on a set yet. I debated reraising to find out now if he does have me beat, but the bet was so big already that I decided to just call it and see what this player does on the turn with the information that I called his big raise on the flop. I'm guessing not everyone will agree with this move, but I think it was ok given my hand at the time:



The guy up top folded. And this was when another shining, beautiful 4 fell on the turn, giving me a delicious boat. What's more, the guy on the right, whom I still had on top pair of some kind, liked the 4 as I probably would in his shoes, but liked it enough to push in the rest of his stack:



This I think was a horrendous play by him, given that I had just called a bet and a nice-sized raise on the flop. In particular when you see what he had in his hand, since I insta-called his bet of course:



Top pair, shit kicker. Another great example of why you don't want to be the guy always putting players on the nuts or near-nuts just because of one modestly aggressive action on the flop against a guy who is perceived to be auto-cbetting without any need to have actually hit anything on this hand. The J3 guy played this hand about as badly as humanly possible, but I would have never been there to take down this $280 pot:



if not for Fuel and Lucko. I should send you guys each $2.80, one percent of this pot for each of you, for being the impetus behind me winning this guy's money. Again, I'm not trying to say that either one of these guys would have played this hand at all, or played it exactly like I played it on every street, or anything like that at all (I bet they would not have played it exactly like me, in fact, given both of their massively more cash game experience than I). But it's a great example of the kind of thing I'm constantly looking to add to my game from watching and learning from other better, more experienced players out there. I specifically remember thinking "donkey!" the first time I saw Fuel call a raise and 3 callers of that raise preflop with 64s. Then when he stacked me with the hand, I kinda did a double-take. Then a few days later I watched Lucko call a few preflop callers with 76o and do the same thing. I questioned, and I got answers from each of them explaining the rationale of calling a small preflop bet with junky connectors, soooted or otherwise, to try to nail a cheap flop against multiple players and get to stack somebody good. And slowly but surely, this stuff is finding its way into my game. I may put my own spin on things, but I'm always looking to get better, and the best way in the world to do that is to learn from observing and picking the brains of others who are better than you. That's what I hope some people can get out of the 347 posts I've put up here over the past couple of years. Well, maybe not Dr. Zen, who obviously has emotional problems after busting his bankroll for the umpteenth time this year. But the rest of you.

Have a nice weekend, everyone. I should be online intermittently in the evenings so you can come and berate me for the content of this post. God I love being a blogger. Now go and qualify for the FTOPS!