As Busy as I've Ever Been

Yep, that's my mantra lately. I am literally as busy at my job as I have ever been, in my entire life. And as someone who always carries a heavy workload in comparison to my peers, believe you me: this is not fun. At all. I mean, it's one thing when the airhead across the way, for whom its all she can do to even show her face in the office for maybe 30, 32 hours a week, tops. You give her a bit of extra work, and even though she feels like she is falling off a cliff, I don't give a shit. She deserves it, in fact. Or the lazyshiat down the hall, who will complain all day about the hours he has to work but then somehow manages to "work from home" at least two days a week, when his IM shows him as being completely away from his pc for hours at a time during business hours. But when I get heaped on top of my pile another 25-50% more work than I am already carrying, that really means something, and frankly it takes me to a place where I literally cannot get anything else done in the day but work, work and more work.

Over the past few weeks, I am up at the absolute crack of dawn -- earlier even -- and I'm the first one into my office shortly after 7am, where I proceed to sit at my pc and bang out contracts, dial in to negotiations and participate in various and sundry meetings, conversations and strategy sessions, until around 7pm when the sun is already on its way back down for the night. This week will make a complete five-day work week where I was not even afforded the opportunity to go and grab a quick lunch, not from a deli and not even one of those carts that midtown Manhattan is so famous for. And as if it's not insult enough that I work 12 hours a day in my office when pretty much the entire rest of my colleagues show up for more like the usual 9 or 10 -- on a good day! -- lately, when I finally get home around 8 at night, I have to immediately fire up the laptop and am back working on that contract markup before my work shoes are even off, my lenses are out and often literally before I even sit down. That's just how much I have to get to, how much more than is possibly able to be done by a normal person in a normal day.

So if you've been wondering why you haven't seen me on the virtual tables almost at all in the past couple of weeks (or much here at the blog, either, for that matter), no I haven't changed my username to protect my anonymity, and no I didn't finally stick my head through my laptop screen after one too many 2-outers on the river. I just haven't even had the time to sit the fuck down and do something I want to do, even at night when I'm home after a long, long day in the office.

Here's hoping that Friday night will be my first night truly off from work in about 2 1/2 weeks thanks to a couple of marathon sessions over the past couple of weekends that had me sitting in my office for a full day all alone on Saturdays and Sundays. And if I haven't returned your emails this week, don't take it personally (well, you should take it personally, but the rest of you, please don't). This weekend I am desperately hoping to get that break to catch up on everything else in my life outside of work work work work work.

30k Gigowatts of Poker

After getting down to heads-up in the nightly 30k guaranteed, $27.50 buyin tournament on pokerstars exactly six days ago, and then winning the tournament outright this past Sunday night, I decided to take another stab at it on Monday night even though I was probably a bit more tired than I would have liked to have been in order to have a real shot at making another deep run. Even though without a doubt one of the huge improvements to my overall game as compared to, say, four or five years ago is that I basically never even try to run a big mtt anymore if I know I am too tired to have a real go at it, in this case I figured I would make an exception given the extreme success I've had in this thing of late, and the fact that my extended vacation from work was just coming to a close. I registered, a bit late as per usual, and decided to give it the old college try.

And try I did. Although things started slow for me as per usual, around the second hour I won a couple of big pots in succession and before I knew it, I was in the top 100 on the leaderboard less than two hours in once again. I did not drop out of the top 100 as we crossed from 400 players left, down to 300, and then 200, and when the money bubble burst last night at 198 players remaining, I was solidly in position in 67th place for the top third of the remaining field. I could feel the swell coming, and I swear I knew already at that point that I was going to final table this tournament again.

I rode this optimism for another hour or so, watching the field dwindle to 150, 120, and then eventually 100 players left by around 11:30pm ET, and all the while I just kept on betting and raising, winning a number of pots without a showdown, and showing the hammer three separate times on preflop steals or resteals to really get my image juicing. Then I was dealt AK and got re-reraised allin preflop by the button who had A5o, who I'm sure was shocked as shit when I flipped up big slick on the time he finally got sick of me showing the alleged worst hand in poker after reraising people preflop and on the flop to keep adding to my stack. Then I held in a big pot allin preflop with KK against AQ, and before I knew it, there I was in the top 20 in chips as we crossed the final 100 players left in what I am beginning to think of lately as my tournament. 11:30pm passed, it was quiet as a mouse in my house, and I won a couple more pots with without a doubt the scariest image of anyone left in this tournament, and with 96 players remaining at around 11:35, I was in 16th place with just over 67,000 chips. I just knew I was final tabling again, I could feel it calling to me and it had my name written all over it.

And then the lights went off.

Not figuratively; literally. The lights in my family room started to flicker, one light on the ceiling in particular, but all of them really, and as I sat there dumbly starting at them -- not a totally unheard-of phenomenon given the way my house is wired -- maybe five seconds went by, and then everything went dark. The TV went off, shutting down a perfectly great episode of Seinfeld in the process ("What's this, this salty discharge coming out of my eyes?" Jerry asks Lori Loughlin amazedly in this one, still one of the classic all-time lines in one of television's greatest-ever sitcoms), and all the lights in my family room went dark, as dark as I have ever seen my house get. A fuse, I figured, and so I went to grab the flashlight and make the ghost-walk into the utility room in the basement to turn whatever had blown back on and make it all right. But when I got down there, there were no fuses blown at all -- everything was sitting in its normal "On" position -- and so I quizzically made the walk back upstairs to the first floor, and that was when I noticed how truly black it was. I mean, we've lost power in my house before, but for some reason it had never seemed quite this dark, or quite this quiet. And as I walked by the front door, that's when it hit me: I wasn't the only house who's power had gone out.

Every house in my entire neighborhood was dark as night (literally). The street lights were all off. The perpetual spotlights in the houses, including my own, were all extinguished. As I again stared dumbly out the front door trying to make sense of it all, I saw two neighbors with flashlights walking around the interior of their own houses, and that's when I realized that something bad enough had happened with the power grid in my area that I was not likely to see a return of our power anytime particularly soon. After quickly ascertaining that I could see the bright lights of New York City off in the distance from my upstairs window, so I knew we weren't dealing with a 2003-style blackout all over again, I figured what the hey, I guess I'll just go back to the pc and finish out final tabling the 30k in the dark and the cold, why the hike not.

Only, when I got back to my laptop and tried to sign back in after having timed out and probably missing the last two or three hands during my darkened trek to the basement, the cold, harsh reality hit me: my modem was also out. There I was, with the screen frozen on the poker table as of the moment the lights went out, with the leaderboard still open in the background showing me as 16th of 96 runners remaining, only there were also those pesky few new windows opened up informing me that the connection had been severed, and that pokerstars had failed multiple times to re-establish a connection. Dammit. I sat there in awed silence for a few more minutes, trying in vain to think of some solution that would enable me to fulfill what was clearly my destiny to final table the 30k for a third time in six days, and then when that failed to generate any creative solutions since I have no usable wireless connections in my house that are not tied to a power source of some kind, just waiting in vain while hoping against hope that this thing that had somehow shut down the power for as far as the eye could see in my neck of the woods, would more or less instantaneously be repaired and I could resume my rightful quest.

But alas such was not meant to be on this night. After going upstairs and calming down my daughters who had woken up disturbingly to find both their clock and their two nightlights dark, and trying to wait out my baby who had also awoken in his room with all the commotion, I dialed up the local electricity company, who informed me they were already aware of the outage and had technicians on the scene. While I took that as good news, I knew something capable of shutting down power in an entire neighborhood or more was not going to be fixed right away, so I did the only logical thing I could think of given the hour and the situation: I went to sleep.

At 1:17am I awoke with a start, when the light in my bathroom suddenly turned on and my clock started flashing wildly and showing the inevitable 12:00am, along with the restarted hum of the boiler, the heater and the various other whirrings and buzzes that you never realize just how much you hear omnipresently until they all disappear at once for a while. After determining that I was not dreaming, I leapt out of bed and quickly ran downstairs just on the off chance that my ginormous stack still had some life left in it, after being blinded down straight through from 11:35pm for a full hour and 42 minutes. Pokerstars took an extra second or two to load back up, and I had to restart my wireless router to get the whole internet connection back live again, and when I did, I quickly re-opened the tournament lobby to find myself....

Blinded out in 28th place. With now 22 players remaining, I must have put up quite a battle, perservering from 96 remaining all the way down over more than 100 minutes to 28 left, but I just missed any opportunity to try to get back in and actually see a flop and stop the pure donating. Of course, given the payout structures in these events, and given that the buyin for the 30k is just $27.50, I had only won something like $130 for my efforts, which is obviously a far cry from the 5k available to the winner on this night, but as I said it was just not meant to be. Obviously, any time you win five buyins in any mtt, it has to be considered a success in macro terms, but of course given the history here I was and still am beside myself to have missed out on another opportunity, in particular given all the work I had put in getting myself to the point I was at in this thing when my neighborhood lost all power.

So if you check out last night's 8pm ET 30k guaranteed tournament leaderboard on pokerstars, yes you'll see good old hoyazo out in 28th place, my third deep run in this event in less than a week. But don't think I'm pleased about that performance, and it's not just because I didn't win. This time, I got close enough to start to feel the fire burning once again, but then the rug was pulled out from under me and I wasn't even given a chance to defend my title. Sigh.

Suddenly, somehow, I feel like I am owed another deep run in this thing again. 30k guaranteed tonight, anyone?

Serena

For anyone living in a cave or something, up there is Serena Williams officially losing me this weekend, after I have been a big fan of hers for a long time. I mean, I've always loved the Williams sisters, mostly because they can really play the game and they make for great, interesting television, and secretly I've always rooted harder for Serena than for Venus because I too am a younger sibling with an overachieving older brother very close in age to me, so I understand the competitiveness and the spirit burning inside Serena better than most. But somehow, since Serena completely lost it at the US Open this past weekend, all I seem to be hearing is how she got screwed, she was the victim of an unfair foot fault call, and that what she did is wrong but no big deal.

Well it is a big deal, it's a very big deal, and in my view, so far Serena Williams has gotten off very easy compared to what should be happening to her as a result of her little outburst.

Let's start by talking about what got Serena all worked up in the first place. Serena complains that she never gets called for foot faults, but suddenly here in this U.S. Open, she got called for them all the time. Specifically, two points away from losing the U.S. Open semifinals to Kim Clijsters, Serena was called for a foot fault that ended up making her face two match points in a row. And ESPN and the networks have plenty of up close and personal footage where you can easily see that part of Serena's foot does in fact touch the line on the serve when she was called for the fault, so there's no actual doubt about whether or not the call was accurate. Serena's explanation above seems to suggest instead that she thinks she is entitled to foot fault whenever she wants because it is not something that she feels has been consistently called against her this year. To this day Serena only refers to the call as "the unfair foot fault call", even while eventually apologizing to her opponent, her fans and even to the line judge after about two days and making two other press releases first.

Unfair? And how exactly is this call unfair? So let me get this straight: Serena makes a habit of foot-faulting, and some times this year the line judges have not always called it on her. There is a clear rule, the thick white line is there where the players serve for a reason, but Serena I guess just likes to disregard that clear rule of tennis when it suits her. And some people have let her get away with it previously. So now she's automatically entitled to continue getting away with clearly violating one of tennis's main procedural rules? I mean, this isn't necessarily like when people say the refs should swallow the whistle in overtime of a hockey game, or in the final minute of a close NBA game (which I absolutely disagree with as well btw). Many of those calls or debatable whether or not they are violations, and much subjective judgment is involved by definition in making a call like holding or pass interference in the NFL, roughing or intereference in hockey, or a blocking foul in the NBA. In this case, there is a clear white line, there is a lineswoman staring right down the line for the exact purpose of watching the foot faults, and Serena clearly stepped on the line. It's a foot fault -- factually speaking -- and there is no debate about it. So just because Serena has gotten away with doing this before, does that mean she is now entitled to keep breaking that clear rule in the future, even in the biggest spots near the end of the biggest tennis tournaments in the world?

Let me ask it a different way: just because OJ clearly murdered two people and got away with it once, does that now mean that the murder statutes no longer apply to him, and he's allowed to kill whoever he wants for the rest of time? Is that how it works? Obviously not. Some people let Serena break a rule. But the rule still 100% applies to her just like it does to everyone else. Others were called for foot faults during this year's U.S. Open just like Serena was, and it's not like she is even trying to argue that it is only being applied to her and not to others. No, Serena is just objecting to the lineswoman calling a foot fault -- one which Serena was clearly guilty of -- at that key point in a match.

So I guess then that Serena is allowed to break other rules too if the match is on the line? What's next? If Serena is down a break already in the first set, and she hits a ball out of bounds, the referees should allow her to hit the ball into the doubles court of her opponent? Or can she smack a ball two feet long and still expect it to get called In near the end of a match since all those fancy white lines on the court apparently don't apply to her when the match is on the line? Or better yet, why can't Serena just walk right up to the net and serve from there as hard as she can and smash each serve by her opponent? I mean, the foot fault rule isn't supposed to be called in that spot according to Serena, so how do you draw the line at being just one inch over the line, or one foot, or ten feet for that matter, right? Face it -- the foot fault line was enacted to ensure that people do not get the unfair advantage that clearly goes to someone who serves from closer to the net than everybody else. It cuts down the angles, increases the speed of the ball when it gets to the opponent, and makes it that much harder to return a serve as it is served closer and closer to the net. The powers that be in tennis decided that serves must be launched from fully behind the back line, and that any touching of that line by the player's foot before the serve is made is a violation. For good reason. And that's the rule in tennis, period. So to be clear, there is nothing "unfair" about this or any other call made against Serena at the U.S. Open. If anything, her being allowed to foot fault at other matches during this year is what's unfair -- both to Serena, in making her think the rules did not apply to her, and especially to her previous opponents who apparently repeatedly had to deal with someone getting a little bit of an edge on every serve by breaking a clearly established, clearly defined rule of the game.

And now let's clarify exactly what this outburst was. This was not someone slamming her racket on the ground (that was earlier in the match) and yelling out "Shit!" in a loud voice. And this wasn't even someone doing what I call "pulling a McEnroe" and asking how the line judge could be so blind, how could she miss that call, etc. This went far beyond complaining about a bad call. For those who don't read lips and have not heard the story, what Serena turned to the line judge who called that foot fault on her and said was "If I could, I would take this fucking ball and shove it down your fucking throat! Motherfucker!"

Somehow, nobody is talking about this angle, but what Serena did here goes right to the integrity of the game, and that's why it is no small thing even by John McEnroe's standards. Serena repeatedly menacingly shook her racket towards the line judge, and screamed at her about shoving the fucking ball down her fucking throat. This is far beyond complaining about a bad call. This is threatening an official at the game with imminent and detailed physical violence, and that is a huge no-no. In all professional sports.

Let me ask you this: what would you think if Alex Rodriguez came out onto the field in between innings at Yankee Stadium, put his arm around the home plate umpire, and said "Listen, Bruce. If you'll make sure I get something to hit by calling the first two pitches thrown to me next inning balls instead of strikes, I'll give you $10,000 cash money after the game"? Does that sound acceptable to you? Of course it's not acceptable, and it is expressly against the rules to offer anything of value to an umpire that is likely to or designed to -- or which gives the impression that it could -- influence the way he calls the game.

Well it's the same thing in the other direction. What if A-Rod lifted up his shirt showed the umpire a long, sharp bowie knife stuck in his pants pocket, and told the ump that if he didn't call the first two pitches to A-Rod balls instead of strikes, that A-Rod was doing to plunge that blade deep into the umpire's throat? What are your feelings on that? Of course it is not acceptable, and in fact just like the previous example, it's grounds for an immediate suspension to make statements that influence or attempt to influence the officials in this way. I mean, it's one thing to whine about a bad call. You can yell, you can swear, you can complain all you want (within reason). But when it moves to the point of threatening imminent physical violence towards someone for making a call against you, what's the likely result of that going to be? We didn't get to see it here because Serena's blowup immediately cost her match point and the players left the court, but what do you think would have been going through that lineswoman's mind if, say, 10 minutes later, she saw Serena foot fault again in a later play in the match? Would she have made that call just as readily as she made the first one, having just been threatened with imminent bodily harm like that by a clearly very angry and out-of-control Serena Williams? Maybe yes, maybe no. I don't know. But the very fact that we have to wonder about it is exactly what makes Serena's outburst so totally unacceptable, on a very basic and significant level.

The best analog I can recall to what Serena did by threatening serious physical violence against a lineswoman in the US Open is when Rasheed Wallace flipped out at NBA referee Tim Donaghy back in 2003 (in what actually turned out to be one of the many games Donaghy fixed) and actually waited outside by the loading dock for Donaghy to leave the stadium later that night in an attempt to kick Donaghy's ass. Wallace was suspended by the NBA for seven games for this little stunt, the longest suspension in NBA history for something that did not involve actual violence or substance abuse. And why did 'Sheed receive such a long suspension? For fucking with the game itself. For attempting to use physical threats to intimidate a game official into calling the game the way Wallace wanted him to, instead of the way the ref saw fit.

What Serena did was exactly the same thing as Rasheed, only in a bit of a different medium. That the U.S. Open let the dollar signs do the talking and allowed Serena to play in the women's doubles finals with her sister Venus two days later is sad enough as it is. But Serena should clearly be suspended for what she did the other day in New York, for at least a couple of tournaments as far as I'm concerned. I am sure if it was anyone other than Serena (or Venus) that a multi-tournament suspension would have already been announced. WTA, get off your asses and do the right thing to show Serena and the rest of the players on the men's and women's tours that threatening physical violence against the game's officials will not be tolerated in any way, shape or form. So far Serena has suffered absolutely nothing from her outburst, other than the ridicule of millions of Americans who watched a desperate, angry little baby sulking and moping and lashing out in a pathetic attempt to blame a totally innocent lineswoman for her own crappy play and semifinals loss.

Denial

So, slow weekend in the financial sector, huh?

OK so my pledge to you is that on Tuesday I am going to get it up and write about some fucking poker in this space for the first time in a week. It has been impossible for me to find that within me since this whole miserable mess began to unfold a week ago today, but on Tuesday I plan to force myself to change that and give you guys what you really come here to read about every day -- poker.

For now, suffice it to say that I am hurting. For the sixth straight day, you can expect me to be good n drunk already by the time I lurch off the commuter train at my new suburban home. I can't really deal with reality without it. In a way, today's shocking bankruptcy declaration by Lehman Brothers will be a calming influence on my life and really on the lives of many of the people more directly involved as employees in the company. I need something else to focus on all day while I toil away at my new job, other than the constantly-updating real-time LEH quote always ticking on my screen. Mostly downward, since I started the new job to tell the truth. I need to start focusing on helping my friends and former employees over there move on with their lives, start finding new jobs or new endeavors, be it school, a complete change of industry, whatever. And heaven forbid on my own life, imagine that.

One lasting aspect I cannot get out of my head from all this deals with Lehman assholeprickmotherfuckerhopehedies CEO Dick Fuld's raging denialism. I wrote last week about the fact that Merrill Lynch bit the bullet and sold $30 billion of troubled mortgage assets earlier this summer to Lone Star, an entity that specializes in making such purchases, for 22 cents on the dollar. And how in fact, the price was cheaper than that, because Merrill took the additional step of financing about 16 cents of those 22 cents on the dollar they received. They basically sold $30 billion of mortgages to Lone Star for $6 billion, and they lent Lone Star $5 billion of that $6 billion as it is, including giving Lone Star the right to put a significant portion of those securities back to Merrill if they price dropped significantly from current values as of the time of the sale. Many people would describe (and have described) this as selling the mortgage assets for 6 cents on the dollar, and I would not necessarily disagree with that characterization.

As I mentioned last week, ever since the day Merrill announced this major asset sale, Lehman and CEO Dickhead Fuld have been on the market, trying to sell up to $40 billion of its own troubled mortgage portfolio. But Penis Fuld would not accept less than 85-90 cents on the dollar for his portfolio, despite the precedent set by Merrill just a couple of months ago. As a result, no deal has come close to being reached, and Lehman now declares bankruptcy while holding some $60 billion of distressed mortgages on its books.

And just look at what fucking went down this weekend. Friday closed out with Bank of America being rumored to be the frontrunner to buy Lehman Brothers, which after last week's disastrous stock market performance could probably have been purchased by BofA for what? A billion dollars maybe? Less even? $500 million? Well, over the weekend BofA got its first look at Lehman's mortgage book, and what they saw was not pretty. It was so bad that by Saturday afternoon, BofA had already backed away and removed itself from its candidacy to buy Lehman, at any price. Immediately, some were speculating late on Saturday that BofA was still reeling from its horrific purchase of mortgage specialist Countrywide Financial last year, near the height of the market, and/or that BofA had capital and liquidity problems of its own, and just could not scrape together the cash to purchase Lehman Brothers in these troubled times.

Well lookie what happened. Not only did BofA have the interest and the willingness to buy a large U.S. investment bank, but they had fifty fucking billion dollars to do it. But they didn't buy Lehman, with its $60 billion of liquid shit on its books. Instead they bought Merrill, the company whose astute management bit the bullet and solid their shit for literally pennies on the dollar a few months ago. Just like I said last week, that's a guy who is a leader, someone who is willing to take the short-term hit in exchange for the long-term gain to the value of his company. Cock Fuld, on the other hand, is a jackass who let hubris blind him from doing the very thing that could have saved at least some semblance of his company from disappearing, like it now will. Friday BofA was going to buy Lehman, which they could have gotten for a billion dollars or less, and then on Sunday they instead decided it was a better value for them to spend more than 50 times as much to buy Lehman's competitor who had a horrible mortgage portfolio until a few months ago when they took their medicine and just did what they had to do to get rid of it.

Denial. Anyone familiar with substance abuse or other forms of addiction will know that this always remains step one of addicts dealing with any problem. The human condition simply predisposes us all to be tempted to just deny deny deny our problems, and they maybe will go away. But in this case, Prick Fuld's denial got him everything he would never want for himself and the company that he's been with since fucking 1969. And now the 25,000 employees whom he told to trust him in a company-wide conference call earlier this summer just found out what happens when you put your trust in the hands of a known denialist. What a sick, sick ending to one of the saddest stories in Wall Street's history.

Back tomorrow with some real life poker content. That is my pledge to you.

To Bail or not to Bail, That is the Question

So today might actually be the last day of this space being a Lehman Brothers and finance blog and more of a poker blog, but not surprisingly given the situation, I've got more to say and much more on my mind about the situation today. So as of late Thursday, word is that the U.S. government is working overtime to orchestrate a sale of Lehman Brothers to whomever they can find to buy the beleaguered bank. Bank of America has been mentioned among the large U.S. financial institutions, and HSBC and Barclay's, long rumored to be Lehman suitors back when the company was actually worth something, lead the list of potential acquirors on the foreign bank side. Who knows where this will eventually end up.

One of the interesting rumors I read this morning is that the Fed, the U.S. Treasury and Lehman management -- somehow still the same motherfuckers who got the company in to this whole mess over the past several years and didn't do shit to get them out of it -- are exploring a possible three-way deal, selling the investment management unit to one party, the investment banking operations to another, and the mortgage assets to a third party. Now to this, I ask Who the fuck would ever want to buy those last two parts? We're talking about a combination of the investment banking business and the real estate assets that are valued at negative $5 to 6 billion right by in the market. I don't know the split between the two, but does it really matter at this point? It's obvious the company has or is currently in process of losing most of its investment banking clients. The capital markets (fixed income and equities) division of the company has been crushed by huge losses, poor trading volumes and a focus on fixed income which has seen about 90% of its revenues evaporate over the past twelve months. Who wants to buy those businesses now, without the crown jewel of Neuberger Berman to help cushion the blow? And now Lehman wants me to believe they might have a buyer for their distressed real estate holdings as well? Puh-lease. That one my friends, I'm not just not seeing.

But I have to say, I think the most interesting aspect to this whole talk of a government-orchestrated buyout of Lehman Brothers today is the notion that the U.S. government might once again have to step in with a bailout using public funds. This would be after a similar move with Bear Stearns back in March, and then just last weekend's government seizure and capital influx to both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Bear bailout basically involved the government standing behind and agreeing to take on the risk of the last $29 billion of the $30 billion troubled asset portfolio of Bear's that JP Morgan took on when the government "convinced" JPM to buy out Bear to keep it from officially going bankrupt. The Fannie and Freddie actions are even more socialist-sounding, with the government stepping in and flat-out taking over control of the two mortgage giants, at a total cost to U.S. taxpayers of potentially a couple hundred billion dollars. And now many people are saying the government should once again step in to bail out Lehman Brothers as well. Let's discuss.

First and foremost, I completely hate the idea of government bailouts in general, and especially government bailouts of public companies in the financial sector, whose greed and thirst for profits led them to make literally billions of dollars in profits and get all nice and fat -- for them and for their shareholders -- when things were fine, but then as soon as things go bad, then they need the government, and not the fat cats or those fat shareholders to bear the brunt of the losses. That shit to me is just plain sick. Frankly, this article right here I think sums up my feelings on the issue better than anyone else I've seen and far better than I could do it myself.

So all that above being said, I do need to point out for those who don't understand this, the government truly had no choice but to bail out Fannie and Freddie. Between them, these two institutions hold some 75% of all mortgages in this country. Think about that one for a minute. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the fallout from that kind of failure would compeltely crush the the average consumer, the debt markets and most other aspects of the U.S. financial system, probably for years to come, and the end result of all that would be far, far worse than if something was done to backstop the troubles. Of course, where the fuck was the government over the past 5-10 years to stop these two institutions from being in such a position that their failure could actually happen and could actually impact the system in this way? Nowhere, because the companies were making money. Greedy hand over greedy fucking fist. So that's a problem, and one that the current administration should defnitely have to answer to. But given where we were at a few months ago, there at that point was just no choice for the government other than to step in and take over. Those failures would crush the system, and like I said the effect on the U.S. economy and on the financial markets around the world would have been exponentially magnified beyond its true scope because of the fear, the panic and the general collapse that would have ensued.

The better question on whether or not there should be government bailouts I think relate to the investment banks. I think a strong argument can be made that, back in March, the outright failure of Bear Stearns over essentially a two-day period would have had a similarly crushing effect on the financial system and on the U.S. and global economy. Not truly similar in scope to that of Fannie and Freddie, which simply could not be borne by the U.S. or really anywhere in the world without a Great Depression-type of panic effect the likes of which no one reading this today has ever seen, but it probably would have been very, very bad. For whatever reason, I find it harder to swallow bailing out these investment banks though, because unlike Fannie and Freddie whose very existence has always been ultimately to provide mortgages to U.S. residents, a bank like Bear or Lehman Brothers only exists for one purpose: to make money. And that is exactly what they did, for many many years prior to Bear's failure earlier in 2008. I'm too lazy to go and add it up right now, but suffice it to say that Bear Stearns made billions and billions of dollars in profits over the several years prior to this year, and their CEOs made hundreds of millions, the stock grew by billions, the large shareholders got rich off of this profit machine, everything was driven by the huge sums of cash this business spewed out. That was the whole point. I just have a real fucking problem with the government stepping in when things go south because these greedy, hubris fucking bastards' investments all went south and suddenly the whole profit machine broke down.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, at the time I was in favor of the government stepping in to guarantee $29 billion of Bear's troubled debts, because at the time -- and perhaps this judgment is clouded a bit by my working directly in the investment banking industry myself when it happened -- but it seemed to me that a Bear collapse would have been catastrophic enough to parties all around the world, big and smaller, rich and poor, to warrant the government preventing the calamity from happening.

But now I think I see the error of my ways. In retrospect, which of course nobody knew at the time, but in hindsight it is clear to me now that the government should have let Bear fail, and taken on the risk of whatever fallout there was from the 5th largest investment bank in America collapsing. The unwinding of transactions, the massive losses for some of the institutions and other companies and parties most affected would have been tremendous. The losses to Bear's counterparties would have been in some cases catastrophic, and the shock to the financial system at large would have been felt far and wide to say the least. Surely the stock market would have tanked unlike anything else seen so far since the credit crunch happened. But you know what? It should have. The whole house of cards has come crumbling down over the past several months in this country, and a collapse like this, with the unimaginable lack of foresight and oversight from this country's financial leaders and current administration -- and that means idiot Bush and the laughable Congress over the past several years -- when it comes right down to it, is worthy of having caused a huge correction in the stock markets, plus a lot of associated panic and fear to go along with it. We should have been afraid, we should have been panicked back in March. But the government stepped in to stop the full effects from being felt, and look where that got us. That $29 billion backstop from the Federal Reserve back in March to cover Bear Stearns' further losses on their horrible loan portfolio ended up just being the tip of the fucking iceberg, with the government now an additional $200 billion in the hole (of taxpayers' money, of course) to prop up the whole consumer morgage system in the country, on a bailout that believe you me really had to be done.

But now the vultures are circling again over Lehman Brothers, and once again the socialist bitches in this country who don't even realize how socialist they really are, are crying out for the government to step in and backstop Lehman Brothers' debts and losses for whichever financial institution they can convince to buy Lehman on the cheap here. And frankly, without a government guarantee or some form of government protection, there is a decent chance that nobody wants to go near the shitstorm known as Lehman's global mortgage portfolio and the company simply falters, dies and ends up bankrupt in a matter of days. And you all know if you've read here this week how broken up the whole situation and that whole thought makes me, having many of my good friends, hard-working and truly top-notch people and employees, people I myself hired over just the past several months, still stuck there right now inside that building I can see right out my window here. To think of those people all losing their jobs with the company that I know and love going completely kaput in a matter of a week is unsettling and nauseating to say the least.

But you know what? I don't want to see the government step in. I truly hope for the best for Lehman Brothers the company, and for every single person I know there who does not deserve to be burdened and affected by all this bullshit. But I've come to the conclusion over the past 24 hours or so that another government bailout is the worst idea I can imagine right now. Right now the last thing we need is more government action in private enterprise, and more taxpayer money being used to backstop the nasty effects of the greed and hubris of a small number of super-rich asshole leaders who should be jailed for their horrible actions over the past year or two. The U.S. people already don't realize the tremendous price they're going to pay over the coming years as we all -- every one of you out there reading this -- struggle to pay for the ridiculous cost of these bailouts in the form of higher taxes and lesser services from the government. $229 billion dollars and counting just isn't easy to come by or just overlook -- and believe me, there will be more bailouts, with companies like Washington Mutual, the nation's largest thrift bank, already essentially finished -- and we will be paying for this for a long, long time in this country. So I don't even want to think about the government stepping in to back any the $60-70 billion of distressed mortgages on Lehman's books. If they can't find a buyer for this dog at $3.50 a share or whever the stock opens today, then I think, sad as this makes me, the government ought to let market forces drop the stock to $2 a share, to $1 a share, or lower. Eventually, make the price of buying Lehman Brothers cheap enough, and someone will probably be willing to step up and take on the risk. And if worst comes to worst, and nobody wants to take on that admittedly unquantifiable risk for any price, then I think the only real choice is to let Lehman go away. It's a horrible outcome for all the people I know and respect and care about over there, but what else can I say. Now is not the time for another governmental bailout, at least not of Lehman Brothers. Six months ago when Bear collapsed, governmental intervention seemed at the time like a necessary evil to me. Right now, it's just not. Sad but true.

Oh and by the way -- and I know this probably opens a whole can of worms here from all the diggheads who've been arguing politics for the last few weeks on their blogs -- but if the American people elect a man as President who thinks raising taxes on anyone right now is the right move, then they will get what they deserve. It's fine to vote blindly party-line like basically every single person I've seen writing about the election on their blogs seems ready to do, but if you vote blind and without thought, you will elect a blind and without-thought leader who will act blindly and without thought. Please, I urge you, try to use your eyes and your brains this November.

Panic

Too upset to write about poker today. Lehman shares are down another 40% this morning, and the calls from my friends there have turned from sad and scared, to panicked and frantic. Seeing five tv camera crews outside the front doors of the headquarters now two days in a row in the morning as I walk by on my way to my new job isn't helping matters either. Meanwhile, this story is exactly what I am most concerned about with the stock plunging yet again for the fourth day in a row -- and once you go and read that story, keep in mind that those figures are just for the period ending on August 31. That is, a good two weeks before all the shit has his the fan this week. Just wait till the numbers come out for the month of September for this stuff. And if you read between the lines in this story as well, once again I fear the writing is on the wall for the 160-year-old investment bank. Does that last story, the the optimistic title and all, not sound exactly like the dreaded "vote of confidence" that usually comes from ownership a day or two before firing a head coach or manager of a sports team?

Anyways, that's all I've got for today. I finished The Poker Tournament Formula II this morning on the train on the way into work, and I have got tons of stuff coming from that book that you will see here in the near future. I just have to wait until I have it in me to write it all down.

Gotta Know When to Fold 'em

Sorry guys, I know this is a poker blog and of course I am all about writing about poker, but this Lehman stuff is really on my mind today and I'm going to write some more about it today. This is actually stuff that's been swirling around my head for some time over the past couple of months, and me writing this all down is really much more for me than for you guys, so bear with me. I promise this will not turn in to a Lehman Brothers blog or a stock market blog or anything. But if you're at all interested in my perspective on things with the biggest debacle in the stock market right now, feel free to read on for my thoughts.

So I just hung up from listening in on the big conference call this morning that Lehman Brothers held for the investing public regarding its future plans and the truly hideous quarter it reported today. My lord what a clusterfuck. The company lost more than $5.60 a share in Q3, more than basically all of the analysts were predicting even after the company obviously leaked information to various parts of the market over the past month or so that the quarter was going to be truly fugly. One of the highlights of the quarter included an astonishing $7.8 billion of gross writedowns, by far the worst quarter yet in the company's history -- surpassing Q2 of this year and now marking only the second time in the company's history as a public company that it has posted a loss -- and bringing the company's total asset writedowns in the past year to around $14 billion. The total loss so far in 2008 is nearly $7 billion for the firm as a whole, and who knows where things go from here, as fiscal Q4 which just started Sep. 1 has not exactly begun with a bang in the financial markets, so say the least.

But the more disturbing part of this morning's announcement from Lehman management is the lack of any concrete new news regarding the company's plans to fix the problems it faces going forward. Obviously the company needs excess capital -- 8 to 10 billion dollars worth by some analysts' estimates -- to cover the huge losses it has experienced and continues to experience this year. And yet, there is no word of any stock sales, to foreign investors in Asia, the Middle East or otherwise. No news of a concrete sale of the asset management business that has been rumored and now appears to be true according to this morning's conference call. And no word of sales of any of the troubled mortgage assets held by the company, in the small sum of, oh, just another $70 billion worth.

Read that again. Seventy billion dollars of troubled mortgages held by Lehman Brothers on its books right now. Still. One of my favorite parts of the company's plans to deal with this mess is the new idea to spin off these mortgage assets into a separate company called Real Estate Investments Global. Now tell me, who the fizzity fuck is gonna want to own that piece of doggie turd? They couldn't find people to invest in that pig no matter what they tried. So what are they going to do to find buyers for that separate public company? Simple! They're going to spin it off to the existing shareholders of Lehman Brothers stock. Basically force the creation of a market of buyers for this garbage by spinning it for free directly to the existing shareholders. Most of whom who have a single brain cell in their fucking heads will immediately sell the shit, I'm sure, but if it allows Lehman to get the troubled assets off of their books, then hey, just go for it. This is very similar to a move Lehman made earlier this summer when it spun off a couple of new entities it called "hedge funds", and basically funded them with a bunch of risky, hard to value, overvalued and troubled assets that Lehman itself desperately wanted to get off of its own books. Never mind the fact that these two spinoff entities were all composed of Lehman employees, using Lehman computers, networks and other assets, and all sat in Lehman's office space. But with those moves, the troubled assets got off of Lehman's books, and that's all this quick-fix CEO was looking for at the time. Well now it has all come home to roost.

One thing that Lehman specifically denied all through its conference call this morning is that the company is not seeing capital outflows from its asset management business and that counterparties are still perfectly willing to trade with it despite its recent troubles and despite the company's stock literally plunging 50% in Tuesday's trading action. Well you know what? I'm gonna have to call a big fat fucking bullshit on that one. You tell me -- if you had $10 million invested in Lehman Brothers before this week began, you tell me, is that money still sitting with Lehman now? To be more realistic, what if you had ten billion dollars with Lehman, as many of the large money managers, pension and hedge funds have under management? Is all $10 billion still sitting in Lehman's coffers somewhere? When there are plenty of other, more stable financial institutions out there where you could keep that money and not have the completely constant worry of whether your money will still be there tomorrow, and whether the company will still even be in business tomorrow? Of course not. For the company to say they're not seeing any outflows is not surprising, and I can't blame them for lying. They have to lie on this one point. If the CEO gets on the phone and tells the world that customers are taking their money out, then suddenly this is Bear Stearns, and the company will be gone -- yes, gone -- in two days just like Bear was. But for anyone to believe this story is preposterous to a significant degree. Of course people are taking their money and running from Lehman right now. And they would be fools not to, given what's gone on with the stock over the past year, over the past six months, over the past 3 months, over the past month, and now especially over the past few days.

Moreover, Goldman and Merrill and Morgan Stanley can come out all they want like they did after the close of trading on Tuesday and claim that they are all still willing counterparties to trades with Lehman Brothers on the other side. Suuuuuuuuure they are. Goldman and Merrill and Morgan may be a lot of things, but they aren't stupid, and they don't just throw money down the toilet when they clearly know that's what it is. I'm sure, thanks in no small part to extreme pressure from the Federal Reserve over the past 24 hours and over the past several months, that these other three large-cap investment banks are still willing to do some trades with Lehman, generally speaking. But if you think after Tuesday's trading action that this morning, Goldman is lined up to enter into, say, a 10-year interest rate swap with Lehman Brothers worth $15 billion, then you my friend are a jackass. What these companies will do, while still being willing to enter into small, short-term trades with Lehman, is they will immediately begin pulling in their exposure to Lehman by limiting the number of large trades, and certainly the number of long-term trades they will enter into with the company. They have to. They could arguably be sued by shareholders for not doing this, given how obvious and prevalent and public the problems with Lehman's future have become now this week. So sure they all say the right thing, the thing the Fed I'm sure coerced them all into proclaiming publicly yesterday after the market closed, but behind closed doors these companies are acting to preserve their own capital as much as they can, which is exactly what they should be doing. If you were a shareholder in Goldman Sachs right now, would you want them taking $15 billion of exposure to Lehman's troubles in a 10-year swap transaction? Think about that one for about 0.00005 seconds.

I've never written about this before here, but one of the saddest things that's gone on at Lehman Brothers during the past year as the credit crunch has deeply impacted business at the bank is the paralysis among so many of the employees there, who know deep down they should be looking for employment elsewhere but who simply cannot get themselves to unfreeze and take the plunge. And I say "sad" because that's just what it is, people who are simply paralyzed by fear, or by circumstances, or both into inaction. I personally know it to be a fact that most of the people at any real level of seniority at Lehman have been making way way more money than they are otherwise worth in the marketplace. This is a cold, hard fact coming from someone who has implicit knowledge of exactly what I speak about here. My old boss, for example, I know what he does and I know what those jobs pay elsewhere outside of the investment banking world, and I can tell you with absolutely no hesitation at all that he has made a good 200, 250k more a year at Lehman over the past couple of years than he would ever make at any job he could ever get if he leaves right now. Ever. He probably makes a lot more there right now than he will ever, ever make again in any job in the rest of his life. No joke and no exaggeration there. I also know that his boss makes about 350k to 400k more than he could ever make if he left Lehman Brothers right now, doing what he does. I mean it, I am talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars more than what they are really worth. And that guy's boss, whom I also personally know, makes a good 500k or more above what he could expect to make anywhere else.

Now putting aside the obvious problems associated with the fact that this company who is quickly running out of cash is somehow paying all of its employees two to three times or more than what they're actually worth, this mass overpayment of the senior-level people has contributed more than anything else to the paralysis among employees that I personally observed over the past year at the bank. Take the first guy I mentioned above as an example. He's known for a while that things are bad -- beyond bad even, horrible is probably a better word -- at the company for some time. For months, literally. He knows that the prospects for the company recovering to any semblance of its former self, and the prospects for him continuing to make the money he's been making there these past few years, are very low. He knows this. But he has been making literally $250,000 more than he could make if he leaves for any other company on the earth. Period. So in his mind, if there is even a 1% chance that his job at Lehman Brothers might persist, and that he might be able one day in a few years when things have calmed down and perhaps Lehman finds a way to survive to get back to making that kind of redonkulously inflated compensation again, he feels like he simply cannot leave. He can't bring himself to give up this ridiculous cash cow that's been dropped in his lap over the past few years. Think about it -- the thought of him willingly leaving that 250k a year on the table and taking a job for the "measly" money that he is actually worth for what he does, while someone else gets his grossly overpaying job, makes him want to throw up in his mouth. He can't face it. His boss can't face leaving his 600k a year job for the 200k he is worth anywhere else in the world, if there is even the slightest chance that he could have stayed and kept making 600k a year (and more) for the rest of his life if things turn around. The thought of giving these ridiculously over-inflated incomes up is making all the people making any kind of big bucks at the firm freeze in their tracks. And I have to tell you, sitting around and watching that go on with everyone around me as clear as a bell, that has to be one of the saddest things of all to me given my own perspective on things. These people just can't bring themselves to leave, even though they've seen the writing on the wall for quite some time.

Which takes me to I guess my last point for today, and after all this there actually is a poker point to it all. It's like the famous Kenny Rogers song, "The Gambler" -- what does he say in that? "You've gotta know when to hold em, know when to fold em." Maybe my poker experience helps me to see these things more clearly than some others out there, I don't know. But as a rule I know when I'm beat. I know when to hold em, and I also know when to fold 'em. Now it's true, I'm not making as much money as a lot of the people I mentioned earlier in this post at Lehman, and maybe my thought process would have been different if I were. But I don't think so, and I know it shouldn't have been. I know the people I mentioned above will never again make the kind of money at Lehman that they'd gotten used to over the past few years. As the absolute best case scenario -- something which I would rate as maybe a 5-10% chance at this point, nothing more -- maybe Lehman somehow finds a way to remain independent through all this bullshit and maybe in some number of years -- and I don't mean anytime real soon -- these guys could be making some real money again. But for me, I'm not interested in waiting five years or more for that, a 5-10% shot as it is, and I knew I had other options. So I got out, found a better job at a far more stable company at this point, in a far more stable industry, and in the end I will clearly make more money at the new place over the next few years than I would staying in the investment banking world. But so many of the people I spent the past three years of my life working with just don't get it. They've got down the part about knowing when to hold 'em, but they just dont know when to fold 'em. But just like I can lay down those pocket Tens on the board of TJQ when I've got two allins ahead of me and one player still to act behind me after there was a raise and a reraise already before the flop, I hung 'em up at the bank and have moved on to better things. I can only hope most of my old friends at Lehman can do the same soon.

"You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done."

No Utility Today

I had another post already written for today talking some more about utility odds in tournaments and responding to some of the commentary to my post from yesterday, but you know what? Fuck utility odds. Just look at this shit instead:

LEHMAN BROS HLD(NYSE: LEH)
Last Trade: 9.29
Trade Time: 11:59AM ET Tuesday, Sep 9, 2008
Change: - 4.86 (34.35%)
Prev Close: 14.15
Open: 12.92
Day's Range: 8.00 - 13.10
52wk Range: 12.02 - 67.73
Volume: 137,421,857
Avg Vol (3m): 58,416,800
Market Cap: 6.86B

Is that fucking sick or what?

See, this is exactly why I recently left this company for a new employer. I saw a company that had a ton of problems, sure. Anyone could see that. And I think I could have lived with that on its own, maybe, if things seemed to be being dealt with adequately. But the biggest problem and the biggest reason I felt the need to get the fuck out of there is that I saw a senior management team at Lehman that was focused solely on denying its problems rather than doing whatever it had to do to fix them.

Look at Merrill Lynch -- a couple of months back they sold friggin $30 billion of shitty mortgages for literally 22 cents on the dollar, and at that they even financed 16 cents of the 22 cents on the dollar that they sold these for. It was a massive, sick haircut for them and a huge black mark for management and for the firm as a whole, but it got the company rid of a significant portion of the huge problem assets that had been plaguing the company for some time and were perceived (correctly, obviously) to be likely to continue plaguing them if they didnt get the mortgage assets off their books. So their management team bit the bullet and they just did it.

Lehman's CEO, on the other hand, has been reportedly shopping between $15-40 billion worth of Lehman's own messy mortgage portfolio for the past two months, basically ever since the day that the Merrill announcement first hit the wires. But by all reports, the donkey in charge at Lehman refuses to take more than a 5-10% discount on the current value of the mortgages, even while Merrill, a company in not nearly as desperate of shape as Lehman, took an 80% or more hit on its own very similar portfolio.

Similarly, Lehman has reportedly been in talks with KDB and a few other large banks in Korea and China about acquiring a controlling stake in Lehman (too lazy and pissed and upset to link these, but the stories are everywhere if you do a simple search on Google or Yahoo! Finance), and now those deals have fallen through, which is the proximate cause for today's huge, sickening selloff. But why have those talks ended without the capital infusion that Lehman so truly desperately needs? Because reportedly the donkey CEO is insisting on selling the shares for 50% above Lehman's book value. Without getting into the details of exactly how book value is calculated, suffice it to say for this dicussion that book value is a paper value, an accountant's calculation, based on the value of assets in the company at the levels they are currently marked to on the books. Lehman's book value is currently $34 a share. So the CEO basically wants someone to buy 50% of the shares in the company for $51 a share, when it is currently trading even before today at $13. Smarrrrrrrrrrrrt.

Current leadership at Lehman Brothers refuses to accept the basic fact of business that when a seller is a distressed seller, meaning that everyone out there, including all the potential buyers of what they're trying to sell, knows that the seller is desperate to conclude a transaction, that hurts the price that someone is willing to pay for whatever is on the market. This isn't my opinion, this isn't something which a man or a management team or an entire company can just "decide" does not apply to them. It just does. Lehman management also refuses to accept that it is at this point commong fucking knowledge that the company is not worth anywhere near the value of assets as currently listed on their books. These hubris-infused fools have literally sat by insisting on the world for their low-value assets and highly dubious stock price, all while the rest of the financial markets and now Lehman's own share price have crumbled all around them. And what are they left with now? That's right -- absolutely nothing.

It is criminal how negligently poor this company's response has been to all the bullshit of the past year. What Lehman's leadership is doing and has already done to so many thousands of the company's employees' lives cannot be forgiven or even forgotten. I care about the damage done to the investors in the company's shares over the past few years, sure, but at least those people knew when they were investing that they were taking a gamble. Anyone who's gotten in at any stock price over the past 14 or 15 months has certainly been (or should have been) well aware of the credit crisis and at least generally the ramifications that could be had on the world's big investment banks. But it's the employees of the company, whose jobs, livelihoods, whose families' financial security depends on the company, whom I feel for the most.

Right now I just hope that management of Lehman Brothers gets what's coming to them, either in this life or the next. Somebody should be held accountable not for the credit crisis per se, which surely cannot be blamed on any one person and obviously not on Lehman Brothers specifically, but for the reaction (or total lack thereof) that has gone down at Lehman over the past year, and more specifically over the past eight or nine months, that has now led us to that beautiful stock price quote at the top of this post.

Talk about a true real life donkey. Somebody get this guy a poker blog right away please.

Faceoff With a Pro, and $T Decisions

The suckouts continue to dog me fast and furious on full tilt, as I have managed to amass large stacks early in most of the mtt's I have run over the past week, only to find a way to get beat by a 2- or 3-outer somewhere just short of the money in most of the opportunities I have had of late to post another big score. Thankfully somehow I have remained profitable over the past week or two nonetheless, thanks to some more nice $T hits as well as a successful run at the O8 1-2 pot limit cash tables on full tilt.

Other than the cash play, my most exciting story of the weekend was probably winning one of these $75 buyin supersats to the Sunday night $535 buyin satellite to the 25k PLO heads-up tournament full tilt is running. Unlike the $26 buyin variety, of which I have played a few as well to a little bit of success and which are limited to 32 runners, the $75 buyins are not surprisingly a much better deal in that the players are only limited to 8. Thus, the formula is simple: win three heads-up PLO matches, and you've got your 535 bucks.

Making this one more fun for me over the weekend was the list of players, which included out of my seven opponents two guys whom I already had marked as uber fonkeys from my Omaha cash play, plus red FTP pro Chip Jett, a guy who I've seen on tv from time to time. My first heads-up match was against a guy I did not know, and I dispatched him in 19 hands when he refused to bet the pot on the turn in a spot where I had a large draw to a set, top two pair, a straight and a flush. When my somewhat obvious flush draw filled on the river, I made a large pot-sized bet and the guy simply could not lay down his turned straight. Fast forward a couple of nasty chat comments later (and some goading from me, natch), and I was on to waiting for my second opponent. At the time only Chip Jett's match was still running, with Chip on the ropes with under 900 chips to his opponent's 2100+.

Well it wasn't maybe ten minutes later when Chip Jett showed up a my second opponent. I guess he had come back quick and won, something that frankly is just not that uncommon in a game like Omaha where there are so many big draws and so many come-from-behind victories. It's always exciting to have a shot at a professional in a heads-up context, and frankly I have always thought this is one of the very best aspects of playing on full tilt. Chip is a player with $1.9 million in lifetime tournament winnings according to full tilt and 33 major tournament final tables, so I figured I was gonna have some fun with this one. And a fun time I did have.

For all seven hands the match lasted.

Hand 1 saw me raise before the flop to 90 and Chip fold:



In Hand 2 I checked preflop and then bet the flop with an oesd after Chip checked there too, also taking down a small pot and preserving my early chip lead (pun intended, what the heck):



Hand 3 was my first loss of the match when I called Chip's raise preflop with JJ66 rainbow, not a hand I love but in heads-up play I figured a good shot to make a winning set. We both checked after I whiffed the flop, but then Chip bet the pot on the turn and I had to lay it down with too many possibilities that all beat me:



With Chip and I basically even once again after three hands, Hand 4 saw me reverse what Chip did with me in Hand 3, as I raised preflop with a pair of Queens in my hand, Chip called, and then I bet pot on the flop with the overpair plus a Queen-high flush draw. Chip folded and I won 180 chips back:



I called a minraise from Chip to see the flop in Hand #5 with a soooted Ace, but had to fold to Chip's c-bet when I essentially whiffed:



In Hand 6, I once again raised preflop with KKxx in my hand, Chip called, and annoyingly an Ace flopped. Thankfully Chip checked with me on the flop, and the turn filled my inside straight, giving me the current nuts plus the nut flush draw with one of my Kings. I bet 540 chips, the full pot, and Chip called. Unfortunately the board paired on the end, and when I pushed 'em in, Chip folded pretty quick. I'm sure he had an Ace in his hand but I didn't get to see since he folded to my turn bet:



When Hand #7 started, I was already up in chips about 1850 to 1150 and obviously I want to eliminate a professional player with lots of tournament success as quickly as I can. I was dealt AKJ9 with the J9 soooted in diamonds, and I figured this hand was worth calling a preflop raise from Chip just based on high-card strength and nut straight possibilities alone. The flop came K64 with two diamonds, giving me top pair and the 3rd-nut flush draw, which I figure has to be a good flush in heads-up play. Chip bet out about half the size of the pot, and I went for the pot-sized raise, thinking I was probably ahead or at least very close. Chip re-reraised me allin, and I suddenly figured my top pair and/or 3rd-nut flush draw were likely no longer best, but for only another half of the current pot and with a chance to eliminate a tough player like this, there was no way I was laying down there. We flipped up our cards:



Where Chip surprised me holding just the overpair Aces plus a 6 for an alternative second pair. His pair of Aces was currently head, but with two cards to come, I had a ton of outs to my flush, to trip Kings or to Kings-over that did not hit Chip's hand to give him Aces-over. I had so many outs in fact, that I was actually a decent favorite, making this a great spot for me to call Chip's final half-pot reraise, again especially getting in at almost 60-40 to eliminate a guy with nearly $2 million in tournament winnings.



As you can see from the final screenshot above, I hit the Queen of diamonds on the turn to make my flush, and I had eliminated Chip Jett from the supersat, advancing to the final heads-up match where the winner would take down the $535 seat, and the loser would grab the booby prize of 17 whole dollars. I was overjoyed to see that my hu opponent in the final match was a guy I already had noted from a previous mtt satellite as calling with anything. The specific thing I had noted in this event was him calling me down with 3rd pair shit kicker on the river in a holdem match, after I had checked just one time in the hand. Now that right there is a great example of how some good notes can really work for you, in that this gave me a great plan to just bet my good hands and whenever else I thought I was ahead on the assumption that this guy was going to call call call. And that's exactly what he did. It took me 13 hands, which saw me get out to the early lead after he twice called my pot-bets on the flop only to fold on the turn. Eventually I won the match by hitting a flush on river when he had turned an inside straight with 54xx in his hand when I happened to be holding a 5 too, which made me think it less likely that a heads-up opponent would also hold one of the other three fives in the deck. So my read that he was bluffing was wrong, but I still had 9 outs to flush him plus three outs to make a higher straight, and as I mentioned I spiked the heart at the river to take it all down:



Blooooom! And then the best decision I made the entire tournament through I think came right after this, when I considered for maybe less than a minute before unregistering immediately for the actual $535 satellite and just keeping the cash to play another day. Why play the best Omaha players in the world for $535, where the odds are exactly 1 in 50 of me winning a dam thing? Answer: I have no idea. So I quickly unregistered, pocketed the $535 and I say thank you to this guy, whose advice a long time ago on playing the weekly 1k on full tilt has alway stuck with me, and lord knows my roll has been noticeably better off for it.

Oh by the way, today we got our fucking house. The lease is signed, we have the keys, and we took the Hammer Girls up to see their new abode today, their new bedrooms, new backyard, and especially the awesome new porch, where we sat and ate bagel sandwiches for lunch together as we start the next chapter in the lives of the Hammer Family. All this a full three days before the lease on our current apartment of the past five years was set to expire. It's a kickass house in the 'burbs, and while I still have my trepidations about suburban life in general, it's not like I don't know if I can hack it. I spent years 4-18 of my life in suburban Philadelphia, and my wife in suburban DC, so I know how it goes. But it's a great place, far better than the one we were so trying to get for the past month, and it just goes to show what a little desperation and a lot of hard work can accomplish in a very short amount of time.

And my wife thought we wouldn't have time to find a good place. Pshaw!

Big Night of a Different Kind

Wow did I have another big night earlier this week in online poker. Even though I managed to record a 2k+ swing on the day, it was completely different from every other big night I have ever had. Let me explain.

So as I've mentioned here recently, I've got a lot going on in my life right now outside of the poker world. Most urgently just now, I am in the unenivable position of needing to find a house to live in in the suburbs of New York City. Actually, that would be fine, but the problem is that I basically have only a couple of weeks to do it. How I let myself get into this situation is a loooong story for another day, but suffice it to say that literally with every passing day, the pressure on me to figure something out quick about a huge decision like this grows exponentially.

Anyways, long story short, earlier this week was a baaaaaad day. We thought we had this place, then we didn't get it, and then some events ensued that led me to some serious life tilt. I mean, top two or three days of life tilt since I started writing this blog some time ago. I was flipping out, as my friends from the girly chat could attest to. I had completely lost it.

And this is where my big day of poker comes in. In the olden days, I was having such an awful night, the old me would have gone and lost $2000 at the online tables over a short amount of time, and the sickest part is I would have enjoyed doing it too. I know -- I've been there before. Few buyins at $400 nlh (or higher!), not even giving myself a chance, betting the pot with every possible draw and stacking off with bullshit in my hand, plus throw in a handful of auto-donks at $110 and $220 sitngos to boot, pushing every ace-rag or sooted bullshit just like a good blogger should. Trust me when I say, I know from experience, that night was a $2000+ loss just waiting to happen. My roll can handle it, especially after last weekend's $T explosion for me, and I know how these nights have gone in the past. There just would have been no stopping me.

But instead, the other night saw the new me trump the old me as far as bankroll management. I 100% realized the mindset I was in, and I consciously forced myself to stay away from anything that could possibly cost me any significant piece of my very hard-earned roll. Instead I took a suggestion from a fellow blogger in the girly and played just one table of $10 buyin PLO, trying as hard as I could to lay one of those typical PLO bad beats on some cocknose as my way of dealing with the life tilt I was experiencing. And you know what? It worked! I felt much better after maybe half an hour of chasing every inside straight draw and bottom-two pair bullshit.

Grand total from my 30 minutes of blowing off steam at the poker tables? A loss of 55 cents. Adjusting for the rake I probably lost about a quarter while I got the exact same release that I used to get from blowing hundreds and even thousands of dollars, over basically the exact same period of time.

It was a 2k+ swing for me last night, trust me. If i had a screenshot to show the two grand I saved on the day, I would most definitely post it for posterity's sake. But believe me when I say, the next morning it feels fucking good to gaze at the ole full tilt balance and like what I see.

New MATH, BBTwo Scoring and FTOPS Update

Well, it's another Monday, and that can mean only one thing:



Mondays at the Hoy, tonight, 10pm et on full tilt. Password as always is "hammer". And tonight, after what I think was a very fun and successful experiment with some 6-max nlh in last week's Hoy, this week we will once again be doing things a little bit different. For all you ring game donkeys out there, we are back to full ring instead of 6-max play for this week. But tonight, for a change, we are implementing a different kind of change that is all but sure to lead to the best, most skilled poker player winning the MATH tournament this week: Turbo!! That's right -- tonight's Mondays at the Hoy tournament will be a $26 deep stacks Turbo no-limit holdem tournament, meaning that the blinds (and antes) will escalate at the faster pace compared to the normal blogger events.

The change to Turbo format for this week only will surely help end the event at an earlier time which I think is good for just about everyone. My hope is that some of you east coast donkeys out there who might never have played before because you know going in that you can't afford to stay up until 1:30 in the morning playing an online poker tournament, can now get in there and play for your chance to sit in the BBTwo Aussie Millions Tournament of Champions freeroll in late December for a shot at an 18k Aussie Millions prize package. Starting at 10pm ET, there is every reason to believe that the tournament will be down to near the final table or so after two full hours of turbo blinds escalation this evening, and it should be done entirely with 2 1/2 hours is my guess. Maybe less. And you know what, even though turbo events obviously favor the lucky at the expense of the players whose higher skill level would normally allow them to wait for strong hands and then get paid off with them, there is still a definite skill to turbo events. I should know -- I've played hundreds of them. And if you haven't noticed, these BBTwo-enabled blogger tournaments have already been luckfests as it is thanks to the larger field sizes involved, so I don't really think we're changing much here in practical reality, other than the length of this week's tournament as well as the specific suite of skills needed to win out (aggression is much more important in a turbo event, for obvious reasons). So come on out and play tonight in the first Turbo BBT tournament in the history of time, where the 11th seat to the Tournament of Champions will be awarded sometime probably shortly after midnight.

And one other thing while I'm on the topic of the BBTwo. I've seen it kinda tangentially referenced in a few blog posts, and I've had discussions about this point in various girly chats over the past few weeks since the BBTwo has been running, but for the record I just want to definitively acknowledge here the obvious truth about the new scoring system for the BBT: it works. Brilliantly. How many people have you heard bitching about the scoring system this time around? How many people have you seen or heard others talking about seeing playing sub-optimal poker, just in an attempt to reach "the points"? The advent of a Tournament of Champions, combined with awarding points to only a sensible number of the top finishers as opposed to any donkey who came in 41st in an 83-person Mookie tournament, has left us with 100% exactly what I was clamoring for so often during the first BBT: the players are clearly not even considering the scoring system when they are playing the game. And as I've written here previously several times, that my friends should be the goal of any scoring system in a poker tournament -- it should only operate in the background, and never possibly apply to anyone's actual play in an actual tournament. Nowadays, these tournaments are running 100% just like the always did before the BBT came along -- tons of people are going out early, and there's not a single donk I can see trying to "fold to the points" or some shit like that. In short, we have completely fixed the scoring problem from the first BBT, and with the ToC idea for the 18k grand prize, there is very little doubt that people are playing the games just the way they should be.

OK so to recap briefly the poker action from this weekend. Friday night was FTOPS #3 in pot-limit holdem, $216 buyin. Unfortunately, less than 10 minutes in I found my old friend QQ on the button. So I reraised the early position raiser preflop and got called. I bet the total raggy heads up flop and got called. I then checked the raggy turn to try to elicit a bet, which is exactly what I got. I put in a substantial raise and I got reraised allin. At this point I would have had 600 chips left (starting stacks just five minutes earlier had been 3000) in what was basically already a 5000-chip pot, so even though at that point I knew I was beat, I called off the rest in the hopes that he was some kind of a TPTK donkey or maybe a small overpair donkey. He wasn't. He was a big overpair donkey -- KK. And IGH less than ten minutes in to FTOPS #3. That right there was a terrible play by me, and not one that I usually make. Yes it was obviously a massive setup hand and there's no way I don't lose a ton of chips with QQ against KK on a completely raggy flop. But going broke to that hand was bad, bad poker by me, and despite the setup it's my job to minimize the damage just as much as it is to maximize the payoff when I'm the guy with KK in that spot, and in that I failed miserably in FTOPS #3. Jeciimd did manage to cash, the only blogger I saw who cashed in the pot-limit holdem FTOPS tournament, ending somewhere near the middle-top of the top 100 as I recall for some $420 for his efforts.

At the same time on Friday was the Friday night donkament on full tilt, where I played loose and had fun and busted some people by playing some low crappy connectors and flopping to them for a change. Eventually Mr. KOD himself lived up to his name and called my allin preflop raise with 52o when down to 3-handed for all his chips. Suffice it to say that his two pairs by the turn card were enough to send me to the rail in the gheyest possible fashion at the hands of the luckbox who should really be known more as KOBD (King of Blog Deleters) more than anything else. But, amazingly KOD did also claw his way to another 5th place finish in the nightly 28k donkfest over the weekend, so I'm happy to report that the KOD title is alive and well in Las Vegas. And speaking of Chad, I did not play FTOPS #4, the $535 6max PLO event that I would have really loved to play, but I did get to watch Chad play well early, then get tilty and pissy and start calling allins with total garbage hands. There's something really fun about watching Chad suck out on people when he is actively trying to lose in a tournament. Something about the way he plays when he's doing well and getting good cards really makes it uber annoying to get sucked out on by that kind of stuff from the same guy, but that's what makes poker fun. So Chad ended up I think in 18th in FTOPS #4, cashing for over $1800 in the process, so kudos to him for that one.

I don't know much about the other FTOPS events over the weekend, other than FTOPS #7 on Sunday night, the $322 nlh tournament with the $1 million guarantee, which ended up being closer to 1.4M by the time the virtual cards were in the virtual air on Sunday at 6pm ET. Here, I would like to tell you how great it was that I once again outlasted the other bloggers I knew of in this event, which I did. But I still only made it just over two hours in, and god dam if I didn't play on absolute life tilt the entire time. Sunday was not a good day for me due to some personal issues, and lord knows if I hadn't already spent time and money qualifying for this pre-scheduled $322 buyin tournament then I would never have been online playing then given the mindset I was in at the time. But I felt like I had to make a run, so since I didn't really want to be there in the least but felt "forced" to play, I went and played like a complete maniac from start to finish. I repeatedly moved allin for huge overbets on the flop, never getting called on any of them, but the fact is I was making these moves with hands like two overs and a flush draw on the flop, stuff like that. Stuff where if I'm actually called by anyone in that spot, I'm going to be a dog and need to hit something within the next two cards or IGH. It kept working for a while, but as you can imagine my stack was vacillating like crazy as I was just not playing normal poker.

This was tilt poker, plain and simple. Life tilt had turned my game on Sunday into a shell of its usual self, and I went out there and basically made donkey plays any time I hit any part of the board. I bluffed almost with abandon without regard to the cards out on the board or what I had in my hand. In short I just played a totally reckless game, and eventually it caught up with me about 2 hours and 15 minutes in. In the end IGH in something like 1400th place out of around 4480 runners, so I fared decently well all things considered, given the way I know I was actually playing in the game. If you watched me on Sunday, don't think that's how I normally play. That guy was not me. That was some life-tilted aggro-donkey who wanted to lose in there sitting in for my ususal self. Hopefully late on Sunday night I took the necessary steps to rectify the source of that tilt, because during FTOPS time is when I just need the clearest head possible, not a bunch of trouble and issues that I don't normally feel like dealing with even when I'm not focused on winning my family a ton of money in a series of big-guarantee poker tournaments.

Only time will tell I suppose if I've really taken care of this latest issue or not that wreaked such havoc on my poker tournament game over the weekend. Luckily my cash game does not seem affected, and I managed to have another typical full tilt cash poker weekend where I made a lot more money than I lost overall for the past few days. But I can't expect to continue to play well in big tournaments or in cash games when I have the powers that be conspiring to get in my head at a time when the tournament I am in requires total, 100% focus if I am to have any chance to make a big score, so that's something I definitely need to keep an eye on over the next few days. Until then I definitely hope to see all of you for a night of turbo poker donkery as the BBTwo starts off a brand new week with tonight's Mondays at the Hoy tournament at 10pm ET on full tilt!

Tiltmonkey is Me, and Looking Into the BBT Top Ten

Yesterday I played on tilt. And it had the usual results. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

As most of you know, I am a lawyer. Although I started off working for a big law firm in a big city for a few years, nowadays I work in house at a company doing corporate-type of legal work. Anyways, this week I am working on a large deal for my company, and we're using outside counsel to take the lead on the deal because it is one of the largest deals a company like mine does. So I get to be in that fun position now of managing the very same big city, big law firm lawyers that I used to be one of. Since I came from that environment, however, I tend to remember how shitty that life was/is, and thus I always take great care to treat my outside law firm lawyers with the respect that I always wished I would have been treated with by my clients when I was in the law firm (but rarely ever was).

Cue this other guy working the deal with me here at my office. Yesterday he was such a raging asshole to our outside lawyer that I was embarrassed to be associated with him. And he did it for no good reason. This is really only the second time I've gotten to see this guy interact with outside counsel in a significant way, and now he is two for two in being a supreme prick to our law firm lawyers. I mean, automatically claiming all the work they do is terrible (even when it's not), literally accusing them of malpractice (both times), and just generally speaking to these guys like he is god and they are his little bitches. I've never seen anything like it. For a guy who, like me, started off and was trained in the very same big firm environment -- and who left it because the lifestyle and the way you get treated was just plain atrocious -- it is just amazing to me how quickly some people forget themselves and where they came from. I've never been like that, and I never will be. I sit and watch this guy bitching out our outside lawyer, and the way he speaks to the guy, I am just amazed. When my co-worker himself was a law firm lawyer, he doubtless did nothing but bitch about how his clients treated him, as did I. Now, when he has the opportunity to treat this guy, who is busting his ass, coming in early and staying late for us by the way, with the respect and dignity that he himself always thought was sorely lacking in his own law firm, he declines the opportunity fully and instead it's like he relishes in having the chance to dish this same shit back out that he had to put up with all those years in the firm.

What a losery move. That's about all I have to say about it. I mean, what does it say about my co-worker and I that his reaction is to work out his 10-year-old grudge against law firm life basically by hazing the shit out of this new young guy, not even giving him a chance to do a good job even when he actually is doing a good job, while my reaction to the exact same situation is to never forget where I came from, and to try to give our outside counsel a fair shot to do a good job. I don't know exactly, but what I do think is that it really shows some kind of unresolved feelings that my co-worker must have about his own law firm experience. I have nothing of the sort. I worked that job and lived that life for four years. Four miserable, fucking shittyass years. And then I got out, got a great legal job at a great company, and now I'm here. I like my job nowadays, I love being a lawyer, and frankly I don't even regret a second of the time I spent in the firm, now that it's all in the past. I don't have any issues about that time of my life that I still need to work out, and I don't need to take out those unresolved issues on any other poor unsuspecting sap who I for whatever reason cannot bring myself to keep an open mind toward. I've never been one to hold grudges -- if I did I could never continue playing poker with most of you abject donkeys -- but it still never ceases to amaze me how some people just cannot get over themselves. And when I see someone acting like this guy did yesterday to our outside lawyer, even to the point of hurting the quality of the very work that we are paying this guy to do for us, it really puts me on life tilt.

So by the time I got home last night I was already on major tilt, both from the attitude my co-worker had generally, and from the way he was acting towards out outside lawyer all day long, including how I know it eventually impacted the overall quality of the work he was doing for us by the end of the day. Shit, I wouldn't have been putting my best foot forward anymore for that guy after the shit he said to our outside lawyer all afternoon yesterday. Nobody would. So I got home, life tilting, and yet I still felt pressure to play in the Al's Riverchasers tournament. I mean, I've bitch-slapped this tournament for the past month straight, chopping first place two tourneys ago and then losing only to a 12-year-old who could not be beat in the last event. So I ended up logging on just minutes before the tournament started, and you know what? I played like I was tilting before it even started. Because I was. I played TPTK like it was gold Jerry gold early on (with the JackAce of course, but it was soooooted), folding when it was obvious I was behind to an overpair, but not before tilting off most of my stack on what would normally be an obvious situation to avoid getting into much trouble for me. Throw in some very unlucky river cards, and I was probably around the 15th person eliminated from the event last night, but I never really had a chance. If you got some chips from me yesterday, then consider yourself lucky to have been at one of my starting tables, because those badboys were destined to spew to somebody early on. I hate playing like that, but what can I say. I'm at least as susceptible to tilt as the next guy. Who are we kidding, I'm much more susceptible.

So I logged in this morning and I see that BBT leader Bayne made his 10th BBT final table at Riverchasers last night and won the whole tournament once again. That guy is crushing everyone else on the list. And it got me thinking, because I know how Bayne plays. Then I started looking at the rest of the top 10 guys on the BBT leaderboard. I have something to say about all those guys. And today, because I'm still in a pretty rotten mood as I have to keep working this deal with this anus at my office until we're done today, I'm going to share with you the dirty little secrets about how each of those guys in the top 10 play poker. I'm not saying I'm actually going to reproduce my actual notes on these guys. But, I'm basically going to tell you here the rub on all of 'em. One by one by one. Now with all the insecure donks out there I'm sure this will have annoying ramifications on some other blogs. And lord knows you could write a fucking treatise on how to beat me at nlh, in particular in blogger tournaments where I have had very little success this year. Who shives a git. I don't. So without further ado, please enjoy today's feature: Looking Into the BBT Top Ten. FYI this will use the top 10 players on the BBT leaderboard as of before last night's Riverchasers tournament. If you don't like that, screw off.

10. IslandBum1. It actually sucks for me to be starting with this guy because he is probably the person I have the least to say about of all of the BBT top 10 players. What I will say is that Island is not much of a bluffer. He plays tight, and if you give him some good cards he generally knows how to make use of them ok. But don't give him good cards, and he simply doesn't have much of a shot. More often that not, this is a guy who makes it to the BBT points, but is just not aggressive enough to make it to the money. He definitely posted a big win in one of the very early BBT events, but since then it's just make the points and then fizzle out early for the most part. Just get out of his way when he's betting big unless you've got a monster, and otherwise push him around when he's not betting big and you're basically good to go.

9. Astin. First off, let me say that Astin is a really cool guy. I met him out in Vegas last week for the first time, and I have nothing but good things to say about him. That said, there are two main points to make about Astin's game, three really even. #1, he gets luckier than many other guys out there with his starting cards. Plain and simple. Now I'm not really trying to say that he is just a lucky guy overall, as that is just not something I believe in overall. But what I think I am saying is that over the relatively small sample that is the last couple months worth of blogger tournaments, the guy has gotten better starting cards than most of us. Without those, he would not be as high as he is. Plain and simple. #2, Astin is highly aggressive. Normally that's a good thing and frankly in general nlh terms this is a positive and not a negative threat. But if you're looking for someone to slowplay into donking their entire stack to you when you flop that full house or nut flush, Astin is a guy you want at your table. Play him just right, and hope he has some kind of a hand to go along with your monster, and he's done. And this leads right into my final point about Astin: It can be hard for him to lay down big starting hands in big spots. Even at the live WPBT tournament last Saturday at the shithole Orleans, very early in the event, Mattazuma minraised Astin's preflop raise, and every player at the table was thinking Aces, or maybe Kings. Astin called the minraise, and then when the flop came three rags and Mattazuma uber-confidently moved allin just like that, Astin must have stared at the board for a full three minutes before finally calling with his pocket Queens. Mattazuma showed Kings and Astin's day in the tournament was nearly over.

8. MiamiDon. Don is actually a pretty solid tournament player IMO, but he has his weaknesses too. Basically, Don is like me in that he's willing to push his sometimes marginal edges harder than he needs to earlier in tournaments than necessary. This means he's the kind of guy who is prone to pushing allin over the top of an EP raiser and a caller of that raise early on in a tournament with, say, pocket Tens or a hand like that, where he could easily get called by AK or AQ and be racing. With Don it's that simple. Take your big hands up against him early and often, and you can take him out because, like me, he plays his own big hands very aggressively, even ones which are likely to be racing against two overs or against a lower pocket pair when he has the overs. That's why when Don does well he tends to do very well in these events, making the money in a full third (4 out of 12) of the times he's made the BBT points at all -- because he plays that same aggressive brand of poker that I and many other blonkeys do. But the fact of the matter is that playing this style makes it harder to survive to the end of these tournaments, even while also making it more likely that when you do survive, you go far.

7. RecessRampage. Alan is a tough player, and for a relatively new guy in our group he has made quite a significant inroad with his success so far in the blonkaments this year. In fact I don't really think Alan has a whole lot of significant weakness in his game. That said, there are ways to take advantage of how Alan plays, in the sense that there are ways to attack anybody no matter how they play. Alan is highly aggressive, as is the most successful general strategy for nlh tournament play. But that aggression means, for example, that Alan is an active blind stealer. Even very early in the blonkaments, Alan will quite often attempt to steal the blinds, and unlike many of the bloggers, Alan will do the blind steal thing from spots other than just on the button. Alan generally prefers the pot-sized steal in tournaments -- which I find to be fairly standard in 6-max cash games but not usual for tournaments where most stealers are sizing the steal-raises with relation to the size of the big blind as opposed to the size of the pot -- and he will try to steal from the button and from the cutoff with abandon with all but his worst hands, even early on in a tournament. I've even observed him stealing from two spots off the button on occasion, although my sense is that he tends to have stronger hands when he steals from that spot than he does from closer to the button. In any event, the best way to play Alan I find is to raise him. Raising him with good hands is all the better, but if he's near the button and is raising, you actually having good cards is optional. That's the thing about Alan, and about many successful aggressive nlh players -- he is aware of his aggression, and he's willing to lay down to raises when he knows his hand is not that strong. In stark contrast to some of the other players on this list, Alan is not normally the type to call off the rest of his chips to a reraise when his hand is not that strong. He's more apt to lay it down and wait for a better spot when he holds a stronger hand.

6. jeciimd. Obviously a lot has been written about jec over the past several weeks, as the only player in the top 52 on the BBT leaderboard who has yet to cash in any BBT tournament. That said, jec is not nearly the "fold to the points" kind of guy as his reputation might lead you to believe. Unlike some of the other well known tighties among our group, jec is not usually near the bottom of the tournament leaderboard when the BBT points are approaching. Rather, he's often gotten off to big stacks early in these events. It's only after that happens that jec's weaknesses start to show IMO. I just don't think jec is aggressive enough around the middle-game of these tournaments. Like some of the other players on this list, the way to get jec is to bet and raise him. Raise preflop, and he's tempted to fold even decent hands like pocket 8s and pocket 9s. Bet or raise him on the flop and he's tempted to fold hands like top pair second kicker, just like that. He's folded KK preflop in big tournaments. He's folded AK on Ace-high flops to just a lead bet from an opponent. That is no way to make it to final tables in strong chip position. Bet and raise the guys who don't want to call, and you can keep them in line.

5. NewinNov. I like Newin's game, probably because like some of the other people on this list, he plays a healthily aggressive game and isn't afraid to push his strong hands early. The way to beat Newin is to play good hands against him, and let him bet too much against you when you are actually ahead. Newin can and will c-bet with the best of us, so you can use that to your advantage and raise him out of pots on the flop with strong hands and/or strong flops. One move that also tends to work with Newin is the old stop and go, where you bet or raise preflop, and then just smooth call Newin's likely aggressive flop bet. Then you can bet the turn and take down a larger pot with a good hand. Newin is probably a bit more aggro than most of the other guys in the top 10, so if you play your cards just right, a well-timed slow-play has a better chance of knocking Newin to the rail early than most. And like Alan and some of other more aggro guys on this list, Newin is good enough to lay a hand down if you give him enough reason to, so always keep that in mind when playing a guy like him and you can do some damage.

4. SummerBabe. Iggy is a good poker player, plain and simple. So why the fuck do you guys keep donking him your chips???!!! I don't understand it. Iggy can hold his own already. The best way to play with Iggy at your table early on is to respect most of his early action I cannot believe some of the bullshit I've seen this guy get handed to him in these tournaments, with people who act like he doesn't have top pair, or who act like he's going to lay down a good hand to their crap. It doesn't hurt that Iggy has gotten incredibly lucky in several of these BBT tournaments of late either, both with being dealt countless pocket Aces as well as hitting countless inside straights on the river, etc. But Iggy is a good combination of aggressive with strong hands, and yet protective of his weaker hands, in particular earlier on in the tournaments. The best way to beat Iggy is to check to him with good hands -- like many of the top BBT guys, he finds it very hard to resist betting if he doesn't think he can win in a showdown and if you are showing him weakness. But make no mistake, Iggy is actually a pretty effing crazy bluffer late in these tournaments, so remember that and don't let him push you off of your good hands. He probably has nothing. And stop spewing your chips all over him with subpar bullshit!!!

3. oossuuu754. As a relatively new poker blogger, oossuuu754 burst onto the scene this year and quickly made quite a bit of noise in the first few BBT tournaments. The thing is, osu hasn't done so well in these tournaments since then. And here's why: he is way way aggressive. Don't get me wrong -- the guy won his way into the WSOP Main Event on his first try, and he's done a lot of damage in the blonkaments, so he clearly knows how to play the game. But he is prone to early exits from these tournaments because, like all of us have experienced at some point or another, he gets too aggressive early with less than great hands, and is willing to go to the mat bluffing, or betting without the nuts. Although this tendency will likely serve him well over time as a nlh tournament player, this is a big reason why he has only moneyed 4 times out of 18 trips into BBT point land in 32 tournaments. Push him or let him bet at you with your strong hands, and osu is as vulnerable as anyone on this list.

2. Buddydank. Buddy is also a relatively new poker blogger, and creator of the kick-ballz live radio broadcast he has been running during the BBT blonkaments, in particular during the Mookie events when he is at his best. After just winning his first-ever blogger tournament in this week's Mookie, Buddy is up to 2nd place on the BBT leaderboard and there's obviously not much you can really say against any of the play of the guys near the top of the leaderboard. But I'm going to anyways. The only thing I can really say about Buddy is that he doesn't seem to quite have the aggression level needed to really excel in these things. I mean, obviously his 2nd place position speaks for itself, and he's been a very consistent BBT point gainer and that is what it is. But, if you watch Buddy play he doesn't seem to quite have that aggressive flair that the biggest moneymakers all have. Typically Buddy is not quite aggressive enough to build a big enough stack early to be able to make a run at the top 2 or 3 spots in the blonkaments. Even when he won his first Mookie this past week, he had to hit a major lucksack pot when down to 4 players to not only get a chip lead but to even stay alive beyond that point. More often than not, with Buddy you can push him off of hands and he will let you know if he has a monster, and is just not quite enough of a threat to make moves with nothing in key late spots to be a huge threat to win.

1. And last but not least, there is Mr. Bayne. Now again I will begin by pointing out that I don't know how much I can possibly critique a guy who has made 10 final tables out of 32 BBT tournaments. That is just incredible and as I've said for many of these top-ranked guys, that record basically speaks for itself. That said, Bayne has shown himself to be a bit of a calling station before the flop early in these tournaments. In my experience if you can reraise Bayne early preflop with strong hands, he doesn't like to lay down to reraises once he's already committed with hands, even hands that you normally have to lay down early on like QJ, etc. So push at him, or push back at him, with your strong hands and you can get an edge on him while building pots in which you are the favorite. Similarly, Bayne is also a big fan of the flop or turn push when he believes no one has hit the board. Don't be afraid to call once in a while if you have a strong hand after the flop and he gets allin, and that's a good way to keep this guy down. Otherwise, just wait till he makes the final table, where Bayne normally is not coming in with a big stack, and you can often take him out there, despite him winning last night's Riverchasers tournament to add to his very impressive BBT resume so far.

OK so there you have it guys. Now go get these clowns out of the way so people like me and this guy can make things interesting with late-stage runs in the BBT standings! Enjoy your weekends, I should be on hitting up the 2-4 6-max cash tables as well as maybe taking a run or two at the 100-seat guarantee on Sunday which I've just decided today for the first time that I might try to play in. It's Father's Day after all, so I should be able to do or play whatever I want, right?