Blonkaments

Lots of changes at hand for me these days has lots of thoughts swirling around my head, thought about the blog, about poker, and many about things totally unrelated to anything I write much about here. One decision has really crystalized for me this week, and those closest to me in our group will know it is something I've had on my mind for months, literally. In fact, it's a decision I had already finalized a couple of months ago until being talked out of it at the last minute by some fellow bloggers.

I'm not going to schedule Mondays at the Hoy for next month, or really anytime in the future as far as I'm concerned right now.

That's all. To me the whole thing is not a big deal for myself or for anyone else in the least, but for some reason some people thought it would matter if I did this, so I let myself get talked out of it for the past several weeks. But my heart is just not in it, if you can't tell from reading here. I don't really care about pimping it anymore, and I don't even really care about playing in it or reporting on it like I once did. So no more MATH for the time being, and this time it's for reals.

It's amazing to me to think about how much has changed over the past few years I've been involved in the whole poker blogging scene. Back when I first got into it, Wil Wheaton probably had as big a part as anybody in starting up the whole craze of private blogger tournaments when he ran his WWdN tournament every Tuesday night at 8:30pm ET on pokerstars (password as always was "monkey" lol). I remember with no problem at all how much I used to look forward to playing in that thing. It was literally the highlight of my week it seemed at the time. We're going back a good four years now, but that WWdN was literally the focus of my entire week back in the day. I loved getting together to play with all the bloggers for our one weekly get-together. It was the chance to chat, to catch up, to needle some friends and donk it up for fun. And honestly, I wouldn't have missed a WWdN for the world, as anyone who played in it regularly like me can attest to since I was always around.

I remember back then there were some other attempts to start up at least semi-regular online events for the bloggers -- Iggy did a couple, Jordan led the DADI events, and those were fun. Again, I remember not wanting to miss them. They were events, and just being a part of it gave me something to look forward to, something to aspire to play my best in, something to really want to win. Around that time the WPBT events also started up, the first regular leaderboard-based series of private blogger tournaments. These ran for a year and quickly turned into a slew of mixed poker games, limit, pot-limit and no-limit events, and they were both well attended and for me super fun. Back in those days, playing in every single one of these things really got me going, and I know I wasn't the only one.

But without focusing on the things that led to this point, suffice it to say that today, I no longer feel that way about the blonkaments, and they are a far cry from the singular outlets of fun for our entire community that they once were. I mean, I do love the Mookie, I always have. I can't really say why, other than to say that Mookie runs a great tournament, I love his hall of fame and his winner profiles on his blog, and Mookie is an all-around great guy which I have to say is rarer that it probably should be in this group. I am proud and happy to know that I have been a part of driving the popularity and the significance of the Mookie as the "new WWdN" for the next generation of poker bloggers, as it has been and still remains the one tournament to draw the largest crowds week in and week out, and is easily the closest thing we have to a tournament to look forward to every week, at least in my book. But other than the Mook, I just don't feel it for the private blogger events anymore like I once did. As I said, this post is not about why that is, rather than just that it is.

And before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, this post is in no way an attempt to degrade or put down the people involved with the regular weekly blogger tournaments. I'm one of those people, for crying out loud. By and large, the weekly tournament hosts (myself included, obv) are all pretty much the finest people available in poker bloggerdom, and I've had nothing but fun times playing in their events, chatting with them in the girly and offline. And I am by no means saying that I won't ever play any of their events again. Quite the contrary, I'm quite sure I will play them again several times. But it's been a while since the blonkaments have been the focus of my online poker play, as they basically had been for the better part of the past couple of years. It's just not what I look forward to anymore, it's not what I yearn to win and it's just not my focus these days anymore.

So no more MATH tournaments being set up for me. We had a great run. I started this thing up back when there were very few private blogger tournaments. The Mook was around, and I believe the WWdN was still in its dying stages as well. But there was no Riverchasers, there was no Donkament, there was no Big Game, there was no Skills Series. Heck, we weren't even playing the Bodonkey on that dominating poker site known as Bodog back then! At the time, I knew that Mondays at the Hoy was fulfilling a specific need and a significant demand among bloggers, myself very much included, and the participation in the event has always borne that out. I've enjoyed being a tournament host over time, I've loved setting up the different events, reporting on their outcomes, keeping the annual moneyboard, and of course being a part of the Battle of the Blogger Tournaments in all its splendor through three separate tournament series. The people really wanted another private tournament outlet to play with the bloggers at the time, and the MATH stepped in and filled that need nicely, leading to the creation of several other regular private events on other days of the week, which for a long time was all good for the poker blogger community. Today, that need no longer exists, not with the bloggers at large, and to be honest not with myself now for many, many months.

So I'll still be around, business as usual, but I don't have any plans to host any more Mondays at the Hoy tournaments, on full tilt or otherwise. I wouldn't change a thing about the Hoy in the 2+ years I've been running it first on stars and then over on full tilt, but for me the tournament has clearly run its course and no longer fills a need that I know needed to be satiated for many of us a few years back. If you don't see me quite as much in most of the regular weekly events (sans the Mookie of course, which I feel compelled to continue donating to ad infinitum please), it's not a reflection of anything other than my diminished focus on the private blogger events, nothing more.

At the latest, you'll be seeing me next week in Le Mookie. Waffles really screwed me last week though, now the odds of him winning his prop bet with Bayne are back down to 12 to 1. I am looking for the guy to make it interesting early here so I can maybe book some more action in addition to the props I already have going with Bayne as well as IT. And of course there is always that prop bet that Mookie and I have for the remainder of 2008, but who remembers that one of us owes the other three months' worth of Mookie buyins if one of us wins the Mookie during the year, since neither one of us ever really comes close.

Have a great weekend everyone, back at ya next week as always.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes...in the MATH

Mondays at the Hoy returns again tonight on full tilt at 10pm ET, which I am thinking is likely to be our last with the 6-max no-limit holdem format. As most of you know, I changed the format to shorthanded nlh at the beginning of this year merely to benefit my own self, but as that change has not worked to my benefit I am thinking about a new change that hopefully will result in me winning several MATH titles in the balance of the year.

God how I love that stuff. You really can't make it up, can you? I mean, there's about 50 of you out there who rail my ass every single solitary second I am online on full tilt and have for months, so you know as well as I do how many total shorthanded nlh tournaments I have played of any size or any kind in this entire year since making the perma-change to the Hoy tournament format. It was something I played quite a bit in the first half of 2007, but that shit is so foreign to me at this point and has been all during the past twelve months or so that frankly 6-max holdem just feels a bit funny whenever I do sit down to play such a tournament. But hey you have a blog so why not just write down whatever you want about somebody, right? Don't want to be confused with the facts, I know how it works.

Anyways, back to reality for a minute -- yes I am planning a fresh change to the MATH format starting with the July events which will begin one week from tonight, July 7. While I have enjoyed playing for $216 buyins to the weekly Sunday evening tournaments on full tilt, in the end the very thing which attracted me to this payout format -- the availability of $T -- also I think makes paying out in this way somewhat ineffective, since one can so easily (and usually does, it seems) simply use the $T for any tournament other than the weekly Sunday guarantees. Which is a great outcome btw as far as I'm concerned -- people should be playing only those tournaments that they want -- but it does make it somewhat more pointless than I thought it would to structure the payouts in this way, so I think that experiment will be over with the end of the month of June here in Hammer land.

Instead, starting with next week, I am going to take advantage of one of the new tournament structures recently made available on full tilt and try to give it a whirl with the Shootout tournament format. We will go back to the regular payout format, but I am eager to see how a Shootout structure works for a regular blogger tournament for the first time. I'm not sure if anyone has ever even done a shootout blogger event in the past, but I'm going to give that a try and see how the shootout works for the MATH for a few weeks as I continue to look to optimize this thing moving forward.

My hope is that, starting not tonight but next week, the change back to regular money payouts in addition to putting forth a shootout structure for a month or so will increase the fun and excitement for the blogger tournament to start off the action every week in our group. Personally I am not someone who has logged any significant time at all playing shootout tournaments in the past, but I think there might be something a little bit extra fun about winning a couple of one-table sngs on your way to winning a blogger tournament. Plus the other fun side of the shootout format is that it still provides lots of fun and useful experience with shorthanded and even heads-up confrontations, as winning a shootout tournament will require everyone who eventually wins to play all the way down to heads-up and eventually to win out at their starting table to even reach the final table of the tournament. As I said, I have personally played probably fewer than five shootout toutrnaments in my entire life, but to me this sounds like a fun experiment and one that I expect to last for a while as we move into the summer and beyond with the Mondays at the Hoy tournament on full tilt.

So again, tonight we are still in a regular 6-max nlh tournament format, with payouts in the $216 increments that we have had all through the month of June, but this week will be the last week of this tournament format for the Hoy. Tonight the game is at the usual time of 10pm ET, right under the "tournament" tab under "private" on full tilt, and the password as always is "hammer". The buyin remains the same at $24 + $2, where I plan for it to remain as we head into the Shootout format starting next week. And remember, last week saw MATH virgin AGuda take advantage of the usual beginners' luck to power his way to a second-place finish, so tonight we will see if AGuda is just a flash in the pan, or if he even shows up at all to defend his first-timer luck performance.

See you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt!

Sunday Heads-Up, Big Game, and a MATH Change

Howdy to everyone on a beautiful sunny Monday morning in New York City, where it seems that summer has finally sprung as we head into June in the city. I spent the weekend battling it out along the Jersey turnpike (and various and sundry other attempted workaround routes) with beach goers and other daytrippers that is so common in summertime in this part of the world, which sucked when 85-mile drives turn into 4-hour whinefests with the three Hammer women in the car. My back was killing me so bad after my overly lengthy return trip on Sunday evening that I opted to unregister from the Big Game at the literal last second because I knew I would not be able to focus for a long period of time, which I was not.

First off, we did not get back from NJ and get the kids in bed until about 9:25pm ET on Sunday, which meant that for the third out of three weeks, I had missed significant time from at least the first round of the new Sunday Heads-Up blogger tournament. This time I was spared the indiginity of blinding out of a heads-up match by being awarded a bye in the first round of the 6-player field as I attempted to defend my title from last week when I overcame a 1500-3000 starting chip deficit in my second round match on my way to victory. This time around, I had already missed my entire first round bye by the time I sat down at 9:25pm, and my second match, which once again had started with me at a 1500-3000 chip deficit (so ridick), was already off to me having blinded down to around 1200 chips. Awesome.

So I'm down like 3300-1200 chips when I first sit down, and while I'm thinking how ghey this all is, I manage to chip up one or two hands while saying hello to my opponent. Within maybe 10 hands or so I had doubled through him, I would love to tell you with what but I can't remember. Maybe my AK vs his underpair or something similar, I just don't recall. It wasn't a suckout though, that I do know. Anyways I don't recall any of the specifics, but just like last week in this tournament, once I got in a groove I amassed chips in big bunches, playing aggressive with top pair type of hands, primary draws and even bluffing hard in a few spots, showing some hammers, stuff like that. Within maybe 10 minutes I had won all 4500 chips and ended the match, propeling me to my second consecutive heads-up final in this event as we both sat down at the final table with 4500 chips apiece.

I was not familiar at all with my opponent in the finals, who I'm quite sure has never played a blogger tournament before from his name. But just like my opponents last week, this guy just played way way too tight. In heads-up nlh, I believe it is almost never appropriate to open-fold preflop, even a 62o type of hand I like to call with and occasionally raise with just to keep 'em guessing. With just one opponent I find the pot odds are basically there with any two cards to try to flop a pair or better and see if I can win some chips. He did not start out open-folding much preflop, but for a long time every single time he just open-called preflop, I would raise him 4x or 5x and he would fold. Many of those times I kept flashing him utter shit hands like Q6o, 53s, 97o, etc.) when I made this move, hoping I could pick up a big hand in that spot and get me some chips. As with my prior-round opponent, eventually I got in with AK vs AJ and doubled through to take a big chip lead, and then we played back and forth for a good 30, 40 minutes with me up roughly 6000-3000 chips almost the entire time. Finally at some point I got him really short by continually raising every time he open-limped before the flop and stealing lots of pots with flop bets that went uncontested, and eventually he pushed into my ATs with his Q9o after like 130 hands with me already up about 5 to 1 in chips at the time. I held and I took it down:



So that is two in a row in this biatch. Not sure why more people aren't playing in this thing. I guess it may be the redonkulous starting chips policy, which really is inexcusable of full tilt. Is there no way this can be changed? Maybe we should just consider lopping this thing off at the closest lower power of 2 number of players -- 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 or 64 and that's it. I don't love that option at all either, but no way you can be starting people 1500-3000 in second round games, even if the 3000 guy had to play an extra match. That shit is gizzney. I would probably try the lop-off method and see if that works better. With some better pimpage there is no reason we can't be getting at least 16 if not 32 every week for this thing IMO. I guess my domination may be keeping people away as well, but that's not going to last forever. Months maybe. But likely not forever.

Speaking of blogger tournaments, so the BBT3 is done as of this weekend's Big Game, won by a new name maneki something after he overcame a more than 3-to-1 chip deficit to Julius Goat from early on in heads-up play. So Goat ends up missing out on a BBT3 Tournament of Champions seat after he failed to win an event like I did last month in Stud-8, but don't worry the man gets some nice parting gifts as a result of his participation in the BBT3. As in, something like $2700 won throughout the series, after only playing in about half the tournaments. Goat dominated the Big Game throughout the BBT3 and that was enough to give him a couple of largeass cashes and easily take the crown for the most money won in the challenge, which as my readers know is the way I personally would always evaluate success or failure in these things. Personally I think things like BBT points are kind of silly when you can already just count total profit from the series, which takes into account final-two-table and final table finishes, how deep into the final table you run, and overall wins in a nice little formula as far as I'm concerned. So to me, Goat is easily the best player not to nab a ToC seat, but take it from me, winning a tournament to get in there is hard to do so I'm sure Goat and his $2700 of winnings are going to be just fine. Although I imagine a lil' bit pissed this morning after his good cards went completely dry for almost the entire heads-up battle.

So, with the BBT now over with, I thought about making a slight change to the regular Mondays at the Hoy tournament that runs tonight and every Monday at 10pm ET on full tilt:



No, the password is still "hammer" and the format is still going to be 6-max nlh, which I have been enjoying and I think many of the players have been as well. I am all about a little variety in our weekly games, and some shorthanded holdem is a fun weapon for any poker player to have in his or her arsenal. But what I did change for this week is the prize structure of the tournament.

In the past, I have always had the MATH pay out at full tilt's regular payout schedule, which usually ends up paying the top 8 or 9 spots during BBT time, and maybe top 5 or 6 outside of the BBT. But as most of you know if you read here with any regularity, I am all about satelliting into larger events, and more than that, I am really all about getting bloggers into the big events so that one or more of us can make the Really Big Score. Well, I've decided to put my money where my mouth is this time around, and I have set up the Mondays at the Hoy tournaments for June, starting with tonight's tournament at 10pm ET on full tilt, to pay out in increments of $216 for buyins to the weekly Sunday afternoon big guarantee tournament on full tilt. So this week, we will pay out as many winners as we have $216 in the prize pool, and the winner will be automatically registered for Sunday at 6pm ET's 750k guaranteed tournament on full tilt.

Although I have considered something like this several times before, I would never have done it in the end before the advent of $T on full tilt. But now, if you are not available for the 750k on Sunday afternoon, or even if you are available but you choose not to sink $216 into that event, you can just go and unregister and you will receive $216 in $T for your use on full tilt as you desire. But my hope is that, by playing in the Hoy, some people who would not normally have participated in some of the bigger events can get their chance and maybe make some noise. I plan to follow on the blog here the people who play in the Sunday tourneys after winning their ticket through the MATH, and my hope is there will be some great stories from the next little while here as I explore my ultimate dream of getting some blogger(s) into a situation to win a huge phuckload of cashish. So come on out tonight for Mondays at the Hoy at 10pm ET on full tilt and let's get it on, 6-max nlh style, for a shot to play with the big boys in the 750k guarantee on this coming Sunday afternoon.

See you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt!

Short Night in the MATH, and FTOPS Turbo Tonight

70 runners came out for Mondays at the Hoy this week, as the crowds have been growing a lil' bit for the Hoy over the past few weeks as the BBT3 boils down to its last three weeks. 70 contestants once again means the top 8 finishers are paid out, with a total of $1680 in the prize pool for the tournament. So our winner once again will clear over $500 of pure profit for their efforts in my weekly 6-max nlh tournament.

Man did I have a short night in the Hoy, busting near the bottom of the pack after exactly 36 minutes of play. A couple seats to my right was Tuscaloosa John, who as most of you know has been crushing the BBT3 so far with his typically TAGgy brand of tournament poker, and Tusca got off to a shortish stack early, I don't remember how. But as a result, he was stealing more liberally than usual from his button and even cutoff as I recall. I took advantage a couple of times, including flopping top pair no kicker and checkraising him out of a pot on the flop with a rare minraise from me. My kicker was literally a 3 so I did not want to stay in that pot for any more chips than my minraise committed me to on the flop, so I got lucky there I suppose.

But then my focus on Tusca's stealing got me into big trouble, a leak in my game that I simply have to get better about. I'm working on it, but sometimes I put too much stock in what I know to be true about the way someone plays, without giving enough credence to the fact that everyone picks up monster hands sometimes. So anyways, Tusca steal-raises from his button yet again, maybe the 6th or 7th time he had open-raised in that position already on the night, and I opt to smooth call from the small blind with K6s. The hand is nothing great of course, but it's soooted and frankly I figured ahead of or very close to Tusca's stealing range here. The big blind also smooth calls. The flop comes K87, I think with two of a suit, but not my suit. I could lead out into a nice-sized pot for the early part of this tournament, but instead I figured I know Tusca's game and he is going to c-bet here if we just check to him, and then I can checkraise him good and he'll have to fold to my top pair. So I checked, the big blind checked, and as planned Tusca bet around two-thirds the size of the pot I think. Perfect.

Now I look at the stack sizes for the first time in the hand. Clear mistake #1 by me not to have been hyper aware of this already. But Tusca's 1600 chips (starting stacks in the MATH are 3000) means that any raise I put in from Tusca's c-bet will clearly commit him. So I am going to just push allin if I raise at all -- might as well maximize my fold equity, right? So then since I'm just now on the flop realizing that I'm playing for a full half my stack, I pause to re-evaluate the hand. I have K6 on a K87 board. Sure someone could be in there with two pairs or top pair with a higher kicker, but what are the chances? Tusca has been stealing almost from the beginning with 90% of his hands into unopened pots on the button. I just flopped top pair. And, Tusca hasn't really shown any real strength so far in this hand at all -- no reraising or anything, just a steal-raise from the button and then a standard c-bet. Odds are strong that, given my top pair, he does not have top pair and I just have no reason to believe he has anything else ahead of me. So, I go for it and move allin. Tusca, because he is a Man, thinks for a while before calling allin with? AK. Top pair top kicker. Suh-weet read, Hoy wtg. Half my stack down the drain, bad play and bad read by me, way too early in the tournament to make a move like that with a nice stack.

But never fear, I got my chance to double back up pretty soon afterwards when maybe one orbit later I picked up pocket Kings, I believe again in the big blind. Awesome. Even better is that I think it was Chip who opened utg with a minraise. The utg minraise, coming from a solid player like Chip especially, screams out like a strong hand to me, one just begging to be called or reraised. If this guy has Aces to my Kings with me on a half-stack now, then so be it I am going home. But otherwise I viewed this as a great opportunity for me against a hand that I am likely between a 65 and 82% favorite over. So when the action folds around to me, I take a page out of this guy's book (never thought I'd be saying that) and did the ol' over-raise for value. Chip had raised preflop from 50 to 100, and I pushed in for my last 1500 or so from the blinds with my Kings, fully expecting the call. Chip instacalled, and amazingly it wasn't Aces -- it was pocket Queens. At least I had made a great read to follow up on that terrible read against Tuscaloosa John earlier.

So I'm allin preflop with my KK against cem's QQ, looking to double up back to 3000 chips and get a new lease on life in the MATH after the disastrous hand with Tusca. But the flop came Q89, the river brought a Jack and I could not resuck the inside straight or higher set on the river that I so meritoriously deserved, and IGH. Early. At 10:36pm ET. So it was a night where I made one bad read for a large pot in an over-aggro situation, and then got slammed by the odds when I got myself into a very good situation after a very good read by me. I guess I can live with that, but the past two days saw me play bad and run even worse, after a nice week getting back into the poker swing last week after a couple of weeks away from the game and away from everything but sleeping. For example, the past two nights in the 10:45pm ET FTOPS ME megasat have seen me bust out both times within the first half-hour of play with AKs allin preflop against one time KK and one time JJ. Now, those are both not the worst examples of bad play out there, but the bottom line remains that I am forcing the issue by getting allin in 20 minutes before the flop against raisers and reraisers with AKs. This may be a perfectly great play two hours in to this tournament when the Ms are shrinking and desperation is on the rise. But 20 minutes in, I can make that play if I want to I suppose, but I can't complain when I lose the race (or am dominated like in the first situation). I am just not playing my A game, and I'm running poorly picking up AKs vs KK and AKs vs JJ and losing KK to QQ and stuff like that. It's a bad combination for an aggressive player like me, and one I need to right before I really leak my roll as a result.

Here are some people who did play well enough in the MATH to cash this week:

8. $58.80 -- RNallin
7. $58.80 -- peacecorn
6. $92.40 -- que31dawg
5. $134.40 -- actyper
4. $184.80 -- Wadzilla
3. $243.60 -- Blinders
2. $352.80 -- PokahDave
1. $554.40 -- Shabazz Jenkins

So Shabazz Jenkins, whom I understand to be quite a good player in his own right outside of the BBT3, has finally won his BBT3 Tournament of Champions seat here in the 13th to last event of the tournament series. Shabazz is yet another strong entrant to join in the ToC over the past few weeks, and will only further limit each of our respective expectation from that tournament overall by winning his way in. But as I've written about before, with all the $28,000 just in WSOP prize packages being awarded in the Tournament of Champions, I personally think it should be hard as hell to win, which means getting in as many strong players as we can into the field.

Well that's all I have for you today, as I continue to struggle with my game and my decision-making in the early part of the mtt's I've been playing just lately. In addition to the latest BBT3 Skills Series tournament tonight at 9:30pm ET (password as always is "skillz" and it is open to everyone, I think tonight might be HOE?), I think tonight is the night of the one FTOPS tournament I already qualified for, which is the $216 Turbo nlh event hosted I think by Mandy B, another of the dubious red FTOP pros as far as I'm concerned. So that will go off at 9pm ET, with my guess that the whole thing is completed within 2 1/2 or 3 hours given the redonkulous late-game structure of these turbo events. I'm just hoping to make it through a couple hours or so, which is my estimate of how long it should take to run to the decent money payout positions. And of course there is the Blowdonkey tonight as well if that's how you roll, also I believe at 9pm ET, over on that "other" poker client. So lots of excitement tonight for those of you who like to donk it up ToC-style with the bloggers and/or are interested in a $216 crapshoot
tournament, turbo-style. See you tonight for all the fun and festivities.

The Law Chica Scores Again, and Single Stacks vs Double Stacks

Don't forget the Mizzle tonight, 10pm ET on full tilt:



Password for the MATH as always is "hammer", and one and all are welcome as the BBT3 rolls on tonight for some 6-max nlh fun times.

So yeah I was gone for a couple of days there, I have heard about it from enough of you but what can I say, sometimes a guy just needs to recharge. Actually last Thursday the culprit was work, as one of my colleagues left my group and my company for good (riddance) that day, but the transition and the increased work responsibilities for me will be noticeable for the foreseeable future. That said, in the end I got just what I wanted as far as my promotion at work, and my company did not go out of business last week like some investment banks did, so for the time being things are going ok overall I suppose. And this past Friday was Good Friday, a bank holiday, and as such we are closed at work and I generally tend to take my holidays seriously even as blog holidays when I am able. So that's my excuse for two uncharacteristic days of absence, it's not much but it's all you're gonna get. I'm back now and better than ever, and that's all that matters.

For starters, last night I watched LJ absolutley manhandle the field in the nightly 32k guaranteed on full tilt, treating me to a masterful show by her over maybe two hours or so of early Push Time as she navigated the field from around 100 players left down to around 25 before I finally hit the sack for the night. LJ was playing like a pro, barely showing down a hand in two hours, and using selective aggression like a champion on her way to an eventual 2nd place finish out of 1721 runners for over $5600 cash money. You cannot play Push Time any better than LJ did there, and she is rewarded with her biggest ever online win. so go stop by her blog and congratulate LJ for yet another big tournament score. Does anyone in our group cash in the big ones with LJ's regularity? Anyone?

And while I'm on the topic, while I was away our man Smokkee went and came in 3rd place in the daily $165 buyin 40k guaranteed tournament at 3pm ET. Go read about his exploits at Smokkee's blog and make sure to congratulate the man on his largest-ever online poker cash of over $6000 and change! What is in the water this past week or so that has all the bloggers turning in huge performances for largest-ever scores? I don't know but I want to get me summa that for myself, I know that much.

So today I wanted to talk a little bit about one of my favorite topics -- the Mookie. Over the weekend I was reviewing my last few Mookie finishes among other things, and a very obvious fact jumped right out at me. There is quite simply a major difference in the proper tournament strategy for a 1500-chip tournament and a 3000-chip tournament. I've heard and read a number of people saying the opposite around the blogging world -- heck, I might have even said so myself at one point or another -- but that shit could not be further from the truth. When the blinds are starting out exactly the same in either format, the simple fact is that there is a ton more room to splash around, to play some small ball and try to see some cheap flops and nail 'em, or to wait for the good cards and pick your spots, in a 3000-chip event than in a correspondingly-structured 1500-chip one. Way more.

One of my many Mookie problems over the past couple of months is directly related to this. I have clearly been playing the regular-stack Mookie's identically the same way as I approach the 3000-chippers, and that is no way to survive and accumulate in a blonkament or any other mtt. It just cannot possibly work, unless I get smiznacked in the face hard with the deck, which just doesn't happen nearly often enough to plan a strategy around. Let me give you an example of exactly what I mean:

So I'm reviewing my hand histories and screen shots over the last several Mookie's, and here I go maybe 30 minutes in, with blinds at 25-50, limping in from middle position behind an EP limper with a hand like 97s. I'm hoping to attract a couple of more stragglers into the pot behind me and maybe hit something big with soooted one-gapper. So EP limps for 50, I limp for 50, the cutoff limps for 50, and then the button makes it 150 to go. The big blind calls the 150, as does the EP player, and now I have to call another 100 to see at least a 3-way flop and more likely a 5-way flop once I get in there with 97s. So I make the call, thinking my pot odds and especially my implied odds easily justify such a move here. And you know what? Implied odds probably do justify the call here with 97s, all other things being equal.

But here's the problem -- all other things are not equal, in particular in this context the variable of stack size. We are 30 minutes in to the Mookie, let's say my stack is right where it started at 1500 chips, and now here I am calling off 10% of my stack with 97s. I don't know about you, but that is definitely not where I want to be if I am trying to win the dam thing. 97s for 10% of my stack preflop? Blech. Whereas, if I had started with 3000 chips instead of 1500, making that same limp-call move 30 minutes in to the tournament doesn't bother me in the least. Yes it's still 5% of my stack with a speculative hand, but frankly the difference between those two is quite noticeable in my eyes. I have little trouble making a well-timed play for 5% of my stack preflop with a sooted one-gapper. If I miss, I fold and so what, I have 2850 chips instead of 3000 in my stack. No big whoop. But when I fold the flop after completely missing it and am down to 1350 instead of 1500, that is a much bigger difference.

But the even bigger problem for me has been coming after the flop is already out in the short-chipped Mookie. As most of you know, I tend to play pretty aggressive poker overall, and that definitely extends to my postflop play in addition to my preflop play. So if I like the flop for my hand, or more accurately, if I sense a lack of strength on my opponents' part, I am likely to bet at almost any flop at any point in the tournament. And, depending on the preflop action and the exact texture of the flop, I am likely to bet somewhere between 2/3 and the full size of the pot when I make such a bet on the flop. So look at what this does to me in the 1500-chip stacks:

So going back to my example above, let's say I do go and call the 150 and end up seeing a 4-way flop with my 97s, making 625 chips in the pot and bringing a flop of 983 rainbow on a hand where I had started out even with the starting stack of 1500 chips. The big blind and the EP player check to me, and what's my move? On this type of flop, I would likely as in most cases want to put in a bet of roughly two-thirds the size of the pot, which in this case is around 450 chips. So let's say I do that, and then someone in late position raises me allin. Now look at me. I've got 1500 - 150 - 450 = 900 chips left, and there is now 1075 chips in the pot. Yes I can fold my top pair no kicker to the allin raise on the flop here just 30 minutes in to the Mookie -- most likely that is the "right" move in terms of me probably being behind here in some way with just two cards to come -- but how sure am I that I am definitely behind here? Basically I am facing a poor decision either way on my part, one that is mostly a direct result of the fact that I have been betting over my head with a mediocre hand right from the getgo here. Either I decide I am pot committed and I call off my last 900 chips into a 1075-chip pot with just top pair 9s no kicker (and I am a donkey), or I fold my top pair and am left with just 900 chips and a very poor chance of recovery to respectability. Damned if I do, and damned if I don't, and again it all comes back to stack size. That exact same decision for the exact same numbers of chips involved just isn't nearly as tough if I still have 2400 chips behind as opposed to when I have just 900 behind. Laying down to the reraise is a much easier decision I think with just top pair 9s no kicker, and reraising allin is even a better option that simply is not available in the 1500-starting-stack scenario due to the limited number of chips involved.

When it comes right down to it, long before even the first hour is up in these 1500-chip blonkaments, the starting stack all but requires you to be nearly committed to the pot to even bet or call a normal-sized bet on the flop, one time. So, I need to play different kinds of hands differently in a 1500-chip tournament to adjust for this fact. I'm sure I used to know this back in the day when all of our regular weekly blogger tournaments were 1500 chips to start, but it didn't all click in my own mind again until this past weekend while reviewing my recent Mookie failures. I can't play a hand like AJo for a raise preflop and then withstand (or even lead) one round of normal-sized betting on an Ace-high flop in a 1500-chip tournament, whereas I can do so in a 3000-chip tournament quite easily without really risking a significant portion of my stack on the hand. With 1500 chips, I have to noticeably tighten up my preflop play, and more than that, I need to very directedly practice pot control from the very earliest parts of each hand in order to see flops, turns and rivers on my own terms. Once I start adjusting for that, I am hoping to see a noticeable improvement in my Mookie performances, hopefully in time to win me my prop bet with Mookie at some point before this year is out. Ha ha yeah right.

And don't get me wrong here btw, I'm not complaining even a little bit. I enjoy the 1500-chip format. I love the shorter (what used to be "normal") stacks and I am a huge fan of the variety in the whole thing as I have written about here previously. I am merely making an observation that I have not previously made, and in fact which I have been practicing as if the exact opposite of this observation were in fact the truth. So much of poker is all about adjusting, and in this case it's no wonder I haven't done squat in the Mook since the switch back to 1500 starting chips a couple of months ago. I've been playing it as if no switch actually occurred at all, when in reality a significant switch went down which has noticeable impact on the proper strategy of play compared to the 3000-chip donkfests I've become used to over the past half a year or so since the first BBT hit town and we all upped our tournaments to double stacks. I've been the deadest money in that tournament week in and week out, for going on a couple of months here.

But now all that changes. And hopefully I can start the change tonight by focusing on adjusting my game a little better for the 6-max superfast structure of Mondays at the Hoy as well. See you tonight at 10pm ET for the MATH on full tilt!

Holiday Monday Post

Well ok so maybe it's only a holiday for some of you out there, but for me the stock market is closed and the bond market is closed as well, and that means no work for Mr. Hoy today. I'll take it, with the shit that's been going on at my job over the past several months, what a flipping joke. I am quite sure I'll have some more good stuff to say about that once my situation at this place clears up a little bit one way or the other, but suffice it to say that for now I am going to enjoy my day off and won't have much of substance to say here today either. I will be back on Tuesday with my regularly scheduled poker content and pomposity here, don't doubt it for a second.

So let me just say that I declare Miami Don the big winner from Sunday night's blonkament action overall, as he outright won the marathon super stack HORSE Skillz Series tournament along with a 3rd-place finish in his own Big Game as well. We had decent field sizes for both tournaments which is great, and although Don, myself and I think swimmom each final tabled both events, Don was the only one who cashed in both and for that I declare him the overall winner on the night. Vinnay took down the Big Game after playing what I would describe as a very loose style, making a number of dubious calls, although in reality I understand that there was a 3-way chop for the Big Game title between Don, Vinnay and Chad, so congrats to all three of them on that front. I got naked-flush-drawn out of the Big Game near the beginning of the final table along the way in a spot where I would have been in great position if my 2-to-1 hand had held, but I'm not complaining, I've had some reasonable luck of late in the blonkaments and that's the kind of hand that needs to hold up in order to win these things. But most importantly for me, I played well, and even better, I had a good time which is after all the point with thee things to begin with isn't it? Even playing blonkey HORSE proved to be fun times, and once again buddydank radio was going strong with what I think was probably its best show of the year, other than maybe that one night of public drunkenness that is going to be hard to top. But the guest hosts were awesome on the whole, the spook commentary was funny as shit, and best of all, there was a lot of poker being discussed which is all good IMO.

And speaking of blogger tournaments, don't forget tonight!



Monday night, holiday or otherwise, 10pm ET on full tilt, password as always is "hammer". The MATH is on for tonight, once again going 6-max nlh up on your asses. We've had a good time in what has proven to be a very fast-moving tournament over the pat few weeks since the perma-switch to shorthanded tables, so please come on out tonight if you're online and looking to donk it up in some aggressive no-limit holdem and some fun times to boot.

That's all for today. Everyone enjoy your holiday (hopefully you have one) and best of luck at the tables.

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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



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



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



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

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



Unfortunately LegacyRik beat me into the pot with this:



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

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



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



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

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



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



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

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



He instacalled with this:



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

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

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

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



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



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



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



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

Final BBTwo MATH, and Back On My Game

This weekend, it would seem that I finally came out of the semi-slump I had been experiencing for the past little while. Couple of months even I guess. I mean, I've had some nice wins smattered throughout that time, but in my personal opinion I have not been playing my best game for some time, and I think I've seen that in my results. But I digress....



That's right boys and girls. Tonight is the last night of the BBTwo-enabled MATH. Oh don't worry -- the weekly Monday night MATH tournament as we know it will continue on into perpetuity, or until I die an untimely death or when they finally outlaw and prevent anyone in the U.S. from playing poker online. But this is the last week of the BBTwo, with four juicy tournaments for each and every one of you to pick up one of the last four BBTwo Aussie Millions Tournament of Champions freeroll seats. We've got the MATH on Monday night, the Mookie on Wednesday, Riverchasers on Thursday, and then we will end the BBTwo just the way it started, with the Big Game on this coming Sunday night for your TOC-qualifying pleasure, and it all begins with tonight's MATH tournament at 10pm ET on full tilt. The password as always for the MATH is "hammer", and tonight the game is once again 6-max no-limit holdem. No turbo, nothing fancy, just plain old 6-max nlh. I think I alluded to this in an earlier post, but my plan for the time being is to make the MATH a 6-max nlh event for the foreseeable future starting in 2008. I mean, it will be 6-max tonight and again I believe next Monday, but I have something fun planned for the last two Mondays of the year, as they happen to occur on Christmas Eve and then New Years Eve, so only the abject junkies(including myself) will be playing in those two events. Otherwise though, for the time being I think we're looking at 6max nlh, starting with tonight for the MATH at 10pm ET on full tilt. Same $26 buyin, same "hammer" password, but come out tonight for your last chance to qualify for the BBTwo ToC for the Aussie Millions in the Hoy.

OK so back to the weekend. As I mentioned earlier, while you guys were all out living it up in Las Vegas over the weekend, I went and turned my game around in a hurry from right here in my bedroom.

The fun started when jeciimd, your current 2nd place on the BBTwo leaderboard btw after a 3rd-place finish in the first BBT, hit me up on the girly and talked me into starting up one of these 90-person $24 knockout sngs on full tilt. I think I've never played a 90-person sng in my life on full tilt, though I used to enjoy those 180-person tournaments on assholestars so I figured why not, I would give it a shot. Fast forward about 2 1/2 or 3 hours, and 7 $4 bounties later to mean I was already freerolling the thing, and I had ended up in 2nd place overall out of 90 runners. Total profit of over $350 net, I will definitely take me some of that. That will buy me into my next 35 Mookie's right there without ever winning one, you can't beat that, right? I was disappointed not to win it, but I entered heads-up play as about a 3 to 1 chip underdog, and as it is I got allin on the flop with a pair and an OESD. Unfortunately my opponent held a higher pair, and the OESD did not fill, and I just didn't have the chips to withstand that kind of a beat. I would push again at a 3-to-1 chip deficit with pair + OESD, so I'm happy about how that whole thing turned out overall. My final table play was impeccable to get to that point, and for that I have got to credit playing a lot of one-table sngs recently. More on that in a minute.

Anyways, the real reason I was on on Friday night and willing to start that 90-person sng is that I knew the Kat-less donkament was going on and I figured I would jump in there as well. I was laughing about it with some friends on the girly chat this weekend, but I basically get my ass mauled in that thing every single week during Monkey Hour. I mean, one time I got lucky a few times and I went on to win the donkament that week after I ended the first hour with the chip lead and just never relinquished it, but the way I see it, everyone takes out their anger and aggression on me for playing so aggressively in all the other blonkaments every week and for ranting and raving like a lunatic here on the blog about the play of others, and as a result I end up having to buy in at least 10 or 12 times without exception, sometimes as many as 20 times or more, and in the end I basically always end the first hour right around the minimum possible stack. I do enjoy playing the donkament, but even though I joke that it is my poker therapy for the week, in reality I see it more as poker therapy for my opponents against me rather than actually for me. In any event, the story was the same this week, as I ended Monkey Hour at just under 4000 chips and about 2/3 of the way down the leaderboard. Nonetheless, after three hours of grueling play, here was the end result:



Booooooooom! My second donkament win of the year, and a huge $30 profit for exactly three hours of play and hard work. Wow.

But the real story of my big run this weekend was at the sng tables. Although a lot of people have noticed or even participated in the recent string of sng challenges and similar assaults on the sng tables among the poker bloggers, few people know that I actually started this assault a few weeks back. I began hitting up the $55 and $110 turbo sng's about a month ago, something which a number of other bloggers quickly started doing as well, although I'm happy to say I don't run into many other bloggers at the 55s and 110s where I focus most of my play. Really I'm more often in the $55 turbos than anything else, and I have to say that overall the results have been really great in a few key ways. First and foremost, the bottom line. I don't keep detailed stats and I don't have any foncay graphs to show of my performance, but I would estimate that I am up around 2k on the $55 and $110 turbos in the past month. Just this weekend alone, I cashed in 12 out of 17 $55 turbo sngs, including 7 outright wins for $247 and change apiece, or a net profit of over $180 in each. And that doesn't even count the two $110 turbo sngs I also won outright for each a $495 payout. It was a very profitable weekend for me overall at the tables for a number of reasons, the sngs being a big part of it. That 90-person sng from Friday and the donkament helped too, as did three other large mtt cashes on the weekend including in the 50-50 on Sunday night which I qualified for for $28 earlier in the night, but overall my results really shot up this weekend so at least I had that to hang my hat on while knowing all the fun that was going on in my absence in a certain place in the desert.

But more than the profits, these sng's have really been helping with my confidence in my game in general, my end game in particular, and have also helped me to focus on some realities of tournament play that I haven't spent a lot of time focusing on of late. There is nothing -- no way whatsoever -- that is going to help your shorthanded or late-game tournament play more than sitting in a bunch of 1-table sngs. I mean, where else can you get the hands-on practice at shorthanded, low-M nlh tournaments that you can get every time you sit down to a sitngo tournament? You just can't. At the $55 level, the money means enough -- at least to me -- to take the play very seriously, and as a result I find that if I make marginal calls of preflop raises with hands like the jackace and pocket 6s, I'm going to run into trouble. Playing as many sngs as I have in the past month -- I would estimate it is something around a hundy of them at this point -- I have gotten to relearn what kinds of hands to push with early and what kinds of hands are worth passing on before the pots get big to begin with.

Another thing that these 1-table turbo sngs are great for is reading players, and in particular reading players for steals and resteals. I cannot tell you how many times over the past month I have reraised a button open-raiser with air and won (and a few times I've lost btw) just based on watching their play, the pace with which they put in their bets and just their betting amounts and patterns generally, and this is all good for my game. As I've written about here many times, I tend to play my game based more on my instincts and my reads than anything else, and I purposefully go out of my way to encourage stealing and restealing, because I invite this sort of approach from my opponents because, frankly, I believe I am better at it on balance than they are. So these sng's have really helped me to hone my reading abilities and my penchant for sniffing out blind stealers, which is all good for me and my game, at all parts of a tournament.

One other aspect of poker math that I am constantly faced and re-faced with as a result of all of these turbo 1-table sngs is heads-up allin preflop odds. Especially with the turbo structure, give it 20-25 minutes or so and it becomes pretty much automatic for a short stack, for example, to open-push allin from the button with almost ATC, and certainly with any Ace. So, for example, I am re-learning just how likely one is to win with a hand like QJo when up against Ace-rag. After all these sng's, I have re-learned all over again about figuring pot odds given the large blinds in the late stages of these short tournament to know whether it makes sense to call with that QTs against a guy I know is pushing any Ace. As anyone who's played a lot of these sngs recently can attest, these two-middle-cards against a top-and-bottom hand showdowns really end up deciding the final finishing order and payouts of the turbo sitngos a whole lot more than most people may think, so making keen decisions based on pot odds -- even when you think you are likely "behind" but not that much -- is a crucial skill and one that I think most people have not developed nearly as much as it can be developed.

All this is to say that this weekend really got me thinking back in the right frame of mind after several weeks of tilty attitude that definitely had me playing less than my best poker game. So while I look forward like I always do at this time of year to reading all about the great times that were had by all out in Vegas for the WPBT this time around, be forewarned that I've gotten my game back on and I'm coming looking for you tonight in the Hoy and through the rest of this week as well. Monday night's field may still be a bit small due to the return from Vegas of 120-something of our closest fake internet friends, but then with this being the last week to qualify for the freeroll I guess I could see the crowds going either way for the MATH tonight as well for the other blogger tournaments to round out the BBTwo this week. And don't forget to get into that 9:45pm ET nightly token frenzy on full tilt to get your $75 token for this Sunday night's Big Game on full tilt. Even though I already won my token last week and registered for the Big Game, I will probably try to play the frenzy every night this week if I'm around as a showing of solidarity with you all. And although I will write some more about this later in the week, don't forget that KOD is hosting a new Sunday night HORSE knockout tournament as well, starting this Sunday night, also on full tilt. You can look me up to find the tournament, which I believe has the password right on the tournament lobby. Get in there as well for what I am really looking forward to as far as you non-holdem-all-the-time donks out there. More on that later.

See you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy!!

MATH, Mywebatm and Playing Suited Connectors Late in an MTT

First things first for a glorious Monday morning in New York City....



So after much discussion and back and forth with full tilt, tonight's MATH tournament, with I think just 7 events left in the BBTwo and thus 7 chances left to win your seat into the BBTwo Aussie Millions Tournament of Champions freeroll later this month, is going to be a "normal" 6-max no-limit holdem tournament. We did this once before about a month or so ago and personally I loved it, and in fact it seems more and more likely to me that the long-term MATH will be 6-max nlh forever more after 2007 is in the books. So no turbo, no rebuys, but just plain old short-handed nlh this evening in a return to quasi-normalcy for the last couple MATH tournaments in the BBTwo.

For interest's sake, my original plan as recently as the middle of last week was to have a shootout tournament for this week, but in the end full tilt simply does not have the technicial capability at this time to run a shootout format, even though as I explained to them repeatedly, it is shockingly simple to set up. Nonetheless, there is a reason why you never see any shootout formats on full tilt, as opposed to on pokerstars which runs double shootout satellites regularly into their large Sunday tournaments, etc. I still can't really believe that full tilt cannot make this happen (are you listening FTP John? FTPDoug?), but for now rather than pursue a sort of contrived setup we had been discussing to approximate a shootout tournament, instead we're just going to run a regular 6-max nlh event for this evening's MATH.

Similarly, after a lot of discussion with full tilt, they simply cannot offer me the heads-up tournament structure that I was hoping to set up for our last BBTwo-enabled MATH next Monday night. Again there were some creative options for approximating a real heads-up tournament structure, but in the end IMO it was more work than it is worth, and with too much potential for trouble like I know we've had before for heads-up private tournaments on full tilt. To me this is even dumber than the lack of a shootout tournament structure, as full tilt has got to be crazy not to be running a heads-up nlh tournament as part of the FTOPS for example, given all the pros that are associated with full tilt and who play there on a regular basis. To think that full tilt has yet to offer a $216 (or $535, for that matter) buyin event in a heads-up format with all those pros in any of now six FTOPS tournament series is beyond me, but it's true. So, no heads-up action for us next week, which will probably end up just being 6max nlh as well, although I will let you know right here of any changes to that sometime within the week.

So come out tonight for the latest BBTwo tournament and the 7th-to-last chance to win that Tournament of Champions seat in tonight's shorthanded nlh MATH tournament at 10pm ET on full tilt. Password as always is "hammer", and the buyin is back to the usual $26 or tier I token.

On an unrelated note, I got what I consider to be a ridickulous email from full tilt this weekend, advising me of an impending change involving mywebatm, one of full tilt's current payment processors, and I was wondering if anyone else had any thoughts on the matter. Basically, the email said that, due to "anticipated technical difficulties" (whatever that means), full tilt was immediately decreasing deposit limits from mywebatm to a paltry amount (I think $100 a day, $200 a week and $300 a month, which amounts I think are already even lower than that). Moreover, full tilt was offering me a frigging bonus of up to 50% of my reload, but only if I withdraw my entire account balance to mywebatm, and then redeposit to full tilt within 7 days using a different payment processor. Huh? So now full tilt is going to give up a 50% bonus, but only if I withdraw my entire full tilt account balance to one of their previous payment processors, and then redeposit from a different processor? Full tilt is going to pay me to withdraw every dollar I have from their site? WTF is going on here? Does this sound as recockulous to you guys as it does to me? I know with 100% certainty that there is more to this story than meets the eye, because believe you me, it would take quite a significant issue for any poker site to literally pay me to take all my entire account balance out of their site. I read that email again this morning and I'm still basically in disbelief. I did notice that mywebtatm's website seems to have changed from its previous address at mywebtatm.com to now mywebatmcard.com. Not sure what is up with all that but I'm sure that this has something to do with those "anticipated technical difficulties" that the email referred to. But you know it's something significant when I'm not even willing to take the free money from full tilt to participate in whatever silly scheme they have cooking up. Can anyone out there tell me why on earth full tilt would offer me up to a $500 bonus to completely deplete my account with them and then redeposit via another payment processor? For the life of me this shit sounds fishy as hell and I am loathe to participate until I can understand more wtf is going on. Bad, bad email from full tilt on that one. And it's not the first time.

I also wanted to put up an interesting hand that went down this weekend for me in the nightly minefield known as the 28k guaranteed on full tilt. This was late in hour 3 of the tournament, where we were just about 60 players away from the money spots, with around 240 players remaining out of 1100-some who had started. I was low in chips, with a little under 9k in my stack at a time when the average stack in the tournament was somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 or 16k, so I was basically under half the average and somewhat in need of making a quick move with the blinds at 250-500 and a 50-chip ante per hand, giving me an M of somewhere around 6.

So, I am dealt T9s in middle position. UTG folds, as does UTG+1. The next player, who is sitting on a stack size similar to my own, puts in a minraise to 1000 chips. I'm looking at a bet that is about 1/9 of my existing stack, and with five players still to act behind me and 2200 chips already in the pot from the blinds and antes.

How do you like to play this hand before the flop? Call, raise or fold here?

I will tell you that I opted to make the call. Of course I was hoping to see the flop for no more than the 1000 chips already bet by the early-middle position player, and T9s is a great hand to take someone down with in a very not foreseeable way. But I think the two biggest reasons I called were (1) the possibility of a multiway pot developing since we had an early-middle position minraise, and then my own call also from middle position, and still with five players left behind me including the two blinds who would be highly likely to call in my view since they were already in for their blinds and since the raise was only another 500 chips on top, and (2) I was short. In this case, I was getting into desperation territory, I needed to make a big hand pretty quick or my stack would soon be dwindling into worthless territory, and this hand was in my view a perfect opportunity to either make something big happen, or hopefully let me out fairly cheap with not too much damage to my stack given that it was already short to begin with. I view this as a questionable call on my part, but by no means a terrible one, and I like my reasoning for making the call, but I would be interested in hearing any thoughts you all have on the matter.

Anyways, we end up seeing just a three-way flop -- something I still can't believe that at least the blinds did not call given the pot odds they were receiving to make such a call, but the player to my immediate left called as well giving us three players to see this flop:



So I've flopped bottom two pairs on a high-card, connecting board with no suits. As you can see above, the first player checked to me on this flop.

Now what would you do here? There are now 4200 chips in the pot, and I have 7,774 chips remaining in my stack. Do you check or bet? If it's bet, then now much?

Let me know your thoughts and I will be back tomorrow with some more of this fun hand to analyze.

Before then, I will see you tonight for 6max Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt! By the way, in I'm sure a vain attempt to combat the constant tilt I've been on lately, including basically this entire weekend, I will be getting sloshed for the MATH again tonight. You might as well be too.