In Poker, So Hot and Yet So, So Cold

Ever wonder why I tend to get kind of short when people talk about how "bad they run"? Why I openly chuckle when I read about someone quitting poker because of how bad they got screwed...in the Mookie last night? Or why I don't have the pitying reaction you're looking for when I read your story about your brutal loss in the first hour of that 1500-person mtt you like to run on occasion?

This weekend of online poker for me had all the answers and then some. I should start by saying that I played some of the best poker of my entire life over the past four nights (I was home from work on Friday, so this was like a four-day weekend for me in terms of being able to stay up late and make some deep runs without having to worry about being up at the crack of dawn to get to the office). But while playing a bunch of really awesome tournament poker enabled me to make deep run after deep run over the weekend -- some of it in some pretty damn big tournaments -- something always seemed to just get in the way to prevent me from making the real big money on the weekend. And the stuff that "just got in the way" this weekend was enough to make most of you yak in your shoes, especially when you consider how much actual cash money I left on the table over the past few days.

So here was this weekend in a nutshell for me.

On Thursday night, I didn't do much in a few of the other tournaments I played, but I made an awesome run in the nightly 25k guaranteed sniper (bounty) on UB. After nearly five hours of play, I'm in 6th place out of 17 remaining. I've spent hours building up a solid image and playing absolutely, positively mistake-free tournament poker to get to this point, and I find JJ in mid-late position and open-raise it up preflop. The guy to my immediate left calls, who had played fairly tight over the past couple of hours at the table with me and the flop comes the almost best possible flop I could imagine:



I mean, sure, everyone wants to flop top set, but when you think about it, when you're this close to the final table and are looking to build an insurmountable stack, and your preflop raise without an Ace gets called, you're almost rather looking to flop second set with an Ace on board so you can feel confident you're going to get paid off by someone holding a big Ace of some kind. I had played with this guy for hours and I was quite sure he does not just call my preflop raise with pocket Aces, so needless to say I was thrilled with my situation there on the flop, and I could begin to smell the 6k+ first prize as I prepared my bet on the flop. I bet around half the flop, wanting to seem a little weak and encourage a raise from a guy with an Ace, and was overjoyed when the guy pushed allin on me without even a moment's deliberation:



Of course I can't fall over myself fast enough to call, and my opponent flips up QTd -- not even an Ace -- for a Queen-high flush draw and an inside straight draw to boot. With my set on the flop, plus all the redraws to a boat even if my opponent makes his straight of flush, I am a 66% favorite here, or 2-1 to amass a monstrous stack and be comfortably in second place of the 17 runners remaining. But then check out the turn (and the river!):



He made his 2-to-1 shot on the turn, and then made it again on the river for good measure, and of course no resuck for me. First prize in this tournament was a little over 6k. I bust in 17th place for a paltry $420 instead after playing absolutely perfect poker and flopping a set on pretty much the most favorable flop for me that I could realistically have imagined.

Moving on to Friday, I should mention that I finished in 22nd out of 1227 players in that same nightly 30k guaranteed tournament on pokerstars that I took 2nd place and 1st place in earlier this month:



My exit here wasn't bad, really. After losing a big race with 77 vs AQ, I was in 18th place out of 22 left when I obviously open-pushed allin with A8o from the hijack, and the cutoff woke up with AK. IGH in 22nd place -- netting under $100 cash in the process as opposed to the first prize of around 6k -- but at least it wasn't a suckout or bad beat that did me in.

Unfortunately, I can't say that about the rest of my weekend's big eliminations.

Also on Friday, I busted from the nightly $75 buyin, 7pm ET 40k guaranteed tournament on full tilt in 26th place, my second-deepest ever run in this tournament, and this one was another of those eliminations that I just cannot deal with very easily. A middle position player who's been highly aggro for hours open-raises it up preflop, and I call from late position holding pocket 7s, feeling pretty confident based on this guy's history that I am ahead here of what is likely a couple of big calls. The flop comes T88, and my opponent insta-pushes allin for the rest of his stack without waiting even half a second after seeing the flop hit the felt, the classic sign that a donkey has missed the flop with two overs, and I think for just a few seconds before calling him down, and I am shown AQ unimproved. I'm in line to have a top-3 stack with fewer than three tables left, but no sooner can I begin to enjoy having outplayed another guy in a huge spot in a big tournament, that the turn comes a Queen:



First prize in this one was around 10k. I bust in 26th place for $220. Who knows how much more Tournament EV I left on the table there, but with a 3rd-place stack and 25 players left, several thousand was entirely likely for me, a heck of a lot better than a measly $220 for my efforts.

Also on Friday night -- a "great" night of poker for me that featured three really deep runs in the same evening -- was UBOC Event #12, the $150 buyin, 75k guaranteed sniper tournament that is right up my alley. I absolutely crushed in this one, taking advantage of two AA's and a KK during the second hour of play to build up a massive stack early, after which I coasted for a good couple of hours before taking advantage of countless Harringbots on my way to another deep run in UB's annual poker tournament championship series. I made so many great plays in this thing, never missing a read and always keeping my aggro in check despite being in the top 10 in chips pretty much from early in the second hour all the way to the 7th hour. I managed to bust 16 people along the way, which I know because you get one of those little bounty windows (and a $15 bounty prize) with every elimination in these sniper events on UB, and I was an absolute terrorist from start to finish through the field of 573 runners who came out to play UBOC #12.

Unfortunately, "finish" for me in this ended up being in 15th place, when I held a 4th place stack and ran KK into the 5th place stack's AA:



KK into AA, with less than two full tables left in one of the annual majors on UB. It is just so sick, especially since I didn't even reraise allin preflop with my Kings, opting instead to wait to see if an Ace fell to give me a way to get off the hand, but the Q22 flop did me no good as it it just about the least scary flop imaginable for a guy holding KK. But alas, this one was in the cards (pun intended) from literally seven hours earlier, and IGH two hands later in 15th place with just $570 to show for my efforts, plus of course the sixteen $15 bounties I picked up along the way. First prize in this tournament was 18k, and I had been in 4th place of 15 left, and was dealt KK to boot. From 18k to $571, with one flip of the cards. In light of all the other stupidity I ran into late in mtt's this weekend, this KK into AA might have been the biggest sickness of them all.

Not to be outdone, on Saturday night I final tabled full tilt's nightly $26, 8pm ET 35k guaranteed tourney for the second time this month, powering my way through more than 1200 runners despite having nothing going on for the first two hours in the event. So we're down to 8 runners left, with me in 6th place of those 8 remaining. The tournament short stack raises the 24k big blind to 72k from early position, and I push my own short stack of 390k allin from the big blind with pocket 7s. I am of course instacalled by AQs. The flop is clean, and the turn is cleaner, and I am just one card away from sitting solidly in 2nd place of 7 remaining in the 35k:



And then, putting a delicious capper on a weekend that was so hot, and yet so, so cold on the virtual felt:



Seven hands later, I'm out in 8th place, for a wonderful consolation prize of $761. Now, 29 buyins is 29 buyins to be sure. But, first prize in this tournament was $8800, and I was one card away from a 2nd-place stack with 7 players remaining. From $8800 to $761, it's hard for me to feel anything but queasy about it even when I re-read this a couple of days later.

I played consistently the best poker I've played over a whole weekend in my entire poker-playing life over the past few days. And while I probably netted around 2k overall over the period, realistically I've got to guess I left what, 15 to 20k in Tournament EV on the table in very real terms over the entire weekend.

So forgive me if I don't necessarily share your opinion that you "run so bad" because of how that $10 90-person sitngo ended for you the other night.

Brilliant Poker Semi-Fiction

Not sure what made me click over to Morning Thunder's blog today -- where I read from time to time but generally not every day -- but when I did I was treated to one of the most laugh-out-loud funniest posts I've read in some time. Go and enjoy it for yourself, as I imagine that behind the flowery images and wonderfully descriptive prose is a story that each one of us has considered at some point over the last several years of our lives.

64 But I Need More

Wow I am on a miserable run lately on the online poker front. My live poker game is as good as it's ever been -- I've mentioned before here that I remember not all that long ago the first time I ever played one of those daily holdem tournaments in a casino, I was so nervous, I got bounced early on a race I didn't need to take on at the time, and I distinctly remember thinking at that time how I would be lucky to ever even make the top 20% of any live casino tournament in my life. Fast forward five years or so, and I've won some solid coin in live events in Vegas, and more than that, I've won three different daily casino tournaments while just goofing around so far this year. But online, the past week or so has been absolutely brutal.

It's happened to me before. More times than I can count, really. In fact, truth be told, this downswing isn't even close to as bad as the worst it's ever been. But for the past few weeks, I just can't win anything I play. I've barely touched the mtt's over the past couple of months -- not sure why, although I do seem to recall having a similar period after returning from Las Vegas last summer, so maybe I burn out a little playing so much poker over four days that I literally see pocket pairs and flop-turn-river whenever I blink my eyes, I don't know. But I've been mostly playing turbo sitngos lately, and damn the variance on those things is just sick. Especially when you play a lot of turbo heads-up.

Oh, and a lot of super turbos.

I can't help it sometimes. I realized a long time ago that online turbo tournaments are a style that I can play realllly well, and to this day it is clear whenever I play turbo events that at least half the people at the table -- be it sitngo or mtt -- honestly do not understand the kind of adjustment that needs to be made in order to have long-term success at this pace. Sitting around and waiting for a big pocket pair might work in this one instance if you get lucky, and sure it might make you some money for a week or two while you run good and get just the right situations just when you need them, but over time it's a far losing strategy in turbo tournaments, and quite simply you should not be playing turbo if that is the plan going in. Anyways, these guys might get lucky against me in a given event or three of course, but in general I am at a major skill advantage whenever I'm playing in a turbo tournament structure online.

Narrow that down to heads-up turbo sitngos, and the skill advantage is even more obvious. Now granted, in heads-up play, it is also concurrently harder to take advantage of that skill differential because the play can be so automatic throughout, but at the same time it is just painfully easy to see the deficiencies in the games of most heads-up players at the stakes I tend to play. It's just them and me, and no one else to focus on or to complicate the analysis and make it harder to make moves, etc. And amazingly, if you take it a step further and play the super turbo heads-up sitngos, it is sad how much almost every single person dumb enough to be playing in these rake machines is truly totally out of it when it comes to strategy for these things.

If you play turbo heads-up sitngos at anything above micro stakes, I'm sure you've noticed the autobots who automatically min-raise every single time they act first before the flop. From start to finish, without deviation, every single time. And never a real raise, always just a min-raise. It's such an exploitable strategy, and once I've noted them, I'll usually just kick it back up 4x their raise on a reraise with air right there, they will invariably fold, and then I will instantly show them my trash. These auto-minraisers are such clowns, I will steal their minraise 7, sometimes 8 or more times in one turbo sitngo that lasts 7 minutes. It's unbelievable the free chips that are available over the long run from these people who think they've figured out the way to beat the games. It's so awesome, really. But the best part of all is, even in the super turbo heads-up sitngos, there are idiots who still are out there min-raising every single pre-flop when they act first. Minimum raising, when starting with ten big blinds and with 3-minute blind rounds. How can you not love that?

So yes, as I'm sure the snarkers out there are thinking, why am I on here writing about this instead of playing those super turbo min-raising idiots right now this very second? The answer of course is that I've been playing the super turbo heads up sngs for hours a day over the past several weeks, and yet I don't have anything good to show for it. Lately the variance has just been on the ugly side over and over and over again. Yes I'm getting in ahead with the same consistency as always, but when you're playing in super-turbo land, getting allin pre with A7s vs K9s is not just commonplace -- it's around the best you can really realistically hope for if you're the A7s guy. That's why the variance is so sick in these things. Cuz you're really coming out there and just trying to get it allin preflop with a 60-70% advantage and hope you get your worth out of that situation over the long run. But 59-41 or 63-37 is just not all that favored to be able to avoid getting beat with some actual regularity when you actually play it out, something I've always known but which is so easy to forget until you go through one of those rough patches that mathematically have to happen if you play this game enough times over a long enough period of time.

Over the long run, I've performed fairly well in the turbo and super turbo sitngos that I have played. But lately, 64 percenters and even a few 80 percenters have just not been holding up their end of the bargain. And it's been probably the most annoying few weeks of poker that I've experienced in a year or more.

Bittersweet BBT

Four events so far in the BBT5. I don't really count The Buddy last week because I was gone for a little more than the first hour and ended up pushing allin real quick to try for an insta-double after raising about 75% of the first several hands I saw in the middle of Hour 2 with a short stack. But otherwise I've played in three of them, and I am playing really good poker. In stark contrast to how I usually seem to feel at the beginning of these long tournament series, I'm basically playing some of the best poker I ever play. I just haven't been able to withstand the barrage yet and my number seems to keep coming up over and over.

In the first Invitational tournament a little more than a week ago, with two runners out of just 79 entrants (more like 70 when you strike those who did not show) slated to nab BBT5 ToC seats, I was active from the getgo as always, but I had to make two big folds early on, one to Tripjax and one to Fuel. With Fuel I laid down top pair third kicker and was pretty sure I was behind when he raised me on the turn (seeing what he has gotten allin with in the BBT tournament so far has left me thinking likely otherwise). Against Trip, who is a little tighter, I laid down top pair 2nd kicker and an open-ended straight draw to his turn raise which also made a flush possible, and that one left me with under 1000 chips from the 3k starting stack not more than 20 or 30 minutes in. From there though I fought back, playing a smart, aggressive game and using my entire short stack as needed to keep people at bay, which also helped me to double up a couple of times in pretty easy spots where I knew I was ahead and figured I would be able to get my opponent's full stack. Down to around 20 remaining, with me solidly in the middle of the field, and two ToC seats on the line, I found QQ preflop in the small blind and reraised a big stack allin. He instacalled with AKo and IGH when the Ace flops. First card out of the deck.

One week ago today was the first Poker From the Rail tournament of the BBT5. In that one I once again slipped a bit in the earlygoing, but again there I quickly turned things around, won a ton of pots, mostly without showdowns, and really started to climb. I was in the top ten in chips for a while around the midpoint, but once again more than halfway through the field and with a nice stack going, I ran 99 into a big stack's 77 preflop, and lost when the 7 flopped to send me home before the deep part of the tournament.

I did not really play in last Wednesday's Buddy as I mentioned, but this weekend was the second of the Invitational tournaments, this time with 108 runners, much more than the field of the first week's which will prove to have been easily the best chance anyone will get to play for the big prizes in the ToC. Once again I slipped early, when I made a monster flop of T65 with two clubs while I was holding AT of clubs in my hand, against a guy who had called my preflop raise from the blinds. I led out on this flop, and he called. The turn brought an offsuit 7, which I wanted to make sure to bet at again given the three to a straight now on the board, and my opponent smooth called once again after some pause. The river brought the scary-looking 9 (offsuit) for a final board of T5679, but I figured there's no way I'm putting this guy on an 8 given the way this board played out (what was he calling on the flop with?), so I moved in on the reverse hoy for his last 600 chips into what was probably a 4500-chip pot already at this point. And he showed me 76 for the turned two pairs I definitely did not see coming and once again a sub-1000 stack very early on in this thing.

From there though, I fought back and once again used my short stack to my extreme advantage. I won about 25% of the total pots at my table preflop for the remainder of the first hour, and when someone finally doubled me up with their top pair fifth kicker early in Hour 2, I was back above the starting stack and looking to move even higher. I chased people off of hands like it was my job, and I busted at least four guys along the way to amassing over 10k in chips and another appearance in the top 10 of the leaderboard for a good long while. Eventually I open-raised for the umpteenth time from the button, this time with a deceptively strong JJ given how ridiculously I had stolen for the past couple of hours, and the small blind, a known tight player, reraised allin for a little over twice my raise. I knew this guy was tight but I also figured he could be in there with a slightly lower pair than mine, and he certainly could be in there with AK or maybe even AQs (and he figures I play like a maniac, so his range could be even a bit wider than normal), and the pot odds I was getting were simply far too good to fold given that I figured I was somewhere north of 50% to win the hand against his range. I called, he showed AK, and the Ace on the river erased half of my stack just like that in a hand that I could not have played any other way.

I picked up a couple of pots with now a short stack once again in the bottom ten of the 30-some players remaining out of the field of 108, and then never fear, I pick up QQ on the button, and the action folds to me. I did the standard raise of 3x to 900 chips (about a fifth of my stack at this point), and the big stack in the big blind waits maybe two seconds before moving allin. Of course I am calling here, he flips up KTo, and the King on the river sends me home. Gulp. I went to run some errands and when I come back maybe 25 minutes later to check on the leaderboard, that guy is already completely out despite using the suckout to jump to 3rd or 4th in chips of around 36 or 37 remaining at the time.

Like I said, I am playing some really solid tournament poker lately, across all my poker playing including the BBT5. I just haven't yet had the opportunity to hold up where I need to along the way in the series. A lot of the old standbys from the private blogger tournaments, guys who have made appearances in prior BBT Tournament of Champions, seem to be playing overly aggressively or otherwise somehow not on their game so far four tournaments into the 24-event series, which should help my cause all the more. Hopefully 24 total chances at the ToC is enough for the math to work in my favor one time, because I'm confident I will be right there and still alive when it's my turn for the luck to even out in this thing.

More Quick Hits

Lots on my mind today, and not a ton of time to spend blogging, so here we go in the "quick hits" format once again.

First, I was actually interested in watching the Winter Olympics for the first time this week on Wednesday night, even though Hammer Wife basically has the NBC coverage on the tv in the room with me all night every night this week. For whatever reason, I just don't find most of the winter Olympics to be fun to watch. I mean, of course I -- like the rest of the free world outside of the U.S. of A. -- don't take silly hobbies like snowboarding seriously as an Olympic sport, as America only lobbied for these to become Olympic competitions over the past couple of Olympics since we figured we could stuff the ballots with some free gold medals in those hobbies since we are after all the country that spawned the X Games and which otherwise has the money and the free time to pursue such newfangled activities. The figure skating does not particularly interest me, and basically any sport that relies on judges to subjectively decide who wins a medal -- judges who time and time again, mind you, have proven themselves to vote with their eyes closed based on biases wholly unrelated to who the best skaters are on that given day -- are more or less dead to me. I watched an hour or so of the ski jumping earlier in the week, but come on that is about as bad of television as there is. It's basically just a guy skiing motionless down a pre-dug track on a hill, and then pushing off with his legs while he stands, motionless, in the air for maybe five seconds as he floats to the ground. I'm not saying I could or would go and do that myself right now, but if you had to invent a boring, absolutely-no-action tv sport, that would pretty much be it. That, or the luge, which basically amounts to someone lying on their back for 80 seconds and trying to remain as motionless and flat as possible. I also saw some of the mogul freestyle skiing a couple of days back, but how many times can I watch someone break their knees over and over again by just bumping up and down in a way that deliberately impedes their pace and keeps the action slow and boring?

But then came the ladies' downhill skiing on Wednesday night, and I have to admit this was really pretty cool. Not being a skier myself, I am always amazed at how quickly these people move and how sharply they take these turns back and forth. What was cool on Wednesday night was that -- and I don't know if this was due to track conditions or what -- these skiers were completely and totally out of control from the moment they left the gate until their either face-planted or somehow finished the race still upright. Without exception every single one of these downhill skiers had absolutely no control whatsoever, and basically they each experienced the most terrifying minute and a half of their lives as they hurtled at 75 miles per hour back and forth down a track with a hugely steep downhill slope and much sharper cuts and curves than most other downhill tracks in the world, and you could just tell that each and every one of them was just praying to hold on for dear life. It was pretty amazing, and the complete franticness of the pace combined with quite a few entertaining face plants made for the first interesting watch of the entire Olympics in my view.

Oh and while I'm on the topic, I've seen several people mention in blogs or elsewhere how much they enjoy the speed skating. Really? At least in the head-to-head battles on the large course, there are some nice straightaways for the skill people to have the chance to power ahead and maybe even pass somebody due to their incredible leg strength and drive to win. But most of the speed skating they've shown so far is this ridiculous short-track kind, which I cannot understand how people can enjoy. There is no straightaway to speak of at all in this thing, and one lap takes all of maybe 7 seconds, 6.8 of which are all curves as the skaters are by design too busy crossing-over their skates on the curves to even think about actually racing. It's more like WWE skating than actual speed skating in any event, and I don't care if Apollo Ohno wins gold medals at it for America. In fact, I'm sure the silly short-track is just another format pushed into the Olympics by the Americans because we think we can win the gold in it with more regularity than the old, more pure speed skating of days past. At least with the heads-to-head skating races on the large rinks, there is some actual time and opportunity for those with the most actual speed skating skill to come out in front. Short-track speed skating is like the super-turbo version of a classic Winter Olympics sport, just a push-and-pray donkey's dream of someone who grew up watching real speed skating in the real Olympics, back when they used to only come around every four years instead of every two years nowadays. I think of the short-track speed skating as the Rush Poker of the Winter Olympics, which might sound like a compliment to many of you who have extolled the virtues of the Rush on your blogs but who are actually just unknowingly shilling for full tilt as they further bastardize poker in the name of the almighty dollar.

On an unrelated sports note, does anybody know why is Tiger Woods having another "press conference" on Friday at the PGA headquarters in Florida? And why on earth are these jackmonkeys on the radio saying he better say he's sorry so he can move on with his life? He already said he's sorry. About five different times. And I have news for you -- unless you are Elin Woods and happen to be reading this blog (I'm sure she is a big fan), Tiger never owed you any apology for what he did. Period. You're not married to him. He never made any promises to you regarding his off-the-course activities or his fidelity to his wife. And he certainly doesn't owe you five different apologies. So get up off the guy's back please. What Tiger did is despicable to say the least, and if I'm his wife I wouldn't be caught dead anywhere near him, not for any amount of money (even $300 million). But this lemming-like insistence across the media and the country that Tiger had better apologize (again!) on Friday in front of the cameras is just that -- lemming behavior. Newsflash: for the most part, the media in this country are the least intelligent, least integrity-having, and least honest or "good" group of people out there. Mindlessly following what they tell you to think to serve their own selfish agendas makes you closer to a 1930's Nazi than a 2010's American. So wake up and give the guy a god damn break.

Lost was effing awesome this week as any true Lost fan knows. So much left unanswered, but we probably got as much information in this show as in any episode in the series's history. That Flocke is "recruiting". That Jacob touching the six people he touched (Sawyer, Hugo, Jack, Sayid, Locke and either Sun or Jin) allegedly is what set them up to eventually end up at the island, as had been assumed. That strangely the other of Sun / Jin, Claire, Charlie, Rose, Bernard, and especially Kate were not touched by Jacob and were not drawn to the island by him in that way. That the mysterious numbers from the first couple of seasons are somehow connected to the selection of these six people. That Jacob is looking for "candidates" to replace him as guardian of the island. That Ileana scooped up Jacob's ashes and put them into a bag to take with her to the temple presumably for some purpose. That there is some kind of a "referee" in the battle between Jacob and Flocke in the weirdo blond kid who showed up out of nowhere a couple of times in this episode. That Sawyer was able to see the kid, while Richard Alpert of all people was not. How much of what Flocke told and showed Sawyer is actually true though? And is Sawyer really going to fight for Flocke, or as Doc Jensen of EW surprised me with in his column this week, is Sawyer running one final con, against the doer of evil, the Man In Black. Can Sawyer even fool Flocke like that, is that even possible to do? We'll have to wait and see. I'm just glad Kate wasn't featured this week again, for that I am eternally thankful. And WTF is up with the alternate reality storyline? The more they show of that story line, the less likely it seems to become to me that this is actually just a final flash forward to the end of the series when the Losties finally get it right. Although I will still say that it is obvious to me that the writers will find a way to bring the two story lines back together, as there is just no way that they are going to keep these two realities separate without tying the two together in some way.

Ahh, and of course, there is always poker. Lovely, fair, poker. Mother fucking dickshitting poker. Poker is destroying me right now. After all my talk of playing less after a great 2009, I have broken my own rule between double guarantees week and now the FTOPS and am instead playing a lot, which would be great if not for the Sick Ass Beats I take about 10 to 15 times every single night. Last night's standout hands include my KK vs TT on a KTx flop, allin, and then another Ten on the turn (that's not something you see every day!) in the $100 1-rebuy tournament on full tilt, and the flickaflonk in a $220 heads-up nlh sng who called my preflop raise with KK with his K6s, flopped 457 and called an allin from me for twice the pot on the flop, and then of course turned the 3 to bury me. I've been such a dick in the chatbox to these monkeys over the past several weeks of just plain brutal suckouts that it's a wonder my chat hasn't been perma-banned. I know I can play profitably in most of the games I play, but withstanding the kinds of suckout streaks I have seen over the past month-plus is more than any human can take. Rest assured that if most of you had to play my hands for even one night, your heads would fucking explode and we'd be cleaning up your brains off the walls for weeks. Clearly, I need a break from this shitgame right now. When you run like I do, too much poker can definitely be detrimental to my world view.

OK back to the grind. Working for the man sucks almost 1/1000th as much as playing poker does!

BBT4 ToC Odds -- The Rest of the Field

Wow have I been taking some sickass suckouts lately. More than usual. And they're the kind of suckouts where I am a few outs away from having a really big stack, and serious chip utility, only to find myself suddenly looking at the tournament lobby screen, having to re-check the hand history to even try to figure out whatthefuck just happened. As much as I hate running bad, I hate even more going through a string of suckouts heading into a tournament that I am more looking forward to than maybe any individual poker event this year (so far, not counting my upcoming WSOP foray later this month). The BBT4 Tournament of Champions is this Sunday night, June 7, at 8pm ET on full tilt, and I will be opening up the blog all day on Sunday, updating live throughout the day heading up to the ToC, and hopefuly sticking around well into the evening updating my own progress as the ToC wears into its later hours. And speaking of the BBT4 Tournament of Champions, without further adieu let me get to my predictions for the rest of the field that I have not already covered in my prior couple of posts. In alpha order, starting with those I have not yet covered:

Dr. Pauly -- Pauly is a solid poker player, and is always a danger to make a deep run using his ability to extract chips from his opponents, where Pauly is better than many in this field. That said, Pauly is far too busy with his writing to play much with this group anymore, and as a result my suspicion is that Pauly's poker skill will be outweighed somewhat by his inexperience against this particular field of blonkeys. With an average odds of 21 to 1 against, Pauly's still going to fare better than average, coming in I think right around 15 to 1.

Miami Don -- Don is an interesting pick for the ToC. He only played in 26 of the 56 BBT4 tournaments, but in those 26 appearances Don amassed more than 28 points per event on his way to 5 final tables and over $1220 in cash winnings. Don's solid BBT performance combined with an equally solid run in the most recent Bodonkey to demonstrate his ability to play against the bloggers. Don is another guy whose chances to win one of the two 10k WSOP prize packages is solidly above average, probably coming in at around 11 to 1.

nightranger -- StB plays under the handle "nightranger" on full tilt and is another guy who has demonstrated skill in maximizing value from his strong hands. Although StB has won several blonkaments in his day, those days were mostly some time ago, and as a rule we don't see StB in our regular games with anywhere near the frequency that was once the case. In the end I know that StB can play the game, but I think his odds of winning one of the top two prizes are right around average given his lack of recent experience against most of the rest of the ToC field. 22 to 1.

pushmonkey72 -- I really owe pushmonkey one, because it was he who almost singlehandedly put my one and only lifetime Mookie championship on a silver platter for the taking earlier in the BBT4. But despite that one act of undying kindness for which I will feel eternal gratitude, I think pushmonkey is a very long shot to finish in the top 2 in Sunday's Tournament of Champions. I know push has won a few blonkaments over time, but I've just seen too many poor decisions to think him likely to last against this particular field of BBT4 tournament winners. 35 to 1.

pvanharibo -- Obviously pvan has the skill to win the ToC. LJ has the aggression that all great poker tournament players live and breathe, and she's shown that she can do it on a large stage several times over, both in the blogger tournaments and elsewhere. On top of that, she tends to hit when she needs to and the bloggers fold to her like it's going out of style. The only thing the rest of the field has going for it is that pvan had a pretty horrible BBT4 overall, certainly by her standards. I will temper the odds a bit as a result of her cold streak in BBT4 tournaments, but we're still looking at 15 to 1 for pvan to take this thing down.

qrs1 -- I don't know who this guy is, and I only saw him start showing up in the BBT4 somewhere near the end of the series. Having only played 12 tournaments total in the challenge, qrs still somehow managed to finish in 36th place on the series leaderboard overall. Although the guy popped up with 6 final tables in those 12 tournaments, I have to scale the odds down somewhat based on some of the plays I saw made along the way during the BBT4. Not knowing anything else about who this guy is, I will lay his odds of winning at around 20 to 1.

rake feeder -- Rake won I think the very first tournament of the BBT this time around, besting me in heads-up play at the series-opening Big Game. Rake also showed up for 28 events, meaning that he participated in fully half of the events of the entire challenge, so he's mixed it up with the group playing in Sunday's ToC sufficiently often to know what's what. The thing about Rake that makes me a bit dubious about his chances of running deep is that in those 28 BBT4 tournaments, it was just three final tables and 3 ITM finishes. That tells me that Rake's game is a bit hit or miss, and that regardless of his early performance, he simply does not have the late game skills that many of his competitors in this field are sure to bring to the table this weekend. It will take some very fortunate situations for Rake to last down to the final two. 29 to 1.

rubbishat -- No idea who this is. But they have the word "rubbish" in their name, and it looks like in his one win out of 6 tries was for a lofty $67. Thus, we're looking at another guy who plays exclusively in the $5 Brit gheyness, and thus someone who plays low and who doesn't have much experience against the rest of this field on top. 40 to 1.

Shabazz Jenkins -- I've said this several times, but Shabazz is a good poker player, one I have seen and played with deep in tournaments on multiple occasions over the past year or so. Shabazz crushed in the BBT4, finishing 51 events in 3rd place overall on the leaderboard, with over $1600 cash won and as one of the small handful of players who ended the series with more than 30 BBT points per event over more than 30 tournaments. Despite playing so well in the blogger events, I think Shabazz is a bit of a sleeper in the Toc just because he hasn't been around for too too long and since he only won outright one of the series' 56 tournaments. Shabazz is clearly one of the favorites in this field in my book. 9 to 1.

ShipFaced -- I know nothing about who ShipFaced is. What I do know is that the guy played just 8 BBT4 tournaments, and somehow he managed to win two of those eight tournaments. I don't know what to do with that information since I haven't a clue who this guy is, but I suppose he's gotta be in the top half of the field after that impressive performance over just a handful of events. Plus, on BDR last week someone said he won a Mookie along the way, so you know he's got mad skillz. I'll stick ShipFaced just a bit above average, at 18 to 1 to win one of the 10k packages.

SmBoatDrinks -- Here is a guy who's been playing with the bloggers for a couple of years at least, and I've seen the name several times during that period, so I know he has the requisite experience against this field to at least prevent experience from being a detriment to his chances in the BBT4 ToC. What's more, Boat also finished the BBT in 19th place on the overall leaderboard, making 8 final tables in 43 appearances along the way. The biggest knock against Boat's BBT performance is that he has only been able to turn those 8 final tables into $400 cash, which indicates not many late runs and more than his fair share of early final table bustouts. The good overall performance gets Boat into the picture in my view, but it's not enough to punch solidly into the top half of the field. 18 to 1.

smokkee -- Smokkee is definitely one of the two or three tightest players in this year's BBT4 ToC field. Normally this is not a reliable path to success in a tournament where you need to finish in the top 2 out of a strong, aggressive field, but I don't know that I can ever recall seeing someone on a heater of good luck like smokkee has been on over the past month or two. Anybody who can just foldfoldfold to the final table and then reliably expect KK>QQ>JJ and AK>KQ on a King-high flop cannot possibly ever be far out of this tournament, and when you throw in that the guy has been winning races late in tournaments over the past few weeks at probably an 85% clip, and smokkee has to be well into the top part of the field for the upcoming ToC. Since his success remains based on a mathematically flawed strategy that only works due to some of the sickest luck I've ever seen, I can't put smokkee in the top tier of players, but he is a solid second-tier with very good chances of running deep given his recent performances. 12 to 1.

tgrazz -- I don't know who this player is either, other than to say that the guy suckout-eliminated me from not one but two tournaments during the BBT4. And that while playing only 18 of the 56 BBT4 tournaments overall. In those 18 events, however, tgrazz made just 3 final tables and scored under 18 BBT points per game overall, which indicates not a lot of late strength in his tournament game. Combine that with very little experience playing against this group overall, and we're looking at another below average chance to win the big shit on Sunday. 33 to 1.

Tony Eusebio -- I don't know much about Tony to be honest, but he seemed to be friendly with a few people here and there who played in the BBT this time around. Tony finished the BBT4 in 24th place, with 6 final tables in 31 events played. His points per game was respectable, and I don't recall him making any embarrassing plays, outside of the Skillz game where I'm stil cleaning up the barf from some of the calls I saw. As the ToC is a no-limit event and with Tony having performed well overall in the BBT, I think his lack of familiarity with some of the players will keep his odds down close to average overall. 20 to 1.

Tuscaloosa John -- What can I say that hasn't already been said about Tuscaloosa John and his incredible BBT prowess? Not only did TJ run roughshod over the BBT4 field, including 14 final tables and over $2200 in cashes over 50 tournaments, but he's done it before as well -- TJ won not one but two of the montly 2k prizes from last summer's BBT3 as it is. All this is a long way of saying, TJ has repeatedly beat down on the bloggers over a sustained period of time, and he appears to have this format really down pat as far as having figured out how to survive to make a run at the end of these things. Of course, winning almost every race I saw him in over the past month doesn't hurt either. There's no way TJ is less than 7 to 1 to win one of the big prizes in Sunday's Tournament of Champions.

Vinnay -- Vinnay won his way into the BBT4 Tournament of Champions just a couple of days after I had called him out for never winning the Mookie, ending the challenge in 46th place on the overall leaderboard. Despite showing up for 20 BBT4 events, in general I don't think Vinnay has quite the experience against this type of field that most of the other participants in the ToC will have, and on top of that I also note that Vinnay made just three final tables in those 20 tournaments played. Overall this stacks up to a slightly worse than average shot at the big prizes on Sunday, probably around 25 to 1 against.

And that rounds out everybody playing in the BBT4 Tournament of Champions on Sunday night at 8pm ET. Everybody except for me, that is. As I mentioned on BDR the other night, I feel like I surely have the skill to make the kind of deep run needed to nab one of the 10k WSOP prize packages in this thing. I had a solid BBT overall, finishing in 15th place on the leaderboard while making 7 final tables and more than $1200 over 39 events played. But, if I am to make the deep run I know I am capable of, I will need to get some good situations along the way, either in the form of decent cards, hitting some flops, or at the least having some of my 57% and 52% hands hold up when I need them. And unfortunately for me, the story of my BBT4 has been more or less the total opposite of that, as I always seem to be the guy losing the key race, missing the 14 outs twice in a key spot, and just generally not being afforded the opportunity to wait out the good spots nearly as much as many of the others who really killed this time around in the BBT. And with the way I have been running lately, it seems almost a certainty that I will get suckout- or luckout-eliminated somewhere along the way in the upcoming ToC. My poker skill matches up well againsts the totality of this field, but I am simply nowhere near the top of the list as far as actual chances of winning the big shit. 15 to 1.

OK that's all for now. I will update the Hoy live blog right here on Sunday as often as I can, at least until I get sucked out on by some douchebag who would jizz all over himself if he even thought about winning 10k in a poker tournament. That should be good for an hour or so at least after the 8pm start time of the ToC, but look for me here ahead of that for some good old-fashioned live blogging of my poker day.

Still Running Sick, and Another Poker Book Review

Well, I took a couple of days away from poker after last week's hideous streak of 2- and 3-outer bad beats. I showed up for one tournament last night, and promptly got it allin preflop with my JJ against my opponent's TT. Ten on the flop and IGH early. That makes three consecutive oustings from that particular tournament where I got it allin with my opponent having three or fewer outs. Lately in there I've been waiting until after the flop though, so I guess I have myself to blame for believing I could hold up as a mere 82% favorite with the way I'm running.

Should make for a fun Mookie tonight though, as I make my triumphant return to Fuck Tilt. 10pm ET on full tilt. Mookie Curse + already losing to 2 outers all week long should equal a brilliant burnout early in this one. Just hope you're at my starting table this evening. And don't worry about trying to get it in behind -- I've been taking care of that just fine lately myself, as I am consistently getting myself into good situations, playing my strong hands optimally to get myself into the best possible positions. Yes, I want people to make those calls, yes I want to be in these situations as much as possible, yes the long term should work itself out yaddayaddayadda blahblahblahblahblah. Pay me bitches!!

So back to the poker book I mentioned last week that was a good, solid read, I was referring to Gus Hansen's "Every Hand Revealed". This was the one that jeciimd had recommended to me, and I have to say that guy hasn't given me one bad poker rec yet. Hansen's book is solid, because he basically recounts the entire background and situation of every single hand he played in the entire Aussie Millions tournament that he ended up winning. I mean, deep down I know exactly why I enjoyed this book -- it is more or less exactly like reading one of my tournament recaps in my blog, only by a better player. He does basically exactly what I do when I win a big tournament, only he literally mentions every single hand he played, while I skip the most boring ones in my tournament recaps and probably only end up covering maybe 60-70% of the hands I play throughout.

Gus does a good job with this book, largely because his style of play is so aggro that it is a real eye-opener to most of the people reading this book I imagine. In fact, kinda like I said about Arnold Snyder's "Poker Tournament Formula" books, if you are someone who has never won the big mtt and does not really understand why you're never getting close, if you're a Harringbot or a tightydonk like I know many of you out there reading this are, this would be a fabulous book for you to read. You will see just how many times Hansen opened a hand with a raise when his cards were absolute and utter shit. You will see the moves Gus makes without any regard whatsoever to his own cards, just playing his opponents instead. You can watch Gus play a tight(er) style early, and then get to see hand by hand how he opens things up as the tournament wears on. Any of you out there who have won large mtt's before already know this in general -- because there really is no way to win a large mtt without being one stealy mofo -- but for the majority of you who have not, I think reading "Every Hand Revealed" should be enjoyable and educational. And, although Gus shares the same (lack of) writing skill as almost all other poker authors out there, his writing does have a very informal and laid-back thing to it that makes this book seem much less instructive and much more just a fun read, which is also a positive I think.

I've already started reading a new poker book that I am really enjoying, which I will review in a later post. But after slogging through Daniel Negreanu's clunker a couple of weeks ago, Gus Hansen's book was a welcome and pleasant surprise, and it's a book that I would recommend to others to read if you like playing multi-table poker tournaments. I give it a 7.5 out of 10 overall. I don't see myself as the best audience for this text as I was not surprised to see most of the moves Gus makes in that I know what it takes to run deep in the big mtts, but I still had a great time with it and I look forward to more of the same from Gus if he can string together some more big tournament wins.

FTOPS Main Event

So earlier this week I had written about losing around $2000 of cash on three separate 2- or 3-outers on the river, all occuring when the money got in after the flop. It's something I've been focusing on for a good couple of years now, a strategy which I see most the great professional mtt players follow fairly religiously in the tournaments they play in -- almost to a man, these guys hate to get it allin without the mortal, uncatchable nuts. So I've been trying to do less and less of the get-it-allin-well-ahead before the flop stuff, even though I used to do that all the time. I've written about it here countless times over the past couple of years, but after getting it in ahead and taking the number of suckouts that I take,I have really been focusing on turning those 80% favorite hands before the flop into 90%+ favorites after the flop by waiting an extra round or two before getting all the money into the middle.

So there I was earlier this week, running in "the" 40k, "the" 32k, and those juicy turbo satellites into the FTOPS Main Event, getting knocked out of all three on either 2-outers or 3-outers despite waiting until after the flop to get all the money in to the middle. What does this mean, exactly? I'm talking about having pocket Tens in the small blind, and the cutoff bumps it up on a typical steal-raise, and rather than push my last 20 big blinds into the middle right there preflop when I'm fairly sure I'm ahead, I figure I will wait until the flop, and just give myself a chance to get away where the donkey with the A4o would have spiked his Ace on the flop and taken me out. So I just call, the flop comes all rags, and then by checking I induce my opponent to push allin on me. I flip up my Tens and he shows pocket 9s. 9 on the river, and IGH. When you've played 3 or 4 hours into tournaments over the previous few days and that has been the way it's ended for you just short of where the money really gets big three separate times, it can be very hard to swallow.

Then, one day after writing about this was when I made that fantastic run deep into the 50-50 on full tilt which I wrote about on Thursday and Friday of last week. This is the one where I picked up my first premium pair of the entire night in pocket Kings with exactly 10 players remaining out of the 1195 who started, the guppy chip leader calls my preflop pot-sized reraise with 75o, pushes all-in to me on a 7-high flop and then manages to suck out the river 7 to eliminate me in tenth place despite playing the hand about as poorly as it could have been played on every single street. That was conservatively another $4000 or so of Tournament EV added to my already $2000 from earlier in the week, all raped away from me by river suckouts after I managed to get myself in well ahead in key spots in big tournaments.

Well, Sunday night this weekend was the FTOPS Main Event, which I did play in, and played in very well might I add. I managed to chip up on several hands, mostly bluffs of course, in the first hour or two, and my first really big hand did not occur until just about two full hours in to the event. It's worthy of some screenshots, because hand histories just don't do these things justice all the time.

So I'm around 33% above the starting stack, right around average just short of two hours in to the Main Event. I pick up pocket 3s on the button, and since I've done my usual thing and been a stealy mofo throughout the tournament so far, of course I have to raise here so I go for my standard 3x raise to 480 chips. The small blind, a guy who had tried at least one time previously to move me off of a hand he thought I was stealing with by using a minraise, which he quickly folded to my pot-reraise, reraises me here with a below-average stack:



Now, even though I obviously don't have the odds to properly set mine, the bottom line was that this guy had gotten out of line a couple of times already, I figured there was a very good chance I was already ahead and that he would push any raggy flop allin on me from first position. So I went for the call:



The flop comes down T73 rainbow -- my only flopped set of the day -- and my opponent bets a big portion of his stack but not all of it:



OK so now I can whittle down his range of hands to literally just a few, all of which I am crushing. To not push allin here, he either hit top pair top kicker with AT, or better yet, he has AA-QQ and desperately thinks he's going to double up here, with a small chance that he might have flopped a higher set with 77 or TT given his please-call-me bet here on that short stack of his. Either way, I am content to play this one slow, just in case, so I just callin the hopes of seeing the turn card before committing the rest of his stack to the pot. In keeping with the tournament strategy I mentioned above and have written about incessantly here for the past couple of years, waiting until after the turn will just give me that much more information, and maybe if an Ace, King or Queen falls, and he does something that really indicates a higher set, I can at least consider getting away from the hand, unlikely though that may be:



So the turn comes and it is basically another rag, after which my opponent quickly pushes all in:



So here I am, I've waited until after the turn card here, and there is just nothing on this board that can possibly get me to fold here. My opponent's actions are consistent with a high pocket pair, and I nailed his ass by flopping the set on the flop in a spot where he rightfully assumes I have been stealing with air all along. I've seen all the cards but the last card with my deceptively strong hand, and my opponent has forced me to a decision for the rest of his stack. I've lessened the risk of my getting drawn out on significantly by not only waiting until after the flop but also until after the turn. What more can I do, I can't fold here obviously. So I call, with much confidence:



Booooom. Well played with the one pair for a just under the average stack in a $535 buyin tournament.

River card:



2-outer on the river, after waiting for not just the flop but even the turn before getting the last half of my opponent's stack into the middle. Sound fucking familiar?

Now granted, it was early enough in this thing still, with some 2500 runners remaining and only nearly 800 making the cash, that it is very difficult to ascribe an actual cash value to that disgusting, despicable suckout. Maybe just a couple hundred bucks, being fair to the math. But who knows what this could have turned in to. And like I've been saying all fucking week, it hurts especially much when I am going out of my damn way to decrease my risk by waiting to see as many cards as possible on the board before getting the majority of the money into the middle, even when I'm fairly sure I'm ahead on an earlier street. I mean, higher pocket pair losing to lower pocket pair allin preflop is bad enough. That is an 82% favorite or so in most cases, and anytime you lose a big stack on that kind of a dominated hand, it just feels wrong. But when I've got the Tens over the Nines after the flop and the money goes in, that is what, a 91% favorite? So this week alone, I lost two 91% hands and one three-outer on the flop as well for an 88% hand, all in key spots in big tournaments with real cash on the line. Then I closed that week out by getting beat after the fucking turn card with a 2-outer for a 95% favorite, up in flames, in the biggest tournament of them all.

I mean, what do you do when even 19-to-1 isn't good enough to double up in a huge spot in a $2.5 million guaranteed tournament?

It isn't often that I wake up the next morning still feeling physically ill about a bad beat. In fact, it's been years now since I almost ever care about a bad beat even an hour or so later. But this one, coming on the heels of a week of close calls, deep runs and horrible anal rapages, is really clinging with me. Someone think of something to say to put this into perspective please.

Mixed Bag, and Fun With the Chatbox

Tuesday night was a mixed bag for me in poker, which I guess could be viewed as good or bad given my recent stretch of frustration. Despite all my talk about donking it up at the Waffles-level cash games (1 cent - 2 cent blinds) or just staying away from the game for the night, I was feeling much better when the time came on Tuesday evening, so I ended up running a few nice mtt's as if it were just a regular day, and I'm happy to say I played much better than I have been and that my mentality was pretty much where it should be. I ran three mtts on fuck tilt full tilt on the night, cashing in two of them, and I even allowed myself to get talked in to firing up the old ICB account and using some of that Bodonkey money to play a $44 mtt on the worst of the poker clients with Don in the midst of the best mtt streak of his poker career.

One thing I have to say about Bodog is that everything I've been hearing about the players there is pretty much spot on. I can't comment on the cash games since I don't play them there and can't see how playing against uber donkeys will be anything but bad for my aggressive always-get-in-ahead game, but Tuesday saw truly some of the worst tournament poker play I have ever seen. This $44 mtt started with 1500 chips, and I think after three or four hands I was already the chip leader with over 4600 chips. And I'd love to take credit for my awesome play in those hands or for being dealt AA and KK and shizz, but in reality I won two allin hands with top pair, one with top kicker and one which a 6 kicker. People literally threw their chips at me right from the getgo, it was pretty sick. Just as I've said the players on stars are worse at tournaments than those on full tilt, so far from one night's play I have to concur with what you've all been hearing -- the players on bodog are a serious joke. Playing against total idiots can be annoying in a way of course, especially when you are not a lucky player, but in general I can't really find anything good to say about the guys I ran into all through Tuesday's mtt run.

I got to do one of my favorite things last night in this bodog tournament which is ruin some jagoff's night after I busted him due to his poor play and total lack of understanding of his image. Basically, Don has just come to my table at the time, and I had been explaining to Don in the girly how I had watched this clown push allin on massive overbets on the flop and turn no fewer than 20 times in the first hour or 90 minutes of this tournament. While Don and I sat there, he again overbet every flop and turn he saw, probably two or three more times over a few minutes, and I was just licking my chops for the time I could actually pick up a hand against this clown. Long story short, a few hands later I find pocket 8s, and I see a flop of J32 against just the overbettor. He immediately bets out on the size of the pot on the flop, not even overbetting the pot which made me think for sure he was weaker than he wanted to be. I commented as much to Don in the girly, and I called his flop bet. Then the raggy undercard on the turn fell, and the guy again insta-bet me allin. I thought for about three seconds, figured if the donk of the century just got me then so be it, and I called off my stack with 2nd pair 8s. He flipped up pocket 7s and I stizznacked his ass. And then the chatbox blew up.

"How could you call that!"

"With all that money in the pot? Are you some kind of idiot?!"

"How on earth could you call that you donkey?!"

I love it. I've written about this many times before, quite recently even, but there is basically no one I love more at the poker table than a guy with a horrible image but who has no clue what that image is. We all know these guys -- the guys who call down with shit cards all night long, and then when you finally take a stand with a mediocre hand and bust them, they are nothing short of shocked and appalled. So I quickly decided on the thing that would probably bother this guy the most of all, and went for it in the chat:

Me: "Sorry, that was a misclick."

Donk: "WHAT?!! Are you ****ing KIDDING me?"

Me: "Yeah, so sorry. First time I've played here, I meant to click on another table."

A string of expletives followed. And the best part is, with my response I not only ruined the guy's entire night and left him I'm sure telling all his friends about his "unbelievably bad luck", but he is also assured of now continuing to play the exact same way he did last night. Anything I can do to keep the quality of play on bodog to a minimum, you all have me to thank. Just unreal these no-image guys.

Anyways, sadly my end results on the night still suffered from some horrific beats, as in fact each of my last three mtt's ended in a suckout or setup elimination for me. I just cannot shake the bad beats lately no matter how hard I try. In the bodog, another guy went on megatilt after losing two thirds of his stack on a bad beat himself, and pushed allin into my KQs when I was chip leader, so I quickly called and of course he had been dealt KK just one hand after tilting out of his mind. Then, the same anusnose pushed allin again when I had AK, and I called only to see -- you guessed it -- KK again not four or five hands later, and IGH somewhere in the mid teens for a small cash. So that was a very poor and shocking ending for a tournament which I literally led the vast majority of the way, but as far as one of my first mtt forays onto bodog, the players just plain sucked.

Sadly I suffered a similar fate in my other two late mtts on full tilt. In the 5050 I once again cashed, but I busted in the low 100s when my AA got allin against of all things AJ, and even though he was fully dominated by my pocket rockets, he still managed to runner-runner straight me. So ghey, but so standard for me lately on full tilt. Similarly in the $50 megasat at 9:45pm ET to FTOPS #17, which awarded $322 buyins to the top 20 finishers out of 130-some runners, I was top 15 in chips with 36 remaining when I managed to get some guy with a huge stack allin with his A7 on a board of 762 against my 88, putting me in position to double to the point where I surely could have gone to bed and made the cash (and I probably would have, at that hour), but then the clown runner runner flushed me with his 7 and IGH short of the payout spots. Hard to accept.

I know I sound like a broken record with my experiences on full tilt lately, but what can I say, variance is crushing me lately mostly in spots where I am getting it in ahead and just taking a serious beating. As I've said here many times, what more can I do than get allin preflop when I am dominating, or better yet wait until after the flop when I am ahead and have my opponent drawing to just a small handful of outs? It will all balance out in the end and I have surely had my share of success on full tilt overall, but my lord when things are running bad like this it can be really hard to believe. Frankly I can't even believe I'm willing to log in to the full tilt client these days after the consistent spankings I've been receiving, but I know I will be on there tonight to play the Mookie at 10pm ET (password as always is "vegas1"). I may be disgusted with full tilt but no way I am missing the grandpappy of all blogger tournaments just because of a little ass fucking from my favorite online poker site.

See you tonight, have the vaseline ready!

Dont-Want-To-Play Tilt

I donked very much on purpose out of the FTOPS on Monday night, around the middle of the first hour. For a $1060 buyin. That's all you need to know about my mindset right now. I literally called an allin reraise with of all things the dreaded JackAce. And it's not like I thought there was a chance in hike that I was ahead.

Similarly, I donked my way all the way up to 3rd place out of around 300 remaining in the 50-50 last night. But then I suffered one stoopid bad beat that took half my chips, and from there I literally tossed into the garbage my still top-80 stack. On purpose. With 83o or some shit against a tight preflop raiser who was obviously calling my push.

I just didn't give a crap, and I didn't want to be playing poker.

Not sure what I've done in the past when faced with this feeling, although I remember feeling it (several times) before. Does that mean I play tonight or take another day off? I suppose only time will tell.

Miami Don final tabled one more tournament on Blowdog in the afternoon, and still another final table in the evening on Monday. That guy is really figuring shit out after a long time chasing the mtt dream without really getting the whole game about late-stage tournament play. There is almost nothing better than watching a friend advance his game like that. Hopefully Don will take some time to write about some of the changes he has made to his game almost overnight in the past few days that have brought him such awesome results.

Maybe he can teach me a thing or two about having the right mindset to play a tournament these days.

I have more questions about major areas in my life at this moment than I've probably had in quite some time. I'm not sure if that is contributing to my general poker malaise or what, but I'm just not focused on the game like I need to be if I expect to actually play the the game properly. Much of the uncertainty in my life should (hopefully) be taken care of over the next few days, so perhaps once that is done I can get back to my normal routine. For now I have no plans to play any more large-buyin FTOPS events, as believe me when I say I am just throwing my money away. Literally.

Hey, at least I write when I'm running bad. Personally I find it really cheapens the whole blogging experience if I only post when I am on a hot streak. To me this feeling of frustration and just lack of focus and desire to play is part of the fun in a sick way, part of the real poker experience. At least, everyone goes through it, some more often than others, and when you read here you've always gotten a real-world view of poker from the eyes of a regular tournament player. It ain't all fun n games folks, especially for an old tilter like me.

See ya around. Maybe I'll donk it up at some super low limit cash tonight or something to try and clear my head. Who knows.

Favre

Wow. I mean, wow. Brett Favre a New York Jet. Needless to say, this city is electric this morning.

It's like this. As many of you know, I'm a Philadelphia fan through and through. In all the sports. Yep, that's right. Phillies. Eagles. Sixers and Flyers. The whole shebang of local franchises where I grew up and where my family still is today. So let's just say that I know what it's like to be a fan of loser teams and the butt of every joke a city across. As my few fellow haters bloggers from Philadelphia are all too keenly aware, it means a special something to be a real hardened Philly fan. You grow up with a certain feeling -- call it pessimism, call it inevitability, fate, whatever -- but you basically know how mostly every season is going to end before it even begins. And it really affects you, inside and outside the world of sports, in ways that only a true fan of Philadelphia could ever understand.

The New York Jets are one of the very closest things to these Philadelphia teams, another team that hasn't won a superbowl in basically two generations. A team that always seems to find a way to lose, to trade the better players for the worse, and the one who always seems to come out on the losing end of every transaction and just every occurrence in which they are involved as a franchise. Get the first pick in the draft? The guy blows his knee out in training camp. Picked to finish first in the division for the first time in over 20 years? Quarterback shreds his Achilles tendon early in Game 2 and the team ends up 4-12. Trade for the coach who just won one of the toughest divisions in football? Guy ends up being the literal worst coach in any sport in the history of time and is gone after two abysmal seasons. It's just like that when you're a fan of the Jets, and again it's eerily similar for me to what my own sports fandom has been in my nearly 30 years of being an avid fan of all the Philly teams.

So Brett Favre struts into town with the truly shocking news in this area that he has been traded for what, a 4th round draft pick. And you know what? I have absolutely no doubt that Favre is going to make some real waves here in this city. I mean, many people just aren't cut out to play and live in New York City. For some it's too busy, for some it's too loud, for some it's too big, and for many it's just too much of a microscope, and they end up cracking under the pressure, performing poorly and/or just flipping out. I remember Randy Johnson in his first week as a New York Yankee literally punching out a camera man who was asking too many questions up in Johnson's face. Guys like that, and there are many of them, just aren't cut out for the big city like this. Scores of other players just find out they could never handle the media scrutiny, the constant criticism, the millions of fans writing, talking, calling into sports radio, etc. all picking apart every little thing their star athletes say or do. It's a rough life, and it takes a special kind of player with a special kind of focus, including an uncanny ability to tune out all the noise that comes along with being in New York, to really survive here and to thrive here.

But Brett Favre is just such a guy. Even though he's from the back woods of Mississippi and has spent basically his entire life there and then in the local-community environment of Green Bay, the guy still has that certain je ne sais quoi about him. More than anything else, it's a presence. Favre is going to step foot off the plan at LaGuardia in a day or two, and I'm telling you, he is instantly going to be the king. If there is any quarterback in the NFL that is just plain cool, it's Favre.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say this is the greatest thing to happen to the NFL since Joe Namath's improbable victory in I think the third superbowl ever back in the late 60's. Personally, I think one of the big losers in this ends up being Brett Favre. Sure, he gets to keep playing football, and obviously with the shit qb's the Jets have going on right now, he will be the obvious started right from the get-go for his new team. And yes, he gets to continue his already-record streak of consecutive starts at quarterback in the NFL. But there are two big downsides to this move. The less significant downside in my mind is that Brett is now playing for the hapless Jets, and I don't think he is even close to good enough to overcome the loser mentality that afflicts that franchise as bad as any of the Philadelphia teams. So Brett is in my mind jumping out of his current situation and into another where he is highly unlikely to have any huge success, and I don't think even the Favre-enabled Jets are anywhere near good enough to make the superbowl, or even possibly to make the playoffs in what is sure to be another stacked AFC.

But the worst part of this whole thing is that I always cringe a little whenever one of these franchise guys who spends more or less his entire career playing for one team in one city and building a bond with the fans and really the entire community, suddenly up and leaves for a new team, new city, etc. I mean, did it feel good to you watching Joe Montana end his career as a Kansas City Chief? Now Favre is in some ways throwing away everything he built up over the previous 16 seasons in Green Bay. There is just something magical to me about these all-time greats at their sport, starting and ending their careers with the same team and going down in history as an icon for the city in which they always played. The Robin Yount / George Brett type of athletes. Now Favre has removed himself from this venerable group, and personally I never find that history reflects quite so well on such players once they leave the friendly confines of the city, the field and the fans where they became famous. I suppose only time will tell if Favre lives to regret the decision to venture away from his home away from home in Green Bay and to the media center that is New York, where the fans are crazed but the team has basically been a comedy of errors and a comedy of failures over the past many, many years.

What's that? Oh this is supposed to be a poker blog? Well eff poker. I am tilted beyond tilt these days. It's so bad that on Wednesday night I went and unregistered from a couple of FTOPS tournaments I had previously been all set to play later this week and weekend, and I'm not sure when the next time will be that I'll be up to putting up hundreds of dollars of my very hard-earned cash on the line when I can't beat players who bet at me on 6th street with three of a kind or two high pairs showing in razz (both true stories!) and I haven't flopped a set in probably four months. Eff poker, did I mention that already?

Thoughts of Running Bad

I've got nothing fresh or original about poker swirling around my head today to be quite honest. The truth of the truth is that this past week has been one of my least enjoyable weeks of poker in a looooong time. The thing with being me is that when I run bad, I will take 15-20 bad beats a night. It is sick. I've learned to handle a ton of bad beats, and really I can't remember the last time I even close to tilted from any particular beat. But as mostly a tournament player, these bad beats never seem to come at a good time or in an unimportant pot, and lately they have been ending some nice runs I've been building up over several hours, most often just short of the bubble in the nightly majors.

Consider just the most painful ones from just Thursday night. I lost a ragingly monstrous stack in the Riverchasers when I got it in with my AA against KK allin preflop, and I still couldn't find a way to win the hand. When I caught someone bluffing with their 74o allin reraise vs. my pocket Queens late in the 32k, the guy rivers the straight. And in the $150 satellite to the $1060 buyin FTOPS #10, first my JJ loses to 99 allin preflop to rape half my stack, but through my greatness I managed to rebuild and was back in the top third of the field with about half of the entrants eliminated, and then my AA loses allin preflop to QTs when the guy flops a migga fligging flush on me. I mean WTF.

Anyways even I have to admit some digghead ranting about the bad beats he took last night is no kind of good blog reading. It doesn't even feel good to write it, believe me. Suffice it to say that I when I run bad, I take a lot more bad beats than most people could deal with, and it can really sap away my enthusiasm pretty quick if it continues for long. So today after yet another night of spankage, I got nothing fresh.

So be it.

Let me change things up then by asking a few questions of the readers today.

First, Esquire80 left me this comment to yesterday's Bet or Check the River post:

"I've got to agree w/ shrike, your optimal play is to bet out right into him. In this particular case he would have most likely folded but he could have called, folded or you would have induced a bluff which you were prepared to snap off.

Based on your read you are assigning him something like a 10% chance of a flush?

Overall, you are losing value here unless your plan is to check raise the river with your strong holding in an attempt to squeeze more out of him. In this case he didn't have anything to squeeze but if he had someting like Krag w/ 2 pair or got a cooler w/ a set you could felted him.

Frankley, to be results oriented I don't think you could have got any more value out of that hand given his holding but the value bet on the river is the superior play in the long run." (emphasis added)

This is a very black-and-white-ly stated position, and in my experience in poker such matter-of-fact strategies generally prove not to be nearly so cut and dried. So I get it, my presumed fellow lawyer guy, you say that betting is better than checking in this spot. But not once do you say why that is correct. And the why is at least as important as the what. So do tell, I am all ears.

Secondly, let me ask a more general question here. Am I the guy everyone is talking about who uses too many commas and uses them too liberally? I mean, I like to think I'm pretty self-aware, and it's not like I don't know that I seem to write more and longer posts than most people. But when people are out there commenting on how people use commas all wrong, have they actually been talking about me this time for real? That would be fucked up.

Here's another good one: Who the fuck would ever be betting on an NBA game right now? Go read that link. I have to credit our man for the inside scoop on the betting lines in Las Vegas Miami Don for that link. But dayummm, who on earth is betting basketball these days? Think the NBA might have to revise its stance that this was an isolated referee, acting alone, all along? Christ, that shit just gets worse and worse.

Oh and before I go, for those who don't know, Bayne and Waffles have a $100 staight-up bet going where Waffles bets that he can climb to the top of the year's Mookie leaderboard within I think two more months or so. When the bet was made earlier this week, I think Waffles was in 7th place or something, and was basically $260 or something behind the current leaders, LJ and Surflexus. Well, already Waffles busted out with a third-place finish in this week's Mookie tournament, climbing a bit on the board and narrowing the amount he has to recover in the next several tournaments. So today I am going to establish some odds on this bet, which I will plan to track the rest of the way through the challenge.

When Waffles agreed to bet $100 straight-up that he could climb Donk Mountain enough times to overtake the leaderboard top spot in just a couple of months in the Mookie of all tournament, in my own head I set Waffles' chances at about 3% of winning that bet. Now, however, after this week's performance alone, I'm going to kick those odds up to about 12%. That is a big jump right there, but think of it this way: what kind of odds would I be willing to offer someone who wanted to bet me, say, $50 that Waffles would win. So I get to keep his $50 if Waffles does not take the Mookie lead, but if he does take the lead at any time in the next two months, would I be willing to pay $500 in exchange for the $50 now? I would not, not quite. I'm setting that line at around 8 to 1 odds, like I would take the $50 now if I knew I would have to pay out $400 if Waffles wins the bet. So 8 to 1 is where I'm setting "the Waffles line" for now. 8 to 1 everyone, place your bets, 8 to 1.

F Poker (Part XLIV), and Micro League Baseball

Tuesday night sucked balls when it comes to poker. Yes I did win a couple of FTOPS satellites early in the evening, one of which I just took the $T from while I guess I will just stay registered for FTOPS #1 which is coming up in a few weeks. But other than that, it was just rediuckubeat after redickubeat. I don't even want to talk about it. I mean, I got two-outered on the second hand of the stars 5050 when my my A7 got called allin by 97 on a board of A97. One second all the chips go in, the next second the 9 falls on the turn, and IGH on hand #2. Seven minutes into Skillz razz on Tuesday, I was dealt 777. Too pissed to even put up the screenshot, but that's just how it was for me -- rolled up just seven minutes in to blogger razz.

In the full tilt 5050, I fared a little better than the stars version, where I lasted 34 whole minutes until my AK lost to QQ. Yeah yeah I know that's nothing to complain about, right? Well, how about the fact that the money went in on the flop, when I made top pair of Kings and my donkponent couldn't lay down the pocket Queens, huh? Feelin' a little worse about it now, are we? So ghey. That two-outer was of course was on the river. I also busted out of two super turbo satellites, which of course are mostly luckfests anyways, but in these I ran QQ into KK early -- uber ghey in super turbo land of course -- and then topped that off by losing TT to 88 allin preflop on the rivered straight. We've all been there, you know what these filthy nights are like.

Oh and I should not forget -- I even ran in the donkfield known as the nightly 28k on full tilt, and in this rare appearance I managed to not only run AK into KK in the first hour, but we of course did not get the money in until the Ace-high flop, my bet and my opponent's inability to fold his Kings when clearly beat. Then the predestined King on the turn gave me the unfoldable top two pairs, and once again IGH frigging pizzed off. By the time I ended the night with my A9 losing to AA on an A8549 board to knock me out in the middle of the pack in the 10:45pm ET $109 satellite into the 1 million guaranteed tournament this weekend on full tilt, my night had been so magically delicious that I knew, I just knew, it was time to hang 'em up for the night.

Believe me, I don't want to talk about it.

You know what I do want to talk about though? Micro League Baseball. There's no way I'm the only who was reminded by the All-Star Game pre-game on Tuesday of playing Micro League Baseball on the early pc's all the time. I was such a mathy dork even then, I remember running an entire 162-game series between the AL All-Time Greats and the NL All-Time Greats, and keeping stats on average, home runs and RBIs for every player on both teams. As I recall, Hank Aaron and I think Stan Musial might have hit the most home runs over the 162 games, but back when this was (early 80s I guess?), the full-season numbers were kinda silly ridiculous as I recall -- people hitting 75 home runs in a season and such other silliness. It's amazing how much a generation of performance-enhancing drug use can change things, isn't it?

Can I possibly be the only person out there who used to play and love Micro League Baseball?

Sunday Heads-Up, Mondays at the Hoy, and Bloggers in the FTOPS

God do Mondays suck. Ever since my kids have begun to grow up just a little, I have noticed two significant changes in how I feel on Monday mornings. First and foremost, my weekends are awesome. Pretty much every one of them. Working the schedule that I do, I see my daughters more on each day of the weekend than I probably do during the entire work week. That's just the way it is. So we have a fucking blast together as a family on my weekends, one of the many reasons I have no interest in playing much poker during the daytimes on my precious weekends with my family. I've always been a nighttime-only online poker player, and as far as I'm concerned I always will be since it's not something that I secretly want to change. So #1, my Monday mornings always suck more these days because I have such a great, fun time with Hammer Wife and my kids on the weekends, much better than anything I used to do back before I had kids.

Secondly, I am tired as balls by the end of the weekend, pretty much without fail every single week. I roll out of bed after the 6am two-daughter ticklefest that wakes me up pretty much every morning these days, and dam if I am not literally sore every Monday morning in places on my body that I had completely forgot could even be sore. Now that the kids are fully mobile, a trip to the playground, a quick jaunt to the park, or even just playing tag around the house after a while can be draining as shit on a thirtysomething dad-type. Dam I have got to get into better shape.

So just about the only good thing about Mondays is this:



Mondays at the Hoy, 10pm ET tonight on full tilt as the BBT3 rolls on with I think just nine events left, which means nine chances to lock down your BBT3 Tournament of Champions seat. All you have to do is win one of the remaining nine events like I did a few weeks back and that's it, you're in. And with a maximum of 50 players now all playing for their share of 28k in prizes in a freeroll, this is sure to be the one of the biggest tournament attractions of the year among the world of poker bloggers. So with two full weeks left in the BBT3 challenge, I encourage everyone who is not yet in to the ToC to take whatever shots they can. Plus, I was looking the other day and had forgotten that there are decent cash prizes for I think the top five spots on the final BBT3 point leaderboard, with the players who finish in spots 6-20 will receive their very own full tilt jersey. And you won't even need to spend the 68,000 full tilt points or whatever it is to get it! So my point is, there is much to be played for here with a couple of weeks and nine events left in the BBT3, so I am expecting to see the crowds grow a little as the challenge runs to a close. Al has recently stated on his blog that he does not expect to run another BBT challenge for some time after the BBT3 is done, which I think is all goodness for a while, but again that just underscores the significance of playing to win for these last couple of weeks of May.

Speaking of blogger tournaments, this Sunday night saw the premiere of the newest weekly private tournament, one called the Sunday Heads-Up which is hosted by loretta8. In the end an awesome debut of 40 runners came out to play in the first regular heads-up blonkament, which as I mentioend last week I think has the perfect buyin of $26 a pop. This made for a fatty first prize of some $440 to the eventual winner, a player with whom I am not at all familiar, and nice payouts to the top 4 spots.

Despite having a real blast and becoming more sure than ever that this is a blonkament with staying power, my night in the inaugural Sunday Heads-Up kinda sucked in a way. Basically, I missed first the first 10 minutes or so of my first matchup, againts Vinnay, and was down already 2310 to 690 chips when I finally sat down. Grrrrrrreat! And all this while 2/3 of the field fucking sat out the first round. There has got to be a better system than this for heads-up tournaments, there just has to be. Making some people play an extra round -- in a tournament with only three wins to make the money for most of the players, mind you -- is simply far too much of a disadvantage to really be fair or right in terms of crowning a real winner. Plus, did full tilt adjust for this by starting those people who had to play an extra heads-up round early with 1500 more chips in all the other later matchups than those who sat out the first round? I did not sit and wait for all the matchups to start to sit and count, but just from looking at the total chips in play in the last few matchups of the tournament I think they might have done this all the way through. That also does not seem right to me at all, and if that's what these guys think is the "fair" and equal way of adjusting for the extra round of play, then I have to question these guys' sanity.

Anyways, so I sat down with Vinnay when I was already down 2310 to 690, and I started playing silly aggro as I figured was my only chance. I autofolded constantly whenever I had nothing and knew I was not going to make a play, but otherwise I was in there raising and moving allin every chance I thought I might have an edge. I managed to get it back pretty close to even after a nice showing of how aggro always beats tight in any heads-up matchup, but then I made the mistake of forgetting I was in a blonkament, albeit a brand new one. I reraised allin with my pocket 9s, and of course Vinnay instacalled and showed me Aces. 99 vs AA in heads-up play, right when I had brought it back to even from that huge early deficit. Awesome. But a great primer for me for another week of blonkaments for me to run bad in.

And speaking of running bad, that was me this entire weekend during the short couple of hours that I did sit down to play some poker. I did play FTOPS #20 in 6-max limit holdem on Friday night, determined to play tight as I had been writing about it the obvious required strategy early in this and any other limit tournament. I stuck well to the game plan all through the first hour, where I was slightly above my starting stack and around 35% of the way through the field on the leaderboard. Then 90 minutes in to the tournament, it all fell apart in a hurry for me. I chased a hand I shouldn't have, and at that point it cost me like a third of my stack to execute the chase and then fold the river with absolutely nothing. Then after chasing once, suddenly it was like the spigot was opened. I chased, was ahead and got outdrawn on the river twice in the span of three or four hands, and before I knew it I was out before the end of Hour 2. Very disappointing, and I would like to personally apologize to any of you out there fool enough to be railing me on any kind of a limit holdem event. That was a crash course in how not to play lhe right there in the second hour, make no mistake about it, and it cost me my buyin and a bustout nowhere near the cash in the second of only two FTOPS events I played in this time around due to having missed out on all the satelliting fun leading up to FTOPS VIII with mono.

I did manage to fit in a number of sngs and mtt sats for FTOPS events on Friday and Saturday, all for the $T really since I had no plans to play anything over the weekend due to the useless starting times other than perhaps the FTOPS Main Event if I had gotten in. But I couldn't win shit, in any format. I ran KK into AA in two of these from up front. Got sucked out on in solid position twice. Played over-LAGgy in a couple of spots early just because I was mini-tilting from my performance over the weekend in general, which is always the perfect complement to running bad in my game, I have found.

I would love to know if anyone knows of any deep blogger runs in any of the later FTOPS events this time around, but I'm ashamed to say that no one from our group seems to have recorded any sizeable cashes at all in this particular FTOPS series. Sucks. I remember Bayne and jec making huge 5-digit scores in final tables in I think O8 events in the FTOPS last year. I believe it was Iakaris who made the deep, deep run in the pot-limit holdem event probably four or five FTOPS's ago by this point. And I know a number of us have busted out with four-digit scores in FTOPS events over the past year or two. But none that I know of this time around. Like I said, that sucks.

With such an incredibly talented bunch of bloggers when it comes to skill poker, I normally expect half the final table in these things to be comprised of the same attendance list from last week's Mookie.

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

MATH Recap, and One Thing I Love About Poker

71 boys and girls came out for the latest Mondays at the Hoy tournament on full tilt, creating a $1704 prize pool with once again well over $500 paying out to the last man standing.

This week saw four bloggers and four non-bloggers cracking the top eight ITM positions on the night, with the big money going to Dave who outlasted blonkament newcomer zackklemm, another of the Lucko crew, in a long heads-up match before finally securing his first ever Hoy title as well as the coveted BBT3 Tournament of Champions seat on Monday evening. Here are all of the cashers from this week's Mondays at the Hoy:

8. $59.64 willwonka
7. $59.64 ANIguy
6. $93.72 Schaubs
5. $136.32 katiemother
4. $187.44 PokerBrian322
3. $247.08 Chippy McStacks
2. $357.84 zackklemm
1. $562.32 PokahDave

And here is your updated 2008 MATH moneyboard, including this week's results:

1. Pirate Wes $959
2. columbo $928
3. astin $900
4. Breeze81 $825
5. lucko21 $650
6. dwal78 $597
7. corron10 $594
8. ChipyMcStacks $563
9. PokahDave $562
10. Tripjax $553
11. Roberto551 $545
12. fuel55 $512
13. surflexus $488
14. pureprophet $484
15. zeroluck001 $476
15. Jordan $476
17. tilt_away $461
18. TuscaloosaJohn $423
19. twoblackaces $409
20. Loretta8 $389
21. zackklemm $358
22. bayne_s $291
23. jmathewson_III $274
24. numbbono $261
25. Miami Don $224
26. Donkey Shortz $215
27. katiemother $203
27. VinNay $203
29. DaBag $202
29. Byron $202
31. recessrampage $198
32. PokerBrian322 $187
33. willwonka $185
33. mattazuma $185
35. buckhoya $150
35. Mike Maloney $150
37. ANIguy $149
38. iam23skidoo $144
39. BuddyDank $142
40. chitwood $127
41. cubanlinks $120
42. LJ $119
43. kevin_with_AK $106
44. BamBamCan $95
44. thepokergrind $95
46. Schaubs $92
47. bartonf $89
48. HotPants29 $74
49. Hoyazo $67
50. scottmc $63
50. jamyhawk $63
52. CheckinMyAA $62
53. PirateLawyer $60
54. DonkeyPuncher74 $56
54. RaisingCayne $56
56. pokerdad13 $55
56. waffles $55
58. jeciimd $52
58. zeroluck001 $52
60. AltronIV $47

Congratulations out to Dave for the big win, and to our four new cashers and four repeat cashers for 2008, including Dave and Chippy now in the top 10 on the current moneyboard.

So last night as I missed out on the Hoy to watch the Yankees smack down on the Rays from the third row of the stadium right behind home plate, I was thinking. About my poker game, and about how interesting and difficult it is to cope with running bad, immediately following upon a nice stretch of running really, really well. I was talking to a few of you on the girly last night about it when I got back in time to watch the second half of the Hoy -- when you're running well, it is almost impossible to imagine ever not doing well at this game. You're getting dealt cards, you're hitting flops, making draws on the turn and river. It's all coming to you and of course you're playing all these great hands like a champion and getting paid off. Running hot is so fucking great, so indescribably fun like that, that I find myself taking my time when I am running hot to constantly remind myself that it won't always be like this, and for me to try my damnedest to remember this feeling for the inevitable time not too far from right now when I will once again be running cold and find myself longing for the good old days.

But it is running cold that highlights for me one of the coolest aspects of this game. Coldest, maybe, is even a better term. Because when I'm running bad, poker life is just the total opposite of what I was describing above. It seems that no matter what I do I simply cannot build up a stack. I get no cards and every time I shove with shit, I'm suddenly getting called and beaten. If I do happen to suck out on someone on the flop, before I know it the river brings the resuck and I am back on the rail once again. And the craziest part is, I run bad for a little while, and then I start downright playing bad as a result. And I mean sometimes willingly, knowingly, just playing bad poker.

This is the aspect of being a regular poker player that just fascinates me the most, and ultimately one of the main things that keeps me coming back to this addiction habit hobby I have enjoyed so much over the past few years. As bad as being on tilt and playing bad and knowing that I'm playing bad is, I still like the feeling. I actually like it. I crave it. At the end of the day, poker is just about the only thing I know that can ever give me that feeling of hopelessness, that challenge to just make it through the night eeking out a tiny profit on the day.

See, at work, I am basically the same arrogant prick you read about here every day. I am really great at my job, and sure I guess from time to time something might upset me a little bit at work, but for the most part I just do my job and do it very well. Sure the lawyer on the other side of a negotiation can be a whiny little bitch and make my life more difficult than it should be. Yeah I sometimes have clients within my own company who bitch and moan so much that they can really put a damper on my minute-to-minute enjoyment at the office. But truth be told, there is literally nothing at work that can possibly bug me as much as I am bugged most nights that I play poker, because "random bad luck" plays almost no role whatsoever in my daily comings and goings in the office. I am basically always "on my game" when I am working, and little things might unsettle me a tad here and there, but I'm never "running bad" as a lawyer for weeks and weeks on end. It hasn't happened for hours on end. My job is simply not susceptible to that kind of work variance, if you will, like poker is so much subject to.

Similarly, in my life itself unrelated to poker, yeah my friends might piss me off from time to time, and sure my family drives me fuckin crazy at least as much as the next guy, etc. But once again, nothing really ever puts me on life tilt to the degree that taking three bad beats a night for a week can do to my poker game. Nothing outside of the world of poker even comes close, when it comes right down to it. Poker has a unique ability, a unique position in my life, of being the only thing that can basically turn my brain and my confidence on its head, and leave me feeling like a beaten man, someone who just cannot win a large percentage of the time.

And the sick thing is, I love it. I love that there is something on god's green earth that can make me feel that way. Yeah the feeling itself is gross, I don't deny that, but just having something that can reduce me as close to the quivering blob of protoplasm as anything out there, it is exciting in its own way, as much as it is unnerving. I can easily see where someone who constantly feels flustered, hopeless, beaten down at work might not want to come home and deal with the bad turns (pun intended) and constant variables that poker regularly throws your way. I'm not the least bit surprised that someone with tons of personal problems at home or deep-seeded issues with one's parents or children would not be looking to invite poker into his or her life as well, with all the beatdowns and suckouts and long runs of poor play and even poorer results. But for me, poker provides the one constant place for me to be reminded that I am human, that I am very much not infalliable, and in fact that sometimes, I can do just the right thing and still get a dick shoved in my ear as a result.

For me, that feeling actually works. It feels right. And strangely enough, sometimes I think it keeps me coming back more than just about anything else about this game.

Well, that and the mobneys. Lots and lots and lots of mobneys.

Skills Series HORSE tonight at 9:30pm ET on full tilt as the BBT3 rolls on. I will definitely be there and I am expecting to final table this bitchsnot tonight. I deserve at least one good run in the Skills event before the BBT3 is over, don't I? Oh and don't forget the Blowdog tournament at 9pm ET either, if that's how you roll.