More Thoughts on Foxwoods and My Live MTT Performances

Jordan left me an interesting comment to my post yesterday expressing my disappointment about my performance at Foxwoods this past weekend, or to be more specific, about my performance in large live mtt's in general. Here is the text of Jordan's comment from that post:

"Hoy, if you played 7 MTTs in a night and didn't cash in any of them, would it disturb you as much as playing 7 big tournaments over several years without a cash?

I only mention this because I, too, was unable to succeed at the Turning Stone tournament this weekend (for some reason, my site is down, so no post yet). It sucked, but I had to remind myself of the fact that it is one tournament and my sample size of large buy-in tournaments is relatively small. I thought I'd pass the thought on to you. Being 0 for 7 sucks, but its only out of 7, after all."

All fair enough. But here's the thing: I know I should be performing better in these tournaments. I'm there, and I see how the others play, and I know how I play, and it is very obvious that I should be doing better. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

First, a few clarifications. For starters, I'm only referring to the largest, multi-day live mtt's I've played in, because in one-day live events I am perfectly happy with my performance and my profitability. And also, I'm not talking about cashing in these large live mtts -- rather, I'm just talking about making it to Day Two. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I think I have played in seven multi-day live mtt's in my poker career -- three WSOP tournaments, one WSOP circuit event at Caesar's in AC, one large-buyin tournament series event at Foxwoods last year, and the Venetian Deep Stack event where I recorded my biggest ever live score, plus this past weekend's near-bubblage. In about half of these events, making Day Two and cashing were pretty close to the same thing -- even in the Venetian DSE back in 2009, we made the money around midnight on Day One, played another two or three hours to get down to 48 players, and then reconvened the next day to determine the winners. But in the other half -- namely, the 3 WSOP tournaments as well as the WSOP Circuit tournament I played in -- those were three-day events, so making it to Day Two would not at all have even necessarily meant cashing in the tournament. So I could easily have several more Day Two's under my belt without having some obscene cashing percentage in the largest live mtt's I have played in. And yet I have just the one Day Two at the Venetian, and that pisses the shit out of me.

Looking directly at Jordan's comment, to answer his question, yeah, I think I would be a little bit surprised (though I'm sure it's happened before) if I played 7 online mtt's each at full attention in say a week and failed to get through maybe 60% of the field in any one of them. If I played seven live mtt's and could not even last far enough to the equivalent of Day Two in a WSOP tournament in any of them, hells to the yeah that would disturb me. Shouldn't it? Day Two in the preliminary WSOP events is what, roughly two-thirds of the field gone? That sure as hell would strike me as unacceptably poor performance for me, if I failed to outlast two-thirds of the field in all seven out of seven live mtt's I played in. It would. If that makes me pompous in someone's mind, I can live with that. I am a self-proclaimed "hammer-playin pompous ass" right here on the blog, so yeah, call me pompous if that's your read. But yeah, to answer the question asked, if I don't even last through two-thirds of the field in seven out of seven live mtt's -- in particular live, where I am playing just one mtt and there are zero other distractions to take my attention away from the game -- then yes, that seems more than bad enough to be worthy of my noticing, and my lamenting my poor performance.

And don't get me wrong -- I understand Jordan's point perfectly, and it is perfectly valid to a point. A sample size of seven is pretty much not even worth mentioning, statistically speaking, when it comes to drawing conclusions about the totality of my poker tournament prowess. Of course. Which is why I'm not using my lifetime 1-for-7 in making Day Two's at all to argue that it comprises a representative sample from which to draw conclusions regarding my poker tournament skill in general. Yesterday's was not a post of me saying "I guess I'm just not that good at poker tournaments after all!" or anything similar, which I agree totally with Jordan is not a conclusion one can draw from this relatively tiny sample size of seven live nlh tournaments spread over five full years of play. Much the opposite -- my point in barching about my results in the largest live mtt's I've played in is that I clearly am a good tournament player, and yet my results simply do not jibe with that conclusion. It is precisely because I know this 7-tournament sample of tournament results is not representative of my actual skills, that I am here writing these posts lamenting my lack of performance in those events.

I should be doing better in these tournaments. I don't just mean that in the abstract, either. I'm better than most of the people who enter these larger-buyin tournaments in casinos these days. Period. That wasn't true when I first started playing tournaments in casinos -- much the opposite, I've written here about how I could not imagine ever winning a casino tournament way back when I first started getting seriously into this game several years ago -- but in today's day and age, it's very clear that I am closer to the top of the skill levels of the players in the tournaments in which I play. Anyone can choose to believe or not believe this as they see fit, and of course I am more than fine with that, but the bottom line is, one of my favorite things about the whole experience of playing a large-field, solid-buyin live casino mtt, is going through the motions of quickly figuring out who is playing too tight to win, who is playing too loose to hold on to their stacks, who the calling stations are, who are going to be the chasefonkeys at the table, etc.

Let me say this a slightly different way. For the past three or four years or so, when I sit down to a live mtt of almost any reasonable size, things quickly shake out at the table in a way that is only known to a few of the players at the table. I'm sure this will sound familiar to a few of you out there as well. There are usually one or two other guys there that are more or less like me at a random table -- guys who play smart, tight-aggressive poker, guys who you quickly realize you don't really want to mix it up with in a pot in the earlygoing unless you have to. These are often the guys who are out there firing barrel after barrel and taking down a lot of pots uncontested, or they're the guys who always seem to be showing down big cards in the biggest pots, etc. It doesn't usually take more than an hour or so for it to be clear -- at least to those two or three of us at the table -- who the other Players are seated with us. And everyone else has already by that point made it very obvious, again at least to the two or three of us, what their specific weaknesses are. Within an hour or two of sitting down -- who am I kidding, I start doing this almost immediately once I figure out specifically how someone is bad at tournament poker -- the two or three Players have not only correctly applied labels like "chasefonkey", "calling station", etc. to each of the bad players at the table, but we actually start isolating against them. So when dickhead calling station open-raises from early position, and I find a hand like KQ or AJ that I would fold against many raisers for whom I have more respect, I won't just call with that hand against the calling station -- I'll raise. Because even if you told me he had AT vs. my KQ, I would want to be in there against him heads-up in a heartbeat. All the Players do this, it is as natural to us as the day is long. And I can see the other couple of Players at every table I am at early in these things doing the exact same thing. We generally try to avoid playing each other, but boy do we take our whacks at the poker fools around us. That's almost the sole focus of our games for the first several hours at any live mtt -- taking the money of the non-Players at the table.

Anyways, this isn't supposed to be a description of every little trick of the trade that I employ in poker tournaments. It is, however, a simple statement of fact that I am one of those guys -- at every single live poker tournament I ever enter nowadays, all the way up to the $2500 WSOP buyin events that I have played -- that is very aware of the badness of those at my tables, and who follows the same strategy of attacking those bad players just like every other good player there. We all do the same thing, and it's very overt in its own way if you know it is going on. And I'm one of those guys, noting carefully how these two players call every single raise preflop ("I can't wait to pick up a hand against either of those monkeys!"), these two guys limp in with every single hand ("They'll bleed those chips away or get caught holding second-best if I don't get their chips first."), and how the guy to my right as well as two to my left have only played two hands in two hours ("Either they'll pick up pocket Aces, or they'll blind themselves to death like Broomcorn's uncle.") When I am so clearly above most of my opponents at every live tournament table I play at these days in terms of skill, in terms of knowledge of the game, in terms of feel, and -- thanks to the wonders of online poker while that was allowed -- in terms of mtt experience as well, it is difficult for me to be satisfied with 1 Day Two out of seven tries.

All of this would be much easier if I could just chalk my poor large live tournament results to bad play. Or to not paying attention. Or to a lack of study or care about the game and how to get better. But that is simply not the case with me. Every time I sit down to a poker tournament table, I know very quickly what most of the other players' weaknesses are, and I immediately join with the other skilled player or two at the table in a concerted plan to exploit those specific weaknesses. I'm sure I have spent more time reading about and studying the game than 99% of people out there, and I never let a hand go by at the table without carefully noting any salient details and tucking them away for future use against the participants. I know just from sitting there that I'm better than the majority of the players I've been up against in the large live mtt's I've played in, and that contributes quite a bit to my feeling of total dissatisfaction with only making it to Day Two one time in seven tries. The way I have outplayed people and the bad beats I've taken in a number of these events are more a testament to this fact -- and to Jordan's correct point about the sample size being very small in relative terms.

Somehow, the world's most successful poker players don't seem to get eliminated on Day One nearly as much as I do, suckouts or not. And I wish I had a good handle on why that is.
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Foxwoods Keys to Success

Just one more day of workin for the man and I will be off to Foxwoods for Event #1 of the Spring Into Summer Mega Madness tournament series. As I have mentioned here over the past week or two, this is a $600 buyin no-limit holdem tournament with a $125k guaranteed prize pool. Based on what I've seen and heard, I would guess this event will end up pulling in a good 300, 350 runners on a weekend (hopefully more, of course) and that 125k guarantee will be easily exceeded, but I guess I won't know until a couple hours after Saturday's 11am ET start time. It would be so great to finally make just the second Day Two of my poker playing career, but in order to do that, I'm going to have to play a heck of a lot better poker than I played in my two recent practice tournaments I detailed in yesterday's post. I wanted to take today's post to write down and cram into my brain once again the lessons I learned from playing this week that I had grown quite rusty about over my three-month poker hiatus.

First and foremost, I have to do better at not betting too aggressively and/or play too loose right off the bat in the hopes of hitting that miracle flop. This is simply not advice I have ever needed to focus on before -- I think playing 100 mtt's a month thanks to the wonder of online poker helps from making any one tournament seem too important or too boring to sit on the sidelines for -- but it is clear from my recent tournament experiences that it's where I am at now. I resolve on Saturday not to drop more than 10% below my starting stack during the first two rounds of play unless I pick up a big hand and am forced to make a major laydown. In general, making laydowns has never been and continued not to be my problem over the past week -- I laid TT and AQs preflop, I folded a slow-played TPTK to a big river raise from a guy who made too many deliberate faces at me while I was pondering my move on the river to have anything other than a big, strong hand, and I even laid down two pairs twice on the river to big action, one of which was still a multi-way pot. But unless something like happens, I flop a set and then the river four-flushes or something and I face a huge bet, I will not play too aggro early on, I will not call preflop raises or reraises with garbage, and I will absolutely not allow my desire to mix it up with the clear fish at the table to back me into a corner where I am in against a strong player with a weak hand late into a pot.

Secondly, assuming I last through the first, say, three or four hours of this tournament, I resolve to resteal more. Shit, I resolve to resteal at all, given my timidness in several a propos situations over the past 9 or 10 hours of tournament play I put in this week. I have simply got to take advantage of stealing from the stealers, because each time you do it, it is worth a good couple of orbits of sitting out and just ceaselessly contributing your blinds and antes. And the big problem is, everyone steals nowadays. The blind steal has become such a part of the nlh tournament game nowadays -- in particular among the young types that will likely predominate the scene at Foxwoods this weekend -- that if you do not take advantage of the stealers from time to time, not only do your own blinds get eaten up when you are in the first two seats left of the dealer, but your ability to steal any pots diminishes over time since someone else is always in there ahead of you opening the action. I have to tell myself over and over again: there is no way these guys are that strong, all the time. This was always something that I used to take for granted as it came naturally to me to play with this type of attitude over the years, but as I mentioned yesterday, if there's one thing I take away from my tournament play this week, my lack of balls when it comes to restealing from the preflop stealers is That Thing. Of course, restealing with total air will eventually run me into a monster and end my tournament run prematurely, but all I can say is, I've honestly never had a deep, deep tournament run where I never restole from someone who I thought was trying to pick up the blinds and antes with a weakish hand preflop. Never. Some of that of course is the cards I get, some of it is situational of course, but the bottom line is, if someone is on a medium stack and we're getting down near the money, a well-time allin against a guy giving off a weak vibe pays dividends, not only directly in terms of the amount of chips in my stack, but also in the meta game, as you keep everyone thinking every time they consider putting in a raise before the flop with less than a premium holding.

My game has always relied as a major cornerstone on preflop aggression. Even when I can feel the bubble near, as I could twice over the past week, I need to keep up the pressure against the people I believe can fold and who have demonstrated a willingness to mix it up with beatable hands.

The last thing I want to make sure I remember -- and this, too, is something that needn't even be said back when I was playing with regular consistency -- is to preserve my chips. In that first tournament this week, I know why I pushed allin on the flop on a stone bluff with 9-high in the hand where I got eliminated. I know what went into the decision, and taking everything into account, I still think there was a good chance when I made that move that I was right in that spot and could have chipped up nicely in that hand. But did I need to make that move just then? I was 5th in chips with less than two full tables remaining, and the top 8 slated to receive payouts. Was there a good reason for me to risk my entire stack on a guess -- and that's all it was, an educated guess -- that the biggest stack left in the tournament was weak, when I couldn't even beat a bluff and had barely any outs to draw to even if I got called? No, of course, there was not. So I probably shouldn't have been doing it. Or at the least, I should have thought about my play in the exact terms that I just described it before making the decision to push everything allin and risk elimination just short of the money by one of the few stacks left in the tournament that could wipe me out in one hand. And I can tell you, I did not think about it at all like that at the time. At the time it was just like "Well, there's no way that clown has a hand again. If he leads out on the flop, I'm pushing no matter what." I didn't look at his stack, my stack, the other stacks at the table, and I did not consider that I had literally just managed to climb my stack out of the doldrums for several hours back up well above average as we were fixing for a run to the final table. To go and throw away all of that patience, all of that hard work, all of that deserving success, running a stone bluff with 9-high against a guy with a monster stack who'd been hitting hands all day and who raised me preflop and led out on the flop? Not smart.

Play tight early. Loosen up preflop late, especially against the middle stacks who already have an inclination towards folding. And protect my chips from needless, thoughtless risks. These are the keys to my having a successful tournament at Foxwoods on Saturday. I will try to update here how I am doing, in particular if I last a little while and might be making a run. Have a great weekend everybody and wish me luck at the indian reservation in Connecticut.

The Hand That Kills

It's been a while since I did a post like this, but I've been meaning to write about this one for some time, as I often think to myself when I make a significant change in my poker tournament strategy generally, or any of the specific things I do in my tournament play to try to be as successful as possible.

Basically, I like to think that I can play pretty much any hand profitably in the right situation. Whatever hand people tell you to always fold from early position, I play it from early position from time to time. When people say you always raise with pocket Queens, you never limp from late position with pocket Aces, etc., I pretty much don't follow that rule. I mean, I do sometimes to be sure, but in general, I'm not a big fan of hard and fast rules in poker, at least when it comes to no-limit holdem, and especially when we're talking about preflop starting hand requirements, and generally what people do in nlh in small pots. I'm a firm believer in always being ready and willing to do the unexpected, and as a result there are almost zero starting hands worth mentioning that I will flat refuse to play under certain circumstances, even from early position.

That said, one hand has really been kicking my ass lately, and doing so in some kind of basic ways that have really got me making a change to a long-standing habit I have developed over the years in nlh tournaments. Yes, I am here today to talk about the dreaded King-Queen. Sooted or off. This is a hand that I've been playing pretty liberally for some time. Like, my whole poker-playing career. I simply treat it like all the other trouble hands out there, which means that I play it to try to hit something good, but I'm not going to lose a ton of chips with it unless I flop big to it. But I've always played KQ preflop, and frankly, I've done so generally from any position at the table, and never really given much thought to how things end up when I do.

Until this year. Along with my increased attention to my poker game in general and making the right decisions that will lead to tournament success in every game I play, I have also been making a concerted effort to try to locate other possible leaks in my game in general, and of course a big part of that is paying attention to whether certain hands or certain types of hands are causing me trouble when I decide to play them at all. And what I have found over the past few months of careful study of hand histories, screenshots and the like, is that when I am opening with KQ from anything resembling early position, I am simply not making a profitable play from a nlh tournament perspective. And it doesn't change if I raise or just limp preflop when I open -- if I am dealt KQ in an early position, and I do not fold it before the flop, I am losing more than I am making from that decision. It hurts me to admit that to myself -- as I said above, I like to think that I can play any hand profitably enough to see a flop and then trust myself to get away from it as needed.

But I just cannot play KQ profitably from early position. Although in a given hand here or there I can make money with it of course, in general I just do not play KQ from an early position to a profit in no-limit holdem tournaments. Strangely -- or perhaps not so much -- in limit holdem I seem to do fine with KQ, which is probably a better hand in limit than in no-limit due to the risky nature of the hand, but in nlh tournaments, KQ has officially been downgraded in my arsenal of starting hands to play, to the point that I have not been playing it from early or even early-middle position over the past couple of months, and I am generally the better off for it. Sure, when I get three callers of my preflop raise and then the flop comes down TJA, I am always glad to be in there and will surely make some nice coin. But for the myriad times when the flop comes raggy, or with a medium pair on the board, or even the most dangerous when a King or a Queen flops, I am simply finding myself losing more chips than I am winning when I'm getting in there before the flop with King-Queen.

So, no more KQ from early position for me. Bring on the 72o for sho. Just no KQ.

Live Poker Hand Question -- Conclusion

Yesterday I posted about a hand that occurred early in a $400 buyin tournament in AC this past weekend, and asked what you would do on the river if you were me. As a reminder, here is the setup from yesterday's post:

The tournament started with 10k in chips, and late in the first hour I called a preflop raise from mp with T8s, and the big blind called as well which brought us a flop of T84 rainbow, three-handed. With 1250 in the pot, the big blind led out for 400 chips, and the original preflop raiser thought for a few seconds before just calling, and I smooth called as well with the flopped top two.

The turn card was an offsuit Queen, making a board now of T84Q. The big blind surprised me by leading out again, this time for 1000 chips into a pot of 2450. The guy to my right thought it over, for a little longer this time, and eventually slid out a purple chip as well for the call, and again I made the pot-odds call as well, a bit reluctantly.

The river card then brought an Ace. The big blind hesitated a bit and then slid out another purple and some yellows, a 1400-chip bet for his third lead of the hand. The guy to my right had a kind of disgusted look on his face, but after a few seconds he too slid out 1400 chips to make his third postflop call of the hand. The action was to me on the river to call 1400 to win 8250 in the pot.

Now of course, the answers I got in the comments were mostly well thought-out, but like any good "What would you do?" hand, almost nobody could keep themselves from critiquing my earlier play of the hand -- even though that's not what I asked -- in particular my not raising on the flop. As I mentioned yesterday, top two pairs is the only two-pair hand that I will generally slow-play, and I should re-mention that nobody gave me any credit for the fact that I wasn't checking here, I was calling a decent bet, building the pot by about 60% on that street while keeping two potentially weak players in the pot. Someone, I think it was Astin, mentioned that when your top two pairs are Tens and 8s, it is almost not like top two pairs at all. That is a semi-valid point, although the math I imagine would not bear out that statement in its extreme. The turn card will be a Ten or below still more often than it will not be, and even if a Jack or Queen falls it is hard to be too concerned with just the one non-Ace and non-King overcard on the board (I certainly would not be, given the action in this hand so far). Another commenter mentioned the many straight draws available on this board as a reason for the raise on the flop, which I simply do not understand at all. For my money, if I see a flop of T84 in a 3-way raised pot, that is one of the least drawy boards I could ever hope for. If T84 rainbow is scaring you away from slow-playing because of draws, then you just have a different view of math and odds than I do I guess. Sure, 732 rainbow would be even less drawy, but T84? Come on. That is almost ideal from a drawing perspective as far as maybe letting another card slide off.

This is all a long way of saying that I think I agree that with medium two pairs like this, and only because of the fact that this is a 3-way pot and not heads-up, some kind of a raise on the flop is probably the more +EV play over time (I'll have to check with Blinders on the EV calculation of course). Certainly in this spot it did not work, as the turn was an overcard that also completed an open-ended straight draw from the flop, and then of course the river brought the dreaded Ace, but taking the results-oriented viewpoint out, I think I buy that raising my hand on the flop was probably the better move against two opponents. I just don't think it is nearly as obvious as the commenters seem to think it is, as I think a couple of key considerations I mentioned above were overlooked in general by the commenters.

That said, this was really a question about what I should do at the river. The comments were split about 50-50 as to folding and calling, though even those recommending a call seemed not very confident, calling more for the pot odds than anything else. Well, I already had the alarm bells going off in my head from the flop when the guy to my right just smooth called, and when he did the same thing again on the turn, I was thinking either overpair or flopped set in a big way. When the Ace hit the river, I figured I was going to have to fold to any action since at least one opponent had at least one pair heading into this street, and the odds of one of them holding an Ace as a kicker are fairly good given that they called a preflop raise in this hand to begin with. So when the first guy led out again -- for the third time after getting two callers on both the flop and the turn -- this to me smelled like a very solid hand, at least an overpair himself if not two pairs or better. I mean, how many times do you ever lead out on the flop, get called (twice), lead out again on the turn and get called (twice), and then actually lead out still another time on the river? That to me just screamed of strength. Similarly, the player to my right calling all three of those bets also screamed out that it was at least strong ish -- more than one pair, say -- in which case it seemed to me that I had no option but to fold on this river. I was not sure that both of my opponents had my two pairs beat, but 3rd and 4th pair really could not reasonably be ahead of both of these guys the way I saw it.

And so I laid it down, even for the measly 1400 into an 8250-chip pot. I would only have to be ahead of both guys roughly one time in six to make always calling here profitable, and yet I relied on my reads sufficiently to figure that I'm not going to be ahead of both of these guys even that often to make the call worthwhile.

The big blind flipped up?












Pocket Kings. How he bets out a third time on that river after getting called twice on each of the flop and turn is utterly beyond me, but that's definitely the way a big-time donkey would play this hand.

And the guy to my right flipped up?











We'll never know. He took one look at the big blind's pocket Kings and he fucking mucked.

One pair FTW!!!

As an epilogue, although it took me a good hour to truly get calmed down from the tilt induction that was that hand, eventually I bounced back in the tournament with several big hands, mostly without having to show down anything, and in the end I took 3rd place when my short stack push with J9s got called by A8o and I could not catch up. Still, I won almost $1600 for my efforts, and overall I played great in my last live tournament tune-up prior to leaving for Las Vegas three weeks from yesterday. Make that two weeks and six days from now. Just two+ weeks baby, just two+ weeks.

But tell me, how do those two clowns both bet and call three times with just one pair?

Live Poker Hand Question

This past weekend, after an absolutely brutal week of work, on a whim I decided to head down to AC for some live poker action, in what will be my final live tune-up before I depart for Las Vegas and the 2010 WSOP.

**As an aside, holy shipe my plane leaves three weeks from today! Am I excited about that? Maybe just a teeny little bit?**

Anyways, when I got to my casino of choice on Friday night, they happened to be running a $400 buyin turbo tournament, which picked up somewhere between 30 and 40 runners and featured 15-minute blind levels. A horrible structure for a live tournament for sure, but one of the fun things about me playing a live turbo tournament like this is that it is likely that I have logged more hours playing turbo structures online than anyone else in a field like this on a given night, so theoretically I should have an advantage over most of the other players who will not be properly adjusting their play to the faster than normal blinds and antes.

The tournament started with 10k in chips, and late in the first hour I called a preflop raise from mp with T8s, and the big blind called as well which brought us a flop of T84 rainbow, three-handed. With 1250 in the pot, the big blind led out for 400 chips, and the original preflop raiser thought for a few seconds before just calling. Now, normally I'm not a big fan of slow-playing with more than one other player in the pot, but this was a fairly innocuous board, and while I would not have checked if the action had not been opened in front of me, I thought just smooth calling with top two pairs here was an acceptable move. I've mentioned this here many times before, but my general theory on flopped two pairs is that it's not worth slow-playing unless you flop the top two. It's just too easy to get counterfeited when someone else hits their kicker and you end up losing a big pot, but with top two the chances of that are much less and it makes for a hand that I thought simply calling along on the flop was a nice idea.

The turn card was an offsuit Queen, making a board now of T84Q. The big blind surprised me by leading out again, this time for 1000 chips into a pot of 2450. The guy to my right thought it over, for a little longer this time, and eventually slid out a purple chip as well for the call. So now I have T8 on a QT84 board, and it is 1000 chips for me to call into a 4450-chip pot. I did not love the fact that the big blind led out again, and I especially did not like the fact that the original preflop raiser had smooth called those lead-out bets, twice in a row now. But getting around 4.5 to 1 odds, how could I fold the hidden two pairs? So I reluctantly called, swelling the big early pot to 5450 chips.

The river card was an Ace. An ugly, vicious, despicable Ace as far as I was concerned. The big blind hesitated a bit and then slid out another purple and some yellows, a 1400-chip bet for his third lead of the hand. The guy to my right had a kind of disgusted look on his face, but after a few seconds he too slid out 1400 chips to make his third postflop call of the hand. The action was to me on the river to call 1400 to win 8250 in the pot.

What do you do?

Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time (Volume II) -- Review

A year ago or more at this point, I remember posting here that I really enjoyed the first volume of "Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time", the first book by internet poker pros Eric "Rizen" Lynch, John "Apestyles" Fan Fleet and Jonathan "PearlJammer" Turner. Like Gus Hansen's "Every Hand Revealed", these books ultimately take the same approach that I have been for years with my own tournament recap posts, focusing on several hands over a long period of time in the same tournament, using those true-life summaries to help show how these guys won a few of their biggest tournaments. I find this style of teaching very effective personally, and I thought Rizen, Apestyles and PearlJammer used it very well in their first book. There were even several scenarios posed to all three authors, and you could read the differences in how each player would consider and approach the same poker situation. It was really a pretty cool book and I'm sure I wrote here how I was alerady looking forward to Volume 2 coming out, which it was said would focus more on end game as compared to the first book which focused more on early and middle mtt play, accumulating a stack, etc.

Well, Volume 2 finally did come out a month or so ago, and I was among the first to order a copy from Amazon to add to my extensive collection of poker literature. And today I can report here: this book kinda sucked.

Yep, it was bound to happen, and I should have seen it coming. The same exact thing happened with Dan Harrington, eventually, although both of the first two volumes of his seminal books on nlh tournaments (including the second one, also focused on "end game" considerations) were pretty amazing, but eventually even he went to the well one too many times, made the easy money grab, and his Volume 3 ("the Workbook") is about as useless of a poker text as you will ever find, replete with poor examples, poor analysis, and just generally nothing new compared to what he'd already said once if not twice before.

To be clear, Volume 2 of "Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time" isnt even close to bad like Harrington's third volume, but there is just not a whole lot of great tidbits in there like I recall the first book being chock full of. The one very interesting focus I take from reading this book is how much each of the three successful online poker playing authors seem to focus on stack sizes when getting down to the endgame. This is definitely not something I focus enough on in my own game, and I think just the fact that each author appears to be sizing up the stack sizes of his opponents as well as himself before each and every decision they are making when a big-field mtt really gets down to the nitty gritty is something that itself I can incorporate better into my own game. I mean, each one of the authors probably makes stack sizes their primary focus throughout this book, even moreso than position, even more than the absolute strength of their own cards in most cases. That was the one aspect that I will definitely take from this book that will make me a better poker tournament player going forward.

But that's basically it. Otherwise, it is clear to a guy who has done as many tournament recaps as I have that these three authors took only a short period of time in which they recorded all of their hands (like I do most nights) in a tournament in which to find one that they actually won. I say this because, in the end, in each author's section of the book (each author writes one section of about a third of the book which details one particular mtt run from the point where the ITM positions are reached right up until the author wins the tournament) is basically full of hands that are not necessarily representative of good poker logic and skill, are full of what each author in retrospect admits were probably sub-optimal plays made by the hero, and ultimately each one of the three mtt runs described in the book are chock full of stoopid suckouts and unbelievably lucky draws that would have eliminated the author but instead held on to eventually lead to victory.

Unlike Harrington, who basically made up each of his poker scenarios in his books in an attempt to create a specific set of circumstances that perfectly illustrate the point he was trying to make, these authors were restricted by reality in that they wanted (like I do) to use real-life examples hand from real-life tournaments that actually happened to them, and as I mentioned above, coming up with sufficient real-life hand examples to illustrate the many moves necessary to win a large-field online mtt takes many many many trials and many many months of research and of recording every hand you play, and these authors just did not spend enough time amassing great hands from real-life mtts where they ended up winning. Instead, it is easy to see from reading this book that they picked a nice tournament win that occurred for them over, maybe, a 1-month period, and then went back and reviewed every hand that happened to them from ITM to the end. Even it it meant that they showed themselves making a dumb tournament play, semi-justifying it in the analysis in the book but then showing themselves luckdonking their way to victory. In Apestyles' mtt that he depicts in the book, for example, he limps into the ITM positions with barely a stack at all, among the bottom couple of players left in that tournament, and proceeds to make a highly dubious play with an only semi-strong hand, and luckflonks his way into a huge suckout triple-up on the first hand after reaching the money positions to the give him the chips to move on.

Although I imagine that the authors think that their semi-justifications of these plays in the analysis in Volume 2 makes it ok to show them, the bottom line is that, for a guy like me, seeing these authors make what I know to be poor poker decisions and then suck out big time really does cheapen the overall significance of the advice they provide in the books. Sure, everybody makes mistakes from time to time in their poker play, but writing a book that features those mistakes but then attempts to justify them because in reality these authors had no other tournament runs to choose from, is going to take away from the overall value the book brings to readers who are looking to learn how one wins an online large-field mtt. Honestly, other than the interesting focus paid to stack sizes as I mentioned above, I do not see where Volume 2 of this series is going to help that guy who hasn't really quite figured out how to win yet.

Preflop Decision -- Pocket Queens (Conclusion)

Here is the conclusion to Wednesday's post about Pocket Queens preflop. To refresh those of you who did not see the real-life scenario I recounted yesterday or who need a reminder:

You are down to 25 left out of 58 remaining in a $200 buyin knockout tournament in Atlantic City. Blinds, which rise every 20 minutes in this typically fast daily casino tournament are up 400-800 with a 100 ante about two hours in to the event. Right now the average stack is 26k, and you are sitting on around 34k after a couple of big pots have helped you to more than triple from the 10k starting stacks.

An old man with about 14k in chips leads out under the gun for 10k straight up. This utg open-raise is for approximately 12 big blinds, and I immediately looked to notice that it was for most of this utg player's stack as well.

The utg +1 player, one of the largest stacks remaining in the tournament with around 50k in chips, thinks for a while, seems to be agonizing before eventually just smooth calling the 10k raise.

After all that action, you look down in utg+2 position to find pocket Queens.

How do you act?

I note that this is from an actual hand that happened to me recently in a live casino tournament and there was considerable disagreement after the fact on the best play.

We got some good, thoughtful responses, and as expected (and in line with the opinions at the table), there seems like a pretty even split between pushing and folding. That's why I think this hand is so interesting to analyze, because it's one of those situations where people with decent poker brains seem to reasonably disagree. Even though to me I hated playing this hand but in the end I felt like I had made the right decision, regardless of how the results ended up.

I agonized for a good while -- this was far and away the only premium hand I had seen thus far on the day after a good few hours of play -- and then I laid down the Queens.

How could I not? One of the key pieces of information that nobody keyed on in my description above but which definitely played a very significant role in my read of the utg player was that he was an old man. For those of you who have only ever played online poker, maybe that means nothing to you. And maybe it shouldn't if online is all you ever play. But putting guys like Doyle and Slim aside, old men as a rule are tightass tightwad tighty mctightersons. Especially when I've sat with them for 30 minutes and have barely even noticed that they're in the game, like this fogey.

So when this grizzly old fogey bastage who's been tighting his way along quietly for half an hour suddenly open-raises from under the gun, immediately I hear those bells I always talk about going off in my head. When I looked over and saw that he had pushed in approximately 10k of his 14k stack on the raise, when the blinds were just 400-800, those bells turned to ambulance sirens or rock concert speakers. I tried hard to get into Old Man Tighty's head, and to really imagine if I am a tighty mctightass, what hand would I possibly push in 10k of a 14k stack on a 12-big blind raise? I mean, I know this guy is fuckin tight. So is he pushing only 12k out of his total 16k stack in there utg with pocket 4s? No way. Tighty is definitely sitting on more than enough chips to wait for a better spot when any pocket pair out there, or any two high cards, are likely to call his below-average stack. And one thing about these tighties -- they will roach like my old apartment on Sullivan Street in Soho. These tightass old men will just fold and fold and fold and hang on and fold and fold and fold some more. They don't care if they're the lowest stack in the tournament for three straight hours. They will wait for those pocket Aces and then boom, they're allin and lament how everyone else folds to them. We have guys like that in our own group in fact, you can watch em nightly in the mtts on the major poker sites. Fold fold fold fold fold fold fold fold push allin with pocket Aces, everyone folds. It's good stuff.

Anyways, so Oldy isn't pushing with 44 there from utg with still 16 big blinds left and only 15 or so people from the money (10 paid). And if he did btw, he would obviously push in all 16k, rather than leave the highly curious 4k behind. So it's not 44 or 55 or something like that, of that I am sure. And as I thought about it, it's not 88 either. Same reason. Tighty just doesn't risk pushing in like that utg when any higher pair or two high cards could call and bust him, when he is beginning to be able to sniff the sweet smell of that minimum cash coming up if he can just fold for another hour or so. Not UTG, not with 16 big blinds left (in a very fast daily casino tournament, where 16 big blinds actually has him not far under average), and certainly again not for 12k of his 16k stack rather than the whole 16k. So it's not a low pair like 3s or 4s, and it's not even a medium pair like 8s or 9s. Now let's think about Tens or Jacks -- why would he possibly push just 12k of his 16k in with those hands instead of the whole 16k once he gets above a normal raise of 3 big blinds or so? Remember, this isn't full tilt, so that 12k couldn't have been some misclick or something. The old man looked at his hand and then willingly settled from among all his possible options to push out 12k of his 16k stack for a 12 bb preflop raise. Why? Anyways, no way with Tens or Jacks, or even Queens I would say, all of which are hands that people fear. He might raise 3x with those hands, sure, or maybe as much as 5x as you sometimes see people do (but with 16 big blinds total, 5x leaves you with fewer options than a more standard 3x raise in my book), but 12x? Leaving another 4x behind? I just don't see that.

Then I thought about AK. Could the geezer have AK? Would tightwad raise 12k of 16k with AK? Again, I just couldn't get myself to see it. I know tons of guys, in particular with a below average stack and a very tight mentality who would autopush with AK there, and actually hope to get called by a pocket pair and take a race to double up or go home. It's not even a terrible play in many cases in my view. But in no case would I ever advocate raising "just" 12k of your 16k stack with AK. Why hold back that last 4k when you are looking for the double up and want to make sure you see all five board cards with your AK in case you get called? Withholding that last 4k does nothing for you in that situation whatsoever, even if you get called by AQ or something you are now in a stoopid position for your last 4k in chips, for no good reason. No, that's not a move that the tight old guy does with AK either. So it's not 22-QQ, it's not AK (and certainly not a move that the tighties would ever do in that spot with AQ or below), which leaves only two hands really, one far more likely than the other: AA or KK. I just couldn't see any other preflop hand that fits the tight guy's range. And frankly, I know the ubertight mentality well -- they really hate letting anyone in when they've got pocket Kings, cuz we all know they'll get in there with a weak Ace and then of course an Ace will flop. So to me, this was about 75% likely pocket Aces, 20% likely pocket Kings, 3% likely AKs, and 2% likely for the rest of the field on the theory that he could just be a massive donklesmith.

While I was busy considering the fact that I was going to have to fold pocket Queens from utg+2 in a fast casino tournament and a chance to jump near the top of the leaderboard if I win, the big stack next to me in utg+1 slides out just a call of the huge 12k bet, with enough chips behind easily to bust me.

I knew as soon as I saw him move his chips forward that I had to fold. It actually made the decision much easier, but frankly I was folding to the old guy anyways I am pretty sure. When I am 98% sure a guy as AK, KK or AA, and really 95% sure that it's AA or KK, I just can't commit a huge portion of my nice stack to QQ preflop. And as I mentioned, it was the only hand I'd seen the entire day that was anywhere near that strong, which made the laydown all the more annoying. But I remained rational, I refused to get attached just because it looked good before anyone had acted in front of me, and I opted for the smarter, more patient route.

Especially since UTG had pocket Aces, and UTG+1 had AK. And of course, the AK did suck out a rivered set and busted the UTG guy after getting allin on the turn, and he would have eliminated me as well had I pushed preflop, which is the only way I would have considered playing this pot if I opted not to fold given how large the preflop pot already was.

I have another good preflop situation that happened shortly after this one in the same tournament, maybe I will post that tomorrow for people's comments.

Preflop Decision -- Pocket Queens

You are down to 25 left out of 58 remaining in a $200 buyin knockout tournament in Atlantic City. Blinds, which rise every 20 minutes in this typically fast daily casino tournament are up 400-800 with a 100 ante about two hours in to the event. Right now the average stack is 26k, and you are sitting on around 34k after a couple of big pots have helped you to more than triple from the 10k starting stacks.

An old man with about 14k in chips leads out under the gun for 10k straight up. This utg open-raise is for approximately 12 big blinds, and I immediately looked to notice that it was for most of this utg player's stack as well.

The utg +1 player, one of the largest stacks remaining in the tournament with around 50k in chips, thinks for a while, seems to be agonizing before eventually just smooth calling the 10k raise.

After all that action, you look down in utg+2 position to find pocket Queens.

How do you act?

This happened to me recently in a live casino tournament and there was considerable disagreement after the fact on the best play.

Big MTT Week

Whew! With the UBOC going on over on UltimateBet -- and the events starting at actually playable times for Americans (mostly 8:05pm ET) as opposed to WCOOP at pokerstars these days -- as well as Full Tilt's double-guarantee week, I have been playing the most mtt poker I've played in probably a year over the past week or so. As I have alluded to previously, I made a deep run to the final table in one of the UBOC events earlier this week, about which I plan to get a post up later this week for sure recapping what ended up being another solid tournament score for me, albeit one where I -- again -- left a lot of dough on the table thanks to multiple bad breaks when down to the final few at the last table. But otherwise, I have been trying to get in on as many of the larger mtt's on full tilt in the evenings as I can, even taking it so far as to leave work a bit early one day this week to get in on the 7pm ET mtt's which I pretty much never, ever get to play anymore thanks to work and family obligations.

So far, as I mentioned I made a big hit in the UBOC a few days ago, but on full tilt I have just not been feeling the love yet after two nights of heavy mtt playing (heavy for me, anyways). I continue this week to amass some massive stacks in the UltimateBet tournaments -- some leading to small cashes and some to no cash at all, sadly -- but I have had very little luck getting anything serious going on full tilt so far, and I'm not sure exactly why. I think part of it is that, despite my hope that there would be tons of overlay in these events with the guarantees doubled, what we're finding instead is that every fonkadonk and his mother are joining in on these tournaments to try to get a piece of the swollen prize pools that this week offers. As a result, unlike past times when this double-guarantee promo has been run, I have literally yet to see a single tournament on full tilt with any overlay at all. The 50-50 usually attracts around 1000 runners for very close to the 50k guaranteed in the prize pool. So this week, they turn it into the "Fifty Hundo" with a 100k guarantee, and what happens? 2200 donklickers show up to try to slip on some banana peels and stagger their way into the money. The 28k at 8pm ET on full tilt, which usually attracts around 1500 runners at $26 apiece, this week suddenly sports fields of over 3000 runners every night. And like I mentioned, for the most part these additional players are not the more skilled players who you might normally find participating in the large-field $26 and $50 mtts available on line. No, for the most part I think these extra guys are by a vast majority flonkeys -- the kind of guys who would never normally play in an mtt at this level -- but you are just hoping to get lucky and get deck-smacked for a few hours and try to make a hundy or two.

With such a huge influx of flonkadonks in the big guarantees on full tilt, it's no wonder to me that I am not having success. I've never really done particularly well in the $26 level nlh mtts on full tilt. If you think about it, most of my success has either been at the next level or two up ($50 or $75 buyins or more), or in rebuy events which again distort the buyin levels up from just allowing anybody with $26 of scratch in their full tilt account to register to donk it up. As compared to a guy like, say, Chad, who has been called the King of Donks for a reason after he won the nightly 10pm ET 32k on full tilt like seven times in one year, I simply do not fare as well against the lesser competition as I do against just one level up from the bottom of the large-field mtts. I have written about this before and have long thought that this is because these clowns simply do not understand when to fold, be it preflop, on the flop, or afterwards. And you know what? I could not count how many times -- just in the past two days of double-guarantees week on full tilt -- I have been called down in a big mtt by an abject moron making a hideous play, even some times where they actually turned out to be ahead. Because I have noticed that, when the board comes down 9TJ with two suits, and then the river brings an 8 of the same suit as the other two sooted cards, there is just no way you're getting your opponent to lay down his pocket Kings, not on the flop, and not on the turn, and it just doesn't matter how much you're betting or how well you have told your story of strength right from the getgo in these things. I've always fared better against opponents who know how to fold at least a little bit, and that is exactly what appears to be missing from the fields this week on full tilt as opposed to the normal participants in these events.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop trying. I would love to say that I'm just not going to try to push anyone off a hand unless I am holding a monster for the rest of this week on full tilt, but in a nutshell I get dealt a monster hand only about once a week or two, leaving me with no other option but to make plays when I know more or less exactly what my opponent has that I cannot imagine him calling me down with. They just keep calling anyways. Thank god there's been UB this week to get my game on in sort of the opposite -- a smaller field of players where people are at least willing to fold if it is obvious they are beat, even if they started off with two good cards in the hole. I don't see this as much of an issue on full tilt in general, but this week it's just been painful watching these tournament morons call call call with shit, and then either suck out or just end up ahead because they aren't smart enough to fold their pocket pair to the obvious straight or flush on the board, etc. Unfortunately I do not think Wednesday's action in the UBOC is any good from what I recall, so I might be stuck playing a million full tilt mtts again, resigning myself to just hoping to limp to the min-cash like all the other monkeys while praying to get slapped in the face with the deck.

There's just so much money at stake, I feel like I can't stay away.

Ballys Tournament Win

A couple of weeks back I headed down with some friends to Billy's poker room in Bally's in Atlantic City and played in the $200 bounty tournament the poker room was running, which ended up having 45 runners and a total prize pool of a little over 6 grand. I knew going in this would be a real luckfest, typical of most daily tournaments in Atlantic City, with 20 minute blind rounds, usually lasting 4-5 hours from what I was told when I registered at the counter. And, never having played a live bounty tournament before, I learned that each participant would be given a single $25 actual casino chip along with 10k in starting $T chips, which would have to be given to the person who eliminates you along with your chipstack. Although stacks were deep for the first few minutes with starting stacks of 10k and blinds that would begin at the standard 25/50, those blinds would jump quickly in this aggressive tournament structure to 50/100 after just 20 minutes of play and then double again to 100/200 just 40 minutes after the start. Again, this is also typical in my experience of most of the daily poker tournaments available in AC these days.

Early on, not much happened with me for the first couple of rounds, so I tried to be patient while I looked for a way to double up early. I won a couple of pots with aggressive betting -- standard Super/System sort of stuff -- and quickly I climbed my stack up to around 12k in chips for the early chip lead at my table. But then I let my read get me into a very bad situation, one I was lucky to escape from. I open-raised from late position with ATo, the best hand I'd seen by about 45 minutes or so into the tournament, and the old man in the big blind, who had defended a couple of times before despite seeming very tight like most old men are, defended again by calling my preflop raise, and I put him on shizznit after he had already shown an over-willingness to defend his blind in just a few minutes that this tournament had run so far. From watching him I felt like I knew this old guy woulda reraised me if he had anything substantial in the hole, especially given how actively I had been open-raising already in the earlygoing, so I was liking my AT here, and I liked it even moreso when the flop came down AJ7. The old man checked, I confidently bet after his check, and he paused a bit before calling. I wasn't sure what this meant, but my best guess after this call was either a small pocket pair, or perhaps a low ace that he just got lucky with. The turn then brought a raggy 3, the old man checked again, so this time I made a bigger bet to try to end this right here with my likely-ahead-but-vulnerable top pair. And this was when the guy nearly fell out of his chair "thinking over" his response. I mean, he leaned back, took a very loud deep breath/sigh, stretched out his arms and legs very prominently, and just made a huge production of the whole thing as he considered his options. Eventually after a good, solid minute of very overt activity, the guy check-raised me allin. He had been a little short already before this hand began, mostly from defending his blind to liberally and then taking it too far, and it was all just such a stoopid production he made that I figured he just had to be bluffing. I mean, who would make such a damn production out of it if he was actually strong? I thought to myself, "That has got to be 'strong-means-weak' in action", even though I knew this guy was generally an old, tightish guy. I thought quite a bit over it, knowing that AT on this board is nothing to write home about, but in the end my gut told me he was weak since before the hand began, and so I decided to listen and called for half of my remaining stack. Old man flips up? The ever-mighty A3. So he defends his blind against a preflop raise with A-rag, and then he makes the very questionable move of also calling my c-bet on the Ace-high flop with his top pair no kicker. He lucksucked me hard by hitting his kicker on the turn after his bad flop call, made a ridiculously huge public production to further suck at poker and accidentally "trick" me into thinking he must be weak just because no one with even half a brain would ever want to make it so obvious that he had a strong hand. Anyways, he effed me and I would be down to just over 2000 chips from my 10k starting stack, and that's when the river rewarded the better player by dropping a miracle 3-outer Ten for the resuck. Ahh the resuck. Nowhere else in poker is something so unwelcome and unfair when done to you and yet so deserved and just when it works in your favor. And with the turn of a card I moved from losing 80% of my stack to nearly doubling up late in the first hour of what I understood was normally a 4-5 hour long event. A very good turn of events for me.

Early in Round 4, just more than an hour into the tournament, I called a preflop raise from across the table with my 66 in the big blind, against a guy who had open-raised almost every single time the pot was unopened when it got to him the entire way through this tournament -- I mean seriously, maybe ten different times in an hour -- and always c-bet the flops after he was the last raiser pre-. The flop came TT4 with two clubs, and I checked to the preflop raiser who led out with his standard c betty-looking thing, which I opted to call as I assumed my pair of 6s was at least as likely to be ahead here as to be behind, and the betting was still small compared to the stacks. The turn brought another miracle card -- a 6 to turn me a boat -- and of course I checked and of course the unstoppable aggromonkey bet again, smallish. I thought it over for a while, hollywooding as much of a thought process as I thought would be believable, and then I once again just called, eying the amount in the pot and deciding that I could still make a credible river bet or raise for most of his stack if necessary. When the river brought an offsuit Queen, I figured my best chance to really get paid here was if the guy happened to have a big, big hand, and his betting out twice after the flop supported such a conclusion. David Sklansky's No-Limit Holdem book a few years ago covered this same topic, but sometimes the best way to get paid big in nlh is to bet as if your opponent has a large hand, and assume you weren't going to get paid much anyways if he doesn't have a big hand, but this way you are sure to maximize your big hands when you are in fact up against another monster. In this case, I immediately moved in my entire stack, which was much larger than the size of the pot given my recent near-double, and just hoped for a call. When the guy started agonizing, I knew I had made a good decision; clearly, he had something he really liked, and he did not just want to give it up like that. As my ooponent kept thinking, the seconds ticked by and I began to worry that he might fold. So I tried to channel my very best bluff face by acting completely stone-faced, like I was afraid the guy might see through my ruse. I tried to put up the exact same face that I look for when I think someone is bluffing. Whatever I did, eventually it worked, as the guy turns to me and says "I can't find a way to lay it down."

As soon as I heard that, I knew I had his stack, and my second $25 bounty chip in just the first hour and a half of the tournament. No way he says that line if he also has a boat, and with anything else on this board I know I've got him beat. Turns out, he had AT and had flopped not only trips, but trips with top kicker. I probably would have had to really do something crazy to get him to fold, but I didn't, and I shot up near the top of the leaderboard before the end of Round 4 in a tournament that would end up finishing during Round 13.

At this point, with a nice fluffy stack of chips in front of me, I did what I do best and commenced operation bullystack. With my big stack and as close to full utility as I was going to get in this fast-paced tournament, I turned on the jets and absolutely steamrolled the table, garnering several comments over the ensuing hour or so in the process while I bet and raised everyone else out of pot after pot after pot. I raised pretty much every time the action came unopened to me, mostly with absolutely no regard to the cards I was dealt. I remember winning a pot with a raise holding 42o, another with 86o, and there were many more just like those as well. And I didn't just drop the hammer on these guys during this stretch, either; I dropped it twice. Within the span of maybe 7 or 8 hands. Most people do not know this, but live hammers -- in particular, when not done to other bloggers -- are so much more dramatic than they are online, by a factor of like ten. People get really taken aback by that shit for some reason, who knew. But I love the boost it gives my image, and I just need to be sure to be prepared to show down some better cards for a while if need be. Or, just keep on pushing and try to make more than I lose from the aggression, which is exactly what I did over the next couple hours of this tournament. The key was that without exception I managed to fold to any reraises I faced when I did not have the hand or the pot odds to back it up. Yes it caused me to lose chips after having raised preflop with some regularity, but again the key to playing the bully is to make sure tht overall I am making more chips from the times everyone folds to my raises then I'm losing from the times people keep pushing me off my largely bullshit hands. Playing first-in aggro but smart to reraises, I knocked out three or four other players along the way to the final table, but we finally consolidated around Table 1 -- the table I had started at a few hours earlier -- when down to ten left.

I entered the final table as the chip leader, as we took our second break of the tournament just after we re-drew for seats to start the run to the money in the top 6 positions. I know I was the chip leader -- I had around 87k in chips to start the final table out of the 450k total chips in the tournament -- because when I came back inside from my second smoke break of the event, they had removed the yellow 100-dollar chips and brought in a nice light-blue color chip denominating 10,000 dollars in its place. I remember it so vividly because I had left for my smoke with a massive pile of chips in front of my seat, so big and unwieldly from repeatedly scooping up tons of little pots with nothing in there, sprinkled in with a few stackings of shorties for good measure. The pile was so big that I remember I had been having trouble finding places to keep my arms as I reached down to peel up the corners of my hole cards. But then out of nowhere, when I came back from the 10-minute break, I had this tiny little pile of chips, and at first I was all whatthefuckjusthappened and ready to go find the Tournament Director, until I realized that the primary change in my stack was the switching out of 3 1/2 huge stacks of red 1000-dollar chips and replacing them with a pile of just 8 of these light-blue 10,000 chips. But I also knew I was the chip leader because nobody else around the table had more than two blues along with their remaining reds and the purple 500 chips, while I had 8 of 'em. The rest of the stacks around the final table ranged from shorties with around 10k to about 60k for the closest stack to my own.

Mercifully, mostly due to the silly structure of this tournament that had even me as chip leader holding just over 10 big blinds with blinds of 4000-8000 and a 400 ante, the beginning of the final table went fast as the shortest stacks were forced to push almost on their very first big blind when sitting with Ms of just around 2 or even less. Typical daily casino nlh tournament structure, with typical laughable final table pushfest ending. The good part of that at least like I said was that the first 3 final table eliminations happened fast, with me grabbing one of them when a shorty pushed under the gun and I found AJs in the big blind and called. He had A8s and I held to pick up my 7th knockout chip of the tournament and getting me back to break-even for my buyin (including my own bounty which I still held on to at the time). These first few elims took us down to 7 players remaining, with 6 slated to pay out, in amounts roughly equal to $500, $600, $750, $900, $1200 and $2100, give or take some change on each. So as the bubble loomed -- a bubble which lasted probably about 40 minutes thanks to at least three allin suckouts from the short stack as any self-respecting tournament bubble would insist upon, which is an extremely long period of time for when the average chipstack was about 65,000 chips while the big blind had risen to 10,000 chips -- I noted how much the payouts in this tournament were weighted towards the top two spots, increasing by roughly just a hundred bucks a spot between 6th and 5th and 4th and 3rd place. This would make it especially important to make it to the final couple of spots in this event, and in my mind it also increased my desire to do a chop if anyone was interested since with just an average M of 6 this was obviously anybody's game -- even I as chip leader had an M under 10 -- and it was clear we were going to be subject to the vagaries of poker luck, and who happened to pick up TT vs 88 first or who got the AK and won a race against JJ. So, after about half an hour of bubble play, as the blinds moved up to 6k-12k, further dropping the average M to near 5, someone suggested a save for 7th place, which I readily agreed to and literally took $20 cash out of my pocket and suggested that everyone do the same. Pretty quickly everyone left agreed as well and I offered to be banker for the $140 save to ensure that 7th did not go home empty-handed, and hopefully loosening up the action a bit among the short stacks. And it worked, as within just a few minutes a shorty with an M under 2 pushed KTs and got called by AK, sending him home with his $140 cash booby prize plus whatever bounties he had managed to amass, and launching us into the payouts for the final 6 finishers. At the moment I had slipped to second place after folding a couple of times to allin reraises from stacks big enough to cripple me (any reraise is crippling when even the chipleader's M is under 10!), but when one of the two super short stacks suggested a chop, even I figured it wasn't worth pushing for then as two or three of these guys would likely be gone very shortly and then would increase significantly the chance of us actually finding some unanimous agreement on splitting up the remaining prize pool.

We played a bit further, and as expected two more guys dumped out early when luck and the silly blinds forced them in with lesser hands, one of the running into AA as I recall thinking at the time how fun that is to pick up pocket rockets at the final table of any tournament. Unfortunately, I had had a couple of more times where I laid down questionable hands to reraises in an attempt to amass a stack to last until those lucrative top two spots, and finally when down to four remaining I found myself the short stack with about 65k in chips, a little under two-thirds of the current average. When the action folded around to me in the small blind a few minutes later, I felt compelled to push with any two cards to pick up the 12k from the big blind and try to increase my stack by almost 20%. I did so, and the big blind, who was the chip leader at the time and thus had the chips to burn, began to agonize over whether or not to call. That sucked for me, since I was holding 53o, and I tried to give off my best indication of strength, acting confident, strongly stating my chip count when he asked, and just generally looking around and being active like I picture someone with pocket Aces would be, as opposed to the stone-faced, motionless aura I try to work when I want someone to think I am bluffing. It did't work, the big stack called me and flipped up A9o. Whoops.

The flop was a whiff for both of us, still leaving me with 6 outs twice, and then the turn brought the most beautiful 3 I can ever remember seeing in a poker game, securing my double up and reallllly pissing the big stack guy off bigtime. He referred to this derisively as a "suckout" the rest of the way through the tournament, including while we waited to receive our payouts from the overworked TD as well, and I didn't bother correcting him that (1) his A9o -- a hand I imagine would have called there with as well -- was only roughly a 60% favorite when the money went in, not exactly a suckout-level beat, and, more importantly (2) when I pushed with the 53o, I was far more than 50% to win the hand given the likelihood that the big stack would fold there, plus my 40% chances of winning with what would surely be two live cards vs. just about anything the big stack was likely to call my push with. But no matter how you slice it, I had doubled up with 53o, and thanks to the extremely short stacks around the table, this put me slightly back in the chip lead, a lead I would lose a minute later when I once again folded a hand I had raised with preflop (KJs) when one of the other large stacks pushed in on a reraise. The guy to my right then eliminated the 4th place finisher and took a comfortable chip lead when his AQ bested the shorty's A6 allin preflop.

It was at this point, down to just three players left with me in 3rd place around 100k in chips, while the other two guys had around 150k and maybe 200k or so, that the big stack surprisingly offered to chop. He was a really good guy, someone who I had gotten to know a little bit over the past four hours where he was mostly at my table, as well as over a couple of smoke breaks along the way, and I was happy to see that he had enough knowledge and experience in casino poker tournaments (turns out he comes to AC a couple of days per week) to be willing to agree to a chop even when holding the chip lead. His immediate proposal was for each of the three of us to take $1200, and then leave the last $900 and change in the prize pool to play for. I always like a chop that assures everyone a decent payout of at least the minimum that the next player out would receive but then still leaves some skin in the game to go ahead and finish things up, so I agreed, and so did the 2nd place guy after a few minutes of finagling. We all shook on it and then moved on to play it out.

And that's when I picked up my only big pocket pair of the tournament -- a big fat pair of pocket Aces. So sweet. Long story short, the big stack raised ahead of me with what turned out to be QJo, and my allin reraise from my short stack wasn't enough for him to consider folding given the odds, and I ended up doubling to a nice fat stack. While I was still stacking my chips, the shorty to my left was eliminated in 3rd place on the next hand, his face still clearly smarting from losing his chip lead to my 53o, and as soon as we found ourselves heads-up, I offered the nice guy who had originally offered the chop to chop out the remaining $900 as well. Looking at our stacks, I had probably just under three times as many chips as him, and I quickly offered him a 600-300 chop of the remaining 900, with him being allowed to retain his own $25 bounty chip as well as part of the deal. He quickly reviewed the stacks, took a second to think, and then happily agreed.

Two smokes and a bunch of wasted time later -- the TD was just starting to pay out a 12-way chop in a turbo tournament that ended at the same time as ours when we agreed to our final chop -- we recieved our receipts to take to the cage for our payouts. 3rd place took our chopped amount of $1200, plus the three $25 bounty chips he had won during the tournament, and the nice guy in second won $1500, plus his two bounty chips and of course his own that he retained as part of our deal. And I cashed out with the remainer of the prize pool per our deal, which came out to $1890 and change. Plus, I had won a whopping nine bounties along the way at $25 a piece -- some nice booty for playing big-stack bully for about three hours straight to end this short tournament -- and retained my own as well, giving me a total of an extra $250 for my efforts on top of the $1890 cashout from winning the tournament. How I managed to eliminate more than a fifth of the total people running in this thing seems pretty incredible, but more than that, I played a solid game from start to finish. I made the one big mistake early on my semi-misread on the turn against the guy who had lucked into two pairs, but that's one of the big lessons I've learned over my time playing mtt's over the past few years -- the good players are the ones who not only play well, but the guys who make the most of the good luck that they do receive. I got lucky to get that guy in there willing to call a preflop raise and then call a flop bet with top pair worst kicker, I got extremely unlucky with that 3 on the turn, and then I scored a major resuck suckout on the river to not only keep from losing 80% of my stack, but to score an early double as a result. Would I go on to spew everything away over the next couple of blind rounds? Or, as I did, would I take that "second chance" to give serious consideration to every play I made, settle down and start playing my game the way I know best? That's one of the keys I am noticing more and more during my big tournament runs as well as those of most people I know: everybody gets lucky sometimes, but the best players make the absolute best of that luck when it does happen to them.

And so goes the story of my second live daily casino poker tournament win, good for around 2 large net of all expenses and the buyin. Most importantly, I had a blast playing live poker as usual, and once again I found myself throughout simply overwhelmed with all the information I felt I was picking up from these players after what seems like a lifetime of purely online play. Not only am I pleased to have a nice start towards my most important poker goal for 2010 -- to turn more of my rare final tables into victories instead of just top-4 or top-3 finishes -- but this only strengthens my resolve to find a way to play some more live poker during 2010, however that has to happen. It's very hard for me to get out to a casino and play at a time when they have regular tournaments scheduled, but I have just had such an amazing run of success in live poker tournaments of late that I am left feeling like I am straight-up leaving money on the table if I don't find a way to get in a little more live tournament action this year than I have in the past. In fact, after this win in AC to start off the year right, my thoughts have turned towards Foxwoods, where I know they run a major poker tournament series every Spring and again every Fall in what I understand to be the nicest, best poker room on the East Coast. I haven't been to Foxwoods in more than a decade -- certainly since before their WPT poker room was installed in the basement of the Rainmaker Casino -- but I'm thinking that 2010 should be the year that all that changes once and for all.

$30 Rebuy Mini FTOPS -- 27k Score Recap

As I posted the screenshot of on Thursday, I did finish in 3rd place in Event #17 in the Mini FTOPS on full tilt the other night, which was the $30 rebuy nlh tournament, in 6-max format. The 6-max thing was an interesting trend here in this latest Mini FTOPS which just ended, where it seemed like every other event (or more) were suddenly 6-max, which I just don't understand or know the origin of at all. And to be honest, although there was a time a couple of years back when I was really in to 6-max nlh tournaments -- back when I used to focus on the nightly 30k 6-max mtt on full tilt every night, and when I played and cashed in the 6-max nlh tournament in the WSOP as well -- these days I find 6-max tournaments to be a bit of a drag, in that I think it caters more to my tournament game to get a little bit more time to play with some fairly deep stacks. I only registered for the event because I was just sitting down to the pc, it was still in the early parts of the late registration period, and frankly I've been beating up the $30 rebuy nightly on full tilt lately already, including my 5k score for second place in that event a few weeks back that I recapped here, and it seemed like something I would enjoy checking out on a whim on Wednesday night.

I should mention here that the other thing I really loved about the Mini FTOPS is that you could buy in to these badboys direct with FPPs. I must have had 30 billion FPPs stored up in my account last week, as I've been playing with some regularity on full tilt for more than four years now and yet have never even considered spending any of them on any of the little overpriced prizes in the full tilt FPP store. So in the three other events of the Mini FTOPS I played in this time around, I bought in straight for FPP points. 8000 FPPs here, 12,000 FPPs there, I barely notice the difference in my FPP account, and I certainly don't care about it, but I do get to spend my FPPs finally on something worthwhile, where the plan is if possible to turn these free buyins into actual cash money.

So anyways as I said, I registered a little late for this tournament, and as I sat down I noticed that there was one other regular stack (1500 chips), two double stacks of around 3000 and one quad stack of a little over 6000, so I immediately rebought to get my start at 3k in chips and be able to make a solid double with a little luck early in this thing. The immediate rebuy -- pretty much always the best bet of the night in any rebuy tournament as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, I lost my first buyin within the first few hands when my KQ on a King-high flop got allin to a guy holding pocket Tens, who natchy rivered a Ten to nearly felt me just minutes in to the tournament. Now that's just typical rebuy-hour bullshit, and the way I see it, I came to play in a tournament this large and so, especially with the ability to buy in direct for FPPs, I wanted to give it another crack. So I double-rebought in for another 8800 total FPPs, but unfortunately a short while later I was half-stacked again when my KK lost to a jackmonkey with A2o when he -- of course -- rivered an Ace after calling a couple of bets from me with nothing but Ace-high. Less typical, but still the kind of crap that goes on all the time during monkey hour. The rest of my second stack was gone maybe 10 minutes later when I got mostly allin with T9 on a KT9 flop but ended up getting -- you guessed it -- rivered by a queen to give a straight to the idiot who called a big flop bet with JT on that flop. In a split second I made the decision to buy in one more time and that's it -- a double-buyin of course, as my table suddenly had about 30k in chips around it to throw around and still another 15 minutes or so of rebuy hour.

Finally in the last 5 minutes or so of monkey hour I was finally able to make a move, as people typically tend to start pushing with crap if they have not amassed big stacks in an attempt to either make a move in the final few minutes of rebuy time or bust out trying. First I called an allin reraise from the guy to my left with the funny Asian name, and when my A4o held up against his K9 (even through the river, somehow), I was informed via pop-up window that I had just busted my 6th lifetime full tilt pro from a pro bounty tournament, this time a guy named Yongsuk Chang. $30 back into my full tilt account, so I'm only in for five buyins at this point, and then just two hands later a late position guy with just 3000 chips (average was over 6k at this point with rebuy hour just about to end) open-raised allin from late position, I found KQo in the big blind and decided to go for the double to get me at least around average heading into the rest of the tournament. The guy luckily turned up a dominated QJs, and just a minute later we broke, I took the add-on (so back in to the tournament for six buyins in total) and I entered Hour 2 right around average in chips of just over 6000:



Hour 2 started off relatively uneventful, with my only big pot being one where I called a preflop steal-reraise from a short stack and my A7s, was up against 99 and failed to connect, knocking me back down to around 4200 chips at the time and a good three-quarters of the way down the leaderboard with about half an hour to go in Hour 2. Near the end of the second hour I did manage to win a decent pot with AK on a King-high board and then with QQ on a Queen-high board, but both times I failed to get a call of my large bet on the river and found myself back around 6k in chips after I got rivered again a short while later by a naked flush draw donkey with ATs against my AK on the Ace-high flop. I chipped up a bit in the final hands of Hour 2, and I went into the break with just over 7k in chips, good for about two-thirds of the way down among the 1700+ runners still alive in the event:



I got my first real big hand of the tournament early in Hour 3, when I moved AJo allin preflop against a suspected stealer on a shortish stack, but then disappointingly I also got called allin by a third player whom I did not expect to stay in the hand. Turns out my JackAce was against Q8 and TT, and a Jack on the turn gave me more than a double to over 16k in chips, suddenly about 5k above average and good for around 350th place out of 1500 runners. At this point with the deep stacks afforded by such a large field in a rebuy event, I was for the first time in this event really able to start making the kind of moves I want to be able to make in mtt's, things like restealing on the flop, float-calling on the flop and then stealing the pot on the turn with a good-sized bet that is backed up by many big blinds worth of chips behind, etc., and with that I was able to slowly chip up to around 20k in chips, which was important because bad beat #5 against me was lurking right around the corner:



Obviously I'm calling this. And:



Not to blow this hand up into anything bigger than it was, but suffice it to say I do not believe I have ever been bad beat as much in any one tournament as I was in MFTOPS #17. Given how significant the pots during the latter half of my 11-hour run in this tournament eventually proved to be, I opted not to show screenshots of every single early bad beat I took, most of which I merely mentioned above. But they all took their toll, especially when experienced en masse all in one giant long sitting. Hands like this were so commonplace in this thing, the only saving grace I can come up with is that at least I managed to have a big enough stack to withstand each and every one over 11 hours worth, enough to make a nice big cash in the end at least, although bad beats would be a significant detractor on my total cash winnings in this thing before all was said and done. For now I was back at 15k, at this point right around average, and commenced trying to build a stack once again.

I got myself up over 20k with this river bluff-raise:



Hard to say why I did what I did here (both opponents folded), other than the generic sensing of weakness. With two guys in the pot, one of them raised preflop while the other just called, and then there was a bet and one of them called on the flop as well. In 6-max in particular, preflop raisers seem to get in there more often with Ax than wth pairs since the structure requires you to be so much more aggressive, and with all the calling going on in the hand, it just seemed like neither of these guys had hands they wanted to go to the felt with, and I sensed an opportunity to force some folds with my push with fourth pair. This time it worked. And then, just minutes before the third break, I got my first double-up with a big stack, against a guy who had been getting pissy with me in the chat after all my aggression no less, when I floated the guy on the flop, he failed to bet the turn with his top pair, and I ended up making runner-runner trips on the river with my lowly Q4o. The guy had been being such a dick to me in the chat, claiming I was on tilt after taking multiple bad beats right in front of him, so when the second Queen hit the river I opted for the major overbet, hoping if nothing else that this guy would be getting tired of me pushing allin so big on the river:



It worked. He had KJ, he couldn't fold, and not only had I doubled up again, but I had my first of what would prove to be many, many eliminations on the night who would be following me around all night berating me for my "bad play". Yeah. I was the one who made the bad play here by instacalling for 50 big blinds with top pair third kicker on a board with two Queens, three cards Ten or above, and three hearts. Yeah. With 36,243 chips at the third break, I was up to 100th of 873 remaining:



Got my first pocket Aces of the tournament about halfway through Hour 4, and although I won a decent amount of chips with it, it was only about half as much as it could have been:



The guy with the TT who we eliminated on this hand became the second guy who followed me around for the entire rest of the tournament insulting me in the chat. Because again, yes, it was my bad play I guess that led to his elimination. Next time I'll have to remember to fold those pocket Aces to action before the flop. Splitting the donk's stack lifted me up to over 40k in chips for the first time, and to the top 50 spots on the board with still just under 800 runners left.

Here's me getting coolered bigtime again a short while later in Hour 4, as I rivered the nut flush against one of these FTOPS gold jersey donks who are almost invariably the worst players at any table they are seated at:



I overbet-reverse-hoyed the guy, he called and, of course, that river card totally effed me:



Notice again, another guy calling me stupid in the chatbox. Good times. Meanwhile, I lost another 11k later in the hour when I called an allin with my AK, the guy flipped up JTo, and the Jack-high board once again cost me a shot to take a favored hand into the top 40 or so remaining stacks. Par for the course with all the other bad beats I took in this thing over the entire 11 hours of play, but my frustration level just kept rising and rising. I mean, even for me, this amount of bad beats was getting to be completely out of hand. So, back under 20k in chips again, I once had again to resume building a stack after surviving another sick setup and another dumb bad beat, but again I should point out as I have so many times in the past here on the blog that I was lucky to have as many chips as I had such that I would be able to survive the inevitable bad beats. Quite the number of beats I took in this was not really necessary, but to some degree they are always going to be inevitable and sometimes you just need to have enough chips to live through it.

Two-thirds of my dwindling stack disappeared on this hand just before the end of Hour 4, after the small blind called my preflop raise with my A7s, but I didn't put him on an Ace from the moment he had made the call. So when the flop came Ace-high, I bet, he just called. On the turn we both checked, which further fueled my thought that my pair of Aces was ahead in the hand, so when he bet out 8k on the river, I ended up calling with top pair thinking that I was best, and getting better than 2 to 1 on the call anyways even if I was beat. I was very wrong:



And with under 10k in chips, my run in the $30 rebuy Mini FTOPS event was suddenly in danger of ending early, well short of the money even, under the weight of too many coolers and, finally, one bad mistake on my part. Such is the way with no-limit holdem -- you play great for 6 hours, you make one mistake, and you're done just like that. Shortly after, I pushed allin preflop with QJo, not called. Allin with ATs on an Ace-high flop, not called. Allin preflop with the hammer, not called (shown). Allin with K5s preflop, not called. And then just before the fourth break I got back into the picture in the Mini FTOPS when I raised UTG with KJs, fully intending once again to get it allin but not wanting to push at that point since I had improved my stack 50% over the past few minutes. The big stack to my immediate left called my raise, and we saw this awesome flop:



In this spot, I knew I needed to achieve maximum extraction given my depressed chip position; this was double up for me or it was a total waste of a large flop. Having been the preflop raiser, I definitely wanted to c-bet here, so I threw in 3k into the 4875-chip pot, and the big stack smooth called (perfect!). Knowing I needed to double up here to get back into the race, I had to go for the bet-the-flop-then-check-the-turn move, hoping my opponent had something strong and would bet out here on the expectation that I was giving up after my turn check:



As soon as the big stack bet out as small as he did (3600 into roughly 10k in the pot), I knew he was strong and I was just hoping he didn't somehow flop the Ace-high flush, which would be so me. I repopped for my last 7k in chips, and the big stack had to call, and he showed this:



Goodbye, pocket Aces who only called my UTG preflop raise, and hello again to 31k in chips! Few hands later I added another 8k when the guy across the table called me down preflop and after the Ace-high flop with A2 despite my UTG preflop raise:



This, from the same guy calling me an idiot in the chat earlier. Good times, like I said previously. In any event, at the fourth break I was back alive, just under the 41k average chipstack and in 186th of 421 remaining.

Eight minutes into Hour 5, I had my new biggest hand of the tournament. I open-raised from middle position with AQs, and the big blind reraised me about 2.5x my bet, so I called. I don't love calling preflop reraises with AQ of course as anyone who reads here regularly knows, but in 6-max play again it becomes a more viable move due to the faster nature of the game, and with the hand being sooted it's something I would call with in most full ring games as well given the flush possibilities. The flop came with two of my suit, so I called my opponent's c-bet, and then the turn completed my nut flush. When my opponent checked the turn, I led out and he called my bet. Then on the river he pushed allin for his final 20k or so in chips, pushing right into my nuts. Turns out this time the river had coolered him just like the hand earlier when the river made my nut flush into my opponent's full house:



Now I had over 66k in chips and was up to the 60s out of just over 400 remaining. Back having a nice big stack again, I was immediately able to start aggressively chipping up, open-raising any Ace, any two face cards or really any two connected cards as well like 98o, QJo, etc. I even started doing some absolutely ridiculous things like floating two preflop raisers on the flop with the intention of stealing a bit pot later in the hand:



This is the only time in the tournament I did something this reckless, but these two guys had been playing and raising with shit at this table, and they had been talking smack about my play in the chatbox as well, so I figured I would take a shot with enough chips to hopefully hurt at least one of them. When none of these guys bet out on the Ace-high flop that also had a possible high straight draw and a flush draw, I figured these dickheads would definitely have led out with an Ace and at least one must have been on some kind of a draw. So, after the turn ragged out, I decided to follow through with my plan all along in the hand with a bet that looked like a guy holding a solid Ace:



And both guys folded, I'm sure with their anger increasing with every second:



I should note for the record that, in retrospect, my preflop call with this hand was pretty much the worst poker play I ever make, and it's really not something I would do again if given the chance. I can't explain it other than just that sometimes when I get a big stack and start to take over a table in nlh tournaments, I find it useful to figure out exactly where I'm at at the table, and just how far I can go and keep getting respect on my action. In any event, this hand put me over 80k and in even better position to make moves with now back up to 80 big blinds, in 45th place of 375 remaining. I called raises with 87o (had to fold the flop), A4s (won with a bet on the flop), and then of course I restole with this:



And I did my duty and showed as well as always:



I got up over 90k when I called a shorty's button push with QTs, he showed 86s and miraculously my QT held. I lost a race to another shorty, another guy who had been responding to the dickheads following me around in the chat after I had eliminated them earlier in the tournament for about 15k chips, so then two hands later I open-raised with the hammer again, took it down, and showed:



As an aside, I was into the final 80 runners in the 5050 on this same night at the same time. Wanna see how I got eliminated there right now?



How do I lose this? He's got just 4 outs twice, plus I have eight other redraw outs. I'm going to be top 3 in the 5050 at the same time as this Mini FTOPS run.



Or not. So, so sick. But such is the life of the mtt grinder. Ghey as it is.

So, back to the $30 rebuy Mini FTOPS. Just one minute after that sick, stoopid elimination from the 5050, I got involved in a blind vs blind confrontation when I called this smallish raise with third pair and no reason to believe I would be behind if I improved my hand:



I did improve on the turn, and of course I checked to the guy who had raised already on the flop, and when he bet out again I moved right in:



Turns out he had flopped two pairs with Q3, and he called for the rest of his stack, which would bring me over 100k for the first time on the night.

Or not, thank you river:



It's enough to make you cry, really. I mean, how many times can I lose to a 4-outer in one night? Sadly, that wasn't even close to the last time on the day. And there I was right back down to 43k. The chatbox lit up at this point with people speaking about four different languages, all laughing and enjoying that some guy hit a 12-to-1 shot against me. Classy.

Oh, and the very next hand?



quickly turns into this:



I'm really not sure why I didn't just pack it in, push allin blind repeatedly until I busted, and just go to sleep at this point. I'm really not. Here we were not even five hours in to what was sure to be a very long tournament, and I've already been bad beat about as many times as I ever get bad beat in an entire night. And all these asshats on the rail can do is talk about how lucky I keep getting? I guess that's why I was still alive in this thing while they were on the rail with the about 100 other people I had eliminated from this tournament already on the night. But to say that my frustration level was rising would be a major understatement. Those of you who've had the pleasure of girly chatting with me during a typical night of play -- which involves probably 5 or 6 bad beats on average spread over a few hours -- can imagine what my temperament was like after yet another bad beat, this one back to back with the last. 90k down to 33k in the span of about 2 minutes, against guys who I played circles around and didn't even know how far behind they were when they tried to gift me their chips. Playing mtt's regularly is just so sick for the psyche, take it from me. You have to be insane to really do this to yourself for any prolonged period of time.

I guess these guys convinced themselves through the chatbox that I was on some massive tilt, because it couldn't have been five more minutes before the assidiot to my left -- the guy who first four-outered me on the river with his lower two pairs vs my higher two pairs -- reraised me allin on this flop in a spot where I had to call my last 16k to win 50k. With top pair and a short stack after fifty billion suckouts against me, it was an absolute no-brainer call:



Yet another gift, and I was back over 66k in chips, with a fair amount of breathing room of about 35 big blinds, good for 86th place of 277 remaining. Although it felt like I had won about 500,000 chips already in this thing, I was still somehow in the top third of players after the idiot with the Q5 middle pair let me right back in this thing.

Few minutes later, obviously I called this:



I was up against pocket Jacks, and natch I could not pull it out either:



Back down to 56k as I just could not get a damn thing going in this thing. One minute before the fifth break, I once again felt compelled to call this against a confirmed aggromonkey on a perpetually short stack who had himself already sucked out on me once:



Donk! No part of the flush at all.



Ahhh, but this is against me, so no matter:



I mean can you believe this shit?!! Again back down to 54k instead of over 100k. Same ahole who 4-outered me once 8-outers me again here, plus fading my four redraw outs. I shoulda quit back four suckouts ago when it first occurred to me. The fifth break came, and I was in poor position yet again despite having won at least 750k in chips if things broke how they should:



After no playable hands for the first 20 minutes or so of Hour 6, I made a frustration play and finally got to experience the rush of sucking out on someone else, one of the uber dickheads who had been dirty chatting at me for over an hour at this table:





My god was that so effing sweet. I only wish I coulda called instead of raised allin, and done so on the turn instead of the flop, and then beat his ass. Gee, I wonder if I had this coming in this thing or what? Bastages. Anyways, finally I was over 100 grand, well over in fact up at 143k, and for the first time in hours I was back over 50 big blinds in my stack and with a litle bit of room to move. Up to 36th of 172 remaining.

I made another 15k in chips when I flopped trips with 62 on a 66x board, turning quads before failing to get a value call on the river. But I quickly undid that, buying a little advertising when I allowed myself to get called down on the river with the hammer after having bet on the flop already:



This only added to the general theme at the table that I was some kind of tiltmonkey, luckbox fishdonk. Which was of course a-ok with me. Especially when that same guy called my river bet puting him all in here about 15 minutes later:



The chat from the idiot I sucked out on up in that shot there probably didn't hurt either.



Bloom. Elimination number 5000 on the day. And I was at my tournament high, getting right up near 200k in chips for the first time, and into the top 20 with 144 guys left in the tournament. I quickly lost 40k in chips in a blind vs blind confrontation again with the guy to my right who had sucked out on me twice already when my A8s was no match for his AKo allin preflop, natchy. But when you catch a guy holding nothing but his cock in his hand basically eight other times in one night already, how can you possibly put him on a strong hand that ninth time, right? So frustrating. At least it made this one feel all the better, my second pocket Aces over 6 hours of play:



Which not only got me back up to 200k but also eliminated one of the worst, dirtiest chatting, generally biggest ahole players I met with during the night. And there were plenty to choose from, believe you me. And FrankTaylor3 would become the latest in a long line of eliminations for me who would follow my ass around until the wee hours of the morning just to smack talk me and my play as much as possible. I mean this f-up literally stayed up until at least 6am just to tell everyone else at my table late in this tournament how bad and lucky of a player I was. Till at least 6am!! Sure, I stayed home from work the next day. But I won 27 grand. What's this guy's excuse? I watched some guy win 27 grand and told about 15 other people how bad of a player he was all along the way? Wow.

Anyways, so I was back over 200k, and then right around the end of Hour 6, I jumped up over 300k in one sweet hand, where I had 85s in the small blind, a hand I was thrilled to get to play multiway when four players limped to me and I could complete for just 1700 more into a 17,700-chip pot. Mmmmmmmm. A no-limit player's dream. The flop came down Q97 with two of my suit (hearts), giving me a flush draw plus an inside straight draw to boot, for conceivably 12 outs into a very deep-stacked 5-way nlh pot. So I checked it with the four guys ahead of me and was surprised to see everyone check around on that flop. And then came the beautiful turn card:



As you can see I put in a standard turn bet of around 2/3 the size of the pot with my second nut straight plus redraw to the flush as well. I wasn't exactly sure what I was hoping for here, and frankly I wasn't sure what my opponents were on given the limited information I'd received so far, but I knew I was calling when I got this in response:



But it turns out I was in a bit of jeopardy here after all, as my opponent held J♥T♥. Amazingly I managed to dodge what, 13 outs once, between his higher straight and higher flush possibilities when the river came another 7, and after one more nice pot on a raise from me with K9 on a King-high flop, I headed into Hour 7 in 11th place of 82 left:



I treaded water right around the 400k level for the first half of Hour 7, blinding and anteing away (we were at 2500/5000 with a 600 ante halfway through the 7th hour) but then stealing enough preflop when the pot had not been opened in front of me to more or less recover those costs of playing the game at that point in the tournament. One such hand was J9s, another hand I love to play (as multiway as possible) in no-limit games, and when I raised it here on another typical steal play:



the big stack in the small blind reraised my 15k raise up to 45k. If I'm not suited and it's only heads-up I am likely to fold this hand in many situations, but with the hand being suited and the other guy being so, so deep, in no-limit I figured this is the kind of hand that I had to pay the price with and hopefully get lucky. And get lucky I did:



After first checking to make sure I hadn't accidentally fired up my pokerstars client instead of full tilt, I watched my opponent, who remember had reraised me preflop, lead out for 61k, less than two-thirds of the pot, and when I see a bet less than 2/3 the pot without a good reason for it, a little bell goes off in my head. So let's see, the guy reraised me preflop, and then he thought for a while and let his timer tick down to half before leading out for less than two-thirds of the pot on the flop. He's got a big pair. And I just flopped the nuts on him. And he's one of the few guys in the tournament right now who still have bigger stacks than I already do. Immediately it is obvious to me that this could be the biggest hand of the entire tournament for me if I can play it right. I considered how to get this guy's entire massive stack if he's sitting on pocket Aces. I figured if he's good -- and he's made it this far in a donkeyrific mass-marketed $30 rebuy tournament that had 3500 players and over 10,000 total buyins, so he could at least be reasonably good -- but if he's good, he might fold if I push in here. If he's good, this guy's gonna want to be pushing allin big with his Aces, rather than be put to the test for most of his stack and have to call off with his pocket pair. So you know what I did?



Yeah. I minraised, something I just about never do. But in this particular case, as strong as the minraise might make me look, I've got this guy on Aces and now, with this bet, I've put him into a situation where he can reraise me allin and expect to have significant fold equity with me still having 130k or so remaining after my minraise. I figured this was my best chance of getting this guy to get trigger-happy with his pocket Aces and see a chance to win a large pot where he is probably ahead, as opposed to if I push allin on him where he might (correctly) reason he is behind or at least where I am drawing very rich.

It worked:



My read was dead-on, and I held:



to win a massive, 850,000 chip pot, and just like that, I was the chipleader with 59 runners remaining, 7 1/2 hours in to the Mini FTOPS $30 rebuy:



For anyone interested in my stats through this point to make it from starting with 1500 chips to 850,000 and the chip lead, here they are as of that moment:



20% of flops, a little bit light for my preference in a 6-max event but acceptable I suppose. And especially impressive here is my showdown percentage being all the way back up to 47%. Believe me, when you take 9 bad beats or whatever it was over 222 hands, being anywhere near 50% in showdowns in a no-limit holdem tournament is to me the best stat on that board.

I picked up another 80k in chips when I busted the guy across the way from me who had gifted me such a huge stack with his pocket Kings, when my KQs bested his JJ which he moved his short stack allin with on a Queen-high flop. The rest of Hour 7 was pretty uneventful for me until the end of the hour when I called a preflop raise with pocket Tens and flopped a vulnerable-looking set on a KT9 flop with two clubs. I led out for the full pot, wanting pretty hard to take this one down right there rather than let some random club, Queen or Jack draw cheap to some dirty shit, and this time I was the victim of the dreaded minraise instead of the perpetrator. I thought it over for several seconds, and I figured I was probably currently head, facing some kind of draw to beat me, but that I probably held redraw outs to a winning boat. Thus, while I would not want to call allin from the chiplead position when I know I could just fold and still be 1st of 40-some players remaining, in this case I figured I was currently the favorite, and that I could obtain some significant fold equity given my opponent's large stack with a push. So that's what I did. The guy sat and sat. His timer ran down, and he requested extra time, which started at around 60 seconds. He let it get all the way down to 11:



before making what I can only assume was a big fold. Some kind of a shitdraw, or a pair-and-a-shitdraw or something similar. And just like that I was over a million in chips, the first guy to reach that point in this tournament:



At the 7th break I was still just over a mil, at the time in 2nd place with 41 guys left. We were slowly but surely getting down to the big time here, although in 6-max remember 41 players means almost 7 full tables still left. Given what I'd been through between the hours of 9pm and now 4am, to still be alive at all let alone to have such a large stack is more than I could ever hope for. I still can't believe I was still alive after all the suckouts, I really can't. And over the past hour as well, several more dickhead railbirds had come out of the woodwork to hate on me, including at least two guys I had eliminated from tournaments earlier in the week by severely outplaying their asses. I am still amazed how many people will follow someone around for hours, even days just because of one poker play, no matter what it was, how good, bad, lucky, unlucky, whatever. I can honestly say I don't think I've done this other than maybe one time when I wanted to see what it was like, and it very quickly became apparent that it did not make me feel cool at all to do so. Ahh well, the more the merrier I suppose, especially when I'm well on my way to my biggest-ever online score in front of all of them. and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.

With this huge stack and now with comfortably more than 100 big blinds, I was determined to play as aggressively as possible, and I stole a great many pots through Hour 8 as I fought to stay ahead of the 4000/8000 blinds and 1000 antes per hand. I think my favorite moment of haterism might have been this one (I literally have hundreds of screenshots of the highlarious stuff that was said to me), when I switched up tables and found myself salivating at seeing not just one but two gold jersey FTOPS winners at my table. As anybody who plays regularly in the larger tournaments on full tilt knows, almost without exception the gold jersey wearers are the worst pieces of shit tournament poker players on the entire site. Two gold jerseys felt like two golden spewmonkeys to me, and as I'm just digesting what I'm seeing having just appeared at this table like 5 seconds earlier, this pops up in the chat:



Just two more of my loving fans. Blizzuff I had busted from two tournaments earlier in the week, and McLovin had been one of my early victims in this tournament several hours earlier. Oh, and I liked this one a lot too:



He's referring to Jamie Gold there, having just said that I play like him and then I, ever the egger-onner, told him Jamie Gold was my hero. These guys literally made this run for me at least 2 or 3 times more enjoyable and interesting than it would have been otherwise.

In any event, most of Hour 8 was more of the same, me playing highly aggressive poker and bullying the tar out of guys with medium stacks who were focusing on trying to get closer to the big big money at the final table and did not want to mess with my open-raises and resteals preflop and my consistent flop and turn bets representing strength. Near the end of the hour, I reraised the small blind before the flop from my big blind with AKo, and he pushed allin on me in response in a move that is more common than you would think when I have the stack to be that guy at the table making it impossible for anyone else to get any traction because I'm just betting and raising so much that eventually people just want to lash out in response:



This guy picked the wrong time, as my own image is the thing that made me so unsure that he had Aces or Kings, or even any pocket pair at all for that matter. I had to call, and I was very pleased with what I saw:



But then the turn card had something to say about that:



and just like that, with yet another bad beat, I was back down to 800k in chips instead of 1.5 million and a commanding chip lead once again with just over 20 players left. In fact it slid me all the way down to 11 out of 22 remaining. So sick. I had a couple of nice pots in the balance of Hour 8, but I could not do enough this hour with my medium stack to stay ahead of the ever-advancing blinds -- which is much easier to do with a huge stack of course -- and I headed into Hour 9 in 12th of 19 left with about 2/3 of the average stack:



You get bad beat enough in these tournaments, and it becomes extremely difficult not to be affected in a meaningful way by them. Here my entire style of play was taken away from me, a style that was helping me to accumulate chips by leaps and bounds while I was just able to stay ahead when I got the money in comfortably ahead. I took a walk around the house, hit a home run derby on the Wii and came back for Hour 9 refreshed if not frustrated as hell at not just being able to follow through with my favored hands, basically all throughout this event.

Hour 9 did not start off well for me. My 680,000 chips quickly slipped below 500k, as anyone out there who knows me knows that I am never, even playing just to survive, never playing to make the next payout level, and really even never playing to make the final table. I want to win, and thus I came out firing in Hour 9, hoping to build back my stack like I had after so many other bad beats I had taken already in this tournament. Unfortunately, those attempts failed and as I mentioned I quickly slid down to 16th of 18 left and looking in poor shape to make even the final table:



From here it was just about stealing, stealing and stealing as much as I possibly could, trying not to get allin against a dominating hand but otherwise willing to go to the felt and take a shot with two undercards if the situation made sense given the shitty stack I was left with after the decimation of yet another bad beat. Finally, mercifully, after several steals and several folds by me to reraises after I had raised already to try to pilfer the blinds, I doubled through a guy who made yet another horrible call of this allin bet from me on the flop:



He called with pocket 8s, and somehow my 9s held to get me back up to 1.1 million and into 8th place of 15 remaining players. Then about half an hour later, my whole tournament changed when I reraised a preflop stealer with my big slick:



He pushed in response, and I felt I had no choice but to call:



He showed pocket Jacks, not a hand I would have folded in his spot, and check out that lovely board:



Ooooooooh. 2.2 million chips, with the turn of an Ace. On the turn. Sweeeeet. This was good for second place of 13 left in the tournament:



Sitting in 2nd place with just 13 left and in position to win a shitload of money, it was time to switch back into a bit more conservative mode, so I spent most of the rest of Hour 9 -- this being from roughly 5am to 6am my time -- sitting back and watching others slowly bust, stealing just enough pots to maintain my position at the top of the leaderboard as we inched closer to the final two 6-max tables, where the payouts would be a minimum of over $3000:



I had a massive suckout here, my second of the entire tournament, when I reraised a guy allin with pocket Tens, and he called with pocket Jacks for about half of my nice big stack. The turn card brought my salvation though in a big way:



and suddenly with just a few minutes to go in Hour 9, I was once again the chip leader, now with just nine players remaining:



Needless to say, the rail exploded afresh there with my second suckout of the 10-hour tournament. You woulda thought I sucked out 310 times though with the way all the haters were talking. It's comical, really. But I just laughed it off, not really engaging the monkeys like I had been a few hours previously, but not letting it get to me or anything at all either. I stayed above 3 million in chips while a few more people busted, dropping me down to 3rd of 8 players left, just two from the elusive final table, but still very close to the chip lead, where I remained as the ninth break came and went, with play resuming at 6am my time. Work on Thursday was quickly becoming a pipe dream I knew, but with 64k on the line and me so close at this point, some things are just more important, right?

Early in Hour Ten, I lost a race with 44 to try to bust a guy in 8th place, again much to the delight of the rail, dropping me to around 2.5M and 4th place of 8 remaining. Later in the hour, I open-raised preflop with A3o and had to lay down to a reraise, and then still later I called a 3-way preflop raise with JTo, tried to take a stab on the turn but had to lay down when my opponent led out big after the Ace on the river. Before I knew it, I wasn't in such good shape anymore on the leaderboard or for making the final table:



But then I won another key race here a short while later:



Yahtzee!



Which not only kept me alive but gave me back the chip lead as well, now just one spot away from the final table:



The final table bubble took forever, as usual in these things. People played tight as hell of course, and the full tilt rng always seems to be ready and willing to serve up rediculousness as needed to keep things interesting, as the short stack on the other table sucked out when dominated three separate times as we played hand for hand. And then, mericfully, the bubble burst when, predictably, QQ took on AK at the other table and this time the overcards won:



And here we were at the final table, just a few minutes before 7am my time in a tournament I had started at 9pm the night before:



And remember, this was a big-ass tournament after 10,000+ buyins at $30 apiece, and each member of the final table was already looking at at least five figures in payout:



I took over the final table chiplead when I called down this aggromonkey twice including on the river:



and then I busted the 6th place guy when I called his allin push on the Queen-high flop with my KQo, besting his AK:



And we were down to five. With me well out in front with over 7M in chips. All of us guaranteed at least 15k in cold, hard cash. The tenth break came and went, still with 5 of us in there, and play resumed with me knowing for sure I would not be working in my office on Thursday, having just watched the sun come up out my family room window while I still sat in front of the computer screen.

A short while into Hour Eleven I faced this situation:



and given how aggro this table was, there was no way I was folding here. I got heads-up against the allin guy, he showed AQ, and I held to eliminate #5 as well:



And then there were four, with me once again comfortably in the lead at over 7.5M in chips. And a short while later, the shorty across the table pushed allin preflop for 500k into my pocket 7s, I called and finally won the race to score a big elimination:



So we're down to three remaining, me with 9.8M in chips, the guy to my left with 5.6M, and the short stack across the way sitting on 1.8M. After not too long I raised with AJs preflop and the short stack pushed allin for only another 3x my bet, which I begrudgingly called with AJs three-handed. I was unfortunately up against AKs, and I could not hit to stop the shorty from doubling through me up to around 3.5M in chips, although I still maintained a slight chip lead over 2nd place. At this point I proposed that we deal, and eventually the other two guys agreed to work on a deal, so we activated full tilt's new final table dealmaking software. I was willing to go straight ICM for the split, proposing this deal:



which would have paid me 47k (first prize was slated to be 64k) and left $5100 for the three of us to play for. The shortest stack quickly accepted the deal, but after sitting for maybe a minute waiting for the other guy to accept, I grew impatient and decided to just play it out. Just like when I was in Vegas at the Venetian Deep Stack final table this summer, I am always in favor of a chop when luck has become a huge factor and we're down to the real big money, but I am most definitely not in favor of sitting around trying to convince someone to deal. Not when I think I'm the best poker player at the table regardless. So I clicked on "Reject Deal" and we resumed play.

We played aggressive, three-handed final table poker for a good long while, before finally I reraised the 2nd-place stack with top pair, and I found myself reraised allin in a spot where I just didn't feel like I could fold for another 1.2M into an 8.7M pot:



And here it is:



I'm ahead, and if I win this hand, I shoot up to over 12M in chips to 3.5M for my heads-up opponent. The $64,000 first prize in this thing is very close to within my grasp. My opponent had twelve outs twice, but we're already after the flop here, and I'm roughly what, a 55-45 favorite to take over a totally commanding chip position for a big big payout. The turn was an offsuit 6, giving my opponent a couple more outs in matching his kicker, but then the river took the breath right out of my lungs in a big way:



It's just so wrong. Now I was back down to a distant third of 3 left. Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh. I fought back to over 5M in chips with a couple of nice aggressive moves and a couple of top pair flops, still well behind the chip leader but in ok position. That dwindled under 5M after a few folds to raises and reraises, and then I raised preflop from the small blind with KJo, the big stack called, and then I led out on an AA7 flop, thinking for sure with two Aces on the flop there was no reason to believe the guy actually had a third Ace in his hand. He smooth called, which concerned me a little, but I was getting more the medium pocket pair vibe than the Ace vibe. When a Queen hit the turn, I decided to test my medium pocket pair hypothesis and led out, which my opponent just called. Also not a good sign, but him just calling once again left me believing that he could be sitting on a hand like 88 or 99 or something similar. That's just what my gut was telling me. When the river King gave me second pair and paired my top card, that improved me enough that I decided to go for the gusto and put this guy to the ultimate test, representing some serious strength with a third bet after the flop in this hand, and a large one at that:



And, well, let's just say that it's never good when you try to represent the hand that your opponent actually has:



What can you do. I went with my read, my reads that had led me to this 27k payout, far and away my largest ever online score, and this time it failed me as my opponent had the amazing fortune of flopping a full house and of me improving significantly and surprisingly on the river. Sure I would love to have that hand back, but shit if we're playing the time machine game, how about I get back the hand that would have eliminated this guy when I was more than a racing favorite to get myself into extremely good position for heads-up play and a run at the 64k first prize.

Here was the final payout screen:



And the final leaderboard, or as final as I cared to stay up for:



In all, it was an amazing run, one that ended disappointingly and which was absolutely replete with bad beats as most any 11-hour tournament is, especially a donkey rebuy with nearly 3500 entrants and over 7500 rebuys and addons. Not that I'm complaining about the 27 grand. But as is always the case with these things, the sad truth is that I've spent as much time since then thinking about the 40 grand I didn't win in this thing than the 27 grand I did.

Maybe I'll have some more on this later in the week. I usually write some good stuff after big tournament runs, especially after the process of reviewing all the big hands Gus Hansen style in a recap post like this. Hope it's been enjoyable or helpful to some.