In my last blog, somebody asked me what tricks I've learned over the last couple of months. I wasn't going to talk about it much - there are some things you just don't talk about when you play with the same people regularly - but there was a thread in the 2+2 HSMTT forum that got mostly deleted which is a pretty safe thing to turn into a blog entry. (If you read that forum, it was the 'QT on a Q high flop vs. an old nit' thread - it was 45+ posts and now it's mysteriously 28. No clue why it got pruned, and it's a shame, because a lot of those posts were interesting.]

At any rate, here's the hand:

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400-800 (100)

cutoff : hero (T70,000) Been at the table for 1 hour and established tight aggressive image

SB : (T50,000) Standard older nit, although he seemed to be opening up, may have just been a rush

BB: JC Tran (T150,000)

Folds to hero in cutoff, raises Qc10s to 2200, SB and Tran both come along for the ride.

Flop Q64 SB leads 2000, Tran instamucks

Hero???

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Most of the better MTT pros took the 'call the flop, raise the (2x) turn when he only bets 2500' line. [Hero raised to 8K - a small raise, but one that works decently live. I'd raise to 12K but that's quibbling.] This is something that has *definitely* changed in my game since Vegas - the ability to turn top pair into a bluff. A lot of players...actually, probably almost every MTT pro...just don't ever bluff with hands that have showdown value, but when playing live - especially in big tournaments with lots of people just happy to be there - I think not doing that is a major mistake. When he bets the turn, his most likely hand is a better queen, and the fact that we actually have a queen is irrelevant; we might even be better off with 65, because if we're behind that hand has more outs (and it's very very rare that he has exactly JJ-99 etc.) So, since we don't want to call down this bet and a river bet for no apparent reason only to lose, we may as well convert our hand into a bluff; if he calls, fine, it's the WSOP, and we can always follow up with a huge river bluff (on any river - here, it came the J, and my advice was for hero to shove for just over a PSB when checked to).

Bakes and 0evg0 then said that a good hand reader would see through that, mostly because of the size of the turn raise. I know 0evg0 is under 21, and I'm pretty sure Bakes is too, so that part of their replies is influenced by them not playing live enough - it doesn't matter what you raise to, old nits will fold regardless. But the more important part of that reply is that they both, especially 0evg0, said stuff like 'you're bad if you raise to 8K with only a flush draw on the turn'. The other half of what I learned in Vegas: that's 100% not true. Internet players correctly interpret tiny bets by live nits as weakness, but we then make the mistake of thinking our opponents play the same way as ourselves, and we wind up making big raises when smaller ones would still be fine. The real reason to raise to 12K, rather than 8K, is that the follow through bluff shove on the river doesn't look so big that a nit might 'correctly misinterpret it' as a bluff (never mind that I'd value shove all my real hands there too.) But if we're raising to 8K as a means of pot control - say, if we're not sure about whether to bluff shove any river, or maybe we think we might have the best hand and it's more of a 'range merging value semibluff' - we can easily do that with a flush draw, a Q, complete air, etc. and it'll have almost the same effect (re: our fold equity on the turn) as a 12K raise. We could even do this with top set, as long as our plan is to make the river bet smaller and milk whatever hand he thinks might be good. In other words, the fact that the raise is small, should, in theory, mean very little re: our hand range, and that we can very easily have a flush draw here.

Okay, so what does all this actually mean? Basically, when playing at Turning Stone next month, I'm going to make all of my turn and river raises smaller relative to the pot (keeping in mind the pot size relative to my stack size) and see what happens. I have a hunch the results will be good.

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Took another 11th place (barf) in the 215 HORSE event I played last night. Not much success this week otherwise, but then again, I played very little due to a lot of writing I had to complete. As a consequence, I'm done with the magazine articles I talked about a while ago; they should come out this fall and I'll reprint them here. I probably like writing about poker more than playing it :)

Before I start, yet another "congrats", this time to my friend Leo (Pechorin/Superfluous Man on this site), who FT'd both the $1050 and the $162 MTT's on Pokerstars last night - winning the latter - for a combined 50K. Great job, man. I think the combined total of the two houses I stayed in in Vegas last month is now over a million since then...

Anyway, I finally got around to reviewing the notes I made back during the two WSOP events I didn't recap. The 1500 summary follows:

I almost didn't play the event, because, thanks to sleeping late the night before, everyone in the house showed up just before it started and wound up having to register as alternates for a 3,000+ person field. What that meant was we wound up getting to play almost exactly 2 hours in - meaning we started with 3,000 chips and 100/200 blinds, ie, with almost no room to play. At my table, which was, of course, composed entirely of alternates, 4 people busted in the first 3 hands as everyone tried to get a playable stack ASAP. Most of them were pretty bad, but it didn't matter; at that blind level with that type of shallow stack poker involved, you just have to play your cards and I didn't get many to play until 2 hours later.

I'd somehow gotten to just under 5K (I think by restealing once or twice) when I got my first break during the 150/300/25 level. Someone limped in EP and I made it 1500 in EMP with tens, intending to basically take down the pot or to get it heads up with the limper. Instead, the button, whom I already tagged as a calling station, called the raise for an effective 1/3 of our stacks. The original limper folded, and we went heads up to the flop, which came a very nice J87. With a pot sized bet or so in my stack, I, of course, simply pushed and was called by a hand which had me crushed - 77 (wow). I hit a 9 on the river to double up and waited out the button's muttering to himself about the terrible beat he'd taken. Shortly thereafter, I won another coinflip with AKs against 33 and suddenly had a 16K stack, 50 BB worth and a real threat. (At that point, of the ~8 people I came to the Rio with and played with as an alternate, only Shaun Deeb was still not busto, and only one other person that started at my alternate table was still there. Incidentally, one of the bustoed alternates was Rainkhan, somebody you'll be seeing a lot of in the WSOP broadcast - we wound up swapping 5% of each other and I had to ship him a couple of hundred bucks after this tourney ended. I have great timing with my swaps.)

At that point, I lost a few all ins to shortstacks who had slightly better hands, dropped down to 12K or so and stayed in the 10-15K range for the next ~3 hours. Hovering in the 10-20 BB area, once again, I mostly just played my cards and occasionally looked for spots to resteal. One of my key targets here was an Asian guy one to my right who was very aggressive from LP and in the blinds - he'd raise almost every time it was folded to him, and as it happens, just as I'd be getting short once again, I'd wake up with some sort of marginal hand like 88 or Axs that was still way ahead of his range, I'd shove and he'd make an annoyed fold like clockwork. This kept me in business until I pushed J9 in the cutoff with something like 10K/12 BB at 400/800/100 (meaning an M of 5), the big blind with 8x woke up with AT and I turned 2 pair to put me up to 18K or so, a workable stack to actually play postflop but at the cost of ruining my image.

Almost immediately afterwards, the Asian guy raised again, this time from UTG+2 or so, and I looked down at black tens in MP2. With my image being what it was now, a reraise wouldn't really get him or anyone else to fold anything, and I felt like he had to have a much tighter range from EP than LP, so I decided to just call. Everyone else folded and we saw a 9 6 5 flop ("gin"), he bet ~5K into a 6K pot, I shoved 10K more, and after tanking a bit, he finally made the call with black eights - a sick spot for him and not one he could really get away from. I held up and wound up with a nearly 40K stack at 400/800, probably in the top 10% of the tournament.

Right after that, I blew off 10K on a weird hand that only happens live. I raised 55 in MP and the guy right behind me immediately shoved his stack, giving me (IIRC) 1.7 to 1 or so. As I was thinking, I looked to my left and noticed he looked increasingly uncomfortable, so eventually, I wound up calling. He *was* uncomfortable - he 'only' had jacks, put me on a small pair based on the amount of time I was taking, but, in his own words, didn't want me to call. Chalk this one up to good reads gone hilariously bad. At any rate, I went into the 800/1200 level, just prior to the bubble, with around 35K - somewhere around the table chiplead, with the rest of the table hovering in the 15K to 30K area.

The table had been tight, but reasonable up until that point. On the bubble, though, everyone simply froze up. This wasn't just a regular old WSOP table with a few good players and some mediocre ones - it was a crowd of people playing the smallest buyin event on a weekend, and it showed in their play. So, of course, I promptly FPS'd all my chips:

After already making a couple of raises that orbit, I raised 8 7 UTG+1 to 3600. It folded down to the BB, a kid in his early 20's, who'd replaced the Asian guy and seemed fairly aggressive since then. Even before it folded to him, I had the sense that, if he would try something, the stacks were right (I couldn't tell his *exact* stack, but felt he had about 30K) to make a big 4 bet. True enough, it folded to him, he paused, and as I stared at the felt, I eventually heard the dealer announce "reraise". He'd made it 9500. Well, okay then...I asked for a chip count, and as it turned out, he had about 15K behind. "Not what I thought, but wow, this is the exact spot I was thinking about. All right, if he ever does this with air, or even 'merely' AQ, he's snap folding, and he isn't going to make a heroic call with tens all that often. All in". I shoved, and to my credit, my read was right again - he took about 20 seconds before reluctantly calling with...AK. Whoooops.

Did you know 87s is only a 58/42 dog to AK, though? Board: J62...5...........4. For the first time at the WSOP, I ran good. [A month after the fact, I think it's a bad play, of course...just not as bad as I originally thought it was a few hours after I'd made it. Yes, it was ugly - he needed to be far deeper for me to pull this off, and him reraising a UTG+1 raiser OOP wasn't exactly the bold aggressive LAGgy "move" I was waiting for. But at least I made it with some decent reasoning behind it.]

After that, having had him covered, my 65K stack was good enough to bully the table around. It broke shortly thereafter, literally during hand for hand (10 from the money), but by the time H4H was over less than an orbit later, I'd already moved up over 80K. At that point, as usual, the room went nuts and 30-40 shortstacks busted within the next 20 minutes. The final interesting hand I played on day 1 came when someone from my old table - who'd seen all of these hands I've typed out - moved into the newly vacant spot 2 to my left, I raised KQs in the CO to 6K at 1/2K and he shoved about 25K total from the BB. Online, this is a snap call, but live, this is usually a close decision - except he'd seen me play and could have been shoving light. Eventually, I decided my hand was slightly too good to fold, called and held up against his.....74o. That got me over 100K, the high point of the tourney and good for a pretty nice picture of me with a pyramid of chips on pokernews somewhere.

I think I lost one more pot after that and ended the day at 93K at 1/2K, good for 20'th/218. Unfortunately, as the entry from back then says, I only won 2 more pots during all of day 2 and finished 83'rd or so. Ah, poker, how I love thee.

Up next: the 1K rebuy recap, and a couple of new articles I'm working on.

Another day, another FT - this time, 4'th/231 in the UB 129 bounty-ment for $2,000. I ran and played pretty well up until the final table, where 66 < 32s and KK < KQ AIPF. To be honest, I wasn't even very surprised, heh. I got back to the chiplead 4 handed, but couldn't seal it when I raised with JJ, KJs called and flopped a flush. That's poker; at some point, the final tables will break my way, too.

I'm probably not going to play tomorrow after a string of late nights, so let me see if I can catch up with this blog then...

Fortunately, it keeps on not happening because instead of having time to write a long entry, I keep making deep runs. Tonight was a nice monkey off my back - 3'rd/272 in the 109 6 max rebuy on FTP for just over $10K, as well as 2 other small cashes, making it a nice 3 for 4 day.

I didn't play my A+ game this time just because I was rarely in a marginal situation all night - either I had the hand and timing to win a big pot, or I didn't. But overall, I'm really encouraged by my post-Vegas results; it's just been deep run after deep run, and with a few exceptions (one pretty big one tonight 4 handed - oh well) I feel like my reads have been excellent, too. It's nice to be on fire while playing good poker.

I'll update this thing one, two, or seven times whenever I'm actually done playing by midnight :)

Looks like I've got 3 recaps to write instead of 2. I set tonight aside to finally get to work on the blog after I busted out of the Sundays, but managed to get to 31'st in the Million before busto, instead. Unfortunately, when I got there, KK < A4 for half my stack and AQ < JJ (on a KQxJx board...) for the rest. Three thousand dollars and change just isn't very sweet when I can taste a second Stars FT.

I'm *definitely* proud of the way I'm playing, though - tonight, I was only all in while behind once in eight hours and my bag of tricks got a lot bigger after Vegas. That also makes the second FT I've made this week (the other was a small rebuy event where I lost a couple of big flips to bust early, as well, but it's a start.)

There's a lot to be said for poker boot camps.

Update: of course, my friend Adam won the tournament for 200K. If somebody other than me had to do it, I'm glad it was him - he's been trying to break through in a major for a while now. Congratulations and I'll see you at Turning Stone :)