Most of this week's been pretty uneventful, with the exception of me blowing lots of chips in the WCOOP 5cd event (not that anyone knows how to play 5cd, so it hardly counts) and losing a couple of really big 2:1's in the 6 max. Today was a weird day - I went 0 for 4 in the main tourneys with 4 early busts, didn't really feel like playing anything else, then entered FTP's 215 HORSE on a whim and wound up second for 4K. I even had a 3:1 CL HU in Stud 8 and went into the hold'em round with a 180/130 edge, but then went 0 for 13 hands in hold'em. Having said that, the structure late in that thing is terrible and it had been a crapshoot the whole way - as an example, I went from a CL with 11 left to 2 BB with 9 left - so I don't particularly mind the finish; when you're playing 8/16K with 130K effective stacks, there's no real skill involved, just flopping pairs.

More importantly, I'm unhappy about the fiasco on Absolute (check BBV if you're unsure of what I mean.) This will probably not affect the industry as a whole - it's not going to be mainstream news, poker's survived much worse, Annette (read: an 18 year old girl) winning a couple of mil will deflect attention anyway - but the fact is that the sites depend on a lot of implied goodwill to do business, and as of today, that's gone. As of right now, it's been almost a full two days and AP has done absolutely nothing about a business-threatening situation, while the affected parties are busy chip dumping in a mind-numbingly stupid attempt to take the heat off themselves. That's completely unacceptable to those of us who make a living trusting these places with five or even six figure bankrolls.

After this is over, and AP has taken whatever half-assed action they wind up taking (keep in mind that some people might be 50K in the hole here - that's worse than Pokerspot - and there's no way AP will pay them back, because they're Absolute [censored] Poker), I'm going to pull a few strings and ask for reassurances behind the scenes of the industry. This must not ever be allowed to happen again.

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Woke up this morning - looks like JCarver's up another 200K from a nice FTP donkament. GG :)

Also got a bunch of videos out of it, but still trying to figure out how the software works. I might have something up later.

Anyway...77'th/3499 on FTP, ending with 44 < AcTc on a 9c5x4c board for a top 10 stack, and 59'th/1100-something in the Cake 100K when I lost a flip for 20BB to yellowsub. This later one wouldn't be a big deal if it didn't come within 30 seconds of the first one. Barf. It's probably a good thing that that particular segment of the video didn't record for some reason/I'm getting tired of super deep runs in big tournaments ending up with 5-15 buyins when I lose as a big favorite. Really.

On the bright side, while skipping tournaments for most of the rest of this week, I've discovered that I'm almost definitely a winner at FTP's higher stakes razz games after all. It's good to know that NL can end tomorrow and I'd still make marginal amounts of money off Internet video game equivalents.

BTW, to follow Bond's lead: who wants some non-poker content in this thing? I've been keeping it 100% poker so far and have no problem doing that, but either way, I'll leave it up to the comment section.

There's no particular overriding theme to these hands, but I think they're worth posting and make for a good read...

This is a story of 3 hands from the 1K sat I managed to bubble the other week (heh). After a $10 dealer addon, we started at 11K chips and 25/50 blinds. Other than me in Seat 4, my first table had a couple of solid 2+2'ers, but otherwise seemed pretty loose passive, with the exception of Seat 6. Seat 6, a late 20-something guy with an Ipod who looked confident, was playing at least half of his hands - open limping and overlimping everything, then firing at a lot of flops. Unlike most people that play like that, though, he clearly took flop texture into account; he'd never fire, say, an Axx board, but he wasn't afraid of 2 barreling when the flop and turn were low. As a result, he picked up a truckload of small and medium pots without a showdown or even a river and had around 13K at the end of the 30 minute first level.

I really wanted some of those chips, but with him to my left, this was going to be tricky. I resolved to play loose preflop, knowing that I'd be folding a lot but would get some of his c-bets in the pot when I hit - especially with my no doubt weak image. I got to see a couple of flops, missed them and folded (there's no reason to play a hand with guys like that without hitting *something*), so the first important pot came during 50/100:

Seat 6 limped UTG, three more people limped and I completed 87o/the BB checked. The flop came Q76r, we checked to him and he bet ~350 into 600. Everyone folded to me. Ordinarily, I'd obviously just fold, but here, I called, planning on check/calling the turn and river unimproved - a risky play but one I felt I could afford to try this deep with what was quite possibly the best hand. A very nice 8 hit the turn, I checked, he fired about 800, I thought before raising to 2200 and he turbofolded, for the first decent pot he'd lost all day.

[Sidebar: The reason I CR'd here was, of course, value in case he actually had a queen/to protect my hand in case he randomly turned any one of a number of draws I'd have to pay him off on. This was not, however, the way to get the most chips in the pot - if a 7 came off I'd likely check/call and possibly even check some rivers. I might also do this if I had Q7 on a Q762 board. In those cases, where his marginal hands would be drawing dead and I wouldn't be so vulnerable to most of the deck, I'd usually want to let him see a scare card like an ace on the river and decide to fire again.]

After that hand, the guy clearly geared down for a while and the rest of 50/100 passed without much incident from our side of the table, but he'd taken a couple of more pots off loose players at 75/150 and was probably around his original 11K when Hand 2 came up:

I caught jacks in EMP and raised. Seat 6 called (I got the feeling he wanted to play a pot vs. me) and we saw a KT8, 2 spade flop HU. I bet ~700 into 1225 and he predictably called. [Sidebar: the reason I bet here is to control the bet size - no reason to check/call 1K - and because I could probably fold to a raise. If I felt I couldn't, this would likely be a check/call.] The turn was a brick club - making two clubs - and went check/check.

The river: a red jack. Ordinarily, we'd just bet and hope to be called by a ten, a bad king, etc.; even if he were to bluff a missed draw a lot, we'd likely get paid more on average if we set our own bet size, since he'd never call a checkraise. But here, when we just checkraised the villain once already, the CR is a perfect play; most live players would never be able to resist a call with any showdownable hand the second time around. So I checked, he bet 1100, I made it 2600, he called and mucked.

Hand 3 came at the end of that level. A 2+2'er raised in MP (not needing too much), someone called in LP, I overcalled KJ on the button, and Seat 6 made it four handed to a K97 flop. It was checked to me, and I bet 1200 into ~1700, mostly just wanting to take it down. Since this is called '3 hands against the same opponent', Seat 6 naturally shoved for about 7K.

I thought it over for a full two minutes. Basically, against any other player at the table, this would be an autofold - except for three straight draws, it was a dry flop, 97 was a distinct possibility, and he would certainly shove with a set. Could he be tilted enough, or mad at specifically me, to do this with a worse king? Possibly, but what worse king? On the other hand, I couldn't see him with AK, and thought he probably wouldn't be here with K7s. Overall, I felt that I was right around 40% - maybe a shade less - against his range and getting just about the right odds. Eventually, after taking longer than anyone at the table to that point, I made the call against what, luckily, turned out to be KT. Oddly enough, I'm still not sure that a call was the right play - it turned out that he *could* have a worse king, and, of course, I had to take his potential tiltiness vs. me into account, but if I'm right and sets/97 need to be weighed more heavily in his range, I might have lost a few G-bucks here.

C'est la vie.

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A quick announcement: As of today, I'm officially the newest guest pro at Cardrunners.com, where I'll be doing videos and the occasional full tournament HH summary/review (like the ones I used to do at 2+2 a long time ago.) The good news is, while CR is a paid content site, I'll no doubt have a bunch of outtakes and the like left over, some of which I'll definitely be posting here. Expect to see an "Adanthar busts out half an hour into a bunch of tourneys" video or two around mid-September.

In four years of playing poker, I've never managed to outright bubble a big satellite until today. 35'th/169 with 34 paid - they tried their best to bust before I did, but just never quite got there. I think there are a couple of spots where I missed open shoves, but in the end it was more of a case of too many short stacks winning coupled with too much outright stalling eating what used to be a very safe stack with 45 left. Ugggggh. Since I consider sats my best game, there's just no excuse for this, and I'm really surprised at how annoyed I am about losing some fraction of 5K in equity (yes, it's a big 1K satellite to a 5K event, but MTT's are like that - I was playing 4 handed for a 48,000 first place prize only a few days ago and didn't even feel disappointed when I finally lost.)

On top of that, my roommate is in the hospital with a very screwed up finger, so since I never had any plans to play the main event here if I didn't satellite into it in the first place, this is making me want to leave TS and go down early for the weekend. I'll figure that out tomorrow morning.

Some fraction of my life tilt is doubtless contributed by the hand before the bustout: I'm in the (4/8K) BB with a 12K total stack *before* posting when MP, the second shortest stack at the table, decides to shove ~20K (gape.) SB calls blind *expecting me to be committed and overcall* - of course, I instafold.

MP's hand: KK. SB's blind call? K5 suited. Despite that clear riggedness, he even managed to hit a 5 on the turn! Like I said, life tilt.

In conclusion, I'm managing to be remarkably whiny about winning some number > 10K on this trip. Hmm.
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Today's 1K non-satellite final table featured mlagoo (2nd, 36K) and kalensc (third, 22K - he's the same guy who won the first event) along with a couple of other guys I know. In other words, my clique pretty much destroyed Turning Stone (and the Internet MTT's held during that time) after pretty much destroying the Internet during Vegas, too. Even when you bubble sats, I guess poker is easy.

After the < 2 hour run at TS, I put in a full tournament schedule tonight but quickly busted out of everything except the FTOPS LO8 event I entered on a whim...where, 9 hours later, I just finished fourth for $17,700. I mostly did this by running ridiculously hot with my starting hands and having very few actual decisions anywhere. "lol, donkaments" indeed.

I'll recap this later, as much as I'm capable of analyzing a limit Omaha/8 event (not much at all.)