Today counts as a weekend because I say it does and because it equally went nowhere, heh. I didn't play either of the Bellagio 5K's (under the weather on Saturday, too sleepy on Monday) but did play a full Sunday schedule plus the satellite at 10 PM tonight. All of them were pretty much totally pointless, with no real deep runs to speak of except an FTP 750K bubble where someone jammed 66 for 16x BB, I overjammed tens for 17x and got called by QQ behind me/managed to somehow whiff both of my outs. I also managed to not win a single hand in the satellite today - it had a pretty lousy structure (3K chips, 40 minute levels starting from 25/50), so I played four hands in 90 minutes, lost all of them and was busto so fast that I'm actually going to get enough sleep for the 1 PM sat tomorrow.

There are three or four more sats left (I plan on playing them all, even if I win a seat in the first one; despite the structure, the play is terrible enough to be worthwhile) and the 15K ME (I may or may not play this if I don't sat in, pretty much up to my backers and how I'm feeling about it.) I'm still feeling very positive about my game/results (in fact I lost the absolute minimum on a hand today that I might have gone broke with online), and feel that I'll end the year on a good note no matter what happens at the Bellagio, but it'd certainly be nice to win a bunch more cash this week.

Vivek played a weird hand in the 5K that I'll post/comment on here after he posts it on 2+2 himself tomorrow or the day after. Usually, we agree on hands pretty quickly, but I really disagreed with him here and think it's worth discussing. I'd rather not comment on every decision/the outcome yet, because it's a multistage hand, so I'll start with PF, which may be the most important decision here, anyway:

At 800/1600/200 9 handed, Vivek's got ~23K in the BB after posting. It's folded to good2cu in the CO, who makes it 3700 with ~30K behind. He's made several of these tiny raises before, once each in EP and MP and once on the button, where he eventually showed down T8o. The button is a middle aged Indian guy who seems fairly aggro, and the SB is a tight older player; both have g2cu covered.

Good2cu is actually a very good cash game pro and one of the biggest winners at 5/10-25/50 NL online, but Vivek didn't know this at the time. Regardless, Vivek looks down to find J9o. There is 7900 in the pot and Vivek would have to call 2100 to see a flop. He could also fold, or shove 23K as a resteal.

My questions for my readers (other than "fold/call/raise", obviously):
-What do you think about g2cu's range here?
-Does knowing he is a very good cash game player alter what you want to do?

The 3K yesterday was amazing - I actually managed to go 0 VPIP for the first 90 minutes. Given I showed up a little late, it means I went into the first break able to say I was better off watching TV. I might be a nit, but c'mon, that's absurd. It didn't go anywhere after that, either - we started with 6K, and six hours later, I'd never gone under 4000 or over 6500 the entire time when I won a flip to put me at a whopping 11K at 300/600. Then I busted five hands later. In a perfect world, I think I'd have been better off dropping the buyin on one of those ice cream sundaes made out of real gold at Serendipity, but in a perfect world, they also wouldn't have shut that place down for health code violations, so it evens out. Either way, I think I yawned more times while folding yesterday than I sucked out two Sundays ago, and without even a funny Cardrunners vid to show for it.

To get over that atrocity, I didn't play today (well, that, and it's the seniors event/I'm not eligible for the AARP). Tomorrow is the 5K event; the goal is either to FT that or bust out of it in an hour and then win some random Sundayment the following day to make up for it.

Also, if I ever go the entire first hour of a donkament with a VPIP of 0 live again, I'm raising the next hand blind.

Short version: I went 1 for 6 today, but the 1 was a 7'th place in the UB 200K for 7,000. This one's bittersweet; I sucked out on the first hand of ITM (just like the FTPment) so it's another freeroll, but after surviving ~45 minutes of 11 handed play with a nice stack, finishing seventh is really annoying. The culprit was the only guy at the FT that I'd say was bad, who led into me on a JT5 board with A3 (making effective stacks a PSB at that point) and then hit a 3 outer (okay, 7 outer, turn gutshot ftw) when I decided to let him bluff. Doh...now *that* one hurts, because it's only a good play if he leads a river blank, but he didn't even have the decency to be good enough to lead the river ace. In other words, I might have played it bad vs. a bad player with lots of money on the line, which sucks. (oh yeah, and then I ran Ax with 8 BB into his jacks. lol donkaments etc.)

Still a good pair of Sundays, though, and sets me up nicely for Vegas, where I hopefully - cross my fingers re: the weather - arrive tomorrow.

In between taking a couple of days off (I always do this when I play so late it messes up my sleep schedule) I've been analyzing my play in the donkament and making several videos out of it. So far, I've got about a half hour of raw video, covering just under half the MTT, but it's by far the less juicy half so it looks like my next month Cardrunners schedule is covered early. (Gotta finish this before I head to Vegas on Monday - otherwise, I'm gonna be doing this in my friend's apartment rather than playing. Yuck!) The way I do these videos is actually fairly time-consuming, because I record every important hand and often need several takes to get the commentary right; so far it looks like it takes me about three hours to record one hour of video, not counting prepping the HH for the converter and fixing any crashes. It's definitely not something I'd do for free, but on the other hand, the after the fact play by play lets me rethink every major decision, which is a big help.

Flashback: once upon a time, I was a low to midstakes SNG player just going up to the 100's on Party with a pretty small bankroll. To make a long story short, I was cold-PM'd by Gigabet and asked to analyze the play of all his opponents in the 1K Steps that were just starting to go off at the time. I did that and prepped a couple of dozen detailed scouting reports on people playing the highest stakes games on the Internet at the time. I credit that task to getting me where I am today, transforming my game and making me take a giant leap in my thinking and abilities. CR, PXF and other training sites are a lot easier than poring over every hand that went to showdown for every player in a 10K sample, but I don't think you can beat something like that for getting into your opponents' heads. That's essentially what I'm forced to do when I make a big vid, and it's been doing a lot for my aggressiveness in MTT's since I started recording them.

One question on the topic I've gotten is "aren't you afraid that people will see your play and adapt?" Meh, not really. Most of my game is typical generic TAG, which can't really be exploited well short of 3 betting me light in certain spots, and most people don't pick those spots well so it doesn't even matter. Further, I can and do easily adapt to regulars, and I also have a couple of tricks I keep back even from the vids. It's just way harder to exploit a thinking TAG than a LAG in the same situations, since you can 3 bet LAG's light without being nearly as scared that they've got the nuts. (That isn't to say that good LAG play isn't better. I actually think it is, but it's so hard to do that only a handful of people can pull it off without crashing and burning somewhere.)

---

The good news about that win is that, coming when it does, it basically seals up another really good year on top of the last one. I've been extremely lucky in that I'm making as much as I would have in my former career path, while playing maybe 1/4 as much as I'd be working. Of the dozen or so people from law school and three good friends I keep in touch with two years later, only two are still on their first jobs, and three or four have already left the law (both are totally standard but still really icky given the amount of loans everyone's got). I'm by far the best story out of all those guys not gunning for partner, and while I have no idea how I got here, I'm definitely enjoying it.

With that win sealing the deal and living in Vegas in the summer taking that idea off the table (how many roaches can you seriously have in one backyard? Damn), I'm officially looking for a condo with my wife. It looks like places I'd like to live in in NYC are about 300-500K depending on the number of rooms and the location; the former's not a problem, but for the latter I'd have to win another donkament somewhere to be totally secure. I plan to solve this by getting there a bunch more times. I can't stress this enough: to be a true tournament professional (that's "donkamenteur" in French), it's very important that you suck out as often as humanly possible.

In conclusion and/or summarizing this entire entry:

1)I'll write some more from Vegas
2)lol donkaments

Step 1: suck out hardcore ~5 times
Step 2: play pretty well
Step 3: set up, then lose a big flip for 2/3 the chips in play 3 handed
Step 4: massively profit anyway and feel pretty good about it

trip report here/CR vid coming eventually.