On second thought, I can't really sleep yet (soon, though!), so briefly, good hands from today:

-Re: Vivek: He calls PF. I think this is okay against a decent or worse player, but a mistake against g2cu (in fairness, he didn't know how good good2cu was - this is just a hypo we talked about later.) Even at 4:1, the reverse implied odds here are a real problem, because with middle cards, g2cu will probably play pretty optimally on the flop against your range - that is, if he's got air or totally whiffed the flop, as a good player, he will evaluate flop texture and check behind/fold more when middle cards hit, which is exactly what you have right now. Conversely, when he gets it in against you, you'll probably be in much worse shape than you want to be in even when you hit a pair.

I personally felt that g2cu was opening well more than what Vivek'd need to just automatically make a shove profitable, but V disagreed. Barring that, I'd just fold. At any rate, Vivek called instead and the flop came down AJ7r; he check/called 4K into a just under ~10K pot.

Turn 2, putting two spades up. Vivek checks (a little under 12K effective stacks, 18K pot), g2cu bets 6K. Action? (I think this is totally obvious now, BTW...)

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-Hands I actually played today that didn't involve sucking:

1)I've lost pretty much every pot I played w/o showdown and have ~23K when I raise 2 limpers at 50/100 with black AK to 500. They both call. Flop J55, 2 hearts; they check, I bet 1K (this is a good board to cbet 3 handed IMO), one folds, one calls. Turn 9, he checks, I think about live tells and his range and decide he's folding a lot if I bet, make it 2500, he thinks and mucks. Yay!

2)It's 200/400/50 and I have a bit over 30K when I make it 1200 with red nines UTG. BKIce CC's it UTG+2 (at this point, we both know we've played with each other before but aren't sure who it is), and we're HU to a 554 flop. I bet 1600 (my standard half pot cbet here) and BK quickly calls. At this point, I'm 80% sure he's got exactly JJ-TT with the balance being high clubs.

Turn 8. I'm normally done here, except, playing nitty as usual, I've got the perfect image to turn my hand into a bluff and make him fold jacks. I second barrel 3500, he tanks a full two minutes and mucks. For the record, his fold is probably good because I do take this line with red aces fairly often and always take it with the nut flush so my frequency of bluffing is pretty uncommon, but it happened to be a perfect time to bluff with an overpair.

3)I'm nitting it up for a while until opening 85 in the cutoff later at 2/4. Micon, who's been doing some truly mindboggling stuff (we're talking open limping on the button, cbetting the flop *and then minbetting the turn*, the most transparent squeezes ever, etc. etc. etc.) snap calls on the button. Flop 7 5 5 ("gin"), I bet 1600, he starts counting out chips before making it...umm, 5K-ish? with 40K behind, and my brief thought process, consisting of "if he checks behind on the turn after I call I really will kill myself, so how do I get him to stick in lots of chips with an overpair?", leads me to, like, min3bet to 12K (lol). He does ship in the rest with A T, which somehow doesn't get there so I have 63K.

4)With 30K or so behind, BKIce opens two cards (that's basically my range for him tbqh) to 1600 at 300/600/75 UTG+1 and gets three callers. I'm in the big blind, look down, see J 7 and literally shrug as I toss an extra 1K in getting a billion to one.

Flop J 7 2. I run good. Anyway, SB checks, I check, BK thinks and bets 4200 into whatever giant amount the pot is, fold/fold to me..."hmm, if I CR here, this looks way strong, and besides, he probably has queens anyway. I'll just wait until a non-deuce comes off on the turn and then bet into him so he can ship it". Okay, I call...turn T. Well, that basically does wonders for my action or lack thereof, but fine, I'll lead 10K anyway and hopefully he shoves aces. Nope, he tanks for a couple of minutes and then apparently folds some kind of jack. Oops.

and with that, I'm off to bed. blogging is hard.

Okay, where do I start with today?

Umm...let's start with yesterday, instead. I lasted 90 minutes in yesterday's sat (thus, 0 for 3 on seeing the 200/400 level) but Vivek and I bought in to the 15K directly anyway, incidentally leaving us cash busto. That means we go home and go to sleep early, right?

...yeah, obviously, I don't fall asleep till 4:30 AM. But that's okay, because my alarm is set for 10:30 and that's six whole hours, right?

...yeah, the groundskeeper team decided to mow the lawn or something at around 8 AM with an extremely loud something or other, right outside our windows.

Of course, we both get to the Bellagio completely fried but still forced to play five 90 minute levels of deepstacked donkament poker with no dinner break...

...so of course I have 84K (45K average @ 300/600) and Vivek has 60K, after, at least in my case, misplaying almost every critical hand. The highlights:

1)I have 88 in a 5 way limped pot (30K stacks, 50/100 blinds). Flop 842r. BB leads 300 into 500, I make it 800, noted poker authority Micon coldcalls on the button, BB folds. At this point, I have his range narrowed to exactly 3 hands - 44, 22, and 53. You may notice there is a fourth hand I'm not mentioning - I did too, except I couldn't figure out what it was. Seriously, I knew there was a double gutshot here, but couldn't place it. I'm pretty sure this is what Alzheimer's feels like, complete with general "WTF?" feeling!

Turn 5. I check because I think this card hit him but can't figure out what the hand I am thinking of is other than randomly trying to rule out 76 or A3. He bets 2K, I call. Seriously, I have a brainfreeze like you can't believe at this point and do not CR solely because I can't figure out what the hand is. looooooooool.

River 7 (obv). I quickly bet 3K as a blocker, he makes it 10K, I finally remember the hand I'm missing ("oh yeah, 65 got there just now, didn't it") and fold. /kill self.

2)Where do I even begin here? This may be the weirdest/dumbest hand of all time...

Flashback one hand earlier: It's 300/600, and BKIce, who's decent, makes it 2K UTG. The button, who's played okay to this point, makes it 6200 with about a 25K stack. SB, the guy to my right, now tanks and eventually makes it exactly 11,200 (lol). Obviously, button calls his K9 sooted (loool) and they wind up all in when he flops a flush draw but SB's AA somehow holds up. Okay, no big deal.

At the end of this hand, though, it turns out that the tournament has to pause - we've played as many hands as the other guys did on Day 1A, so there's a five minute break while they figure out how many more hands we need to be equal to the other guys so everything's fair. It turns out the answer is five, so once the donkament resumes we've got exactly five hands to play before bagging up. In the meantime, while this is going on, the table spends the entire five minutes talking about how obvious the minimum 4 bet was, etc.

The very next hand, MP, an Asian guy with a 60K stack, makes it 2K to go. Button, the SB from the previous hand who now also has 60K behind, thinks and makes it 5200. While he's doing that, I check my hand in the small blind...

...and I have aces, with a 75K stack, out of position to the second consecutive 3 bet, with the Asian guy closing the action if I just call. So I have to 4 bet. To what? I don't know, but I'm working on 4 hours of sleep and 8 hours since breakfast, 15 minutes to dinner and no clue how to play this that doesn't involve tablewide ridicule.

So, umm, I take 20 seconds and then just shove hoping they put me on AK. Yeah, I dunno, my brain froze a second time. Amazingly, if either of them calls with kings, the shove isn't even that horrible!

There are a bunch of other hands, most of which I didn't even play bad, but I'm way too fried to post them now. I'll talk about them along with Vivek's hand next entry.

in conclusion, apparently, I get there and/or donkament better when I'm sleep deprived.

(and now, let us never mention the aces incident again)

I'll have more about Vivek's hand in my next entry since he still hasn't posted it online yet. In the meantime, here's a brag post about the satellite tonight:

When we're standing in line to buy into the sat, an early middle aged guy ("MAG") behind us standing in line with his girlfriend/wife asks if we have some spare casino chips he can buy (because the registration cage only takes chips and not bills for some reason). We sell him a couple of hundred; he pays us from a giant wad of bills he's taken out of his pocket. This guy is plainly a regular, maybe a semipro or pro, and at least decent at poker, but he's over 30 and his SO is here, which means he's not nearly as LAGgy early on as some random 18 year old in the same spot. Anyway, thanks to a dumb Bellagio rule of seating all the people in line in order, all three of us get seated at the same table.

About one orbit into this (3K chips, 25/50 blinds), some guy to opens to 150 in MP; he's called by the old nitty guy on the button (nitty here means that he's got a pair or two big cards.) I look down in the BB, see black queens and am thinking of what to reraise to when I see MAG counting out chips in the SB. He eventually makes it 525.

I think 20 seconds, the first 5 of which involve actual thought and the next 15 are spent basically talking myself into this. Then I fold QQ, 60xBB deep, without putting a chip into the pot.

Some action happens between MAG and the original raiser and MAG eventually shows black aces. I rule.

Oh yeah, then I didn't get a hand to play for an hour and pushbotted into queens and lost, but the point is that I read souls. Wheeeeee.

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.