Well, mostly. I had time to chop another satellite in between sweating Nath and a couple of other people. The 525's are getting a bit harder as the WSOP gets going, but they're still incredible by online standards.

Today's feature hand: With one limper at 25/25 (2K starting stacks), a pretty aggro Indian guy who already busted someone with KK > QQ on the first hand overlimps and 4 people see an A95 flop. It gets checked through. The turn is a 7 (2 hearts), the BB - a middle aged white guy who basically screams 'tourist' and is not in the last longer (meaning that he's probably terrible) - leads 100 [pot] into the field. The first limper folds, but the Asian guy quickly makes it 300. In a sequence of events that probably doesn't even make any sense to himself, the BB now makes it 800 while yelling "Come on, hearts!" Asian guy, of course, instashoves with the obvious nuts, the BB laughs and says "I lied about the hearts", instacalls the rest of his stack with A5o and the entire table silently cracks up when his eyes practically bug out of his head upon seeing the straight. Have I mentioned that I love live poker?

Moving on...whenever I'm not playing, I've been talking poker with any number of people. Because practically everyone I know from the Internet is here and walking around the Rio like it's some sort of giant anime convention, I can't really walk more than 50 feet without someone saying 'hi' and telling me about a hand or six they've played. This place has turned into a poker bootcamp and I love every minute of it/I can practically feel my game improving leaps and bounds overnight. The funny thing is that the live game is so different that a lot of the lines I'm thinking about at any given point would simply never occur to me online and I even know ahead of time that nobody who isn't here will get them. I'm really beginning to understand why the live pros and the online guys don't mix.

I might not be playing tomorrow (too much stuff to do and no NL event) so I leave you with yet another fantastic developing Brandi Hawbaker thread.

edit: Almost forgot - in a highly surreal moment, the first thing I saw today when I walked in the tournament room was, of course, the razz final table with Eskimo Clark's giant stack in prominent view. Eskimo proceeded to blow a huge 5 handed chiplead and finished fourth, but managed to walk off to the dinner break and back under his own power. I guess he can claim the almost as impressive title of "first person to go from heart attack to winning donkamenteur in 48 hours"?

It sucks when you do, though. 0 for 3 in big pots with a medium stack/winning one pot overall will do that. I didn't play particularly well, but there's probably nothing I could've done anyway. C'est la vie - next year.

Today's sample hand: David Oppenheimer limps with a 7 up, a LAGgy guy to my right overlimps a 9, and I raise 5[32]. They both call. I peel with 5K on fourth vs. their 96 and 7Q (which David overcalls), then obviously fold the [32]5K3 on fifth (lol). Meanwhile, the 967x bets into David's 7Q2x (I might have the upcards slightly wrong but this was the general idea) on every street including betting the river in the dark, David makes a reluctant call with something like a rough 8, and it's good - not because DO made a great read or was right to peel anywhere, but because the 9 managed to misread his hole cards and actually paired twice, confidently betting his worse hand all the way down.

So it went - like I said, I didn't play particularly well, either, but it's pretty hard to top a bustout hand where, after we were all in on fourth, DO had 2 paired by fifth but finished with a 6 low vs. my...jack. Back to running bad.

This all takes second place to Eskimo Clark, though. A few days back, Eskimo had a heart attack during the stud event and was evacuated to a hospital. He was back playing in the razz event today when, apparently, he went into convulsions and lost feeling on his right side. The paramedics were called and tried to get him out, but he refused their help, telling them that he wanted to die playing or something ridiculous like that, and was still in the tournament when I left the room.

I don't even know what to say about this - somebody like Eskimo is so far out there that I have no idea how to relate to him. There were and still are lots of famous old time gamblers in these stud/razz events, and some of them clearly enjoy the games as much as anything else they've got left; more power to them. But Eskimo is basically mailing in what's left of his life to spend the last few hours of it playing a razzament. I obviously feel a lot of pity for this guy, but supposedly, he has family. Where are they? How about Harrah's, which already set themselves up for a lawsuit over his first heart attack (brought on by him playing in the tent outside) and have now decided to let him keep playing? Ugh.

Yeah, I guess the silver lining in this whole razz affair comes down to this: at least I'm not the guy that will inevitably bust Eskimo Clark out of his last tournament.

I've got 7100 chips with ~134 people left, right around the average. I was completely controlling my first table for a while before going card dead, slipping down to life support, then going on a late rush/losing a big pot right at the end.

NO ONE knows how to play razz. At my first table, I had Ted Forrest to my right and Humberto Brenes opposite me. TF was a gigantic calling station and played like he had somewhere to go, spewing off chips left and right until he busted (on a hand where my 652 bricked off in spectacular fashion and I had to fold fifth in a huge pot. Damn*.) Humberto played more or less TAG, until he tilted off his last 1500 chips calling with [A2]3JJ vs. a 689 up. Of course, he got there, so he parlayed that 1500 into about 10K when the table finally broke a half hour before the day ended. Meanwhile, out of the two dozen or so people I played with, *4* knew that you have to dump a good starting hand in an unraised pot when you brick fourth - one actually managed to argue with a pro about it, just before luckboxing the pro out of a huge pot when, you guessed it, he took a card off with something like a 7J showing against something like a 38. Good times. If I hadn't hit a K (and folded!) every time I raised on third for two hours, I'd have destroyed that table.

At my new table, I busted Mark Karan, but lost that aforementioned big pot when David Oppenheimer rivered a wheel vs. a hand I had to pay off with. I also had a couple of mental lapses that probably cost me about 1K. Otherwise, though, I'm happy with my play and think I have a decent chance at this - running good is a prerequisite, of course, since that stack gives me about two hands' worth of action, but then again, that's razz.

Lots of big names still in but most of them do suck at razz - looking forward to 3 PM tomorrow.

*This is a hand I actually played bad: An ace, two threes and a four are dead, some guy raises with something and TF reraises. I have [52]6. I three bet to isolate here, and had the best hand when I did, but I should really just fold preflop because my hand is so thoroughly dead. That's what happens when you go card dead for two hours...fortunately, it didn't cost me much. Still, a better razz player would probably have about 1500 more chips than I do. Oh well - like I said, everyone else is worse.

Well, when it comes to sats, anyway. I didn't get anywhere in either of the last two big tournaments - once due to a bad bluff on my part, once due to a bad beat that dropped me down to the 8-15 BB range where I stayed in for the next four hours before mercifully busting - but I feel like I'm playing better, which includes chopping a 525 and a 215 razz sat (probably the only other razz tourney I'm playing this year.)

Today's live NL hand: I'm sitting on the left of Cam Hua, who's, frankly, playing really bad - loose/passive all over the place and pretty much spewing everywhere except for his hand reading, which is still on target. I've already won a nice pot off him with a river overbet with the one card straight nuts that he paid off when, at 50/100, he limps UTG (his range includes K9s here.) I pick up AK in MP1, raise to 400 to isolate, and everyone folds back to him/he calls. (I have ~5500ish and cover him by a fair bit.)

Flop QT7. He checks, but this clobbered his range, so I check behind. The turn is another 7, he instachecks and I check (I'm probably calling a river bet unimproved at this point.)

Except, the river is a K and he bets 550.

The pot is 950 and ordinarily, online, this isn't even a close call - but he knows exactly what I have, and he's still betting. Right after this post, I'm going to go on 2+2, post this hand, and get clobbered by people telling me to call...and they'll probably be wrong. I really feel like I picked the worst of the three options, and that if I wanted to win this pot, what I should have done is to bluff shove, representing the nuts I already got him with one time. More likely, I should have just folded. Instead, I called because I like pot odds and was, of course, shown J9. I need to learn to trust my instincts and go with them more in annoying spots like this one.

Today's razz hand and why I love the idea of a razz tournament even though I'll probably go busto in it ASAP: Six players remain in a sat where the structure is so nuts that the average player has, I'm guessing, maybe 6 BB. After two people including myself fold, the remaining upcards are a 3 (held by Mr. Bracelet Winner from the day before yesterday), a 9 (held by some guy who's attempting to play well but the structure is so fast that he's failing), an 8 (the only other decent player in the field), and the bringin, a 10 held by an Asian guy who's never played razz before and is basically a total newbie.

How to screw up your tournament in one go: Bracelet Winner *open limps* his 3 (I think completing KK in the hole is probably a smaller mistake than this). The 9 calls behind him. The 8 now raises (completes), indicating a decent hand (but who the hell knows), and the 10 looks at his cards and says "I think I have to call" (he has two babies down but can obviously be gotten off his hand on fourth).

I'm fully expecting Mr. Bracelet to now go ahead and reraise so the 8 can 3 bet and try to shut the 10 out, making a huge pot heads up vs. an 8 where he can't possibly be a big dog. Instead, he folds (lol). The 9 follows and the 8 actually gets the hand heads up against the 10!!! The ten pairs on fourth, folds and the 8 doubles his stack without ever seeing fifth street. Completely ridiculous, and why I am going to love this tournament. I don't even care if I run bad, as long as I get to laugh at the play.

Oh yeah - I finally booked a nice, big sat win on top of that, my friend Justin Rollo is at the FT of the 2K, and I won my first ever shot at credit card roulette. Running good is awesome.

The good thing about being a poker player is the ability to set your own hours. A lot of people in and around poker have written a lot of things about keeping yourself in prime shape to play, and some of that is knowing when to take a couple of days off. After the shootout the day before yesterday, I was pretty ready for a nice break, and since there was only a 5K NL event yesterday/no event at all today, it seemed like a good time. Putting in a few hours playing different games instead of grinding out SNG's and tournaments was a nice touch; instead of trying to pushbot and hoping not to get called, I spent some time making street by street decisions in limit and (tonight) some 15/30 razz at the Rio.

Razz is a game that is almost always played in a mediocre to bad fashion (I'll be fair and say I'm mostly including myself here) because it's so math heavy and compounds errors so much - one loose player who makes big mistakes on third or fourth street and locks himself into hands to the river can pretty much make the entire game. Tonight, I played with an Omaha bracelet winner, a guy who presumably understands poker, who was far too loose on third, made himself keep drawing with marginal hands because of it, and visibly tilted because he wound up down so much to people who (despite making big errors like betting with no edge themselves) just destroyed him with their better hand selection. Unfortunately, you never see this game anymore, because of the variance associated with good players playing each other and because bad ones get wiped out ridiculously fast. That's too bad, because it's one of the most fun, and the easiest to play 'decently' - while also giving you the chance to make some nice, thin value bets. It also lets you play one of two diametrically opposing styles depending solely on the guy across from you - you can either bloat pots early, tying both of you to a pot where you have a big equity edge on third, or keep them small and let the other guy make huge equity mistakes on fourth and fifth. Add in some obvious crazy semibluff spots, and it's a very subtle, but rewarding form of poker. I don't pretend to be great at it - I probably give away equity to most of the top FT pros - but, wow, did I ever have an edge over the non-2+2'ers at the table tonight. With that, I've basically talked myself into playing the razz bracelet event on Sunday.

But enough about a game none of my readers care about...tomorrow, it's back to the grind. Three hours of totally different games later, no limit sounds good again.