Nothing going on the last two days (other than me lasting exactly two hours before losing a big coinflip in the last 1500) since I needed to move into the second house I'll be renting for the rest of the Series. Well, nothing is a relative term - there've been some crazy mixed game sessions at the house the last couple of nights (it looks like I'm the Chinese poker champion of the circuit or something), and Vivek, my housemate, just took sixth at his 3K limit final table. 4 cashes in 6 events in the 9 days since he's turned 21...the man is both very good and running awesome, a nice combination.

Tomorrow's event is another 1500, but I would ideally like to play the Sunday tournaments online, too. So it looks like I'm going to go for a double or nothing strategy the whole day - I'll either be surfing the net by 5 or sitting on a monster stack. Let's see how that works out.

It turns out I had just enough time to go to the Rio and play one satellite, which I won outright. I'd asked for a chop twice - once at 100/200 when I had 6K/big stack 11K/shortie 3K, and again just before the final hand at 200/400, when it was 4K/8K/8K. Both times, the big stack refused; after the second time, the shortie wound up pushing AJ into the big stack's AK when, as it turns out, I had kings. Ballgame, ship the 5 grand, etc.

This makes me want to post about making deals in general. Most of the "A+" online elite either don't make deals at all or won't accept anything that isn't wildly in their favor. When I'm playing my best, I think I'm up there, and I definitely don't give up much in shorthanded tournament situations (my final table record proves it) - but I definitely do make deals, and in fact, will sometimes take slightly the worst of it (giving up a couple of percentage points, though not more) to make one stick. Two or three thousand dollars is significant to me, but it's not a huge number or anything. And yet, I'd probably be okay with giving up some fraction of a c-note to take it down.

Why is this? I think most of the pros around the net these days greatly underestimate variance. I'll fess up right now and say that two thirds of my net profit last year came from a whopping one tournament. So did Nath's. Taking the first couple of 2+2'ers that come to mind, after making his deal for 400K 3 handed at the WSOP, Jurollo's going to be around there, as well; Rizen is an absolutely ridiculous tournament player, but does anyone think he made more than 500K last year if you don't include his WSOP result? Gobboboy's second place is probably pushing 80% of his roll...etc., etc., etc.

All of these big wins have one thing in common - suckouts. I had 3 big ones in mine. Gobboboy hit a one outer (among many others) in his, Nath, Jurollo and Rizen doubtless had quite a few, and so on. Even playing your best, it's very difficult to play so well or get hit by the deck so hard that you never get your chips in while behind. What's important about this is that it only takes one time where your 25% or 33% shot doesn't hold up to turn 2/3 of your profit for the year into a loss. You can argue that in the long run, that's irrelevant, because even tournaments full of suckouts factor into a good player's expectation, but the long run in poker is somewhere between the cockroaches inheriting the Earth and the Sun going supernova; in addition, there's no such thing as a tournament these days where shorthanded play doesn't consist of "push top X%, get called by top Y%". I firmly believe that when you get to a final table and are in line for a significant payout, you should do what you can to lock it up, rather than winding up in a "who can run the hottest 3 handed with 20 BB" game. Of course, this doesn't apply when you have a significant edge, but those aren't that easy to come by - and are somewhat cancelled out by the utter monkey tilt that I'd go on if I passed up a huge deal and then lost a coinflip.

The A+ league, especially the 18-22 crowd, has an easier time ignoring variance than I do. A lot of that has to do with the fact that they don't care about money management anyway, which is actually an advantage in nosebleed stakes poker. I, on the other hand, do care about money, and I have to admit this causes me to give up a step to guys like sbrugby that have no problem with dropping 1 million a week. Maybe I'll get to be enough of a degenerate gambler to stop caring about that, but I'm okay with where I am for now...and it sure looks to me like chopping tournaments, especially with short stacks in the endgame, is a much better idea than playing them out*.

*of course, if you're playing live and they don't call with a push with anything but aces, it's another story.

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.