Pretty much out of it since Friday. This is gonna be the first Sunday I've voluntarily missed in at least a year. Dumb flu :(

Totally wrecks my schedule, though I should be alive and moving again within the next couple of days.

Nothing of note this Sunday. I did go deep in the only thing I played on Saturday, a big event, but, you know, mess up a hand, lose half your stack, win 3 buyins instead of 30, ooooopsie. I *have* ramped up my play a little bit and am slowly learning to 6 table (this probably has something to do with why I bubbled everything on Wednesday, the other day I played a lot this week :p)

The two screwups of note that both cost me tournaments this weekend both involved misjudging raise size tells. I lost a huge pot just ITM in a $530 when someone raised only 3x after a limper, I didn't think for enough time and jammed 99 next to act; of course, he had aces. Similarly, in the Million, a 30/15 raised 4x in LMP, I had tens in the small blind, thought even a 4x size still meant a lighter hand than most people would have there and jammed a pretty nice stack. Nope, he had jacks. I probably still stack off on the ragged flop if I just call, but it's the type of thing where I should just know better than to jam pre. Most people don't think twice and it's the type of hand you can't really post on 2+2 because of how weak it looks, but the fact is that when I'm not a little bit rusty, I know better than to jam preflop in either situation, regardless. So, I'm posting this as a way to get myself to think a little more before I act.

Oh well, no big deal. I've gotten lots of good news lately and have definitely raised my confidence level and play - I just want to make sure I don't accidentally do something bad like that in the Borgata. The more time goes by between live tourneys, the more I want to play them (for no apparent reason at all.)

Link to Adanthar MTT CardRunner vids on YouTube

Check it out - it's not the best vid I've done, but it's a pretty good one and has a nice summary of blind defense/pot odds in MTT's in Part 3 somewhere.

Update: Looks like it's got some pretty bad audio sync issues. These don't exist in the actual CR vid, I swear :p

I've noticed something about the scene. Since UIGEA, it's a lot easier to find a nosebleed game - every site out there now has at least 50/100 NL and most top out at 3/6 - but the games that used to be called high stakes, those bread and butter 5/10 and 10/20 games, run at the same rate they did two years ago and at 10x the difficulty rating. They're still very beatable, but you have to know what a TAGfish is to beat them, and have to know what a dolphin (the LAGfish eating the TAGfish) is to crush them. The same thing applies to tournaments; we don't notice it because the donks we play in the first two hours are almost as bad as ever, but, increasingly, a vast percentage of the people ITM in the bigger stakes events are at least TAGfish. The ROI of a tournament player, which is - invisibly to most people, because they don't get there that often unless they play 29802389489 tournaments - determined largely by final tables and the ability to win them, is affected by these guys even more than in cash, because while they might be fish postflop, they do know how to pushbot.

Okay, so, your ROI's dropped because people suck in different ways now. What does that mean?

Most of the people I know came up in poker through the SNG/MTT scene; comparatively few started out playing cash and almost none started at 6 max (nobody starts there; it's an online midstakes thing you kinda have to graduate through.) The first of us started in '03-'04, many more in '05, and a bunch in '06, but due to UIGEA and the fact that only fourteen months have gone by, comparatively few people that are good, well rolled HS players today started playing after last October. The upshot is that those of us who are already here only have the BR management that was required of us *last year*.

What did I know about BR management and moving up? Not a damn thing. As recently as '05, I was told to play a whopping 10K hands in fixed limit (which took me a month or so two tabling it) to know when to move up. Over in SNG land, most people used to think 30 buyins was enough, and some of us made do with 20-25 in a pinch. We'd basically just kinda rush up the ladder (which maxed out at 200NL and 15/30 limit at Party anyway...very very few people even wanted to play Spirit Rock at 10/25 on UB and no other games even really existed), eventually stick when we didn't thoroughly suck, and beat the games in spite of ourselves because they were full of complete idiots. Nobody I know has a BR management background because we all had mid five figure or six figure rolls by the time anyone cared.

So now a bunch of people are sitting there with, say, 100K-200K and decide they're rolled for every game they want. This means playing the big 1K MTT's online (possibly/probably all three of them), another 2K in buyins worth of random tourneys a night, and/or, if they play cash instead, probably 8-12 tabling midstakes for another 10K on the table. Except, ROI's have gone down, aggression [meaning variance] has gone way up, and every 6 max table from .50/1 to 10/20 has 4 regulars, 3 of which have Cardrunners/stoxpoker subscriptions and 1-2 of which probably teach somewhere. Despite all this, the games are still beatable - but the days of 30 buyin rolls are so long gone, it's laughable, and just because you can beat 10/20 or even 25/50 does not mean you can beat the next level up (which, BTW, is a gigantic freaking jump, because for some reason we're all primatefish that love round numbers and don't stop to consider how much easier it would be on everyone involved if there were about 5 more widely played limits between 10/20 and 50/100.)

So, to sum it up...guys who have never lost in poker at any stakes, because they skyrocketed up and are used to considering themselves at the top of a ladder, keep climbing up, not thinking how far from them the next rung is, who currently occupies it and how much effort it's going to take to stick to it. Then they go on six figure 'downswings' which are really about half variance, half playing bad after losing the first 50K, drop down and rebuild, quite possibly playing worse due to lack of confidence. Repeat. Somewhere, Phil Ivey is laughing (and, by somewhere, I mean 300/600 on FTP. Seriously, he's probably there right now.)

Prediction: the good '07's that come up will be much more likely to stick at the top rung right away than any one of the people I'm taking about. They'll be used to playing in tougher games with 50-100 buyin rolls, taking variance as a sign of playing bad and immediately retreating, etc.

Further prediction: a lot of people will go busto (enough to be on near permastakes) in '08, and a lot more will get rich - at the cost of ever-increasing variance to them, as well - backing them. By the end of this year, well known, "good"* players like me, who might have live staking deals but retain their own action online, may be in the minority.

*(I maintain that I'm not good, I'm just better than them)

Sunday was a relatively pointless 0 for 4, some tough breaks blah blah blah, whatever. That isn't really the point of this post.

Since it's Dec 31 (and I'm about to log off the Internet to go have fun), people have been posting their yearly results. Yeah, okay, The Bryce won 2.5 million in nosebleed limit because he's God, a few people have 500K-800K years because they're freaking insane, whatever.

leatherass (a Supernova Elite who grinded 80 billion hands at midstakes) was breaking even on the year and needed a spectacular 100K month to get anywhere?

Daut44, one of the better 25/50 Stars regs (IMO) and a good tourney player, is up a total of 100K online?

Gobboboy is down money total on the year which *does* count his 250K (after staking) Aussie cash 2'nd place???

WTF??? How do I have higher numbers than any of these people? It's not like I play a lot and it's not like I'm *that* good!

I think I need to make a detailed bankroll management/skill management post and IM it to everyone I know. The fact that so many people are not keeping the money they win is unacceptable.

Other than that one Sunday and a couple of tourneys today/tomorrow, I'm taking a break until the New Year. Nothing particularly important - I just wanted to be refreshed for January and the Borgata WPT.

Tallying up the year, it looks very good; even though I didn't win a six figure Sunday event like last year, I still had some huge scores and great results for how little I play. My new year's resolution, other than the cash thing, is to put in more hands in general and take those results to the next level. Aside from that, though, I'm pretty happy with my life and the way things have worked out.

Again, happy holidays, and, except for tomorrow, see you in '08.

Short version: Went nowhere, only played one least bit interesting hand all day.

JackPotter2 is at seat 0 with 2770.
korrupt911 is at seat 1 with 475.
T LaZeR is at seat 2 with 3005.
BadAzzCop is at seat 3 with 2095.
Adanthar1 is at seat 4 with 2965.
phildar10 is at seat 5 with 3790.
Tmay_420 is at seat 6 with 1845.
RandalFlowers is at seat 7 with 2685.
Hixx is at seat 8 with 2645.
habash is at seat 9 with 2725.
The button is at seat 5.

Tmay_420 posts the small blind of 10.
RandalFlowers posts the big blind of 20.

JackPotter2: -- --
korrupt911: -- --
T LaZeR: -- --
BadAzzCop: -- --
Adanthar1: Qc Qh
phildar10: -- --
Tmay_420: -- --
RandalFlowers: -- --
Hixx: -- --
habash: -- --

Pre-flop:

Hixx folds. habash folds. JackPotter2 folds.
korrupt911 raises to 60. T LaZeR folds. BadAzzCop
folds. Adanthar1 re-raises to 210. phildar10 calls.
Tmay_420 folds. RandalFlowers folds. korrupt911
calls.

Flop (board: 7c 8d 8s):

korrupt911 goes all-in for 265. Adanthar1 raises to
530. phildar10 raises to 795. Adanthar1 thinks "lol" and calls for implied set value, then check/folds the turn.

Jeez, if he just slowplays one more street on an utterly nonscary board, he may well stack me somewhere, but no, he min3bets and gives me pretty close odds to draw to a 2 outer. I wish I'd have hit just to spite him :(

Anyway, after taking close to a week off, I'll at least take having the whole night to myself. No big deal. One more Sunday to close out the year on a high note :)

Feeling way better about poker in general (although, of course, the guy from my last post wound up finishing fourth obv.) I even put in a Sunday where I built up some pretty big stacks [and then blew them off, one in spectacular fashion that will get my replacement CR vid tomorrow laughed at :p. I blame leftover tilt and/or the one big mistake of the month I'm allowing myself to make.]

Regardless, after a mandatory couple of days off to recover, I'll be back playing a big MTT schedule and probably mixing it in with some MSNL 6 max after New Year's. I need to get myself in a frame of mind to finally get over cash variance and just grind out some hands, because regardless of how good I am getting at MTT's and how much I'm going deep in big events, I can only get as aggressive as I need to get by learning to crush midstakes. I've always crushed every cash game I played in regularly except maybe high stakes razz, but most of that has been full ring and I've just never taught myself to play deep shorthanded poker without TAGging it up. That beats 6 max anyway, but I'd like to develop my LAG gear a bit more.

Up next, I've got an 'emergency replacement' CR vid tomorrow (already done), a couple of videos for a European mag of some kind in the next week or two, and the Borgata WPT event in January in between Sundays and whatever other tourneys I wind up playing. There should also be some stuff relating to tworags that a lot of people will like.

Happy holidays :)

Buuuuuuuusto ~54'th for 29K (which, minus staking and makeup, means I made 1K on the series. Ship it?)

There were a bunch of hands, but the key four in a nutshell:

-Up to 200K by chipping up and never seeing a showdown, I raise QQ at 2/4K. Loose/bad Asian guy calls 1/3 of his stack in the BB, then stop and goes me all in on a J86 flop with the mighty 98o. It's good, so I lose 70K.

-Back to 200K by chipping up and never seeing a showdown, I eventually win a big flip with tens vs. AK, get up to 330K, then raise AJ from MP to 22K at 4/8 with a very tight image. Folded to the BB, who's been playing worse and worse all day as he's gotten drunker and drunker; he calls. Flop K J 3, he checks, I bet something like 35K to try to induce a shove, he snap shoves, I snap call and his K2 wins (sigh, way to CR your bluff catcher). This drops me down to 140K while he gets about 300K. Over the next hour, while I chip up one hand at a time, he defends his BB again with 64s and flops a boat vs. 99, calls a 9x shove with K3o and wins, and generally luckboxes a million chips or so. Well, okay then, at least I'm still in.

-Back to 190K when the following hand happens: MP3, who has been raising my BB from the button all day and generally trying to be aggro (it would work better if he didn't keep running into monsters behind him or I wasn't 3 betting him light; as it was, he'd steal my blinds 2-3 times, then I'd reraise him light and win them back so it would even out), raises to 24K at 4/8K. CO, who's new to the table, calls, I find ATo on the button and run my second squeeze of the day to 65K. MP3 tanks forever and (apparently) folds AQ.....but CO actually thinks and shoves?? Now I'm getting 2:1, can't really be against aces and eventually wind up making a pot odds call against 99 on the last hand of the level, then win the giant coinflip when the doorcard is a T. The rail berates me, etc., but they're bad at poker, and I've got 436K going into 5/10 at the best table in the tournament with a couple of really bad players, one of whom has a million chips. Also, my image is shot, which is perfect because the plan is to nit up the last 90 minutes and hit homeruns when I actually get hands.

-So, obviously, on the first orbit of 5/10K, the drunk guy raises to 30K, the button (MP3 from the last hand) calls, and I look down at AK in the big blind. Options: 1)just shove, 2)go for massive value because I'm "obviously squeezing", make it some really large number and PSB shove most flops (check/folding horrible ones like 876 or something). I pick option 2 and make it 150K, MP3 takes 15 seconds, says something like "I've got you figured out, you're squeezing, blah blah blah" and splashes a bunch of 10K chips into the pot.

Flop Q98, pretty perfect. I shove. He turbocalls with...JT; turn brick, river brick. Yes, that's right, he put 1/3 of our effective stacks in with jack ten soooooooted and flopped the nuts in a 900,000 chip pot (average stack at the FT will be 2 million). Then, with his new 1.5 million chip stack with 50 people left, he gloats and says how he knew I was squeezing.

I swear I've never been more tilted or pissed off while playing this game as I was for the next five minutes. I could deal with the bad side of a coinflip or a generic bad beat. This was above and beyond. I usually try to act with as much class as possible at the table, but the sarcastic "well played sir, you definitely had me figured out" I came up with was the least of what I actually wanted to say. If he'd been sitting next to me and not across the table I might have wound up arrested.

When play ended for the day, forty five minutes and two very well timed calls to my wife later, I was beginning to unwind while sitting with Vivek (who's still in) at the buffet when an older guy, who was sitting with me during a bunch of Day 1, totally randomly came up and complemented me on my play at the time. That helped, and I calmed down enough to grab another plate of food when Devilfish Ulliot, who'd also been at my table for the last hour or so and at a couple of my WSOP tables, also came up, told me 'nice play, unlucky' and the more important 'Gus Hansen got the guy to do the same thing you did with the nut flush draw and won a million off him - he's down to 300K now'.

And that's the story of why Gus Hansen is now the chipleader, some drunk asshole is almost busto and I'm blogging this at 1:30 AM instead of getting some sleep. Amazingly enough, I'm not even bitter or pissed off anymore - I played so well in these three days and got myself in perfect position to final table a huge event, was all in for all of my chips a grand total of four times and just wound up in the unluckiest possible spot the last time out after I got the guy to make a giant mistake. I'll be back; he won't. In the meantime, there are a bunch more tournaments to play.

In conclusion, lol donkaments.

Short version because I'm a little tired: I have 119,700, right around the average with 152 people left (paying 100). The blinds will be [edit: 1500/3000 with a 400 ante next level and 2000/4000/500 after 90 minutes, so a lot of people will be busting early on in the day, but I have enough chips to hopefully make it through for a while.]

I started off today at a tough table with Phil Ivey, the tournament CL (who's still the CL today). Apparently, the way he gets a lot of his chips is by getting someone to overcall his bet on a QT9K board, then check/call all in on the river without a jack. That said, he played very well and I felt lucky that the table broke after 30 minutes, until I got to my new table, which, at various times, featured Hoyt Corkins (with a big stack on my right), another FTP pro whose name I can't remember, JC Alvarado, Ted Lawson, Antonio Esfandiari and a bunch of other people who didn't suck. Playing my cards at that table basically led me to bleed off several thousand chips an hour with no discernable slowdown until I lost/won a decent pot each in a ten minute span, but I got lucky to get moved to another table when we were the last to have 10 players (the tournament shifted to 9 handed 2/3 through the day) and nobody busted/I was UTG when another table needed a fill-in. This table, where I spent the last level and a half, featured mig.com on my left but nobody else of note, and I was able to chip up 40K in the last 90 minutes.

Hands:

1)At my second table, Alvarado opens 3600 UTG at 600/1200 (he usually made it 2600 in this spot so this was weird) with around 50K, and I coldcall AQ with 70K-ish. Right after I do that, it turns out I misheard him and he did actually say 2600 - which is pretty bad because I was going to 3 bet him otherwise. At any rate, the SB, a pretty bad calling station Asian guy with 25K, overcalls, as does the decent BB.

4 handed, we see an A 9 8 flop. Two checks, JC leads 7200 into 11K-ish, I call (with very likely the best hand because his range was soooo wide). Now, though, the SB tanks and eventually overcalls??? BB folds, turn 9, SB takes 5 seconds and sticks in his last 18K, Alvarado instamucks. Problem: I'm getting 2.x:1 and I can't rule out spades or AJ from the SB, so I make a crying call and he does show me spades - AK. Well, I certainly wasn't expecting that...congrats for getting the most I guess?

2)5 minutes later, I have 45K and open AJo in MP1. Alvarado calls from his BB. Flop 433r ("I have the best hand"), he check/snap calls a 2/3 pot bet or so. Turn T (2 spades), he 1/2 pots it ("I still have the best hand"), I ship it in, he turbofolds, I show (this is lame because it looks like I'm bragging but I need to set up an image a *little* bit better than 'meganit' at this point) and have 65K again.

3)I fold for a while, pick up AQ and raise UTG+1, Hoyt calls in the BB. Flop A32, check/check. Turn 4 (2 diamonds), he half pots it, I call. River x, he checks, I 1/3 pot it because he's not calling more than that, he calls while getting ready to muck his cards and does. I've got 80K, get moved off the table a bit later and am really thankful for it because that one sucked.

New table:

I steal a few hands here, but play tighter than I would without mig to my left, including open folding an SB to him at 1K/2K/300 (with antes like this open folding is really annoying but had to be done.) Next hand, I pick up QQ on the button and make it 5500; mig folds, BB calls. Flop K 9 2x, check/check; turn 3, he bets 7500, I call after thinking 15 seconds; river 4, he checks, I make a really small 10K bet on the end because he's not calling anything more either, he calls and mucks (I think I rivered his king here, not sure).

That puts me at 100K and sets up the fun hand of the night:

2 orbits later, folded to me in the CO with 22, and I make it 5500 because I have a pair. It's folded to the BB, an older Asian guy who's probably one of the Nguyen/Tran/Vinh crowd (there are a couple of dozen of these guys, all related to and/or backed by each other, that travel the circuit), who calls.

Flop QT3 and he checks really quickly, making me ~90% sure I'm getting CR'd if I bet, so I check.

Turn 3, an interesting card. He takes 10 seconds and leads around 6K into a 15K-ish pot. I quickly realize three things: I have a very good chance of having the best hand here, he's not betting the river all the time if he does have air because this is the same line I took with QQ and looks like a hand with showdown value, and I might be able to bluff shove on some rivers if he bets the right (wrong) amount, regardless. So I take the same amount of time I took with the QQ hand earlier and call.

River K. With around 30-35K left behind and a 27K pot, he goes into a weird act, looking at me, the pot, the board, playing with his chips...for a full two minutes while I'm doing my usual thing and staring at the felt. I'm so confused by this I have no idea what he could possibly have, and every second that goes by makes me want to call a river bet, but I really just have no clue what to do until he finally clearly chickens out and checks. I instacheck behind (honestly, I might be better off shoving, but the way he acted sorta polarized his range towards air or, like, a full house or something) and get ready to muck my hand quickly until a few seconds goes by and he's forced to turn over A 7. Of course, when he sees I have fifth pair, he goes kinda nuts, slams his hand on the table, yells "how could he call???" and starts punching in his Blackberry to tell his friends about this. I don't really blame him.

Vivek is also still in (with a whopping 217K), as are two other team Wafflecrush members (Bakes 300K!, fatalerror 117K). Hopefully, we'll make some good things happen this weekend.