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...)

---

-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.

It turns out that scheduling a 1 hour, cross-airline layover is not a good idea when you're flying from NY through Minneapolis in bad weather. Not only did I miss my flight, I got stuck in Minneapolis for a night. Fun fact about American Airlines policy: if it's an airport problem and not a plane problem, they'll only give you half-off coupons for a hotel instead of comping it. It's as if they were competing to lose my business, especially when I *just* signed up for their frequent flier program, like, two weeks ago.

Anyway, I finally got to Vegas yesterday, watched Vivek (psyduck) bubble the 15K Venetian event (uuggggghh), then lasted 90 minutes in today's Bellagio $2500 tourney when QQ < KK. Standard, but whatever, lots more poker coming up soon.

On the plus side, I'm officially not going to Australia in January. This is good because it turns out the Aussie Millions conflicts with the Borgata WPT event, and since I've got comped rooms there and don't need to take 48 hours and two stops each way's worth of flying to make a single poker tournament, going to AC instead is a no brainer. I still want to visit Australia, but it'll have to wait for when I can make a real vacation out of it.

Meanwhile, at the moment, I'm just sitting in Vivek's apartment surfing the net and waiting around for the nightly tourneys to start - pretty much the same thing I do in NYC, but in a new and exciting time zone. The poker lifestyle is weird.

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.

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving :)

After Sunday, I took another break this week for obvious holiday-related reasons - well, that, and too many good videogames have come out lately. So, today, I wanted to play some poker, spent 2 hours at the 20/40 razz tables on FTP and made 2K. Razz is remarkably easy when you run hot and play better than them; why aren't tournaments more like razz, especially in terms of running hot? :(

I always hate writing about this game because a)I don't know who's reading this, and b)there's so little in print about it that any tidbit of information I release is bound to wind up improving someone's game a little too much. The last time I wrote a couple of posts on a particular subcategory of poker, I singlehandedly made it several times harder over the course of the next year; it's still possible to crush satellites more than any other type of MTT, but nobody's as terrible as they used to be. On the other hand, razz makes for some incredibly easy examples of good hand reading/poker (just ask Sklansky, who uses it in every single book he's ever written) and might also be the most profitable midstakes game available online. (Hell, it might be the most profitable high limit game, too. There are a half dozen 200/400 regulars on FTP, and I know for a fact at least two of them are pretty bad. If I was a shade better and/or properly bankrolled...)

Why is everyone so bad? Very briefly, it's because the aggression revolution that transformed poker since '04 hasn't made it to razz yet, and the one book on it - Sklansky on Poker - is pretty much the most misinterpreted poker book on the market, with everyone involved taking its contents in the most weak/tight light possible. Yes, Sklansky says to call lots of good hands on third instead of raising in order to exploit your edge on fifth and later...but he doesn't say to play passively, and taking that the wrong way makes people give away pot after pot after pot. I would love to go into more detail, because third street in razz is probably the worst played and least understood street in any card game with multiple betting rounds, but somebody's going to have to pay me to write a book in order for that to happen. It's too valuable.

So why is the title of this blog post 'tournaments are silly' when it's pretty much a tease about a game no one plays? It's because donkaments and razz have one thing in common: almost nobody playing either them 'gets' poker. Don't get me wrong - a number of the FTP regs are pretty decent at razz, and the top MTT pros are very good at MTT's. But very few of those people who do not also play cash games understand poker as a whole. They don't make thin value bets, don't understand pot odds except in the context of their game(s), think that 'waiting for a better spot' means giving away pot after pot after pot...it goes on. Even on Cardrunners, people don't really understand that when you're getting 1.4:1 on a call when you're a small favorite against someone's 8xBB pushing range, the result is not a 'thin' call and it's got nothing to do with 'calling an all in with A4' or whatever. IMO, in order to 'get' poker, you have to intuitively understand just what your edges are and how to take them, and very few people not playing NL cash/nosebleed limit/HS PLO really grok any of that.

A pretty basic razz concept that gets my point across: as I said, Sklansky says that it's worth just calling a nice hand instead of reraising on third if it makes the other guy play bad on fourth (by calling too much in a small pot), and worth doing the same thing on fourth if it makes them play bad on fifth. But wait - what do people do really, really badly in razz? They take lots of cards off as way too giant dogs on big bet streets. So, how do you exploit that? Well, you can either give away a large number of small pots on fourth to press your edge in a now medium pot on fifth...or...you can bloat pots on third with the best hand, get to fifth as - most likely - a big equity favorite, and then get them to call as a big dog over and over again because "the pot is large". This is what Sklansky actually does say to do (just not in so many words), but his advice hasn't been followed, because the people playing the game refuse to raise without the nuts. Their mentality is the same as the people refusing to make pot odds calls on CR, and it likely just kills their results.

BTW, I don't claim to murder those games playing this way, but I'm not even that good at razz - just poker - and I'm already a slight to decent winner at the highest razz games below nosebleed. I hear I'm also supposed to be pretty good at donkaments, but they're silly. Still, I plan on winning a couple of them at the Bellagio next month.

Until then I'll probably just play a bunch of razz and Sundayments.