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.)

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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.

lol tournaments. Jeez, can I stop losing with AA to Ax for a week? I think that's three in a row now. :(

Oh well. In lieu of anything resembling a deep run, at least I've got time to play videogames. In the meantime, here's the hand analysis video I promised:

Hand analysis video

(This should be a live link by tomorrow morning...blurry, but watchable. Why does Google/Youtube blur quality so much?)

I'm gonna set a little goal for myself. Namely, I'm gonna re-read part 10 of Bond's post and stop griping about variance :)

Check out the whole series if you haven't already; it's very good and the type of thing I would love to churn out if I had time. (Which I do. I'm just hideously lazy.) Seriously, though, it's some great stuff.

Okay, on to serious business. I've played okay this week, with few results but an occasional thin value bet (I can always tell when I play well; it's when I'm surprised to get a 'thin' bet called by a better hand and surprised to double up through a much worse hand in the same tourney. Oh yeah, and when I pull off some dumb bluff...wait, no, that's when I play 'inspired'. "Inspired" in poker is often a word that actually means 'suicidally dumb, except they're worse'.) Of course, I hope to change that today, but since we're talking about poker, breaking even would be OK, too.

Good news on two other fronts: my CR videos have been well received, and I'm making some extras for some magazine or other that wants a few. At the same time, it looks like I'm joining Team Wafflecrush for live events for at least the next eight months, which means I'll be playing in at least one of those weird "gigantic buyin events where everyone plays inconceivably horribly" things a month for a while. This has the joint effect of getting me out of the house and letting me experience the thrills of slightly different-looking casinos on every possible continent, in addition to possibly winning a lot of money and/or losing it for other people. Hopefully, it's the first one!

Another minor promise to myself: in addition to making another video tonight, I'm gonna find some hand worth posting and then get an audio clip of me dissecting it on here within a day or so.

Keeping a promise to myself to at least briefly update the blog after Sundays:

Everything considered, it was a pretty mediocre day, one of those "oh, they've got the extreme top end of their range this time" surprise-filled funfests that make you curse the concept of G-bucks. I ran pretty bad and didn't even play that well (blah), dropping a little under a grand all told. My only cash was in FTOPS, though, and I'm 3 for 3 in that series, which is always nice. (Annoying sidebar: the guy to my left for 2 hours was pretty bad, but is still in with 2 tables left as of this writing. Of course, I doubled him up from a ~10x stack on a pretty bad button vs. SB "2:1 call" that should really have been a fold because he had just enough chips to make it bad. Meh.)

Tomorrow is "video Monday", which basically means I've been slacking on my CR vids and have to finish up recording a couple of hours worth of replays for Cardrunners. I have a good tournament HH saved up for it - the FTOPS 6 max event - and it ought to make a good video, because I play a pretty nitty 6 max style that nobody really teaches but works very well in donkaments. The natural aggression in 6 max combines with tournament players to create people that don't know how to hand read but keep on betting for no apparent reason, which means all you have to do is to keep calling their bluffs down and you make moneys. Easy game (when they don't wind up with a full house at showdown, but really, who makes those?)

After that's done, I'm going to get this blog back to analyzing hands in some detail. It's been a while.

Since the AP thingamajig started, I've played very little and have gone on a very peculiar streak. On the one hand, I'm "almost" playing well - making deep run after deep run after deep run. Since early September, I've only played 72 online tournaments (lol @ calling myself a "pro" right now - this *is* changing with FTOPS season)...and cashed in 26 of them, a > 35% clip. Given these things pay 10%, that's insane and totally beyond the normal definition of "white hot". To put it another way, last year, I had a 2xx% ROI (return on investment), another white hot number, but only cashed something like 15% of the time!

The bad news - very little money to show for it. Oh, I've made some cash, but there are only a handful of final tables in here, and it's not because I'm folding into the money. The last two days pretty much cover it, along with the playing "almost" well part; out of 8 tournaments, I cashed in five and bubbled another, while managing to lose a couple of hundred bucks yesterday and winning about 1500 today. It's not the end of the world, but in that timeframe, I managed to get it all in with overpairs on raggedy boards for lots of chips four times and be behind all four times. That's just ugly, and it's made uglier by the fact that a couple of those were folds that I should normally make. Then, there are days like today, where I got a couple of lucky breaks to get very deep into the razzament only to go 0 for 3 with A247, A42, and A543 in a 20 minute span for big pots. You can lose one of those hands and still be in decent shape; I even managed to lose two and keep some chips. But to lose all three adds up to a 92/8 or so cooler that you can't possibly get out of in a limit game.

So, essentially, I'm mildly confused as to how I'm doing. On the one hand, it seems like I'm running white hot and playing well while, on occasion, making good reads and picking my spots very well. On the other, I also seem to have a case of "I have an overpair, time to stack off" syndrome and have left my ability to fold second best hands in big pots somewhere (this'd be better if the pots didn't get big *after* I don't fold them) along with a legitimate case of running bad late in events. This type of thing is pretty rare - nobody stays at a 35% ITM rate and doesn't make huge amounts of money for very long - so either I'm overdue for a month or two that makes me hate life, or I'm about to find myself a lot better at poker. I'll find out soon enough.

At this stage, it appears as if the investigation from my own standpoint is largely over. AP has cleaned up as much as they could - I can't test them any more than I already have from where I am, but they are saying the right things re: "changing" their ownership structure, and certainly, none of the implicated people remain in day to day operational control. I have another radio interview tonight and the delayed ESPN article is finally coming out in a day or two, but that may be the end as far as the media is concerned, as well.

With that done, I'd like to talk about where the industry, as a whole, goes from here.

Politically, we (that is, the PPA) are making much faster gains in Congress than I expected a year ago. The WTO case's nascent explosion - as desperately as the US is still appealing, the writing is on the wall and the majority of House members are now aware of the potential 100 billion in damages figure - is galvanizing them into action. I would not be as optimistic as Barry Greenstein's 'six months to legalization' figure; that is unrealistic, because I can almost guarantee no action on a subject like this one will be taken in an election year. But we do have an excellent shot at legalization in the 2009 Congress, especially with a Democratic president in office (no need for partisanship - the simple truth re: the 2008 election landscape is that if a Republican wins, it will be a narrow victory, and they will certainly be too beholden to the FoF types to immediately pass an Internet gambling legalization bill even with that kind of pricetag attached.)

With this in the background, the last thing that anybody in the poker community wanted or needed is the discovery that, in the words of one of my AP sources, "two morons in Costa Rica were ruining everything". As I've written before in this blog, the other sites have watched this closely, collectively slapped their foreheads and taken measures to clean up their own houses. Of course, almost nobody's willing to publicize this further - why would they? - but everyone recognizes that a second scandal cannot be tolerated right now. A hint of massive corruption behind the scenes of the sites/money/people driving the legalization bus would have incredibly bad consequences in Washington; at the very least, it would mean the end of the current industry, because any bill would have to specifically exclude the existing offshore entities to be palatable. In other words, a whiff of bad PR in the next year and a half could cost a handful of people many billions of dollars. I don't think I need to spell out the likely result if someone gets caught trying this again in the near future.

At the same time, we also discovered one very disturbing thing about the poker community - we're absolutely (ok, I'm done) horrible at regulating ourselves. The entire HS MTT player base screamed about AP's riggedness for a month; this had zero impact on player traffic. When AP was *proven* to be rigged with the Excel file and admitted to the rigging, with several articles hitting the front pages of MSNBC and Yahoo, their numbers dropped about 5% for the first week and have now made up almost half of that this week. In a twist that is frankly shocking, even a game that was proven to be rigged still attracts players. That does not bode well for anyone - either ourselves or the industry at large - because, for all that AP is reformed, the fact is that there were almost no long term consequences. Once the players are fully paid back, the penalty for cheating turns out to be less than a 100% markup, and no one's going to jail. In the long run (I am talking a decade plus) this kind of non-responsiveness from the market could very well drive the industry off a cliff or keep it just as shady as ever.

In other words, we need regulation. The ancaps at 2+2's "no true Scotsman"/"the government is worse"/"this market isn't free" dodging aside, there is nothing that could be worse for us at this point than a widely held perception that online poker really *is* rigged that we cannot instantly refute in a single sentence. That has got to immediately change. In the short term, the change may have to come from the sites themselves or from their licensing agencies - certainly, the KGC's new...umm, existence...is a start, as is the theoretical new culture of transparency at AP - but in the long run, we must both accept and embrace governmental oversight. Furthermore, the PPA is currently not the best vehicle for this; it is a body formed by and controlled by the existing sites, who have a slightly different agenda from the players and will not be nearly as quick to react to a gaming scandal from our end as they should be. It took them a week after AP's admission to even put a blurb about it on their site; that's not good enough. Had any FoF-owned Congressman been a little quicker on the uptake, their meet and greet function a while ago would have faced some extremely tough questions.

So, as I said...we need reform, and it's unlikely to come from the existing players in the political arena. Time will tell how and in what form Internet gaming will be legalized, but if we want an optimal resolution - legalization of the market we have now, without losing the ability to play at places like Stars and FTP in the process - three things *must* happen:

1)The sites have got to maintain their newly improved security procedures and remain on their best behavior.

2)The PPA must be more proactive with respect to these issues than it is now, and must seek to develop some sort of platform for answering the question "What form of regulation should Congress impose?" Simply seeking a "legalize and forget" bill without wondering about what happens if and when someone asks for conditions - and a large number of Congressmen surely will - is not good enough.

3)Either the PPA or the sites themselves (same thing, really) must come up with some sort of PR strategy for handling these types of issues in a coordinated fashion. Online poker is not a fragmented marketplace where one bad vendor affects only its own customers; another scandal could wreck the entire trade fair. By a minor miracle, this last disaster landed in the laps of several trusted people in the poker community who were able to manage the fallout. What happens when the next one makes the headlines and nobody bothers to ask any of us what we think? The Cardplayer tactic of hiding its head in the sand and hoping the whole thing goes away is not going to cut it.

In the medium term, I hope to work on some of these myself; perhaps this is the first step on my eventual transition out of the playing field, and perhaps not. What I do know is that no one can afford to leave these things undone.

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Poker status: meh. As usual, I've only played a handful of days recently. The one thing that went right from a pretty disastrous Sunday (it's not every day you lose 2 82/18's and a 93/7 fairly deep, all for lots of chips) is that I'm now 7/8 in my last Cakeaments, with the 1 being a 72 player/1 seat, 3 small $ sat where I self-destructed away a chip lead. No real harm done there, and being on fire at Cake, even with those smaller prizepools, does wonders for my confidence.

Obviously, over the last week, the AP mess has more or less continued to spiral around the 'net. It's going to keep doing that for a while, while the lawyers sort everything out. In the meantime, I now have enough contacts, both external and internal, to sort out this entire story, and at some point in the future, I'll probably blog about it, but for now some things are still sensitive and I'd rather keep a few details to myself. Suffice to say, however, that AJ Green's scalp has pretty much been nailed to the wall, and I'm definitely proud of the investigation Nat and I - okay, more Nat than I, even if I threw a few critical details in there - managed to pull off entirely over the Internet and entirely based on public pressure.

For those of you who haven't been reading the monstrous 2+2 threads, other incidental subjects of interest that have come up this week:

-Nat may be going to Costa Rica as an informal player auditor/interviewer role. We've talked about me going as well, but I'm pretty undecided. We'll figure it out.

-David Sklansky briefly made an appearance and said he'd go down for 200K. That thread lasted five minutes before the very obvious deletion.

-AP's released a couple of statements, with lots more on the way. They're remarkably bland, primarily for legal reasons, but it's a start.

-Proposed screenplays: 1. Proposed books: 1. Airtime: at least an hour's worth on the radio (click me for a really long interview), and probably another three or four hours' worth of phone calls with the media, not counting emails and back and forth with AP management. Why is Tila Tequila on Jimmy Kimmel and not me? Oh yeah, the bisexuality and boobs, my bad. Still, I think I've done pretty well as an impromptu industry spokesman.

In fact, I'll definitely have a future blog up on the media/politics/regulatory angle of this whole thing sometime soon. In the meantime, stay tuned; this might be winding down, but it's not by any means over.

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Oh yeah, and I actually played some poker. I'm now 5 for 5 of my last big Cakeaments with 3 FT's, but unfortunately, I pretty much bubbled (2K consolation prize) an Aussie seat package. It'd be lamer if not for the fact that at least one person says hi to me at every table I sit down at. Wheeeeeeee, Internet celebrity.