Italian Vegas

Even my golf is turning very like my poker these days – steady, steady, donk moment, steady, steady, donk moment …

On Saturday afternoon in the Medal I started 4,4 before an 11 at the 3rd. From the remaining 15 holes I posted 11 pars and a birdie 2 to shoot 84 (a nett 78)! A double bogey 5 at the par3 7th, a triple bogey 8 at the 8th and a double bogey at the 15th were mind-fuck blemishes on an otherwise very decent scorecard. Anyway, back to moaning about poker …

I’ve had another couple of decent results on the $10 SnGs so my SharkScope stats are back in the right direction again. I was home alone on Saturday night so was able to give 100% concentration to the 3 x two table sessions I played. From the 127 online games I’ve played on BlueSq I now have an ROI of 23% and a total profit of $235. Hardly mind blowing I know but those stats were truly grim a month or so ago.

First up last night was the $10, $30k GTD R/A on BlueSq. Having re-bought on the first hand (when blinded 20 chips below the 1,500 starting stack) I managed to hold my own until the first break and end of the ReBuy period. First hand back though, and after establishing a tight table image, this donk calls my All-In …

Hmmmfff! Not amused and it lead to me having to me ‘hang about’ long enough to make the money. From the 1,311 players that started, I exited 161st with top 150 getting paid.

On FT, I was in the $75, $17.5k GTD from 9pm. Playing well, stealing at all the right times and extracting maximum valyooo from many of my best hands, I managed to finish 12th of 556 for $422. Just five places higher and it’d have been a very, very nice pay day (in the region of $1,500). My exit hand was AJo into AQo on a A high non-flushing board. I shoved over the top on the flop at the wrong time obviously (not too bad a time in terms of strategy / blinds / money already in the pot) but I was playing to win and taking that hand down would have taken me to 2nd position. I have no complaints though as I played really well and it’s my best MTT result in a while and I now have a 93% Rating on OPR, a 38% ROI and InTheMoney figures of 17/53 (32%). I just have to work on improving that Average Finish position in HoldEm NL online games.

On the other tables, Derek was doing well too. He finished 11th in the $30k GTD as above and Mary managed 26th in the SHG on Stars. Congrats again to you both!

The $1k to $5k Challenge hasn’t been brought up again yet. I think / hope we’ll prob be ironing out the details later on this week / this weekend. Maybe Derek’ll consider doing it on $10 R/A virtual games now

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I’m now 50% backed for the $1.5k WSOP event tomorrow. It kicks off midday Vegas time, that’s 8pm UK time. Thankyou to everyone who bought a piece of me, I’ll be playing my very best. We’re looking at a likely 2,700 player field with over $600,000 to first place… so u can do the maths on your percentage

I think pokernews will be trying to keep track of the big name pros rather myself so unless I bust Doyle Brunson you might not hear much from me. I’ll do some sort of write-up after the event anyways.

You’ll be able to get updates by clicking the following link and going to Event #52 once it’s put up there. http://www.pokernews.com/live-reporting/

Here are a couple of pics I took from the $50k buy-in HORSE final table tonight. It was 3-handed Erick “E-Dog” Lindgren vs Scotty “It’s all over baby” Winnn vs some 2p2er with a girls sounding name. All of the big names were out railing it and messing around drinking on the sidelines. Obv Phil Hellmuth tried to get in on the cameras as much as possible too…

… and commit myself to the $1k to $5k challenge with Zanshin, I’m gonna play 5 x $8 SnGs on FT (for $26 Tokens) for a 50/50 on profits deal with AceFilledDreams from RaiseTheRiver.

Having just railed him on the FT of his final attempt on a ‘staked deal’ he had with Cadmonkey, we got chatting on WLM and got onto his unanswered staking request for funding to play 10 of the above. As I now have $100 on FT from the Amatay 10k bet, investing $44 and three hours into something like seems worthwhile. I’m hoping that it’ll teach me patience in the early stages of tourneys / SnGs as that’s the key to these things.

See the RTR Forum post to keep up with our progress.

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Rather than put up all of the $1.5k from my roll I’d like to even my variance by getting up to 50% of it backed by any people who’d like the action. You can buy any %’age you like in me from 1% ($15) upwards. I’m giving the action straight up, so you take 10% for example and you’d take 10% of whatever I win. If I bust you bust also.

As much as I dislike the variance in tourneys I can’t come to Vegas and not play a WSOP event! I’ve decided to play the last $1,500 entry WSOP tourney. It’s a 3-day event and should have around 2,000 entrants, with the top 10% of the field getting paid. First place will pay around half a million dollars.

I’d expect my equity in the tourney to be around $2,000-2,500 (meaning if the tourney was ran a million times that’d be what I’d expect to get back each time on average) but the variance is huge as it’s the only big WSOP tourney I’m playing. One shot basically. Due to the top heavy payout structure around 80-90% of the time I will bust the buy-in. So although I’m certain I’m profitable to back it certainly is a gamble, but a positive expectation one!

The event is on Monday at midday Vegas time, if you’d like to buy a piece of me drop an email to bazclef@gmail.com and tell me how much you’d like to buy. I can take payment by transfer on Stars/FTP, bank transfer, in person, etc.

The APAT Event in Dublin was almost two weeks ago now and I haven’t blogged anything about it – woops. It was fairly uneventful for me anyway …

On a day when I simply wasn’t getting cards, I resorted to stealing and playing aggressively with suited connector type hands just to keep myself above average in chips. It worked in that I didn’t spend much time below 7k in chips (or above 12k in chips). With AJd in early position I raised it up only to fold to an All-In by a similar stack in a middle position. From a middle position with TT I raised it up and folded again when re-raised by the same player above and an All-In by the SB. My exit hand was AQ on the BB. I raise it up and get called by Luca in his pink Hulk t-shirt. I considered him to be the best and most aggressive player at the table and with my tight image pretty well cemented in most folks’ heads, I check the 763 rainbow flop over to him. As expected, he fires out a 2.5k into a 3.2k pot and I decide that I do stand a chance of being able to steal it right there and then by shoving my remaining 7k in. I shove, he thinks for a minute or so, then decides that, with 18k or so behind, it’s valuable enough to call me with his 88. The 8s hold up. WP Mate.

The rest of the weekend was most enjoyable – the APAT regulars are great craic and I enjoyed every minute of the weekend despite throwing Euros away left right and centre. I did make a small profit on Roulette and on Prob Bets (one was that I couldn’t go 2.5 hours without peeing) so all was not lost.

Where are we going … ?

Derek and I have agreed that we have to look at our poker ‘careers’ in more detail and work out how to bring our fre online game on from recreational donking to semi-serious low stake grinding / luckboxing. Details will be available once funds have been deposited and the terms agreed but the main objective is to turn $1k into $5k ($500 to $2.5k each) by the end of 2008 without going broke. We’ve arranged to start in July which means we now have only a few days to change our mindsets in preperation.

$10 SnG Success

Over the past few weeks I’ve made more time for poker despite still being as busy as ever with work. To take some strain off myself, I’ve contracted in a PC repair guy and an experienced Web Developer / Coder and I’m enjoying work (the medium amount I’ve left myself) a lot more. I’ve taken two nights off this week, I managed to fit in 4 holes of golf on Monday afternoon, an hour at the driving range this afternoon and half an hour this afternoon to updated my Blog

Having been denied the chance to play 10 x $10 SnGs staked virtual online gamess for cadmonkey on RaiseTheRiver, I set myself the goal of playing them for myself to see how I’d do. I had recently moved up to the $20 SnGs but after a bankroll demise, I have quite wisely stepped back down for the time being.

So, by firing up two 6 Max tables at a time (one turbo and one standard being my preferred option), I hoped that it would stop me getting as bored as easily and stop me playing marginal hands just to keep in the action. And, from the results below, it appears to have worked …

$222 won for a $110 stake. I’m happy with that!!! Now if I could only stop donking it all away on the 50c/$1 tables …

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Took a bunch of pictures around the Venetian and some of the strip…

So yea, booked like $420 there, shippp. Then went across to Venetian to meet up with Pete/Dan and had some noodles. All 3 of us ended up getting in a $1-2nl cash free online game and drinking coronas and shots throughout, was pretty much carnage and a lot of fun. We didn’t leave ’til after 5am I think and I was reeeally tired and pretty frustrated after losing most of the money I’d spent that day making! Lesson learned, don’t drink and play or play tired. if I’m going to drink play $2 blackjack or something instead. Although I did run pretty bad that session, but whatever. Was really frustrating worked hard at Caesars booking a good win then jizzing it away. Grrr!

Venetian shops
Guy on a Segway outside the Venetian“Las Vegas and the fuckin’ Mirage”
Scotty Nguyen’s car (probably) outside Rio
Today was pretty lazy, slept ’til like 2 then lay in bed watching the Mask of Zorro Got up at like 5 and headed into the Rio, played a short cash session and ran pretty poorly, the table wasn’t great either. So I quit and left after a few hours. The $50k horse event was on which was pretty cool to rail for a bit, and the $5k 6-max too. Awesome fields. Isabelle Mercier is sooooo hot in real life. Had a burger from In n Out which was sweet.

Damn I’ve played 76 hours of poker since arriving here just 11 days ago, pretty sick.

Kind of concerned that almost half of the trip has gone and I’ve not done a lot of the touristy shit I was aiming to do. Really need to hook up some of the following…

• Shooting guns
• Spearmint Rhino
• Rollercoaster at NY NY
• Stratosphere
• Shopping at outlet mall
• Cirque de Solie show
• Penn and Teller
• UFC 86
• Rancid gig at the House of Blues
• Play at Bellagio and Wynn
• Euro 2008 final

No idea when I’m gonna get the chance to half of this stuff but if I get the chance to do some of it that’d be cool. Will probably try to do most of it on the last week while the main event is on. Next few days are gonna be griiiiinding to try to get in a better position to play this WSOP event… might take Saturday off though, watch the football then go drinking or something.

Booked some small wins day before yesterday and put in a decent sized online session, getting like 800 hands in on the laptop.

Headed in to Caesars Palace yesterday to play cash game onlines and did well despite only getting a few hours sleep the night before. Seeing as drinks are basically free while playing I decided to start working my way through their drinks menu. I recommend the Chocolate Julius, tastes like the fakest chocolate ever but is very delicous.

Gonna get my grind on at the Rio or Caesars tomorrow. My aim is to get back to breakeven for the trip by the end of the weekend and play the last $1,500 WSOP event which is on Monday. If I’m playing it I’ll be selling half of my action at face value, will post about that over the weekend.

Noticed $100 had been shipped to my Stars account this morning, Amatay lost the bet on whether he could make $10k this month playing SNGs on Full Tilt. He kind of underestimated the difficulty of the task, I’m pretty sure he took off the first day of the challenge and went out drinking lol. I think he would have needed to play about 1,000 SNGs AND run well to win the bet. Unlucky you lazy fishay.

Spent a bunch of time on study yesterday, read a lot of The Poker Mindset, posted some comments on weaktight, railed a coaching session Brian was doing with Dice and picked Dan’s brain a ton about live poker. Made a lot of adjustments to my online game, a lot that Adam mentioned in his comments on the last post. Basically playing a lot more passively preflop and not inflating pots without a big hands, playing draws more passively, keeping a tighter image, etc.

Really not too much tourism or whatever going on, although that being said there are lots of big poker players at the Rio. On nearby tables to me yesterday were Devilfish, Raymer, Violette, Mortensen, David Williams which was cool. Anyway, we’re all pretty much still in the mood for playing poker so continuing to play a lot and expecting to get burned out soon. Will take a couple of days off and do some tourism and drinking. But until then it’s allll poker, planning on heading to the strip in an hour or two.

Dan and I headed out to Rio late last night and pulled a big session getting in at 7am. I booked a $1,040 win in the $2-5 online game. Building a huge pyramid stack throughout the night and cashing in 3 racks of chips FTW. Booooooom. It’s GO TIME.

Got up at 5pm today played some pool and had a delicous breakfast(?) of blueberry waffles and Mountain Dew, best drink ever. Now chilling in the pool playing some cash on Full Tilt with Matt, weather is pretty much a perfect 100 at this time in the evening (7:30pm).

Suspiciously 3 cases of All-in Energy Drink have been delivered to our house, I think from a tourney Dan entered.

Firstly you don’t get nearly as many hands in live as you do online, when you only play 200-300 hands in a 5-6 hour session (you could play 2k hands online in that time) variance is huge. So the results of a 200 hand session have a high luck element, it’d take weeks or months of live play for variance to even out and get a rough idea of how you’re doing. One unlucky hand or suckout in a live session will likely kill your entire session.

Bankroll
My bankroll seems shallower when I’m across here. I brought across $6k poker monies, and have $1k online at FTP out of my total $13k bankroll. I remember railing a session with Brian and Dice a few weeks back where Brian pointed out that he classed your bankroll as the amount of money you have instantly available (in that case he was talking about online on FTP) rather than your entire poker bankroll.

So the best solution for me is to find a way to make the remainder of my bankroll available to me in Vegas. I’ll figure out the best solution for this today.

When you spend 6-7 hours playing live at a table where the players are mostly awful it doesn’t feel good to book a losing session, let alone booking a string of 3-4 losing days. It certainly has affected my confidence and put me on a bit of a downer. So it’s important to accept that in the short term (which can mean a week, or even a month live) poker is largely a game online of luck. It would certainly take months of play live for the skill element to show.

Most important thing for me to do is to prevent tilt and keep myself sane is to accept that the day to day results do not matter, and focus on constantly improving my play. I’ll probably remove the day to day results thing I put at the left hand side too.

So there are a couple of solutions to this… the most obvious one is to move down and play within my Vegas roll requirements. This would mean playing from a $3.5k bankroll, so basically playing $200nl and $300nl. I really don’t want to do this as I feel comfortable enough skill wise to kill the $1000nl online games let alone $500nl which I’m currently playing and obviously want to profit as much as possible while I’m across here.

Short Term Results
I’ve lost count how many times I’ve blogged about short term results now. It’s the main thing that continually tilts and frustrates me, however not running well live is definately a lot different than not running will online.

I disagreed at the time but now I think my current situation illustrated why he’s right. At the moment I have $6k in Vegas, of which I’ve lost $2.5k. That sort of variance is completely normal at the virtual games I’m playing and is fine within my $13k bankroll. However in Vegas I’m looking at that loss as a factor of the $6k cash bankroll I have here, so I feel frustrated. Not only that but I feel anxious about losing another $2.5k and busto’ing my Vegas roll. It’s the same case at the moment on FTP where I only have $1k online due to the lame $1.5k per week deposit restrictions.

Also, thanks for all of the comments so far!

Just re-read a lot of The Poker Mindset and kind of cleared things up a bit after that depressing last post lol. There are 2 errors in my thinking that are causing me to be frustrated with poker at the moment.

So with the mindset sorted out… lets gooooooooo. Crushing time.

Been eating out with ppl quite a lot, the food here is just SO DAMN GOOD. Ate at Noodles at the Bellagio which was easily the best chinese/asian food I’ve ever sampled. The noodles/dumplings were on another level, if you’re in town… make sure to go there! Also been at The Cheesecake Factory at Caesars Palace which was good although we ended up having to get most of the food bagged as the appetizers were so big and we were filled up on cocktails. Flying Gorilla FTW. Sushi buffet restaurant tonight, huuuuuuge selection so tried a lot of different things, supremely delicious. The food here really is just top class.

As for other stuff going on umm…

So I’ve moved to playing $2-5 for a bit, really aiming to grind out a lot of hands and recoup a couple of k before moving back to tourneys and STTs. Unfortunately I just can’t seem to get things going, I feel like I’m playing well and the virtual games are great but I’m just not running well. I understand I need to be patient but I’m getting frustrated at being across here and not being able to beat up these soft fre online games.

Running 0/6 in the wsop sats killed $2.25k of my $$$ roll here in Vegas, and seeing as I’d be really annoyed if I continued to run bad then I’ve got to sit out of them for a while. This really frustrates me as they’re so soft and I know I can crush them. I’m sure my expectation in at least $150 per STT.

Went to see The Incredible Hulk tonight too which was good, although nowhere near as good as Iron Man. Kind of a solid 5/10 Marvel film.

Played an online session tonight and booked a 2 buy-in loss, just continued run-bad. I bet it’s because I didn’t play from the pool… damn. Wish I could get stuff going right now as it’s kind of depressing me from a poker point of view. Really my outlook on the situation is just a bit messed up. I’m simply running bad at the moment but I guess I’m not used to running bad live, it sits with you more. Gonna read over The Poker Mindset a bit tomorrow.

Will probably take the day off tomorrow, do a bit of study and get down to some drinking.

Kind of a really frustrating last few days poker wise. I really want to book some decent wins here but can’t run well.

Anyways, here’s some tourism from the Rio today… the sharp eyed will spot Doyle, Hellmuth, Ivey, Harman, Boatman, and more. There were some STACKED tables at the $10k Omaha Hi/Low where I took the pics. One table had Tony G, James Mackey, Howard Lederer, Annie Duke, Dario Minieri, Andy Bloch and John Juanda!

Other news… I ate a Baconator for dinner, how do you beat that? A fucking BACONATOR. Matt arrived today too so gonna go hang out for a bit. I’ve bust my cash roll now, so I’ll be cashing in some travellers cheques tomorrow.

Started playing WSOP single table sats today as they’re real soft. Buy-in is $325, with $3000 being awarded to 1st place in wsop tourney chips, but it’s almost always chopped 2 or 3 way. Unfortunately I’ve not chopped one of the damn things yet despite always feeling like the best player at my table. I dropped $2k today, variance imo.

EDIT: Made $380 on full tilt while chilling drinking in the pool with the guys. I run so damn hot from the pool. Shipppp it.