Who’s Your Daddy?

Well, it’s not me for sure.  Congrats go to Trauma Poker who outlasted drizz and CJ for the DADI HORSE title.  It was my first HORSE tourney, one of my first tourneys in a couple weeks, and I stumbled out after a big busto hand in Stud H/L.

So I ended up heading back to HORSE at Stars after busting out, this after an afternoon session as well.   Between the two sessions (afternoon and evening), I was up another $536.  I’m still making a ton of bad decisions, probably in Omaha H/L the most.  It hearkens back to my early days of poker north of G-Vegas, when I was playing guts and wild card draw games as a shift supervisor in a textile mill.  I worked in the dye plant of a knit, dye, and finish operation, and we made fabric for the automotive industry along with swimsuit and intimate apparel material.  I remember playing some wild wildcard pot-matching game at a management meeting (I was one of the youngsters), made no money at the time.  Was dealt trip 7’s when 2’s, 4’s, and 10’s were wild, was in, lost that pot (matched $25 along with two other guys), then lost the next pot (matched $75 pot) the a third ($225).  I had to write a check for the third pot, and I was just freaking out.  There was one guy who was in and it was folded to me, and I was right of the dealer.  If I folded and the dealer did as well, the guy would drag the pot.  I had just rags, and I knew the pot had all my money, and I just had to fold and all my money went to the other guy.  This wasn’t all-in re-buy, this was you had to find money to stay in the hand.  Brutal stuff.

Anyways, back to Omaha.  Basically, I just tend to overvalue almost everything.  In no particular order, that would be the non-nut low, two pair, the overpair, the bad flush.  The list goes on and on.  There is another list for Stud and Stud H/L I’m sure, but I don’t have the energy to document it.  I’ll probably be heading to Felicia’s to bone up on stud at least.

I’ve played long enough to at least have a hint that my HORSE run is part play and part luck.  There has to be part learning curve on other folks as well.  One interesting dynamic is that I don’t use PokerTracker when I play HORSE, since only holdem shows up during play.  I don’t know that it makes for any better reading of opponents or anything, maybe it does a little, I don’t know.  Besides the change in games, the other significant change for me is that I’m playing 6-8 handed.  HORSE is an 8-max game due to the stud games, and with the scarcity of tables coupled with a player sitting out, you’ll often find yourself 6-handed or less.  I’ve never been much of a short-handed player, skipping the 6-max tables in pursuit of the comfort of folding on a full ring table.  This has forced me into playing more hands, which I still need to work through a bit.

Linda just chatted with me using Skype.  She was at the Miami airport, connecting from Vegas to Aruba for the UltimateBet WPT event.  She basically holds down two jobs, dealing at the Bellagio while driving PokerWorks.  It is a very, very tough thing to do, and she is great at both.  It basically means that she comes home from dealing, then is working with programmers and other PokerWorks folks several hours straight, all trying to improve the site.  Make sure you stop by and give her some love during all this.

As you may or may not know, the World Championship of Online Poker is going on at Stars.  To give you some comparison of prize pool and numbers:  the WSOP Circuit Event in Lake Tahoe last week drew 125 players paying $5k each, rounding up to a $615k prize pool and a $196k top prize.  WCOOP Event #2 ($530 entry, NLHE) brought out a whopping 4,495 entries for a $2.25MM prize pool and a grand prize of $320,865 for Sweden’s Rambo5.   What does that mean?  The glory might be on the Travel Channel or ESPN, but the loot is online.

That’s enough for me right now.  More coffee, get some work done, then a big weekend of coaching soccer and maybe sneaking to the table.  Have a great weekend, and hope to see you soon.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 7:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized.