Change100 at PokerWorks

Tuesday was my day to rage solo. I unexpectedly had the afternoon off from work while Pauly was down at Bellagio all day covering the WPT Championships. After grabbing a late breakfast with him at the Cafe Bellagio (I went for the lobster omelet and suggest you do the same) he adjourned to media row in the Fontana Lounge while I walked back out to the Strip, contemplating what to do with my day. Obviously poker was on the agenda but the hour being not yet noon, there would be hardly any good live games running. An afternoon donkament was in order. I snagged a copy of Card Player and decided on the $60 buy-in 1 PM NLHE freezeout at Planet Hollywood.

When I arrived at the poker room, the manager informed me that the tournament start time got moved to 2 PM about 2 weeks ago, so I bought into the only cash game running at the time, $3-6 LHE. The lineup consisted mostly of players waiting for the tourney to start, including a piss-drunk German tourist with stringy blonde hair who played every single hand. He was still awake from the night before and was still pounding Heinekens. Between him and the passive, limping tournament donkeys, the table played like a Commerce game. I won a huge pot off the German when I flopped top pair with T-7 from the small blind, turned two pair and rivered a boat. He called three bets on the river with ace high. I was praying for him to be at my tournament table. (more…)

“Sometimes, you’ve just got to say, ‘what the fuck?’”

-Risky Business

Anna Wroblewski’s story is a good one. It’s perhaps the sweetest poker Cinderella story since a guy named Moneymaker parlayed $39 into $2.5 million nearly four years ago at the WSOP. As the legend goes, then-19 year old Anna left her native Chicago for Las Vegas 2 years ago to take a shot at making a living as a poker pro. Playing underage in Strip casinos, Anna’s luck ran afoul and she soon lost her bankroll, necessitating her return home. Now 21, Anna recently came back to Vegas to give it another try, but went broke again. To pay her bills, she got a $10/hr. restaurant job and took her first week’s paycheck, all $300 of it, to the Bellagio where she bought into a single-table satellite for the $3,000 Five-Star Classic NLHE event. Anna won the satellite, and the $3K tournament. After a chop was made, Anna took home close to $300,000 and a $25,000 seat into the WPT World Championships. I’m guessing she also quit her job.

Following the Bellagio coverage yesterday, I loved that Anna was downing beers and hopping around the Fontana Lounge amidst a sea of hardened poker faces. Tripling up early in the first day of play, she exuded the sort of unfiltered confidence at the table that can only come with a life-changing score. Financial burdens are instantly lifted. Self-doubt vanishes. You feel like you can compete. That you deserve to be there. There’s a part of all of us, as poker players, that wants to be that story. (more…)

Once again, a big thank you to all the readers who offered some great analysis of this troublesome hand. However, unlike the K-K hand from last week, this case is not exactly of the open-and-shut variety. Half a dozen or more potential plays were offered up, all of which have sound reasoning behind them. Let’s look at this hand one more time:

There are ten players remaining in a 45 player SNG. Six are paid. Blinds are 250-500 and play is five-handed. Action is folded to you in the small blind and you hold the 8c-9s. You have 9200 chips and the big blind has 12,500. You complete the blind and the BB checks. The flop is the 5s-6c-9c. You bet 1,000. The BB raises to 2,000 and you call. The turn is the 5c. The pot is 5,000 and you have 4,600 left.

What’s your move?

(more…)

There are ten players remaining in a 45 player SNG. Six are paid. Blinds are 250-500 and play is five-handed. Action is folded to you in the small blind and you hold the 8c-9s. You have 9200 chips and the big blind has 12,500. You complete the blind and the BB checks. The flop is the 5s-6c-9c. You bet 1,000. The BB raises to 2,000 and you call. The turn is the 5c. The pot is 5,000 and you have 4,600 left.

What’s your move?

I played Miami Don’s Blogger Big Game last night, capping off a close-but-no-cigar sort of weekend in poker for me. 53 bloggers showed up creating a $3,600 prize pool with almost $1,400 awarded for first place. Since that would like, quadruple my bankroll, I dug out the $75 token I’d been hanging onto for weeks after winning it in a “token frenzy” and decided to take a shot, that cheesy line from Rounders echoing in my head.

“You can’t lose what you don’t put in the middle… but you can’t win much either.”

(more…)

The world is so thick with poker news and gossip today we almost need our own tabloid…

The Poker Biz reported yesterday that Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker have dropped their entire stable of sponsored American poker pros. Antonio Esfandiari, Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi, and Mark Seif were all given their walking papers, their estimated $500,000 a year endorsement contracts up in smoke. What would happen to UB’s Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke was less clear, but a visit to both sites reveals that all references to Duke, Hellmuth, photos of “Team UB,” Absolute’s weekly $1K heads-up matches with site pros for the TLB winners… everything related to them was gone. It seems to be a cover-their-ass move for the safety of these pros, all of whom live in the U.S. In light of the Neteller arrests, Absolute/UB wouldn’t want them getting pinched as an employee of a gaming site or anything like that.

Though wouldn’t that be kind of a treat? Seeing Phil Hellmuth hauled out of the WSOP in handcuffs? “They forgot one thing! I can dodge bullets, baby!” (more…)

That’s what I usually yell at my screen when I get bad beated online. A yell is probably the wrong word. It’s more of a cry, painted in severe exasperation. Whatever it is, Showcase knows to stay the hell away from me whenever he hears it.

I made that cry/yell/whatever three times tonight. (more…)

Thank you all for your comments on the J-T and K-K hands. I truly appreciate the time you took to offer your thoughts.

Let’s look at the K-K hand first.

After the UTG player made it 7,000 and I saw the kings, I thought back to what he had seen me do at our first table, early in the rebuy period. I was pushing a lot of hands and made a couple of huge suckouts, including one on him when my 3-3 took out his 9-9 with a 3 on the turn. The whole table was getting frustrated with me, as I built a big stack rather quickly and decided to wield it instead of tightening up. I played a lot of marginal hands and won more coinflips than I lost in those early levels. He was playing a loose (and I think correct) rebuy strategy as well, he’d just caught the worst of it. But here he was again, so my first instinct when he raised UTG and I picked up the kings was “how can I get the most value out of this situation?” (more…)

Let’s look at a “hypothetical” situation.

You are playing the PokerStars $11 rebuy, where there are over 1600 runners. You have $61 invested in the tournament. 232 players remain and the bubble bursts at 225. First payout level is $78, covering your investment. You have 44,000 in chips, just slightly above average. The blinds are 1000-2000/100. You have just been moved to a new table and have played less than an orbit there, but recognize the UTG player’s avatar from your first table, where you both played a loose-aggressive style in the early stages of the rebuy period. That same player (big-stacked at 100,000) raises UTG to 7000. You are dealt K-K in 3rd position. You consider pushing, but decide instead to re-raise to 20,000. Action folds around back to the UTG player, who moves all-in. You have 24,000 remaining in your stack.

What’s your move?

(I’ll be revisiting this hand and the J-T hand in a later post)

Typically I’d be giving EPT Monte Carlo final tabler Gavin Griffin all sorts of flack for his spiky coif that is currently dyed a light pink, but there is quite a story behind the odd color job. According to a report on the PokerStars blog, Gavin and his girlfriend Kristen, a breast cancer survivor, recently did the Avon Walk for Life and have pledged to walk another 39 miles this summer. Gavin dyed his hair pink for the walk in a show of solidarity. PokerStars has aggreed to help their effort in a big way, donating $15,000 to the Walk for Life to start and by matching donations up to $100,000 made by PokerStars players for the duration of the EPT Monte Carlo final table (where Gavin is just outside the chip lead).

To make a donation, open up PokerStars and make a player-to-player transfer to a special account set up for this purpose called “AvonDonate.”

Kudos to Gavin for raising awareness. Hopefully there will be major good karma on the way for him at this final table!

**UPDATE**

DEFINITELY good karma. Gavin just won the EPT Monte Carlo, collecting 1,825,010 Euros!