Change100 at PokerWorks

I wish our first two days in Vegas were as easy as the drive out from Los Angeles. Though we managed to drive 300 miles, pick up our keys, and shlep all our stuff from the car to our apartment at the Del Bocca Vista in less than five hours, Pauly managed to break a mirror in the bedroom before we could even finish unpacking. I’m not superstitious so I didn’t think much of it, but for him, it was akin to the seventh sign of the apocalypse. Everyone’s favorite internet doctor was genuinely spooked.

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I played the PokerStars Oceans 13 Darfur Tournament this afternoon and finished 263rd out of 744 runners. The event ended up raising $41,800 for Not On Our Watch. I went in for 4 rebuys plus the add-on and happily busted my Stars account for a worthy cause. I ended up seated at the same table as the lovely Mad Harper, who covers the EPT for PokerStars while Pauly drew Humberto Brenes’ table. He had more railbirds than the Costa Rican “Sharrrrrrrk.” I spotted Drizz, Katitude, yestbay1, bayne_s, AlCantHang, Derek, EPT founder John Duthie, Katja Thater, Bill Chen, Tom McEvoy, and Chris Moneymaker in the field.

My big opportunity to acquire a stack came late in the rebuy period when I called with A-K in a four-way pre-flop all in. My opponents had K-J, K-J and 5-8 offsuit. An 8 flopped and I was felted. Did a double rebuy and hung on with between 3000-5500 for the rest of the tourney. I donked out when I raised with K-T from the cutoff, got re-raised by the button and just decided to shove for 10 BB more. He had Q-Q and that was the ballgame. But it wasn’t really about winning in this one.

Pauly played a lot better than I did and went out on a bona fide bad beat “with A-9 vs. A-2 and the cumstain rivered a 2… you can quote me on that.”

I played a few $6.50 turbos during the Darfur tourney and finished 2-2-4, funding a couple of rebuys. I suck at playing heads-up in these turbos and seem to lose all solid reasoning and patience when we both have like, 6000 chips and the blinds are 400-800/100. I blew huge chipleads heads-up to land both my second place finishes.

Tomorrow, Pauly and I pack up the car and move to Vegas for the next two months to cover the WSOP for PokerNews. For our summer digs, we have a lovely furnished apartment with a patio and a big screen TV at the tweaker-free Del Bocca Vista complex, which also features two pools and a gym. We have a ridiculously short commute to the Rio and are within a five-minute drive of a Sonic. Mmmmmm… Texas Toasters. We’ll have a few days to settle in, attend some pre-WSOP meetings, and hopefully find time to play some cards.

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…)

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.”

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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)

While sweating the Ohio State-Georgetown and Florida-UCLA games Saturday night (Pauly had bets out and I’m miraculously in contention to win his NCAA pool), my inner junkie got the best of me so I played this: (more…)

After a 2 week hiatus, I got back on the horse and played another blogger tournament. Pauly was feeling well enough to play in the Riverchasers tourney and I decided to join him, having really nothing better to do until the series finale of The O.C. came on at 9 PM. (more…)