High On Poker

Hello from beautiful New Orleans. Wifey Kim and I caught a 7am flight, and we’ve spent the day walking around the city and getting our bearings. Of course, that meant a brief detour through Harrah’s to check out the casino and the poker room. Even though it was about 11am on a Wednesday, the poker room looked pretty busy, with a decent waitlist going for 1/2 and 2/5 NL and an interest list for LHE/LO mixed. I won’t be able to play until tomorrow, when wifey Kim starts her first program at the Speech-Hearing confernence at about 11am. That’ll keep her busy through about 5pm, giving me 6 uninterrupted hours of live poker…with more to come on Friday if wifey Kim finds any other programs worth attending.

Last night, though, was a real trip. I got home a little later than usual because I was trying to get everything in order at work before I took my vacation. By the time I was home, wifey Kim was still hours from returning from her monthly Tuesday dinner date with her girlfriends, so I decided to fire up a tournament. I looked at the offerings and decided last minute to forego PokerStars $22 PLO8 tournament in favor of the 6-max $22 NLHE tournament with a $2k Guarantee. There were about 180 players in the event and it was already in late registration, so I signed up. By the time registration closed, there were around 380 players. Go figure.

Of course, with my trip scheduled for the next morning and wifey Kim galavanting around town, I probably shouldn’t have been playing at all. I should’ve been cleaning the apartment, because nothing is worse than returning from a vacation only to find a mess. So, I multitasked. I took out the garbage during one of the synchronized breaks. I emptied the clean dishwasher and filled it anew with the few dirty dishes in the sink. I took apart our drycleaning and put my half away, leaving wifey Kim’s clothes by her closet. And I played poker. As best I could, anyway.

I cannot remember the last time I was so card dead. I must not have seen a card higher than 9 for the first half hour. It was incredibly frustrating, because my table was full of the loosest donks I’d seen in a while.  Players were raising from the CO with Q3o and then playing random flops like they had the nuts. Of course, I did a foolish thing. I started to get too antsy and took a couple of stabs at pots, both building them pre-flop and continuation betting post-flop, when the opportunity arose. This was a complete and utter disaster. At first, I was getting folds, but the blinds were still too low to really care. But eventually the loose dousches stopped folding and began to play back at me. When you have such little regard for your opponents, its not easy to give them credit for hands, but I found some solace in one of the only useful pieces of advice I got from the Tao of Poker (the book, not Pauly’s gonzo blog): Sometimes, when it feels like a guy cannot possibly have it because he’s been too loose/aggressive, he just may be on a string of lucky cards. You can try to fight it by playing back at him, but this could just lead to destruction. The wiser path is to accept that it is just not your time and to wait for the flow of variance to return in your favor.

And that’s what I did, eventually. First, I dusted off more than half of my 3k starting stack, hitting a low point at about 1,210. While that sucked, it was much better than the alternative, busting out early with no chance of recovery.

Eventually, I was able to put aside the other things distracting me and get down to business. With about 90 players left, I was in the 20s or 30s, until I hit a major hand that catapulted me to the top of the leaderboard. I help AQ and after open raising, faced a re-raise all-in from a push monkey and a call by the player next to him. I was still relatively new at the table and had yet to get a read on the caller, but even after cycling through about four different tables, I noticed a remarkable trend: it wasn’t just my first table that sucked; the tournament was full of donks.

I’d really be interested in other people’s perspective on this, so I invite comments on the subject. Is PokerStars filled with worse players than FullTilt? I had surmised this in the past, but I hadn’t played at Stars for months, if not a year plus, until the recent stint, and the difference in play was amazingly stark. Stars was full of fish!

I made the call, only to see that the pushmonkey had JT and the other caller had JJ. I was gripping the throw pillow and saying a prayer in my head that went something like this, “PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!” And it worked. The turn was a Queen and I practically tripled up, catapulting myself into the top ten in chips.

From there, I continued to accumulate, using the advantage gained from having a huge stack. The big stack benefit was only magnified by the short-handed tables, and I was able to continue to gather chips.

After the bubble broke at around 36 people, the action picked up again. I was in solid 12th place or so, but at around 28 people, lost a pretty large pot when I walked into the nuts. I held JT and called a raise, since the raises were very liberal and I was having success betting people off of pots. There was one other caller and we saw a flop of AJT. I figured I was in great shape, but it turned out that I was in third place. The original raiser had KQ for the nuts, and the other caller had AT for a better two-pair. I check called a flop bet, and then check-raised all-in on the turn, since both players had less than a min-raise left behind them. Alas, my hard work from earlier had paid off. I still had about 5k even after that disasterous hand, and had dropped to the bottom 10 players in the tournament.

Nothing to do but get back to work. I fought my way back, stealing pots when I could and maximizing made hands where appropriate. The blinds and antes were starting to soar, so once I got into a stealing rhythm, it didn’t take long to work up to 8k, then 10k, and so on. From here, a lot of the details alude me, but by the time we were down to two tables, I had reclaimed my spot near the top of the leaderboard. It’s weird seeing over 200k chips in ones stack, starting from 3k. But it was that good kinda weird.

At the final table, everything was moving well until we were down to three-handed. By then, it was almost 1am. At about 12am, I started getting nervous. I needed to get some sleep before the 4:30am wake-up necessary to catch my morning flight. In fact, when wifey Kim went to bed, she asked, “Are you even going to sleep tonight?” I gave her an incredulous look that was shorthand for, “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll be done in time to get enough sleep.” But by midnight, I was doubting my words. That caused a tad of anxiety, but like most things in poker, I just needed to compartmentalize and focus on playing well.

Three-handed went on for a long while with a lot of parity. Eventually, we each had similar stack sizes, but I found myself as the shortstack. I made my final exit with AQ. I called a raise, expecting to trap with my AQ. I flopped the Ace on an AKx board. I check-called. Then check-called the turn. And finally made my play on the river, check-pushing all-in. My opponents’ ranges were still crap, so I felt I was ahead, but feelings don’t count in poker. He had AK, and I was out in 3rd place for prize money north of $750. Not bad on a $22 investment, which incidentally constituted 1/2 of my Stars bankroll.

Not one to keep significant money online, I have already cashed out $500. I figured it was especially prudent since the UIGEA enforcement deadline is Dec. 1. I don’t expect much to happen, but I don’t like that gamble.

The $500 withdrawal counts as a win toward my yearly goal. I consider any deposit online an instant loss and any withdrawal an instant win to keep myself honest. I don’t track game to game online; just deposits and withdrawals. It makes life a tad easier and after all, I’m really a live player who dabbles online.

The $500 win puts me over my annual goal. That’s pretty sweet, although that won’t change anything about Harrah’s New Orleans tomorrow and Friday, or my play in Vegas or AC in December. What a fantastic poker schedule!

Until next time, make mine poker!