WCOOP, WSOPE and being bad at poker

Date: Mon, Jul 14, 2008

After grinding out the cash games last week during the Stars promo I'm back to tournies this week. I have sucked sooo badly all week, repeatedly running up huge stacks and donking them off in a variety of super fun ways. I went deep in a couple but lost key flips/got sucked out on, and had a couple of light shoves called and way behind when short. Didn't really get much going in the Sunday Million or any of the other Sunday tournies last night, so a dissapointing week overall.

Unfortunately all of the guys I backed are out of the WSOP. One guy made the money but busted in the first level. It was fun railing the guys and it was cool being at work in the morning here in the UK and getting the odd update e-mail.

There isn't much on the poker horizon for me a the moment, but two things I'm looking forward to are the WSOPE and the WCOOP, both of which aren't until September.

Since they have added a £1500 (roughly $3k) event to the WSOPE, I initially looked at trying to sat into that, but it appears nobody is running sats to that event, so I may try to buy-in direct. I don't really have the patience or the bankroll to try to win a $25k ME package, so I doubt I'll be bothering with that.

WCOOP, WSOPE and being bad at poker

Date: Mon, Jul 14, 2008

After grinding out the cash games last week during the Stars promo I'm back to tournies this week. I have sucked sooo badly all week, repeatedly running up huge stacks and donking them off in a variety of super fun ways. I went deep in a couple but lost key flips/got sucked out on, and had a couple of light shoves called and way behind when short. Didn't really get much going in the Sunday Million or any of the other Sunday tournies last night, so a dissapointing week overall.

Unfortunately all of the guys I backed are out of the WSOP. One guy made the money but busted in the first level. It was fun railing the guys and it was cool being at work in the morning here in the UK and getting the odd update e-mail.

There isn't much on the poker horizon for me a the moment, but two things I'm looking forward to are the WSOPE and the WCOOP, both of which aren't until September.

Since they have added a £1500 (roughly $3k) event to the WSOPE, I initially looked at trying to sat into that, but it appears nobody is running sats to that event, so I may try to buy-in direct. I don't really have the patience or the bankroll to try to win a $25k ME package, so I doubt I'll be bothering with that.

Stars Promo and WSOP

Date: Wed, Jul 9, 2008

I've played quite a lot of cash games on Stars over the last few days as they were running a double VPP promotion which was just about worth me moving from my usual games at Party. I dropped down a level to $200 NL and ran 10-12 tables of FR. I have to admit after doing so much 3-4 tabling and improving my concentration I struggled a bit to start with but overall I finished up $1,200 which was not too bad, and managed to clear 12,000 VPP's.

I would have liked to do more, but I only really got the chance to play on the final two days of the promotion. It looks like they might be doing a similar one next week so maybe I'll get more time to play then.

It was part of a 4 week '2x' promotion by Stars during the first week of which they had the VPP promo above in addition to a bunch of double chance tournies at $2, $22 and $222. This week they are doubling the guarantees of all of their regular tournaments. I initially thought they might squeeze a small overlay on some of them, but that thought was quickly dismissed when the $50 gtd had an astonishing 2500 runners compared to it's usual 1200, and a $125k prizepool.

I posted on the forum that this was great and all, but only really means I'll be busting out of tournies with bigger prizepools. I didn't disappoint last night, busting from the 100k with KK < A9, from the 90k with AK < QQ, from the 80k with 55 < 85 (he shoved to resteal and I called, river 8 obv) and last but not least the 50k with KK < AA.

Good times.

I have been watching the WSOP ME updates all week too, and a couple of the guys I backed made it to day 2. One has just over 70k in chips, the other is short on 15k. Still plenty of room to play though and they are on separate days (2a and 2b) so at least I get to rail a little tonight and tomorrow. My favourite non poker story from the WSOP so far is of the guy who, when the cards were first in the air at the start of the day, stood up from his chair and crashed two symbols together. He was promptly informed about the excessive behaviour rule or whatever it's called, and told not to do it again. Something tells me he already knew about the rule.

Staking

Date: Tue, Jul 1, 2008

I have been doing a lot of staking recently, so I thought since it's more interesting than me talking about bubbling final tables or bitching about losing huge pots in cash games as a massive favorite I may as well write about it here.

There are two types of staking deal I engage in. The first is purely for fun, sometimes they make a little profit, sometimes they don't. I still seek to back + EV players but it's usually for small amounts, a typical deal will be someone playing 50,000 hands of $50 NL and me picking up 10% of a $1k seed fund and taking 60-80% of the profits on my share. I often rail these people, try to give them advice and just enjoy being a part of something they are trying to achieve. I have done a few smaller MTT ones too, backing people 100% for a set number of tournies and taking a cut of any profits.

The second type is more about making money. I have backed people for everything from $50 NL to 30/60 FL sometimes picking up all of their action. On the whole these deals have gone very, very well for me. One person I backed made me just over $4.5k in two separate deals (including makeup from the first) over just two months, and my biggest loss to date has been about $500 which I'm more than happy to write off given how well my other deals have gone.

Last week however I encountered my first real issue. I backed a player $2,000 to play $100 NL 6-max with a 20 buy-in BR over a set number of hands. This player was hugely +EV and after running badly at the start and dropping to $50 NL for a while, he eventually clawed it back and went on a nice run towards the end to finish up at $3800 total. We had a 70/30 split in my favour, so I was due to pick up a tidy $1200 profit and he was going to pick up $600 for his efforts.

Unfortunately after the deal had ended he supposedly decided he wouldn't want to play low stakes after being at $100 NL with his newly earned, but ultimately smaller $600 BR, so he proceeded to try to work up a bit more money using the money I staked him while he still had it.

The story is that he was taking shots and first lost the $600, then lost a bunch while tilting, eventually stopping at $2k. This was over a period of about 2 weeks while I didn't hear from him at all (before this we spoke 3-4 times a week, so initially I thought he had done a runner with the whole lot). I managed to get my $2k back which I was happy about after being frozen out and thinking I might end up with nothing, so at least I didn't actually lose anything on the deal.

Obviously I have no way of knowing if his story is true. He has no way to pay the money back, hence the original staking deal, and the only way he could raise more funds was to get another backer, which I would obviously move to block. So I think I have to write that money off, which is annoying, but I think it would be too much effort and stress to try to get it back when I consider my chances to be pretty low from the outset. Ironically I knew he wanted a larger BR, and if he didn't go silent for 2 weeks I was going to alter the deal slightly in his favour to give him a chance to build a half decent BR and start playing for himself.

All this leads to a few deals I have been arranging recently for the WSOP. I had a couple of stakes for people in prelims but I pretty much broke even on those with one early exit and one small cash. However, I have backed no fewer that 7 people for the WSOP Main Event this year, all on different deals. Some of them are buying straight up percentages, which isn't that good of a deal for the backer, but it's just a bit of gamboool with a potentially huge payouts.

So I'll be watching the ME with interest next week and hopefully one or two of my guys will go deep and make me some serious money...

Bubbling Final Tables Is Fun

Date: Sat, Jun 7, 2008

I often switch between cash and tournies depending on how I feel, but I generally go in patterns of a week or so playing one, then switching.

I think tonight might be the end of my tournie run for a week or so. I ran up a huge stack in the $10 rebuy on stars and made the final 2 tables 1/18. From there I lost like 459 flips and ended up busting in 13th after shoving over the top of a 3x BB raise with JJ, only for him to tank for like 30 seconds and call with KQ.

I can't win the flip and I miss out on what would have been my first FT for a while. On the bright side, I managed my big stack really well and utilised it to stay the CL from about 60 down to the final 2 tables.

So frustrating.

Well, this doesn't happen live...

Date: Thu, Jun 5, 2008

It's rare I make any stupid mistakes online with regards to bet sizes or accedental calls, so maybe I should be glad that this doesn't happen more often.

I rushed home from a busy day at work to make the $50k gtd on Stars and a few other tournies. About 10 mins in I get QQ in the SB and it folds to the button who just calls for 20. I bump it up to 100 and both the BB and the button call.

Flop = K85 with two hearts and I go to lead for 275 to see where I am.

Instead, I bet 2775, and the BB instacalls.

Interestingly he has 4h 5h for the flush draw, but of course still hits on the river.

So pissed off with myself now. Not because of the bustout, but because the $50k is pretty much the only decent tournie I can play tonight and I definitely wasn't busting on that hand if I didn't make that mistake.

WSOP 2008

Date: Tue, Jun 3, 2008

So it's WSOP time again. After seeing a few trip reports and live updates my enthusiasm is definitely back, I can't wait to get out there later in the series to tear it up and lose large amounts of money.

One of my favourite things about the WSOP is the stories it brings. So far this year I have heard of the open shoving cash game player who offered to take his whole table elsewhere to play in a limo (to which they obliged) and more recently today's action from the $1k rebuy event where a handful of people are in for $20k+, twice the buy-in for the main event and still on starting stack. It tilts the hell outta me when I'm in for $150 or something in the $10r, but I guess these guys are playing with the same rebuy period approach as me, just with a LOT more money.

All the stuff I have been reading has made me a little annoyed with myself for not playing any WSOP sats this year. I was really excited when they came out, made a half hearted effort to build a W$ roll and then never really followed up on it.

I look forward to posting some interesting stories over the next few weeks, and hopefully some deep runs from either myself or one of a couple of people I have backed this year.

Biggest Cash Pot

Date: Fri, May 30, 2008

Last week I was having a discssion about poker with a friend of mine who mainly plays live. He got me thinking about live poker again, and since I hadn't played for a while and had a 4 day weekend I thought I'd make an effort to play live.

It's fairly obvious from the title, but it went really well. I played two nights running and on the first night I made the final table of a £10 rebuy with 120 runners. I busted in 5th when I shoved 2 pair on the flop vrs a flush draw for half the chips in play and he hit.

I played a great £5/£5 NL cash game after I busted, but it broke up about 30 mins after I started playing as it was already pretty late.

I decided to play the game again the following night. It's a fair bit above my normal $400 NL games online (pretty much $1k NL) but I feel comfortable in the game, and it's not like I'm playing any significant volume.

It was an interesting mix of players, two or three players who knew each other who were quite old and nitty, two younger guys who were loose and aggressive, and the rest were either really straight forward or really awful.

Unfortunately it's not a particularly interesting hand, basically I raised preflop with AK, two callers, JT3 rainbow board, I raise, a guy in MP folds and the other calls. Turn is an offsuit Q so I bet out again, villain re-raises quite big and I flat. The river is a blank and I bet out 1/2 te pot or so and he jams.

I half expected him to have the same hand, but he flipped JT for flopped two pair and I raked in a pot of about £1200, which is roughly $2400. Not much happened in the game after that, but it was petty sweet to cash out my chips rather than just logging off after a win like that.

Not played much online this week, but have run quite deep in the $50k on Stars a couple of times. I made a pretty bad play in one with about 40 left and a decent stack, which I was pissed off about, but I played again the next night and made a similary decent run. I was runnning sooo bad in the $50k, so hopefully this will be the start of me running a little deeper in it from now on. It's pretty much the only decent tournie that starts at a good time for me, so I play it pretty much every time I'm online in the evenings.

Cash Going Well

Date: Thu, May 22, 2008

Not too much going on recently. Didn't really get anywhere with the Sunday tournies this week. I'm a little annoyed about all the FTOPS events starting at 11pm UK time, but not much I can do about that.

I'm running at about 5bb/100 over the last 20k hands of $400 NL 6-max. Not the biggest sample size ever, but I think I'm finding my feet a little more now. I have invested some time in reading through my HH's and watching some videos on Cardrunners and PXF.

There does seem to be lots more decent multi tabling regulars at this limit, but I'm not struggling to find good games, and they also seem to want to steer clear of me unless someone is really spewing which is a good thing I guess. I'm only playing 3-4 tables at the moment, so I think it would be more of a problem if I wanted to start doing more. I can't see that being any time soon though, so I should be okay.

I'm aware I need to start posting more content, I just never seem to think about this blog. I'll try to make some notes when I'm playing so I remember anything interesting and make sure I post about it here.

Titles?

Date: Sun, May 4, 2008

I'm running out of names for titles, so I might start using the date in future. I should probably be more imaginative, but since my posts aren't that frequent they often cover a number of topics, so nothing really covers them all.

I have had a bit more time over the last week or so to play poker, which has made a nice change. I kept trying to play when I didn't have much time or had other things on my mind which inevitably doesn't work.

The other day I started playing what I thought was two turbo double shootouts because I only had a couple of hours to spare. They were both normal speed which I didn't have time to play. I donked around a bit and true to form when you're not trying, I won both my first tables and ran up big stacks at both final tables just before I had to go. I was 1/3 in the $650 satellite with 2 seats and 1/7 or 1/6 in the $215 Sunday million one with 3 seats.

I gave one of my non poker playing friends a quick lesson on how to play internet poker and handed over the controls. Needless to say he won neither seat, pretty much call/folding his stack into oblivion.

gg $765.

I played the Sunday Million for the first time in ages last Sunday. Unfortunately Monday is now an early start and a busy day for me at work, so normally I don't bother. It was the $530 buy-in this week and I came 70th or so for about $3,000. I basically short stacked the whole tournie, I think I had about an hour or so with above avg stack when was floating around 230k ish and the avg was 150-190k.

It's a bank holiday here tomorrow in the UK, so I'll be playing the Sunday tournies again tonight.

They confirmed the WSOP final table delay I spoke about in my last post. I still think it's a pretty crazy idea, but I guess it's probably never going to effect me. It should at least be entertaining to watch the build up and see what they can do with it. On the plus side, if it does create more hype and get more exposure then it will bring more players to the game, which is obviously a good thing.

WSOP Final Table Delay

Date: Tue, Apr 15, 2008

As some of you may have heard, Harrahs/ESPN are looking at delaying the Final Table of the WSOP by 3 months. The idea is that they would then have the time to follow the players around, build a back story and make the FT more of a global sporting event than it is now.

Some of the main reactions to this are quite funny:

- OMG What if someone dies in that 3 months
- People will collude and do deals
- People will get trained/coached by pros for a % of their winnings

Although I think all of these points are valid, I don't think any would be that big of a deal.

It's possible someone dies during the WSOP while they still have chips anyway. I realise that this is more likely given a 3 month gap in which to croak, but it's still not something that would be a major concern.

As for the training, I think you would be surprised how little you can teach some people in 3 months. I think the better professional players (if any) who make it would suffer a bit as the level of competition would increase, and naturally there will be more information available on them than the randoms who make it to the FT. However, the dynamics of the tournament can change at any time, so much of what they might learn could change in an instant. They suddenly find themselves short, or double through twice and a few players bust early and leave him 5 handed with a huge chip lead.

I don't think it's possible to practice all of those eventualities, so I still think the player who can adapt and draw on his own experiences will still have an edge.

There are some benefits for the players however. They will fill the poker media for 3 months prior to the big day. Their faces will be on the front of magazines, Stars and FTP will sponsor the non-sponsored players and they'll generally get a lot of exposure that they wouldn't otherwise, because normally we only know who makes the FT the day before. I can't even name the people who busted 6th or 7th in previous years, but I definitely would be able to if I got 3 months of them in interviews/magazines/websites.

After saying all this, I still think it's a bad idea. Harrahs are trying to hold on to a TV audience that is losing momentum. There is a lot of poker on TV these days and not enough people to watch it all. It's difficult as a producer of these shows, because fast paced action with vibrant well known pros is what the majority of poker programme viewers want. Only a minority want to see interesting well thought out hands with detailed analysis. When you're trying to appeal to a wide market you don't want to confuse them by saying that 'He floated the flop so that he could shove over the top of any turn card that was unlikely to have hit villains range'

If they want to appeal to the wider audience then this 3 month gap is the way to go.

I have a solution that probably helps both parties though. It's actually really simple.

Run the WSOP episodes DURING the WSOP. It's a long enough event, with 4 starting days you have plenty of time to edit a story together. Then it might be worth having a day or two gap before the final 18 start. That way they can catch up on the action, show the story so far and still keep the players happy. Play down to 9, break for a couple of days to air the last lot of highlights from the final two tables and build some excitement. Do some bios on the players, market the hell out of the final table then screen it live with a reasonable delay.

As long as they remain smart with which hands they show from the earlier tables I don't think this would be a bad idea at all. It keeps it close to the original format and nobody is going to get whacked to improve the equity of someone else at the table.

Back On Track

Date: Wed, Apr 2, 2008

Things have been much better since I got back from my holiday last week. I think the break did me some good.

I have been on a good cash game run over the last week, running up about 7 or 8 buy-ins over ~25k hands. I'm enjoying playing less tables with the same earn rate, but the $400NL games are definitely as tough, if not tougher than I expected. While I'm enthusiastic about playing cash I'm going to make the effort to learn as much as I can and put some more time into studying the game. I think table selection is going to be much more important than it ever has been for me. I have never really played at a level where you have to do as much as you can to avoid the good regulars.

I'm also looking around at some other sites, as I tend to stick to Party, FTP and Stars. I need a site with decent ring games and a good rakeback deal so I have more choice when the games are a bit dry elsewhere.

I haven't played many tournies since I got back. I played a couple of the big Sundays but other than that I have just been donking around in a few sats.

Last week I played in an awesome home game with 8 guys, of which only one really knew what he was doing. The stakes weren't high but it was certainly interesting trying to adjust my game to play against people who think 4 cards make a straight, and that middle pair is a hand to bet your house on. I might write up a trip report for that as it was good fun and actually highlighted a couple of aspects of my game that I need to work on.

No Fucking Way

Date: Fri, Mar 14, 2008

Ugh. If these sats were beyond a joke before then I really don't know what they are now. I made another FT of a Double Shootout tonight, making it 4 in the last 6 tournies. I'd trade any of those for a win on the second table of course, but it just doesn't want to happen. I got HU in this one and got my money in with 2 pair vrs a higher 2 pair.

I then made the FT of an $11 rebuy for the same $650 seat. I was only in for $33 and happy to make the FT, even if I was short. This was a regular speed tournie so we were quite deep by the time we got 4 handed. There was 2 seats up for grabs. I played pretty aggressively and was CL with and M of over 40 for quite a while. The shortish stack kept shoving quite deep over my SB raises and I was looking for a good spot to call. I finally picked up AQ, raised, he shoved and I call. He flips A8 and promptly flops an 8 and leaves me 4/4 and desperate to get back in it. I finally bust after shoving 44 into 77. If win the hand we're 3 handed with 2 seats and I'm a decent chip leader.

These are really starting to piss me off now. I have come so close so many times and like I said in my earlier post I'm giving up value in other games I could be playing instead of trying to build a roll for the WSOP sats. I'm actually up about $150 from playing all these sats from all the $80's and $60's that I have won from bubbling, which is pretty funny.

I didn't play the direct WSOP sat as I played live tonight. Got nothing going there but it was just fun tournie I play with a few friends who don't play too seriously.

Off on holiday for a week now so no poker until I return. Let's hope I can pick up some momentum when I get back. One thing is for sure though, I have already worked harder to win a WSOP seat this year than I did to win either of the two I won last year.

Double Shootout Sickness

Date: Thu, Mar 13, 2008

The $16 Double Shootouts to he $650 WSOP sat are getting beyond a joke now. I made another FT today (3rd in a row) and was shoving light a lot with 6 left and a stack around 1200 to 1800. I pick up the blinds twice in an orbit and get dealt KK in the BB. UTG opens for 600 and I shove for 1700.

UTG calls with 99 and the board runs out T2JQK. So sick. With how bad I'm running in these can I at least win an 80/20? That pot wold have seen me in great shape and this one paid 2 seats as it was nealry full.

I'm free tomorrow night so I might just buy in direct to the WSOP sat. I don't really want to waste too much time playing these to increase my value when I'm missing out on games where my hourly is much higher. Plus they are now tilting the shit outta me.