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WSOP Taxes

Date: Sun, Nov 16, 2008

Sometimes I hate living in the UK. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things I love about this amazing and unique country, but from time to time I get annoyed with the weather, the way the country is run or a number of other random annoyances.

It's easy to just see the negatives, but it's important that you don't take the positives for granted. One of these is that I don't have to pay tax on my poker winnings. This suits me for two reasons, the first is that obviously I make more money, but the second is that I'm lazy when it comes to things like record keeping and form filling. So with the news about the taxes due by the players at the Final Table of the WSOP, I'm very grateful for the tax laws on gambling in my home nation.

It's been widely reported so I won't go into too much detail, but overall the players who made at FT this year potentially face an average tax bill of over 42%. There are some changes as the winner Peter Easgate moved to the UK during the break (one definate advantage of the FT delay for him, that's for sure) but the overall result is that all of the players are paying at least some taxes on their winnings.

Had Eastage not moved he would have been in line to pay 72.77% of his winnings, some $6.6 million, straight to Denmark's tax agency. That's a pretty sick rake.

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The Poker Economy

Date: Fri, Nov 14, 2008

The Poker Economy

I have never really thought about how the poker economy until the last couple of months. I always just saw a system of people depositing $100 on a Friday night, donking it off in whatever SNG's or cash games they saw fit with the money filtering through to the winning players (and some others who eventually lose it) and the rake takes it cut. The winning players move up, maybe some cash a bit out, maybe some of the players at the higher levels take some of the money off them and move up, and so on.

Tournament wise I think you have to assume that your average winner of the Sunday million or an FTOPS event doesn't plough the $200k back into the poker economy. It seems likely such is the same for the mid/high stakes grinders too. I think this system is reasonably sustainable, as long as there is a steady supply of people doing the initial depositing and some maniac open shoving every third hand on a Friday night at $2/$4.

So it's interesting to see how things are changing at the moment. Someone told me last week that cash game traffic was actually up at Stars and FTP over the last few weeks. I thought that was a little strange give than they are currently struggling to make some of their more aggressive guarantees at the moment. However, it would appear that at least some of this traffic is coming from other sites where the games are drying up, as I found out this weekend. There has almost always been decent traffic at Cake and Party for the limits I play ($200NL/ $400NL) at the weekend, but that seems to have slowed a bit recently, and with less decent table selection options available, I found my self playing cash at Stars for the first time in ages.

On the positive side, there still seems to be plenty of action online. It feels a bit like early post UIGEA with nobody really knowing what effect it will have on the player pool. The games may be marginally tougher but for now at least, I think the industry is going to be fine. It will be interesting to see what happens other the coming months as people discover that this financial storm may be a little harder to weather than people suspected.

Now of course we have the confirmation/finalisation of UIGEA to fret about. I think the banks currently have a bit more to worry about that spending money on systems to implement the changes made my a pretty open-for-interpretation law, but that’s just the way I see it. The reality is it could be worse, and the harder it is to deposit the less liquidity there will be in the games, so they are bound to get tougher.

Certainly an interesting time for online poker. And only time, as we are all fully aware, will tell.

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Where are the November Nine?

Date: Wed, Sep 24, 2008

I'm not sure what Harrahs/ESPN's plans were to hype up the WSOP final table, but it doesn't seem to be working.

As we approach the end of September I honestly can't name any of the players at the final table. Perhaps that would have been different if the gorgeous and highly marketable Tiffany Michelle had made the table, or either Helmuth or Matasow had managed to run a bit deeper.

I think if they are going to generate the hype they need to pull this off they need to start now. As for making it a global event, I haven't even seen anywhere it's being shown here in the UK. I guess we'll have to wait for re-runs on some random entertainment channel in 2010 or something.

I hope I'll be proved wrong and when the WSOP programmes start to air they pick up a significant amount of interest. This should be a great chance for poker to get an influx of new players to the game, and help improve the profile of poker as a game where peoples dreams can be realised.

On that note, the WCOOP Main Event final table featured a microstakes tournie player who won a $5200 seat in a depositors freeroll. He wasn't able to unregister so played, made the final table and ended up dealing for over $800k with a shot at making over $1 million if he won. If you're going to run good for once of your life, I'm pretty sure that's the time to do it...

Edit: Sods law, after I posted this I fire up Stars and see they are doing a big promo called The Million Dollar Men which involves the 6 PokerStars players at the final table of the WSOP.

Trust Stars to succeed where others have failed.

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Where are the November Nine?

Date: Wed, Sep 24, 2008

I'm not sure what Harrahs/ESPN's plans were to hype up the WSOP final table, but it doesn't seem to be working.

As we approach the end of September I honestly can't name any of the players at the final table. Perhaps that would have been different if the gorgeous and highly marketable Tiffany Michelle had made the table, or either Helmuth or Matasow had managed to run a bit deeper.

I think if they are going to generate the hype they need to pull this off they need to start now. As for making it a global event, I haven't even seen anywhere it's being shown here in the UK. I guess we'll have to wait for re-runs on some random entertainment channel in 2010 or something.

I hope I'll be proved wrong and when the WSOP programmes start to air they pick up a significant amount of interest. This should be a great chance for poker to get an influx of new players to the game, and help improve the profile of poker as a game where peoples dreams can be realised.

On that note, the WCOOP Main Event final table featured a microstakes tournie player who won a $5200 seat in a depositors freeroll. He wasn't able to unregister so played, made the final table and ended up dealing for over $800k with a shot at making over $1 million if he won. If you're going to run good for once of your life, I'm pretty sure that's the time to do it...

Edit: Sods law, after I posted this I fire up Stars and see they are doing a big promo called The Million Dollar Men which involves the 6 PokerStars players at the final table of the WSOP.

Trust Stars to succeed where others have failed.

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Where are the November Nine?

Date: Wed, Sep 24, 2008

I'm not sure what Harrahs/ESPN's plans were to hype up the WSOP final table, but it doesn't seem to be working.

As we approach the end of September I honestly can't name any of the players at the final table. Perhaps that would have been different if the gorgeous and highly marketable Tiffany Michelle had made the table, or either Helmuth or Matasow had managed to run a bit deeper.

I think if they are going to generate the hype they need to pull this off they need to start now. As for making it a global event, I haven't even seen anywhere it's being shown here in the UK. I guess we'll have to wait for re-runs on some random entertainment channel in 2010 or something.

I hope I'll be proved wrong and when the WSOP programmes start to air they pick up a significant amount of interest. This should be a great chance for poker to get an influx of new players to the game, and help improve the profile of poker as a game where peoples dreams can be realised.

On that note, the WCOOP Main Event final table featured a microstakes tournie player who won a $5200 seat in a depositors freeroll. He wasn't able to unregister so played, made the final table and ended up dealing for over $800k with a shot at making over $1 million if he won. If you're going to run good for once of your life, I'm pretty sure that's the time to do it...

Edit: Sods law, after I posted this I fire up Stars and see they are doing a big promo called The Million Dollar Men which involves the 6 PokerStars players at the final table of the WSOP.

Trust Stars to succeed where others have failed.

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WCOOP

Date: Fri, Sep 12, 2008

I have been seriously impressed by the turnout at the WCOOP this year. Stars have just had to increase the number of seats in the $25k HU event as it reached it's 64 person capacity a full three days before the event was due to start. They have also smashed the guarantees on all of the events so far, so maybe getting 2,000 players to stump up $5k for the Main Event, which has a $10 million guarantee, won't be a difficult as I thought.

Unfortunately I'm 0 for 4 during this series, and it looks unlikely I'll be able to play any more events.

As I suspected the play in the non Hold'em events was horrible, but I think all the super duper mega crapshoot sats probably had something to do with that. I satted into the $320 Omaha event in a $107 tournie with 750 starting chips and 3 minute levels, the only saving grace being that none of these super turbo satellites have a rake. I'm pretty sure people who simply had no idea what they were doing were playing these, and due to the structure of the sats there would have been plenty of them in the main WCOOP tournies.

Even though I won't be participating I still have a decent number of stakes in people for the remaining events, some of which are most definitely due a ~$400k win so hopefully I'll have a big score to write about next week.

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Harrington, WCOOP and Cash Games

Date: Fri, Sep 5, 2008

It's been a busy few weeks for me since my last entry and although I have played a fair bit of poker, it's been a bit hit and miss, and mostly cash games.

I ran at 4BB/100 over 35k hands in August at $400 NL 6 Max on Party, but I also did a few 12 tabling sessions on Stars at $200 NL when I had the motivation. Hardly exciting stuff, but certainly very profitable.

I have also been reading the Harrington cash game books over the last few weeks. I have seen people on various forums arguing both ways over the books, but I really like them. I don't think they'll ever be the well known 'must read' books that the Harrington on Hold'em books are, but they definatly have a place on the bookshelf of anyone who plays cash games. I really like Harringtons writing and explanitory styles, and I think these make the books easy to understand. As with the tournament books there isn't anything in them that makes you go 'Wow, that's some crazy shit, that might just work' but they help you look at your own game and how you approach certain aspects of deep stack play. It's also nice to look at someone elses thought processes and the way they view other peoples situations in hand examples from multiple angles.

Unfortunately I haven't really had time to play any tournies. Mostly I have just been donking around in 45 man Turbos when I haven't felt like playing cash. I think there is probably some decent money to be made in these, especially at the $55 level where they run often enough to get significant volume in but the players are still aweful. You get some regular multitablers and some decent players in them, but most of these are easy to identify if you use PAHUD or something similar.

So after grinding cash games for over a month now I fell like switching back to tournies again for a while. Hoepfully I should have more time now that work is a little quieter.

The WCOOP starts today and I have been playing a few sats to different events. I managed to win two seats to $530 events and an EPT Double Shootout which was also good for $800 in W$. I'm going to be playing the first NL event tonight, then the $530 NL on Sunday followed by maybe one or two random $215's during the week.

Unfortunely in the second week I'm moving, so I don't know how quickly I'll get a new broadband connection or whaetver set up. Hopefully it will be in place by Sunday for the $1k NL event, but I really have no idea how long it will take.

It's times like this I wish I was a bit better at other games. My HORSE isn't too bad, with the possible exception of Razz, but I don't think I have enough of an edge to be playing the $320 PLO events or anything like that. I might be wrong of course, I'm sure with all the sats the fields in the non Holdem WCOOP tournies will be bad, so maybe I should take a shot at one or two if I get the chance.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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