The Poker Chronicles

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June 30, 2004

Ohio Las Vegas Nights

Here in Ohio we really don’t have any casinos, so as far as non-internet poker goes you have two options. You can either play at a house game (illegal, but much more fun and higher stakes) or at a semi-legal Las Vegas Night, many of which are run all across Ohio every Thursday through Sunday. I call the Vegas Nights semi-legal because they technically are legal to run (under Ohio’s bingo laws) but the people who do run them break a large number of the rules and are often prosecuted by local police and the FBI. Fortunately as a player you are not responsible for any legal infractions committed by the management at a Vegas Night because it is a legal affair, unlike house games where players can be considered to be aiding and abetting the operator. Also the Vegas Nights have much more action than the house games so for my first two years of playing poker I played almost exclusively at the Vegas Nights, rarely missing a weekend. I probably averaged playing 25 hours a week or so, along with working 35 hours at Sam’s Club.
In all of the time I was there nothing ever went wrong. No robberies, no police raids. For the last year or so however poker in Akron has been under attack from all sides. The Cleveland police have shut down most of the operators running in their city. Akron operators have been indicted by the FBI as the result of federal investigations. House games and Vegas Nights, all of which have large amounts of cash and usually no security, have been getting robbed left and right. But in spite of all these people continue to run them and people continue to go to them (more than ever in fact) and the action seems to keep growing. For every operator game busted two new ones seem to spring up because, plain and simple, people are going to gamble.
If the recent FBI indictments of the most popular operators weren’t proof enough that the golden days of the Vegas Nights are over, then last weekend’s events should suffice. Early Monday morning two men tried to rob a Vegas Night, but this time the security guard was armed. One of the perpetrators was shot in the face and killed instantly, the other escaped. I think now that bullets have begun to fly it safe to say that I and many others will be avoiding these games entirely. Also I think there will be fewer robberies, or at least the ones that there are will be better coordinated. Either way I won't be there when they happen.
The man in charge of the Vegas Night where this occurred was quoted saying "It is unfortunate that over a few dollars someone had to lose their life,” which is definitely one opinion. Another one (mine) is that I am glad this jackass is dead, as it is one less person who may shoot me one day. If you commit armed robberies you have to be willing to face the consequences. This guy had supposedly been involved in a few of the earlier robberies, and it is unfortunate that he lived as long as he did. I do hope this is a lesson to the other people involved in these types of hold ups, but I doubt it will be.
I don’t have any experience in robbery, but it seems to me that if you stick up someone and a security guard pulls a gun you better shoot him as fast as you can, not just sit there and yell at them to drop their weapon. If you are going to get involved with this sort of stuff you have to be able to kill people, and it seems in this case (fortunately for the security guard) the guy wasn’t. He saw the guard draw his gun and yelled at him to drop his weapon, which was all the time it took the guard to react.
The guard who shot the man was a former police officer and he undoubtedly knew how to use a gun. He is a very likeable and friendly guy and it is unfortunate that he had to be in that position, I am sure this has to be traumatic for him but in the end I think he will realize that he did the right thing.

Posted by themaroon at 11:13 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 29, 2004

Censorship

One thing I can never understand about online poker sites is the censorship. Every site blocks out their own set of words from being placed in the chat and even though I generally don’t use many of the words they block I still can't understand why they do it. The idea of censoring certain words in the chat box never makes any sense to me for a few reasons.
First of all everyone playing on the site is of the age of majority. It isn’t as if they can't handle hearing these words, or are going to run around town like a 5 year old spouting off their newfound vocabulary. These are all adults, all of whom have heard these words every day of their life. They aren’t going to cry if they see the word fuck in the chat box.
Now I realize that there are a good number of people out there who buy into society’s ideas of which words are OK and which are not (a lot of useless garbage if you ask me, but a topic for another day) but it is not as if they are forced to see them. Every site I play at features a dozen chat options, including the ability to turn off an individual player’s chat with a couple simple mouse clicks. So if they care for their opponent’s diction they can simply right click their name and remove the offending chat.
Also how hard would it be for each site to give people their own custom chat filter? That way all the people who don’t want to see the occasional “shit” don’t have to, and the people like me who couldn’t care less can say whatever we wish.
Another reason why I can't understand the censorship is that it doesn’t really work anyway. First of all there are too many characters which can substitute for letters. Want to say ass? Try @ss, or a$$. The possibilities are endless, and I am pretty sure the effect is universal. Also there is the spacing trick. Want to say shit? Try s h i t. Some sites actually try to censor these, but you can always seem to find some combination of spaces which will get your word through. In fact on Party (where you can still space the letters to pass the censors) any time they find those 4 letters consecutively with one space inserted anywhere they censor it. Try typing in “wish it” and you will get “wixxxxx”.
Perhaps the funniest thing to me is when players report each other. I think their reluctance to do anything more about it than block the offender’s chat for one day may be my favorite thing about Party. Whereas other sites will ban your chat semi-permanently with little provocation Party will simply send a floorperson in to monitor your chat. He will tell the offender to stop, and if they do no more will be done about it. How great! This whole article came from a really funny situation at a table tonight. One guy offended another, who then reported him. I always find it funny when that happens. I mean how lame do you have to be to actually complain because someone is making fun of you when you can just block their chat? I guess most people are just so insecure that they can't stand the thought of someone saying things about them that they can't see. Party is a never ending comedy isn’t it?

Posted by themaroon at 8:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 27, 2004

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

I really seem to be having no luck in the Party Poker multi table tournaments lately. It does seem that almost every tournament I get knocked out of is due to either someone calling a huge amount preflop beaten or calling the huge amount preflop with a favorite that they still had no business calling due to the situation. You can't simply judge your tournament play by the final hands however, so this is not an indication of how much of my recent bad run is my fault.
Tournaments are so hard because the correct play is the one that gives you the most tournament equity, which is very hard to determine. A lot of very good players who I talk to often forget this fact, which means that pot odds are not your primary consideration and a lot of experienced ring game players never seem to be able to grasp this. In a way they are, it is just that since individual chips become devalued as you gain more of them (in terms of tournament expectation) and increase in value when you have less what appears to be 3:1 pot odds is actually substantially less.
The point of all this is that it is much harder to judge the quality of your own play in tournaments than in ring games, since there are so many more factors, some of which are hard to compute or entirely intangible. I do know that at my worst I am probably still a huge favorite in these Party tournaments, since very few people in them have the slightest clue what they are doing. The availability of satellites makes them akin to a $22 tournament, since that is how much 2/3 of the people in the paid to get in.
I just checked and for the year I am 6/28 in $215 tourneys on making the money, with one final table (4th) for a total profit of about $23k. I have done pretty well in other tournaments as well, so I am still up a good amount for the year. So I guess I shouldn’t be too disappointed in my performance, since I make the money about 21% of the time when only 10% of spots pay. What is more important is that whenever I make the money I seem to move at least half way up through it. This is easy to do on Party, since so many people play only to make the money. They stall for an hour or so before the money, and they fold hands where they should move all in just to squeak in, so whenever we do get in the money there are a bunch of short stacks who no longer care and proceed to move all in with anything. It takes an hour sometimes to get from 160th to 130th (the money in the Sunday tourneys) but to get from 130 to 100 takes 10 minutes.
So I think I will continue to play in these tournaments and try to work out a few kinks in my game. Just like ring games you always feel like you are doing everything wrong when you are on a bad streak (and everything right when you are on a good one) so I will try not to let that get to me, while still searching for ways to improve my play. I do feel as if my confidence has been shaken, but I will continue to plug away and try to win it (and some money) back.

Posted by themaroon at 11:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 26, 2004

Short Term Plans

Well here is what I have on tap for the near future. I am going to continue to play mostly ring games, with of course the $215 tourneys on Party mixed in, until my trip to Vegas on July 12th. In Las Vegas I am going to the Orleans Open, where I plan to play the first few hold’em tournaments of the event, and maybe the $125 Stud event, just because I can. A friend of mine who was out there a few years ago (George from Atlantic City) told me the structures aren’t so hot, so I may skip some of the events if that is true.
Then I will return on the 19th and hopefully be able to move into the new place. I would like to have everything set up there in time to play in the first few WCOOP hold’em events (can you tell I’m not big on Stud or Omaha?) on PokerStars and the next million dollar guaranteed tournament on Party Poker on July 31st.
Then towards the end of August I may head out to L.A. for the Legends of Poker . They have a few tournaments in the $1,000-$1,500 buy in range, plus some $515 satellites to the main event. This will depend on my bankroll at the time and how I am feeling, but I would very much like to get out to L.A. since I have never been there before.
If I do skip this event it will be mainly because I am definitely going out to the Borgata Poker Open in September. The Borgata is without a doubt one of my favorite places to stay, and they always have very good structure to their tournaments. They have perhaps the best super satellite structure of any of the major events I have been to, and their main event this year is the $10,000 buy in (up from $5k last year) WPT event. I will definitely run some of those, and probably the first few hold'em events.
Supposedly the lady who found my old cell phone just mailed it back to me, so if I get it I will not be moblogging (Microsoft word’s spell checker tries to tell me that word should be “mob logging” and damn it I find that amusing ) since I plan to return this new phone. To be honest the new phone isn’t any better, it is just the same thing with a camera attached, so it isn’t really worth $400 to me. I will however try to take photos with my digital camera for you all, and post the photos here. When I bought the camera I focused more on picture quality than portability so I will pretty much be doomed to wearing cargo pants at all major poker events from now on, but I own a few pairs so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Also if any fellow bloggers or bloggees are going to be at any of those events let me know, we’ll meet up. It shouldn’t be hard to find me. I’ll be the guy with Bose Headphones, an MP3 player, and cargo pants playing in every hold'em event..

Posted by themaroon at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Family Functions

I went to a family function today for the first time this year. I spent Christmas in Florida with my mother, so I hadn’t seen my father’s side of the family (the one I am closest to) in quite some time. Since I only made public the info that I quit my job around the time of the holidays I wasn’t sure if any of them knew, and if so how they would take it. I figured my two older cousins knew, since they golf with my father sometimes, but the rest of the family I was unsure of.
It turns out that most of them had heard of some of my tournament wins from my father, and in all were very supportive. They asked me all about what I do, which is odd since I have not had that experience yet with family. I guess it helped that my father’s father, my grandfather (who died before I was born) helped support his family with poker winnings. My grandmother and grandfather would host poker games at their house. So I suppose that the negative stigma most people have towards poker (the tendency to lump it with other forms of gambling) doesn’t run in my family.
All in all it is strange being able to talk openly about it with people other than my girlfriend, my poker playing friends, and of course the thousands of random strangers who read this blog. Granted I didn’t get into too much detail. They mainly asked me about the tournament wins they had heard of through my dad (“Now how did you win $24,000?” was a popular question) and what playing on the internet was like. I didn’t really go into much detail about how I play mainly ring games rather than tournaments (and have made a lot more than $24k at them), but I figure the tournaments are more exciting anyway. Ring game details might bore them to death.
I guess I am fortunate to have a family that has been exposed to poker for many years. Granted I wasn’t going to just go get a job even if they disapproved or anything, but it is nice to have the support of your family rather than wonder if they think I am a degenerate gambler and worry about me constantly. Never hurts to have one less worry.

Posted by themaroon at 10:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Iggy's Over/Under

In order to get the blogger forum going I have posted a poll. Everyone who knows Iggy come on over and place your over/under bet on when his next post will be. I don't think his hiatus will last long (and I hope not), do you?

Posted by themaroon at 3:24 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

New Stuff

I have added a new feature today, the Poker Chronicles Forums. I'll add a link over to the top left shortly. I added it for two reasons:

1. For the Ask Matt forums. Want to know what I think of a hand you played? Who I am voting for? What color boxers I am wearing? Ask away.


2. So poker bloggers/readers can have a place to chat with one another. Comments are nice but aren't very interactive.

Thanks to all the folks at phpBB for the great free forum software. The internet is the greatest place in the world. You can actually get useful things for free (no strings attached) and all viruses have cures.

Posted by themaroon at 1:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 25, 2004

Selling Out

I decided to try this Google Adsense thing you see to the right to recoup some of the fees involved with running this site. Every blogger seems to be shoving their Party affiliate links down their readers' throats to pay for their sites and maybe make a little extra on the side. But since just about everyone who is reading a poker blog already has accounts at every site worth playing this seems to be more trouble than it is worth to me. So rather than beg people in every post to sign up for something that they probably already have anyway (as about 82 other poker bloggers do) I am going to mix in some unobtrusive text ads. Will it even pay for my server costs? I doubt it. But it is an interesting experiment.
I have had the Amazon ads on the left ever since the blog began and they have racked up a mighty $2 in ad revenue for me. I don’t care if they never make another cent anyway. They are there more as recommendations. Actually nobody has ever purchased one of them through the links, but some people clicked a link then bought something else from Amazon so I still made a couple beans. I wonder if I am going to have to claim that $1.92 on my taxes.

Posted by themaroon at 3:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 24, 2004

The Latest

It is with a heavy heart that I removed the link to Amarillo Slim's book today. Someone on Party pointed out that he is a convicted child molester. This turns out to be technically untrue, since he pled down to something very close to child molestation but not quite a sex offence (some sort of assault) but it is enough for me to go ahead and pull his book. It was a great book and all, and the man did so much for poker that I have to be grateful for him but I imagine he is now ostracized from the poker community for fondling his granddaughter. I could have sworn I saw him at the WSOP this year, but there are so many 70 somethings in cowboy hats running around Binion's that I could easily have been mistaken.
Also the $5/$10 experiment is going well. I have won just over $7,000 now in the last 68 hours of play, making my hourly rate just above $103. I feel that it actually would have been significantly higher if not for the growing pains during the first few dozen hours when I was still getting used to playing two tables. I am actually becoming more optimistic about moving to playing 2 $10/$20 tables at a time. I still feel as if I miss a bet or two every now and then as a result of playing 2 tables, but not enough to make it unprofitable to add the second.
I’ll leave tonight with a quote from someone named Chuck Humphrey, which I stole from PokerPages.

Before you criticize someone walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you criticize him, you will be a mile away, and you will have his shoes.

Posted by themaroon at 8:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 23, 2004

Astute Reader

One of my readers posted a response to my last article which is too good for everyone not to see, so here it is:

There are even some people who are in both groups 2 and 3. They lose, but think they win, and think they would win more if the game wasn't rigged.

How true. We'll call that group 2.5.

Posted by themaroon at 10:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

3 types

Well I got another sucker to play me heads up tonight. He put a couple bad beats on me at the 6 max table by doing things like calling raises with K 8 off, so I started trash talking him a bit. He started telling me how bad I was, so I challenged him to heads up and he actually played. This was the first time I've caught a sucker at this limit, so I was happy. Unfortunately he only had $220 in his account, but this allowed me to bust him and get back to my 6 max games before my seat got pulled.
It always cracks me up when people as bad as this guy (his name was dwestgate) think they are some kind of sharks. It is sure a good thing for me I suppose, because if they didn’t they would never play 15/30 heads up. It just makes me wonder how many people out there can really be winners at this game. Pokertracker makes it appear that about 15% of my opponents are winners, yet somewhere between 80 and 100 percent think they are. How can this be possible?
In real life I can see how people can delude themselves into thinking they are winners when they are not. When you win the cash goes straight into your pocket. You buy things with it. When you lose the money comes straight out of your pocket. No paper trail involved. When you run out of cash it is simply because you spent too much, and you go to the ATM and get a refill or two. You have no account balance to look at everyday (as you do on Party).
Online however all of the information is right there in front of you. The only thing I can think of is that the average person buys in and cashes out so many times that they lose track of how much they are in for. The history function only shows you the last 20 transactions or so making it easy to forget all of those buy-ins.
In related news I got a sucker to accuse me of being a house shill today. Apparently I won every hand (despite the fact that I got pocket kings 4 times there in one hour and won zero of them) and every draw I had (which in reality was the best hand on every street, but improved on the river) came in. This is why this player (Hollidaydoc) loses on Party Poker, not because he never ever presses the fold button.
This leads me to a theory I came up with the other day. It is that there are 3 types of online poker players.
1. People who actually win.
2. People who lose but think they win.
3. People who think online poker is rigged.
If you find someone who is outside of this group please let me know. Until then I’ll be playing heads up 15/30 with the members of group 2.

Posted by themaroon at 8:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 22, 2004

Reader Response

I watched you bust out of a Party Tourney last night, 77th I think it was. You were short stacked with AJo and went all in, preflop, for 300. One medium stacked player called with a KJo and ended up taking the pot.

Actually I busted out of the 900 man tourney about a half hour into it, so I was far from 77th. Probably in the 700s somewhere, I didn’t look at the standings since it wasn’t really relevant. Also my opponent had KQ.

Afterwards you went ballistic and berated him for making such a bad call. You came across very insulting, immature, and downright nasty (yeah, I know it's your "strategy" for getting someone in to headsup play, in this case the guy laughed it off).

You are correct, this guy was not going to play me heads up. All he was interested in was the fact that he won the hand, and therefore his play must have been correct. You can certainly have your own opinion of my table antics. It has done the job for me enough to know that it is effective at getting heads up matches. If it didn’t come across as immature, insulting, and downright nasty it wouldn’t work.

Anyways, do you really believe calling a heads up all in bet (only 300 units)with KJo was a bad play? Your all in bet only amounted to about 1/5 of his stack. Are you saying if you were in the same position you'd let a short stack bully you out of the pot? KJo is not a bad hand, heads up.

First of all it wouldn’t be bullying him out of a pot. He posted $20 of his $1100 stack on the bb. There was one limper, I went all in from the sb, and he called $300. This is an atrocious call. He was getting just over 1:1 odds on a hand that was either a slight underdog, a 6-4 underdog, or a huge underdog. I suppose if you think I would shove KJ then there is one chance he could be a 2:1 favorite, but that still would not make the call worth it because of the likelihood he is dominated by AK, AQ, or QQ or higher. Also there was an early position limper behind him to act, who could have just limped with AA or KK or something. This isn’t too likely, but is a definite possibility. We were in the early stages of a very long tournament so knocking a player out has little value. There is no reason at all for this guy to call here, other than being an extremely weak player who couldn’t lay down KQ if his life depended on it. KQ is not a bad hand if you are at a heads up table. Being heads up against one player at a ten handed table it is a pile. There was nothing I could have had that made it a good call. I would have just limped with KJ there, but even if I would shove anything KJ or better it is a bad call. I actually shoved just because I knew that I could get a call from a hand like KQ, or even better one like A 10 which I had dominated. I wanted him to make that call because it was such a bad one. He did and I got knocked out for it. I have no regrets.

Just for the record, I am not a hater. I've read your blog from the beginning and will continue to do so, no matter how nasty your response to this is. I think you are a above average player and believe you have won what you say you have. I think your nastiness and unsportmanlike conduct is ridiculous, and I don't buy that you are always doing it to get a headsup match. I think a lot of it is you are genuinely tilting, and can't control your emotions. Also, I think you and John try to impress each other by berating other players. Kind of a macho thing. As you mature, I'd bet your behavior changes. Before you rip me a new ass, all this is just my opinion, and I acknowledge that I could be mistaken.

Well it isn’t a macho thing at all, but is sort of a fun thing we do when together. If you hung out with us you would realize that we (and our other friends) attack each other like this (all in good fun) all of the time. It does make the time go by, and alleviates some of the overwhelming boredom of playing against such simpletons. Playing against suckers may be more profitable than playing against skilled opponents, but it is much less fun as well. You may be right about my behavior changing though, it already has somewhat since I have begun playing $5/$10 so much, where it doesn’t net me any heads up matches at all. I don’t even bother with the whole routine there anymore. Also I won't say that I never go on tilt, since I don’t think such a thing is possible. But it takes a lot more than one idiotic call knocking me out of a tournament to do it. If it didn’t I would not be able to play this game for a living, especially at 6 max, where I take much worse beats than that every 5 minutes. And I generally don’t rip people up here if their arguments are well reasoned and not entirely spiteful. So feel free to post your comments any time. Also do you care to divulge your Party name? You obviously know both mine and John’s. If you see me in a tournament feel free to chat.

Posted by themaroon at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

4

One thing that always cracks me up is the way everyone on RGP and 2+2 always measures their win rates in BB/100 hands. I suppose maybe they all have Pokertracker and don’t really bother writing down things like hours played, win, etc. But I think that most of them do that as well, but actually think that BB/100 is a more significant and/or accurate measure of their performance. I personally couldn’t disagree more. The reason for this is the simple fact that your objective in playing poker is to make the most amount of money you can, period.
This is why I use $/hr, the good old standard. If player A makes 4BB/100 hands at a $5/10 game ($40 per hour) and player B makes 2 BB/100 but plays 4 games at a time ($80 per hour) then player B, who appears to be not as good as player A, is going to make a lot more in the end. This is a fairly obvious example, and many people do include the number of tables they play at a time, but this still can be misleading. For instance when I have played $10/$20 6 max on PokerStars I am lucky to see 85 hands per hour, because of their slow software. Their high-speed games may be a little better (I haven’t tried them) but still won't be much. At Party or UB, which both have incredibly fast software, you can see as much as 125 hands per hour on a regular basis. So I’d much rather make 4.5BB/100 at Party than 5 BB/100 at Stars.
I also especially like the short handed forums. The people on there really have no idea what they are doing at all. The misplay hands left and right, post them like they played them well, then will never consider the fact that they misplayed them. I actually tried to explain why someone’s move was horrible one time (which it was) and without insulting anyone at all (a new tact for me I know) and everyone immediately rallied against me. The worst part was that it was a very simple situation, where a player thought he was beat after being checkraised on the turn and reraised anyway to attempt to get a free showdown if his hand didn’t improve. He had a flush draw (2 in hand, 2 on board) along with top pair weak kicker which he thought was no good, but (correctly) didn’t want to fold because the pot was large. He would have had to call the turn with his flush draw, then call the river if bet at. I told him that his reraise was bad because it would either:
1)Cost the same as just calling down if his opponent just called and checked the river.
2)Not win any extra money should his flush come, since the way he played it did not make it appear he had a flush draw, and his opponent was highly likely to have a hand like 2 pair which he could reasonably expect to be paid off with on the river.
3)Cost him 2 extra big bets if his opponent capped it on the turn and bet the river (and he missed his flush draw). Of course he would hit his flush about 1/5th of the time, in which case he would make 2-3 BB extra, but losing 2 BB 4 times for every once this happens makes this an overall bad play (or –EV as 2+2 readers love to say).
The poster was under the fallacious assumptions that the checkraiser could not reraise the turn. I admit it isn’t highly likely but is definitely a possibility, given that it appeared he had a set or 2 pair. The board wasn’t scary enough to stop someone with a set or top two from just capping it, so this assumption was a bad one. He also was assuming that if he just called and the flush came that his opponent would check, which there was no reason to believe would happen. So the way he looked at it he either would pay the same as calling down if he missed his flush, or squeeze an extra bet if he hit.
Of course he was unable to see that what I said was correct. He would not let go of his baseless assumptions that the player would not cap the turn under any circumstances and would also check if the flush came. Even if he knew his player well (which he didn’t appear to) anyone would have capped a set or top two there. And most people would have bet the river regardless of a third card of the flush suit.
That was the last time I explained anything to anyone on that site. They are too close minded to make any use of it anyway. Now I simply like to read their botched hands (which they think they played well) and marvel that these people are beating the games. I guess in poker someone has to win, so given that Party Poker has about a 1,000-1 fish to shark ratio some of the fish are going to rise to the top. And sharks love nothing better than the fat fish. Especially when they don’t know they are fish.

Posted by themaroon at 7:19 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 20, 2004

Party Tournaments

I have been saying for a long time that Party tournaments have much better structure than Stars, and they do. But something is ruining it now to the point where I think I may switch back to playing mainly on Stars for tournaments. Stalling. This is when player take the maximum allotted time every single hand in an attempt to make the money. Their idea is to slow the blinds down and sit until they are in the money, at which point they promptly go all in and usually get busted. I have written before about why this is almost universally bad for every player at the table.
The most annoying part about people stalling is that you have no recourse. Players are costing you money and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. At one table this week, table 6 in a tournament with almost 1400 players (and they break in order, so people were stuck with him the whole way) a fellow was stalling from the very beginning of the tournament. This idiot, his name was sdalipagic, wanted to stall his way in to 60th place. Unfortunately everyone at his table could do nothing about it, and anyone who managed to make it to the point where the table broke was going to be at a very big disadvantage from having seen half as many hands as anyone else. Everyone at the table with this asshole was cheated out of a chance to win, and there was absolutely no way for them to prevent it. Nothing in the world will make you want to play elsewhere more than this.
If this were an isolated incident it would not be as much of a problem. Sadly though any time you get 50 spots out of the money you get at least one staller at your table. There are too many people who satellited in for $20 and think that the bottom payout of $275 is a huge payday. They have no concern about first place, they just want to hit money. And this would be fine with me except their stalling is greatly hurting my chance of winning first. They are costing me money. When you go to PokerStars they ban stallers from playing in tournaments and they have software to minimize its’ effects in the first place, which I will talk about in a second here.
Sadly Party Poker refuses to do anything about this horrible problem. They responded to my email yesterday saying that players have 30 seconds to dispose of as they please, and they would not interfere. Now this is fine, and I even understand the policy, but it makes people not want to play in the tournaments. It effectively makes the 20 minute rounds into 10 minute rounds, maybe even worse when people do that. When I buy in to a tournament for $215 I should not have to deal with this.
The only solution seems to be one that the people on Party (judging from our discussions on the cruise) are loathe to use. The time bank. It really is the only way to cut the stalling down. Give people 10 seconds to act, but let them have an optional time bank they can use for when they have a serious decision. Maybe give them one minute or 90 seconds, and refresh that minute every hour. At least then they will have 20 seconds less per hand to stall, allowing you to see dozens more hands per blind level. Also there are times during a tournament where you actually need more than 30 seconds to make a decision (which could be worth tens or sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bigger tournaments) and you should have the time available.
To be honest I see no reason why any site would not adopt the time bank. It is the only reasonable answer. I guess maybe it would be considered too much of a nod to PokerStars (who invented it) but there is no shame at all in taking your oppositions’ best ideas. It is the way of capitalism. Party Poker has taken most of their other good ideas (stats, player notes, Sunday $215 tournaments) and put them to excellent use, why not this one? To not do so is a bad business decision.
So I am considering not playing in Party Poker tournaments anymore. This Sunday, and every one from now on, I am going to play in the Stars $215. I think they have a limit one on Saturday as well. When Party does something to seriously address this ever growing problem I will consider playing in their tournaments again. Until then it is not worth the agitation when they have perfectly good tournaments elsewhere. Party Poker really has too much of a “we are the biggest and if you don’t play here 40,000 other people will) attitude for my taste. I am going to email them this message, I will share any responses with you that I get.

Posted by themaroon at 6:14 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 19, 2004

The $215

Tonight I played in the $215 limit tournament on Party Poker. I played for 5 hours and got 15th for a prize of $1176. This isn’t much of a prize and is fairly disappointing, but when you get no good cards for 5 hours I guess getting 15th is a blessing. I quite literally had the most mediocre luck imaginable. I got KK twice and one AK, which pretty much got me every chip that I ever had. Other than that I folded just about everything, in the end having only seen 9% of flops. I won a total of 6% of hands throughout the entire tournament.
I also managed to increase my haters club by at least 4 new members. This always happens to me in tournaments because when I see people stalling I attack them. Stalling is perhaps the dumbest tactic you could ever use, but I think I have gone into this before on here so I won't do it again. Nonetheless I have actually in the past managed to convince people not to stall, which is beneficial for both them and me. Sometimes I have also been able to insult them into it. So when I see people stalling I try both tactics.
Of course whenever you insult someone you get 3 people (often not including the person you insulted) mad at you, and today was no exception. It is amazing to me how people who have very little poker skill can be so sure that they are exceptional players, and never is this more apparent than when you try to explain something to them that they don’t understand. Add in the fact that they hate you because you called someone an idiot for stalling and in the end you have zero chance of convincing them that you are correct, but they aren’t the ones stalling anyway. The concept that stalling is almost universally bad is one of those few poker concepts (similar to not bluffing at dry side pots with all-in players) where it is actually beneficial for your opponents to understand it, so I think you should try to explain it to them whenever possible. But try that before the insulting phase. Once people hate you they just assume that everything you say is wrong, and they not only won't even consider whatever you tell them but will actually just automatically take the opposite viewpoint.
I seem to have really touched a nerve with this one idiot today named ChopperRick. He pretty much went ballistic, trying to insult me for no reason every few minutes throughout the tournament. Of course nothing he said had any logic behind it, and he pretty much was left with nothing but petty insults when faced with actual solid reasoning. It was just funny how he kept trying, obviously seeking my attention. I think some people are actually deeply offended when you call them an idiot, despite the fact that you are a random person thousands of miles away, and do this in order to somehow gain your respect. They rationalize it as hatred of you, or ridicule, but it is really a sad plea for attention. In any case all he accomplished was making an ass out of himself and getting me to disable his chat after I grew tired of his pathetic attempts to insult me.
In addition to the haters there are the people who whine for hours that you are annoying them in your chat. These in my opinion are the biggest idiots of all. They can't right click your name and then click “disable chat” because their fragile ego can't stand the thought of you saying something about them without them knowing. Personally once I have tired of idiots like the above ChopperRick I simply block them. To not do so and whine about their chat when you don’t have to read it is like complaining about getting wet when you are holding an umbrella. Anyone who does it needs to choke on a peanut and stop wasting food that could go to people intelligent enough to contribute something to society.
Also I have a rather funny anecdote. When we were down to 120 people (only 70 spots paid) some idiot at my table with an average stack named BloodyPirate starts stalling. This is incredibly absurd because bottom money is a useless $410 while first is $30k. not only that, we are going to be hand for hand something like 21 spots before the money, so all he is going to do is put himself in a worse situation then. So I emailed Party asking them to send a floorperson in to hurry the game along. The message I sent was:

I am in the $215 limit at table 10 and player bloodypirate is stalling. Can you please send a floorperson in to stop it immediately?

So I keep playing and sure enough a floorperson comes in and says “Please do not use foul language at the table”. I am a little suspicious because I have had the floor called on me enough times to know that they address you by name when someone complains. Also I wasn't using any foul language at all, and I couldn't remember many instances of anyone else doing so either. I immediately type in asking the floor to make the assclown stop stalling and the table breaks immediately, so I never got to talk to the floorguy. Sure enough after the tournament I look in my email and here is the response I found to my initial letter reporting the staller:

Dear Matthew,

Thank you for contacting us.

With regards to your email, thank you very much for bringing to our attention the use of foul language in the chat box. We will definitely address the situation as soon as possible.

Next time you see someone using offensive language on the tables, please contact us as soon as possible so that we can take immediate action.

Thank you again for helping us maintain a positive atmosphere on our tables.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact our Customer Care Department at any time. We are here 24/7 to assist you via email.

Thank you for choosing us as your online gaming site!

Pranitha
Poker Customer Care

Seriously, does anyone there speak English? If they do then they must not work in customer support. Every time you send Party an email they either send you something like this back that is completely off topic, or they simply paraphrase your question and send it right back to you with no hint of an answer. Very rarely do you actually get a response that has any meaning, so of course I emailed them informing them of that. I am still waiting for the response to that one.

Posted by themaroon at 9:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 17, 2004

How To Win Friends And Influence People

If you are ever talking to some friends who are knowledgeable about poker and a subject comes up which you know nothing about there is an easy way to find an informed opinion in a matter of minutes. Simply search for the topic on RGP, figure out what the general consensus of its denizens happens to be, and adopt the opposite stance. This is not only effective when speaking of how hands should be played (though it is highly useful there), but also about such things as politics, religion, and simple multiplication. In fact it has gotten to the point where this strategy will work in just about any situation. If you went through life simply plucking your opinions from the inverse of the ones on that mailing list you would be thought of as a well spoken, well educated individual. People would often express amazement about how knowledgeable you are and how well reasoned every opinion you have is, because I assure you that 99% of what is said on there is quite the opposite.
Take for instance the Thursday morning water cooler discussion about the previous night’s WPT. This would be your time to shine. When people say things like “I like Moneymakers’ shove with JJ there because it was definitely the best hand” you can respond with something more educated. Try “Just because he has the best hand does not mean a shove is necessarily correct. In this case he should maybe just call and see if an ace or king flops and Phil bets, because if so he will know he is beaten (due to the fact that Phil would not bluff with an all-in player) and be able to escape with half of his stack. If the flop comes and Phil checks he can then bet all in, possibly saving him from an ace beating him on the turn or river and winning him the pot whereas he may have lost it if he went all in. In his situation winning the pot is the most important consideration, not making the extra 200 thousand chips when his hand holds up.” Now your coworkers will be amazed at your intellect.
Also should one of them ever say something like “I don’t know how he called 1/8th of his stack with just Ace high on the river, no matter how big the pot is” you can respond with “Well, if he thought there was a reasonable chance his opponent was bluffing and the pot was substantially large then he is risking little to gain quite a bit. He is not that much worse off with 1/8th of his stack gone, but winning the pot would almost double him, putting him in much better shape and greatly increasing his chances of winning the tournament.”
And when your opponents say “that Chris Hinchcliffe must be a great player to get 3rd in that event and second in a WSOP event” you could respond with “Short term results do not indicate skill. Any monkey that was as aggressive as he is could have that much success. The only indication of his skill level is the fact that he grossly misplayed every single hand at the final table and needlessly blew an overwhelming chip lead, which suggests that he in fact has the poker skill of the average cantaloupe.”
So go out, take my advice, and use it to win friends and influence people. Coming up with well reasoned opinions on your own is hard work. You must not only be able to apply correct logical thinking to a situation, but also have the motivation to do so. Being able to do so puts you in a very small minority amongst poker players, but even if you are able why go through all of the work when there are a wealth of opinions by people with the IQ of a typewriter (and not the electric variety) who pieced their argument together solely to hear themselves type without any logical process involved? Also should that well run dry (and if that happens I will likely have to seek employment) try the 2+2 forums instead. Those people actually attempt to reason out most of their arguments though so it requires a little extra work, but in a pinch it will do.

Posted by themaroon at 11:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Hand of the day

Party Poker 5/10 Hold'em (6 max, 4 handed) converter

Preflop: Yours Truly is SB with Js, Ts.
UTG calls, Button (elizie) calls, Yours Truly completes, BB (Dunker) checks.

Flop: (4 SB) Qs, 4d, 9h (4 players)
Yours Truly bets, Dunker raises, UTG folds, elizie calls, Yours Truly calls.

Turn: (5 BB) 8s (3 players)
Yours Truly checks, Dunker bets, elizie calls, Yours Truly raises, Dunker 3-bets, elizie calls, Yours Truly caps, Dunker calls, elizie calls.

River: (17 BB) 5d (3 players)
Yours Truly bets, Dunker raises, elizie calls, Yours Truly 3-bets, Dunker calls, elizie calls.

Final Pot: 26 BB

Results below:
elizie shows Qc Tc (one pair, queens).
Yours Truly shows Js Ts (straight, queen high).
Dunker shows 4s 9d (two pair, nines and fours).
Outcome: Yours Truly wins 26 BB.

These are the people I play against. This fellow thought that 2 pair (and not a good 2 pair) was worth $40 on the turn and a raise on the river. The other guy couldn't fold top pair weak kicker for any amount. This is why I think I can pull $100/hour playing 2 tables at a time.

Posted by themaroon at 5:08 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 16, 2004

VIP

When Party Poker recently canceled their bonus on account balance (a.k.a. interest payment) I was annoyed. They were giving you 10% annually on all balances up to $10k in your account, provided you played a few hands and didn’t cash out more than twice. This amounted to about $83 a month for me, since I just made sure to keep the full $10k in my account. So lacking any incentive to play at Party Poker rather than one of their skins I decided to look around and see if I could get a better deal elsewhere. I am still not ready to just give up on Party entirely, as their action is so much better than that of any other site, but I figured if one of the many Party Poker skins would give me something for playing there why not give it a try. So I promptly cashed out $8k of the $13k in my Party account and headed for greener pastures.
The only place I found with any decent sort of ongoing promotion appeared to be Empire Poker. This is the most well known Party skin, and they recently began offering a VIP club where you can earn VIP points. At first I thought it was a great idea, so I bought in for a few grand on there and started doing most of my play there. Then after a few days of playing about 1000 hands per day I noticed my VIP account was only going up 30 points. Upon closer examination it turns out the number of points you get for real money play is equal to the square root of the amount of hands you played, calculated daily. The square root? How did they come up with this?
Suppose you play 100 hands, you get 10 points. So if you play 200 you get 20 right? Nope, 14. Play 900 hands and you get a whopping 30. You played 9 times as many hands, but get 3 times the VIP points. So in effect they are saying that the more you play, the less they are going to give you per hand. How does this make any sense at all?
A book at that site costs 1500 VIP points. So at my current rate of 900 raked hands per day it would take me 50 days to earn this book, and that is playing 2 tables concurrently for 6 hours a day. So it is well over 600 table hours of play, and they are going to give me a book. On PokerStars you get 1 FPP for each hand played, and a book costs about the same amount, 1500 points. So there I would get a book every other day, rather than every 50.
I just can't think of any reason why someone intelligent enough to be in charge of promotions for an online cardroom worth millions of dollars would ever greenlight something so stupid. Hmm, let’s give people less as they play more. Yeah, that will draw them in. I think I am going to play 1 hand there per day, collect my 1 point, and then every 5 years get a free book from them. It would take 4 years to get it playing full time, so why not. And I’ll bet they wonder why every single tournament they guarantee has to have house money added to it.

Posted by themaroon at 8:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Expirements

Well the $5/$10 experiment is going well so far. I am currently at $85 per hour after about 50 hours, which is not really a whole lot more than I was making at one of those tables but considering the slow start I got off to it is an improvement. Every single day I play there I am more and more amazed at just how bad everyone plays. Let me give you an example. Yesterday I raised A10s utg and was called by the player after me. The flop came A 10 10 rainbow, I bet and was called. The turn and river came 8 and 2, and both time I bet and both times I was called. I checked the hand history afterwards to see what the guy had and he had 2 4 off. He cold called a raise preflop with 2 4, and called both the flop and turn with undercards despite the scary board.
As bad as people were at the $10/$20 level nobody ever did something like that. People at that level were mostly maniacs (and almost entirely horrible) but at least they were aggressive. My friend George once said that aggressiveness masks a lot of flaws, and these people are proof of it.
Also I think I am going to be moving in mid July, so I am probably going to skip the Festa Al Lago. I was looking forward to it, but moving is going to be pretty expensive and my bankroll is growing once again but is still not quite where I would like it to be. I am hoping instead to make it out to the Orleans Open, since attendance there is usually very good.
I am also looking forward to the WCOOP on PokerStars. Their events have half hour rounds so the structure will actually be worth playing, unlike most of their tournaments which are vastly inferior in structure to the ones on Party Poker. I am also excited about the heads up tournament, which has a $215 buy in and should be pretty interesting. The total buy-ins for the hold'em events should add up to about $5k, and I will probably play them all (I am sure John will play many of them with me) so a nice score will be possible.
Also I am going to start playing in some of the satellites for the Ultimate Bet WPT event in Aruba, as I hope to make it there this year. I would ideally like to play in all of the major events which you can win your way into through satellites online. There were 3 of them last year, so I assume there will be at least 3 this upcoming year and wouldn’t be surprised to see one or two more.
Party Poker also updated their software this month as well, so you can now register for the semi-finals for the Party Poker Million 4 the same way you would register for any tournament. This is a great idea, and I never could understand why they didn’t do this to begin with. This should increase the number of players greatly I would think, which will make it even easier to qualify. The second round begins July 8th, and they have 4 tournaments (running until the 11th) which I plan to play in. I will play in every one of these until I qualify, and will then probably still play in them because I will then receive $12k for any wins. Unfortunately the first set of semis didn’t allow direct buy-in so I didn’t play in them. Very few people did in fact, which I am guessing is why they added it for this one. Last year they had oversold the boat and had to turn down a lot of people, so perhaps they wanted to start out slowly.
I think that I will have a much better experience on the cruise if I get to go again. I will either go alone this time or take a poker friend. My girlfriend and I were very bored last time. All there is to do on the ship is play poker, and I didn’t want to play and leave her with nothing to do. This time I will play poker every waking hour and all will be well. I really do hope they change the location, as I have no real desire to go to Mexico again, and would probably even just stay on board and sleep through the ports if they were the same.
Well I have to get back to the tables, so that is all for now. Good luck.

Posted by themaroon at 1:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 12, 2004

Life As A Pro

Perhaps the most important question I have been asked is what did I learn about playing poker for a living (and life in general) in my one year. First of all I learned that being good at poker is only a part of being a successful pro. I have seen people who I know to be winning players quit their jobs, and even though they love poker it just wasn’t the career for them. The swings can be very upsetting, though at least for me time has cured this malaise greatly. Whereas I was upset greatly when the bad streaks occurred in the beginning, I now can take them in stride (even ones lasting 2 months) without my confidence being too shaken. I have learned that confidence is just as important as poker ability, and that there is a very fine line between confidence and self delusion. You must be able to analyze your own play objectively, realize that everyone plays badly sometimes while not excusing yourself for doing so, and take responsibility for you own results while not letting bad streaks (or your occasional bad play) damage your ego. I have learned that you must adjust your personal life (more from watching friends than from myself) in order to have any shot at success. It is hard to explain to a girlfriend that you can’t go out on Sunday because you have to play in your Sunday $215, because in poker you don’t ever have to play at a certain time but you must retain discipline and play in the most profitable things. It is hard to explain that you need to be left alone so that you can concentrate, and that you need to retain your emotional equilibrium when playing.
It is for this last reason that I have also learned what a wonderful girlfriend I have. Pretty much all of my friends who had girlfriends were unable to resolve the conflict between them and poker. Mine however has been very understanding and we have both worked together to create an ideal situation where she is respectful of my job and I do not let it get in the way of our relationship. It has taken some sacrifice from both of us but in the end has been well worth it, since we get to spend much more time together now and I am not always (or ever) worried about money. She has been very supportive of my choice of careers, even though it is one that is looked down upon by most people. It seems that everyone either thinks you are a degenerate gambler and/or just self deluded a fool who is temporarily lucky and those who are close to you worry about you while those who aren’t consider you somewhat of a novelty. I hope that someday professional poker players are looked upon in the same light as professional golfers, actors, or football players, but I don’t think that day will come anytime soon. Most people seem to think television coverage has helped in this regard, and it may have helped for the people who are regularly on TV, but for the rest of use who are not (some of whom win as much as or more than the vast majority of those on television) it seems to make people think you are the poker equivalent of the thousands of people who move to Hollywood to become famous actors and end up spending the next 30 years as a waitress hopelessly waiting for their big break.
Poker is somewhat like acting in this regard, in that most people who try it will fail and some will never throw in the towel and spend their whole life trying to make it. However unlike movie stardom, poker success does not require notoriety. In my trips to Vegas and other gambling towns I have met numerous people who have spent 20 years or more grinding away at limits no bigger than $30/$60. They may never be on the WPT or ESPN, but they have made hundreds of thousands (some even millions) doing something they love. One big bet an hour at $30/$60 when playing full time adds up to over $120,000 a year and I would guess that there are a good number of people out there doing that. Add in the people doing the same thing online and there are hundreds of successful pro poker players out there. Considering that millions of people play every week this may not be a large number, but it does mean that it can be done.
Most importantly I have learned that poker is the career for me. I have never been the 9-5 sort. Even though I am not sure I want poker to be my sole income for many years, I am sure that it will provide enough money and satisfaction for at least the next few. As I grow my bankroll I will probably want to branch out into real estate, owning a small business or two, and some other things. I do not yet know if I will succeed in becoming one of the top players, but I think I have as good a shot as anyone. I would like to at least play a few major events a year (I have already played 2 this year) and will probably continue to do so for my entire life. Even if I am never good enough to play those white chip games or plunk down $10k for a buy in whenever I so desire I will not be too unhappy. If I can keep making 6 figures annually at poker for the next 20 years I will be able to retire in my early 40s a multi millionaire, with more than enough money to accomplish whatever I wish to in life, all the while being my own boss and working on my terms.
I also feel that I have a good mentality for being a pro. I of course get frustrated with the game at times but I am always able to remain on my A game. I can withstand the bad streaks and not get too optimistic over the good. I have a supportive girlfriend, but even if for some unknown reason things don’t work out with her I will never be the type of person to let my personal life interfere with my job. If I had to find another girl I would find one who was supportive of it or none at all. I have watched friends throw away everything they wanted because they fell too hard for a girl and I am definitely not the type to ever do that. I don’t think you can be if you are to be successful at poker, or probably at anything for that matter. You need to be able to balance relationships and work to be good at anything, and your significant other has to be the same way. I would guess that this conflict is why most people who attempt to become professional poker players fail in the end.
Well there you have my observations, take them for what they are worth. I think this will give some insight into poker and life, and especially that area in the middle of the Venn Diagram where the two intersect. This blog has been a great help to me over the past six months and I will continue to update it often. The readership seems to be skyrocketing and the feedback overwhelmingly positive so I will continue to post as long as people are interested. Thanks for reading.

Posted by themaroon at 7:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

One Year Of Playing Poker For A Living

I just realized that it has now been over a year since I quit my job at The Home Depot to play poker for a living. I was working 25-30 hours a week there at $11 per hour, for a net income of about $15,000 (pre tax) annually. I am not sure exactly how much I made because I didn’t keep records of my live play the first few months (which was most of my play) but I can estimate my expenditures and know about how much my bankroll grew during that time. So I am positive that the net sum was either 6 figures or very close to it, meaning that I made more in one year than I would have in 6-7 years of working at The Home Depot.
When I first quit my job I had saved up a bankroll of about $5,000. I started playing live and immediately lost a few thousand, which forced me to move down to playing $5/$10 in real life. Then at some point I discovered Party Poker and began playing $3/$6 and $33 Single Tables on there. I played quite a few hours and over the first 2 months I covered my expenses and grew my bankroll to back over $5k. A few times during that period I would take a shot at playing a few $5/$10 games but each time I hit a bad streak and lost my way back down to $3/$6, at which point I promptly rebuilt my bankroll. This was trying to my confidence, but I knew that it was simply short term results working against me and I kept at it. Then came my lucky break.
Just around the time I quit my job my friend Keith had the kind of run you only hear about. One day he had a few hundred in his PokerStars account, and since he had a job he decided he didn’t care about it and was going to either lose it or make some serious money. So he went and bought in at $30/$60 with only a few hundred (which is the bankroll equivalent of Russian roulette), went on a rush, and a month later had won over $30k. To me and my friends this was somewhat like winning the lottery. So Keith started playing quite often (eventually quitting his job to do so) and he and I would run some of the tournaments on Party Poker. At that time they had a nightly $55 NL tourney, and a $109 Limit one once a week, and that was as big as the stakes got. Now they have a $162 tournament (or above) every night and numerous $109’s. Oh how the times have changed.
So anyway my big break came when in one week Keith won me about $5k. He won a $55 NL and got second (and should have won if not for an incredible run of bad beats when heads up) in a $109 limit in back to back tournaments, both with about a $5k prize. He also picked one off for $10k a few weeks later when splitting with my friend John. What a run that was for him. Anyway now my bankroll was over $10k, which may as well have been a million as far as I was concerned, and I could move back into what I thought was more profitable, the $10/$20 games at the Vegas Nights around Akron. I also took a trip to Atlantic City which didn’t go well, but only shrunk my bankroll by about $1,000, most of which was expenses. So I began playing full time at the games around town for a month or 2 and was making a little, though not much. Because you see so many less hands per hour in real life your bad swings last a lot longer (in terms of time) though they are for the same dollar amounts. You are just as likely to lose $2k playing $10/$20 online as you are in real life, but you are much more likely to lose over a month in real life than you are online, assuming that you are a winning player.
Then one day I went to a house game and had a big loss playing $10/$20 in a 5 handed game. I had thought that I played very well, but simply took a good number of bad beats, and it got me thinking about short handed play. A few people I had met before (who were friends of John) had been playing short handed online full time for a few years and making six figures annually at it. In fact you can now see these people playing in the $100/$200 games on Stars almost every single day. Though I won’t divulge their screen names here, they are players who are often talked about on 2+2 and RGP and are well known to anyone who plays bigger limits online. So I decided to give 6 max a shot.
At that time I had worked my initial $250 Party Poker buy-in to over about $5k so I figured Id take one or 2 thousand and give the $10/$20 6 max a shot. This was in early October and for a few days I won every time I sat down and ended up about $5k ahead. It was at this point that I started to realize what incredibly high fluctuation the game must have, and at the same time that it must be incredibly profitable. So I immediately quit playing it, afraid to lose that much back which in hindsight was probably a very intelligent thing to do. I decided to move down to $5/$10 6 max where the games were probably easier and learn the game more while building my bankroll. So I played that game for the next couple months and managed to win a little over $15k. I was on top of the world.
Then after a couple hundred hours of beating that game for over $70 an hour I decided to take a shot at the $10/$20 games. I started out losing a little which I think was due to a combination of the games being radically different and a little bad luck. I wasn’t down much though and wasn’t too dismayed so I kept at it and in no time had the game figured out and was beating the hell out of it. At $5/$10 the games were very passive, but the games were almost insanely aggressive at $10/$20. Luckily many hours of playing against the 1 maniac who seems to be at every $5/$10 table had prepared me a good deal for what I was to encounter, because even though the players were aggressive they were far from good. So for the first month or so I ended up making over $125 an hour.
It was at that point that tournaments began to explode on Party. At first they had the Sunday $215, which was offering first place prizes of $50,000 or more. Then they added one on Saturday, then one on Friday. Then came the weekday $162 buy-ins, and before you knew it every day of the week had a tournament with first place prizes bigger than my entire bankroll. When you are first starting out and playing $3/$6 games making $25 per hour a $215 buy in seems like a lot of money. When you are making over $100 an hour it is peanuts. So I launched headlong into tournaments, playing every $215 I had the time for and every semifinal and super satellite for the Party Poker Million, which I was desperate to play in. The big weekday tournaments (which are now just $162 buy in regular multis) originally came from their $162 super satellites, which they would run once or twice a week. After a while the boat was apparently oversold so they switched to just paying out $9k prizes instead of cruises, and then eventually made them into just normal tournaments.
So I began playing many tournaments and I had little success at first. I seemed to money enough to break even in regular tournaments, but I had spent quite a bit on satellites with nothing to show for it. However during the very last set of semifinals I managed to win my way into the cruise (after spending almost $2k in satellites). At this point I still spent most of my time playing $10/$20 6 max and only played a few tournaments each week. Then a few weeks before the cruise I caught another big break. I had gone to sleep one Sunday morning (the last day of February) around 11 a.m. and as such didn’t have any intention of waking up to play in the $215 tournament at 4 p.m. However at about 3:30 my friend John called and told my girlfriend to wake me up, which she did, and he told me there were already 1700 people registered for the tournament. Normally 1500 was a big turnout and there was still a half hour left to register, so this one was bound to be much bigger than usual. Knowing I would be unable to go back to sleep anyway I decided to play in it with him, and it ended up having something like 1997 people in it, which is a record I still have not seen bested. Back then Party Poker was still experiencing massive growing pains and the tournament spent at least a couple hours on pause waiting for the servers to be fixed. The whole wile I had an average stack and was desperately hoping that the servers would go down so I could receive a couple thousand (they payout people when the server fails, which had happened to me a few times before) and go back to sleep. Fortunately for me that didn’t happen, since 10 hours later I had taken 4th and was $24k richer. I had to give $12k to my friend, but still it was a hell of a boost to the bankroll.
I went on the cruise in March and didn’t win anything in the tournament (I had started my blog before this so my trip report and the report of my $24k win are in here somewhere) which was pretty much uneventful. I came home and resumed life as usual. I wanted to start playing tournaments pretty much full time, but unfortunately there just aren’t enough big buy in tournaments online to really make this possible, and I haven’t got the bankroll yet to play all the major events around the country, so I kept on playing ring games part time and tournaments part time, which I still do to this day.
Since then I have won a few tournaments. I took down a $109 NL on Party for $8500, and a $200 limit at the Mirage for $5k. I have done pretty well in live action as well, mostly playing $20/$40 and $30/$60 limit hold’em, and a little bit of live no limit hold'em in AC. Hold’em is the only game with which I am extremely comfortable, but fortunately due to its recent popularity explosion you really aren’t missing out on much (if anything) by being unable to play the other games. The suckers want to play hold'em and I want to play with the suckers. It seems though that you really can’t find hold'em only games above the $100/$200 level so at some point I do hope to become proficient in Seven Stud, Stud 8, Omaha, Omaha 8, Deuce To Seven Lowball, Razz, etc. If I am going to be playing the white chip games eventually (which is my ultimate aim) I am going to have to learn those games. I still feel that even though I have improved so much at hold'em in the past year I have plenty more to learn about this fascinating game. Right now I am learning to better play no limit and tournaments (and no limit tournaments), as well as improving my limit game. I am playing a lot of single table tournaments, a lot of multi table tournaments, and a lot of short handed limit games. My bankroll has stayed pretty static over the last couple months due to a pretty bad run which has caused me to win very little more than my expenses, but I am optimistic about it as I feel I have been playing well.
The only thing I am unsure of after my first year of play is my expenditures. I won somewhere around $100k and only managed to save about $25k of it, making my current bankroll about $30k. Don’t get me wrong, I am more than safe with $30k, but where did the rest go. I guess quite a bit went to travel, as in one year I have been to Vegas 3 times, California/Mexico once (for the cruise), Atlantic City twice, Tunica once, Florida once (non poker). So that’s probably $10k in travel expenses right there, not counting food. I bought way too many toys (laptop, mp3 player, Bose headphones, new suit, lots of clothing, new monitor, upgrades for my PC, furniture, home theater system, digital camera, and that’s just off the top of my head) which probably adds up to $10k. I did give away about $14k splitting (though I gained $5k). I paid off the vast majority of my debts (and am about to pay the rest) and probably had about $20-25k in normal living expenses (and another large amount eating out, since I have expensive taste in food) so I guess when you add all of that up the math works out correctly.
I think that in the next year I will try to keep a tighter rein on my expenses. I am probably going to spend a couple thousand on this new move, but then I am done buying toys for quite some time. I am going to buy a large screen TV for about $1200 which I can hook my computer up to, that way I can sit in my new recliner and play online. I think we may also buy a loveseat together since the new space necessitates a little more furniture, and a few other things that will all add up to maybe $700 each. Plus I have to pay rent at the new place one month before we move in, so there is another $500 for my half of it. After that though there really aren’t that many toys that I even want that I don’t have, and I won’t have any new expenses until the lease on my car runs up in November, so I should be able to take those few months to increase the old bankroll. I am also going to cut back on travel a bit, since I seem to make more just staying home playing online. I still will need to get out to a casino every now and then for a big tournament to escape that grinding feeling you get playing online full time, but for the most part I am going to just try to run up my roll to where I can play the $100/$200 games on Stars.
Well that pretty much sums up year one. These are simply the results, and in the next post I will give you something much more important. So stay tuned.

Posted by themaroon at 7:26 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 11, 2004

Mulligans

Someone left a comment on my site, which may or may not appear on the new page. So just in case it is lost in the shuffle here it is:

well, I'm gonna have to give you a mulligan on this one. Since I came to this site via HDouble's page I'll assume there is something of value here. If you don't know who Ashley is then you obviously are not fully immersed in the poker world. He's a regular poster on RGP and an excellect hold'em and stud player, as I have played with him in person and attended his well run charity poker tournaments in Boston. To put his quote in context, he was replying to all the people who think that Raymer was a lucky internet amateur, a MoneyMaker clone, who, through dumb luck beat out 2600+ other players. Anyone familiar with Greg knows this to be ridiculous, as he's a high-limit regular at Foxwoods and a well-read poster on RGP and 2+2. It's like the Marlin's winning the World Series, people will say the Yankees were the better team, but they lost, the Marlin's won and without any better means to compare them than head-to-head competition you'd have to say the Marlin's were the best team in baseball. And so, on those 5 days at Binion's Raymer was the best NL hold'em player. Of course, on paper, the Yankee's were the better team and at the WSOP there were many, many players who were, on paper, better players. Ashley was just giving Greg his due. As far as calling his book rubbish based on misinterpreting this post, I don't think that's fair. Go out and buy it, read it and then tell me what you think of it.

Well I have no idea how good or bad Raymer is myself, but I understand your (and Ashley’s) point that he isn’t simply a Moneymaker or Varkonyi. Still winning the WSOP does NOT make him the best player. The major difference between baseball and poker is the luck factor. If the Yankees and the Marlins play head to head the team that plays better will win every time. I suppose if both teams are very closely matched one could play slightly better and still lose to bad officiating or something, but this is a rarity. If the Marlins beat the Yankees in the World Series (Of Baseball, that is) it is because they played better. Not that they are necessarily a better team, but that they played better in that seven game series.
Chess is similar. Every player has good days and bad days. If I played Kasparov heads up enough times I would beat him sooner or later. And I would beat him because I played that one game better than he did. I would not be a better player than him, but I would have played better than he did for one game.
So let’s assume poker was not a game of luck, and that whoever played best always won. Even if this were the case (which it most definitely is not) it would not make Greg Raymer the best player in the world. It would make him the player who played best for one tournament. Those are two very different things.
Poker however has a luck factor. You and I could play heads up for any amount of money, even for 5 days straight and you could play better than me the whole time and still end up losing to me. Anyone who does not understand this simple concept does not understand poker, and therefore I would not want to read their book. I am sure that in fact Ashley probably does understand this and would see the flaw in his logic immediately, or at least I hope so.
So Greg Raymer’s winning the WSOP does not make him the best no limit tournament player in the world. It doesn’t even mean he played better than everyone else in that tournament. In fact really all it does mean is that he is now a wealthy individual. He may or may not be an excellent player. Hell, he may in reality be (though I doubt it) the best player alive, but if he is it isn’t because he won one tournament, even if it was the WSOP. Hence I found that quote to be entirely flawed and worthy of the “Stupid Quote Of The Day” title. If anyone needs a mulligan here it is Ashley Adams.

Posted by themaroon at 9:19 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 10, 2004

New Site

Well I have been considering moving from TypePad to my own hosting service for quite some time, and now I am finally doing it. I have 2 other blogs to move over (which I hope to accomplish by the end of the month) and then the old one will be no more. During that time I will of course continue to post new content here and work on improving the site. I have a load of new features planned. I am going to add a forum just for poker bloggers (and of course their loyal readers) and a moblog, so you can see what I see when I travel.
The 9 months or so I have been with TypePad have given me a great introduction into the world of blogging. It is truly one giant community, and for someone just starting out who wants an entirely text based blog I would highly recommend it. They are fairly generous with storage space and bandwidth, and require no knowledge of web developing to use. Plus their Recently Updated lists give you some exposure (to humans and to Google) and will
I am now switching to a new hosting service and am going to use MovableType. This is the program TypePad was based on, though now I have much more control over all of it. Finally all of the time I spent learning how to create a cascading style sheet will pay off! I imagine at some point after I finish migrating I will use my new power to tweak the layout until it looks tighter than any other blog on the planet. I am hosting the whole thing on ProHosters, which is the best hosting service I have ever used (and I have used many) because of their incredible support. They will do things for you (like install Movable Type if you are too ignorant to do it yourself) that other companies will laugh at. One time on an old site I hosted there they even took a look at a PHP script I had made and helped me debug it.
So if you are a regular reader (and I now have hundreds of them) let me know what you think of any changes that pop up. There really haven’t been much yet but there will. I enjoy my reader feedback (my girlfriend laughs when I tell her I am answering fan mail) so keep it coming.

Posted by themaroon at 7:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 9, 2004

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June 8, 2004

Stupid Quote Of The Day

I found the most ridiculous poker quote ever written. Ready for it? Here it goes:

All in all then, Greg Raymer's victory demonstrates that he is, right now, the best no limit tournament poker player in the world.

This comes from someone named Ashley Adams who apparently wrote a book about entitled Winning 7-Card Stud. You really don’t have to examine the rest of this person’s circular and disconnected logic to realize right here that they are an idiot. What they are saying in just this simple statement is that winning one event makes you “the best no limit tournament poker player in the world”. What this means is that given a field of 2600 players, whoever is the best player will win 100% of the time, because if the best player did not win every single time then how could winning one event make Greg Raymer the best? It couldn’t. In fact, contrary to this idiot’s fallacious reasoning it didn't.
I am not even attempting to comment on Raymer’s skill, just that winning the event does not in any way indicate how good of a poker player he is. All it indicates is that he played in the event. He is however almost undoubtedly not the best no limit tournament poker player in the world by quite a wide margin. He beat a field largely comprised of people with no clue whatsoever, but even if the field consisted of 2500 pros (if that many existed) winning would still not make him the best. It may make him the wealthiest, but not the best.
Anyone who would ever say something like this obviously has no understanding of poker. They also have a poor mind for logic, because it takes quite a bit of confusion to come the conclusion that winning one event, even if it is the biggest in history, makes you the best. I am half tempted to get Winning 7-Card Stud, as I have a feeling that anybody dumb enough to make the above statement would produce a highly amusing book, given that they have no concept at all of how poker works. But since I make my living taking money from idiots rather than giving it to them, I think I will skip on purchasing this pile of rubbish.

Posted by themaroon at 1:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 6, 2004

The Recap

Well in recap the trip was an overall success. We managed to pay for the expenses (including some nice dinners) and end up a little more than a thousand ahead each. We were splitting, as we always do on roadies, so even though John had a relatively bad run (and was still up a little) I made up for it. In some ways I felt that I should have spent my time over at the Taj playing $30/$60 or $40/$80 (nothing bigger than $20/$40 went off at the Borgata) or some such higher stakes, but at the same time if my goal were to earn money I would have been better off just playing on Party from the broadband connection in the room. The purpose of the trip was to escape the grind of playing online for a short time, and I accomplished that and learned something valuable. I don’t have much experience playing live NL ring games, so I feel like I learned a lot. I still have a lot to learn about this fascinating game and my experiences playing short handed ring games and NL tournaments have done a good job preparing me for it. I look forward to playing it more in the future.
I lost my cell phone somewhere on the ride home. I think it fell out of my pocket at a rest stop or something. This is unfortunate but it seems I can get a nicer one anyway for not that much money and I would like to get one with a camera. That way I can have a moblog so my readers can see what I see at all the major events. I don’t think anyone else in the poker blog world is doing this, so it should be a great service to my readers.
I think the best part of the whole entire trip was playing with all of the WPT pro wannabes. It is so funny how all of these young kids watch a few televised events, read a book or two, and think they are going to be the next Phil Ivey. So many of them would say things to me like “we are going to run this table over” or “that guy doesn’t stand a chance at this table with us here” and I had a hard time holding back my laughter because it was invariably some weak tight kid who couldn’t fold top pair for his whole stack. Then there were the few insanely aggressive ones who would often just shove in their whole pile and expect you to fold. Those ones never lasted long because eventually John or I would flop a straight and they would try it. Hell, sometimes someone would just flop top pair and call them, sending them to the rail where they whined to their friends about the guy who couldn’t fold top pair for $300.
Also I learned that Atlantic City is actually just as nice as Vegas as long as you never leave the Borgata. Once you do that you realize what a shit hole it is. They have a few nice restaurants there, some shopping, and good poker action. The rooms are excellent and very affordable. So in the future I will just drive straight in to the Borgata and not leave the casino until it is time to go home.

Posted by themaroon at 11:14 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 5, 2004

AC Day 3

Well day 3 was a rollercoaster. I sat down at the $1/$2 no limit game and found myself down $600 in about 2 hours. I lost $300 in one hand where I got too stubborn with pocket queens and lost to aces, then had a few small losses. I kept rebuying up to $300 (the max you are allowed) and after a while I won a small pot so I had $350. Then comes a hand where I call $2 on the button with 3 5 suited after a few limpers. The flop came K73 rainbow and it checked to me, so I bet $10. I was looking around the table and I happened to see the kid to my right lift up his cards and reveal that he had Q 10, which is nothing at all. By this time I knew he was a blatant dunce who watched a few WPT shows and thought he was good, but what followed left me in awe for hours. After everyone else fold he raised it to $30. I knew he had nothing and figured he was simply trying to buy the pot, so I reraised to $85 figuring I would just make him fold his hand right there. Now normally I wouldn’t reraise anything but a monster there, but I knew my pair of 3s was the best hand. Much to my surprised the kid immediately said “all in” and slid his entire stack of about $380 into the pot. I started to wonder if I had really seen Q 10 or if he had something else but I was 100% positive I saw the 10, which meant that even if I was wrong I had 5 outs twice. I was also pretty sure of the other card so I slid my chips into the pot after about 3 seconds of thought and was happy to see that I was in fact correct, he had Q 10. The turn and river missed him and my pair of 3s won a $700 pot.
Of course everyone at the table went crazy. The kid asked me how I could call that much with bottom pair and I told him that I saw his hand. The entire table couldn’t stop laughing. The kid accused me of cheating, but since it was his responsibility to cover his own hand I just laughed it off. He was very upset, but he got over it and I would have bet that he would have been much more careful about exposing his hand in the future, but that bet would have been a loser since one hour later I could see some of his hands again.
So the kid rebought and worked his stack back up to almost $700. I had won a couple small pots, plus that big one so I had him covered. Then came the second big hand of the night. He raises it to $15 in early position, and I call with 7 8 off. I was putting him on a big pair, since he played most hands but raised only the big pairs and AK. I was pretty sure he didn’t have AK because he would have raised more to try to avoid a flop. I know that raising more than 7.5 big blinds sounds absurd, but this table was rocking. Many opening bets were $50 or more. Anyway, we saw the flop heads up which came Q 7 8 rainbow, giving me bottom 2. He bets $50, which immediately tells me he doesn’t have QQ because the WPT wannabes slow play all sets. So I raised it to $150, and he immediately reraised to $350. At this point I was almost positive that he had a big pair and was just being belligerent with it, but I decided to just call and make sure the turn wasn’t a queen before putting all of the chips in, since that would make him trips if he has something like AQ (which I didn’t think he had but couldn’t rule out the possibility) or a higher 2 pair if he has any pocket pair above 8.
The turn came a 6, which gave me the added worry of him having 9 10, but as I said I was pretty sure he had a big pair, knew it was beat, and was trying to bully his way out of it because he just didn’t want to fold. When he bet $150 into me on the turn (the pot was over $700) I knew I was correct, and I put him all in. He called and actually surprised me when he rolled over pocket jacks, which wasn’t even top pair. Fortunately none of his 8 outs (Q, J, or 6) hit the river and my stack grew to almost $1500. One guy at the table asked my why I called $15 preflop with 7 8 and I said “because I thought that if I flopped 2 pair or better I could take $600 off him.” It turned out I was wrong because I actually could take over $700.
From there things went the way they normally do for a few hours. I saw a lot of flops with hands like pocket pairs, goofy connectors, suited hands, pretty much anything I could get in cheaply with. Most hands I folded, including numerous top pairs, but a couple actually flopped monsters and I busted people with them, so even though I was in the game for $900 I wound up with $1900 in front of me and was feeling good. I had everyone covered twice over at the table, but there were still a lot of $800 stacks in the hands of players who would have been willing to give it all to me with nothing better than top pair. There were 2 younger players who greatly overrated their own skill calling every time I raised, and I knew that I would bust them both given enough time. So of course that was when the beats set in. In the course of 1 hour one drunken guy (who we were calling SF since that is what his hat said) bad beat me out of almost $900. He did it by making such stellar plays as calling a pot sized $100 bet with a gut shot, runner runnering me a few times, and then the last one, which was perhaps the most absurd beat I have ever taken. In every bad beat he put on me I got him to call an obscene amount with very few outs (many runner runners) and then didn’t lose a single cent after his draw hit. I didn’t mind though, what did it matter if he beat me a few times? I was going to bust him eventually anyway.
So finally the decision pot came. SF had been raising almost every hand to $10, so when I found KK UTG I limped, which is something I never do. Of course a few people limped and he raised to $10, with one call. I promptly threw in $100, since I knew he would call and we saw the flop which came K 4 5, rainbow. I bet $100, since at this point I knew he was either drawing extremely slim or completely dead, and he called. The turn was a 3, which I didn’t like at all since he could easily have an ace, 6, or 2 and now be drawing live. I bet $200, which in hindsight was a mistake. I should have bet the pot, which at this point was $400, or maybe even set him all in. It would have only cost me $200 or more in the end but it would have been the correct play. However I felt that he might fold an ace here for $400 but not for $200, and just about anything else was drawing dead. The river was of course one of the ugliest cards I have seen, a 6. This wouldn’t be a bad river against any remotely intelligent player, but against this idiot I knew it was the bad beat. I checked and he rolled over pocket deuces for the 6 high straight. What a horrid beat. If an ace or a 2 came on the river I would have won the pot, and if anything else came I might have even got him to call my all in with just a pair of 2s. But I had lost.
At this point I was starting to get a little upset. The whole point of no limit is that when idiots make mistakes you can bust them, but here this idiot managed to bad beat me 5 or 6 times in a row, any one of which would have been the end for him. Now he had over $1500 and I was down to $1100. Fortunately someone tricked me into going all in (for his $300) with trips when he had a full house and I rivered a bigger full house to get me back into range to bust SF. SF (who I had busted once or twice early in the day) actually calmed down for a while, since he was now even, but that of course didn’t last long and soon he was back to his old ways.
For the next few hours I played every single time he came in, for however much he raised. The only time I folded was when someone else reraised him too much. It wasn’t because I wanted to bust him personally, but because I knew that any time I flopped 2 pair or better and didn’t get bad beat I was going to win $1500 off of him. 6 3 offsuit may not be a very good hand for $15, but when you consider that if you flop 2 pair you are quite likely to win $1500 it starts to look a lot better.
Oddly enough after seeing