The Poker Chronicles

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July 27, 2004

Responses

>Been thinking about the RM-AV3100 and didn't know it
>would help me toss out that silly X-10 remote. Now
>it is worth the $200! LOL.
Well that is what I read, I will let you know if it works. Also it only costs $100 or so online. Click the link I have to it.
>How are you hooking up to the TV to play poker?
Just through the DVI for my laptop and probably S-video for any other computers that connect.
>Good luck with your system, you wont want to go to the
>movies again! My 65" Sony and home theater is the best
>thing we have ever added to the house.
I already don’t go to movies anymore, just Netflix so I agree. So tired of people talking during movies.
>If you hook up to the TV, is the PIP one of those small
>windows, or 1/2 the screen?
It is split screen so each would take up half. You can resize the two windows if you want one to be larger.
>How would you play against each other, you can't hide
>your hole cards.. or are you talking about just
>playing at the same time?
>
>I know you guys kind of work as a team, but it's a bit
>unethical to look at each others cards if you were both
>at a final table together or something.

Party doesn’t let you sit at the same table in a tournament, except maybe final table (we have never both made it that far so we don’t know what will happen). Making final table is so rare that it could be many years before we ever both made it there. We once got down to just 2 tables left (at which point I went out) and have made it to the last 3-6 tables many times and have never been at the same one, so we are pretty sure that we will never be at the same table unless we make it to the final one. We have played so many tournaments and gotten so deep that you would think it almost certainly would have occurred by now if the software wasn’t designed to prevent it.
In the unlikely event that we do both make the top table we will just disconnect and play independently until one of us is eliminated. We only play in the $162 tournaments and up (maybe the occasional $109) so it wouldn’t do to have one of us win a large prize and Party take it away. We have always dreaded being at the final table together and one of us getting AA and the other KK or something but decided that if it happened one of us would just have to go broke. Still I think it is unlikely that we will ever be at a table together, since even on our best game we still have only a few percentage chance of making the top table in these 1000+ entry tournaments.
I suppose if we made it there and were still sharing information it would be unethical but I doubt it would ever be very helpful to us. Team playing is not really that useful in those situations. It is an unfair advantage over the rest of the players since it could make a difference in the outcome of the game but isn’t nearly as beneficial as most players might think. We ran a lot of SNGs together back in the day on Paradise and found out that it rarely influenced a decision.

Posted by themaroon at 2:31 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 26, 2004

New Toys

I am taking the next couple days off (possibly until the WCOOP tournament on Thursday) to get ready for my move. I have to pack up everything, give a lot of stuff to Goodwill, and most importantly order all of the new toys for the new place. So far I am planning on getting a big ass HDTV for playing poker on, and general TV viewing as well of course. I think I am going to get this one since it is a good value. I have more room than I know what to do with in the living room at the new place, so I didn’t even want one of the slimmer LCD or plasma models. LCD models are great but one of that size would cost at least $5,000 more than the Toshiba and the picture would be inferior. Plasmas are flaming pile of junk (everyone who bought one will regret it within 5 years) because they have horrible image burn-in problems, start to go bad after a few years of regular use, and can't produce a good black color (just a very dark green which is more noticeable as the price goes down). I would love to have a DLP television because the picture is better than anything else but it would cost an extra 4 or 5 thousand dollars and is just not worth it to me since I really don’t watch much television. I do watch a ton of movies but the picture quality on a DVD is nowhere near that of HDTV and probably won't be until the blue-laser DVDs become commonplace, which is still a few years away so I wouldn’t see that much of a difference anyway. Maybe then I will buy a DLP TV but for now spending $6-10k on a television just seems excessive.
Much more exciting to me than the television however is the remote that is used to control it. I know what you're thinking. What could be so exciting about a remote? Peep this. For an actual picture of the unit and a review check out Remote Central’s review which should be much more informative than the one customer review so far on Amazon. This remote is an update of Sony’s extremely popular RM-AV3000 remote. I have a ton of components which need to be controlled (Cable Box, TV, Home Theater System, PVR unit) and this will be able to do them all with 100% functionality because it can learn custom commands. I have always hated universal remotes because invariably there is always a feature on each component for which there is no button on the remote (making the remote not universal at all) so now I can simply make a button and have it learn the code. Also this thing can perform macros, meaning I can program one button push to do many functions. For instance I push one button and the remote will turn on the TV, turn on the home theater system, turn the volume up, set the home theater system to DVD input, set the TV to whichever input I have the DVD player on, and turn on the DVD player. Talk about the ultimate in laziness.
Also this unit has timer functions, so if I wanted to I could have it turn my TV or stereo on or off while I am not home. This would be useful for people who have parrots I suppose, but not of much use to me. More importantly for me it will interface with X10 home control units, of which I plan to buy a few. Thus I can have the remote turn lighting on and off whenever I wish which is cheaper and much more convenient than a lamp timer. Suppose you have a normal lamp timer and it turns your lamp off. Now try turning the lamp on. It is a pain in the ass since you have to reach down to the timer and mess with the settings. With this remote I can just flick any light I want on or off from my couch, and unlike a lamp timer (which simply switches the lamp from whichever state it is in to the opposite state at the scheduled times) it is intelligent and will never turn a lamp off when it should be turned on as a lamp timer would if you had switched the state manually (say to turn the lamp off when it would normally have been on).
For a tech freak like me this remote will transform my living into a utopia. The reason for the television actually is more for poker use than entertainment. It has split screen PIP so John and I could both hook up our laptops and play tournaments side by side on the same screen. This would be a tremendous benefit I think and we will hopefully be able to do this for the later WCOOP events. Also I will be able to play my normal ring games from the comfort of my recliner. Which brings me to my next toy the gyration cordless mouse. This little baby is an optical mouse with a gyroscope built in that can be used in the air or on any normal mousing surface. It uses RF waves so it has a 30’ reach (most wireless mice have only a few feet of range) and is unencumbered by the normal line of sight constraints of remotes. It also comes with a keyboard and is rechargeable. Wow I love technology. So there you have the cool tech gadgets of my new home, which will be named Xanadu unless and until I find something better.

Posted by themaroon at 4:29 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 23, 2004

Sick Of Poker

Today in the $162 NL on Party I realized once again just how poorly programmed the site is. Usually when you get to one table away from the money they go into hand for hand mode, but today for some reason they didn’t. This caused my friend John to bubble when he likely would have at least reached bottom money which was pretty annoying but I was still in with a good stack so I wasn’t too upset. So he goes out and we are down to 90 (in the money) and sure enough hand for hand comes into effect. This of course cuts the hands played in half and more or less ruined the entire blind level since it took over 20 minutes to get down to 80 where it finally reverted back to normal play. Normally we would have been down to 60 people or less by that time so I was very annoyed with this, but I tried to remain calm since getting upset doesn’t help you win a tournament.
It is unfortunate that online gambling is not licensed and regulated in the US, since you have no recourse against these people and their defective product. I like to think that in the US no business that is run as poorly as theirs could ever have 3 times the amount of customers as ones which are much better. Of course I know this to be untrue and I expect in time Party’s lax attitude will catch up to them when the poker boom subsides. I hate to contribute to their success but even despite all of their problems the action there is unlike anything else in the world so in the interests of my bottom line profits I am forced to mainly play there. I take any excuse I can to play elsewhere, but those excuses are few and far between though they will hopefully grow more frequent.
So anyway the round was killed and when the big blind got to 1k I had a 16 k stack with 75 people left. There should have been 55 people left and the big blind 600 but Party was programmed by capuchin monkeys. From that point I got dealt nothing playable and blinded down to 6890 (BB of 2k) over the next half hour or so. I got one 9 3 after another the entire time, though I did steal the blinds once (with an A 5) when I was moved from my button to second under the gun, costing me 2 potential hands and forcing me to post a big blind and go all in with Q 7, which beat an A 6 and doubled me back to 13,780. I then went all in UTG with AK, was called by AJ, and somehow won (despite being a large favorite) to double up to hit 27k, which was about average, with about 32 players remaining.
After that we broke down to 3 tables and still none of my opponents seemed to even have the slightest clue what they were doing. Blinds kept coming and I found myself on the BB (which was now 4k) with 16k. An idiot named luke 88 with 12k limped UTG and I had q 5 so I checked. The flop came Q 10 2 and I shoved, and the idiot who had limped UTG called with A 10 but spiked a 10 on the turn knocking me down to 6k. Of course I couldn’t expect to win with a 4-1 favorite when it really mattered because this is the worst month of poker of my life. I then went all in with A 10 against 4 4, flopped a 10, but a 4 hit the turn and I was out in 24th. I would much rather have not even played in the tournament in the first place than play 5 hours and have to split a $750 prize, but that is poker for ya.
I still find it hard to believe that someone could play that badly with 25 people left. Calling UTG for 1/3 of your stack with A 10 is about as bad a play as you can make, but I guess that is the way Party works. Tomorrow is another day and there is a $215 Limit tournament for me to get bad beat out of.
After the tournament I jumped into a $10/$20 heads up game with a player named Arbitrage. I had about $1100 left in my UB account (though I did get back about $30 in bonus money, yippee) and he got it all. He really wasn’t very good HU, just insanely aggressive. He raised every hand preflop except maybe 10. In the hour and a half I played him I must have hit 5 or 6 flushes that lost to his bigger flush. He hit 5 outers on me somewhere between 10 and 20 times, all on huge pots. He had me down about 700 for a while then I came back and was winning for a time. About then I got tired and should have quit, but I didn’t and the rest is history. While I was wide awake he bad beat me hand after hand but he has some very easily exploitable weaknesses (mainly a willingness to dump in insane amounts with dominated hands) so as long as I kept my cool I was able to keep grinding back to even. Of course every time I got there he bad beat me for another huge pot, or hit a higher flush than me and knocked me back down again, but I could handle all the bad luck until I got tired. When I got tired though I lost it and started playing as badly as he did. This is the second time I have done that (played when tired) both times against simple maniacs like him, and both times cost me dearly. For some reason I can take all the bad beats in the world when I am awake and not care a bit, but when I am tired I go on tilt.
Yesterday I lost a few hundred playing the same game against an idiot named Offthenuts. I knew him from Party and knew he was an idiot, but he hit and ran me after playing for about 20 minutes. Fluctuations in heads up are so insane, I don’t think I will be playing it anymore anytime soon. My bankroll is getting too low for my liking due to the last few months. This bad streak is starting to get me down, so I think I will play in the tournament tomorrow and take the rest of the week off and maybe not play again until the 29th. I just am at the point where I can't stand poker anymore. So if you don’t hear from me for a few days I am just off trying to clear my head and forget that this stupid game exists. I am sure I will be back (we all know I'm not going to go out and get a job or anything) but after this 3 month bad streak I just need a long vacation.

Posted by themaroon at 11:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 22, 2004

Forum

Someone left a great question in the forum today. I researched the answer and learned from it. Thanks for the question shark, I hope to get more like it, since that is why I put this forum up.

Posted by themaroon at 5:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

I Am Really Starting To Dislike UB

I am starting to become rather skeptical of Ultimate Bet. I think I found a site with worse customer support than Party, and that is hard to do. Here is why I say that. First of all there is the Sit N Go Promotion they have going this month. According to their website you are supposed to receive your bonus on Monday for the ones played the past week. The first week I played I did not receive the bonus until Wednesday, and then only after I emailed them on Tuesday. This week (it is now Wednesday) I still have not received it. I emailed them early this morning and they promised it would be in my account in the next day. They said they were having server problems, which I know to be an understatement.
The reason I know this is because I had a server crash on me in the middle of a sit n go. We had just begun and I had raised 55 and got a few callers. The flop came A 8 5 (perfect) and the server crashed. Before the hand I had about 1k. the site wouldn’t let me log in until 15 minutes later, at which time I came back to find 3 people playing (all said they had been kicked off) and my stack at 500. I of course emailed UB demanding a refund and had to play email tag with them for 3 days to receive it. I won't go over what the emails said since it will just raise my blood pressure but suffice it to say it was very reminiscent of the emails you always get from Party, where they either paraphrase what you said right back to you (with no hint of an answer to your question) or give you some answers that aren’t even relevant to your query.
Then there are a few friends I have who keep getting their account locked. My one friend G from Atlantic City had this happen first. He tried emailing them but unfortunately he has an AOL email address and AOL is blocking emails from online gambling sites these days so customer support never was able to respond to him. They really should have a phone number like Party. So he tried to have my friend log into his account, and then my friend and everyone who logged into UB from his IP address got their account locked too. Simple emails got all of the accounts unlocked once G called Card Player and the WPT to complain about UB (since they advertise through them) and they finally called G. However my other friends who got their accounts locked continue to have problems with it.
So that stuff combined with my hatred of the bet pot button (love the convenience, hate the coaching) means that I will probably not play on UB after my bonus collecting is over. I am going to finish out the sit n go tournaments for the month, play 2 $5/$10 6 max games there until I cash it out, then move back to Party, where I will attempt to play 2 $10/$20 6 max games for a few months. After that the plan is to move up to 2 $15/$30s, then I will probably go somewhere with higher limits available, maybe Paradise or Stars. Paradise has a $20/$40 which is often short handed, so maybe that would be a good step after $15/$30. I know from previous experience that doubling your limits is a tough transition, so it might be better to try to find something like that in between $15/$30 and $30/$60. Wherever I go I doubt it will be UB until they fix a lot of things.

Posted by themaroon at 2:56 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 21, 2004

I Hate The WPT

I have been fighting saying this for quite some time, but I am finally going to give in. The World Poker Tour television show sucks. It sucks bad. I know, this is either heresy or a completely unoriginal thought depending on which way you look at it but it is the honest truth. The show is terrible. I'm not even referring to their blatant exploitation of players either, as I have covered that well enough in the past. Just the quality of their show. Which is awful.
The worst thing about the show is the commentating. Worse commentating would not be humanly possible. Listening to Vince Van Patten’s dumb ass remarks is about as enjoyable as a root canal. Everything he says is either inaccurate or just plain stupid. Maybe twice a season he will come up with a good joke, but they are outnumbered by the bad ones by about a 200-1 ratio. I don’t know where they ever found this guy to begin with but now that the show is a success and could afford to have a better color commentator they should fire him and send him back into obscurity. Who hired him anyway? I can just imagine the interview:
“What are your qualifications?”
“Well my dad was a second rate television actor in the late 70’s, and I used to play tennis. Also I have as much sense of humor as a bowl of cottage cheese.”
“OK, when can you start?”
To be honest though I think Mike Sexton is even worse. Every time he says “I can't believe he is thinking about calling here” when some schmuck is doing an acting job and is obviously going to fold I want to bash his teeth in with a rusty pipe. Unlike that idiot Vince, Mike is actually an accomplished poker player and should know better. The audience has seen people do the acting routine 872,000 times already Mike, you aren’t adding suspense here. Just shut up, please.
Also every segment with Shana Hiatt in it is stupid. Like I care what the Bicycle Casino looks like. And I am going to tell you guys a secret, she isn’t that hot. Yes in a poker room she passes for a perfect 10 (just about any girl who is height-weight proportionate and has at least most of their teeth is a 9 or better in the world of poker) but on a real life scale of models she isn’t very high up the list. She is fine, but there are 800 girls on T.V. who are better looking than her, so quit drooling over her on RGP. I will say that she looks much better in real life than she does on T.V. though, so it is a shame that they make her look like a 16 year old girl.
Another thing I hate about the WPT is that it is only 50% actual poker, maybe less. I would never watch this show without TiVo again. I edited one of them on my computer once to remove the commercials and was left with 70 minutes of footage. I am sure well more than 10 minutes of the remaining stuff was lame segments with Shana or background info on players who nobody cares about, meaning that poker was less than half of the show. Maybe they should call it The World Lame Ass Z-List Celebrity’s Son, Second Rate Model, And Washed Up Redneck Ex-Poker Player Tour.
Also I don’t give a flying fuck about that lame ass Anheuser World Select (a wimpy Heineken knock off) and nobody else does either. Skip the horrible product placement, nobody toasts with beer. Give the victors the champagne they deserve, or at least a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or something. I hope I win one of those just so I can take a sip during the victory toast and then spit it out as if I were surprised at how disgusting the stuff tastes. I can just see the credits rolling while I am in the background yelling “this stuff tastes like ass, someone get me a Sam Adams.”
Also what the hell is with the disco lights? Why don’t we just play some Bee Gees music and have the dealers roller-skate around the table while we are at it? This is poker, not some cheap nightclub. The background lighting on ESPN’s coverage is so much better. People don’t want theatrics; they want to see people playing the same game they play at home but for 1000 times the stakes. No purple or green lighting is necessary.
I am also sick of them acting like the hole card camera was their invention when it had been in use for years across the pond. Even if it were original I much prefer Fox’s method of having RFID tags in the cards so I don’t have to see some goofy black and white images of someone lifting the corner to reveal 2 7 off suit. Also anyone who has ever attended one of these events live will tell you that they have to stop the action about 374 times per hour to remind a player (almost always the same one) to show his hole cards to the camera. Sometimes they even go back after the hand and have the player pluck his cards out of the deck and lift them for the camera just so they can splice it in later.
I actually found the Celebrity Invitational (though I must say they employ a very loose definition of celebrity) to be the only ones watchable, and those only for a half hour. These people at least know they suck at poker (unlike the 4-6 random Joes at every other WPT table who don’t know the difference between luck and skill) and it is rather amusing to see what will happen. It is like having a NASCAR race full of blind drivers. You don’t know what will happen but you know it will be hilarious. It is great though how they act like the celebrities are all A-listers. I mean James Woods, Mimi Rogers, and that one Baldwin Brother who never did anything aren’t celebrities, they are glorified extras. I watch more movies than anyone I know and I can name one movie with any of them in it (Virgin Suicides has James Woods in a major role, a fact I know only (despite liking the movie) because someone on the Party Poker cruise told me when I responded to their “Did you see James Woods?” with “Who the hell is James Woods?”).
I missed Fox Sports Net’s live telecast last week, and if anyone recorded it to DVD and is willing to send it to me please let me know. From what I hear it was actually very well done, with insightful commentary from Howard Lederer, RFID tags for real time card viewing, and just general uneditedness. I truly hope that all events end up broadcast live one day, as it is the only way to watch any sport. And that is what poker is now, a sport.

Posted by themaroon at 12:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 20, 2004

Can Spam

Lately I have been getting plagued by comment spam. This is where shady online merchants advertise their site by posting comments to my entries. I guess this is a plague infecting the entire blogging nation, and it really disgusts me. Some blogs I have read went as far as to post things saying “Please stop spamming; you are ruining this site for everyone. I may quit writing if this continues.” To me this is the equivalent of sending a response to one of those male enlargement emails you get 700 times a day asking them to stop sending it to you. They probably aren’t going to read it, and if they do they will be happy to see that it is a valid email address and be sure to add you to the list of confirmed positives.
Luckily the software I use (Movable Type 3.0 y’all) has a few ways to deal with this. There is the obvious comment deleting and IP banning features, but since the spammers can change their IP addresses (or even develop virus bots that use people’s PCs to write them) both of these require me to take action each time the spammer spams. As long as the comment spam remains limited to a few instances each week I will probably just keep doing this, since I have way too much time on my hands anyway.
If however the spam increases (as I have every reason to believe it will) I will be forced to use a more proactive solution. Movable Type now has a feature called TypeKey, which would require users to register once before commenting. This registration would allow them to comment on any MT powered site. I doubt any spammers would go so far as to register (since the registration is bot-resistant) and even if they did it would drastically reduce the amount of times I had to ban them.
I really don’t want to implement this because I like the comments I get from readers. I know from my statistics that only a small percentage of readers actually comment. Just like most forums there are dozens of lurkers for every one active participant. I would hate to do something that would discourage people from commenting, since I would like to see more people voice their opinions. So I am going to hope that it does not come to this, but in the end it probably will. Hopefully I can delay the inevitable for a while, or maybe some act of Congress will miraculously imprison all spammers, though I think I would be better off relying on humankind’s good nature than the government, which is to say that I am screwed.

Posted by themaroon at 12:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Today

Today is my 24th birthday. Happy Birthday to me!
I have taken a much needed vacation the last couple days, and am ready to charge back to work tomorrow. More poker content will be forthcoming. I actually wanted to just take a couple days and not think about poker at all, yet I go to a bar and it is on TV. I pick up Time Magazine and there is a feature on it. I have 72 friends and family members asking me how I did in Vegas, some wanting to know about the tournament I got 3rd in, having seen it on Pokerpages. I did get to hear some funny conversations guys were having about their home games at the Thirsty Dog today. One guy even won as much as $40 one time. I sure hope I can win $40 sometime soon. Maybe tomorrow.

Posted by themaroon at 6:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 19, 2004

Last Day In Vegas

Today I woke up in a bad mood. Had I not registered for the tournament the night before I probably would not have even played in it. I am just getting sick of poker and need a few days off. When I get home I will probably take the next 3 or 4 days off, and use the time to pack for my upcoming move. Then of course I will go back to Ultimate Bet and get my Sit and Go tournaments in for the week.
Today in the tournament I won one hand and one blind steal. That was it. Nobody at my table seemed to have even the slightest clue what they were doing, except Tom McEvoy and a young guy to my right who were both pretty tight. Other than them everyone was doing such things as opening the pot for 300 when the big blind was 15, or just calling with aces preflop and going broke with them. My chips just went steadily down, one bad flop or bad beat at a time until I hade none left. I then rebought and the same thing happened again.
I got knocked out of the tournament at 2 and my flight isn’t until 1 a.m. so I decided to go rent a room at this place I had heard about. It is a place mainly for people who want to rent by the week or month called Emerald Suites. I had stayed at a similar place (Budget Suites) the entire trip and checked out in the morning. This place is MUCH better and is where I will stay whenever I come out here in the future. There are 4 of them around Las Vegas, and they have a kitchen, bedroom, and lots of cable channels just like Budget Suites did. Unlike Budget they actually have pots and pans, silverware and plates, and most importantly high speed internet.
So I am here wrapping up my Sit N Go’s for the month. I figured the room cost $80 and I seem to make a lot more than that in one day of Sit N Goes (though I don’t seem to be doing it today) and that’s not even counting the bonus dollars, so it was worth the investment. I also will take the opportunity to transfer a bunch of mp3s to my player that I had gotten recently and charge up the batteries for it and my cell phone. Then I will probably hang out here and read (maybe even cook dinner too) until 10 or so, return my rental car, then head on out to McCarran. It will be good to get back to my girlfriend and sub-100 degree temperatures, as I am starting to miss both. So the next post will hopefully be from the comfort of my own home.

Posted by themaroon at 3:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 18, 2004

Orleans Open, Day Number, ummmm, I forget. Been here too long.

Friday I met one of the people who read this blog regularly for a drink at the microbrewery in the Monte Carlo casino. He turned out to be a pretty cool guy so it was nice to talk to him. It is good to get a sample of the people who read what you write, and makes it more enjoyable to write.
Other than that I didn’t do much until the tournament today at the Orleans. It was a $230 Limit Hold'em with one $200 rebuy, which I took. I was doing very well throughout the first 4 hours or so, and spent most of the time as the chip leader at my table. For the last couple of weeks or so I have felt as if I have been playing better than ever before, and today I was definitely on my game. I made all of the right moves at the right times and stole a ton of small pots. I won a couple of nice sized pots too where people let me get out on them and then dumped in a ton of money. Those are always my favorite.
After the second break I had excellent control of my table. By this point all of the very bad players at our table had been knocked out. To be honest it may have been the toughest table I have been at the whole time I have been out here, maybe the toughest in months. So it was no surprise that the 3 or 4 bad players who started at our table or were moved there were gone, and everyone left knew how to play the game at least fairly well.
At that point my shorthanded experience really started to pay off and I accumulated a very large stack. I felt like I had everyone set up and I must have because every time I got a decent hand I won a good pot, and every time I had junk I stole. For a time I may have had the chip lead in the tournament (hard to tell in real life) or at least I was close to it, and I felt like I had a good line on everyone at the table. So of course I got moved.
At my next table the players were quite different. Only one or two had any idea what they were doing. Of course the blinds were so steep that one bad hour was pretty much fatal, and that is what happened to me. A few blind steal attempts were three bet back at me and I missed the flops. Then the worst player at the table bad beat me twice and I was out of the tournament.
I was pretty angry about this because the dunce who took my chips because he had no shot of winning. I always find it annoying when that happens, because even taking my whole stack is of absolutely no benefit to him but it is bad for me. He is like a kamikaze, just committing suicide by calling raises with 8 9 off all day and taking me down with him. After I got knocked out I went to eat and came back and sure enough he was gone, even though he had a huge stack just one hour earlier.
If nothing else I feel that I played very well. I truly feel like my game has improved quite a bit in the last month or two. I suppose poker is like that, you learn some new things, and apply them. Then you go on playing for quite a while and learn a few new things. Whereas when you are new to the game growth is a steady process when you are more advanced it comes in spurts. At least for me it does. Maybe it is that way for everyone or maybe it just is the way I learn. Either way as long as I am continuing to learn I will continue to improve and continue to move up through the ranks. In a coming article (maybe I’ll write it on the plane home) I will try to document what it is I have learned and how it has helped. Maybe.

Posted by themaroon at 5:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 17, 2004

On The Net

Found this link on PokerPages, quite by accident. Thats me in third place. Next time it will be first.

Posted by themaroon at 12:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 16, 2004

Day Off

Today I decided that I needed a day off of poker. I haven’t taken a day off in a long time so I spent the day reading and exploring some of the area around Vegas. Tomorrow I plan to hit the UB sit and go tournaments and attempt to finish 12 of the $109s. I am supposed to meet up with one of the readers of this blog for drinks, so I may not play any multi table tournaments tomorrow, which would be fine with me. Then on Saturday and Sunday there are events at the Orleans, and after those I am on my way home.
If this trip doesn’t turn out to be very profitable it has at least restored my faith in humanity somewhat. After playing with the people on Party I was truly starting to think that everyone who plays poker is a flaming idiot, and the people out here have proven to me that this is not so. If you rated bad players on a scale of one to ten, with one being almost break even and ten being the worst player you have ever seen, the average player on Party Poker would be an 8. This is at the higher limits and more expensive tournaments too, anything $3/$6 or below is almost full of 9s and 10s. Here at the Orleans I would give the average player a 2 (the average player loses at poker don’t forget), which to me is acceptable. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer my tournaments to be full of 10s, but it is refreshing to see that people aren’t all that stupid. Why all of the ones who are congregate at Party Poker I will never understand, but I guess I will just be thankful to have found out about it.
I think maybe Party players just have significantly less experience than players in real life. They don’t have other people to recommend books to them or stress their importance. They may not have any friends who play to talk about the game with. They don’t realize that $10/$20 6 max online is like playing $30/$60 in a casino in terms of fluctuation and have no idea how much they can lose. This would explain why I have notes on hundreds of players yet rarely see more than one or two people I have played with before at a 6 max table, even though I play at approximately the same hours all day every day.
Unfortunately however my trip here has reminded me how annoying people can be. Nothing is worse than people who think they are funny but are not. They all say the same corny jokes over and over (“we chop” apparently has to be said by whoever has the big blind every time it folds around to the player on the button) and just try to be table captains. I like nothing better than a true table captain who is actually funny (Mike Laing is one of the best when he is sober or close to it) and I have only run into one of those out here.
Mike for those of you who don’t know him is the subject of one of Daniel Negreanu’s threads called alcohol. He is supposedly a great no-limit hold'em player when sober. I have played with him maybe 6 or 8 times, and half the time he was drunk (and not so great) and the other times he invariably put in a large amount against me with hands ranging from 10 outs to 2 and got out on me almost every time. In one satellite at Binions he 2 outered me, I got my stack back, he 4 outered me, I built a stack again and then he 3 outered me. I still somehow ended up winning because he kept passing all of my chips to someone else before bad beating me again, and I made a huge comeback. Regardless the point is that he is one of my favorite people to play with because he is actually funny.
When I play I don’t want to hear people tell the same jokes I have heard 800 times before
(“my straight has a better kicker, hahaha” is common on chop pots as is “I have 3 pair e only has two, hahaha”) so I am stuck wearing the Bose headphones continuously. I also don’t like to hear schmucks analyze hands when they obviously have no clue. Every time I hear someone say “I knew you had the flush draw” I want to ring their necks and yell “he would have played about 87 different holdings the same way, only some of which were flush draws.” People always “know” what you have. I wish they had to say what they “knew” you had before you rolled it over, as I suspect they would be incorrect at least 75% of the time.
So in some ways I do still miss Party Poker and will be glad to get back to it. Until then though I have to get busy cleaning out these suckers in the next couple tournaments at the Orleans. More to come tomorrow.

Posted by themaroon at 7:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 15, 2004

Orleans Open Day 4, $230 Limit Holdem.

Today was the $230 Limit Hold'em event at the Orleans. There were 361 entries and everyone got 1k in chips. The rounds were a half hour for the first 9 rounds, then 40 minutes. The blinds started at 10/15 and progressed very slowly, so all in all the structure was fairly good. I was unfortunate enough to have two middle aged ladies with New York accents sitting to my left, one of whom literally did not stop talking for the entire 4 hours she sat there. I kept praying for two things the entire time: that my mp3 player’s battery (which started out on one bar meaning 4 hours or so) would hold up, and that she would get knocked out. She must have gone all in 17 times, been the underdog on the turn every time, and then caught the river. It is like the deck kept getting my hopes up then snatching them away. Every time she won I felt like it was me she had bad beat on the river.
As if her incessant yammer wasn’t enough she also wanted me to make change for her every time she had to post a blind and didn’t have the correct chips. This was ok at first, since I started off doing fairly well and had a surplus of 5s and 25s. But one time she asked me to change a 100 when all I had in front of me were some 100s and 4 25s. I was like “The blind is 75, just put in a 100 chip and the dealer will make change.” After that she left me alone.
That reminds me of the other annoying thing about the tournament: the dealers. I have never seen so many people unable to add or subtract since I attended public middle school in Akron. It really is not that hard. When the bet was 80 players would throw in a $100 chip, and the dealer would just kinda stare blankly at it for a minute. Then he would throw them a green chip. Then three other players would yell at the dealer because he gave back 5 too much and he would stare for a little, take back the green chip and give the guy 2 red chips. How hard is it to subtract 80 from 100, and then figure out how to give someone 20 in chips? And I won't even go into what happened when it was necessary to figure out a side pot.
Also half of the dealers at the Orleans will stop in the middle of a hand to join in a conversation. This is when I lose it. Now I hate players who abuse dealers more than anyone, and would never blame a dealer for a bad card on the river. I am also fairly tolerant of dealer errors, as I can understand how you can sometimes put up a turn too early or forget to deal in a player who is away from a table. They are human, they make mistakes. No big deal. But when a dealer stops doing anything just to talk to a player I go ballistic. They first time it happens I get a little incensed but I will calm down in a few minutes. The second time it happens I will say something to them about it. They of course think that I am a dealer hater (which about 20% of players are), that I am just blaming them for my bad luck (even though I am the chip leader), or that I am a typical grumpy loser. Usually though they will just stop doing it and sneer at me for the rest of the day. Were it a live action game I would drive my point home by never tipping them, but in a tournament no such luck. If after my saying something they continue to stop the action to talk I will call a floor man, or better yet tell them to call the floor.
Nothing is worse than dealers costing me money, but I think it is time to get back to the narrative before I start to sound like Vince Burgio. Granted he would rant more about something nobody cares about, like players who use more paper towels than they need to when washing their hands in the bathroom (and don’t even get him started on the guys who don’t wash after using the urinal) but still here is the play by play. I started out on a roll, winning my way up to 1500 in the first round. Then I didn’t catch anything at all for 4 rounds and found myself very short stacked. I went all in a bunch of times, a couple as a sizeable favorite and a couple with the best hand but still very near a coinflip after the flop. I won them all somehow, and eventually by about round 8 I had accumulated a decent stack. The blinds then were 50/100 and I had about 1800, which was to be my high watermark for the day. After that my stack remained the same until the blinds were 150/300 at which time I lost half of my stack (only 3 big blinds) with a pair of queens when a tight lady reraised and the flop came AKx. I just gave up. I then went all in and ended up in a 3 way pot for all of my chips with ace rag against QQ and JJ. Nothing came and I was out in 80th.
You might think this sounds like I must have glossed over a lot since I played for 5.5 hours. But really I didn’t. I had no luck at all. I didn’t really give or take a single bad beat. Just every hand went bad for me except the ones where I was all in, until the last one. I still somehow outlasted ¾ of the field, but you had to make top 18 to get anything so it wasn’t worth doing. I think I played remarkably well though given the crap I was dealt, so I am in good spirits.
The tournament tomorrow is open only to people age 55 and over. Damn that Oklahoma Johnny Hale and his stupid seniors. All that guy wants to do is run poker games for old folks. Here is an idea, move into a nursing home. You’ll be there soon enough anyway, and there are lots of old folks there. I hope his stupid seniorpoker.com flops (I am positive it will, how could it not?). Also nobody wants to hear your half hour rant before tournaments about poker players who died. There are 872 million of them, and I don’t need you to list them for me. Just say shuffle up and deal, thanks!
Who is this guy anyway? What did he ever do (besides having a 50th birthday) that makes him a poker celebrity. Why does he want to host all of these senior events? This isn’t golf, youth is not an advantage. Doyle Brunson can still beat any cash game around. That guy is ancient and I’ll take him over most people 1/3 of his age. Give the senior crap a rest Oklahoma.

Posted by themaroon at 5:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 14, 2004

Orleans Open Day 3, Part 2. Evening Rebuy Event.

Well I think I will end up at least even for my trip to Vegas, probably up enough to cover expenses. Tournament poker is funny that way. One minute you see this hole you are sinking into, the next minute you paid for your trip and all of your buy-ins. Here is how it happened.
After my bad beat in the tournament earlier I came home and relaxed for a while, trying to cool myself off. It seems that every time I get bad beat out of a tournament the period of time after for which I am fuming mad gets a little smaller. This time my post bad beat tilt period was only an hour or two, and I simply read a book and watched some TV during that time. Unfortunately I also got to think about my bankroll, which has stayed the same for almost 3 months now. Granted staying the same means I am winning my expenses, which are considerable, but nobody ever got rich just making their expenses, so this put me in a bad frame of mind.
So at 6 I got in the Party Poker $162 tournament, and did not play well. I made a bad move at someone pretty early for half of my chips. The guy played his hand very oddly whatever he had (I never saw) so I decided to take a stab at him. It didn’t work, leaving me with about 450. Also I was annoyed because of this dialup connection. For some reason there is no trouble playing on any site other than Party, but playing there is agonizing. I click bet, it waits a minute, and then it bets. I got disconnected twice in the first 20 minutes. So all of these things were agitating me greatly, and with my low stack I started thinking about the nightly tournament over at the Orleans. The structure in those events is terrible, though the payout structure is phenomenal. They give 40% to first, which I am a big fan of. I think 20% and something like 13% for third is the breakdown, with other prizes below that. So in the Party tournament I flopped a top pair with J 8 and just decided to shove (there was decent money in the pot) and lost to JQ. I was annoyed at my own bad play, but after being bad beat out of so many tournaments in the last 2 weeks it was nice not to lose to a 2 outer for once. So off I went to the Orleans.
Today 180 people played. It is a $125 event with a $100 rebuy. The total prize pool after the 3% taken for dealers was $32k, and top 3 was over $22k of that, with the breakdown being something like $12,500, $6,500, $3500. I started off very slow, only playing a couple pots in the first 3 rounds. Those are the rebuy period, and they are only 20 minutes long. At this point there were a couple rocks, a maniac, a few loose players, and then a couple average players. I finally got a hand in the second round. The maniac raised from middle position and I 3 bet him with QQ. The flop came A 9 x, he checked and I bet. He called and from his look I could tell he didn’t have an ace, so I thought maybe he just had JJ or 10 10. The turn was another ace and he checked, so I bet again and he called again. I knew I had him but somehow I got this gut feeling that the river would be a king and cost me the pot. Oddly enough it happened. I'm not a believer in psychics so I’ll just chalk it up to an amazing coincidence, but somehow I knew it, though I had no idea he had K 9. I thought he was just being his typical idiot self with KQ or KJ.
Then I had to rebuy. Right after the rebuy I got 3 3 under the gun and raised it, since most people at my table (other than the maniac) were playing tight preflop. I got one call, and the flop came A 8 3. the caller had AQ and doubled me up. I won another small pot or two and got back to the 2300 I had had before the first bad beat from the maniac.

A few rounds later (when the blinds were 100/200) I got QQ again and 3 bet the same maniac again. This time the board came 10 6 6 rainbow and the maniac said “I’ll give you a hint” and bet. I took his hint and raised him, and he called. I was positive he had crap, but I didn’t know what his crap was. The turn was a rag but it put a second club on the board and he check called me again. The river was a third rag, but it put a third club on the board. He check raised me, and I called only for him to roll over A 2 of clubs. WOW what a bad beat. First the guy 5 outered me, then he called with a 3 outer and runner runnered a flush. Now I was down to 300 with the blinds being 100/200. I was getting rather upset at this point, but decided I would hold my rage until I was out.
Under the gun I got J8 on the next hand and went with it. I decided that it was probably going to be better than my next hand. Everyone folded to the BB who called with 10 7, and I hit an 8 to win it. Now I had 800. How I had 800 I didn’t know, since I should have had 700, but I wasn’t going to complain. On the big blind I folded, leaving me with 600, and on the small blind I picked up Q J of clubs. Someone raised in early position and some idiotic Russian guy (an absolute nut case) reraised all in for 600. again I figured what the hell and called the rest of my chips. The other people had KK and QQ, but the flop was 8 9 10, which made my stack almost back to 2k, where it was both times before the maniac cracked my queens.
After that things started picking up. I won a couple small pots and a few blind steals. I got a pair of aces against the maniac and actually made it hold up, winning me 6 big blinds. I had a pair of threes hit a set for me on the big blind when someone neglected to 3bet their pocket queens, and I busted them. Pocket threes turned out to be the hand of the day later too, when I hit another set to bust another person who neglected to raise their pocket queens preflop.
Fast forward to 2 tables. We are now down to 18, all of us in the money. Me and one other schlub, who I think was named Steve (I had played with him at Binions during the WSOP and knew he was just another overly aggressive chump) both had about 55k in chips. The entire chip count was 120k or so, so we had over 40% of the chips between us, even though we were at separate tables. One guy proposed that we split first and second ($9k each) and everyone else split the rest, which would have been about $1200 for each of them. I was of course game for this since I felt I had a great shot of winning, but I think 9k was more than I deserved by at least 1k or 2, even factoring that I was much better than Steve. The blind structure was rather rough, and even my 50k was only 33 big blinds or so at the time. Everyone agreed to the deal except for one person, who happened to be the next person out. After that one more person objected to the now slightly better deal, and he objected all the way until we were down to 5 players.
By the time we got down to 9 people for the top table I still had about 55k in chips but Steve had over 100k. also another player at my table who I thought was actually a very solid player had grown to 30k, with the others all being in the 10-15k range. Again a deal was proposed which would give me 8k, Steve 10k, and all the rest splitting evenly except for the guy with 30k in chips who would get the extra 600 from me and Steve’s chop of first and second (which added up to $18,590). Again I thought this deal was unfair in my favor so I agreed to it but the old man objected. I was annoyed that he wouldn’t take it, but only because it was so much to my advantage, so I actually ended up sticking up for the guy when the others got annoyed at him. As much as I wanted the deal I understood his wanting to play and he was well within his rights to do so, so I got angry when 4 or 5 people wouldn’t let up on him. He actually turned out to be a very cool guy, and a reasonable poker player. He ended up getting 5th for $1600, so it was to his advantage that he turned down the deal which would have given him $1200.
When down to 6 players I lost a bunch of chips to Steve. I raised AK suited preflop and he called. The flop came k q 4 and he check called me. The turn was an ace and he check raised me. I thought about coming back over because he is a vanilla maniac who was obviously highly overrating himself, but I decided against it since a reraised by him would kill my stack. I called him there and on the river and he rolled over 44. I was now down to 25k or so, which put me below the solid player and ruined any further shot I had of a deal. Also Steve bled off a bunch of chips to the solid player. They both knocked other people out and there we were 3 handed, me with 50k and them with about 110k (for Steve) and 90k for the other guy. The solid player had never won more than $1000 in a tournament before and was practically begging to make a deal. They figured out based on chip count that I should receive $4600, but I knew I was much more skilled than Steve so I declined. Steve then offered a chop of something like $11k for him, $6k for the guy to my left, and $5k for me. This was a bit of a premium for me (though a tremendous ripoff for the guy to my left as he had almost as many chips as Steve yet would receive not much more than half. He probably would have agreed to it to, but not me. I really didn’t care about winning an extra $1500, I wanted first for the trophy and $8k more. I told them that I wipe my ass with $1500 when I run out of toilet paper so we continued.
I kept going all in against Steve with the favorite, and somehow kept winning. I didn’t like this because even if you are a 2-1 favorite every time, when you do it 10 times you are a severe underdog to survive. But the blinds were so big and the solid player was using his stack very effectively against me so I never had a choice. Finally one of his bad hands, a 3 outer, came through for him and I got 3rd, for $3400 after the tip.
All in all I am not too unhappy. I have some more thoughts on the tournament, but I am tired and have to be awake in 7 hours or so for tomorrow’s event (thank God I already registered) so they will have to wait. I will also post the couple pictures I took from the table.

Posted by themaroon at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 13, 2004

Orleans Open Day 3, $430 NLH

Well my streak of losing to every 2 and 3 outer on the river in tournaments continues. Here is the rundown on today’s tournament. All players started with $1000 in chips and you had the option to take a rebuy for another $1000 at any time. I started off pretty well when I doubled in the first round. I had raised 10 8 of hearts to 45 (bb was 15) and a player who seemed pretty solid reraised it only 75 more, so I called. The flop came 8 5 7 with one heart. I checked and he bet less than the pot. I thought from his small preflop raise that he either had something very good like AA or KK or something weak like AK. I thought that if he had QQ or JJ or something he would have raised more. Regardless I called and the turn brought another 8. I checked (having about 700 left) he bet 350 and I went all in. He called with pocket kings and the river didn’t help him so I doubled to 2k.
After that I was the chip leader at the table so I started opening up a bit, raising a number of hands, making pot size bets on the flop, and accumulated another 400 or so in chips. I had just raised the last 2 hands (1 blind steal, took the other down on the flop) when I got JJ under the gun. I raised it to 60 and 4 people called. The flop came 5 7 8 (where have I seen that before?) and the 2 people ahead of me checked. I bet 250 and the two people behind me mucked. The big blind, a younger guy who had just moved from another table, said “all in” and the other guy folded. I looked at his stack briefly and called. Apparently when I looked at his stack I didn’t realize that 2 of his chips were blue (500, which came only from rebuys) because nobody had rebought at my table. So a call I thought was 400 turned out to be 1200, and he rolled over 7 8. I had a lot of ways to improve but none came, leaving me with about 650. I think I might have called anyway. I know I would have after seeing the kid play for a couple rounds, since he pretty much had one move. But I was still pretty annoyed, though I had nobody to blame but me.
A few minutes later the blinds went up to 10/20. A pot came up where one half senile old man (who we will abbreviate to HSOM for the duration of this article) limped in under the gun. A young black man who seemed to be a decent player (though his thuggish appearance undoubtedly made the table full of 40 year old white men dismiss him as an idiot) limped, as did a weak tight old man. I decided I could probably steal or at least get heads up with HSOM by raising to 160, so I did with 10 2 of diamonds. Sure enough HSOM thought for a bit then called the pretty large raise, everyone else folded. The flop came Q high with 2 diamonds and HSOM checked. I figured he was liable to have just about anything here. The pot was 400 and my stack was about 500 and I had a 4 flush so I decided to semi-bluff all in and hope he didn’t have a queen, but rather some junk like Ax suited , AJ, or a pocket pair. Unfortunately for me he had just called the large raise preflop with QJ and my flush missed, so I had to rebuy.
Shortly after the rebuy I limped in from the middle with 10 J after 2 others had limped. A few more people limped and we saw the flop 6 handed, which came J 10 6, 2 spades. I bet out 100 and HSOM raised to 300. Everyone else had mucked so I went all in and he called immediately. I rolled my hand over and he flipped over A J with no spade, making me an 85% favorite. The turn was a 2, making me a 93% favorite. Of course we all know I could never win with that big of a favorite so the river was an ace, giving HSOM a huge chip lead and me a bad beat story for the website.
I will probably play some more SNG tournaments on UB today to fill the requirements. I need to run 12 more this week, which isn’t much. I might go run some of the live 2/5 NL at the Orleans too. And I will definitely be in the $162 on Party this evening, so all of my readers who like to come watch can find me there. We have been having a lot of fun lately with all of the railbirds.

Posted by themaroon at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Stud

After my stud experience today I started thinking back on something I had once heard, which was that stud games are in general softer than hold'em games. Now I'm sure one tournament doesn’t mean much, but I am rather skeptical. I was thinking about the tournament and most of the mistakes that I saw people make were mistakes in a tournament sense, rather than a stud sense. Also there were at least 3 people there who appeared to be pretty good to me. Of course I doubt it would be pretty hard to impress me by simply having a clue, but I don’t think I have ever seen 3 good players in a $100 hold'em tournament.
So I am going to have to say for now that hold'em is the softer game. Of course it was a long time ago (before televised poker blew up) that I heard that stud was generally softer, so whoever said it may have recanted since. But for now I am going to stick to hold'em. It seemed that the $100 stud tournament I played in was more competitive than the Party Poker $162 hold’em tournaments I play in nightly.
That reminds me of this evening’s tournament. Goodness was it an aquarium. I was seated at table one (never a good sign) and it was the most insanely loose table I have ever been in. One hand in the second round 3 players went all in for over 600 with 77, q 10, and k 6. Where do they get these people? I never really picked up much, but I pounced on a few pots and managed to last for quite some time. Finally I ended up shoving for my 4.5 big blind stack with K 9 after the loosest player at the table had limped in early. This guy had been raising just about anything so I didn’t think he had anything that could have me dominated. I figured either I had him beat or worse case scenario he was a 6-4 favorite with ace rag. That turned out to be the case and I failed to improve, being eliminated. Said player then had about 9k which was over 60 big blinds with somewhere around 350 people left out of the initial 1000. As I predicted he didn’t even make the money.
Party tournaments seem to be exceptionally well attended lately. I think their national advertising campaign must be yielding some results. I am not optimistic about future growth though, as the site has grown very little this year. I think they have achieved critical mass, or are at least close to it. One thing I learned from running a house game is that poker players tend to go broke, so you have to be constantly bringing in new ones to take their place. Party will have eventually been marketed to the entire free world. The more customers they have, the higher the number of ones who stop playing, and the higher the number of new ones you need to keep the same amount of action. It seemed that 40k active players was going to be the peak, but they have recently moved up to 45k. And the tournament action has grown significantly as well, I would say by at least 25%
Anyway after that $162 I played 4 SNG $109s on UB, winning the first and having awful luck in the rest. I kept picking up hands like QQ against KK, AK against AA, and I lost every single coin flip. Luckily the player I talked about earlier was in every one (he is in almost every SNG that runs on that site) and the ease of outplaying him kept me alive. He is a prime example of 2 things. First he is an example of why you shouldn’t show hands that you lay down. He often will lay down a top pair and show. It lets me know he is easy to bully. Second (and far more importantly) he is an example of why you should base your bet size on transparent information (i.e. the size of the pot). If you always bet the pot size then your amount gives away no information about your hand. This guy bets small with hands he will fold and big with ones he will not. He may as well play with his hand face up against someone who is paying any attention. I don’t want to divulge his name here, but since I like the guy from talking to him I may clue him in when the month is over, since I will likely never play with him in one again. Then again I may not, since it doesn’t benefit me in any way and could harm me later should our paths cross somewhere.
Winning ¼ puts me down something like $16 there, but I theoretically made $200 in bonus bucks so no big deal. I say theoretically because I still haven’t seen any of the dollars I have earned, which were supposed to be added to my account today. None of the people I talked to did either, so I think something must just be wrong with their system.
Well I am off to read this new David Sedaris book and get a good nights sleep. I need to clear my head for tomorrow’s big tournament, where I hope my recent bad luck will be avenged. I will try to remember to take the camera, so maybe there will be pictures along with the report tomorrow. Sayonara.

Posted by themaroon at 9:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Orleans Open Day 2, Stud

Well my first ever Stud tournament didn’t go very well for me. I may not know much about Stud but I know 9 5 2 is an awful first 3 cards, and that’s about what I saw every hand for the first hour and a half. Before the break I never once got anything better than a split pair of tens, though I had a couple big draws, none of which came in for me. In the entire first hour I won one pot, and it was where I limped in for $5 and everyone folded. The bring-in was away from the table so I took down $30 (the button had to ante 25). I am not exaggerating at all here either, that was all I won in the first 3 rounds so I came back from the break with about 300 chips (starting stack of 700) and we were playing 40/80 with a 10 ante. I then caught AKQ suited in the whole and raised the bring-in (who had a 5 showing). He called despite the fact that it was my first raise of the day. 4th street brought a brick for both of us, I bet and he called. 5th street gave us both 5s, which made a pair for him. Even though I had a 5 I was pretty sure he had just caught trips so I folded, leaving me with about 120. I then managed to win a decent hand where a lot of people limped in and checked third street. I caught a pair of jacks on 4th, bet, got called, and checked it out from there to win pot B for the day. This brought me back up to about 300. I then had a hand with AKJ of a suit which I just called when someone completed. I turned the Q of my suit and just called couple bets to try to improve but didn’t and was back to about 120. I then got a wired pair of aces, went all in against some numskull who called with 2 10 2 and improved to two pair. I think he even rivered a flush, but I'm not sure and didn’t care anyway, since I was out regardless.
All in all it was a good learning experience. I was playing more for entertainment than anything else so I wasn’t as upset about losing as I normally would. I think I learned a good bit about the game from watching the couple players who seemed to know what they were doing. One of them was even Felicia Lee, another poker blogger who it was nice to meet. She said she was surprised because from my writing she depicted me as someone who was 6’6” and perpetually scowling or something. Too funny.
I also think that most of the players I played with were relatively bad at Stud. I only knew for sure that a few were, as it is hard to tell in a short time at a new game when you can't see people’s hole cards. But I just saw a lot of people do things which were obviously bad even to me. I really don’t think the game is all that different from hold'em anyway. Just has some different concepts.
Now I am playing in the nightly $162 on Party, since it has way better structure than the crap here at the Orleans and bigger prizes. I am at the loosest table I have ever been at, so a couple hands could take me pretty far. Tomorrow is the $230 NL hold'em tournament at the Orleans. It has a $200 rebuy, so will probably cost me $430 unless I get a hand or 2 early. This brings the juice down to tolerable levels, as opposed to today’s 25% (plus 3% for the staff) which I never would have played in if not for its entertainment. I looked at it as a high priced movie ticket. Tomorrow is for profit though.

Posted by themaroon at 5:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 12, 2004

Orleans Open Day 1

Well I got out here and went over to the Orleans in the evening. They had a $125 tournament with one $100 rebuy (they are fond of one rebuy tourneys) so I jumped in to see what it was all about. The structure wasn’t very good. The first 3 rounds were only 20 minutes and the blinds double every time basically. You get 1500 in chips after the rebuy, and the blinds when you come back from the first break are 50/100. This isn’t the worst structure ever but it isn’t good. It wouldn’t be so bad really if the blinds went up in smaller increments, but they just double straight to 100/200. That was the level I got knocked out in, when I lost a coin flip, missed two flush draws that didn’t cost me much, and then flopped a set of 3s only to lose on the river to 9 9 when he spiked his 9 on the river. It seems lately that every time I am a 96% favorite to win a pot I lose it. I can win some coin flips, can suck out on people, and win one 2-1 favorite or another but then after doing all that I get a hand where I am a huge favorite and lose all of my chips.
I did get a glimpse at the structures for the Orleans Open events and they actually seem pretty good. The rounds are ½ hours, which isn’t so great, but the blind structure is very gradual and they give good starting stacks for many of them. So I am looking forward to playing the next few.
I was looking at the list of tournaments and tomorrow is the $125 Stud event and I think I might play in it. After the nightly tournament I came back to the hotel and called the few people I knew who know anything about the game and asked for advice. Most of it was basic poker stuff (put the money in with the best hand, etc.) but my friend Marialena gave me a few good pointers that I think might help me stay out of trouble. I figure that general poker skill and general tournament knowledge should be enough to guide me through.
Other than those tournaments I plan to just sit here in the hotel room and vegetate. I want to try to find time to play my SNG tourneys on UB for the week. I only need to run 16 of them (I’ll try to stick to the $109s) to get the full bonus, which should only take a whopping 6 hours of time. I also will probably just play in the big Party tournaments throughout the week from my hotel room. Even these crummy dialup connections seem to work just fine for poker. Well I am off to read and get some rest before my first Stud tournament ever. I have sat at a live stud table once in my life, so this will be an adventure. Wish me luck.

Posted by themaroon at 6:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

For What Little Its Worth

Before I got on this here 737 to Vegas I used a new extension for Firefox called Spiderzilla to download every Card Player Issue to my hard drive, so I would have a little extra reading material for the trip. Normally when I read Card Player I skip at least half of the articles (ones by Roy Cooke, Max Shapiro, and other assorted clueless columnists and/or bad writers) but since I am on a plane and the movie is something awful (it has Denzel Washington in it so it must be atrocious) I decided to look through it. Actually Roy Cooke’s article in the issue with David Williams (who I met once long ago and got second in the WSOP main event this year for 3.5 million) on the cover was ok, though nothing anyone who has played for more than a year shouldn’t already know.
Then I came across an article by Vince Burgio. I normally would never waste the 1 minute of my life required to read his worthless drivel, but I hadn’t read anything in a long time and thought maybe he had something worthwhile to say for once. He didn’t. All this grumpy old man ever does is whine about things no reasonable human being would ever even care about. He is one of the few people in poker I would love to kick in the teeth more than Phil Hellmuth. If I ever run across him at a poker tournament (which I never see him at, does this ass even play?) I may just have a couple of friends hold him down while I urinate upon him. That would give him something worth whining about.
What jackass exec at Card Player green lighted this column anyway? Hmm, an old curmudgeon whining about people who do things like sit out for a round and then pick up their chips, or ask stupid questions. Yeah, we’ll print that. Maybe they were trying to tap into the lucrative “anal-retentive over 65” demographic. If I ran the paper he would be the first (of about 50%) of the authors there I would fire immediately. I would rather see more regurgitated Big Denny stories by poker’s foremost humor(less) commentator, Max “I've Told The Same Story In Every Column For 7 Years” Shapiro.
Vince’s column is called “For What Its Worth”. Trust me Vince, its worth less than 2 7 off suit preflop in a $20/$40 game when an old lady 3 bets the under the gun raiser. It is worth less than AAAA in limit Omaha 8 or better. For what its worth Vince shut the fuck up.

Posted by themaroon at 5:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 11, 2004

Saturday

I woke up too late today to play in the semi-final, which is ok with me anyway. I figured I would just run some SNGs on UB. They didn’t have any $109 6 handed going in the afternoon, so I decided to just play a $215. The players seem quite a bit better there, though still bad for the most part. In my first one I made a small raise preflop and some idiot shoved for about 700 (against a 70 raise). This almost invariably means a crap hand, so I called (since I was either going to be 50/50 or better) and it was crap (AJ, which was about the best of the crap hands he could have had there) but it spiked an ace. I still had about 500 left anyway with a 20 bb so I was ok, until the next hand when I hit 2 pair out of the bb. I got it all in on the turn against the same idiot, who just had turned top pair, but of course the board paired on the river giving him a higher 2 pair. What can you do?
I really am surprised that more people aren’t participating in the SNG promo. I would think that most people who play SNGs all the time (and there are thousands of them) would love getting a free 50%. Maybe they just don’t want to play the ring games to cash them in or something. Any of my readers who like to run SNGs on other sites should definitely give UB a try this month.
After the $215 I lost I saw that $109s were starting to run often so I switched to them. The players there are a little better than the $55 but still very bad. There are two players who I thought were good, but one of them just called his whole stack with awful draws 3 times in one tournament (won them all) so I’ll cut it down to one. He just knocked me out of one by calling my reraised all in with AJ on the 6 7 9 flop (I had 6 7) and runner runnering aces and jacks. I had a ton of chips, so this was some amazingly bad play, but what can you do.
The other player who I thought was good I should amend to decent. I played him heads up in the first 2 $109s I entered and won them both, once coming back from a 6-1 chip deficit. The guy is a strong player but has one glaring weakness which pretty much makes it impossible for him to beat me heads up. When he has a hand or a very good draw he will bet the pot. When he has crap he will bet small, either the minimum or half the pot. He will also bet half the pot when trapping, as I discovered (and always suspected) in one hand in the third one I played. So all I have to do against him is raise every time he bets small, except on boards where he is likely to be trapping. Really this is not hard at all to do, and is a huge disadvantage to him. If he simply used the bet pot button every time he bet he would be a very tough opponent.
So far I have won 9 out of 21, and gotten one second place. This makes for a total profit of $815 in 9.5 hours for an hourly rate of $85.79. I have also spent $1450 in buy ins so far, so I will have received another $725 in bonus money, which would make the hourly rate almost double, a.k.a. insane. True I have to spend a number of hours playing raked games to cash the dollars in, but since I play 6 max games quite a bit on Party anyway I will just switch to UB. I have very limited experience playing 6 max on UB, but from what I do have the games don’t seem to be any tougher and the software is faster (more hands per hour) so I should be able to maintain a rate there similar to my Party Poker rate, which a recent bad swing has knocked down to about $70 per hour. As I said in an earlier post I think I can convert bonus dollars to real dollars very quickly. I don’t think I will have the option of always being one of the first 2 players at the table, but even if I can average getting 1.5 UB points per hand (which shouldn’t be hard) I can pull about $40 an hour, meaning 120 hours or so (about one month) will allow me to cash in the full $5k.
One interesting thing I discovered while talking to a guy named Green Plastic. Apparently this fellow plays these things 12 hours a day because UB is giving away an Aruba trip to the person who spends the most in buy-ins to these things this month. Green Plastic is in second having spent $40k in buy-ins, and the guy in first (Big Dogg, who I thought wasn’t very good, but must be at least breaking even) has spent over $50k. I think that Big Dogg must actually be 2 people or more, because from what I hear he is on almost 24 hours a day. This actually makes me wish I had thought of that earlier, since me and John could have run $215s in shifts full time for a month and won the trip. The leader has basically averaged spending $5k a day (25 tournaments) so if John and I had each run about 15 a day (which is about 5 hours each or so) using the same screen name we could easily have been able to beat him. Even if we only broke even for the month we would get an Aruba trip and $4k in bonus bucks to split, so it would have been well worth it.I realize that this post has been rather long winded, but it will be my last for a day or two. I leave for Las Vegas at noon tomorrow. I am flying in and renting a car. I am going to stay off the Strip out there and may skip down to Los Angeles for a day since I have never been there. I also want to take a trip out to Lake Mead and try to get a feel for the real estate scene out there. I want to move out west in 2 years or so with my girlfriend, and I want to see if there is somewhere not too far from Vegas that isn’t such a desert. If I get really ambitious I may head on out to the bay area, but that is unlikely. Also Garrik if you are still heading out and want to meet up at a bar or something sometime drop me a private message through the forums. I will have my laptop and some form of internet access, so we can trade numbers or whatever.
And thanks to everyone who came to root for me in the semi-finals on Friday night. We had a good run for a while, and I even had a girl doing some sort of nude rain dance in an attempt to bring me pocket aces.
As I am writing this I raised the pot with QQ preflop in a $109 SNG. I was reraised the minimum, there was a call, and I reraised the pot to 440 or so. The preflop reraiser called and the flop came 2 2 3. I went all in and he called my remaining 500 with 66. How dumb you have to be to see the flop there is a question for the ages. Of course it worked because he spiked a 6 to eliminate me. So now I am going to play one more $55 (to make my $1600 in buy-ins for the week) and finish packing. See you all in a couple days, and wish me luck at the Orleans open.

Posted by themaroon at 8:52 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 10, 2004

Semi #2

I played in both the semi final and the limit $215 this evening. Nothing remarkable happened in the $215 and I finished somewhere around 100th. I caught a few hands early, got bad beat by one guy a few times (just like last night’s semi-final) when he made some incredibly idiotic plays. That was about it.
In the semi-final I actually got off to a good start. I ended the first break with 6k, and by the 4th break had about 20k. At that point the blinds got up in the 1k and 1.5k rounds and I never saw a hand worth playing for an hour and a half, so my stack dwindled to nothing. I finally ended up all in with KJ against 99 and never improved to end the day. I finished 70th or so (17 cruise packages were paid), and it was rather frustrating to play for 5 hours and miss. I don’t know if I am going to play tomorrow, I may just wait for the 10 pm tournament or not play either. I still need to pack for Vegas, and I need to play another $900 worth of SNGs on UB to max out my bonus for the week. I think there should be enough action tomorrow to find $109 ones, so that won't take long.
Those are going very well for me. I have played 14 and won 7 and got one second place. The second place should have been first as well, but the clueless chump got incredibly lucky heads up. The structure in these is amazing. The long rounds and small blind increases really allow you to take advantage of the extremely weak opponents. I hope the people at the $109 are even close to as awful as the ones at the $55, because these people are amazingly bad. They play bad hands and play them all as badly as humanly possible.
Well I am off to get in a SNG or two before bed. Goodnight.

Posted by themaroon at 10:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Right now I am playing

Right now I am playing in the second semi-final for the Party Million. The first round is ¾ of the way over, and I have just a few chips more than I started with. I took a bad beat with aces but won a few small pots to remain about even. Just like yesterday I am at a table full of clueless chumps, so hopefully I will commence to winning pots soon. I doubt I will be able to give the bad beat play by play as it happens today, since there is a $215 tournament at 10 as well. I am going to have my work cut out for me tonight, playing in 2 big tournaments, but as always I am optimistic of my chances of winning a cruise and/or a ton of money. I haven’t talked to John but he is sick of poker lately due to a bad streak so I will be flying solo. I don’t mind playing 2 limit tournaments at the same time, since you don’t really need to pay much attention. Simply playing tight and having an IQ above that of a doorknob makes you a winner in limit tournaments on Party. I did just see one interesting play, where I unfortunately mucked a winner (oh well). Party Poker Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind t30 (10 handed)

SB (chump1) (t3000)
Me (t3285)
UTG (t3210)
UTG+1 (t890)
UTG+2 (t880)
MP1 (t3090)
MP2 (t2555)
MP3 (chump2) (t2725)
CO (t3615)
Button (t2650)

Preflop: Me is BB with As, 4c.
UTG calls, 2 folds, MP1 calls, 1 fold, MP3 (chump2) calls, 1 fold, Button calls, SB (chump1) completes, Me checks,

Flop: (6 SB, t180) Ad, 9d, Js (6 players)
chump1 checks, Me bets, UTG folds, MP1 folds, chump2 raises, Button folds, chump1 calls, Me calls.

Turn: (6 BB, t360) Tc (3 players)
chump1 bets, Me folds, chump2 calls.

River: (8 BB, t480) 5s (2 players)
chump1 checks, chump2 checks.

Final Pot: 8 BB (t480)

Results below:
chump1 shows 7c 4d (high card, ace).
chump2 shows Ts Qs (one pair, tens).
Outcome: chump2 wins 8 BB (t480).
Well anyway, wish me luck.

Posted by themaroon at 2:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 9, 2004

UB revisited

In an earlier post I mentioned a few things I disliked about Ultimate Bet. So I thought I would be fair and mention some of the things I do like. And no I didn’t receive any threatening calls from Annie Duke (though I would very much love to) or Phil Hellmuth. They actually do have a lot of things about their site which I like quite a bit, and here they are:

1. Their check/fold in turn button is the only intelligent one I have yet found. Whenever I click check/fold, and it gets to me and I check, I want it to turn into fold automatically if someone behind me bets. This seems pretty obvious but they are the only site I have seen that is this way.
2. They have great variety. They have every game, in every limit. They have huge no limit games, huge limit games, heads up. Pretty much anything you want to play is there. They don’t have that much action but they have the best variety on the net.
3. They have a frequent player program. Granted they give you next to nothing for your time, but it is better than the literally nothing Party gives you. Nowhere close to Stars, but still better than Party or Paradise.
4. They give away a ton of bonus money. They seem to have good offers every month, which leads me to my next point:
5. Bonus dollars are far easier to clear on UB (at limits where the rake is always $1 or more anyway) than on any other site. If you are one of the first 2 people at a ring game table you get 2 UB points per raked hand (10 UB points=$1 bonus money moved to real money) unlike any other site. When I play the 6 max games there it seems that about 6 hands means the $1 (1 blind steal) and playing two tables at a time means that I can see almost 300 hands per hour (250 of which generate 2 UB points each) which adds up to $50 per hour in bonus money. And the best part is they give you however many real dollars you earned as soon as you leave the table, unlike other sites which simply wait for you to clear the requirements then give you the entire amount.
6. I just learned that the buttons can be customized to a “classic style” which emulates that of most other sites. I'm all about being able to customize.
7. Ultimate Bet also has a mini-view which can be useful if you are playing many tables. I personally don’t like it, but the option is there for those who do.
8. They seem to have great customer service. The few times I have emailed them I received responses quickly. Cash outs also come quickly, though this seems to be the case at most sites now a days.
9. Last but not least the sit and go tournament structure is phenomenal. They have 8 minute rounds, which is much better than the normal 10 hands per round you get at other sites, especially when the game is short. They start you with 1000 chips with blinds of 5/10, which then progress to 10/20, 15/30, 20/40, 30/60, 50/100, 75/150, 100/200 etc. I have yet to see a 6 handed get past the 75/150 level, with them normally ending in 50/100. I even won a few in 30/60, which is odd given that the average stack there is 50 big blinds. Again the bet pot button is bad, but the structure is so good that I think I would play sit and go tourneys there over any other site anyway.

Posted by themaroon at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Me and Phil

I had the funniest dream this morning. I was heads up with Phil Hellmuth at the final table of a WSOP event when Phil started running some smack. I went off on him. I told him he couldn’t win because he is a has-been.
“You haven’t won a tournament in what, three years now? You are the past Phil, I am the future. You're not a player anymore. You’re nothing more than a poorly constructed marketing gimmick now.”
I continue on telling him how I am much better at heads up than he is, how I am a player and he is a brand name, etc. I then got 22 against his AK, got all the chips in on the A62 flop and took home the bracelet, at which point he ran off to cry in a corner while I told the ESPN cameras how he is a bitch and can't mess with my mad skills, and how he should stick to writing books and giving keynote speeches while I win bracelets. I have seen the future, and it is good.

Posted by themaroon at 7:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Semi-finals and other assorted musings

The latest Party Poker semi-final is under way. Round 2 just began and I have 2830 chips (started with 3000) which is a little above average. There were 1336 entries and 22 spots pay cruises, with the next 3 paying some insignificant money. My table is excellent, with at least two people who don’t seem to even possess a fold button. One guy has probably seen about 80% of all rivers so far. This is of course not unusual at all on Party, especially since about 1000 of the entries seem to be from those one table qualifiers they run.
For some reason this year the Thursday semis seem to have the most action. The only bad thing about that is that the first day always has the largest average starting stack because of the extra chips you get. Today it was about 2500, and I am guessing the next day or two will have average stacks of about 2000 to start. This is because you get extra chips depending on how many raked hands you played, and a lot of the people who qualified for more than one of them will only have extra chips enough for one or two. I saw this last year, and am hoping to see it again this year since I have enough raked hands to get the maximum 3000 stack for the next 8 years.
As I am writing this I just got beat by a guy who called a raise preflop with Q7 suited, called a raise on the KJ2 rainbow flop, called a raise on the turn when he picked up a flush draw, then hit the flush. What can you do? Now I am down to 2300. Thank God for extra chips.
Anyway during the first round I played another $55 sng on UB, which I managed to win. I am truly amazed at how bad everyone is, yet that seems to pretty much be the story of my life. Every day I see morons make the same atrocious plays and every day I am dumbfounded by it. I was wondering today why that might be and I started thinking back to my early days of playing on the internet, back when Paradise Poker was brand new. Back then the $3/$6 games online were tougher than the $10/$20 games in real life. Of course I have probably gotten a lot better since then, and I am sure that if I went back in time I would find that they were not hard to beat or anything, but still I am sure that anyone who could beat those games could beat the $15/$30 games on Party today. It used to be that when I traveled to casinos and played games like $6/$12 they were about the same as the $20/$40 games I now play in.
I guess poker in many ways just seems so simple to me. Sure there are a lot of hard decisions to be made, and I am never that surprised when someone makes a suboptimal play in a tough spot. But how dumb do you have to be to call a raise with Q7 suited in a tournament, then call a raise with nothing but runner runners? It would seem that you would have to have the IQ of a rutabaga to do it yet the people who do it day in and day out have thousands of dollars to piss away playing poker online, so how dumb can they be? I know for a fact that my average opponent at the $10/$20 6 max games I used to play in lost about $50 an hour. I also know that I saw many who were worse than average playing there quite a bit, so those people must average losing thousands per month.
Perhaps coming from a lower-middle class family has made me overestimate the amount of intelligence it takes to get to a point where you can afford to blow tens of thousands per year playing poker. I guess I just always assumed that anyone who had that kind of money was a lawyer, doctor, engineer, entrepreneur, stock broker, or of some other such profession where they may not necessarily be geniuses but are probably smart enough to fold Q 7 for a raise, even if it is suited. Maybe all of these people are really just housewives or househusbands whose spouses are intelligent professionals. Or maybe these people actually somehow want to lose, or at least don’t care at all about winning and somehow find enjoyment in watching cards come up on a computer screen while clicking a button that says call. I have heard that a lot of gamblers subconsciously feel that they don’t deserve their money and actually want to lose, but even still it seems that they would at least consciously make enough effort to win to fold that runner runner draw for a raise.
Sometimes I think that I subconsciously feel guilty about taking their money as well. It is almost like stealing candy from a baby. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s immoral, it just doesn’t seem fair that they have these psychological deficiencies which make them give their money away. It is like I am taking advantage of the less fortunate. Sometimes I feel guilty about it and it makes me hate them for it, since I shouldn’t feel guilty about taking their money any more than Sony should feel guilty about taking advantage of my predilection towards purchasing electronic items. Life is unfair, and our entire economy is founded on taking advantage of people. I'm not about to endorse communism so I guess my only choice is to be thankful for it and enjoy the fact that their dysfunctions enable me to live the good life.
Anyway I am now out of my tournament. The same fellow who put the bad beat on me with the Q 7 just put a worse one on me. He cold called my raise with K 8 off suit preflop. I flopped a pair of aces on the A 5 5 board, with 2 hearts. His 8 was a heart and he called the flop and turn, runner runnering an 8 high flush on me. It is so annoying to look forward to a tournament for 2 months, then lose to an idiot like this poochdog28. He has absolutely no chance of making the cruise, and even if he did he has absolutely no shot of making any money there. He busted me on 2 hands where I was something like a 96% favorite with no gain for himself, since even if he had 20k in chips he would still have a 0% chance of making the cruise. If he does I seriously may hunt him down and slaughter him. Thank God for idiots like him, they are the reason I don’t have to wake up and go to work every day. Ill just keep repeating that to myself tonight too while trying to avoid killing someone.

Posted by themaroon at 5:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Correction

An astute reader pointed out an error by me in the post Tournament Blues from yesterday. A 10 and an 8 came, giving the AJ a runner runner straight. I wish ace 8 came, because I would have doubled. I will correct the entry, thanks!

Posted by themaroon at 1:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 8, 2004

UB

I mentioned in a previous post that I had been planning to play Sit as Go tournaments on Ultimate Bet throughout the month to take advantage of their very generous promotion. They are giving players bonus dollars equal to half of their buy in (up to $800 per week) on each one you play. My initial intention was to play the $215 ones, 8 per week. Thus I would be making $200 per hour in bonus bucks. The only problem is that they don’t have any action at that level.
All they seem to have good action at is the $55 ones so I have been giving those a try. I really like the 6 handed one tables. So far I have played 8, won 3, and gotten 5 misses. I have spent 3 hours playing those 8, for a net profit of $170 in real dollars and $200 in bonus dollars. So I guess that is almost $125 per hour.
I think that I am just going to switch to playing the $109s, which seem to run during the peak hours. I feel comfortable enough at these $55s, so if UB is anything like Party where the players don’t improve much until the $215s I should be able to do well. I am sure I will be at least break even, and there I will receive double the bonus $ per hour.
I have always liked UB’s software but I am starting not to. It is faster than anyone else’s, which I like. But there are a lot of things about it which are bad. The first thing I don’t like about them is their lobby. It isn’t as aesthetically pleasing or as functional as the lobbies on just about any other major site. The multi table tournaments are a tremendous pain in the ass to navigate, since they don’t pop up in the new window. You have to click to about 18 new pages before you can actually register, which may be part of the reason they have very low attendance. They do have some neat features like allowing you to sort by only 6 handed tables, 10 handed, or heads up, or by high, medium, or low stakes. The only problem is that when you sort sit and go tournaments by stakes like that in the upper tabs, it takes off the sort by stakes function in the window and sorts by game in there. Even when you click stakes once you leave and return it will again be sorted by game.
I much prefer Party Poker’s tree based lobby. You click on real money, play money, tournaments, etc. Then you click on the game you want to play, then the limit. It would be nice if you could click 6 max games only, since they are very popular. Maybe in the future. Also I like the way that they have a pop up tournament lobby there, so you don’t have to navigate backwards constantly.
Anyway I could over look Ultimate Bet’s ugly and slightly less functional lobby if the rest of it were better, but it is not. At the table there are a number of things wrong. First of all the notes. You can take notes on players which comes in a goofy pop up window. I like PokerStars’ notes function the best of all sites because I don’t want to have to deal with pop-ups when I am playing. Theirs are just done in the chat window, which has tabs so you can easily switch back to chatting. Both on Party and on UB you have to deal with the annoying pop up window. Nothing is worse than when you are typing a note, it comes your turn to act and the poker window pops up on top of it, then you have to minimize the window to find the notes.
I could forgive them for their pop up notes anyway if they had something simple that told you whether you had notes on someone or not whenever they were at your table. On UB if you want to know who you have notes on and who you don’t you are forced to double click every person’s name at the table. What a waste of time. I don’t bother with notes much in these sit and go tourneys because I know I am not going to play them that much, at least not at the $55 level. But being able to categorize opponents and simply look at notes and get a line on their play is a great benefit when playing two 6 handed games, which I will have to do there for quite some time to actually retrieve my bonus dollars.
Then there is the chat box. This is AWFUL. There is no separate line just for your typing, it just pops up on top of the chat window when you start pressing buttons. Good luck ever trying to copy or paste there. Also when you type more than one small line of chat it makes your chat box scroll oddly, and you can't type nearly as much in at one time as you can on other sites which often makes your sentences cut off in the middle of a word. It is hard to use and unsightly, much like the lobby. They should simply add a dedicated line for you to type in. Also I have tried to change the color of player chat to be different from the color of dealer chat with no luck at all. It is hard to distinguish chat from dealer text, and I like to have the summary in my chat window. If you had the dealer’s full chat I imagine it would be near impossible to follow a conversation.
The next problem I have with them is the button layout. All of the other sites have similar button layouts but UB is different. This is actually not bad, you just have to get used to it and is a minor problem. They do use “raise to” buttons, rather than raise, as most better sites do. The only site which doesn’t do this is Paradise, where the button performs a “raise to” function when you have not already put in money on that betting round, but a normal raise function when you have. This is counterintuitive and confusing and should be changed immediately.
These things are annoying but my biggest problem with Ultimate Bet is the bet/raise pot button. I love the convenience, don’t get me wrong. I generally bet or raise the size of the pot (or close to it) at almost all times, so it saves me a good amount of clicking. The only problem with it is that suckers do not bet the pot as often on sites without that button, but they do on UB because it is there. If you play a few tournaments on Party you will see that almost nobody has a clue what amounts to bet when betting, and they bet all sorts of goofy amounts from their entire stack down to the minimum with rarely a pot sized bet to be found. If I were to write a book telling beginners how to play no limit tournaments I would tell them to bet about the size of the pot every single time they bet, because I feel that most people could follow this rule without fail and greatly improve their game. On UB they do follow this rule quite often simply because that button is there and is convenient. So just having this button there makes people much better players, which is bad for me and is why I will not play any significant amount of no limit tournaments there. I also wouldn’t play lower buy in no limit games there and would opt for a site that didn’t encourage my opponents to play better. This won't make a difference at the game with $25/$50 blinds because most people there will know how to properly bet their hands, but at $1/$2 or $2/$4 this could greatly affect your hourly rate.
So if UB wants to have better software they should:

1. Design their lobby to look better and be more functional. This wouldn’t be hard to do.
2. Fix the notes so that you can see who you have notes on and who you don’t without clicking on them.
3. Add a dedicated chat line above or below the chat box. Expanding this so you could see a few more lines wouldn’t hurt either.
4. Most importantly they need to remove the bet pot button. It is like the software is coaching players.

Posted by themaroon at 11:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Tournament Blues

The tournaments went pretty badly today. I played well in them but the cards would not cooperate. The $162 limit tournament was one long series of missing flush draws and other people not missing theirs. We missed a blind level due to server pause, which is something which had pretty much vanished from Party for the last 6 months or so but is having some sort of renaissance lately. So I found myself with 500 in the 50/100 level, when I got aces in early position. I raised and was called by the big blind. The flop came 9 7 6 rainbow, and he check raised me and I of course pushed all in. He rolled over A J offsuit making me a 97.3% favorite to win the pot, but the turn and rover brought a ten and an 8 wiping me out of the tournament. I really don’t know what this guy was doing. I think that if he wanted to play the AJ he should have either reraised me preflop, basically pot committing me and putting me all in, or bet the flop.
Then I decided to once again play the $109 no limit tournament at midnight. Those tournaments are somewhat fun, and the 15 minute rounds make them go by quickly. In the beginning of the second round I got Kings and got all in against A Q on the Q high flop. The river was of course a Q leaving me with about 100. I somehow got this up to 350 before going all in with 10 10 against AQ and losing the coin flip. There had been a limper and I raised it a pretty good amount, so I don’t think that the AQ should even have called preflop, but I guess given that he did you certainly would never expect him to lay it down afterwards.
I am rather frustrated over my seeming inability to win in these things lately. Actually though we have had a pretty decent tournament streak lately, making the money almost every day and hitting the top couple tables a few times a week. We haven’t really had the fortune necessary to drag one down yet because idiotic calls like the one in my last post keep working out for people. But I am more confident than ever that in the next month or two we will drag down a first place.

Posted by themaroon at 7:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 7, 2004

Today's Bad Beat

I missed the $162 NL on Party tonight because I was late getting to John’s house but I did manage to make it to the $109 NL. I ended up getting 17th because of this hand:

Party Poker No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t2000 (9 handed)
BB tooter57 (t12458)
UTG (t35272)
UTG+1 (t32068)
MP1 (t40142)
MP2 (t18122)
MP3 (t12824)
CO (t15974)
IBustChumps (t13372)
SB (t42386)

Preflop: IBustChumps is Button with Js, Jh.
UTG raises to t4400, UTG+1 folds, MP1 folds, MP2 folds, MP3 folds, CO folds, IBustChumps raises to t13372 (All-In), SB folds, BB tooter57 calls t10458 (All-In), UTG folds.

Flop: (t31230) 7s, 7h, Ad (2 players, 2 all-in)

Turn: (t31230) Kd (2 players, 2 all-in)

River: (t31230) 6h (2 players, 2 all-in)

Results:
tooter57 shows Jd Ac (two pair, aces and sevens).
IBustChumps shows Js Jh (two pair, jacks and sevens).
Outcome: tooter57 wins t30316. IBustChumps wins t914.

All I can say here is what the fuck? This idiot thought for almost the full time then called his whole decent sized stack with Ace Jack. This is one of the worst calls I have seen in quite some time, since his hand was most likely dominated, and if not was a small underdog. Not to mention the player left to act behind him. I have eaten things smart enough to fold there.
Oh well, such is my luck as of late. What can you do? John and I have been making the money almost every day, with a couple top and second tables every week. As long as we keep playing as well as we have we are bound to win one soon, I just hope it is a $215.

Posted by themaroon at 8:55 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 5, 2004

Back in town.

Well we are back from the road trip. We went to Atlantic City to see Dave Chappelle and stayed at the Borgata. My girlfriend was rather impressed since she had not stayed in a hotel that nice before. Dave Chappelle was of course hilarious, as he always is. Unfortunately the Borgata event staff did nothing to control hecklers though and the last 20 minutes or so were just Dave responding to them. He finally got tired of it and left, so unfortunately we didn’t get to hear all of his material, but oh well.
Then we went to Philadelphia, which seemed like a good place to be around Independence Day since that is where all of the events took place. They had a lot of festivities going on around Independence Mall and we did all of the touristy things like seeing the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. We also got a cheese steak at Gino’s which frankly sucked. The ones at Tony Luke’s were much much better, so now I know where to stop on the way back from Atlantic City in the future.
It was nice to take a few days off of poker. I was starting to feel a little burned out, but now I am back and ready for some SNG action on UB. I am also looking forward to returning to Las Vegas in a week. It seems that whenever I travel to other cities I just can't help but think “It isn’t Vegas”. We ate at some pricey restaurants at the Borgata and in Philly and none were as good as Olive’s at the Bellagio. Nobody in Vegas charges you for parking. When we were in Philly we spent hours trying to figure out what to do, in Vegas you have to figure out how to cram all of the things you want to do into one weekend.
Well, off to the SNGs. Hope I can earn that $3200 in bonus money without losing $3200 in real money.

Posted by themaroon at 2:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 1, 2004

Results

Well John finished 6th for $2800, which combined with the $500 I won makes it our best score in a while, since I won that tournament in Vegas I think. We made about $1500 each, which isn't great but will pay our next 7 or 8 entries. He really was card dead at the final table, which was about the only chance everyone there had. Unfortunately I will not be able to play the tournament on Friday. I may play on Thursday if I am not too tired, since I want to stay awake so that I can get a full night's sleep and wake up on Friday ready for my road trip. I am taking my girlfriend somewhere for her birthday (she doesn't know where) and it is quite a drive. I am hoping to be back on Saturday in time for the $215 NL since it seems to be as big as the Sunday one anymore. Then I will try to play the one on Sunday from my girlfriend’s cottage on Middle Bass Island using my cell phone as a modem, which may or may not work.
For the near future though I am going to try to play mostly Sit ‘N Gos on Ultimate Bet because of their amazing promotion. They are giving you bonus dollars equal to half of your buy in for each one you play, up to $800 per week. I guess I will then just play my 2 $5/$10 6 max games there as often as possible for a few months, since I will have $4,500 in bonus bucks (I already have $500) to collect. UB is the easiest site to collect bonus dollars on, because if you are one of the first 2 players at the table you get $1 for every 5 raked hands.
It is funny how I have hundreds of bonus dollars waiting for me on every site other than Party, because I always buy in when they have deposit match bonuses and cash out immediately. I figure eventually I will find a reason to play on any of the major sites, so when I do I might as well have a bunch of bonus dollars there waiting for me to earn. Eventually I will hopefully make it up to the Stars $30/$60 games, by which time I should have a few thousand in bonus dollars waiting for me. Maybe in the mean time I will hit the $20/$40 games on Paradise and collect the couple hundred I have there, then after $30/$60 hit the $40/$80 on UB and get the rest. Or maybe I will just win a WCOOP or Orleans Open event and skip straight to $100/$200, who knows?

Posted by themaroon at 8:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Tonight's Tourney

Right now I am watching John attempt to win us $18,000 in the $162 limit. He has an average stack with 15 players left, and he is the only player in with even a slight clue. I finished 25th in the event after riding a rollercoaster the whole way. I found myself with about 2,000 after the first break, which I stayed at until the blinds became 150/300. Luckily I caught a pair of kings against AK preflop to double up off of a player named Orripoloso, who had about 7k at the time. Over the next round or two I proceeded to take pretty much every cent that dunce had, bringing my stack up to about 9,000. I then ground my way up one small pot at a time to 14k when we went down to 3 tables. At that point I got seated in a spot with a maniac after me (unbeknownst to me) who caught me in a few bad spots knocking me back to about 7k. I then blinded down to 4700 when I caught 10 10 under the gun with 500 and 1000 blinds. I raised to 2k and some chump with a 3700 stack reraised with A7. Some other dunce with a big stack called the 2k off of the BB with A8, making me about a 70% favorite to triple up. I just called at this point leaving myself about 1700 because I figured that since the chump who reraised me was basically all in (he had 690 or so left) that I could fold with ease if the flop came ace high or something and the big blind bet, which is exactly what happened. I think that call was a great one because I only care about winning the pot, not how much is in it. Calling left me with chips if the ace came (though not many), and if rags flopped it might give me a shot to knock one player out on the flop. Either way the next hand I was forced all in with K6h (I had posted 1k leaving me with 700) and lost to 55 (who somehow saw a 3k flop).
As far as John’s tournament he has mostly just ground his way up, with the exception of two hands. The first hand was during the 50/100 level (I think) when he caught KK, got to cap the flop, turn, and river against 2 people. One player had QQ (which was an overpair) and caught a queen on the turn, but a king fell on the river. The other player had flopped top pair (jacks) but called caps on the turn and river after it became second then third pair.
Then in a later hand he got most of his chips in preflop with 77 against some dunce with k9. The flop came 10 9 X and the rest of the chips went in. A jack and an 8 popped up on the turn and river though, giving John a straight and a double up to get back in it.
Well now he has an average stack at the top table (which is 10 handed but one player only has $33, so it is basically 9 handed) so I am going to go watch. Let’s hope he can pick this one off, as my bankroll has been ailing a little lately!

Posted by themaroon at 7:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Web Stats

I was looking at my traffic reports for June. I moved my website to this new server on June 13th, mainly because I wanted a little more control than TypePad offered. Since that time I have had almost 16,000 hits on my website, which is nearly 1,000 a day! It is truly mind boggling to me that thousands of people read this site. All I want to know is why :)
Also the Amazon links over there have kicked into gear a little. I am not surprised that The Theory Of Poker is the best selling book, it deserves to be. If I had to nominate any book as the Bible of poker it would be that. Nobody should ever sit at a poker table for money without having read that book.
Also some people clicked my link, went to Amazon and ended up ordering Lee Jones' famous treatise on winning those low limit games. This book helped me to beat the $3/$6 games I started off in, and even though I find some of the advice to be a little shaky overall I would highly recommend the book to a beginner. So I am going to add it here on the list.
I am also adding Matthew Hilger’s Internet Texas Hold'em book, since that is what most of my readers play. This seems to be the most popular book on internet poker. He is some guy who made $100k his first year as an online pro and wrote about it. From what I have heard the book is useful but limited in scope. Hmmm, perhaps someone equally qualified should write one with more detail.
Other than that people seem to be buying the other strategy books on there. I guess this is not surprising, though anymore when I buy a poker book it is one of the ones in the Great Reads section. I guess there comes a point where just about everything you read says the same old stuff, but those books are always very entertaining.
Well enough on books, I have to go to Best Buy and return this cell phone. The one I lost on the way back from Atlantic City was found and mailed back to me in working order, so I am going to return this $400 one, even though I like it. It is a shame too, because I bought Tetris on it and will have to pay $4 more to get it on the old phone. So I guess I am only up $1496 for the day.

Posted by themaroon at 4:00 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack