Archive for June, 2008

Hey, a winning month! Maybe I am not so bad at this game after all. There are still a few days to go, but I probably won’t be playing much if at all. As you may have noticed, I haven’t been playing the last few days either. I leave for Las Vegas on July 1st, and once out there I’ll obviously be devoting quite a lot of time to poker, so I’m buckling down now on some of my other projects.

Granted I’m about to turn around and spend all of June’s winnings in Las Vegas, but I was going to play the main event anyway, so the winnings are still very meaningful. And if you count staking profits, June turns into a damn fine month.

I was playing smaller stakes, though deep-stacked, and ran at about 4 BB/100 over 19K hands.

Non-poker stuff, which is where I devoted a lot of my time, is going great as well. The school system is really excited about the debate league and committed to investing in it, and we’re very close to hiring an extremely qualified new director. I wish I had a bit more time for poker, but as I said, the first part of July will be dedicated to it, and once there’s a paid employee working on the debate stuff, I should have more free time as well.

I was having trouble getting the ESPN360 feed to work. I finally got it streaming just in time to hear, “There are eight players left, Tom Chambers has busted out.” Whoops. I don’t know the full story, but apparently he got all in with top set and lost to a rivered flush. 20K’s nothing to sneeze at, though. Nice run, Tom.

My buddy Tom (LearnedFromTV), who’s already been tearing up the 2008 WSOP with a second place finish for $140K in the $2500 Stud/8-O/8 Mixed event and a shallow cash in the $1000 Razz, has made his second final table of the series, this time in the $1500 PLO/8. Once again, I’m very excited for Tom and for myself, the proud owner of 10% of Tom’s winnings. It’s nice to be freerolling the WSOP before I’ve even arrived in Las Vegas.

The Final Table:

Martin Klaser: 345,000
Erik Seidel: 320,000
Michael Fetter: 290,000
Tom Chambers: 283,000
Jonathan Maren: 210,000
Casey Kastle: 170,000
Larry Wright: 150,000
Joseph Haddad: 135,000
Chad Burum: 120,000

Average Stack: 216,000

Payouts

1 $216,219
2 $137,985
3 $83,538
4 $68,304
5 $56,019
6 $44,206
7 $34,389
8 $27,027
9 $19,656

This is going to be broadcast live (“with no hole cards and horrible commentary”, Tom warns) on ESPN360 at 2PM Vegas time today. I’ve got a ton of work to do before leaving town tomorrow, but I’ll probably have this on in the background anyway.

One Two times, dealer!

After spending more than enough money to buy in directly, I finally won a freaking main event seat in one of the last $650 satellites Stars will be running. Counting the spending money and sponsorship deal that comes with the package, I think that I ended up breaking even on satellites almost to the dollar.

It wasn’t a particularly interesting tournament, but I did make one tight fold fairly early on. I raised QQ UTG, and the BB min-re-raised me. I didn’t have quite the right odds to chase a set, but I called anyway and then folded when he bet half his stack on a ragged flop. Obviously I’m not 100% sure I was beat, and the guy did turn out to be a pretty aggressive player, but I still have my doubts about just how wide his range is for min-re-raising an UTG raise.

I also found myself folding both AK and KK preflop much later in the tournament, but those were actually trivially easy situations. In both cases I had a safe stack, we were one player away from the bubble, and there was a massive chipleader open shoving every hand. There was just no reason to get involved, even with AA.

Speaking of which, here was an interesting spot that I saw at another table on the bubble:  Read the complete post...

The New York Times ran a neat article today about a convention of casino chip collectors this weekend in Las Vegas. In case you need another excuse not to play the slots, you can apparently hit the jackpot even if you don’t deposit your chip:

Last year, Eric Rosenblum, a lawyer from Merrick, N.Y., sold a $100 chip he picked up in the 1980s at the now defunct Desert Inn casino here for $20,000. Returning home from a vacation some 45 years ago, a Missouri woman, Sandy Marbs, threw a $1 chip from the Showboat Casino, once a Las Vegas mainstay, into her jewelry box. Last month, she sold it on eBay for nearly $29,000.

Full Tilt Poker, $3/$6 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 4 Players
LeggoPoker.com – Hand History Converter

BTN: $1,249.10
SB: $600
BB: $1,385.25
Hero (UTG): $1,542.65

Pre-Flop: Q J dealt to Hero (UTG)
Hero raises to $21, BTN calls $21, SB folds, BB calls $15

Flop: ($66) 9 3 K (3 Players)
BB checks, Hero bets $66, BTN raises to $180, BB folds, Hero calls $114

Turn: ($426) 7 (2 Players)
Hero checks, BTN checks

River: ($426) 7 (2 Players)
Hero checks, BTN bets $300, Hero raises to $1,341.65 and is All-In,

BTN: kings full
BTN: %$&$
BTN has requested TIME
BTN calls $748.10, and is all in

Results: $2,522.20 Pot ($2 Rake)
BTN showed 9 A (a flush, Ace high) and WON $2,520.20 (+$1,271.10 NET)
Hero showed Q J (a pair of Sevens) and LOST (-$1,249.10 NET)

I can’t really fault him for this call, because the nut flush is the best hand he could possibly have after this line and folding the top of his range is obviously super-exploitable. But at the same time, he had no reason to think I was capable of floating the flop with a gut shot and then check-raise bluffing the river when he had obviously made a flush. I really don’t think he put me on a bluff, especially based on the chat, he just didn’t want to let go of the flush. Of course trying to bluff people off of flushes at 3/6 (or in general really) is not good poker, but I really thought this guy would be “good” enough to let it go.  Read the complete post...

BryanS, the awesome guy who represents Poker Stars on the 2+2 Forums, just posted a nearly final draft of the schedule for their annual World Championship of Online Poker. As usual, it looks like it’s going to be a ground-breaking event for internet poker, featuring some huge buy-ins, some multi-day events, and some new tournament formats like NL 2-7 single draw that to my knowledge are not offered anywhere on the internet.

I don’t envision myself playing any of the 10K+ buyin events, as I’d need to get a backer and the fields will probably be pretty tough anyway. But I’m excited about pretty much everything else. I like that a lot of the lesser played games have small enough buy-ins that I can afford to take a chance on them and that that chance will be subsidized by players even worse than myself doing the same.

Hopefully my non-poker schedule for this year will work out so that I’m able to play most of the events. It’s nice that, since this is the internet, one can play events that run simultaneously. This is a big complaint from some at the WSOP. Now I just need to build up a bankroll on Stars. Thankfully Poker Savvy pays me in Stars money…

Some notes…  Read the complete post...