Archive for September, 2009

I had a real neat, deep-stacked heads up match going on two tables for several hours yesterday. I felt like we were very evenly matched, and indeed I got off to an early lead, eventually lost a 700BB pot with two pair vs. a turned flush in a four-bet pot and lost a few more big pots to fall way behind, then got back into the lead again when I set over set him for 700BB. At that point he started tilting a bit, and I felt like I had an advantage for that reason. Here’s one of the key hands that helped swing the momentum back my way:

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em, $20.00 BB (2 handed) – Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

Hero (SB) ($4218.50)
BB ($6489)

Preflop: Hero is SB with 5, 5
Hero bets $60, BB calls $40

Flop: ($120) 6, 5, 7 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $77, BB calls $77

Turn: ($274) J (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $222, BB calls $222

River: ($718) 10 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $499, BB raises to $1950, Hero calls $1451

Total pot: $4618 | Rake: $0.50

Results:
Hero had 5, 5 (three of a kind, fives).
BB had 7, A (one pair, sevens).
Outcome: Hero won $4617.50  Read the complete post...

Edit: Made a mistake in the original post. Villain did not have two pair, he had Aces with a kicker that didn’t play.

$5/$10 NLHE, $1100 effective stacks. Action folds to a decent TAG regular in the SB, he opens to $30, I make it $90 with AJo, he makes it $200, I call. Flop is AJ4 rainbow. He bets about $200, I call. Turn is an off-suit 6 7. He checks, I check. River is a 9, he checks, I shove something like $650 into the $800 pot, and he calls with A6s.

There are two major disadvantages to slowplaying that I think I can pretty well avoid in this situation:

1. Losing the Pot. Giving a free card risks improving your opponent to a better hand or letting a scare card fall that enables your opponent to bluff you out of the pot.

2. Losing Additional Bets. When your opponent has a second-best hand that can pay off multiple bets, slow-playing can cost you one or more bets. In big bet games, this is especially bad since the pot size grows geometrically. In other words, the bet that you miss is usually a lot bigger than the bet that you get.  Read the complete post...

As I ended Part 1, my girlfriend and I had just driven home a virtually new car (2009 Subaru Forester with about 4000 miles on it), but we weren’t as happy/excited about this as I felt we should be. I was aware that a great many people in the world would love to be in a financial situation where they are able to pay cash up front for such a nice vehicle, but the process had been stressful and annoying enough to swamp what ought to have been an objectively exciting situation.

It was now 8PM Friday night. According to a sternly worded letter from our landlord, which was most likely a bluff, we would face stiff fines if our apartment wasn’t empty and spotless by 10 PM Monday. We had no new apartment to move into, but we did have a 5×5 cell in a self-storage facility and now a new car that we’d be living out of for the next four months. All that stood between us and the freedom of the open road was an apartment absolutely jammed to the gills with stuff.  Read the complete post...

My latest poker article, WSOP Trip Report Part 2: Jack Link’s and Beef Jerky, is now appearing in the September issue of 2+2 Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

“I was pretty sure I was going to fold. It was the toughest decision I’d had all day, and I spent a good five minutes thinking and staring my opponent down. He was impassive, leaning forwards with hands covering his mouth and eyes revealing nothing. I’d nearly talked myself into a fold, but I decided to count out the chips for a call and see how my opponent responded to that. I slowly stacked up the 7,000 chips I would need, which at that point was about 1/3 of what I had left, and watched for a reaction. Still nothing.”

Enjoy!

Sorry I haven’t been posting much lately. I actually have some pretty exciting news to report, which will make clear why I’ve been busy.

As of today, my girlfriend and I are officially homeless. No, I’m not busto. She’s currently between jobs, and I can play poker from anywhere, so we decided to go (at least) a few months without a permanent residence. The plan was to buy a large car, throw most of our belongings into a storage facility, and then travel the country doing some combination of camping and short-term rentals. There are some cool websites where you can find people either looking to rent out their apartments for a week to a month or a so while they are on vacation or who just have an extra room that they rent out for far cheaper than you’d pay at a hotel.

Buying the car was a really unpleasant experience, which is annoying because it’s such a major purchase and an important decision. I feel like it ought to be fun and exciting instead of stressful and high-pressure. We even made an effort to visit only dealerships with a reputation for not being particularly sleazy or pulling standard car dealer tactics. We thought we’d found a place we liked, and while we were test driving, our interactions with the salespeople were far more comfortable and pleasant than they’d been at any other dealership. Truthfully, that might actually be a liability, as I at least would probably have an easier time negotiating a price with a sleazy used car salesman than with a sweet, grandmotherly woman or chummy outdoorsy guy.  Read the complete post...