“First time?” Mike laughed good naturedly at his hesitation. “It’s already lit, just suck it a little, like a straw. There you go. Wait, wait, don’t blow it out yet.” Walter did his best to oblige, holding his breath as he removed the cigar from his mouth. The taste was surprisingly sweet, like citrus and pine, and a little peppery. He liked it.

After a few seconds, he coughed out a cloud of gray smoke. He tried to take a breath, but that triggered a further bout of coughing, and soon he was doubled over and sputtering. Smurf snatched the blunt from his hand as he cast about for something to drink.

Seeing them just a few times a year is one of the biggest drawbacks of living in San Francisco, and now it seems I’ve missed Oliver’s first poker game! Fortunately, he was eager to tell me about it, with his usual flair for drama, over Skype.

The book is available from the Amazon Kindle Store or in EPUB, Kindle, and PDF formats at Nitcast.com.

Follow Clayton on Twitter@claytoncomic and learn more about his upcoming shows from his website. His podcast is Broadway Comedy Club Radio.

Timestamps

0:30 Hello and Welcome
34:44 Main Event Strategy

Strategy

Hand 1

Blinds 800/1600/200 effective stack 80K
Hero opens to 3500 with Qd Jd in 3rd position, Button 3bets to 8500, Hero calls

Flop QT7 with one diamond.
Hero checks, Button bets 9500, Hero calls

Turn Ks. Hero checks, Button bets 11,500 into 40,200, Hero calls.

River 9s. Hero checks, Button shoves

Hand 2

Blinds 100/200 effective stack 30K.

Villain opens to 450, one call, Hero raises to 1300 with Jc 8c on the Button, Villain calls, other player folds.

Flop (3200) Ac Jh 7c. Villain checks, Hero bets 1500, Villain raises to 4000, Hero calls.

Turn (11K) 9d. Villain bets 5000, Hero calls.

Rivers (21,300) 8s. Villain bets 7000 into 21000.

Hand  3

Blinds 1K/2K/300 effective stacks 160K. Villain opens to 4K, Hero has QQ in the SB and raises 11K, V raises to 33K.

Pick up your copy today at www.nitcast.com (you’ll get PDF, EPUB, and Kindle versions) or in the Kindle Store (Kindle version only).

In this volume, you’ll find essays covering the following topics:

Navigating the Early Stages of a Tournament
Balance
Playing Your Image
Catching Bluffs
(Not) Talking at the Table
The Tournament Mindset

You can buy The Thinking Poker Diaries Volume 5 at www.nitcast.com (you’ll get Kindle, PDF, or EPUB versions) or in Kindle form on Amazon.

You certainly don’t need to have read the earlier volumes to make sense of this one, but if you need to get caught up, the first four books are available as a bundle at a discounted rate!

The table was, perhaps not quite as good as the previous day’s, but pretty spectacular. I made good use of one live tell, but mishandled another.

You Raise, I Call

At the 25/50 level, I looked down at 22 and was reaching for raising chips when I noticed the player on my left loading up. I grabbed just two green chips and called. He raised to 250, and I called. The flop came 843 and we both checked, so I immediately put him on whiffed overcards. The turn brought a 2, and I bet 200. This probably should have been more, but I really didn’t want to let him off the hook if he just had a gutshot, and I thought the smaller size might even keep in a hand like KQ. The river was a 9, I bet 400, and he called so quickly that I regretted not betting more, but at the time it seemed like a reasonable amount to expect an unimproved AQ to call.

Calling Chips

There was another pot where I can’t even remember what I had, but whatever it was, I was betting the river for value. I grabbed two yellow chips, planning to declare, “Twelve hundred”, but as I did so my opponent very clearly grabbed calling chips. I quickly changed course and said, “Fifteen hundred,” but he tanked for a long time before folding. What I should have realized is that he knew I could see him grabbing chips and it was actually a “strong-means-weak” tell meant to deter me from betting.

Blocking Bet?

The two significant pots that I lost were both to that same player.

At 75/150, I opened to 450 with As Kc on the Button, and the BB called. The flop came Ah 8h 3h, and he checked and called 500. He checked and called 1000 on a Qd turn, after a long tank.

The river was the 2h, and he threw out 1000 without much hesitation. At this point I was getting nearly 5:1 and convinced myself he could be block betting a worse Ace, but I don’t think that’s consistent with his thinking so long on the turn. I called, and he showed me 7c 6h.

Lucky Turn

I opened to 400 with ATo at the 100/200 level. Villain called, as did the CO, Button, and BB. I was pretty tempted just to give up, but the Q52 was a little too good, so I bet 700 into 2100. Villain called, and everyone else folded.

I had about a pot-sized bet behind, and was thinking Ks and Js would be great for shoving, but then a 3 popped off and I realized I had more backdoor straight draws than I’d consciously realized (though this was probably part of the reason the flop struck me as too good to give up). I stacked up my chips to jam, and Villain once again reached for his chips. Remembering what this meant the last time, I carried through on my shove, but he practically beat me into the pot. “I got very lucky,” he told me, turning over 33 for a turned set.

“Indeed you did,” I said, a little more snippily than I intended. On to the next one.

Another Lucky Turn

My cash session started off with more of the same. After scoping out five tables at two different venues, I settled into a 5/10 game at Bellagio. There were a few young guys who seemed like serious players, but only one of them seemed to rise above the level of “mediocre reg”, and there were a few soft spots as well.

I limped UTG with 22, two players limped behind, and then one of the seemingly mediocre regs made it $40 on the Button. The seemingly good reg on the BB called. Thinking that the Button would have raised bigger with a premium hand, I re-raised to $160. The action folded to him, and he called quickly. The BB called as well.

The flop came 6c 3c 3s. The BB checked, I bet $200 into a pot of about $500, the Button called with about $500 behind (this is why my flop sizing was small), and the BB folded.

I was ready to be done with it, but the turn was an offsuit Ace. Intriguing. I checked, and Villain checked behind. The river was a Q. I threw five black chips into the pot.

“So sick,” Villain said. “I know you got there. Ugh, I did not want to see a Queen.” Huh, that’s not what I wanted him to be afraid of. “Fuck it, I call,” he said, turning over Ac Kc. I showed him my twos, tossed him $500, and mentally demoted him from “mediocre reg” to “wannabe”.

Bad Donk

I played this one pretty badly to be honest, but because it turns out I was winning until the river, I’m allowed to feel sorry for myself, right?

UTG opened for $30, Wannabe called on the Button, and I called with 43o on the BB.

Flop ($95) 864r. I bet $70, UTG folded, Button quickly called.

Turn ($235) 2. I really need to just cut my losses here, but the gutshot was just too tempting to keep me from firing again. I bet $170, and Button called with no hesitation.

River ($575) A. This is probably a decent card to follow through, but he seemed in no mood to fold, so I finally gave it up. He proudly tabled A5o.

I planned to leave pretty soon and decided not to top my stack off from $1250 to the $1500 cap. Of course a few hands later I flopped the nuts and doubled through someone who probably would have paid off another $250 considering he put me all in for $500 more when I bet $500 on the river.

Pot Odds

I finally got my revenge, plus a good laugh, on what turned out to be my last hand of the session (I was waiting for dealer change because it was a time rake #nitcast). UTG, a weak player who’d been raising too much from all positions, opened for $40. UTG1, who seemed like a good pro, called. I made it $140 with As Js UTG2. Wannabe cold called from the SB, UTG called, and UTG1 called.

Flop ($575) 2s 3c 7h. Checked to me, I bet $300, SB called, the other two folded.

Turn ($1175) Ac. He checked. I briefly considered trying to get my value now, but I actually thought AK was a real possibility for SB, so I decided to check back and fold to a big river bet or value bet if he checked.

River ($1175) 2d. He checked. I thought about betting pot but settled on $700.

Wannabe groaned. “I told myself the bigger you bet, the more I was going to call you. You bet the pot. That means you have either Aces or nothing.” Wow, it was hard to keep a poker face after that little monologue. But he wasn’t done yet. “How much is in the pot?” he asked the dealer.

“I can’t tell you that,” she said.

“You can spread it out, right?” he said. She spread the pot. “Eleven hundred,” he muttered to himself. “That means I only have to be right half the time.” Again, I suppressed a smile. Finally, he gave up the facade and copped to his true logic: “Fuck it, I call.”

Hot off the virtual presses, my latest e-book chronicling the 2009 WSOP Main Event is now available in the Amazon Kindle Store or from www.nitcast.com.

2009 wasn’t my best year in the Main Event – in fact it was one of my worst – but understanding the agony of defeat is even more important to appreciating the WSOP experience than is understanding the thrill of victory. As always, I take you inside of my head, to see both the strategy and the emotion, the excitement and the disappointment, the great plays and the mistakes and the we’ll-never-knows.

It’ll set you back less than three bucks, so please check it out and let me know what you think, preferably in the form of an Amazon review. Thanks and enjoy!

If you were to draw a picture of the prototypical recreational player, you might well end up with a picture of this guy. He’s a slightly doughy white guy, late 30s or early 40s, wearing sporty clothes and expensive wrap-around sunglasses on his forehead. We played together the night before at $5/$10, and I got the impression that he thought I was a bit of a bully.

The flop comes Qh Qc 8h. I bet $80, and he raises to $180 pretty quickly. It’s very difficult for me to believe he has a hand here. I mean, maybe a small pair or a flush draw or something, but I could definitely see him doing this as just a straight Level Two “I don’t think you have anything so I’m raising” sort of thing. I contemplate three-betting the flop but, given my backdoors, decide to call instead. I can check-shove turns that improve me, and I can bluff some rivers if he checks back (though I may not need to).

The turn is the 3d. I check, and he bets $320, which solidifies my conviction that he’s just trying to push me out of the pot. The trouble is that I have K-high, no draw, and only about $150 to shove over his bet. I shove anyway.

He groans and asks the dealer, “How much more?”

“Not much more,” she says as she reaches for my chips.

What the fuck!? It’s a little tricky to keep a poker face through her unsolicited and inappropriate commentary. Thankfully he finds the fold button anyway.

I’m sorely tempted to show my hand. It’s the rare case where showing something so wild really can influence the dynamic of the whole table. Ultimately I didn’t do it, though, because I could also feel the desire to brag (which I guess I’m giving into anyway by making this blog post) motivating me.

The latest and greatest volume in my Thinking Poker Diaries is now available at nitcast.com or in the Amazon Kindle Store. This third volume in the series follows the same format as the first two, interspersing anecdotes from the tournament with strategy essays that discuss topics that came up during my play. Longer than the first two volumes combined, this one tells the story of my 35th place finish in the 2008 WSOP Main Event. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Best Strategy

Nate and I talk strategy on just about every episode, but of course the show is at its very best strategy-wise when the game’s top players share their wisdom.

Ben Sulsky – It was a great privilege to talk about game theory (and philosophy) with a player who is blazing new frontiers in poker strategy.

Mike McDonald – Our conversation with Mike was great in a lot of ways, but among other things he was generous enough to share some deep thoughts on tournament strategy, including the underappreciated “hero check”.

Fascinating Stories

My favorite guests are not only great players (sometimes they aren’t players at all) but also fascinating people who open up about their struggles, their successes, and unique poker careers.

John the Lawyer – A long career in big live games, including a lot of private games, is bound to produce some great stories, and John tells them well. If you overlooked this episode because you didn’t recognize the name, go back and listen. There’s some solid strategy discussion in here as well.

Dara O’Kearney – Going pro later in life gave Dara a unique perspective on the poker world, and his Irish blood gives him the ability to share his thoughts with both humor and deep insight into many facets of the game, including staking.

Terrence Chan – Terrence not only shares stories from his poker and mixed martial arts careers but also gives some insight into the state of regulated online poker in Nevada. This interview is particularly interesting in light of what happened with Ultimate Poker just a few months later.

Ari Engel – Ari reveals that the life of the circuit grinder isn’t always a glamorous one. Even one of the most successful player on the WSOP circuit has to live a nitcast-approved lifestyle to keep his dream alive.

Alex Fitzgerald – Alex is brutally honest about the highs and lows of his career, including his struggle with drugs and his new life in Costa Rica.

Just Plain Fun

Nate and I rarely have as much fun as when we get to catch up with some of the great friends we’ve made through the podcast, and when we’re having the most fun, that’s usually when the show is the most fun to listen to.

Live From Las Vegas featuring Carlos Welch – One of the perks of our relationship with PokerNews was the opportunity to record together in person (a rare treat in itself) from the halls of the World Series of Poker. Carlos Welch joins us for this entertaining episode that includes a lot of strategy discussion from non-hold ’em games.

Episode 100 – This is one for the fans. In this double-length episode, two of our most popular guests, Carlos Welch and Gareth Chantler, turn the tables and interview Nate and me about our lives and poker careers.

For just $2.99, you can purchase The Thinking Poker Diaries, Volume 1 directly from me (you’ll get an EPUB, a PDF, and a Kindle file) or from Amazon (Kindle file only).

There’s a substantial preview available on Amazon, but for a better idea of what to expect, here’s the Table of Contents:

Introduction
How I Became A Poker Player
Introduction to the WSOP
Day One
Three-Betting Light
Day Two
The Bubble
Day Three
Playing a Short Stack
Day Four
More Stories! More Strategy! More Poker!

For those who do read it, please star & review on Amazon and recommend to your friends. I deliberately made the book very inexpensive because I’m more interested in reaching a wide audience than in maximizing my profit.

I’d also be very appreciate for any constructive criticism, as I plan to do a lot more of these and would love to see them improve with each volume.

Thanks!

Andrw

Nate and Andrew also discuss a hand they played against one another at Red Rock after they both busted the World Series of Poker Main Event.

I limp TT UTG+1. CO limps behind, SB makes it $75, BB calls, I call, CO calls. Flop 7s 5d 4d. SB checks, BB checks, I bet $200 into $300, everyone calls. I’m pretty confident at this point that SB has an overpair, which more likely than not at this point is better than mine, and the other two are either drawing or have a made hand no stronger than one pair (or both, of course).

Turn Kh. SB bets $500 into $1100, BB folds, I make it $1800 with about $4000 behind, CO instantly shoves his whole stack in which is about $1500, the other two fold. He was so confident getting it in that I thought maybe my read was off and he’d slowplayed a set or straight but nope he flipped over K7. If CO isn’t randomly improved by a turn card that the vast majority of the time does nothing for anyone, then I’m pretty sure I get SB off of the winner right then and there. This is sort of the cash game equivalent of finding a great cold 4-bet spot in a tournament just to have the BB wake up with AA.

To be clear, I’m all for playing within your bankroll and being shameless about leaving a game that isn’t great when you are taking a shot. I just thought it was funny that he felt the need to make excuses for leaving the game, and mostly I was upset with myself for not trusting my gut more in that previous hand, because after seeing this performance I’m near-100% certain that QQ is never good there.

The really tilting experience occurred later that night in a 5/10 game. A seat opened up, and the floor called “Nick M”, not a name any of the regulars recognized. After a few minutes, a woman talking on her phone walked over, put $1500 in the empty seat, and walked off. She sat on the other side of the room for at least twenty minutes talking on her phone, which was upsetting the guys who prefer to play at a full table, especially because the next person on the list was a well-liked regular who hadn’t been to the casino in months because of health issues and everyone was eager for him to get the seat.

Finally they get the floor to go ask this woman what’s going on and apparently she’s locked up the seat for her boyfriend who is “on his way”. There’s a lot of grumbling about that and I personally find it annoying since there’s a separate process for handling call-ins, but most of the regulars who were complaining lock up seats for each other this way all the time.

Anyway, Nick M finally arrives and sits down. He declines to take a hand in early position (posting not required), then gets up and walks over to talk to his girlfriend, missing another orbit in the process. Eventually he comes back, takes a hand in late position, folds for about forty minutes, opens a pot, folds to a 3-bet, and leaves for another twenty minutes or so. After lots more folding, he opens to $35 UTG+2, gets one caller, and I am in the big blind with KK. I honestly do not feel great about 3-betting, but I figure even a nit is going to raise TT+ and probably won’t fold them to a 3-bet. So I make it $165 and then he gets all serious and raises to $420 with about $1000 behind. I look at him and he seems very comfortable maintaining eye contact. I fold, and two hands later he leaves the table again. We discuss the hand and the whole table agrees he had AA.

Technically if you’re gone for more than half an hour your stack gets picked up, though in most cases this isn’t strictly enforced. As you might imagine, though, at 31 minutes the floor is called and this kid’s stack is taken off the table to applause. It may have ended up working out well for the kid though because he got back on the list and eventually bought back  in for only $1000, several hundred less than he took off of the table, so getting picked up effectively enabled him to go south with his meager winnings.

In his absence the game has gotten kind of wild. I post a mandatory $20 straddle, and the next player to act raises blind to $75 (re-straddling is not allowed). This kid, on his very first hand back at the table, shrugs and raises to $300. He gets a call in middle position, and the blind raiser calls. Flop comes Q52, check, kid shoves for $700, gets called, and tables KK for the win.

Plus Nate and Andrew talk about the resolution of the Borgata counterfeit chips debacle and how to get what you want with pocket Kings.

Timestamps

0:30 Hello & Welcome; counterfeit chips at Borgata
32:23 Interview: Pauly McGuire
88:14 Strategy: Pre- and post-flop decisions with pocket Kings

If you’re a member of Tournament Poker Edge, then you’ll also want to check out my new theory series on bluffing. Like my hand reading and value betting series, it’s a combination of slide show and hand examples.

If you aren’t yet a member of Tournament Poker Edge, you can sign up here!

One of your first goals at the poker table should be to ensure that your opponents never know what you have. Even after the hand is over, it’s generally better to keep the cards face down unless you have to show them, but during the hand you should always do your best to keep your cards a mystery. This may seem obvious, but there are situations where many players intentionally try to “announce” their hand to their opponents with their bets.

As it happens, though, my own contribution is overshadowed by that of Tommy Angelo. His piece is also a good read, but the best part about it is the accompanying graphic, so I’m not going to post an excerpt here. Go check it out for yourselves.

In addition to valuable strategy content, we aim to find unique guests and discuss interesting topics that you won’t hear anywhere else. If you’re new to the show, here are a few of my personal favorite episodes. If you’re a veteran listener, please suggest some of your favorites in the comments!

Best Strategy

Ed Miller – What begins as a discussion of Playing the Player turns into a wide-ranging Q&A session on beating live no-limit hold ’em cash games. Ed’s penchant for explaining high-level concepts in easy-to-understand terms really shines through in this interview.

Olivier Busquet – Even you aren’t a heads up player, you can learn a lot from listening to how one of the best heads-up sit-n-go players in the world stays sharp and works to refine his game. Olivier is remarkably open about his thought process and strategy in the first half of a this two-part interview.

Isaac Haxton – Like Olivier, Ike is remarkably open about how he plays and thinks about poker at the highest stakes. In fact, the two even talk about each other in their respective interviews, making these two episodes fascinating companion pieces.

Fascinating Guests

Shaniac’s Back – Shane Schleger returns to the show to talk about getting out of debt, getting married, getting turned around at the Canadian border, and final tabling the WCOOP Main Event. He does it all with characteristic wit, charm, and humility.

Keone Young – You might know Keone Young as Mister Wu from Deadwood, or as the voice of Storm Shadow from the 1980s GI Joe cartoons, or as Chen Stormstout from World of Warcraft, or from one of the hundreds of roles he’s had in his decades-long acting career. But did you know that he’s also a poker player? Keone shares his fascinating journey from the streets of Honolulu to the movie studios, and poker tables, of California.

Carlos Welch – We first met Carlos in Las Vegas, just days after he’d made the decision to quit his job as a high school math teacher to play poker full-time. The key to his success isn’t crushing at the highest stakes, it’s keeping his expenses to an absolute minimum so that he doesn’t need a lot of money to sustain his lifestyle. His stories of sleeping in his truck in casino parking lots and showering in laundromats are sure to inspire and entertain.

Unique Topics

Ray J – Poker media is full of stories about the people playing at the WSOP, but about the people slinging the cards? Ray J tells about his life as a traveling poker dealer and shares his thoughts about proper procedure and how dealers ought to be trained.

Tubby Boots – There’s not much poker in this episode. Instead, Andrew sits down with his grandmother to talk about her brother, a 400-pound cross-dressing stand-up comedian who loved food, gambling, and life.

Ben Wilinofsky – NeverScaredB brings some high-level strategy to the show when he and Andrew talk about a heads-up match they played as part of the World Championship of Online Poker, but Ben also opens up about his struggle with depression and his Movember campaign to raise money for mental health issues among Canadian men.

Thinking Poker Bookclub

From time to time, we feature poker books on the show. We spend several weeks reading and discussing a book and then bring the author on the show to answer your and our questions.

Jared Tendler on The Mental Game of Poker 2

Tommy Angelo on Elements of Poker

Ed Miller on Playing the Player

” The bottom line is that you need to do that work of actually identifying the hands that you think it makes sense for him to bluff with, rather than simply saying “I can beat a bluff!” or “It’s hard to have a hand better than mine!” There are many cases where it’s actually quite difficult for your opponent to show up with a hand worse than yours, and he has to have something.”

Also appearing is the conclusion to Carlos Welch’s three-part series about how small stakes players can make the most of the World Series of Poker:

Small stakes tournaments in Vegas are some kind of weird lovechild of skilled WSOP events and your average home game where players routinely get splinters from shoving a pile of toothpicks into the center of a dinner table and yelling “I’m all in!” If you want to have a good summer, you have to handle this ugly baby with care.

Yeah, Carlos is a little funnier than I am.

WSOP 2013 Trip Report, Part 4: The Main Event – Unfortunately this is a lot shorter than it’s been in past years, but I did get to play a pretty famous player: “Usually, tough players make it clear that they are going to put pressure on you constantly.That’s not how Doyle played. In fact, I can’t tell you what exactly he was doing, but it was working. In the first couple of hours, he shot up from his starting 30K to over 50K without winning any particularly large pots. He never projected the image of a bully who was pushing too hard, but he raked in a lot of medium-sized pots without showing his cards, which is pretty much the hallmark of a good player.”

Holding Your Own – On that note, here are some thoughts on playing with players who are better than you: “If you play poker for challenge and entertainment, then maybe you welcome the chance to test your mettle against top-caliber opposition. One of the cool things about poker is that anyone can find himself playing with a legend of the game, and matching wits with one of your idols can be an awesome experience. Still, you might as well give yourself every advantage you can in the confrontation to come.”

Small Stakes Tournament Player’s Guide to the WSOP, Part 2 – You may not be bankrolled for the Main Event, but you can still have a great WSOP summer on a small bankroll and a tight budget. Carlos Welch tells you how: “Last month, I suggested tips for setting up your stay in Vegas in part 1 of this guide. This month, I will recommend particular games, locations, times, and opponents to play against. If you follow these guidelines, you should have a good chance of leaving Vegas with more money than you brought.”

WCOOP Heads Up Hand History Review, Part 6 – This is an addendum to a Tournament Poker Edge series from last year’s WCOOP. I played an interesting match in this year’s $200 heads up event that was worthy of inclusion. If you’re not already a member of TPE, you can sign up here.

Today is the $1500 PLO8, the last WSOP event I’m going to play before the main. Although the series hasn’t been kind to me so far, I’m optimistic about this event because I really enjoy playing PLO8, and the potential edge over players who don’t know what they’re doing is enormous. I may well have a larger edge in this tournament than in any other that I played.

So I just want to assure everyone, particularly those of you with a financial interest in the outcome, that I am pumped and ready to play my best today. I was not at all tilted by losing a huge coin flip in last night’s $1K, and after the tournament was over I came straight  home and went to bed so I’d rested for today. I most definitely did not go on an all-night bender and wake up 27 minutes ago on a golf course in Henderson. I am feeling fresh and in a good place mentally and physically.

Let’s do this!!!!

Tubby Boots was a performer with an ecclectic, eccentric career that spanned four decades. At the height of his popularity he played the biggest hotels in Miami and Las Vegas and released four albums: Tubby Boots Goes Topless (available on YouTube), Out of This World, Songs for Swingers, and Thin May Be In – But Fat’s Where It’s At. You can also see one of his live performances on YouTube.

Tubby’s sister, Sylvia Brokos, has nothing to sell. She does not have a website or a Facebook account, and you can’t follow her on Twitter.

Book Club

Next week, we’ll be discussing the Introduction and Part 1 of Ed Miller’s Playing the Player.

Strategy Segment

HJ opens to 20$. CO three-bets to 55$. Hero 4-bets to $125 with As 3s on the button. HJ snap folds, CO snap calls.

Flop is 8c 7c 2c Pot = ~275$

CO checks, Hero bets $110, CO calls quickly

Turn is 9d Pot = $495

CO checks making eye contact, Hero bets $165, CO calls unhappily.

River is Jc Pot = $825

CO checks quickly. Hero takes 30 seconds and moves all in for $340 effective, covering villain by $20 or so.

6:42 Introducing the Thinking Poker Book Club
9:50 Strategy: a hand from Gareth, currently in Uruguay
32:40 Old podcast episodes now available on iTunes!
33:54 Andrew and his grandmother discuss Tubby Boots

Nope, this is just his way. He goes on like this for at least an hour, “Two hours of these fucking cards,” “What am I supposed to do with these shit hands?”, “Un-fucking-believable”,  “Can’t you deal me anything I can play?”, hanging his head and cursing to himself, angrily throwing his cards away out of turn, occasionally storming off from the table to go kick the wall. While he’s gone, some of the regulars talk about how he was hear last weekend putting on the same show.

The player on my right, in between the Tilt Monkey and me, leaves, and another guy, probably in his late 50s or early 60s with a Lou Reed leather jacket look going on moves into the vacant seat. The next time Tilt Monkey starts muttering under his breath, Lou asks him, “What’s that?”

Tilt Monkey looks up. “Huh?”

“I couldn’t hear you, what did you say?”

“Nothing.” His face is red and he looks miserable.

“Hey are you alright, buddy?” Lou asks with faux-genuine concern.

“No I’m not alright. Do I look fucking alright?”

“Whoah, what’s the matter?”

“I been getting my fucking ass kicked.”

Lou looks shocked. “What? Who kicked your ass?”

Tilt Monkey glares at him. Feigning ignorance, Lou forges ahead. “What happened? Who kicked your ass?”

“They’ve all been kicking my ass.”

“Oh you mean in the card game.”

Tilt Monkey lowers his head and returns to cursing his luck.

Lou looks around the table, shaking his head. I’m not the only one stifling laughter. “You all need to stop kicking this guy’s ass,” he scolds us.

It’s the same business when the Tilt Monkey wins a pot. “Finally. About fucking time. Gimme that pot. A fucking pot. One fucking pot in an hour.”

Finally another guy at the table has had enough. After losing to the Monkey and getting this act, he tells him to shut his fucking mouth and stop whining. Soon both are on their feet pointing and shouting at each other. The floor intervenes and tells Tilt Monkey that one more comment and he’s getting thrown out.

To his credit, he settles down well after that and swallows a lot of abuse without saying anything more. People at the table are talking about him like he’s not there, and if I can hear it he can hear it, but he doesn’t react.

It helps that he’s winning now. A few hours later he’s actually up and in better spirits, actually chatting cordially with Lou. “You work out at the Y? I teach right around the corner from there.”

“Oh yeah, where?” Lou asks.

“At the community college,” the no-longer-tilted monkey tells him.

“What do you teach?”

“Statistics.”

“Oh yeah, I heard his ban was up.”

I was curious to ask who this guy was, but about that time, my seat was called. I left the table and didn’t think much more about it.

The $1/$3/$6 was in rare form, with no fewer than four players imbibing heavily. After about an hour, one of them begins speaking angrily to the floorman. “Don’t fucking bring him over here. I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck. Just don’t seat him here.” A few others nod in agreement. I have a feeling I know what this is about, but I don’t ask, and another half hour goes by.

Here comes the part I’ve never seen: a seat opens up at the table, and the floor announces “Paul for 1-3-6”.

“If he sits down, I’m out,” declares the angry guy. He’s been drinking, and he’s always angry, so I don’t make too much of that. But then the table joins in with a chorus of agreement.

“Me neither.”

“I’m leaving if he sits.”

Paul takes his seat, and no fewer than seven people rack up their chips. They’re asking me and the one other guy who didn’ t leave, “Are you leaving? Are you going to play with him?”

I’m all for collective action as a means of enforcing the social norms of the largely governless poker world, but I’d like to at least know what I’m shunning the guy for, and no one will tell me. They keep telling me he’s annoying to have at the table, but this game is full of antisocial personalities, and I’ve never seen a reaction like this. As @DougLeePoker responded when I tweeted about this incident, “meanwhile @howardhlederer is eating lobster tail in bobby’s room, laughing it up with the boys.”

Paul refuses to play three-handed, so we’re left without a game. Finally he goes back to his $1/$3 seat and our game fills back up. It’s mostly new faces and all the big drinkers are gone, so it’s not half the game it used to be.

While we’re waiting to restart, I finally corner one of the regulars and drill him for information. “What is it about this guy?”

“He’s just really annoying to have at the table.”

“There’s gotta be more to it than that. Plenty of people are annoying, but I’ve never seen a whole game break up like that. What does he do?”

“Anything a guy can do to be annoying in a poker game.”

“Does he cheat?”

“No it’s not that. He just like… like he takes a really long time to act, he leaves the table constantly, etc.”

“That’s it.”

“Well, like… OK one time he shit his pants at the table. Like on purpose.”

“What?”

“Yeah, stuff like that.”

The game was starting back up, so I didn’t have time to follow up on what other behavior exactly could be considered comparable to that. I never learned why China Paul was banned from the casino either, but I’m guessing it involved abuse of staff because no one from floorpeople to dealers to waitresses seems to like him. Now that he’s back, maybe I’ll have the chance to find out for myself. Or maybe he’ll never be able to play in the big game again.

“This game was too big for my bankroll. But it was too good to pass up. The board was jack, ten, eight, all diamonds. And all the money was in the middle.

My middle-aged opponent was exactly who you would picture at a 5-10 game in Colombia. Designer sunglasses, expensive watch, supermodel companion, and macho delivery – he wanted people to know he was secure in himself. I knew from the way he played cards that he wasn’t.

“Muerto,” he declared to the table, referring to my hopes of winning the hand, thankfully not my hopes of leaving the casino. His leggy senorita was immersed in her phone at the empty table beside ours. She wore red, carefully arranged tatters.

My chances were quite slim. I had the king of diamonds with a jack, top pair good kicker and the second nut flush draw. My opponent had me pipped in a very bad way, holding ace jack with the ace of diamonds. My chances of drawing out were not zero as he would have you believe, but 12%.”

If you’re not familiar with Gareth, you can learn a lot more about him and why he left his native Canada to live in Peru on one of the most popular episodes of the Thinking Poker Podcast. But before you listen to that, go read his article. You won’t regret it.

Nate and my recent conversation with Gareth Chantler inspired me to continue chronicling here my travels in Europe earlier this year. When last we left off, Emily and I were in Paris. Our next destination was Munich, but I think we both liked that the least of all the places we visited, so I’m just going to skip past it and move on to the Swiss city of Lucerne.

Because she enjoys cities less than I do, Emily was really looking forward to our time in Switzerland. We’d soon be spending ten days in a chalet overlooking the Lauterbrunnen Valley, but first I wanted to meet a friend in Lucerne. Nam, who arrived in Swizterland as a young boy fleeing the war in Vietnam, is one of my more interesting coaching students. When he heard that we’d be coming to his country, he was eager to show us around, and I was eager to meet him.

It was raining on the evening that we arrived in Lucerne, which as a popular vacation/tourist destination is one of the most expensive cities in one of the most expensive countries in the world. The cheapest hotel we could find was well over 100 euros per night. We waited several minutes to check in as an Indian man, oblivious to the clerk’s increasing annoyance with him, peppered her with questions about where to go and what to do in Lucerne. His expectations didn’t seem that unreasonable to me, and I wasn’t sure whether there was an element of racism at play in the clerk’s reaction to him or if he was just demanding more service than this budget hotel typically provided.

We later learned that almost everyone staying at this hotel was Indian. The restaurant we ate at that night was also Indian and one of the more reasonably priced ones in the city, part of a European chain aiming to provide authentic cuisine for Indian travelers. We soon realized that we could find some of the best deals in Switzerland by following the Indian tourists, who for whatever reason seemed to be more budget conscious than the European, Chinese, and Japanese vacationers.

When we returned from dinner, I again had to wait at the front desk. This time I was trying to purchase a power adapter (Switzerland doesn’t use the same plugs as most of Europe) while two Indian men were giving the clerk, who was also Indian, a hard time in heavily accented English about the hold that the hotel was going to put on their debit card, which is of course very standard. The two guests were presumably complaining about the clerk to each other in Hindi when he interrupted them, also in Hindi, presumably to tell them that he understood everything they were saying.

“Oh you speak Hindi?!” one of the men explained and started speaking to him very rapidly.

The clerk cut him off sternly. “We will converse in English.”

“Why? You speak Hindi!” the man demanded.

“I speak everything: Hindi, Murathi, Punjabi…. But we will speak in English.”

“Why?”

“Look around here! Everyone in this hotel is Indian. If they hear I am speaking Hindi, they will pester me with questions, and I will get nothing done all night.”

Nam

The previous night’s clouds were gone, and it was a sunny and downright hot day in Lucerne. Emily wasn’t feeling well, so I went by myself to meet Nam at our designated spot in front of the main train station. Nam knew what I looked like but I’d never seen a picture of him, and I didn’t have a cell phone or other way for him to contact me. The appointed time came and went, and I stared down every Asian man I saw without success. He’d been so eager to show me around that I couldn’t imagine him standing me up, but after an hour I began to worry.

Just as I was about to go look for a pay phone, a well-groomed Asian man wearing a t-shirt and blazer emerged from the station looking frantically left and right. I caught his eye, a flash of recognition passed between us, and then I shook his hand. “Good to meet you, Nam!”

“I’m so sorry Andrew! I just got a new Porsche convertible – I mean just got it yesterday – and I was so excited to drive you and Emily around in it. But the top is stuck in the down position and there would be nowhere for her to sit, so when I couldn’t fix that, I had to get my other Porsche, it’s not a convertible.”

Guess that’s what I get for not warning him that Emily wouldn’t be joining us. As you might guess from the multiple Porsches, Nam’s come a long way since arriving in Switzerland a penniless refugee. As we walked (it was too nice a day to get straight into a car), he told me about himself, his adopted country, and the city of Lucerne.

Around Lucerne

I’ve been to places with cooler buildings, and I’ve been to places of greater natural beauty, but I’ve never been anywhere the scored so highly on both counts. The city of Lucerne has stood on the bank of Lake Lucerne straddling the Reuss River for nearly 1000 years. Its oldest buildings exhibit the famous half-timbered architectural style, and on a clear day you can see the Swiss Alps looming on the horizon beyond the lake.

Nam and I walked through the old part of the city and then up a hill to the stone walls, built in the 14th century, that still surround the city. Several of the wall’s towers are open to the public, so we were able to climb to the top for some awesome bird’s eye views.

Exhausted and thirsty from walking and climbing in the hot sun, we sat in a cafe in the Altstadt (Old City) where Nam treated me to a bottle of Rivella, a surprisingly refreshing Swiss beverage made from milk serum and flavored with apple juice.

He also told me more about Switzerland. It was clearly that he was extremely proud of his country and happy to be a Swiss citizen. That’s not too surprising considering how much success he’s had there, but it was still refreshing to hear someone who believed that his country was on the right track. It’s certainly not a sentiment you hear too often in the US, but even in other parts of Europe (the French are of course world-class complainers) the general sentiment was dissatisfaction with the government and concern about the direction of the country. Nam, on the other hand, spoke proudly about the country’s great wealth, low unemployment, and highly educated population, though he demurred when I asked how much of that wealth was built on helping citizens of other countries shield themselves from taxation.

After our drink we walked along the shore of the lake for a bit, ate dinner, and then met up with Emily. He took us for a quick spin in the Porsche and then we saw the city by night, with the famous Kapellbrücke illuminated and reflected in the river it spans.

Finally he showed us the Löwendenkmal, a memorial to Swiss Guards killed during the French revolution that Mark Twain called, “the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world.” The carving of a lion is the tourist hub of Lucerne, so it was good that we came at night. Though it was a little harder to see, the dark and quiet made for a more fitting atmosphere than a gaggle of bus tourists would have.

Gareth is a Zoom poker specialist who blogs and produces videos at CardRunners. He’s also an instructor at PokerStars’ Poker School Online and available for private coaching. Though he’s originally from Canada, poker gave Gareth the freedom to spend a year living in Peru, and he’s currently back in Canada grinding up a bankroll so that he can hit the road once again. You can follow his world travels and poker travails on Twitter.

Thanks to Bubblegum Octopus for providing this week’s music, including the outro song, “Betrayal is OK”. Bubblegum Octopus has a strong web presence, with tracks and more info available on Facebook, Myspace, or Bandcamp.

This is an extra long episode, and while Nate and I hope that you’ll want to hear it all, we’re going to give you a few timestamps in case you want to get all Reader’s Digest about it:

0:12 Introduction and congenial banter, including an amusing live poker story
7:02 Gareth on life, dropping out of college, and why he gets up in the morning
44:35 Gareth’s year in Peru and elsewhere
58:33 Our best strategy segment to date
1:31:35 Wrap-up
1:35:47 Email us! “Betrayal is OK” by Bubblegum Octopus.

What did you think of Gareth’s story? What did you think of the episode? Please comment here or e-mail us with your thoughts and questions.

Emily’s jack-o-lantern is a tribute to our Europe trip:

And of course it wouldn’t be Halloween without “The R4v3n“. This is seriously a poker comedy masterpiece and you should go watch it immediately if you’ve never seen it (and actually even if you have).

“The more time I spend on the internet, the more disdainful I become of the physical world. I work online, I play online, I shop online, and I meet people online. Owning physical things is mostly a nuisance to me. They have to be stored, carried, cared for, and packed or discarded every time I move, which is often, thanks to the freedom that online poker provides me.”

Not only was my trip to Montreal for the purpose of playing poker online, but it was arranged entirely online. I comparison priced flights online. I found and booked an apartment on AirBnB. Trip Advisor helped me figure out the best way to get from the Montreal airport to my apartment. I used Yelp to find places to eat and things to do during my time off. I used Google Maps to find the best bike routes around the city. And of course I chronicled the whole trip on my blog.

When I was comparing apartments, the reliability of the internet was naturally my primary concern. I ruled out a few otherwise good places because they had a connection shared by an entire building rather than their own modem. The owner of the apartment I ultimately chose assured me that the connection was quick and reliable, and until now it always had been. He did warn me that there was a monthly limit of 50 GBs, but I’d forgotten about that because I didn’t think there was any chance of running into it.

I’m still not sure that that’s what happened, but it’s my best guess. As I mentioned in my Day 1 post, I’d been listening to Spotify near-continuously during the WCOOP. I streamed The Lederer Files and downloaded the 2+2 Pokercast. I unwound after stressful days with Aziz Ansari, YouTube clips, and The Colbert Report (also available in Canada). And I just may have shot myself in the foot during the most important part of the series.

In a way, the timing was fortuitous. At least my disconnection occurred after the end of Day 1 of the Main Event and before the start of Day 2. So while it was harrowing to find a new internet connection while deep in the 1K, it would have been infinitely worse on the bubble of the 5K.

As it happened, I woke up on Monday morning, still without internet in the apartment. Among other things, that meant that I couldn’t actually look up the coffee shop where I was the night before or exactly how to get there. It was a pretty ideal work space, though, so I left myself plenty of time to find it and hopped on a trusty old Bixi.

I impressed myself by beelining straight to it. That gave me nearly an hour to have a coffee and a sandwich and get settled in. The only downside was that the bathroom, which I’m usually eager to use at every break, required a key, so I had to go request that every hour.

I started the tournament with a somewhat short stack, and it got even shorter when I lost a flip to a really short stack with KQs to his JJ. After that, all I could do was nit it up until we were in the money.

That’s not the way I’d prefer to play the bubble, but the payout structure mandated it. A min-cash was worth more than $12,000, and the next few payjumps were roughly $400 each. The implication of that is that sneaking into the money with a very short stack is preferable to risking elimination in order to accumulate chips, because making it into the money with twice as many chips might win you only a few thousand more dollars or less.

I even ended up folding AKo pre-flop when we were 2 or 3 places from the money. I was in the BB with 25 BBs. The chipleader, who’d been bullying the bubble quite successfully, opened for a min-raise from early position. I was ready to shove on him, but then the SB shoved 60 BBs, the second-biggest stack at the table, into the only guy who could bust him. Even if we weren’t on the bubble, this would probably be a fold, so I didn’t have to think too long about it.

The next time I got AK, we were in the money and there was a raise and re-raise in front of me, so it was an easy shove. They both folded and I scooped a good sized pot.

Blinds went up again, though, and I was still too short to make much happen. Finally I reshoved about 13 BBs over a middle position 9.5 BB shove with ATo and lost to AQo. Unfortunate outcome but the right play I think.

Just a few hands later I put my last 4 BBs into the pot with KK and more than doubled through QQ. I thought getting up to 9 BBs would generate some fold equity for me, but when I open shoved A8o from the CO, the button reshoved A6s. The flop came off Q22 with a flush draw for him, then another 2 on the turn to all but lock up at least a chop for him. The river, however, completed his flush and brought my 2012 World Championship of Online Poker to an end.

Thanks for following along! I suppose the last somewhat interesting tidbit was my conversation with the US Customs agent before my return flight. My strategy for dealing with this sort of authority figure is generally to speak only when spoken to and to be extremely literal and limited in my responses. It tends to get on their nerves, but not in a way that they can do very much about. So here’s roughly how our conversation went:

First off, it was early in the morning and there was no one ahead of me in line or at the agent’s window, but I made a point of stopping behind the red line and waiting for her to summon me over, which she did with a subtle nod of her head. I noticed that her name was Canaba, which is funny since she worked in Canada, but I figured I wouldn’t be the first one to point that out so I didn’t mention it.

I greeted Canaba with a cheery, “Good morning!” and handed her my passport and customs declaration, on which I’d declared $3 worth of Canadian-purchased goods crossing the border with me.

She ignored my greeting with a scowl. “You bought $3 worth of something?”

“Yes.”

“What did you buy?’

“Granola bars.” She snorted.

“What were you doing in Canada?”

“Playing poker.”

“How much cash do you have with you?”

“Not very much.”

“What does that mean? Not very much. How much?”

“Like $40.”

“So you didn’t win.”

“I was playing online.”

“What does that mean? Did you win or not?”

“Like, I was playing on the internet. Not at a casino. So I wasn’t playing with cash, and I don’t have cash with me.”

“Ok but did you win or lose?”

“I won.”

“How much did you win?”

“About $15,000.” I probably shouldn’t have answered this. I’m 99% sure I shouldn’t have to, but I guess I’m the sort of guy who’s willing to allow his liberties to be trampled in order to spare himself some discomfort and inconvenience.

“You can’t play online poker from the United States?”

“Correct.”

“Correct you can?”

“No, you cannot play online in the United States.” It might have been more fun to give her an answer like “not on this particular site” or “not without a VPN”, but I decided against trying to confuse her further.

Nonetheless, she suddenly got very defensive. “OK, well I don’t know. I don’t know the rules of poker. Or any kind of gambling.”

“…”

With that she handed my papers back to me. I left her with a breezy, “Have a nice day!” but I didn’t expect an answer, and I didn’t get one.

I’m kind of embarrassed to post this, because it’s pretty hokey, but I do think it helped, so maybe it can help you too:

“This is a long and profitable tournament. You are lucky to be playing it. It deserves your best effort and full attention. There is nothing else you would rather be doing than playing this tournament.

There will be many good opportunities. Wait for them. Conserve your chips. Do not invest in questionable situations, and do not wade into murky waters. Do not bet on guesses when there will be time to form better reads.

Take your time. Think before you act, even, especially, when the decision seems trivial. Pay attention to bet timing and sizing. What does he have? When you bluff, what do want him to fold? When you raise, what do you want him to call? Have you considered all of your options?

This is a long and profitable tournament. You are lucky to be playing it. It deserves your best effort and full attention. There is nothing else you would rather be doing than playing this tournament. Play your best.”

I read this to myself before I started playing and during every break. Later in the evening, when the only tables I still had open were the $5K Main Event and the $1K Second Chance, I had this up on my screen as a constant reminder.

The pre-flop action in this tournament was intense from the very beginning. This is an extreme example, but it gives you an idea of how much people were playing back at each other:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 5200 Tournament, 60/120 Blinds 15 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

MP1 (t20391)
MP2 (t19448)
MP3 (t37186)
CO (t18108)
Button (t52811)
SB (t10829)
Hero (BB) (t28608)
UTG (t22249)
UTG+1 (t10452)

Hero’s M: 90.82

Preflop: Hero is BB with J, 3
UTG bets t240, 5 folds, Button raises to t389, 2 folds, UTG calls t149

Flop: (t1093) 4, 10, 7 (2 players)
UTG checks, Button bets t511, UTG calls t511

Turn: (t2115) 5 (2 players)
UTG checks, Button bets t1189, UTG raises to t2880, Button raises to t5289, UTG calls t2409

River: (t12693) 3 (2 players)
UTG checks, Button checks

Total pot: t12693

Results:
Button mucked 7, 2 (one pair, sevens).
UTG had 4, 4 (three of a kind, fours).
Outcome: UTG won t12693

For most of the first day, I operated under the assumption that there was a good chance any of my raises would get 3-bet and that any of my 3-bets would get 4-bet. Consequently, I played a snug, boring game and I don’t have a lot of interesting hands to share with you from this tournament.

What was interesting was a song that came on while I was playing. I listened to Spotify pretty much non-stop while I playing the series, and after exhausting a few of their other playlists, I was listening to Pitchfork‘s Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s during the Main Event. One song fades, there are a few seconds of silence, and then I hear,

“Yeah, I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge.
The kids are coming up from behind.
I’m losing my edge.”

This is actually the opening to a song by LCD Soundsystem, but it’s a hell of a thing to hear when you’ve just turned 30 and you don’t play online poker nearly as much as you used to and there are all these guys you’ve never heard of before who all seem to know what they’re doing and it seems like every time you google an opponent’s name the first hit is either High Stakes Database talking about his wins at 50/100 PLO or the PokerStars blog talking about he dominated the final table of a recent Sunday Million or SCOOP tournament.

So I had a good laugh at that but I kept my head down and plugged away. After a few hours of nitting it up and not catching much, I’d blinded down to about 14 BBs. I picked up AKo and ended up chopping with another AKo. Two hands later I open shoved AQs for 15 BBs from the CO. The SB called with KQo to double me up. Two hands after that I doubled again:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 5200 Tournament, 250/500 Blinds 60 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

Button (t14879)
SB (t22362)
BB (t23123)
UTG (t22248)
UTG+1 (t96537)
MP1 (t65036)
Hero (MP2) (t15710)
MP3 (t63133)
CO (t18350)

Hero’s M: 12.18

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with K, A
3 folds, Hero bets t1000, 4 folds, BB calls t500

Flop: (t2790) 3, 3, A (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets t999, BB calls t999

Turn: (t4788) 7 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets t2666, BB calls t2666

River: (t10120) Q (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets t10985 (All-In), BB calls t10985

Total pot: t32090

Results:
BB had 5, A (two pair, Aces and threes).
Hero had K, A (two pair, Aces and threes).
Outcome: Hero won t32090

Given the kind of action I was getting despite my nittiness, I felt vindicated in my decision not to get too out of line. Then in the next level:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 5200 Tournament, 300/600 Blinds 70 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG+1 (t59661)
MP1 (t15965)
MP2 (t30852)
MP3 (t13174)
CO (t98427)
Button (t69983)
Hero (SB) (t43714)
BB (t59207)
UTG (t10126)

Hero’s M: 28.57

Preflop: Hero is SB with J, A
5 folds, CO bets t1200, 1 fold, Hero raises to t3600, BB raises to t7800, 1 fold, Hero raises to t43644 (All-In), BB calls t35844

Flop: (t89118) 8, A, 2 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Turn: (t89118) Q (2 players, 1 all-in)

River: (t89118) 4 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: t89118

Results:
Hero had J, A (one pair, Aces).
BB had 10, 10 (one pair, tens).
Outcome: Hero won t89118

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 5200 Tournament, 350/700 Blinds 85 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

Button (t44286)
SB (t18240)
BB (t32885)
UTG (t11119)
UTG+1 (t110948)
MP1 (t81380)
Hero (MP2) (t83778)
MP3 (t21688)
CO (t14290)

Hero’s M: 46.16

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with K, A
3 folds, Hero bets t1400, MP3 calls t1400, 1 fold, Button calls t1400, 1 fold, BB calls t700

Flop: (t6715) 10, 8, K (4 players)
BB checks, Hero bets t3333, MP3 raises to t20203 (All-In), 2 folds, Hero calls t16870

Turn: (t47121) 7 (2 players, 1 all-in)

River: (t47121) 8 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: t47121

Results:
Hero had K, A (two pair, Kings and eights).
MP3 had K, Q (two pair, Kings and eights).
Outcome: Hero won t47121

I won a few more medium pots, then went card dead again towards the end of the night, made a few moves that didn’t work out, and ended the day with 20ish BBs, a healthy but not ideal stack. With the bubble approaching, I knew I was going to have to nit it up again the next day, but I was excited just to be there.

It was nearly midnight, so I would have welcomed the chance to hit the hay and rest up for Day 2 of the Main Event. That wasn’t an option, though, because I was still in the $1K Second Chance, and we were getting down to it. This was the only notable hand from that tournament so far:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 1050 Tournament, 100/200 Blinds 25 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

CO (t19580)
Button (t14087)
SB (t23987)
BB (t16749)
UTG (t37817)
UTG+1 (t16725)
MP1 (t10047)
MP2 (t17606)
Hero (MP3) (t21136)

Hero’s M: 40.26

Preflop: Hero is MP3 with A, K
2 folds, MP1 bets t400, 1 fold, Hero raises to t999, 4 folds, MP1 calls t599

Flop: (t2523) 6, 2, Q (2 players)
MP1 checks, Hero bets t1212, MP1 calls t1212

Turn: (t4947) 6 (2 players)
MP1 checks, Hero bets t1212, MP1 calls t1212

River: (t7371) Q (2 players)
MP1 checks, Hero bets t17688 (All-In), 1 fold

Total pot: t7371

Results:
Hero didn’t show A, K (nothing).
Outcome: Hero won t7371

So I’m chugging along nicely in that tournament, trying just to play well and not think about how tired I’m going to be tomorrow. There was still a thing or two I wanted to do in Montreal – most notably the Latin Quarter, a student hot spot near the Université du Québec à Montréal. Oh well. This was more important.

It’s 2:30 in the morning, and an aggressive player opens the CO. I 3-bet ATo from the SB. He min-4-bets. I go into the tank. Clock is ticking down. I drag the bet slider all the way to the right, take another second to think, and then click “Raise.”

Nothing happens. Then that “Connecting…” bar appears on the screen, and the wireless icon in the bottom right hand corner of my screen is “Looking for signal…”. I stare helplessly, willing the connection to come back. I’ve been playing on this connection for nearly three weeks without the slightest trouble, and it picks now to go out?!

I get down on my hands and knees, unplug the router, wait 60 seconds, replug it. Nothing. Try again with the router and modem. Nothing.

Shit. What are my options? I’m too tired to think clearly. I’m picking up other connections, but they’re all Secure. Blinding off would cost me ten to fifteen thousand dollars in equity. It’s not an option.

I don’t know any of the neighbors. Do I bang on doors in the middle of the night, try to explain the situation, beg for a wireless password? If I could get someone to open the door and listen to me, I could make it worth their while. Offer them enough cash that they’d be glad I woke them up at 2:30 in the morning. How much to offer? $200? $500? It would easily be worth it. But I don’t have that kind of cash, and there’s no ATM around. So then there would be the added complication of getting them to accept an IOU.

I only know one person in Montreal, and though I have Luis’ phone number, I don’t have any way of calling me. Skype was my only phone.

The apartment is just a few blocks from Avenue du Mont-Royal. There are a lot of restaurants and such on that street. I don’t remember seeing any 24-hour places, but I could probably find something eventually. But how long would that take?

I resolved to walk in that direction but also see if I passed anyone on the street who looked like they could be helpful. I wasn’t sure what to expect at this hour, but if I was really lucky maybe I would meet a student on the way home from a late-night study session or something. I grabbed my laptop and stepped out in the Montreal night.

There weren’t many people out, and the first few didn’t look like they had homes, let alone wireless routers. I saw a young couple approaching, but they were so drunk they could barely walk. From the way they were giggling and leaning in to each other, it also seemed like they weren’t going to be wanting company.

Then a cab drove past, and finally I had a plan I felt good about. I walked to the busiest street in the vicinity and hailed a cab. I asked if he know of any place that would have internet at this hour. I was ready to ask in French if necessary, but he understood me. “Probably somewhere on St. Denis,” he told me. The Latin Quarter. I couldn’t help smiling as I hopped in.

Ten minutes later we hit Rue St. Denis, and I spotted an all-night coffee shop and internet cafe almost immediately. “Perfect!” I told him, left him a generous tip, and dashed inside. I bought a stale muffin, got the wireless code, and was back in action less than forty minutes after my disconnection. For all I know, I might have been about to jam into Aces, so it could even have saved me money.

Of course I was getting short, but I doubled almost immediately with TT > AKo. Looking at the hand again, I see know that it was versus the same player who would eliminate me from the Main Event the next day.

Unfortunately I was still frazzled from my little crisis and couldn’t get my head back in the game. I was playing really badly. I made a stupid shove with A7 but sucked out on 77. A few orbits later, we were down to four tables. The button opened for a min-raise. I jammed 20 BBs with T9s in the SB. Assassinato, who was already one of the chip leaders and who went on to chop the tournament, woke up with JJ and that was the end of me. He writes an excellent poker blog, by the way; I suggest you check it out.

I took a cab back home. It was after 4AM, and I was eager to get what rest I could before what I hoped would be another big day. The internet was still out at the apartment, but that was a problem I could solve in the morning.

The only WCOOP that I played on Friday was the $200 Rebuy NLHE. I was in for the “minimum”, but that was the only bit of good news. Actually it got off to a really good start, with me winning two big pots with big hands in the first couple of orbits:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 215 Tournament, 25/50 Blinds 5 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

CO (t10840)
Button (t9970)
Hero (SB) (t4945)
BB (t4270)
UTG (t4995)
UTG+1 (t4995)
MP1 (t4995)
MP2 (t4995)
MP3 (t4995)

Hero’s M: 41.21

Preflop: Hero is SB with A, K
3 folds, MP2 bets t100, MP3 raises to t250, 2 folds, Hero calls t225, 1 fold, MP2 calls t150

Flop: (t845) 3, A, K (3 players)
Hero checks, MP2 checks, MP3 bets t300, Hero calls t300, MP2 calls t300

Turn: (t1745) K (3 players)
Hero checks, MP2 checks, MP3 checks

River: (t1745) 8 (3 players)
Hero bets t690, MP2 raises to t4440 (All-In), 1 fold, Hero calls t3700 (All-In)

Total pot: t10525

Results:
Hero had A, K (full house, Kings over Aces).
MP2 had K, Q (three of a kind, Kings).
Outcome: Hero won t10525

Note that a flush also came in on the river, so for Villain to jam bare trips into me is an absolute gift.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 215 Tournament, 25/50 Blinds 5 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

SB (t14758)
BB (t9940)
Hero (UTG) (t15500)
UTG+1 (t4995)
MP1 (t5902)
MP2 (t9900)
MP3 (t4890)
CO (t10025)
Button (t4315)

Hero’s M: 129.17

Preflop: Hero is UTG with K, K
Hero calls t50, 1 fold, MP1 bets t350, 6 folds, Hero calls t300

Flop: (t820) 8, 9, K (2 players)
Hero checks, MP1 checks

Turn: (t820) 8 (2 players)
Hero bets t444, MP1 raises to t1300, Hero calls t856

River: (t3420) 3 (2 players)
Hero checks, MP1 bets t2255, Hero raises to t4510, 1 fold

Total pot: t7930

Results:
Hero didn’t show K, K (nothing).
Outcome: Hero won t7930

I turned around and bluffed off a lot of those chips trying to get a very good player to lay down an overpair:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 215 Tournament, 30/60 Blinds 5 Ante (8 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG+1 (t15498)
MP1 (t9170)
Hero (MP2) (t19876)
CO (t7666)
Button (t4700)
SB (t4453)
BB (t9590)
UTG (t4167)

Hero’s M: 152.89

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with 8, 8
UTG bets t180, 2 folds, Hero calls t180, 3 folds, BB raises to t475, 1 fold, Hero calls t295

Flop: (t1200) J, Q, 7 (2 players)
BB bets t660, Hero raises to t1666, BB calls t1006

Turn: (t4532) 7 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets t1280, BB calls t1280

River: (t7092) 6 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets t4000, BB calls t4000

Total pot: t15092

Results:
BB had A, A (two pair, Aces and sevens).
Hero had 8, 8 (two pair, eights and sevens).
Outcome: BB won t15092

It’s not a river call I would have made, but he’s a better player than I am, so I won’t say that he was wrong to make it. In any event I recouped a good 80% of what I lost on that hand when the same Villain called me down light in a similar spot:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 215 Tournament, 40/80 Blinds 10 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

MP2 (t16855)
MP3 (t9985)
Hero (CO) (t11755)
Button (t3237)
BB (t3795)
UTG (t5518)
UTG+1 (t15162)
MP1 (t8163)

Hero’s M: 58.77

Preflop: Hero is CO with 5, A
UTG+1 bets t200, 2 folds, MP3 calls t200, Hero calls t200, Button calls t200, BB calls t160, 1 fold

Flop: (t1160) 5, 2, 10 (5 players)
BB checks, UTG+1 bets t490, 1 fold, Hero calls t490, 2 folds

Turn: (t2140) 8 (2 players)
UTG+1 checks, Hero bets t1222, UTG+1 calls t1222

River: (t4584) A (2 players)
UTG+1 checks, Hero bets t3333, UTG+1 calls t3333

Total pot: t11250

Results:
UTG+1 mucked K, A (one pair, Aces).
Hero had 5, A (two pair, Aces and fives).
Outcome: Hero won t11250

I came out of the rebuy period with plenty of chips but ran KK in the SB into AA on the Button for about 65 BBs to make an early departure from the tournament.

The sky threatened rain, so I didn’t plan to do too much with my free afternoon. I grabbed an umbrella and walked a few blocks to a dépanneur that, according to Beeradvocate, offered one of the city’s best selections of local microbrews .

A dépanneur is a convenience store, but most double as liquor stores because until the 1990s they were the only non-government entities permitted to sell alcohol in Quebec. Although you can now buy beer and wine in grocery stores, it seems the best selection is still to be found in the dépanneur, and I had the good luck to live walking distance from one of the very best.

The front room looked like a low-end convenience store, with tightly packed and poorly maintained shelves of overpriced junk food. The back room looked like an upscale wine shop, except that they sold almost exclusively beer. They had literally hundreds of varieties, organized by type, available for individual purchase, and in many cases accompanied by a ranking and/or review clipped from assorted cerevisial publications.  So in one row you’d find all of the stouts, in another all of the wheat beers, etc. This was ideal for my purposes, since I could buy just one of each beer I wanted to try rather than an entire 6-pack.

I’d already done some research, so I beelined for the IPAs. Of the five I wanted to try, I found three. One was sold out, and amazingly there was one they simply didn’t carry. I say “amazingly” because it was hard to imagine them not having a given Quebecois beer, that’s how vast their selection was. I picked out one cold beer for immediate consumption  just based on its packaging and made my way to the cashier in the sensorily dissonant front of the store, where I waited in line between two twitching Charles Manson look-alikes pooling change from their pockets to pay for a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke.

Though it was nearly 8:00, the city was still and fresh, just waking up. The only other people walking the streets of my neighborhood were solitary men well over twice my age.

And the cats. I had seen a few on the streets around here, including one scrawny, patchy-furred beast that was a perfect caricature of an alley cat, but I had no idea there were so many. I must have seen twenty in ten minutes, poking their heads out from under cars or scurrying into gardens.

There’s a bakery around the corner I’ve been meaning to try, and this seems the perfect opportunity. Finally I see someone other than old men on the street. A couple with a young daughter enter the bakery just ahead of me. I buy a croissant and follow them to the park.

Saturday’s storm must have intensified after I went to bed, because branches and tree limbs scatter the ground. My intention is to find a bench where I can read and enjoy my breakfast, and I do, but soon the squirrels find me.

A child of the mid-Atlantic, I’m no stranger to squirrels. It was clear that these rodents were used to being fed, but I figured that if I didn’t offer them anything, they’d keep their distance. Wrong. They hopped up on the bench and inched closer, barely flinching when I stomped the ground in an attempt to scare them off. I’m convinced that they would have climbed right into my lap if I didn’t move.

So now I’m wandering through the park like the Pied Piper, with a dozen squirrels creeping a few feet behind me. They didn’t leave me alone until I finished eating and threw away my garbage. Finally I got to sit in peace and read.

Friday and Saturday were supposed to be light poker days, but with Friday’s deep run and Saturday’s WCOOP special (ie playing for 8 hours to win a pittance), they were anything but. Not wanting my Sunday to drag on longer than necessary, I waited until the last minute to late register the first NLHE event of the day. Three orbits later I’d lost AKo < to AJs and 66 < 88 and that was that.

The $700 was a little more interesting. The guy on my left was a bit of a lunatic, and I found what I think was a pretty good spot against him, though it ended badly for me:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 700 Tournament, 40/80 Blinds (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG (t14833)
UTG+1 (t15543)
MP1 (t5280)
MP2 (t4798)
MP3 (t11924)
CO (t5565)
Button (t9500)
Hero (SB) (t9665)
BB (t4416)

Hero’s M: 80.54

Preflop: Hero is SB with A, 4
7 folds, Hero bets t320, BB calls t240

Flop: (t640) 10, 10, 2 (2 players)
Hero bets t369, BB raises to t1058, Hero calls t689

Turn: (t2756) K (2 players)
Hero checks, BB bets t2756, Hero raises to t5512, BB calls t282 (All-In)

River: (t8832) 10 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: t8832

Results:
Hero had A, 4 (three of a kind, tens).
BB had 9, K (full house, tens over Kings).
Outcome: BB won t8832

I treaded water for like two hours after that, finally got KK, flatted a 4-bet, and check-folded frustratedly to a big bet on a dry A-high flop. A few hands later I convinced myself that the same guy could be a lot weaker than he clearly was:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 700 Tournament, 150/300 Blinds 40 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG (t27812)
UTG+1 (t15042)
MP1 (t22581)
MP2 (t23368)
MP3 (t11516)
CO (t83612)
Button (t21029)
SB (t56371)
Hero (BB) (t10755)

Hero’s M: 13.28

Preflop: Hero is BB with Q, 10
2 folds, MP1 bets t750, 5 folds, Hero calls t450

Flop: (t2010) 4, J, A (2 players)
Hero checks, MP1 checks

Turn: (t2010) 9 (2 players)
Hero bets t1555, MP1 raises to t3900, Hero calls t2345

River: (t9810) 4 (2 players)
Hero bets t6065 (All-In), MP1 calls t6065

Total pot: t21940

Results:
Hero had Q, 10 (one pair, fours).
MP1 had J, J (full house, Jacks over fours).
Outcome: MP1 won t21940

I got off to a good start in the $500 2nd Chance but then lost a good-sized pot on a resteal gone wrong. Villain was a really aggressive 3-better, but I still think this is bad:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 530 Tournament, 100/200 Blinds 25 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

CO (t6800)
Button (t33153)
SB (t12535)
BB (t16855)
Hero (UTG) (t15808)
UTG+1 (t10215)
MP1 (t8177)
MP2 (t9682)
MP3 (t3214)

Hero’s M: 30.11

Preflop: Hero is UTG with A, 10
Hero bets t400, 1 fold, MP1 raises to t825, 6 folds, Hero calls t425

Flop: (t2175) 8, 9, 5 (2 players)
Hero checks, MP1 bets t1239, Hero raises to t14958 (All-In), MP1 calls t6088 (All-In)

Turn: (t16829) 9 (2 players, 2 all-in)

River: (t16829) 7 (2 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: t16829

Results:
Hero had A, 10 (one pair, nines).
MP1 had 10, 10 (two pair, tens and nines).
Outcome: MP1 won t16829

That left me down but not out, and I rallied. I wrote at length in my recent WSOP report about how my own mistakes can be my biggest source of tilt, but I think I did a good job of collecting myself and choosing some good spots to accumulate without showdown like a true short stack ninja:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 530 Tournament, 100/200 Blinds 25 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG (t6675)
UTG+1 (t33028)
MP1 (t12310)
MP2 (t16430)
Hero (MP3) (t6651)
CO (t11073)
Button (t16429)
SB (t10754)
BB (t3089)

Hero’s M: 12.67

Preflop: Hero is MP3 with J, 8
4 folds, Hero bets t400, 1 fold, Button raises to t815, 2 folds, Hero raises to t6626 (All-In), 1 fold

Total pot: t2155

Results:
Hero didn’t show J, 8.
Outcome: Hero won t2155

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 530 Tournament, 125/250 Blinds 30 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

MP3 (t9019)
CO (t31643)
Button (t12715)
SB (t18560)
Hero (BB) (t6951)
UTG (t7440)
UTG+1 (t19967)
MP1 (t10759)
MP2 (t19561)

Hero’s M: 10.78

Preflop: Hero is BB with 2, Q
1 fold, UTG+1 bets t530, 3 folds, CO calls t530, 2 folds, Hero calls t280

Flop: (t1985) 9, 7, 7 (3 players)
Hero checks, UTG+1 checks, CO bets t950, Hero raises to t6391 (All-In), 2 folds

Total pot: t3885

Results:
Hero didn’t show 2, Q.
Outcome: Hero won t3885

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 530 Tournament, 125/250 Blinds 30 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

MP1 (t8959)
MP2 (t30748)
MP3 (t12655)
CO (t18375)
Hero (Button) (t9171)
SB (t7130)
BB (t19377)
UTG (t18699)
UTG+1 (t19501)

Hero’s M: 14.22

Preflop: Hero is Button with 7, 7
UTG bets t500, 5 folds, Hero calls t500, 2 folds

Flop: (t1645) J, Q, 8 (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets t666, UTG calls t666

Turn: (t2977) 3 (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets t1666, UTG calls t1666

River: (t6309) A (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets t6309 (All-In), 1 fold

Total pot: t6309

Results:
Hero didn’t show 7, 7 (nothing).
Outcome: Hero won t6309

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 530 Tournament, 125/250 Blinds 30 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

MP3 (t7925)
CO (t30808)
Button (t12070)
SB (t19009)
Hero (BB) (t13728)
UTG (t6795)
UTG+1 (t19437)
MP1 (t7282)
MP2 (t19561)

Hero’s M: 21.28

Preflop: Hero is BB with 3, 6
2 folds, MP1 bets t500, 4 folds, SB calls t375, Hero calls t250

Flop: (t1770) 5, 2, 10 (3 players)
SB checks, Hero checks, MP1 checks

Turn: (t1770) 3 (3 players)
SB bets t750, Hero raises to t2666, 2 folds

Total pot: t3270

Results:
Hero didn’t show 3, 6.
Outcome: Hero won t3270

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 530 Tournament, 150/300 Blinds 40 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG+1 (t7730)
MP1 (t49352)
MP2 (t12645)
MP3 (t29761)
Hero (CO) (t14623)
Button (t16702)
SB (t25432)
BB (t1777)
UTG (t23656)

Hero’s M: 18.05

Preflop: Hero is CO with K, 8
5 folds, Hero bets t600, 1 fold, SB raises to t1475, 1 fold, Hero raises to t2888, 1 fold

Total pot: t3610

Results:
Hero didn’t show K, 8.
Outcome: Hero won t3610

These next three are all against the same player in the span of less than two orbits:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 530 Tournament, 200/400 Blinds 50 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

BB (t8890)
UTG (t75936)
UTG+1 (t13768)
MP1 (t38577)
Hero (MP2) (t12444)
MP3 (t16972)
CO (t16631)
Button (t5555)
SB (t17806)

Hero’s M: 11.85

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with A, J
2 folds, MP1 bets t800, Hero raises to t1888, 6 folds

Total pot: t2650

Results:
Hero didn’t show A, J.
Outcome: Hero won t2650

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 530 Tournament, 200/400 Blinds 50 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

MP2 (t9090)
MP3 (t75086)
CO (t12918)
Button (t36927)
Hero (SB) (t13644)
BB (t17772)
UTG (t17431)
UTG+1 (t5305)
MP1 (t18406)

Hero’s M: 12.99

Preflop: Hero is SB with 7, A
6 folds, Button bets t800, Hero raises to t1888, 2 folds

Total pot: t2450

Results:
Hero didn’t show 7, A.
Outcome: Hero won t2450

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 530 Tournament, 200/400 Blinds 50 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG+1 (t8990)
MP1 (t74986)
MP2 (t12818)
MP3 (t36027)
Hero (CO) (t14394)
Button (t19322)
SB (t16531)
BB (t5205)
UTG (t18306)

Hero’s M: 13.71

Preflop: Hero is CO with 3, A
4 folds, MP3 bets t800, Hero raises to t1888, 4 folds

Total pot: t2650

Results:
Hero didn’t show 3, A.
Outcome: Hero won t2650

Lest you think I’m being results oriented, I got it in bad here and lost but with my image I still think it was a good call:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 530 Tournament, 200/400 Blinds 50 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG (t8940)
UTG+1 (t74936)
MP1 (t12768)
MP2 (t35177)
Hero (MP3) (t16194)
CO (t19272)
Button (t16281)
SB (t4755)
BB (t18256)

Hero’s M: 15.42

Preflop: Hero is MP3 with 4, A
4 folds, Hero bets t800, 2 folds, SB raises to t4705 (All-In), 1 fold, Hero calls t3905

Flop: (t10260) 8, Q, 9 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Turn: (t10260) 10 (2 players, 1 all-in)

River: (t10260) Q (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: t10260

Results:
SB had 5, 5 (two pair, Queens and fives).
Hero had 4, A (one pair, Queens).
Outcome: SB won t10260

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 530 Tournament, 200/400 Blinds 50 Ante (8 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

CO (t86126)
Button (t11918)
SB (t34527)
Hero (BB) (t10439)
UTG (t20872)
UTG+1 (t16031)
MP1 (t9260)
MP2 (t17406)

Hero’s M: 10.44

Preflop: Hero is BB with 10, Q
6 folds, SB bets t880, Hero calls t480

Flop: (t2160) 5, J, 9 (2 players)
SB bets t1036, Hero calls t1036

Turn: (t4232) 7 (2 players)
SB checks, Hero checks

River: (t4232) K (2 players)
SB bets t2962, Hero raises to t8473 (All-In), 1 fold

Total pot: t10156

Results:
Hero didn’t show 10, Q (nothing).
Outcome: Hero won t10156

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 530 Tournament, 250/500 Blinds 60 Ante (8 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG (t20814)
UTG+1 (t73664)
MP1 (t11558)
MP2 (t31579)
Hero (CO) (t17797)
Button (t21342)
SB (t11921)
BB (t26786)

Hero’s M: 14.47

Preflop: Hero is CO with Q, Q
4 folds, Hero bets t1000, Button calls t1000, 2 folds

Flop: (t3230) 3, 2, J (2 players)
Hero bets t1600, Button calls t1600

Turn: (t6430) Q (2 players)
Hero checks, Button bets t3500, Hero raises to t15137 (All-In), Button calls t11637

River: (t36704) 4 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: t36704

Results:
Button had J, 10 (flush, Queen high).
Hero had Q, Q (three of a kind, Queens).
Outcome: Button won t36704

D’oh.

Click here to read my full review!

My friend, whom I’ll call Victor, works in venture capital, but he’s a pretty decent poker player. He’s been beating $5/$10 NLHE live games for years now and just crushed again this summer. So he’s not, generally speaking, a fish. A few years ago, though, he was playing a $50/$100 game during the WSOP, and he admits that in retrospect he was the fish in that game and was in fact the only reason it was running.

Despite that, he was up a few thousand dollars when his wife showed up to see how he was doing. Victor’s wife has, possibly by design, never grasped how exactly poker works. When he wins, she looks at it as free money, without considering past and future losses. So she comes over to ask how he’s doing, and he tells her he’s up five or six thousand dollars. She gets that look in her eye. “Great! There’s a purse I was looking at that costs $4000….”

Now the whole table is watching and listening to this interaction, and Victor tells me that while he is thinking about how to negotiate this with the wife (how much for a purse? is this going to be an anniversary present?), he also notices everyone else in the game exchanging looks. One of the regulars volunteers, “It’s OK, you can take money off of your stack if you need to.”

At the time, he said, he was so embarrassed about how much his wife was spending on a purse that he didn’t appreciate what was going on with the other players. Now, though, he realizes that they realized that if they didn’t let him take money off of the table, he was going to quit and the game would break. Their look was an unspoken acknowledgement of the situation and agreement to let him pick up the money.

In addition to being an amusing story, I think this contains at least two lessons for those who play poker for substantial money:

1. Your significant other needs to understand the basics so that s/he won’t be unduly excited or alarmed about the sums of money involved.

2. Even if they aren’t as good as you are at poker, the fish aren’t stupid. Nobody wants to feel like a mark, so if you want to keep playing poker with someone, don’t treat him that way.

Zandvoort Aan Zee

A short train ride from Amsterdam brought us to Zandvoort aan Zee, Richard’s hometown. As the closest seaside to the city, it is known colloquially as Amsterdam Beach. Apologies: though Zandvoort was beautiful, I somehow managed to take not a single photo there. Richard was too entertaining.

Though a booming resort in the summer months, Zaandvoort boasts a year-round population of less than 20,000, and Richard seemed to know all of them. He routinely waved, nodded, or paused to chat with people of all ages as he paraded us proudly through the little town.

“We are coming up now on downtown,” he explained, “so don’t blink.” Sure enough, the downtown consisted of less than two blocks of quaint little shops and cafes. Beyond that was a large bar and restaurant whose owner greeted Richard with a backslapping hug.

“This is the bar where I got started playing poker,” he told us. “There used to be like thirty of us who would come here and play on Friday nights.” He described the owner as a second father to him, a man with whom he and his friends still vacation annually.

It was too early for alcohol, so we walked down to the beach and took seats on a comfortable sofa on the outside of a huge cafe. Between the terrace and the cavernous indoors, the cafe could probably accommodate two hundred, but today we were the only customers. The waiter was nowhere to be found, so Richard went inside to order our coffees. “It’s a little sleepy in the off-season,” he apologized.

After our coffee, we walked to his girlfriend’s house, where we borrowed her parents’ minivan so that she could drive us to Richard’s house. Sadly we spoke no Dutch and she didn’t seem too confident in English, so she more or less played the role of chauffeur and we didn’t get to know her very well, though she seemed nice.

It was easy to see that Richard enjoyed small-town living and had no plans of leaving. As he showed us around his house, he explained his plans to buy the ground floor (currently he owned only the top half) when his elderly neighbor passed away. When we came to a largely empty room currently used only for storage, he told us it would be for a baby someday.

It was also easy to see why. He had a large house in a quaint and quiet neighborhood. When the weather was nice, he could spend whole days at the beach and be assured of running into friends wherever he sat. He knew everyone and seemed to have dozens of the sort of close relationships that come only from having known someone for his entire life. If he ever got bored, all the culture and amenities of a major European capital were just a quick train ride away.

In short, Richard’s deep roots in Zandvoort were a stark contrast to Emily and my own nomadic life. After 18 years in the Baltimore area, I lived for 4 years in Chicago, 5 years in Boston, and now for the last 3 I’ve been without a permanent home at all. Part of me envied him his routines, his many convenient friends, and his sense of place.

Then again, there are clear advantages to our lifestyle as well. While I may not be able to walk around the corner to a bar and expect to find a friend there, I’m lucky enough to have friends scattered around the world. I’ve got a couch to crash on in Paris, Madrid, Hannover, Baltimore, Boston, Madison, Boise, Dartmouth, and probably a few other places I’ve forgotten. On this trip alone I have met or will meet other friends in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, London, and Switzerland. There are others I’m eager to meet in San Francisco, Portugal, Hungary, Thailand, Malaysia, and Malawi. Sometimes it’s frustrating that my closest friends are so spread out, but it has its advantages as well.

Volendam

Case in point: after a walking tour of Zandvoort, Richard and his girlfriend were eager to show us more of their country. They drove us to Volendam, a picturesque old fishing village that’s very popular with tourists, and then took us to dinner in Haarlem, which is sort of like a quainter version of Amsterdam.

Volendam was pretty but, as I mentioned, more than a little touristy. We played our part, taking some iconic pictures of tiny Dutch houses and antiquated fishing vessels, but Richard was egging us on. “Look guys there is lots of good shopping here,” he said, pointing at each store as we passed it. “Clogs, tulips, windmills, clogs, tulips, windmills, clogs, tulips, pancakes, clogs.” I rebuffed his attempts to get me to purchase a photograph of myself dressed in traditional Dutch clothing – there were at least half a dozen opportunities to do so – but did consent to a picture with an oversized plastic crab.

His girlfriend was appalled that we’d not yet tried kibbeling, a traditional Dutch snack of fried cod. I bought some for both of us, and while it tasted good, it didn’t seem terribly different from the freshly fried fish widely available in New England.

We walked through the little downtown and out along a dyke as Richard explained how exactly the dykes worked and just how integral they were to the very existence of the Netherlands. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say that the Dutch are masters of maritime engineering and have managed to bend the water to their will in some pretty impressive ways.

Haarlem

Our beautiful afternoon gave way to rain just as we got back to the car, which was convenient for the rest of us but a shame for Richard’s girlfriend, who had to battle both the elements and rush hour traffic to get us to Haarlem. After a drink and some croquettes (Richard was appalled that I’d first tried them in Madrid and insisted that Dutch ones would be better, though I tasted no difference whatsoever) in a beer hall and a sushi dinner which Richard insisted on buying, we had a few minutes to walk around Haarlem. It was dark, so we didn’t see too much, but the city’s main church was lit up magnificently:

Emily and I were already planning to be in Amsterdam for the entirety of the SCOOP because of the sweet apartment we were able to rent, but we also wanted to be there for Queen’s Day, which is basically a huge citywide party in honor of the Queen. So we found a (relatively) reasonably priced hotel on the outskirts of town where we could stay for a few days.

Queen’s Night

In recent years, the night before Queen’s Day has become quite an event in itself. Since everyone has off the next day anyway, they start the party early. There are stages all over the city with free concerts, vendors selling beer and greasy food, even games and rides – it’s a real carnival atmosphere. The main squares are slammed with drunk and stoned (this is Amsterdam, after all) adults of all ages, and boats full of revelers cruise the canals.

Earlier that day, we’d purchased a special Queen’s Day transit pass that was supposed to be good all day, starting at midnight. Thinking ourselves clever, we stayed out until midnight so that our ride home would be free. Turns out most of the trams stop running at midnight, and those that still were in operation were extremely delayed because of all the people in the streets getting in their way. We waited forever and finally caught a train only to have it inexplicably kick all its passengers off several stops down the line.

Now more lost than ever, we and a few hundred of our closest friends tried to figure out where we were and how we’d get home. A few police officers stood around being unhelpful. Finally a bus pulled up that stopped about a mile from our hotel, which seemed like the best we were going to do. Suddenly one of those police officers was in a great hurry to insist that our pass was not good on that bus, because it was operated by a different department than the city transit. Pwned.

Queen’s Day

We were lucky to get unseasonably nice weather for Queen’s Day. It was mostly warm enough to walk around without a jacket, and the sun shone virtually all day. That’s a rarity for Amsterdam, especially in the spring.

In honor of the Dutch royal family, who descend from William of Orange, orange is everywhere on Queen’s Day. Everyone wears orange, all the streets are decorated with orange, vendors sell orange trinkets, etc.

Queen’s Day is very Dutch in that it is all about entrepreneurship and laissez-faire. For one day only, anyone can set up a stand just about anywhere (people mark off the best spots with tape days in advance) and sell just about anything, from food to alcohol to old household junk.

Vondelpark, one of the city’s largest green spaces, is set aside specifically for a children’s market. Some kids just sell their old toys, but others get much more creative and sell things like musical performances and even compliments.

One of the cool things about Queen’s Day, from an American’s perspective, is that people of all ages enjoy it together. In the US, we mostly segregate adult holiday activities such as drinking from children’s holiday activities such as games and pageants. On Queen’s Day, alcohol was sold and consumed in the children’s market just as it was anywhere else (though not by children), without any “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!”-style moral outrage.

After exploring the children’s market, we hopped a tram over to the Jordaan, one of Amsterdam’s most happening neighborhoods. On the way, we spotted a pretty creative decoration:

The revelry in the Jordaan was much more heavily focused on drinking. With tens of thousands of people consuming copious amounts of beer, there was a tremendous need for toilets, and some creative solutions:

The coolest people in Amsterdam have either boats or friends with boats. Armed with beer, music, and/or weed, they cruise the city’s canals to see and be seen:

Because so many people stay out drinking late the night before, the festivities actually wind down fairly early in the day on Queen’s Day itself. The makeshift street stalls have to come down by 8PM, and most people start heading home before then:

On our way home, we came across a small neighborhood gathering that had the feel of a block party. Very few places were still selling food, but we found a pizza place there that, though out of pizza, sold us some calzones. Tweens had themselves a little dance party while their parents chugged wine:

Metric Fish

Little things like this, so trivial in your own country, can prove a major hassle (or adventure, if you want to be good-natured about it) in an unfamiliar place. We carried the clothes from Prague to Berlin, where there was a post office just across the street from the apartment we’d rented for the week in Prenzlauer Berg. I assumed we could buy boxes there, if perhaps at a premium price.

As it happened, they didn’t have any large enough for our needs. I checked a paper goods store across the street – no luck. Went home, googled it, and, through the magic of internet, found that someone else had already asked exactly my question. The answer was “any home goods store”. There was one a few blocks from the apartment, so I walked up there… and they had no shipping materials of any kind.

I again returned home dejected and started asking the Germans I knew where they would go to find a box. They were all surprised that the post office didn’t have it. I specified that it needed to be at least 320 x 320 x 640. One of my friends asked, “320 what? Millimeters?”

“Centimeters,” I wrote back.

“Andrew that is the size of a small room. You could pack up your clothes and then climb into that box and ship yourselves to the wedding.”

OK, so I’m a metric fish. They didn’t have a box to accommodate me in millimeters, either, though, so my search hadn’t been needless, even if I still hadn’t found what I was looking for.

We had to leave our apartment the next day, so I took our recycling out to the specially designated dumpster in the courtyard of the building. There, sitting on the top of the paper container, was a perfectly sized and perfectly preserved cardboard box from Amazon. I grabbed it eagerly, and sure enough it was just what we needed! Unfortunately it was now too late and the post office was closed, so I was going to have to take the package over the next morning before we moved out.

Wie Bitte?

We generally got around with no difficulty relying on our limited German and the English that is widely spoken in Berlin. The post officewas a different story, though. The employees were all disgruntled middle-aged bureaucrats who either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak English. I learned a fair bit of German in the last two months in preparation for this trip, but not nearly enough to manage a transaction like this with words alone.

Especially for someone like me, who prides himself on his verbal acuity in his native language, being unable to communicate with words is an unsettling, humbling, and uncomfortable experience. It’s something I have to actively push myself to overcome, because if I gave in to my nervousness, I’d find myself taking my meals at McDonald’s and Starbucks and experiencing new places from the confines of a tour bus.

So I swallowed my pride and marched into the post office. The woman at the next available station said something in German. “Guten Morgen,” I greeted her, laying my items on the counter. She said something else in German.

“Wie bitte?” I answered. That means something like “Pardon” or “Come again.” A fancy way of asking someone to repeat herself, it’s unideal for my purposes because it both suggests I speak more German than I do and fails to get at the root of the problem, which is that no matter how many times she repeats herself or how clearly she speaks, I’m simply not going to know what her words mean.

She repeated whatever she said. I gave her a blank, helpless stare, and resisted the urge to run. She was not amused, but I stood my ground. She didn’t have to like it – I had after all come to her country without speaking her language and was now inconveniencing her with my ignorance – but the simple fact of the matter was that I needed to mail this package and I didn’t speak German. Like it or not, we were going to have to figure out a way to do this.

With a sigh, she pointed to a scale. Now we were getting somewhere. I lifted the awkwardly large box and maneuvered it towards the scale. As I did so, I knocked over a container of brochures that was sitting on the counter. It fell, scattering its glossy contents all over the floor behind her. She glowered malevolently at me over the rims of her glasses, which rode low on her nose. “Entschuldigung,” I muttered sheepishly, my face burning with embarassment. Sorry.

I placed the box on the scale as she retrieved the brochures. “Normal oder blahblahblah” I heard.

“Normal, bitte,” I answered eagerly, glad to finally understand a question well enough to answer it in German. I didn’t need express service or anything like that, so I was pretty sure “Normal” would do it for me.

At an American post office, you get a lot of follow-up questions. Do you want delivery confirmation? Insurance? Anything hazardous in the box? I don’t know if they don’t do that in Germany, or if she just recognized the futility of asking me, but the next thing she said was the cost. I paid using exact change, to show her that I understood the number, but it didn’t seem to endear me to her any.

Game Theory Without Borders

No matter. The box was out of my hands and on its way to Diez. I embarrassed myself and made an enemy, but the world didn’t come to an end. Ultimately, I did what I needed to do, no one got hurt, and nothing bad happened. I’ll never see that woman again, and not having to lug those clothes back and forth across the continent was well worth a few minutes of social awkwardness.

It was also a good confidence builder for future cross-cultural interactions. Not everyone is eager to communicate with grunts and pantomiming, but ultimately most will once you make clear that there’s no other option.

It’s basic game theory, really. In a game of chicken, where two people drive towards each other at high speeds and the first one to veer away from a collision loses, the optimal play is to remove your steering wheel and let your opponent see you throw it out of the window. Once he knows that you couldn’t turn your car even if you wanted to, he’s got no choice but to turn his (assuming he prioritizes surviving over winning).

Once you make clear that there’s really no alternative to a slightly awkward and embarrassing game of charades, most people will play along even if they don’t like it. Some even end up having fun with it. Those people get tips. So please take note, European service employees: there are some benefits to dealing with American tourists.

The farm itself was pretty cool. Kyrus got to collect real hen’s eggs (though aggressive older New York children blatantly ignoring the four-per-child rule looted all the spoils pretty quickly) and walk around the hen house with hundreds of chickens clucking and fluttering around him. At first he was nervous and I was holding his hand, but eventually he got emboldened and wanted to walk around himself. All was fine until one of the hens pecked at his leg, and then he started wailing and we had to whisk him away.

“No you’re not, you’re not playing the game right.”

“Yuh-huh, I’m gonna win $100. Look how many words I found.”

“You’re not following the rules. You’re only supposed to scratch off your letters.”

“Look how many words. I’m gonna win $20,000!”

“You can’t win $20,000, you’re 11 years old.”

“I’m ’bout to win $20,000!”

“No, you’re not. Those cards were already scratched off, that’s why someone left them behind.”

This finally quieted the boy for a moment. Then he looked up at his teacher and told her, “Yo, you bad luck!”

__________________________________________

While playing at the Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races, I watched a regular with a set get all-in against a flush draw and lose on the river. “You always do this shit to me!” he shouted at the dealer, in such an exaggeratedly angry way that I assumed he must know her and be joking around with her, because how could you actually be that angry at the dealer?

It quickly became clear, from the way the other regulars reacted, that this clown was serious. They tried telling him to call down, but he kept on. “No, you guys don’t see it all. It’s just her, and she’s been doing it to me for months. Stay away from me!” he told the dealer.

Finally an old Chinese man sitting to his right chimed in. “What you yell at her for? She don’t shuffle the card, the machine shuffle the card. She don’t do nothing to you.” You know you have a problem when an old Chinese gambler tells you you’re too superstitious.

While I’m amending recent blog posts, I also have to admit to backsliding on my “don’t judge assholes” philosophy. I split a cab with fellow PokerStars Team Online member Andre Coimbra, whose flight was half an hour before mine, so I got to the airport plenty early. That was good, because the customs line was massive and there were only two agents working it. People all around me were just losing their minds with frustration.

When I got to the front of the line after nearly an hour of waiting, I heard someone say “Next!” I looked around but didn’t see an open station. I did see someone stepping up to one of the stations for non-US citizens, so I assumed that was what I heard and went back to waiting. Someone behind me shouted, not gently, “Over there!” I looked around again, saw the open station, and started walking towards it. As I did, someone else shouted, “Get over there, kid!”

My first instinct was to get flustered. I had, after all, made a mistake that slowed the line down by several seconds. But I forced myself to take a deep breath and calm down. I didn’t stop walking, but I did turn my head and slowly scan the line behind me until I saw the person who’d shouted. I could tell it was him because he was still red in the face and waving his arms at me. You could tell he was the sort of guy who shouts at strangers in the airport. I met his eye for a minute, smiled broadly at him, and then went about my business. I know it would have been better to ignore him, but I must admit it felt good to needle him.

Speaking of which the customs agent gave me the needle when I finally found him. Our conversation went something like this:

“Traveling by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“What were you doing down here by yourself?”

“Playing poker at the Atlantis.”

“What place did you finish?”

“Nothing good enough to remember.”

“How much cash do you have with you?”

“About five thousand dollars.”

“How much cash did you come down here with?”

“About eight thousand dollars.”

“So you lost?”

“Thanks for rubbing it in.”

“Go ahead.”

So kind of an unpleasant start to my day, though I had a nice chat with Andre in the cab and he gave me one of the (very expensive) pictures he bought from one of our PSTO dinners. Also I’m playing peek-a-boo with a little girl a few rows down from me in the terminal and I’m returning from what was all in all a great week in the Bahamas, so it’s all good.

Anti-Ballin’: I’m bringing a small pantry with me, because it kills me to pay $20 for a sandwich.

So wish me luck, and please be patient if the blog and Twitter feed are quiet. Historically the internet at Atlantis has been atrocious and expensive, so while I’ve pre-written a couple of posts, I may or may not be blogging from the Bahamas.

Last night I was there for the second time in two days. My girlfriend has been cramming for the GRE and just had her bike stolen, so I wanted to get her a treat. At the bakery counter, they sell these mini chocolate mousse cakes that she likes.

The couple ahead of me in line were in their late 60’s. They looked lifelong outdoors people, he with scraggly beard, she with close-cropped hair and weather-worn face, both rail-thin.

There were two mousse cakes left in the display case. The woman behind the counter handed one to the old couple. “We need two, please,” the man corrected her. The last two.

The woman took out the other cake, inspected it for a moment, and then showed him a small blemish. Perhaps 0.5% of the icing had fallen off. “It’s a little broken, do you still want it?”

“We get a reduced price, right?” the man asked aggressively, leaning over the counter.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“It should be a reduced price, if it’s damaged.”

“I’m sorry, we don’t do that. We donate imperfect items to the food kitchen, we don’t ever sell them at a discount.”

“That’s not right,” the man insisted.

At this point I was strongly tempted to jump in and offer to buy the cake at full price. I don’t think that in principle there would be anything wrong with doing so.

The thing is, if I’m honest with myself, securing the cake for my girlfriend would not have been my true primary motivation. They sell other things she likes. The guy was being a nit, and I wanted to call him out on it, embarrass him.

Chastened, I held my tongue. The employee resolved the whole situation with an offer to get more cakes from the back. “That sounds good. It’s my birthday!” the man declared with childish delight. The woman disappeared for a moment and returned with a whole tray of cakes. “How much for the whole tray?” the man joked. He was starting to grow on me.

Meanwhile a second employee came over to ask what I wanted. “One to of those, too, actually,” I told her, pointing to the tray of cakes.

“You’re going to buy a whole tray too?” the man asked me jovially.

“They are so good!” his wife chimed in with an endearing, grandmotherly smile.

“Yes, but I think my girlfriend would kill me I brought home a whole tray.” She laughed earnestly. These were turning out to be very nice people, maybe on a fixed income but eager to celebrate a birthday. I was glad I hadn’t been rude to them.

On my way to the cash register, I dropped my cake. It was inside of a plastic container, so it wasn’t ruined- the icing just got a little smashed against the lid of the container. They probably would have given me a different one if I’d asked, but that didn’t seem like an option. It would taste the same in the end anyway.

The police recovered Emily’s bike. The thieves had actually stolen our landlord’s entire bike rack (it wasn’t bolted down) with two bikes still locked to it, but for unknown reasons perhaps owing to the logistical difficulties of transporting a large steel bike rack with two attached bikes had discarded in the bushes of a neighbor’s property barely a block away.

From there we took a subway to Tribunal for some botellon, the fine Spanish tradition of outdoor, public drinking. I’ve never been a big fan of bars, since I’m mostly going to talk to the people I’m going with and could do that more easily and cheaply with drinks at home, but there is something to be said for the atmosphere and for being among people. Botellon is the perfect combination: you’re outside with plenty of other people milling around, but you’re drinking your own alcohol rather than buying it at inflated prices!

The only catch is that while it’s largely ignored by the police, it’s technically illegal. After sitting cross-legged on the ground of the plaza for half an hour or so, drinking cans of beer we bought from roving Chinese merchants with six-packs, Nico suggested that we ought to move along. The police had shown up and did actually seem to be ticketing people.

We sauntered into a club he knew to have live music from time to time, but we didn’t stay too long because there was no band this night. After trying several times to explain to the bartender what a vodka martini was, I settled for a rum and coke. When that was finished, we went back outside to drink in the narrow street just outside the bar. In less than a minute, a Chinese merchant found us and we had beers in hand.

Roughly two hundred people, almost all younger than I, filled the street, retreating to the sidewalks only when the occasional, stubborn motorist slowly forced his way through the mass. Some of those motorists were police, but none showed any interest in the hundreds of open beer cans or the smell of marijuana that occasionally wafted by. The beer merchants were omnipresent when you wanted them but never pushy when you didn’t- they’d walk by saying, “Cerveza, cerveza!” but always in a way that made clear they were doing a brisk business with or without you.

A sudden shriek and splash of water interrupted our revelry. An old woman in a nightgown was out on her terrace four stories above us, dumping water in the general direction of the open-air fiesta. It wasn’t hard to sympathize with her: it was 3AM, the noise from the crowd was surely intruding into her apartment in a serious way, and it was clear that the street would be a mess in the morning.

Still, her aerial assault proved counterproductive. Everyone thought it was hilarious and began cheering and egging her on, some even offering themselves as targets. Amazingly, the old woman seemed to get into the spirit of things and started waving and blowing kisses jovially in between sorties. I thought I was in a safe spot but she very nearly got me, as it turned out that she also had access to the window adjacent to her terrace.

Even after she stopped throwing water she stayed up there for a remarkably long time. She’d been out there for probably two hours and was still going strong when Nico and I decided to call it a night.

We slept late into the morning, and then I packed and made ready for my departure before we went for lunch. Mediterranean food is wonderfully suited to my palette, but after two weeks of it I was hankering for something different. A quick internet search revealed that Madrid is one of the worst major cities for ethnic food of any kind. Apparently Spanish people traditionally prefer very simple preparations and tend to suspect that spice and sauces conceal subprime meat.

Nevertheless, my research turned up a small neighborhood called Lavapies that was rumored to have some good Indian places. It proved to be a fascinating couple blocks with not just Indian restaurants but Indian grocery stores and even a Bollywood movie rental shop. It didn’t seem to be a particularly Indian neighborhood, though. The vast majority of people strolling the street were white, and occasionally an African would offer to sell us hashish, but the only Indian people I saw were working at the restaurants.

All of the outdoor seating was packed, and the staff generally seemed more concerned about finding room for more new customers than attending to those already sitting. The food, when it finally arrived, was excellent and quite cheap, so it was all good in the end.

So after one last delicious meal it was off to the airport. Nico brought the infamous trance CD for the drive, and we talked about when we might see each other again. He’s planning a trip to to the States next summer, but EPT Madrid comes first, and having a place to stay drastically reduces the cost of playing, so maybe I’ll get to Spain once more. I feel like I’m getting to know Madrid reasonably well, even corrected Nico on something today, though I’ve spent less than two weeks there in total.

Likewise, I feel like I know Nico a lot better than the three weeks or so we’ve spent together in the last few months would suggest. We get along very naturally, and it’s always been easy and fun to spend time together, even in the large quantities of the last two weeks. “See you soon,” he said as I walked into the terminal, adding, “Somewhere.”

Our journey began at the tobacco shop, where naturally my continental companion needed to stock up on rolling papers, tobacco, and filters. Then we were on the road, zooming past revelers preparing to celebrate Fiesta Virgen del Pilar. The land surrounding Madrid is dry and brown, scorched by an eternal sun burning through a cloudless sky. Occasionally a crumbling stone cathedral set into the countryside would break up the monotony, but overall it was a dreary landscape, and I told Nico as much. He assured me it would get better.

It did. The brown hills turned green as we pressed northward. Mountains rose up out of the arid brush, and a dense fog clung to the horizon. We were in Basque Country.

We stopped in Bilbao to see Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum and drank cervezas on an expansive patio. A river ran through the city, and the view from the numerous ornate bridges that spanned it would have been even more impressive without the close-hanging fog.

A short drive brought us to San Sebastian, our stopping place for the night. At an internet cafe we compared last-minute hotel discounts and found a 250 euro room going for 79 euros. After settling in, we found a place to eat dinner that looked to be a relatively straight-forward, 15-minute walk from the hotel. We promptly got lost and ended up taking a cab to the very pleasant Basque pintxos restaurant.

Overwhelmed by the task of selecting 4-6 small plates in a foreign language, I chose a grilled monkfish with a fried langostino as my only concession to local custom. I first ordered agua, but after hearing Nico request a cerveza, I told the waiter, “Dos cervesas” and he chuckled and nodded. Me, I was just proud to have figured that much from their Spanish conversation. The food was very good, and we passed a pleasant evening out on the terrace with a second round of cervesas.

We found our way back to the hotel without difficulty and agreed to leave at 9AM, as we had a long day of driving ahead of us. I’m glad we visited Bilbao and San Sebastian, but it meant that we’d covered only about four of the twelve hours of driving that lay between Madrid and Cannes.

I woke and was surprised to see that it was 10AM. “Nico,” I said. A grunt from his bed indicated some level of awakeness. “It’s 10:00.”

He grunted again. “I guess we can’t leave at 9 then.”

“It would be difficult.”

“Unless we leave at 9PM,” he muttered and rolled over. I showered, and he was up by the time I got out, but we still didn’t get on the road until after 11.

The first few hours passed slowly. A heavy fog still obscured what might otherwise have been a beautiful view, and I was tired and hungry. In less than an hour, we passed into France and noticed an immediate improvement in the quality of the roads. I soon learned that France assesses steep tolls for use of its highways, but you could at least see where the money was going. We encountered neither a crack nor a pothole our entire time in the country.

The weather improved, and after lunch at a roadside cafeteria, we lingered on a sunny hillside inventing games to play with acorns. Nico is a former member of the Spanish national ski team and twelve times the athlete I am, but I proved more adept at both acorn baseball and a game where you toss one acorn into the air and then attempt to throw another acorn to hit it in mid-air before it falls.

It was another two hours or so before I saw the sign: “Carcossone”. Perhaps you’ve heard of the famous board game, in which players vie for control of a medieval city. I told Nico that is a favorite of my girlfriend and me, and he asked if I wanted to stop.

“I suppose it would be cool to take a picture,” I said, and so we exited and followed signs for Carcossone. The road narrowed and passed some old-looking buildings. “I guess this is it? Maybe we can walk in a little further?”

We parked and set off on foot through the narrow, one-lane streets. “It’s old, but it’s not medieval,” Nico said.

“I don’t know. It seems like this is all there is to it.”

“I think that if leave now and later we google ‘Carcossone’, we are going to see something we are not seeing right now,” he argued We agreed to check at the office of tourism, and sure enough that was an entirely separate Old City on the other side of a bridge.

When we first caught sight of it, we could not have felt more foolish. Towers and ramparts stretched for hundreds of feet across the top of a broad hill. It was a magnificent sight. We followed a road that traced the outside edge of the fortified walls, finally choosing a parking spot near the main entrance.

Nico spotted an aperture in the wall, and sure enough it led to a steep flight of crumbling stone stairs. When we reached the top, we were up near the battlements. We looked out at the countryside through narrow slits that once would have enabled archers to fire from a covered position on an attacking army.

A second, higher wall still stood between us and the Old City, but we wandered the ramparts for a while before going in. Though beautiful, the interior was a little more disappointing because it was full of tourist shops, restaurants, and hotels. The streets were still stone and the buildings mostly looked original, which was impressive, but they now sold postcards and plastic swords. We were too late to enter the castle proper, but we got some fine views of it from elsewhere inside of the walled city.

As made our way to the exit, the sun was setting, casting rich light upon the fortifications and intricate shadows on the ground. Back in the car, Nico took out a CD called “Trancenation” that he told me he’d been saving for dark. “It’s really good music to just get into a zone and drive,” he promised as he prepared his next few hours’ worth of cigarettes.

“Roll me one of those?” I asked. I don’t smoke, but I figured that if I’m going to drive through the French countryside in a Volkswagon listening to techno music I might as well smoke a hand-rolled cigarette while I’m at it. Nico turned up the music until the baseline hummed in the back of our necks, and we exhaled out of the open windows with wind whipping through our hair.

The sun set and sky grew darker. Neither of us had said anything for half an hour, each in a trance of his own. I thought of a college road trip in California and then further back to my first-year roommate, a Cypriot who loved loud techno music and also rolled his own cigarettes.

We turned a corner and each of us turned toward other in unison, hands pointing straight ahead. The moon had appeared suddenly, fully formed and hanging huge and round, bright orange and perfect just above the horizon. We both grinned broadly and nodded our heads in time with each other and the music, the perfection of the moment passing unspoken between us.

The next four hours flew by and we were in Cannes, greeted by palm trees and beautiful old buildings. At the small duplex we’d rented, the heavily perfumed landlady seemed convinced that we were gay, taking our insistence on figuring out how to work the fold-out sofa as mere pretense. Our place is just two blocks from the beach, and even at night the beauty of the place is evident. Pinpoints of light dotted the horizon in every direction save one, and behind us the dramatically lit facades of casinos and hotels were a glamorous sight.

After a moment of confusion, everything went smoothly at the tournament area. Jack Effel personally accompanied me to verify that my wire had been received, and as unhelpful as he and the staff were online in the preceding days, he mostly made up for it in person.

After a late-night dinner of beer and kebab, we made our way back home. The streets, now filled with fall-down drunk French youth and aggressive prostitutes, seemed somewhat less glamorous, but it was still a great evening.

They say that every cigarette you smoke takes 11 minutes off of your life. I’d gladly trade 11 minutes for another day like this one.

Edit: Supplemented the narrative with a few pictures.

I fled my homeland for this event,

matched wits with the pros and the keyboard droolers,

but fell to a series of beats and coolers.

Pay attention, friends! Don’t let those eyelids droop,

as I sing to you of my WCOOP.

On September 4th, bright and fresh,

I sat to find Liv Boeree on my left.

Immediately my equity took a dive,

without the benefits of meeting her live!

Nothing doing, quickly busted.

Have my long-dormant skills have gone rusted?

Another 6-max, another chance for Yahtzee,

Another seating draw beat, as I met with Raaszi.

He 4-bet shoved, my Queens held out,

and that was the end of de heer Veldhuis.

I ran over the table, never let up,

got down to two, and crushed it heads up.

Second table the same, got it heads up again,

but he made Kings and Queens, when I had Queens and Tens.

‘Twas was not the end of the sweat for me,

a player I backed was heads up at table 3!

But the bad beat fairy was right on track,

And he bubbled the final table Ace-King to Ace-Jack.

The $1K no limit proved a dud,

and I got no help in the triple stud.

Ante Up is loads of fun,

until you get run down by the calling station.

I cashed the Razz, whiffed the 6-max,

Got the only river I couldn’t bluff for stacks.

Five hundred no limit, ran up a stack,

lost it all to two gin cards, back to back.

In my next event, I chose to ignore

The way people play at a table of four,

bet and raised and like a klutz,

bluffed my stack into the nuts.

It’s fun trying games you don’t usually play,

a chance to run bad in whole new ways!

Not just beat but scooped, quartered and snowed!

I got Razzed and then I got PLO’ed.

Eight games sounds like so much fun,

but really it’s eight times the bad ways to run.

And lest my spirits feel too jaunty,

Lady Luck found a cruel new way to taunt me.

I staked a player who won an event-

Surely such luck was Heaven-sent!

But wait, our deal was for no-limit, all.

He won his bracelet in triple draw.

I persevered, could not be routed!

Cashed the 200 rebuy, then got 3-outed.

In 8-game my third draw did not deliver.

Undeterred I check-raise bluffed the river!

Thirteen remaining, final table in site!

Made trips in Stud, but the draw won that night.

Five hundred heads up, won the first match first hand.

Second guy barreled off, but I made my stand.

Third round was costly but plenty of fun,

’till I gave all my chips to buck21.

My heads up luck was pretty squalid.

No money there; everyone’s solid.

My 29th birthday came and went;

’twas nine long hours at the tables spent.

A five hundred rebuy and a PLO8?

Ice cream and cake will have to wait.

Ask luck for a present and what do I get?

Wrapped and delivered, ’twas set under set!

Bad luck? Bad play? All of the above,

lost two different stacks on thin value shoves.

Then the event I final tabled last year,

had him trapped ’till he turned a second pair.

Top pair and nut draw, what can you do?

Bound to lose it all when he’s got top two.

Despair not, friends, and dry your eyes.

The Main Event approaches; deliverance is nigh!

One last chance for a million dollar prize.

It’s that or my online bankroll’s demise.

Hundreds of runners, hundreds of wishes,

hundreds of sharks, hundreds of fishes.

I woke Sunday morning with the will to crush,

a great table draw, and an early rush.

Trips, a set, full house turning gin,

and suddenly I’m chipleader, four hours in!

With the weak players out, the table got tougher,

The pots got bigger, the action got rougher.

‘Twas a great time for cards but I couldn’t catch any.

Thankfully I’ve got short-stack skills a-plenty.

3-bet, shove, push chips around,

Run up a stack with no showdown.

Then my raises got 3-bet, I got no traction.

Finally picked up Aces, but this time no action.

19 big blinds, 1 hour left in the day,

30 players to go until we got paid.

Card-dead for hours it’s a beautiful thing

to finally look down at an Ace and a King.

I welcomed a flip, but there’d be no races,

my big Slick ran into a pair of Aces.

12 hours of play, was it worth all the trouble?

A fitting end to my series, to cooler and bubble.

So much misfortune, it hardly seems fair,

though I’ve got to admit, the opportunity was there.

Despite all the misery, pain, and despair,

I can’t wait to do it all again next year!

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, $4.00 BB (6 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

Button ($468.50)
SB ($584.05)
BB ($400)
Hero (UTG) ($487)
MP ($400)
CO ($420)

Preflop: Hero is UTG with 2, 2
Hero bets $16, 3 folds, SB calls $14, BB calls $12

Flop: ($48) 2, 2, 8 (3 players)
SB checks, BB checks, Hero bets $28.20, 1 fold, BB raises to $72, Hero calls $43.80

Turn: ($192) K (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $66, BB raises to $188, Hero raises to $399 (All-In), BB calls $124 (All-In)

River: ($816) 8 (2 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: $816 | Rake: $3

Results:
BB had 8, 8 (four of a kind, eights).
Hero mucked 2, 2 (four of a kind, twos).
Outcome: BB won $813

The funniest bit is that even before PokerStars rolled his hand, I knew I was beat when I saw that river.

After some thought, my opponent moved all in for 36,500. This is another spot that I’d never put myself in online, betting without a plan for what I’d do if my opponent raised. In a live game, though, I have the added option of staring him down. I stared intently at him for a good three minutes not even thinking about anything in particular but just watching him and letting him sweat for a bit and trying to see what kind of a feel I could get from him.

When I decided that he’d basted in his own perspiration for long enough, I reached towards my chips and watched again for a reaction. He blinked and turned towards me a bit. That felt weak, but it wasn’t decisive, so I just made a note of it. Never taking my eyes off of him, I confirmed with the dealer the amount I would need to call. My opponent swallowed. I counted out the appropriate number of chips but held them in my hand, starting to lean towards a call but not having made up my mind yet. He blinked again and looked uncomfortable. I pushed the chips into the pot.

I look forward every year to writing these trip reports and put a lot of work into them, so I’m very eager to hear any and all feedback. Please let me know what you think!

Excerpted from my WSOP 2006 Trip Report:

As we are taking our seats on Day 1, there is a lot of commotion, and someone saying he needs two seats. I immediately think of US Airways’ controversial policy requiring overweight passengers to purchase two seats, but it turns out the gentleman who will be sitting two seats to my right is William, a twenty-something missing one arm and almost completely unable to use the other, who plays with his feet and needs the second seat to balance himself. One at a time, he pins his cards to the table with his big toe, slides them up a little wooden ramp, and looks them. He’s adept enough with his toes to take individual chips out of a stack and then push them into the pot. He has an assistant who stacks his chips for him when he wins a pot. Apparently he made it into the money last year, and obviously he is popular with the press, so there are a couple of cameras taping him as he gets set up. Maybe I will be on TV after all!

William has busy feet and is getting involved in a lot of pots almost immediately. I wanted to feel the table out a little before getting involved, but I get dealt some solid hands and have to play them. This results in my butting heads with William a few times. He backs down pretty quickly each time, but I can feel him getting frustrated, which is all the more reason for me to get involved with him, since it means he will not be playing his best.

As it turns out, I end up winning a big pot against him with absolutely nothing. A little background: one of the first hands I played, I raised AQ from early position and Will called out of his BB. Flop was rags and gave me a flush draw. Check, check. Turn blanks, he checks, I bet like half pot, he says “I think you have AQ, but that still beats AJ” and throws it away. We play a few more pots in between, with me raising his limps a couple times, and I can feel the frustration pouring off of him. He’s also had two pot-sized river bluffs snapped off by other players.

He limps for 50 and says “I’ll try to induce a raise”. I say “I’ll oblige” and make it 200 with KQo. He thinks and calls, saying “I induced the raise, so I guess I have to call it.” Flop J77, check check. Turn J, he checks, I bet 200, he check-raises to 1000. I just can’t think of any hand he would play this way. I don’t think he has 88+, 66- is counterfeited, and if he had a boat he wouldn’t be check-raising me so hard, he clearly doesn’t want a call. So I think for like a minute and call. River is a 5, and he toes three pink chips worth 500 each and nudges them into the pot with the tip of his toenails. I think again, really hesitant to call off so much of my stack, but I just can’t put him on a hand. I’m tempted to raise him, but that would cost me even more, and I start thinking maybe K-high is good. Why would he bet an A on the river? He’s got to think he’s good but he can’t expect a worse hand to call. He must have a hand with no showdown value at all. So after like two minutes I call him and wait for him to show. He rolls T8s for a busted gutshot. When I turned my cards over and took the pot, he got pretty agitated.

It actually worked out very well for me in terms of my image at the table, because based on the comments people made when I showed down, I could determine how well they understood the game. Some people were just floored that I had put so much money in the pot with such a weak hand and couldn’t see past that. A few players seemed to understand why I played it the way I did. But everyone seemed to decide right then that they weren’t going to try to bluff me, and that would make life very easy for me over the next few hours.

I was thankful the cameras weren’t around when I won my big pot against William, because I’d rather not be the guy taking all the chips from the disabled kid who’s playing to win money for the Foundation he started to help others with disabilities. But I am not getting off that easy. The reporters come over to check in with William, and when they ask how he is doing, he says, “Don’t ask.” Then he swivels in his seat, points his naked toe at me, and says, “This is the guy who did it to me.” He’s kidding, kind of, but we both know that he is really getting me back for calling his bluff.

About a half hour into this level, he is down to just 1500 chips, and goes all in. Everyone folds to me and I look down at a pair of Jacks. I call him, and immediately the cameras come rushing over to witness his fate. My hand holds up, and I eliminate him from the tournament. He continues to rib me for the cameras, asking how it feels to crush a crippled kid’s dreams, and all I can do is laugh. He’s mostly just frustrated with himself because he knows he hasn’t played his best, and he is ultimately a good sport about it. He signs a picture for me (he has better “handwriting” with his toes than I do with my fingers), gives me a hug (which involves him awkwardly flopping his body into me- I don’t do a lot to return the hug because I’m afraid to break him), and wishes me luck.

More Classic Stories:

Little Old Lady Owns Me at 2/5 NL
The Grasshopper and the Baboon
Don’t Make Your Girlfriend Watch You Play Poker

1. I wear a green smock and make minimum wage. Do you really think they let me set or change the prices? If you think it’s expensive, go shop somewhere else. I could give a shit. A woman once came up to the counter with a two-liter bottle of generic soda, which rang up as 89 cents. She pointed out to me that it said 75 cents on the bottle. “That’s the manufacturer’s suggested retail price,” I explained.

“So you just choose to charge more than that?”

“Well, I don’t choose it, but yes, that’s what the store charges.”

“Well then I’ll go buy it at the grocery store,” she told me bitchily, leaving it on the counter.

I couldn’t help myself. “You’re going to walk across the parking lot and through the grocery store, then stand in line, to save 14 cents? I mean the gas alone…” but she was already out the door.

2. It’s not my ATM. It’s not even the 7-11’s ATM. Some bank or vending machine company or whatever pays us to keep it in the store. If you say, “It better be good, I got it from your ATM” when I check to see whether your $20 bill is counterfeit, you will be unfunny, unoriginal, and inaccurate. Seriously, like 10% of people whose bills I checked delivered some variation of that line. Most of them were trying to be witty but a few seemed offended, like I was accusing them of counterfeiting the money personally.

3. You don’t have to apologize for taking a penny from the “Give a Penny, Take a Penny” tray. You don’t have to tell me that, “I put pennies in here all the time”. I don’t give a shit. It’s fine. It’s right in the name. Also, it’s a penny. Although I did once see a guy take like twenty cents out of there so that he wouldn’t have to break a dollar. I didn’t say anything, but I judged him harshly.

4. I’m 16. Please don’t assume that I know smoker slang. If you want Marlboro’s, don’t ask for “Cowboys”. I will have no idea what you are talking about and tell you that we don’t sell that brand. (To be fair, this one might actually be my fault. Even among the teenagers who worked at the store, I was in the minority as a non-smoker, and I did actually learn the slang pretty quickly.)

5. Hold your temper. There’s really nothing of life or death importance going on at the 7-11, so just chill it back.

I once had a guy come in and ask for something like $4500 worth of money orders. We didn’t do a lot of money order business, so I was relatively new to it, but I knew the procedure. I asked my partner to cover the register while I double-counted the money. It was by far the most I’d ever seen or handled. Then I dropped it in the safe before printing the money orders.

There was a limit of $1000 per money order, so I warned him that it would need to be 5 separate orders, at $1 each, which he was fine with. I printed the first two, and then the machine told me that it was out of paper.

I was terrified to tell the guy this. After the way customers behaved when their credit cards got declined or the Slurpee machine was broken, I was literally shaking at the thought of telling this guy that I couldn’t print his money orders until the manager responded to the urgent page I sent him, nor could I return his money.

He was remarkably cool about it. He told me he’d buy a hot dog and a soda and wait. I gave them to him on the house (OK, so I can change the prices. That doesn’t mean I’m going to do it for your cheap ass). He waited patiently until the manager called me back and walked me through reloading the machine. I thanked him profusely.

If he can graciously accept the news that his $4500 is going to be in limbo for I don’t really know how long, then your fat ass can go a day without hazelnut-flavored creamer.

Mitesh and I were leaving the Parque del Buen Retiro with Nico on our first day in Madrid when a good-looking girl, about 18 years old give or take, ran up to Mitesh waving a clipboard. “One sign! One sign!,” she shouted.

Mitesh waved her off and kept walking, but she persisted, thrusting the clipboard and a pen into his chest. “Speak Engish! Please! One sign!”

Laughing, Mitesh attempted again to brush her off gently. “No, no, I’m not signing anything.”

She continued more aggressively, stepping in front of him every time he tried to walk around her. Finally, frustrated but feeling playful, Mitesh did a full-on (American) football rush, faking left and then spinning right to circle around and run past the girl. As Nico and I laughed, he ran a few steps down the sidewalk, spiked an invisible football, and started doing a touchdown dance.

The girl stared angrily after him for a moment, then turned and started to walk away. Hearing our laughing, though, she looked back over her shoulder and shouted “Fuck off! Suck my pussy!” in her broken English, which only caused Nico and me to laugh harder.

“Are the women in Madrid all so charming?” Mitesh asked Nico after rejoining us?

“No, you must be special,” he joked back.

—–

The next night, I caught up with Nico on Skype from our hotel room. After exchanging pleasantries, the first thing he asked me was, “Did Mitesh get any more propositions?”

“Actually yes,” I told him. “When we were walking home tonight, a strip club promote started following us. He didn’t even try to talk to me, but he walked with us for three blocks telling Mitesh how he had pretty girls and we should come to the club with him.”

“Haha, Mitesh just has something about him, huh?”

The same thing actually happened almost every time we walked through certain neighborhoods at night. The promoters always targeted Mitesh for aggressive sales pitches and never even tried to talk to me. Maybe it was because he was Indian, maybe he looked like the Decider among us, or maybe he looked more or less pathetic than I, but he was always the one they talked to.

——

Nico already had Soeren with him when picked us to go to the casino on Saturday morning. After introducing Mitesh to Soeren, I told him I was glad that the two of them would be able to hang around Madrid together when they get bored of watching the tournament.

Without missing a beat, Nico added, “You must be careful, walking around the city with Mitesh. He will get you into trouble.” The three of us laughed hardily, while poor Soeren had no idea what he was in for.

My heart beat eagerly as my eyes scanned the waiting crowd at Madrid-Barajas Airport. It’s nice to know that, after nine hours of traveling, there is a friendly face seeking out you amidst the anonymous crowd, but there was more to my anxiousness than that. The face I was looking for wasn’t exactly familiar: I’d seen it only once, in a photograph. But if Nico wasn’t here, I was going to be seriously screwed, with little money, even less knowledge of the local language, and no plan for getting to my hotel.

It tells the story of my first three days (though actually most of the best stories are from the nights) in Madrid, including significant hands that I played on Day 1A of the European Poker Tour Grand Final. Of course, I spent more than three days in Madrid, but the article is long enough as it is. I plan to share a few more stories on this blog in the coming days, so if you enjoy the article, keep any eye on this page for bonus material!

The camp scheduled field trips one day a week, every week for all of the kids. Mostly they were to educational city attractions like the science center, the zoo, etc. The most ambitious trip we took was to a beach that was more than an hour’s drive from the camp.

For logistical reasons, they scheduled and planned these trips far in advance, so we didn’t have the option of postponing or rescheduling for bad weather. The day that our group went to the beach, it was windy and overcast, not exactly swimming weather. Kids being kids, though, many of them wanted to get in the ocean, and of course that necessitated that most of the chaperons be in the water as well.

We chaperons also didn’t have the option of getting either completely wet or completely dry. Rather, we had to stand, anywhere from thigh- to waist-deep, in the ocean while the kids played inside the wide circle formed by the adults. This was both boring and uncomfortable, as we sat there half-wet and shivering and whipped by a chilly wind.

Terrence, one of my kids whom you may remember as the tough guy from an earlier TFASC, came running awkwardly out of the water and seemingly on the verge of tears. A female counselor standing next to me walked over and asked him what was wrong. He shook his head and wouldn’t answer.

“What’s wrong, Terrence? You can tell me.”

“Nothing,” he muttered. This was odd behavior for him and had my attention. She continued to press him, and finally he shouted, “Man, my balls is froze!”

One summer during college I worked at a day camp for kids from Cambridge. Most people know the city for Harvard and MIT, but actually a good chunk of it is projects and other low-income housing. The camp consisted mostly of minority youth from low-income backgrounds, but there were a few white kids there because they didn’t have money for camp either or because their liberal academic parents wanted them to experience brown people. I was primarily responsible for a group of twelve 7- to 9-year-olds.

Most activities at the summer camp were scheduled, either field trips or “classes” like art, library, music, etc. These activities were always led by a specialized member of the staff, and those of us who were just group leaders kind of helped out as needed but weren’t in charge at those times. Most days the kids got at least half an hour for “recess”, which was time for which I as a group leader was primarily responsible for occupying them.

The camp was at an elementary school with a playground, so as long as the weather was nice I just took them outside and let them run around like idiots for their recess. Granted this made things easy for me, so I’m a bit biased, but I think it was also legitimately what the kids preferred to do. They enjoyed having time to just play in a way that wasn’t scheduled and organized.

The camp’s director started getting on my case that I ought to plan activities for the recess period, so I asked him for suggestions. One game that really caught on with the kids involved blindfolding one of them and having them all run around in a big circle. The blindfolded kid tries to tag one of the others, who becomes the new blindfolded tagger. Anyone who runs out of the circle counts as tagged and has to take over the blindfold role.

Anyone with any experience with kids will correctly guess that they all wanted to be the blindfolded one and would complain if they weren’t chosen. So it occurred to me that since this role was so popular, I could blindfold two kids and make them both “It”.

Of course, the kid in the blindfold is trying to tag the others based on the sound of their running feet, so her “strategy” usually consists of lunging and swinging wildly in the direction of the nearest sound. Perhaps you can see where this is going. Within two minutes, the two blindfolded kids had run headfirst into each other and were both lying on the ground crying.

As I was dusting them off and consoling them, one of the other kids tugged on my sleeve. “What is it?” I asked, a little annoyed that he was demanding my attention when there clearly others who needed it more.

He looked up at me sagely and said in his nasally 8-year-old’s voice, “I think this was a bad idea.”

David Williams- Share Your Soles

Many people don’t appreciate just how valuable feet can be. Millions of youth in poor countries around the world destroy their feet for lack of comfortable, protective footwear. Too often, minor cuts and injuries become infected and gangrenous, wasting a perfectly good pair of feet. If only these impoverished young people realized the economic opportunity that a fine set of toes represents and had the means to safeguard this valuable asset! We could strike a major blow against world poverty.

Share Your Soles is a non-profit organization that collects donated shoes from around the world and distributes them to charities and orphanages in impoverished countries. Please contribute, cash, shoes, or both as your budget allows. I’m a sole man- are you?

Sam Grizzle- Fathers’ Rights Inc.

The American family court system is broken. What other explanation could there be, when so many fathers are denied custody of their children simply because of their penchant for drinking away the family’s rent money? How can we be expected to pay child support when we’re already supporting ten-thousand-dollar-a-day gambling habits?

If you happen to be one of those rare fathers with disposable income, please contribute to Fathers’ Rights Inc. Or just send the money directly to me. My rent is due, and so am I… for a craps heater!

Josh Fields- First Person Plural

Dissociative Identity Disorder, more commonly known as “multiple personality disorder”, is a grossly misunderstood condition, not to mention a personally taxing one. You try sharing a body with a magazine editor, a repentant sinner, a compulsive liar, a virulent racist, and a geriatric card sharp. That’s why I support First Person Plural. They provide resources for people living with DID and spread awareness. Take it from us: living with DID isn’t easy, and First Person Plural can help.

Daniel Negreanu- Locks of Love

Locks of Love is a great organization that provides hope and dignity for people fighting cancer. They collect donated hair to make wigs for people undergoing radiation therapy who have lost their own hair.

Most people who donate are women with long, flowing locks that they can tie off into an easily-snipped ponytail. That’s all well and good for patients who want long, straight hair, but what about those who would prefer a curly or kinky ‘do? Don’t African-Americans get chemo too? (Don’t worry, I have black friends, so I can say that LMAO!)

That’s why I shave and donate all of the short, curly hair that I can. It’s only fair! So if you’ve got hair to spare, please make a donation today.

John Racener- Drunks Against MADD Mothers

Political correctness is out of control in this country, and there’s no better proof than Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). These self-righteous hags want to limit everyone’s freedom to have a good time because a few bad seeds can’t handle their liquor. While I’ve got news for them: some people can’t chew gum and walk! Does that mean we should ban chewing gum? How is that fair to those of us who can chew gum and win $5,000,000 in the World Series of Poker?

Thankfully someone is standing up to this MADDness. Please support these brave patriots in their fight to defend a man’s right to have a few beers when he goes out with his friends. What am I supposed to do, call a cab like a poor person?

Chad Batista- Farhat Museum of Modern Arab Art

Can the subaltern speak? Naim Farhat’s sublime collection (re)presents a compelling rejoinder to Gayatri Spivak’s infamous interrogatory. The Farhat Art Museum is not so much a presentation as a (sub)textual subversion of the dominant Western hegemonic colonialist paradigm of artistic (re)collection. In its rejection of the always-overdetermined caricatures of Arab culture(s) in Western media, the Museum upholds the inherent (in)dignity of an op- and re-pressed people.

I encourage errbody to support the Museum and its contestation of Western media stereotypes that portray Arabs as a bunch of fkn crrooks.

Aaron Jones- Tourettes Action

Millions of motherfuckers in America and around the fucking world suffer from this fucking syndrome, which renders us un-fucking-able to control our fucking obscene outbursts. No matter how goddamn brilliant every other fucking word out of our fucking mouths is or how many fucking fools we stack, some motherfuckers just can’t get beyond the constant fucking profanity. This shit is fucked up.

The folks at Tourettes Action are some heroic motherfuckers. They’re fighting a good fucking fight, and they need your support. So come on, you broke motherfuckers, make a fucking donation. Or don’t. It’s whatever.

My thanks and apologies to everyone who played in last night’s Triple Stud event. I’ll start on a positive note: I had a great time, and it seemed like many of you did as well. Thanks for playing and for being good sports throughout.

Technical Difficulties

1. Structure. It took over 9 hours for us to play from 30 runners down to the 3 who got paid, and several people understandably chose to abandon their stacks rather than continue to play a $1 tournament for so long. All I can say in my own defense is that I don’t get a lot of information about what various options mean when creating a tournament and am still getting the hang of setting the structure. Obviously this was a huge fail, and I appreciate everyone being so understanding about it.

2. Cancellation. It came down to KeondaFreon and myself playing heads up. I had about a 2:1 chiplead, and (s)he opted to concede and go to sleep rather than play it out. Keonda sat out, and I did as well, thinking that we’d get blinded down and end up taking first and second. Apparently, Stars cancels the tournament if both players are sitting out. It paid us out based on our chip counts, which was fine, but as of now results from this tournament aren’t displayed in the Home Game lobby or on the League Standings. I’ve e-mailed support about this and am going to work with them to make sure this gets resolved. I know that everyone who earned points in this tournament worked hard for them and invested a lot of time in it, and it’s important to me that you get the credit you deserve. I’ll update you when I have more information about how this will be resolved.

Despite these problems, we really did have a lot of fun, and I encourage everyone to play our next event:

Pot Limit Turbo Knockout

This Sunday’s tournament will be a $3 +.75 +.30 6-handed PLH/PLO mix. There’s a $.75 bounty on each player, but otherwise it’s winner take all. Points for league standings will be awarded in the usual fashion, ie they will not be WTA. It’s also a turbo, with the “Turbo” blind structure (whatever that means), 5 minute levels, and 3000 starting stacks. I’m pretty confident this one will finish up in under 3 hours unless we get a huge field.

Fun Chat

To give you just a taste of last night’s antics, I saved some of my favorite moments from the chat box. Here, Mortal Limit, Bond2King, and Cadwallion discuss the merits of having abandoned stacks at the table:

Mortal Limit: woo! Blather is at this table now! EV bonanza!
Cadwallion [observer]: two sit-outs at our table, one at yours
Bond2King: oh yeah it’s like whole entire cents of EV, crazy
Mortal Limit: think of it in bets. it gets more exciting.

And then this occurred after Illiterat 2-bet my steal raise with a K up in Razz, called a 3-bet, and proceeded to snap me off on the river with a T8 when I was bluffing with a Q after making two-pair:

Dealer: foucault82 has Lo: Q,9,5,4,2
Dealer: illiterat has Lo: T,8,6,5,A
Dealer: Game #58784501643: illiterat wins pot (810) with Lo: T,8,6,5,A
foucault82: nice call
foucault82: guessint you didn’t knwo it was razz when you raised me?
illiterat: I didn’t know it was razz on the river
El_dzik: hahahahaa
foucault82: hahahhahahahaah
Bond2King: lol that’s a bad beat
Bond2King: you’re opp calls cause they don’t know what game it is

Apparently my bluff would have worked except that he rivered a pair of Aces and thought we were still playing Stud Hi.

Thanks again to everyone who played. I’ll keep you posted about the results of this tournament, and I hope to see you all on Sunday for the Pot Limit Turbo Knockout.

One summer during college I worked at a day camp for kids from Cambridge. Most people know the city for Harvard and MIT, but actually a good chunk of it is projects and other low-income housing. The camp consisted mostly of minority youth from low-income backgrounds, but there were a few white kids there because they didn’t have money for camp either or because their liberal academic parents wanted them to experience brown people.

We counselors got about a week of training before the kids showed up. There were a lot of silly team-building exercises but also some more practical training about stuff like how to talk to kids about violence in their neighborhoods. There’d been a shooting the week before, and we were warned that many of the kids would know the shooter, the victim, or both, and they wanted us to be prepared.

I was not prepared for “Jonah”. He’d just turned 8 and was the youngest in my group of rising third-graders, but he was by far the most mature. He wasn’t from Cambridge at all but was in fact Israeli. His mother was at Harvard for the semester, and he’d ended up in the camp because she needed something to do with him while she taught or studied or whatever.

Jonah wasn’t familiar with American TV or music and didn’t share the love of bathroom humor that most boys that age have. He always looked on somewhat aloofly when they played tag or giggled over Eminem lyrics. On our first day, he was sitting by himself on the bus, so I sat next to him and talked to him for a while. That turned out to be a mistake, because he never made much of an effort to make friends with the other kids, preferring either to talk to me or to sit by himself.

I encouraged him to go play with the other kids, but he told me they didn’t understand him and that he thought they were immature. I try to be honest with kids, so I told him that might be true, but he could try to play with them anyway. He wasn’t interested.

One day, we were out at the playground when he asked if he could use the bathroom. I got up to walk inside with him, and he looked up at me very matter-of-factly and said, “You know, I used to live in a war zone. You don’t have to walk me to the bathroom.”

“I agree, but the rules say I have to walk with you, so let’s walk.” Again with the honesty.

Jonah had to leave camp early to return to Israel. I asked him if he was looking forward to going home.

He pondered this for a moment before answering, again very matter-of-factly. “I’m excited to see my friends, but I’m kind of worried about suicide bombers.” I didn’t have anything to say to that.

1. When I set the stakes at $.10/$.25 and 100-250BB buy-in, I somehow thought that would mean a $2.50-$6.25 buy-in range. Of course it’s actually 10x that, so we ended up playing for larger stakes than I was envisioning. Sorry for those who were turned off by that, but we still had about 10 people drop in over the course of the night.

2. At one point, I was trying to open a second table and accidentally closed the one we had filled. Apologies to everyone who was confused or inconvenienced by this.

Nevertheless, we had a good time. The next game will be at a more Euro-friendly time: 13:00 ET on Saturday, 3/5. Of course anyone’s welcome to play, but since it’s timed to accommodate our European friends, we’ll be playing $.05/$.10 PLO.

Several people asked me if there’s any prize for winning (or losing) the most in the cash games. There isn’t, but last night at least I personally left a lot of money on the table that a few lucky (what else could it have been?) participants managed to carry off:

1. I 3-bet Cal3e’s BTN open with T8s in my SB and bet-called an A97 flop with a back-door flush draw. I picked up a flush draw on the turn and check-raised all-in, but he snapped called with 97, and I failed to improve.

2. Playing heads up with curt2418, I called a raise with A5o, and we both checked a K33 flop. I check-called a 2 on the turn and check-folded to an overbet on a 6 river, though I seriously considered calling. He didn’t show but told me he was bluffing, and only a real asshat would lie in a home game!

3. I 3-bet highland’s BTN raise with QQ in my SB. He 4-bet, and I called. The flop came K-high with two diamonds, and I checked and called a bet. Turn was a 3rd diamond, and we both checked. The river was the 4th diamond, giving me the second nuts with my Qd. I checked, he shoved 2x pot, I reluctantly called, and he showed me AA with the Ad.

Well played, gang. Thanks for stopping by, and enjoy your loot. Hopefully I’ll see some of you back on Saturday.

In this case, GT employed much better phraseology than I did. This is an excerpt from the de-translation of the excerpt from my blog that was quoted in Hungarian on the site. Note the bolded phrase, which I swear I am not making up:

“Yesterday I accidentally found it in a spam email in Mail, which informs me that my account is $ 1,040.26.The letter 2010th February 19 dátumozású was only yesterday, but stumbled as the spam filter caught. I thought this is something a refund of the UB Hall of frauds.”

I didn’t have any cash with me, but at the station where I bought my first ticket, there was a machine that took credit cards, so it was no problem. The station from which my return trip departed did not take credit cards, and cash was the only option for buying a ticket. I found an ATM nearby, but it was going to cost me $3.50 in bank fees to get cash. The tickets cost $1.50, and I never learned how much the fine was, but I figure there’s no way that paying effectively 3x the value of a ticket is +EV relative to rolling the dice and boarding without a ticket. So, that’s what I do.

The train arrives, and as I board, I see that the person boarding immediately after me is a far patrol officer. I run so bad.

He recognizes a woman on the train and chats with her for a minute, bragging about how many people he catches on this line. He is a young, jovial fellow, and very fat. I figure he will be looking for people who look nervous or evasive, so I throw on my best poker face and join in the conversation. I remark on how underused the train seems to be (basically it looked like only the poorest 20% or so of the city was using it, even though it seemed quite pleasant and convenient), in part to make conversation and in part to establish that I am not from around here. We chat for a minute, and at the next station, the officer gets off without checking anyone’s ticket.

Ship it.

my ex gf’s mother finds overripe fruit at the store, takes it home and removes all the good parts, then drives back with the rotten parts and demands her money back. she cycles stores so she can do this on a regular basis.

Since it’s nearly PCA time, this seems like an opportune moment to recount a tale of my own stinginess, which began with me winning a seat in last year’s tournament (well I guess technically it was January of this year). The PokerStars Caribbean Adventure is hosted at the Atlantis Resort and Casino, which, unbeknownst to me at the time I won the satellite, is an outrageously expensive resort. It’s essentially its own self-contained world, and everything costs a gajillion dollars: continental breakfast $25, barely functional internet $13/day, sandwich $16, etc. Had I known how high the incidental costs would be, I probably would not have played the satellites in the first place.

The package that I won was worth $15K, only 10 of which was for the buy-in. Something in the neighborhood of $3000 went towards accommodations, and an additional $1000 tab was available for expenses at the hotel. Any unused portion of the $1000, less a ~$20 convenience charge, would be put in your Stars account months later. I imagine most people didn’t know this or just looked at it as an excuse to spend $1000 on food and drink, which of course was the idea, but I was determined to get the majority of that money back. I succeeded in retaining nearly $700 despite buying internet and fitness center access every day.

My secret? I brought peanut butter, jelly, bread, and dehydrated backpacker meals with me. For breakfast I bought a muffin and a piece of fruit ($10), for lunch I made sandwiches (bartender was happy to provide plastic utensils), and for dinner I heated up water in the coffeemaker and used it to prepare my backpacker meals.

Of course while I was there I was playing poker for thousands of dollars every day, and it’s not that I couldn’t afford a week of resort living. I would argue that it’s not even a matter of being stingy, per se.

In my other life, I work with kids who come almost exclusively from low-income families. I give very generously to charity, and I would simply feel obscene spending on myself in one day what many families spend on groceries in a month. In my opinion, anyone who spends money with that sort of reckless abandon has entirely too much of it, and if they are inclined to give it away, they ought to find a more deserving recipient than a resort.

This is the reason that I barely even tried to qualify for the PCA this year. I say “barely” because I did play one satellite. There’s plenty to criticize about the Atlantis, but they do have a bomb-ass waterpark. And I did get at least one good story out of it.

In honor of the event’s conclusion, we’ve now got up a page with links to my 2010 WSOP trip report plus interviews and ESPN appearances.

Maybe next year…

It takes a little while to get going, but I was pretty into it by the end. Enjoy!

Lottery officials denied allegations of rigging: “We are in the business of luck, and when it comes to chances and probabilities anything is possible, even the rare and infrequent, like in this case,” said Dr. Chaim Melamed, the statistics expert for the national lottery company. An examination of the machines and lottery balls revealed no irregularities.

You’d have to pretty dumb to rig the lottery in so obvious a way, a way that is guaranteed to invite further investigation. Then again, if you’ve got superuser access to an online poker site that you own, you’d have to be pretty dumb to call all-in with T-high on the river in the biggest tournament your site will run all year.

I suppose if this were evidence of fixing, it would be because someone had weighted the balls or otherwise rigged the mechanism by which the numbers were selected in a way that was accidentally replicated three weeks later. And I suppose that is more likely, at least prior to a thorough investigation, than that this occurred as a result of dumb luck. After all

Yitzhak Melechson, a statistics professor at the University of Tel Aviv, said that “the incident of six numbers repeating themselves within a month is an event of once in 10,000 years.”

By way of apology, here’s something to entertain you:

This will mostly be funny if you’re familiar with the “Bling Blang Blaow” meme on 2+2. The short version is that some 50NL heads up player got berated by an opponent after stacking him and responded with what has become an epic poem about cashing out the guy’s money. “The R4v3n” video is a hilariously and exceedingly well-done riff on Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” poem from the perspective of the victim of the “Bling Blang Blaow” episode. Also amusing:

It’s been an exciting and eye-opening experience. We’ve visited a lot of cool places including about a dozen national parks, visited some old friends in new places and met two new babies- guess I’m at that age where my peers are starting to pop them out, and gotten a better feel for parts of the country that we barely knew before. I’d never been to the American South or the Pacific Northwest, and I ended up liking the former a lot better than I expected and the latter somewhat less (though I’m just getting to know it).

There are a lot of things that I miss. Living out of a car gets old, and I miss having a reliable bed, a comfortable desk and chair with two big monitors (multi-tabling on a laptop sucks), and having friends around and being involved in a local community. Oh and a reliable internet connection, of course! I’ve been able to keep up pretty well with coaching, though not quite as well as I like, despite the fact that I rarely know more than a week in advance where I’ll be and when.

More reflections and links to come, but we’re actually about to pick up two of my best friends from college at the airport, as they’ve flown out to visit us in Washington. This is a long-delayed wedding present to them, so don’t want to keep them waiting! In the meantime, here are a few random facts and blog links:

States Visited (in order, including those we passed through without stopping): Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida (just me, visiting my grandmother on the way back from the PCA), Nevada (flew out for Valentine’s Day/NAPT Venetian), California, Vermont, Maine, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington

Dispatches From the Road

A collection of my blog posts about places we’ve visited, things we’ve done, and people we’ve met.

Relative Happiness, Part 1

Relative Happiness, Part 2

Bathroom Ethics Fail

Brown v Board Monument

The Horse Story

LuJean Dunlap

Didn’t Know Google Knew Roads Like This

Book Ideas

The Wisconsin Supreme Court Votes With Poker Chips

It’s Quickly Becoming Non-Ironic

A Bluff I Don’t Want to Call

Lower 48… Done

I came into Day 4 with a monster stack relative to the field. I had over 500,000 chips, when the average was about 180,000, ranking me 27th among the more than 1,200 players who remained. Day 4 was a particularly good day for this, as it was also the day that would separate the players who would win nothing from those who would take home at least $19,000. With 747 players to be paid, no one wanted to be eliminated in 748th place (or 762nd, for that matter), which meant that most people were playing more conservatively than usual.

I had the biggest stack at my table, and the only person who even came close was a guy two seats to my right whom I’d never heard of. He was sitting on about 400,000 chips. It looked like all the stars were aligned for me to steamroll the table and steal steal steal, but it didn’t go quite as flawlessly as I’d imagined it.

Please let me know what you think!

Their flawless software that is now the best and most secure in the industry apparently produced this little gem in the UBOC O/8 event the other day. The bet sizes were all screwed up, enabling people to limp in for 15 at the 50/100 level, and for the player in the Big Blind to move all in. Their response was to cancel the tournament, refund buy-ins, and offer a freeroll for affected players with about $10,000 in UBOC championship event buy-ins added.

Thanks to TwoPlusTwo poster FreeFalling for this awesome image!

“They’re like poker fluffers,” she quipped without missing a beat. “They get it started, and then the pro comes in to finish it off. You’d have to be a pretty big tool to agree to something like that, not just ethically but like… as a matter of personal respect.”

I agree, though I’m sure plenty of people care a lot more about getting backed for these tournaments by any means necessary, not to mention getting to take credit for the win on sites like Pocket 5’s, than they do about stuff like ethics and personal respect. Anyway, I think “Poker Fluffers” is a brilliant names for these clowns, and I encourage you all to do your part to make it stick!

I just played a hand in the $1000 NLHE FTOPS event in which I activated my time bank, for what I believe to be the first time in this event, on the river. Within seconds, my hand was folded. Could you help me to understand what happened? I looked back through the chat log and couldn’t find a previous instance of my having used the timebank. Why did i have so little time available. I ended up folding a good hand in a big pot because my time expired, so I’d like t understand what happened. Thank you, Andrew

Hello Andrew,

Thank you for contacting Full Tilt Poker Support.

Your time bank offers you that little bit of extra time if you need it while playing at the tables.

Here’s how it works. When you’re almost out of time, the colored bar beneath your avatar will start counting down, and a
blue “Time” button will appear above the betting slider on the lower right side of the table window.

If you click the “Time” button, your time bank feature will begin counting down after the colored bar runs out of time.
You can tell that other players are using their time banks when a black box appears and counts down in the time bank spot.

You have a separate time bank for each open table, and each time bank is only applicable to that table.

The amount of time available in your bank varies depending on how long you’ve been seated at the table and the type of
game you’re playing. Your time increases with each hand played, and after every tournament break. You’ll also accumulate
extra time in your bank when you reach the final table of a tournament.

In addition, you have a separate Disconnect Time Bank, which gives you 90 seconds of total disconnect time per 24 hour
period.

If our server detects that you’ve been disconnected, the other players at the table will be automatically informed
through the table chat window. When you reach the end of your allotted decision time, your Disconnect Time Bank will be
displayed and begin counting down.

The Disconnect Time Bank continues counting down until you reconnect to the game and take an action. If you don’t
reconnect to the game before the Disconnect Time Bank runs out, your hand will be folded.

For more information about time banks and the Disconnect Time Bank, please visit our website at: http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/table.php

Good luck at the tables, and if you have any further questions, please let us know.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, $50.00 BB (8 handed) – Poker-Stars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG+1 ($2341)
MP1 ($11912)
Hero (MP2) ($4203)
CO ($2009)
Button ($565)
SB ($2491)
BB ($1000)
UTG ($2797)

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with A, 8
2 folds, MP1 bets $100, Hero raises to $250, CO calls $250, Button calls $250, 2 folds, MP1 calls $150

Flop: ($1075) 8, 8, K (4 players)
MP1 checks, Hero checks, CO checks, Button checks

Turn: ($1075) J (4 players)
MP1 checks, Hero bets $666, CO calls $666, 1 fold, MP1 calls $666

River: ($3073) 10 (3 players)
MP1 checks, Hero bets $3287 (All-In), 1 fold, MP1 calls $3287

Total pot: $9647 | Rake: $3

Results:
MP1 had 7, 9 (straight, Jack high).
Hero had A, 8 (three of a kind, eights).
Outcome: MP1 won $9644

What makes this funny is that my internet wigged out after I shoved, after Villain activated his time bank, but before he called. I didn’t realize immediately what had happened, and on the client side his timer continued to count down. I figured that if he had to think this long about it I was good. It was only when his time bank hit zero but his hand wasn’t folded that I realized there was a problem with my connection. I reconnected to find myself short $3000.

Apparently rattlesnakes are rather common in this area:

We haven’t seen any rattlers, but we did see a baby rabbit. Emily thought it was adorable, so I insisted on demonstrating what it would look like if a rattlesnake unhinged its jaw and swallowed the rabbit whole:

Sorry, no pictures of rabbit or girlfriend.

Yesterday, we took a tour of a decommissioned Minuteman Missile launch control facility. The park newspaper proudly proclaimed that Kennedy called these missiles, “America’s Ace in the Hole.” I believe it’s just for show now, but there’s a sign there explaining that guards are authorized to use deadly force against trespassers. Two separate really classic looking “vacation dads” had their pictures taken next to the sign while pointing to at it. Emily managed to snap a picture of this guy. Our favorite part is how earnest he looks; as you can see he’s even removed his hat:

So later I took an ironic picture of my own:

The literature at the launch facility was pretty interesting. I wish I had gotten some quotes, but it basically presented it as fact that America’s nuclear arms build-up and policy of Mutually Assured Destruction had made America safer and prevented nuclear war. I can’t say that that’s definitively false, but I don’t think it’s definitively true either.

I find it funny how MAD and nuclear deterrence are presented as the ultimate example of game theory played out on the stage of international diplomacy between rational actors, and how now there is this fear that because “irrational” leaders like Kim Jong Il of North Korea have access to nuclear weapons, deterrence no longer works and the world is consequently less safe.

It sure seems like Kim Jong Il is legitimately unstable, but for what it’s worth, convincing the world that he’s irrationally willing to use nuclear weapons would actually be quite a rational strategy on his part. It’s like convincing your opponents in a poker tournament that you’re willing to make an irrational call with like A2 if they re-steal against you, even if you would actually fold.

Likewise, I think it would have required some level of irrationality on the part of either the US or the USSR to actually launch a counter attack if they believed the other side had launched its nuclear missiles. As much as I’d want to convince my “opponent” that I was going to fire back, the truth is that I’m not sure I’d give that order even if I knew an overwhelming number of missiles were headed for my country. There’s nothing intrinsically rational about taking the other side down with you when you know you are about to become a smoking crater. I guess now that I’ve said that I can never become commander-in-chief….

Based solely on her appearance, I assumed she would essentially be a dead seat at the table. That is, she would play too tight to lose much and too predictably to take much from anyone. This was corroborated by the way a few of the regulars in the game regarded her. In one hand, Mary (at least I think this is what they called her) raised to $25 after one limper. A lady friend of hers just called from the SB and check-folded an Ace-high flop. Mary tabled AA, and her friend flipped over KK, saying “I knew it! That’s why I didn’t reraise you!”

That was the first time Mary raised, and she’d been at the table for over an hour. About an hour later, she raised again, and after one caller, I elected to call on the button with 65o, as Mary had about $600 in front of her and I covered. As is my habit, I envisioned what kind of flop would allow me to win a big pot against what I was sure would be a big pair: certainly 347, but I’d be willing to call any reasonable bet on any flop that gave me so much as an open-ender. What about 66x? Would she figure me for calling a raise with a 6? Hard to say, but she’d have to lose something.

Then I envisioned the aftermath. This poor, sweet old woman sits patiently, socializing with friends and waiting for her pocket aces. She finally gets them, the holy grail of Texas Hold ‘Em, and she loses two months’ social security checks to a “bad beat” from some young hot shot who calls an early position raise with 6-5 offsuit. Is this really who I am? A guy who invests $15 in a garbage hand in the hopes of ruining this poor woman’s evening (maybe her month? This is the kind of bad beat story she might tell years into the future) and taking her money, money that could have been used for her grandson’s college education or her granddaughter’s orthodontia?

The flop came Q82, Mary bet and won the pot. She flipped over AQ suited and tipped the dealer.

In the next four hours or so, she watched me accumulate nearly $1000 through aggressive play, while she raised about once an hour and limped into a few more pots. I raised limpers with all kinds of stuff, particularly when I was in position, and the whole table was complaining about it, but every time one of them decided to look up one of my big river buts, they were shown a near nut hand.

I made my usual straddle UTG and looked at my phone: 11PM, meaning I’d been playing with barely a break for 8 hours. More importantly, I could detect a seismic shift in how the table regarded me. I had a mountain of chips stacked in front of me, and most of my opponents had been around long enough to see me raking in all of the big pots I played. Lately, I’d been getting less action and hearing less grumbling about my “bad” play.

But this table was soooo juicy! Not juicy in the sense that they’d lose their asses with anything, but juicy in the sense that there was $7500 in the table and only one other guy who seemed to have half a clue how to play poker. After folding, I resolved to take a walk, go to the bathroom, and play one more hour.

I returned to my seat and posted from the CO. The other competent player limped UTG, Mary limped behind him, two or three other players, including a guy I really disliked and had been wanting to stack for a long time, limped in, and I looked down at 75. It was tempting to limp in too, just to play a pot in position, and then I remembered that I’d already posted. I tapped the table, the button limped, the blinds tapped, and the flop came out Q77.

UTG bet $30, and Mary, to my surprise, called. It was unusual for our table to see this much action on such a dry board, so I just called in position with my trips. Everyone else folded, and the dealer burned and turned the K. UTG checked, and Mary, to my great surprise, bet $75, leaving a little less than $250 behind.

I considered it very unlikely that she would play any hand containing a 7. Could she have KK or QQ? She limped behind a limper, and I’d previously seen her raise AA in a similar situation, so I slightly discounted these, but who knows. I really didn’t think she was the type to semi-bluff. Maybe AQ or KQ? I called, resolving to throw my hand away to a big river bet.

The river was the A, and Mary bet about $55 into a pot of nearly $300. I smiled inside and started envisioning how this pot would give me a stack of over $2000 and get me unstuck for the trip.

Her weak little blocking bet told me she was uncertain about her hand, probably worried that I had a 7. What could I raise? What would she call with? I decided that if I bet her last $183, she’d be getting better than 2:1, and would maybe talk herself into a call, both because she might want to put me on a busted flush draw or just because she didn’t want to fold two pair to the “Macadamia”, as her friend called me (because she thought I was a nut).

“All in”, I announced, moving a stack of red chips into the pot.

Her spindly claws couldn’t shovel chips into the pot quickly enough. “Can’t win this one, sweetheart,” she informed me with a hint of malevolent glee as she flipped over her pocket Aces for a rivered full house. I grimaced, matched the last of her chips, and smiled at her. “Nice hand.”

In my mind, I replayed it. No reason to shove the river. She isn’t going to call with a worse hand. There was no flush draw on the flop to represent. Though unlikely, she certainly could have a boat, and the odds of her having a boat are probably better than the odds of her calling with a worse hand.

But the weak river bet is what I kept coming back to. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how perfect it was. If she made the big bet herself, I’d already resolved to fold. But the underbet convinced me I was good and induced me to try raising for value. Had she stumbled upon this brilliant play by dumb, nut peddling luck? Or did she know that I would do the work for her, and that she couldn’t count on having a big bet of her own paid off? I wanted to ask her this, but I realized it would be rude, as I’d essentially be accusing her to her face of being just another clueless case of beginner’s luck.

After another orbit of folding, I stood up, wished everyone a good night, and went to cash in my chips. I felt a tap on my arm as I stood waiting for the cashier to convert my racks of casino chips into crisp $100 bills. Looking over and down, I saw Mary smiling up at me. “It was an absolute delight to have you at the table, and you’re a helluva poker player,” she told me.

“It’s too bad we were across the table from each other, we didn’t get to talk much.” She said good night and started to return to her seat, but I stopped her. “Your river bet was perfect,” I said.

Her face lit up. “I invited you right in, didn’t I?” she whispered conspiratorially.

“I couldn’t resist,” I admitted with a smile.

Excerpted from my WSOP 2007 Trip Report:

I am sitting in a 5/10 game at the Rio when this giant tool takes a seat next to me. He’s got the sunglasses, the hair gel, fashionably unbuttoned shirt, and a ball cap that reads “Philly” in what I guess was supposed to look like graffiti letters. He clearly thinks he’s hot shit as he takes a fat roll of bills from his pocket and peels off twenty. Then, in completely unballer fashion, he thinks better of it, puts half the bills back, and buys in for $1000.

Meanwhile, his girlfriend is pulling up a seat slightly behind him and to the right. Note that this still takes up some space at the table, as the guy is sitting considerably closer to me than he otherwise would be, and because he is lefthanded, he jostles me several times as he stacks his chips.

The girl didn’t have to be unattractive. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, and large breasts. But she was a thickalicious girl in a very short skirt that highlighted her thunder thighs. Her plunging neckline revealed quite a lot of cleavage, but her completely unsupportive bra gave her a bad case of pancake boob.

I was not happy with this guy for depositing his stubbly face and his busted girlfriend in my peripheral vision, and I resolved to make him regret it.

He posts $10 in the CO, and another new player at the table has already posted $10 as well. Action folds to the tool, who raises his post to $50. I resolve to pop him with any two from the button. I find 72o, but a deal’s a deal, so I make it $150. He glances at my stack, ponders a moment, and calls.

The flop comes 444, and immediately he asks me “Did you make a full house, too? I made a full house. I check.” I hate it when people run their mouths during a hand. After a few moments of thought, I bet $180, and he calls.

Turn is a T, and he checks. Fucking Zeebo Theorem can I really get this tool to fold whatever shitty full house he has? If I really had a big pair I’d just price him in on the turn and river since he’s only got a pot-sized bet left in his stack and probably no understanding of what “pot odds” actually means. But that’s exactly why I can’t run a bluff that way, and if I just shove now, he’ll probably put me on AK like the live “pro” tool that he is. So after much thought I check behind.

The river is a K, and I get as excited about this as I would if I really had AK. “Damn,” he says with deliberately, conspicuously bad acting. “I let you get there. You got AK. I should have bet the turn, huh? OK, I check.” As I am pondering, he keeps mentioning AK, and every time he does, I have to wait a few more seconds before I can bluff. Finally he shuts his stubbly mouth long enough for me to announce a bet of $350. Dickface turbo-mucks and sneers at me with an intolerable air of superiority, “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

I flip my 72o, and his face drops like a rock as the implications of this hand become clear to him. Here he has taken his filly to come watch him own this “high stakes” poker game, and not only has he lost, not only has he been bluffed, but some kid took one look at him and decided that it would be profitable to play the worst hand in poker against him. It’s not like I missed a flush draw and had no choice but to bluff the river. Having never played a pot with this guy in my life, I took one look at him and decided to run a multi-street bluff from scratch with seven-deuce off-suit.

His girl starts consoling him with thigh stroking, but of course her pity is the last thing he wants right now. She is supposed to be in awe of him, not feeling sorry for him. “I wish you had flopped two pair. I would have taken all your money,” he tells me. 77 I guess? Yeah, if the case seven and a deuce had flopped, you probably would have stacked me. Congratulations. I kind of half shrug but still have not said a word to him.

Now he puts $1000 more in bills on the table and is on mega-tilt, limping into every pot, calling any raise, and firing at lots of flops. Amazingly, the table is letting him get away with it, and I can’t pick up anything to play against him. Finally a nice guy on my left cold calls a reraise from the kid with A’s in the SB, leads a rag flop, and shoves over the kid’s raise. The kid calls but mucks when the dude flips his hand on the river and storms away from the table with his woman tripping after him in her skinny heels.

Quick aside regarding White River Junction, which you probably haven’t heard of: it’s a small town just over the Vermont/New Hampshire border, near Dartmouth College. Hanover, New Hampshire, the town in which Dartmouth is actually located, was surprisingly boring. There were about two “downtown” blocks of shops, mostly chain stores and clothing retailers, with a few bland-looking restaurants and one pretty good independent bookstore (the official Dartmouth bookstore, like that of most major universities, is operated by Barnes and Noble).

White River Junction, on the other hand, was surprisingly charming, if quite small. The town is built around an old but still operating railroad station. The buildings immediately surrounding the station are mostly vacant, though still bearing the signs of coffee shops and ice cream stores gone by. One old warehouse is now home to a salvage depot, where a wide array of furniture and other building/decorating materials, antique and otherwise, lie totally unrestored, waiting to be discovered by a canny contractor or entrepreneurial interior decorator. We passed an enjoyable hour wandering through rows of crumbling columns, brass fixtures, hardwood school desks, and dusty armoires.

Believe it or not, the economic engine of the town seems to be the Center for Cartoon Studies, which is exactly what it sounds like: a school for cartoonists and graphic novelists, who who were both the employees and the primary customers of a nearby coffee shop.

A small gallery there, free and open to the public, featured material from R. Sakoryak’s Masterpiece Comics. This graphic novels renders such literary classics as “Crime and Punishment”, “Wuthering Heights”, and “The Scarlet Letter” in the style of comic classics like “Ziggy”, “Batman”, and even “Beavis and Butthead”.

Having had our fill of porch posts and picture books, we departed for Burlington via our backroads route. There were a lot of turns, but that’s par for the course on a rural route in New England. That is to say, “Route 5” is actually a route, not a road, and may in fact be comprised of quite a few different roads.

It truly was a picturesque drive, everything you could hope for from “the scenic route”. We’re cruising along, enjoying the scenery, when I happen to note that we’re no longer on the proper path. No problem, except that neither of us noticed a remotely significant diverging road in the last few minutes. We U-turn and retrace our steps to the intersection where we were supposed to turn off and realize why it hadn’t jumped out at us: the road was labeled simply “County Road” and was unpaved, consisting mostly of dirt plus some lingering mud from the recent rains.

GoogleMaps has been our constant companion on the road for months now, and it’s never tried to put us on a “road” like this. I double-checked, but there was no doubting it: this was the route GoogleMaps had found for us. We were miles from the interstate now, and it looked like there was at most 5.5 miles of unpaved road before the next state road (we had to guess from the names, but we were pretty confident that VT-110 would be paved). Besides, our Subaru Forrester does have four-wheel drive, even if it isn’t equipped with mud tires.

So along we went on our merry way, slip-sliding across the muddy street. For the most part, it wasn’t really dangerous. The worst we could have done was slide into a tree at 5 MPH or get stuck in a rut. Still, I didn’t relish the thought of getting towed out of a ditch by a bushy-bearded Vermonter casting stoic, scornful gazes at our Massachusetts license plates and our Blackberry.

To make a long story short, we managed the 5.5 miles without incident, though we did pass two such Vermonters. Both drove pick-up trucks, and one was pulled over on the side of the road, using a chainsaw to cut up a fallen tree for firewood. I’ve permitted my own beard to achieve record scraggliness, but I still felt stirrings of inadequacy as I gazed upon their bristly chins.

We also passed several other staples of the rural Vermont economy, including an alpaca farm, bark buckets collecting maple sap, and a hand-made sign advertising fresh eggs, $2 a dozen- a particularly substantial increase over supermarket prices considering the customer must first navigate several miles of dirt road to find the farmer.

At last we made it to VT-110 and felt pavement’s comforting, gravelly embrace. Ten miles later, GoogleMaps again attempted to steer us onto a mud puddle masquerading as a road. This time, we pulled over, dug out a paper map, and plotted the route to the nearest interstate. As we put away the Blackberry, my girlfriend noticed that we’d asked GoogleMaps for walking, rather than driving, directions.

The vast majority of people who contact me about “advertising” are actually looking for some shady shit like this, though some of them express it more subtly:

“I work for XXX and we are looking for you to publish some content of ours on your website.  In exchange, I can give you a free £30 free bet at our casino.  Our content writer has produced several reviews of our online slot games.  Would you be interested in posting one of these articles on your site in exchange for a £30 free bet?”

I don’t usually respond, but this one was particularly blatant, so I wrote back:

Sorry, I write my own reviews, and I don’t take bribes.

I don’t know how much big of a deal this is at the small stakes, but in high stakes games it is really freaking annoying. There are usually 25-40 tables with just one player sitting and waiting for action, with just a handful of games actually running. Most of these nits sit out against any remotely decent player who tries to play them and just wait for fish. That’s all fine and good and totally their choice, but I don’t think they ought to be able to squat the most valuable real estate.

The problem is that right now not only is there no way to kick them off the tables (they can keep sitting in and back out again to reset their “sitting out” timer), but apparently they can complain to FTP support and get me a warning for trying to run them off the table.

I’d heard about all this but never tried it out for myself. Last night, I was frustrated by my inability to get any heads up action, and I decided I was going to go give the guy at the top 10/20 table a hard time. It was some clown sitting with $700, and sure enough he instantly sat out against me and said “no ty”.

I ignored his chat and stayed at the table as he repeatedly asked me to leave. Occasionally he sat in, both to get my attention and to avoid getting booted. I always posted my blind but never acknowledged his chat. Eventually he started telling me he was going to report me, I would get a 3-day ban, etc. Still I ignored him.

Finally he sat in and posted his big blind. I raised my button, he folded, and then he sat out again. Now I’ve seen people play their button and sit out, but there’s not much sense in playing your big blind and then sitting out. The only thing I can think is that he was trying to bribe me to go away. Whether that was his intention or not, I took the $20 as sufficient payment to leave him alone, especially since he clearly wasn’t giving up anyway.

This morning, I did indeed get an e-mail from Full Tilt:

Hello Andrew,

This is a message from Full Tilt Poker Support about our heads up table policy.

Full Tilt Poker understands that game selection is paramount in heads up play. If the player first seated at the table does not wish to play the second player, they have the right to refuse the game, and ask the second player to leave the table and it is our expectation that they will do so. If you ask a player to leave and they do not do so, you may send a report to HU-Tables@fulltiltpoker.com, and we will review the issue.

On a little side note, please be aware that the Full Tilt Poker software is designed without any table volume restrictions. This means that there will always be at least one empty table of every type at every stake. You will always be able to find an empty heads up table at any limit at or above $.25/$.50.

We hope that this clarifies our heads up table policies. Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us.

Regards,

Chris
Poker Specialist
Full Tilt Poker Support

It’s pretty ridiculous that they’ve got a little unit or something dedicated to protecting table-squatting nits when their customer support is so notoriously slow and bad. If they would just either randomize the order in which tables appear in the lobby or, more fun in my opinion, allow “king of the hill” style competition for the most desirable tables, it would be a lot more fair and quite possibly encourage more action as well, which means more rake for them.

In the first, I raised with ATo and get one caller. The flop came AA9. I bet, he called. Turn was a 7, I checked, he bet, I called. River was an A, and he had about half a pot-sized bet left in his stack, so I shoved. He tanked and called with J9. “I have it,” I told him, and proudly tabled… 97. I stared at my cards in confusion for a moment, then looked at the board and said, “At lease we chop it.” Then the dealer started shuffling the board back into the deck without awarding the pot to us. As he did, I saw the 9 and 7 and, confusing myself, announced that I had two pair and it’s not a chop. The dealer called for the floor, and while we waited, I realized that it actually should be a chop. Only now the dealer has decided to reconstruct the flop and he does it wrong, this time putting up AA975, turning it into a scoop for my opponent.

I’m pretty sure I at least half woke-up before the situation was resolved, but I quickly fell asleep again and had this dream:

I was playing a PLO tournament. The guy on my right opened to 1100 (I don’t know what the blinds were, but I remember he raised to 1100), and I shoved a little under 10K with Ad Jc Tc Td (apparently no one called me on the fact that an all-in was more than pot). Some very young kid, like 15 or 16, who I didn’t even realize was in the pot had apparently been the one to raise to 1100, and the guy I thought was the raiser had just called the raise. I remember feeling embarrassed and thinking that I never would have shoved if I’d seen the original raiser. Anyway, he called, and the other guy called as well. I felt like an idiot, but they showed AKJ3 and KKJx, and the flop came Ac Jh 8c, giving me top two and a flush draw. I looked to see if anyone else had clubs and noticed that the kid had Jc 3c. Then I realized that wasn’t possible, since the Jc was in my hand. Then I saw that there was also a Jc in the third kid’s hand. We called the floor, and the original raiser, who looked like a huge nerd and was, as I said, very young, commented, in a super-geeky voice, “I wish you’d just relented to my initial wager.” A floor person came by and needed time to decide what to do about the situation, so he sent us on break and gave us some Magic cards as compensation.

Two common themes from these hands jump out at me. The first is that both involved me making really significant errors: misreading my cards, misinterpreting my hand, or failing to notice a third player in the pot. I distinctly remember feeling foolish, embarrassed, and frustrated with myself. Both situations also involved errors or bad decisions on the part of dealers and/or floor staff.

As I say, I’ve been working on this for a while, and on Day 1 of the PCA, I felt like I was doing it about as well as I ever have. I was a statue, sitting placidly at the table, back straight, hands in my lap, slowly and deliberately breathing in and out.

With about two hours left in the day, my original table broke, and I was moved across the room to meet a new group of players. I walked deliberately but unhurriedly across the conference center floor to take my new seat. Two seats to my right was a heavy-set kid with greasy hair, an unkempt beard, a backwards ballcap, and a basketball jersey stretched out over his considerable gut. He was loudly recounting the hand that had vacated the seat I now occupied, in which the European kid to my left (who spoke barely a word of English to defend himself) got it all in with AK in a three-way pot and busted ADZ, who’d held KK. The big hairball seemed to think this was an awful play and was telling everyone who would listen about it, though as best I could tell he’d not actually been involved in the hand himself.

I was still unracking my chips when the dealer said something about a player mucking his cards. “Players don’t muck cards. Dealers muck cards. Players discard cards, and then dealers muck them,” the shaggy sports fan corrected her, loudly and matter-of-factly. She nodded in acknowledgment, but he insisted on explaining the distinction several more times, in several different ways. I had finished unracking and was just sitting there, not reacting to this at all or even looking at the downy detractor, but taking it all in nonetheless. Annoyance slowly crept across the dealer’s face as the guy continued to bloviate, but she said nothing, and neither did anyone else.

About ten minutes passed, most of which was to the tune of the meatbag’s constant rambling. He talked virtually nonstop, to no one in particular, about things going on in the room and hands he’d seen, always returning to this AK vs KK situation with the Euro-kid on my left. I ignored it all, though, barely playing a hand, just breathing and looking and listening and sitting upright quietly and attentively.

So I’m just sitting there, I’m a rock, so fucking impassive that the Buddha would shit himself with shame to see me, when this same loudmouth recounts some story and specifically refers to “mucking” his cards. He finishes the anecdote, with none of the rest of us saying anything for fear of giving the impression that we’re paying attention or want him to continue. I let a couple seconds of silence go by, still stone-faced and unmoving, and then quietly say, never looking at him or even turning my head, “Players don’t muck cards.”

Only the people on our half of the table could hear me, but several of them chuckled. “He’s right,” Hairy assured them. “He’s making fun of me, but he’s absolutely right.” I didn’t acknowledge him or anyone else, didn’t crack a smile or in any way show pleasure at the reception my needling had received. I couldn’t help but notice the dealer beaming her appreciation at me, like she wanted to have her way with me right there on the table. But I was all business, dark shades and brim pulled low. No time for that now, ma’am.

About half an hour goes by without me saying anything to Chewbacca or anyone else. He’d actually kind of calmed down. Then a short stacked player moved all in for only two times the blind. After some consideration, Sasquatch flat called. I had 65o in the small blind and considered making a move. Slowly my eyes took in the short stack and then the caller, who was staring back at me knowingly. I mucked (sorry, discarded), the European who’d been the subject of so much derision called, and the big blind called.

The flop came QJ2, all clubs. It checked around to Tubby, who bet 3K. His fishy friend called, and the big blind folded. The turn was blank, and they checked it through. The river was an offsuit T, and now Euroboy quickly threw 11K into the pot in what could only be a show of extreme strength. I expected to see a straight or better.

The portly pontificator snap-called and discarded angrily when the kid tabled 74cc for a flush. “You’re the best. You’re too good,” the guy began his berating, standing up from the table. “I should have had you crushed on that flop. How do you do it? How do I not have you crushed on that flop? I have fucking Kings with a club, and you flop a flush. Unfuckingbelievable. The one time I try to trap. I’m trying to induce a back-raise from this guy,” he points over at me with one meaty paw.

Growing red in the face, he was beginning to look more and more like a primate. I was severely tempted to tell him that I’m at least as likely to play back at an isolation raise as at a flat call, maybe even moreso, but I just sat placidly, eyes forward. I couldn’t have gotten a word in anyway.

He’s really gone now, foaming at the mouth, eyes wild, speckles of saliva glistening in his beard as he snarls and rages. The Eurolucksack understands barely a word of it but seems to find it just as amusing as I do.

I’m looking now for opportunities to get involved with this guy, who I’m sure is in spewbot mode. At 300/600/75, I open to 1800 UTG with ATo. He makes it 4200 from the SB, and I can’t resist the pot odds. Flop is 855 with two diamonds (I have none), and we both check. Turn is the Qd, and he checks again. I toss a little T4400 underbet out there, ready to bet 15K on the river if called. He ponders for a while and raises to about 16K, and I, with just a hint of a contented smile on my face, quickly fold.

He fires his cards angrily into the muck, and, huffing and puffing, stares daggers at me. After letting him fume for a few seconds, I ask, with genuine concern, “What’s the matter?” It’s the longest phrase I’ll utter to him all day.

Somewhat surprised by my verbacity, he shakes his head confusedly for a moment and explains, “Just…not happy with the result of the hand. I mean, I won it, but…I mean, I guess you didn’t have anything…I can’t give you a free card though… versus your range…you could have the Ace of diamonds…” he fumbles some more, throwing around some disjointed jargon and generally failing to make much sense.

A few minutes later, he asks me if I’ll tell him what I had when we’re done for the night. I turn to look him in the eye, shake my head slightly, then face front and resume my thousand-yard stare. “You won’t tell me? No? We can’t share stories at the end of the day? It’s not like we’re going to play together tomorrow, bro.” I continue to stare straight ahead and give him a little half shrug.

He spends the rest of the night fuming, ostensibly at the Euro but really I think at himself, while I take measured in-breaths and out-breaths. Then I get into my big pot at the end of the night, where I’m all-in with 66 on a 5c6c8d flop versus 74 and AcJc and eventually lose my ass to the straight. He oohs and aahs for a while over the size of the pot, and then starts giving his take on it. “Wow…I mean, wow. Set, straight, nut flush draw… nothing anyone can do there. No one can get away from it… he has to call,” referring here to his favorite Eurokid. “Maybe you can get away from it?” he looks at me, then corrects himself, “No, no, you can’t fold.”

He says this last like he’s reassuring me. Are you sure? Are you sure I can’t fold? You know I’m the favorite, right? Do you get that? Do you get that I’m that I’m the fucking favorite to win it, you FUCKING BABOON?!?!?!?

BB ($500)
Button ($2080)
Hero (SB) ($2060)

Preflop: Hero is SB with 3, 5
1 fold, Hero bets $40, BB raises to $100, Hero calls $60

Flop: ($200) 6, 7, 4 (2 players)
Hero checks, BB bets $400 (All-In), Hero calls $400

Turn: ($1000) 9 (2 players, 1 all-in)

River: ($1000) 2 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: $1000 | Rake: $1

Results:
Hero had 3, 5 (flush, seven high).
BB had K, 4 (flush, King high).
Outcome: BB won $999

The next orbit, vs. same guy:

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em, $10.00 BB (4 handed) – Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG ($1136)
Button ($1000)
SB ($1970)
Hero (BB) ($2000)

Preflop: Hero is BB with A, Q
UTG bets $30, Button calls $30, 1 fold, Hero raises to $133, UTG calls $103, 1 fold

Flop: ($301) 4, 10, 2 (2 players)
Hero checks, UTG checks

Turn: ($301) 10 (2 players)
Hero checks, UTG bets $225, Hero calls $225

River: ($751) 2 (2 players)
Hero checks, UTG bets $778 (All-In), Hero calls $778

Total pot: $2307 | Rake: $2

Results:
Hero had A, Q (two pair, tens and twos).
UTG had 9, K (two pair, tens and twos).
Outcome: Hero won $2305

She was cheerfully plump, with a knitted sweatshirt, bifocals, and a kind smile. But let me tell you, this little old lady was a straight hustler. We asked about rates for the night, and she trotted out the high-end stuff first:

“I’ve got a beautiful cabin, right on the river, hot tub, fireplace, kitchen, barbeque grill, doesn’t that sound like fun? That goes for $180.” She smiled encouragingly but we just gave her the silent treatment until she continued.

“Our intermediate lodges have fireplace and kitchen, they’re two-room suites, those go for $115.” Silence.

“And then I’ve got motel rooms,” she said with a discouraging frown. “Just a standard room, one queen and one twin, for $50.”

We smiled and looked each other. “That sounds good,” we told her.

Without missing a beat, LuJean came right back with, “What if I gave you the intermediate lodge for $85? Could you do $85?” We agreed to check it out. Unfortunately, the fireplace wasn’t really a plus: the whole place smelled like stale smoke, the kind that never comes out of your clothing. I hated to disappoint old LuJean, but I had to bring back the key and take the cheapskate motel room. I left her a $5 tip for hustling like a pro, though.

A Critical Difference

The child in this story is roughly 9 years old.

Father: How was your Halloween party today at school.

Son: Ummm, this girl Matilda, it looked like she was wearing a sign that said “Hitler.”

Father: Oh. Geez.

Son: Yeah, it turned out it just said “Highlighter” though.

Father: You don’t want to get those two confused.

The Priest

It’s been probably 12-15 years since I witnessed this one, but I still remember it vividly. The child, about 6 years old, is in a Party City with his mother, presumably shopping for a costume.

Son: Picks up a huge plastic scythe with a blood-covered blade nearly as long as he is tall, and holds it up for his mother to see. Mommy, mommy, I want to be a priest.

Mother: What kinda fucked up priest you talkin’ bout?

richreich: checks
Viffer said, “omg”
joe E scar: bets $120
Viffer said, “just  anyone in london”
foucault82: folds
loosefer: folds
richreich: calls $120
*** TURN *** [2c Js Tc] [5c]
richreich: bets $874 and is all-in
Viffer said, “just had the best sex ever with some ***** here”
Viffer said, “was gonnna sell her number”

Inside, three shower stalls lined the back wall. Only one other person was in the men’s room, and he was in the middle of the three stalls. “Fish,” I thought to myself as I, seeing no other option, selected the cleaner of the two adjacent stalls.

With nothing better to think about as I showered, I contemplated his serious breach of bathroom ethics. Every man deserving of the name knows that when three adjacent stalls/urinals are available, you take one of the ones on the end so that should a second man enter, he doesn’t have to stand/sit immediately next to you. Only the most conniving, under-handed homosexual would do otherwise.

It was at about this time that I noticed four more, completely empty shower stalls on the opposite wall and realized the gravity of my error. While casting aspersions upon this other gentleman’s bathroom ethics, I’d committed a far more egregious breach myself. Despite a room full of empty stalls, I’d selected the one that brought me into closest proximity to his wet, naked body. If was now standing over in his stall contemplating what a creepy, possibly dangerous sexual deviant I must be, well, he could hardly be blamed.

Evidently there was a glitch on Poker Stars heads up Sit-and-Go’s that enabled players to start a new game using the “Rematch” button even if they did not have sufficient funds in their accounts. What you see here is a small stakes grinder who figured this out and hit up the 5K’s. Clearly the guy’s a thief, but still, it takes some stones for a $100 player to put up $5000 (pretty sure he did have to pay his first buy-in) in the hopes that the glitch exists in the higher stakes games as well.

Scotty from Poker Stars support is supposed to be on next week’s 2+2 Pokercast to explain how Stars is handling the issue, which I’m quite curious to hear. Several 5K SNG regulars have posted e-mails purported to be from Stars explaining that money they won from people abusing this bug has been confiscated. I haven’t yet seen an e-mail confirming that money lost to these players was refunded, though if that happened (and if you think about the optimal strategy for someone abusing this glitch, it’s actually quite unlikely that anyone playing a number of games with them would lose in the long run) I’d be very surprised if Stars didn’t handle it properly. They have far and away the best customer support in the business.

According to Stars security, posting in the 2+2 thread,

Pokerstars became aware of a system glitch which allowed users to accept a rematch in heads-up SNGs despite having insufficient funds in their account. Once we became aware of this we suspended the rematch feature.

We have carefully reviewed each account which played in a SNG where the glitch occurred, and have taken action as appropriate in each case. We did not simply take action against everyone who received a financial gain as a result of this glitch. We carefully investigated each instance, and suspended player accounts only in cases where there was a clear violation of PokerStars’ terms and conditions, such as collusion or chip dumping to exploit this glitch.

During the course of our investigation we initially suspended a small number of accounts, however further investigations proved that some of the accounts in question did not breach our terms and conditions. Those accounts have been re-instated, and we regret any inconvenience caused by the temporary suspension.

It should be noted that only a very small number of accounts have been suspended for abusing this glitch for their financial gain. The majority of affected players have aided us in resolving this problem in a timely manner, and we would like to thank them for their continued support and custom.

We will reactivate the rematch feature as soon as possible, but we’re not sure at this point when that will be. We apologise for any inconvenience that this issue may have caused to our valued customers, and thank those who helped to bring the issue to our attention.

I understand that they can’t keep their winnings, but at the very least, I think anyone who played these guys ought to get some sort of compensation for the time they wasted as a result of this glitch. As you can imagine, the time of a winning 5K SNG player, and if a flaw in the Poker Stars client resulted in time wasted in games where they wouldn’t be allowed to keep their winnings, they ought to be compensated.

Reminds me of how sometimes on the local news you’ll see a story about an ATM that’s spitting out 100’s instead of 20’s and there’s a line of people waiting to use it. I always wondered: why is there a line? Why would the first person ever leave?

(Presumably, the answer is that one can’t withdraw more than 5x one’s account balance or daily withdrawal limit, since the machine still thinks it’s giving 20’s).

I should tell you about the guy we were dealing with first, because he was a character. By nature, he was about as far as you could get from the stereotype of a used car dealer. He’d been a high-end photographer and was only really passionate when talking about all the interesting people he’d shot, from famous poets to Uri Gellar to Chuck Norris. He hinted at some odd turn of fate that had left him selling used cars, but mostly he seemed quite zen about the whole thing.

Despite this, he did occasionally employ some classic salesperson techniques that generally came across as forced, like he was trying out something he’d read in a book or learned during training. However, he twice employed a “I’m not usually one to say this but…” line which sounds like a line but which he delivered in a far more genuine fashion than he had with his other lines. The one that really stood out was, “I can tell you, because I did the intake on this one personally, the woman who brought this car in was a classic. She was the picture of the little old lady who just drives to and from work, never goes over the speed limit, hands at 10 and 2. She’s easily the most perfect prior owner I’ve seen.”

This one is interesting because it’s one of those, “I’m acknowledging that we both know this is a BS line for me, as a used car salesman, to use. And since it’s such a stereotypical ploy, I must be telling the truth!” Much like when I check call a KT8 flop, a K comes on the turn, and my opponent bets again. We both know that he’s representing very little and that he isn’t ‘supposed’ to bluff here and so he couldn’t possibly be bluffing, right?

My curiosity was piqued. So while we were on a test drive, he asked what I did for a living, and got really interested in the whole poker thing. I answered a few of the standard questions: What’s the most you’ve ever won and lost? Is it all just psychology? Have you ever been on TV?

Then I asked him how long he’d been selling cars. “Only a month,” he told me. That would explain his ham-handed lines and his station at the used car desk. But it also takes a lot of the force out of a statement like “the most perfect prior owner I’ve seen.” How many intakes could he have done in a month?

If you’re going to bluff, you’ve got to tell a consistent story across multiple streets.

So we were outside in the pool, about to come in and shower before dinner. I was toweling off when I heard a sudden, angry shout, “Get down! Get down on the fucking ground!” I didn’t even really panic, because although it’s a scary thing to hear, you just don’t expect to get robbed in a La Quinta pool. I mean, is there a stupider place to try to rob someone than a hotel pool?

I looked up, and sure enough there were two men with two guns drawn. Thankfully, they were pointed at a third guy, who is indeed face-down on the ground. As best I could tell, the two with guns were undercover police officers. In any event, they had got no interest in us, so we quickly headed back inside. It was pretty surreal though to see guns brandished at a hotel pool in Mormonville.

The other thing that was kind of funny, in retrospect, were the other two people in the pool with us. There was a little boy, about eight years old, out with his grandmother. The little boy had just dove into the water when he realized he didn’t have his goggles. “Maybe you can just swim without them, and we’ll get them for next time?” Grandma suggested.

“Can’t you just go up and get them?”

“I can’t leave you out here by yourself in the pool.”

“OK.” And so the little boy got out and started walking towards the gate with his grandmother just as the fugitive was being accosted. Knowing now what was to come next, it felt straight out of a Fox crime drama or a Nicholas Cage movie, where one or both of them end up getting taken hostage.

But nothing that exciting happened. There’s been a cop car parked outside all day, but otherwise nothing out of the ordinary.

Usually it’s just some lame joke about the crowds or something, but today, while I was waiting for the elevator at the luxurious Imperial Palace when a skinny man who looked to be in his early fifties walked over and pressed the button as well. “Mmm mmm mmm,” he groaned, shaking his head at me in frustration.

There are about a million reasons why someone might be feeling that way in Vegas, so I just pursed my lips and snorted sympathetically.

“This my last trip with that woman,” he told me. “We get home, I’m gettin’ a divorce.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Mmm hmmm. She outta her goddamn mind. I mean she seriously crazy.”

“Vegas can bring out the worst in people.”

“Naw, man, this been goin’ on. 53 years old and she a muthafuckin’ streetwalkin’ whore.”

I sighed along with him as we boarded the elevator, then asked which floor he was going to. He told me, and I pressed the buttons for both of us.

“Up till now, you know, it was workin’ out alright for me, but I can’t take this shit no more. She is muthafuckin’ nuts.”

“A lot of them are.”

He smiled a bit and laughed for the first time. “You got right, man.”

My stop was first. “Best of luck to you,” I told him.

“Alright, alright, I appreciate that. You too now,” he answered as the doors closed behind me.

There was a huge ice machine in the back room that occasionally spat out batches of frozen cubes into a giant vat. Once per shift, every employee was supposed to shovel the ice into plastic bags, tie them off, and wheel them up into the front to stack them in a display cooler. It was one of the most hated tasks in the store because it was boring, repetitive, and relatively hard physical labor. Usually you needed to hack at the ice with the metal scoop because it all got frozen together, then you had to spoon heavy scoops of the stuff into a bag whose opening was barely larger than the scoop itself. After a few bags, your fingers would be too stiff with cold to tie a good knot, so from time to time a big would spill and then you’d have to clean that up too.

Once Shantel was bagging ice when I heard a loud crash. I stuck my head back there to see what had happened. She was on her knees in front of the machine with one finger in her mouth wiping up blood from the floor with her other hand. “Are you alright?” I asked nervously.

“Yeah. Lid of that freezer slammed on my finger. It got a piece of my meat.” She proudly displayed the finger, which was indeed missing a chunk the size of a sunflower seed and streaming blood.

“Do you want me to call someone?”

“No, I’m fine.”

I had customers, so I couldn’t really argue with her. Eventually she emerged and again displayed the finger, telling me several times how she’d lost some of her “meat”. She’d secured a piece of napkin to the wound with a rubber band, but from time to time she had to replace it when the blood soaked through. I suggested several times that she go home, but she brushed me off, only to arrive at this conclusion herself about half an hour later.

What really made me uncomfortable, though, was when she asked me to cover for her with her abusive husband. She was getting ready to leave him, she told me, and was going to tell him she was working while she went out looking for a new apartment. If he happened to come by looking for her, I was to tell him that the manager had sent her to another location but that I didn’t know where. It probably wouldn’t have been a big deal, but I was completely unprepared to handle the situation if the guy got angry, which it sounded as if he were prone to do.

Thankfully, it never came up. Given the worry that merely imagining such a situation caused me, I sincerely hope that she did successfully leave him. No one should have to live in constant fear of provoking violent anger from a loved one.

In the first place, it’s comically sad that this passes for front page news, albeit below the fold.

What really got me laughing, though, was this awesome quote from a Baltimore balla:

John Furst, who was parking at Broadway Market in Fells Point recently, said he quickly realized that he could buy time on a meter on Eastern Avenue- where the city charges 50 cents an hour- and use that receipt a few blocks over in Fells Point where it costs one dollar an hour to park.

“If you are in the know in Baltimore, you can do well,” Furst said.

Way to scam the city out of fifty cents an hour, John, you badass!

I was one of the store’s best employees, though it’s hard to overstate just how low the bar was set. If I called five minutes before a scheduled shift to say I wasn’t coming, they were just impressed that I called. I was a friend of the owner and his daughter, and once in a while old ladies would go out of their way to tell the manager how much they appreciated the nice young man who knew how to count their change back to them. There was zero chance of my being fired or reprimanded in any way, and I knew it. Consequently, I couldn’t have cared less about Rat Man Carl and his surprise inspections.

He, one the other hand, took great pride in his work. I’m sure he imagined himself a secret agent as he skulked outside the store, waiting like a savanna cat for me to turn my back so that he could slink into the store and surprise me. It disappointed him to no end that I never displayed the least shock or dismay at his sudden appearance nor at the solemn warnings and stern lectures he delivered in a grave tone.

Carl’s son usually worked another store but once had a shift with me. He blatantly stole whatever foodstuffs he wanted and encouraged me to do the same, going to so far as to refuse to ring me up for an ice cream sandwich I ate. I had to ring it up myself, which was itself against company policy but seemed the lesser of two evils.

Several years later I ran into Carl at a Target. We spoke for a minute, and he bragged to me about how he was moving up in the world, making $18/hour as an assistant manager and well on his way to becoming a full-fledged manager. I wished him the best.

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

BTN: $705
SB: $1,359.35
Hero (BB): $1,230
UTG: $1,336.25
MP: $600
CO: $1,828

Pre-Flop: A 7 dealt to Hero (BB)
4 folds, SB calls $3, Hero raises to $18, SB calls $12

Flop: ($36) 3 9 4 (2 Players)
SB checks, Hero checks

Turn: ($36) 8 (2 Players)
SB bets $13, Hero raises to $42, SB calls $29

River: ($120) 3 (2 Players)
SB checks, Hero bets $9, SB raises to $234, Hero calls $225

Results: $588 Pot ($3 Rake)
SB showed T Q (a pair of Threes) and LOST (-$294 NET)
Hero showed A 7 (a flush, Ace high) and WON $585 (+$291 NET)

Unfortunately, I decided to flush the profits and then some on an ill-conceived river check-raise bluff of my own:

Full Tilt Poker, $3/$6 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 5 Players
LeggoPoker.com – Hand History Converter

CO: $998
BTN: $597
Hero (SB): $1,713.20
BB: $352.10
UTG: $1,896.60

Pre-Flop: 8 8 dealt to Hero (SB)
UTG folds, CO raises to $21, BTN folds, Hero calls $18, BB folds

Flop: ($48) 2 J 5 (2 Players)
Hero checks, CO bets $35, Hero calls $35

Turn: ($118) 5 (2 Players)
Hero checks, CO bets $111, Hero calls $111

River: ($340) 7 (2 Players)
Hero checks, CO bets $200, Hero raises to $1,546.20 and is All-In, CO calls $631 and is All-In

Results: $2,002 Pot ($3 Rake)
CO showed J J (a full house, Jacks full of Fives) and WON $1,999 (+$1,001 NET)
Hero showed 8 8 (two pair, Eights and Fives) and LOST (-$998 NET)

First off, I hate the turn call. My thinking was that his range when he near-pots it is polarized to bluffs and boats, but it’s probably so waited towards boats that I don’t belong in the hand anyway. Then I disregard that read on the river and decide based on his bet-sizing that he has an overpair after all and maybe I can take him off of it. Pure sloppiness on my part.

Bear was easily 6’6, rippling with muscles, and, as I’ve said, covered in tattoos. Under no circumstances would I have gotten on his bad side, and it’s a testament to human stupidity that anyone ever did. He told me a story once about a customer of his who requested a custom-designed tattoo. They negotiated a price, and Bear spent a couple of hours inking him up. When he was finished, the guy reached into his pocket and said, “Oh, shit, I’ve only got eighty-seven bucks.”

They went back and forth for a bit, but the guy insisted he couldn’t get his hands on any more money and pleaded with Bear to accept much less than the price they’d agreed upon. Bear finally relented and told the guy to leave a warm, wet compress on the ink for 24 hours.

“Thing is,” Bear growled to me, “you’re only supposed to leave it on for an hour. When he took the compress off, the ink would have run everywhere and left a giant brown smear permanently engraved on his arm.”