Posts Tagged ‘Stud/8’

I don’t have much of interest to report from the other WCOOPs I’ve played recently, which were the $1K NLHE and the $500 NLHE Triple Shootout. I registered 2.5 hours late for the 8-Game but ended up running up a big stack almost immediately but running well in PLO, Triple Draw, and O/8. I lost about 1/3 of my stack in a Stud hand that I probably played badly because I suck at Stud, and then there was this hand in Stud/8.

I think it’s interesting primarily for the 5th street action. I’ve got a small pair, a low draw, and a flush draw, but presumably not yet a winner for anything. Although Villain catches an A, two of the others are dead, it seemed like a good spot for me to try to rep that I had a made Aces up or trip deuces. I doubted he would have better than Kings up. Even that seems unlikely when I end up rivering Kings up myself, but I think his raise on 6th has to be extremely strong. I tanked for a long time before folding the river, and I posted the hand on 2p2 because I’m far from certain I played it correctly.  Read the complete post...

Edit: Support tells me that they are “experiencing some delays” but that points should be awarded appropriately within 24 hours.

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.  Read the complete post...

Edit: Meant to add that there’s still room for a few more people in the league. You can join by searching Club ID # 312467 in the PokerStars Home Games lobby and entering “foucault” when prompted for an Invitation Code.

Thanks to everyone who played in yesterday’s inaugural Thinking Poker Home Game tournament. I had a lot of fun and it seems like everyone else did as well.

Spidurman was our champion, outlasting 15 other competitors, including yours truly, to win first place in the $5+.50 “6-Max and Deep Stacks” event. Bond2King was the runner-up, and Piefarmer bubbled in 3rd place. Also scoring points in the nebulous League Standings were LiPhanOK and QandA201 in 4th and 5th place, respectively. Thus, after one tournament, the current standings look like this:

Don’t ask me how those points are calculated, because I have no idea. As you can see, though, there’s not a huge difference in points between 1st and 5th place, so even if you missed or didn’t do well in yesterday’s tournament, there’s no reason you couldn’t go on to win the season and the grand prize of a Leakfinder review with yours truly.  Read the complete post...

Finished a very frustrating 12/500 in this, capping off a long and shitty day of poker. I was in very good shape approaching the bubble, then got scooped in two sizable pots to get busted down to average as we approach the final two tables. Cyndy Violette took two more big pots off of me, including a questionable value bet that I made with a rivered pair of Aces into her two pair. I can’t complain, really- I was never great at Stud/8 anyway, and I was really rusty to boot. Probably I didn’t even deserve to make it this far. Man another FTOPS win would have been sweet though. Maybe this weekend.

I enjoy Stud/8 and all, but… it’s my birthday, bitches! No poker today. Good luck to those of you playing.

Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Off to a Good Start

On Day 3 of the World Series of Poker, I was feeling good. Nearly 6500 players entered the tournament, and now more than two-thirds of them had been sent packing. With roughly 2000 of us remaining, there was finally room for everyone to play on the same day. It had been a week since I played my first day, but now there were no more days off. Everybody would be playing every day until he lost his chips or there were only nine remaining.

Day 2 had been harrowing. I’d come in short stacked, and despite opposition so tough that Poker News called mine the “Table of Death”, I’d managed to finish the day with just over 90,000 chips, putting me right around the average.

What’s more, my Day 3 table draw looked to be a welcome respite. There were no names I recognized and only one or two other players who even seemed to be professionals of any stripe. Things were looking good for me.  Read the complete post...

Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Ego and Variance

The most difficult thing about playing poker for a living, far more difficult than being good at cards, is dealing with the ups and downs. Although I’ve always ended up with a nice income at the end of the year, I have periods every year where it feels like nothing is going my way and I am losing tons of money. Even after experiencing them multiple times, I still find it difficult to keep a clear head during these “downswings”. This is probably due in part to the fact that for the last few years I have been playing ever higher stakes, meaning that each year brings the necessity of getting used to winning and losing larger sums.

Still, it surprises me a little that although I understand intellectually that poker is a game of the long run and that the results of a single day, week, or month don’t mean very much, emotionally I get stuck on these short-term results. After a good week, I feel like I am the greatest player ever. After a bad week, I often question all of my instincts and decisions, even though in both cases the cards probably contributed far more to the outcome than did my individual decisions.  Read the complete post...

Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Jack Links and NASCAR

The 2009 World Series of Poker was presented by Jack Links Beef Jerky. It takes some effort to step down from Milwaukee’s Best, the presenting sponsor for the past few years, but when a man in a Sasquatch costume appeared on stage to speak, or more accurately to growl, “Shuffle Up and Deal!”, it was apparent that Harrah’s had pulled it off.

Jeffrey Pollack, the commissioner of the WSOP, is a man with an admirable mission and an enormous task: to bring poker into the mainstream of American sports culture. A lot has been accomplished in this regard, much but not all of which can be attributed to Pollack: poker programming has appeared not only on ESPN but on such diverse networks as GSN, Fox Sports, the Travel Channel, and even NBC. The most prominent players are household names, and the WSOP itself is a two-month long spectacle that attracts tens of thousands of players and quite a few spectators as well.

Despite these accomplishments, though, poker has not yet “broken through” entirely. It is still poorly understood by the American public at large and viewed skeptically at best by the sports editors of most major news outlets. Even the WSOP, let alone smaller poker events, have had difficulty attracting sponsors outside of the immediate poker market: online poker sites, poker apparel, energy drinks, and closely related products such as beer and beef jerky.  Read the complete post...