wednesday june 29 :: venetian ladies event

the venetian ladies event was fucking. incredible. i was the youngest person at my table (with the average age of poker scene these days, that’s an accomplishment!) and most pots were limped 6-7 ways, unless i raised the limpers, and they’d get annoyed and grumble but fold anyway. or they’d get annoyed and call, and then check/fold the flop. it’s not often i get to be the young whippersnapper at the table who’s causing all the trouble! i don’t think i showed down a hand once in the first couple levels, just raise some limpers and take it, or c-bet and take it. this was so easy and i loved it! i got myself in a really stupid situation though, when i was in the big blind in a 7ish-way limped pot with 84s. the flop was Q84 rainbow, which was nice for my hand. i wasn’t quite sure (and am still not sure) what the most optimal way to play this hand was though, given the vulnerability of bottom 2-pair on future streets. i discussed this hand with a couple people afterward and the opinions seemed equally split between leading out versus checkraising on the flop. anyway, i decided to lead out for a pretty large bet (probably 2/3 pot or so), and got two callers – one older woman who was generally a calling station, and the button, who was the only other young-ish person at the table, an asian lady in her mid-30s with a baseball cap. she had been playing very tight, but aggressively in the hands she did play, and was one of the only other players putting in pre-flop raises, c-betting, etc. the turn was a 3 of hearts, which was one of the only turn cards it was great seeing, but it was the second heart on the board. i decided to lead the turn again; middle-aged calling station lady gave up her hand, but the button raised my bet about 3x.

this had now become a very awkward spot. i don’t remember now what the blind levels and stacks were so i can’t give exact numbers, but the amount of her raise was about half of my remaining stack. so this became a situation where i would need to commit myself to the hand if i wanted to proceed. i was confident based on my read of this player that this was almost never a bluff, but i was also very confused about what value hands she could be doing this with. i assumed given her tight play until that point, she would almost never be in there with a hand like Q8, even if it was suited. i also thought it unlikely she would play 43s, though it seemed a hair more likely than Q8. i was 100% certain she would have raised a string of limpers preflop with QQ and about 90% certain she would have raised with 88 and AQ, so those were all out. that left 44, KQ, or QJ in the range of hands she might limp behind preflop, call on the flop, and raise on the turn. i could beat two of those hands; however, i couldn’t see why she would ever want to raise on the turn with either KQ or QJ.. unless – could i give her credit for a semibluff!? what if she had now picked up a flush draw with top pair, which would be a legitimately big hand?! sitting two to my right, she had no doubt been observing my aggressive play and general running-over of the table, and maybe she wanted to take a stand and teach me a lesson! obviously that was what was going on. i pushed all in! and.. obviously ran into the only hand she really could have in that spot, 44. she had me covered by a little bit and that was the end of my ladies event. once i thought through the hand afterward i realized what a huge mistake it was to get in with 2 pair in that situation. she was just never ever bluffing and it was also unlikely she was even semibluffing. at the time it seemed crazy to conclude that she had to have the last two 4′s in the deck, but that was absolutely the only hand that made any sense, and i should have been able to fold. i was beating myself up about it for the rest of the afternoon.

in the evening i went back down to the poker room and played a little cash, and also got to meet katie dozier aka hotjenny314, who was still hanging out in the ladies event and ended up making a deep run! also earlier in the day i finally met one of my first internet poker friends sketchy1 who was playing a more fancy venetian event at the same time as the ladies event. on this trip it was awesome to be able to meet so many people i’d been talking to online over the last year. when i’d visited vegas in 2010 it was more just to party since i only knew a couple of people from poker, but this year i was finally starting to feel like i had a bit of a community going on.

thursday june 30 – sunday july 3 :: WSOP adventures

on thursday i packed up groupie headquarters from the lavish Palazzo and relocated to the Rio. the rooms were way not as nice, and this was made even more painful by the fact that because of weekend rates i was paying twice as much for my room (not sure why they think they can call it a “suite” just because they dump a couch in there; it was the size of any regular hotel room) at the Rio than for my very decadent Palazzo suite. but i didn’t care too much – i wasn’t there to hang out in my room!

i got situated and went downstairs to meet up with rob who was hanging out for the TD convention, and we walked around a bit and checked out what was going on in the Rio. we stopped by to rail my former coach alex in an omaha8 event and ran into a bunch of awesome kids i’ve talked to on twitter including marie-lizette and writer jen! after some socializing i moseyed over to the registration window to register for the ladies event the next day, and then headed for one of my favorite vegas destinations – the hooker bar – for some champagne and video poker while i figured out the rest of my evening.

i knew there was a TWSS (the girls twoplustwo forum) meet-up happening at the cosmopolitan, a fashionable new hotel on the strip, and i was eager to meet up with katie and jen shahade and some of the other fine females i’d been conversing with on the internets. it sounded like it was going to be a ton of fun – but that was kind of the problem. i know myself too well, and i know that once i get to a party with a bunch of fun people and drinks aplenty, there’s no going back. i was going to be playing my first ever WSOP tournament the next day, and i couldn’t risk having a hangover for it!

in the rio hallway i ran into marie-lizette, who reminded me that there was a pokerati game ($1/2 NLHE and PLO mix) going on at the palms casino that night.

the palms is right across the street from the rio, so walking over there and chilling in the cash game for a little while seemed like a good low-key plan. the palms poker room was a tad more confined and underwhelming (er like 8 tables??) than i expected, and they only had one snotty waitress who came around maybe every 45 minutes, which was kind of irritating. but the table was a lively bunch which made the game a really good time, and i’d never played live PLO before so that was exciting. i stayed for a couple hours before heading back to rest up for the ladies event.

friday july 1 :: WSOP ladies event

thanks to my non-getting-drunk smarts, i woke up refreshed and ready to tackle the ladies event. i got some coffee and some breakfast and mentally prepared myself for what would be my first WSOP event ever! i thought i would be more nervous, but since i’d already played one of the dailies at the Rio and had hung out for a couple days walking around the tournament area, i felt calm, relaxed, and ready to grind. i always underestimate the time it takes to walk through a casino, and i found myself a couple minutes late for the 12pm start time and rushing in a panic through the casino floor and down the seemingly-neverending hallway that leads to the tournament area. on my way to my seat i ran into mariana, a friend from college who had come to town with her family and was also playing the ladies event. i was indeed a few minutes late, but luckily i had nothing to worry about – there was some kind of nonsense presentation on stage and then lots of music over the loudspeaker and a “flash mob” …yeah. so the tournament was delayed for a good half hour and i was there in plenty of time.

my table seemed like a very good one at first glance. there were four or five older ladies to my left, and a couple of french girls to my right. i figured that they would be the opponents who would give me the most trouble so i was happy to have position on them! one of the french gals was spazzing and dancing around to the “flash mob” and everyone seemed to be in a really good mood. despite all the cheesy intro stuff i do love the vibe at ladies’ events. they are much more friendly and less serious than in regular tournaments. of course, there were a dozen or so dbag guys who decided they were going to crash the party, and whenever one was eliminated the whole room would erupt in cheers and applause.

the BS justifications that some guys have for playing this event are just so ridiculous that it barely even merits arguing about, but since this was my first year playing the WSOP ladies event i feel i should have an obligatory blog rant about it. these guys want to play a soft event, plain and fucking simple. they aren’t doing it for the “principle” or because it’s “unfair” that women get their own event. they are doing it because the average player in a ladies event is far less skilled or experienced than the average player in a regular bracelet event. i would estimate that for at least 90% of the participants, the ladies event was the only tournament they would be playing at the WSOP, and for the majority of them probably the only tournament they would be playing all year (aside from maybe some other ladies events). there are just far fewer female pros than there are male pros, and everyone knows it.

but do you want to know why ladies do (and should) get their own event? i’ve heard varying estimates that women made up between 3 and 5% of the entrant pool this summer in mixed events at the WSOP. that is downright fucking absurd. some women (the obnoxious annie duke comes to mind in particular) like to argue that there shouldn’t be ladies events because “women are just as good as men” and “should be able to compete on a level playing field.” well i agree with both those things, so what is the explanation for why the fuck there aren’t more women playing poker? obviously, women have historically been oppressed in the majority of world cultures. we have made great strides in the last half-century with regard to equal work and education opportunities. when my grandmother got her ph.d. in the 1950′s she was one of the only women in her department. nowadays, more women are going to college than men! so why is there still this massive inequality in the poker world?

i will tell you the reason. the poker world is one of the last bastions of unadulterated, unabashed misogyny. mosey over to any twoplustwo forum and be prepared for animated .gif avatars of gyrating girls in thongs, and random “NSFW” photos of random slutty chicks in bikinis popping up in any random thread. expect to see more comments about melanie weisner’s boobs than her poker skills. when you turn on a WPT broadcast, expect to see more models paid to stand around in skimpy strapless dresses and stilettos than there are female players in the tournament. poker culture delights in objectifying women to an extent that it would be very hard to match in any other industry. because of this pervasive attitude, i’d estimate that playing live poker is about 2-3x more work for a woman than it is for your average male player, because of all the unwanted attention you have to deal with at the table and in casinos in general. every time i enter the card room i am met with “hey baby”s and “what’s goin on little mama”s and most recently, “oooh there she blows!” (er i think i’m offended, but what does that even mean)?

there is no way guys have any idea of the bullshit we put up with on a regular basis simply to play this game. a savvy player will figure out ways use it to her advantage, and adapt to the guy who thinks he can bully you and push you off hands because you’re a girl, or the guy who thinks you always have the nuts because girls are tight, or the guy with a pocket full of roofies who is scheming to buy you a drink. i do think being female is an asset in poker, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still annoying. in my opinion it is best to keep a jolly atmosphere at the table because it keeps the game looser and people aren’t as upset to lose money or keep buying in. i’m friendly with the fish who flirt with me at the table because i want them to play pots with me and give me their money, but then i risk getting followed to the parking lot and getting asked for my number.

if you are a guy reading this and thinking “oh, rough life, guys think you’re hot and want to flirt with you, must be nice” please consider this thought experiment. think about when you sit down at a table, and there’s always one really annoying guy who keeps yammering on about random shit and won’t shut the fuck up. now imagine that every time you sit down at a table, that really annoying guy ESPECIALLY wants to talk to YOU. doesn’t matter if you have a hoodie on. doesn’t matter if you have your headphones on. you are always the target for the most annoying people at the table. or imagine there’s some ugly skank who wants to get all up on your jock whenever you see her, and you have to go out of your way to avoid her. now imagine that every time you go to play poker, you are sitting down to a table with 8 ugly skanks who want to get all up on your jock, who are constantly making comments about you and trying to chat you up. would that be fun for you?

it takes a really strong woman to be able to deal with this shit, and in my opinion that is the reason more ladies don’t play poker. the vast vast majority of women who play ladies events would likely not even consider playing in a mixed event. the chauvinistic environment and the lack of any real effort on the part of male poker players to fucking step into this century is the reason that women deserve their own event. women are already disrespected thoroughly in poker; please don’t add insult to injury by trying to infiltrate our events under the guise of “fairness” or “equality.”

anyway end rant, back to the tournament! the overall level of play was certainly higher than in ladies events i’ve played previously, but the table was playing pretty much as i’d anticipated, with the euro girls playing aggressively and the older women checking and calling a lot. i chipped up playing actively and winning small pots in the first level, but had to raise/fold a couple times as people eventually started playing back at me and 3betting. i tightened up a bit and didn’t play many hands in the second level, and everything was going smooth until just before the first break. i was sitting on just under my starting stack of 3k chips, which was about to become 30bb at 50/100 so i knew i had some work to do when we returned from break. they announced the break over the speaker with about :20 left on the clock and everyone began to gather their stuff to get up from the table, but the dealer, who’d been in the midst of shuffling, said “wait guys, we can get in one more hand!” dun dun dun….

it folded quickly around to me in middle position as everyone was ready to get to the break, and i looked down at AK of diamonds, pretty nice hand. i felt like i probably wouldn’t get action because of the break, but when i opened i got called by two of the older ladies, one to my direct left and one in the big blind. the flop was AKx with two spades (the ace and whatever the other card was. yeah i’m pretty sure you’ve already figured out what’s gonna happen here). but looked like an awesome flop obviously, and even awesomer that the big blind donked right out into the pot. i went ahead and raised because of the flush draw, got flatted by the lady to my left, and the big blind folded. at this point i probably had about 1.5x the pot left in my stack, and the turn of course is another spade but i just don’t think there’s any way i’m ever folding. so you guessed it – i bet, get raised all in and call off vs KJ of spades and don’t boat up. sigh. i was pretty sure she had a value hand since why would she be bluffing, but i knew i had outs if she did have me beat. i did consider checking the turn and seeing what she did, but i didn’t want to give a free card to a lone spade, and anyway i just didn’t think i was folding there no matter what she did, so yeah. two ladies events, two ugly 2-pair hands i couldn’t get away from to send me out the door.

my friend mariana had also busted from the event, so we went over to check out the free slippers. here are my “1K slippers” as she termed them!

we walked around for a little while, and snapped a fan photo with poker legend doyle brunson in the hallway.

i was still feeling pretty juiced up from the ladies event, so i went ahead and registered for the daily deepstack at the rio. it was uneventful; played for a while, went kinda deep but no cash as usual. i busted just around dinnertime and was starving and not too interested in the food options in the poker kitchen, so i wandered around and found a pretty nice steakhouse on the 50th floor of the rio. i got a salad and a nice espresso martini to drown my sorrows, and included was some bread and possibly the healthiest portion of butter i’ve ever seen:

mariana was also playing the deepstack and busted a little while after me, so we met up later for some drinks and gossip. we railed whatever final table was going on in the thunderdome for a while, but railing in the thunderdome really sucks; you can’t see anything that’s going on and the announcers do a horrible job of calling the action. i did get to meet poker photographer and twitter legend BJ nemeth who was snapping pics in the thunderdome, and i also got to say hi to matt matros who was going deep in the mixed limit/no-limit event. matt and i have been playing boggle (it’s a word nerd thing) online for a while on facebook and have some mutual friends, so it was awesome to finally meet! i believe this is at the final 2 or 3 tables.

so a really fun day all in all, despite bricking both my tournaments (and indeed, all the tourns i’d played up until that point). playing the ladies event was an awesome experience and i was really happy i was able to sell enough action to make it possible. i think i was more disappointed that i didn’t come through for my investors than for my own sake, but i have no regrets about playing and will almost certainly play it again next summer if i have the opportunity.

saturday july 2 :: the final failure

on saturday i played the deepstack again, and unsurprisingly played for 6 or 7 hours and fell short of the money once again. nothing interesting to report, and being pretty experienced with bricking live tournaments at this point it didn’t faze me too much. also, matt matros was now at the final table of his event so i got to go rail in the godforsaken thunderdome again! whilst railing i also met some of his fun buddies including lana o’brien and action bob, who also plays the boggle. in keeping with the theme, yet another word game fan and poker sicko nick abou risk turned up to rail as well. despite how hard it was to follow the action at the final table, it was a pretty exciting night because matt won! bracelet #2, such a badass!

we met up with him later on to celebrate at a tapas bar with a bunch of people. so fun!!

so, that was my vegas trip. it’s kind of odd, but the whole experience dramatically increased my confidence in my game despite not cashing in anything. i think i got a good handle on what the tournaments and the structures and the level of play are like. and also just the experience of playing at the WSOP and actually being able to hang made me feel optimistic that i will eventually have some live success.

unfortunately though, the vegas trip was a pretty big “shot” for me to take, and it did not pan out as i was hoping as far as results. as i said i have absolutely no regrets and had an amazing time, but since the trip was exceedingly unprofitable, i was left with very few poker-playing options when i returned. in my next blog i’ll update you about what i’ve been doing post-WSOP!

xoxo thegroupie

when i first planned this excursion, i’d been fixing to stay less than a week. i had my room covered for the first three nights, when i’d be partying with my friends from the east coast. i booked another room on my own from june 27-30, and i planned to play three $200-350ish tournaments – there were a variety of events going on at the venetian, rio, and binions. i mentioned a couple entries ago that i was very torn on whether to sell action for a package that would include the $1k WSOP ladies event, and eventually came to the conclusion that i was not going to do that. but – ! – after writing my last entry i went off to the card club for some tequila-fueled birthday antics, and ended up +$1300.. largest single-session score yet! in the two weeks leading up to my vegas trip, i was now up nearly $3000 in live cash games, and feeling great about poker.

thanks to this little pad to my bankroll, and some mentorly encouragement from mentor shane and a couple of other pro friends, i decided i was going to go for it – i was going to stay for the ladies event on july 1! playing a WSOP event this year has been a goal of mine ever since i got a brief look at the scene when i hit up vegas last year, and it just seemed ridiculous to go there and NOT play the one tournament that i wanted to play the most. it would still have been inadvisable to buy into a $1k tournament myself, but i had a couple friends who’d expressed interest in buying pieces if i decided to play that event. i felt reasonably confident that i could sell enough action to people who i knew and trusted, and could avoid dealing with internet randos and sleazebags. i extended my reservations in vegas and booked a room at the rio through july 3. off we were!

june 24 – 26 : birthday bash

although one of my motivations (er.. justifications) for going to vegas was to celebrate my own birthday, the party was not orchestrated for me, but a friend’s step-mom. the family is very wealthy and organized a lavish weekend-long birthday blowout in vegas, and i was lucky enough to be invited and partake in the abundance. when i arrived at mccarren airport in the early evening, i met up with my friend nadia who had flown in around the same time, and we found that a car service had been arranged to pick us up! i come from a family of coupon-cutters and discount-outlet bargain hunters, so it was cool to experience some ridiculous rich-people shit. first time i’ve had a driver holding a sign with my name at the airport, pretty cool.

our first item on the agenda was a dinner party at SW steakhouse at the wynn. me & nadia outside on the patio:

we were standing in front of this lagoon/waterfall thing, which later featured a gigantic animated robot frog that sang old crooner songs. it was awesome in that “wtf is this”/” errr seriously.. WTF?!?”/”only in vegas” kind of way.

there was of course champagne. a lot of very good champagne!

i have a weird relationship with red meat. i don’t eat it much, but i will have a steak once every 4-6 months or so, and it will be fucking amazing. this one did not disappoint:

my friends were jetlagged and decided to call it a night after dinner, so i went to check out what was happening in the wynn poker room. i was surprised when i found it was rather small and quiet; for some reason i’d envisioned a boisterous high-roller kind of environment. it was around midnight on a friday and it took a while to get my $1/3 seat, which was part of a new table they opened up. as soon as i got to the table i knew it wasn’t going to be a good one – all young males who seemed like solid players ready to grind. one guy already had earphones on and his nose in some poker magazine. no tourists, drunk people, short-buyers, or anyone who looked fishy. i probably should have table changed, but the guy next to me was cute and i was pretty buzzed from several hours of unlimited wine and champagne. i donated a buy-in to the table before i wisely called it a night :P

the next day we hung around for most of the day in a set of cabanas that had been reserved at the encore beach club.

drinking champagne in the pool is always decadent!

at night there was a huge ridiculous party at a private ballroom in the wynn, complete with everything from a karaoke room and temporary tattoo artists, to a red hot chili peppers cover band (yes rly), go-go dancers, and of course lots of great food and drinks.

and cat masks.. obv

i believe we are in the midst of a very horrible rendition of “hungry like the wolf” here.

show me the way to the next whiskey bar….

the dance party lasted through the wee hours of the morning.

so that was all super crazy fun, and i was happy to get some vegas debauchery in before it was time to get to work!

monday, june 27 : poker begins!

partying is great, but i was excited to get down to business and start playing some tournaments. i’d been thinking about playing the ladies event at binion’s, but decided it would be more fun to head over to the rio where all the action was going on!

i registered for the $235 deepstack tournament at 2pm. these were running daily and had a decent enough structure, at least in the early levels. starting stack of 15,000 chips.. my first stack of official WSOP chips of the summer :)

i was a little nervous at the beginning of this tournament. it was my first time playing at the rio, and it was slighly intimidating taking my seat in the giant bustling amazon room. i had heard that the fields in these dailies were soft, but my starting table seemed rather solid, which was kind of annoying. what was with all these capable opponents i was running into?! two guys next to me immediately started talking black friday/internet stuff, and once play started there didn’t seem to be anyone playing obviously weak or bad. one guy, however, was a little spazzy and liked to bluff people and show it, and i ended up busting in a hand with him just before the first break. i had KJ on a K55 board in a limped pot, and i probably normally wouldn’t go broke there, but my opponent seemed like the type who might enjoy going a little apeshit on a paired board. i was last to act during the multi-way hand and i bet after it was checked around to me, and spaz guy checkraised it. when it folded back to me i studied him a little and started a bit of my trying-to-get-a-read line of questioning – “you really have that 5, huh?” dude gave me a very chatty “i’m in the big blind, of course i have the 5. you should fold. save your money” speech. it wasn’t that i thought i had a sick read that he absolutely didn’t have the 5, but i did know that this particular opponent could have a lot of bluffs in his range, and i also thought that given i’d bet when it was checked around to me in position, he could potentially be going for a checkraise with a weaker K or maybe even a random small pocket pair. anyway, the reverse-reverse spiel worked and he had it, oh well!

as i was getting up one of the other players asked if i was going to re-enter, which i wasn’t aware that you could do. players could in fact re-register and hop back in with the starting stack at any time before the end of the first break! i thought about it, as with 15k i’d have 37.5bb going to the 200/400 level after the break, but i was feeling sheepish and annoyed with myself for not finding a fold in that last hand. i decided not to re-enter, and just chill and hang around the rio for the afternoon. the 10k 6-max event was going on, so i went to rail shane & my new friend (and recent bracelet winner!) andy frankenberger with my trusty vegas tour guide (and recent HPT champ!) veerob. rob’s friend lon liked my glasses (upside down).

yes, i wear sunglasses when i play poker. yes, i’m an asshole. when i first started playing live i think it did make me feel more comfortable, since i was afraid of giving off tells. after playing live for around a year now, i feel pretty confident i am not giving away information with my eye movements or facial expressions, but i still do wear my sunglasses – mostly because it is convenient! they are prescription and i can’t wear contacts for long periods of time because my eyes get super dry. and my regular eyeglasses are too dorky and not badass-looking enough for poker. so there you have it. i know some people think it’s super douchy to wear sunglasses at the table, and some people DO wear super douchy looking sunglasses, but i like mine okay.

anyway! at the rio i also met a bunch of cool poker media peeps i’ve been following for awhile, including f-train, jay newnum, and michele lewis! my friend mariko from LA was in town and she came to meet me at the rio. we did some railing and hanging out. mariko and lon had similar shoes, which i thought was cute:

we did some more railbirding and then called it a night!!

tuesday, june 28 : venetian deepstack

i was super excited to play my first $350 venetian deepstack. i like the layout and vibe of the venetian poker room and tournament area, and i felt the structure was better than the rio deepstack structure. once play started i found i also had a much better starting table than i had at the rio the day before. there were a couple of very spewy guys at the table, including a german guy on my direct right who was playing almost every hand, and had amassed a ginormous stack by using the strategy of Never Folding Ever. i was comfortable at this table and felt i had good reads on most of the players, and was ready to take advantage of spots. however, i got into a couple really annoying hands where i had to fold after putting in a lot of chips, and to add insult to injury my beautiful table broke just as i’d been knocked down to around 20bb.

though i was displeased about my spewtastic table breaking, it was a pleasant surprise to find new friend lon at my new table. it was a pretty good table as well and i lasted a couple more levels chipping up and maintaining my stack, but eventually got in reshipping 20ish bb with AQ over a supremely bad player’s opening raise. he called with KJ and got there :\ as it happened, new friend lon busted shortly after i did, and we went out to the pool area, where there happened to be $10 blackjack tables. we decided to sit with $100 apiece and play some just for kicks. when i’d been hanging with the birthday party crew over the weekend, we’d had a few conversations with a guy who was a professional blackjack player and had written two books on it, so i was semi-apprised of appropriate blackjack strategy. blackjack is still a luck game more than a skill game, but for some reason lon and i crushed the shit out of it, and within an hour we had each doubled our buy-in and made $100 in profit. how about that?!

i can see how people get addicted to (or at least, tempted by) luck-based pit games. it’s no work, all you have to do is hit that card you need or roll the right number, and you double your money for basically zero effort. in a cash game it could take hours to double your buy-in; in a tournament, it could take days. when you win money in casino games, it feels stupidly easy and fun compared to poker. we bounced around the casino floor at the venetian all afternoon and played some craps and roulette, and surprisingly broke even on those games. but got free drinks the whole time which is cool. we even fucked around at some $4/8 HORSE for a bit. though i’d recently attended a $.50/1 mixed-game home game, and though i’ve sat a few times at the omaha-8 table at my local card club, i’d never played HORSE in a casino before, so that was another new experience for me. i pretty much suck at all stud games and hate them (though for some reason i hate razz less than the other two), and spewed a bunch before getting back to even when i scooped a big 3-way pot in trusty old omaha-8.

i also got a chance to take a spin at the limit hold-em heads up machine, which turned out to be boatloads of fun. i was skeptical at first as i find limit HE pretty tedious and and i’m not that familiar with the strategy (especially for preflop heads-up action – i.e. what ranges to raise, call, 3-bet; when to fold, if ever). postflop i felt pretty good about my decision making, since it mostly revolves around looking at your pot odds just as in no limit. i believe the machine employs a few different types of strategies or “personalities” and switches between them at random, and we definitely caught him in monkey mode. he loved to checkraise with complete air – i’d say probably c/r’ed over 50% of flops from out of position. it was impossible to make him fold at any point before the turn without putting in 3 or 4 bets; i don’t think he folded one flop, and would bluff raise frequently, and even called me down once with K hi on the river. one cool feature was that you could always press a button to see the machine’s cards at the end of a hand, even if you had folded, so you never felt obligated to call bets solely for information. overall i think we won around $20 playing at .25/.50. i found it really entertaining to play against a bot, especially with the ridiculous and tricky (but often spewy!) plays it was making. i would love it if they could get these machines in california card rooms!

to be continued..

so last night i think i fucked up and accidentally hit “publish” on this too soon, and since it’s getting long i think i’m gonna go ahead and put it up now, and post another entry for the remainder of my trip june 29 – july 3. part II will include: the venetian ladies event, the WSOP ladies event, assorted rio & palms adventures, and very likely a lot more name-dropping because i met way too many cool people. stay tuned!!!

at the time of my last update, i was still waiting to see whether it looked like full tilt would return player funds by the end of the summer. however, after phil ivey came out with a scathing denouncement of the site a few days later, i knew there was no chance of that happening. until that point, i kept telling myself to just be patient a few more weeks for full tilt to get their shit together – all i needed was to get my online bankroll, and then i could use it to make a fresh start playing live. but when it became apparent that they do not actually have the money, and that i will not see my funds ANY time soon, or possibly ever, my financial reality became too bleak to ignore. i’d squandered all the profits i’d made playing live up until then, and was left with only a few months’ living expenses, and i knew it was too dangerous to try to use that money for a live bankroll.

it seemed delusional to think i could somehow continue with poker under those circumstances. i couldn’t play online anymore, and i had no bankroll for playing live. at that point i made the decision to abandon the idea of playing poker professionally. i gave up.

it was the worst feeling i’ve had in a long long time. it felt like the tenuous strings that were holding me together emotionally frayed and broke apart, for real, and for good. i was transported back to the despair i felt just after i finished my ph.d., to the feeling of being stuck in some horrible limbo state with a fancy – but mostly useless – degree, and no idea what to do with my life. from late may to early june i spent a couple “lost” weeks being drunk out of my mind and doing stuff i mostly don’t remember. once i got it together a little bit, i spent another few days aimlessly applying to temp agencies and random office jobs on craigslist to no avail (i have yet to hear back from any of them).

i was still playing online on carbon just for kicks; i’d won a $3 rebuy tournament for $1300 in mid-may, and that was helpful in reassuring me i can at least still play poker. however, with the current state of online poker and the merge network in particular, i am skeptical i will ever see that money. after that score i requested a check withdrawal from carbon (conveniently they offer no visa, bank wire, or electronic withdrawal options for US players), and it has been “pending approval” for at least a month now. on twoplustwo forums i read that checks take 4-6 weeks, and many of them bounce upon arrival, soo.. great. anyway, i’ve been continuing to fuck around on there and in the beginning of june i had a $700 score for a 2nd place finish in another MTT, so that felt good as well. again, i have absurdly minimal expectations of ever successfully withdrawing that money, but it’s nice to be able to play online, even if it’s just to keep my skills sharp.

the world series in las vegas kicked off in the beginning of june, and of course i’ve been jealous out of my mind reading updates from all the pro players on twitter, obsessively keeping up with the reporting on pokernews as all the tournaments progress, and watching most of the final table live streams on the WSOP website. once upon a time i’d hoped i’d be there too, but after my “retirement” i had fully resigned myself to the fact that i wouldn’t be going to vegas this summer.

but then.. ! a fortuitous occurrence!

one of my best friends ever in the entire world from back east texted me, saying that she would be in vegas the weekend of the 24th, that her boyfriend’s mom was throwing some big ritzy party at the encore, and that they had reserved a room for me there! so of course, this got the wheels rolling in my mischievous head. i’d already worked up a schedule of events for late june back when i was thinking of selling action for a package, so i knew there were a few tournaments around that time. there were ladies’ events at binions and at the venetian, along with the usual deepstack schedule there, not to mention this daily deepstack thing at the rio, low buy-in nightlies at aria, and of course juicy cash games everywhere..! basically, everything i could ever want poker-wise, and more, is happening :)

as you can imagine, i didn’t need too much convincing to book a flight to vegas. my own birthday is june 22, and while i’d envisioned some exciting plans involving a bottle of cheap prosecco, my cat, and some talking heads records, obviously i couldn’t say no to a free room in vegas and a chance to celebrate with friends i’ve been dying to see for months. however, i realized that if i was going to be partying with my friends all weekend, there would not be much time for poker. so, ill-advised or not, i decided to go ahead and make a little trip of it, and booked another room through thursday the 30th so i’d have time to play some small buy-in tournaments and maybe get my groupie on at the world series.

after this glimmer of hope about vegas had been restored, i think it gave me peace of mind in some perverse way. it didn’t change anything about my dismal financial situation, but it was like this absurd and irrational assurance that things were all going to be okay again. for the first time in weeks i started feeling motivated about life in general, and i started having the strong desire to play live. i knew it was not sensible to put money that i needed at risk, but i just had this resurgence of confidence and sense of well-being, that this is what i was supposed to be doing. all it took was the idea of potentially going to vegas this summer, to somehow make things right again in my fucked-up world.

i took a trip to a casino i’d never been to, about half an hour north, and within two hours i’d turned my $200 buy-in into $700. it was one of the first winning sessions i’ve had since black friday. my spirits up, i then went over to my usual card club, and turned another $500 profit there. in a few hours, i had made $1k! so that was awesome, and after some really awful sessions just after black friday, the last couple weeks have been huge in restoring my faith in my live game. since that night i’ve played a few more times, at a couple of home games and down at bay101, and i’ve had winning sessions every time! i’m so happy about that – i’ve got a little vegas fund going now, and i’m hoping i can grow it further in the next few days before i head out there.

so now i’ve got approximately three hours until the clock strikes BIRTHDAY. i’m going to finish my champagne and head over to the card club to hopefully continue the winning. i am so ridiculously excited about going to vegas on friday! and even though i’m aware that there isn’t a great likelihood i will win a lot of money (or any money), i’m just so glad for the chance to get out there, and i’m looking forward to meeting lots of people and just being part of things in my mostly sad groupie capacity.

off to the tables, wish me luck, though hopefully i won’t need it!!! ;)
xoxox thegroupie

i tried to do the live-pro thing, and basically got massacred every time i sat down at a table. i couldn’t figure out why it was, that in the same games where i usually turned a nice profit every time i played, i just couldn’t seem to have a winning session after black friday. i’ve been playing live with winning results consistently since last july or so, but somehow it just evaporated. and it was not in any way due to an influx of internet players – i’d see a new face here and there, but it’s not like a bunch of online ballers were coming in and dominating my local card rooms. it was 95% the same donks, donk regs, and degens as usual. there was no reason why i shouldn’t be taking a few hundred dollars off them every night as usual. but after black friday something was different.

it took me a little while to realize – i was what was different. in the last couple weeks i did take a bunch of legitimately disgusting beats for buy-in after buy-in that i won’t bore you with the details of. but instead of say, quitting after dropping two buy-ins to gross suckouts, i’d buy in again. and order another drink. and start looking for spots to gamble and get even, start trying to bluff in spots where i should know a live donk will never fold his bottom pair or gutshot, and otherwise unwisely lag it up in attempts to prove that i could own these jokers who kept on getting lucky on me. which of course, wouldn’t happen.

i lost my discipline and i lost my patience. before black friday, i was playing live maybe 2 or 3 times a week at the maximum, and i’d rarely play sessions longer than 4 hours. i’d go on friday or saturday nights, and have some fun with it. playing live used to be a nice break from grinding online, and it was almost kind of like a treat, as it has generally been the maximum extent of my social activity in 2011. if i took a frustrating beat or was otherwise annoyed with the table, i’d just go home and fire up some super turbos or hop into a succulent multi-entry crackhead omaha.

after black friday i didn’t have a choice anymore. it was either the annoying table where i kept getting sucked out on, or the other annoying table that i took care not to sit at in the first place – or go home annoyed and stuck. which is almost always the most prudent course of action in this situation. but that requires patience and discipline, and as i mentioned, those are skills that seem to elude me at present.

it wasn’t a conscious thing at all, but i think now i realize that once live poker became a “job” rather than a friday night diversion, i started to just NOT enjoy it. i don’t want to be a live cash pro. i don’t want to spend every day interacting with smelly depressing men, being leered at constantly, listening to the same goddamn playlist over and over on my iphone because i’m too lazy to make a new one that will play long enough for a long poker session, obsessively rubbing hand sanitizer on my hands every ten minutes, scanning the casino menu for the umpteenth time trying to find something safe (forget healthy) to order besides french fries or grilled cheese.

i now realize just how much of the appeal of playing poker was being able to work from home the majority of the time, in a clean environment that i like, with all my music and food and a comfortable chair and no one fucking bothering me. i just wish things could go back to the way they were, because i still love poker, and still like it much better than any other activity one can make money at (yah, i’m pretty sure you can’t get paid to drink champagne, and having sex for money is kind of a no-no). and i don’t dislike playing live, i quite enjoy it when i have the hankering to play live. but the past month has taught me that i do not have the capability to make a career of playing live cash – at least at the stakes i can afford at present.

so now i am faced with some depressing decisions in the face of the looming WSOP and tournament-packed summer in las vegas. i was hoping to run up some money playing live and have a little cushion to allow me to play some tournaments this summer. instead i spewed all my money, and basically cannot play any more live poker until i get my online bankroll back from full tilt. this means that until full tilt releases player funds, i won’t be making any plans to go to vegas. a couple people have asked me: why not just sell most or all your action, so you can at least play some tournaments and get some WSOP experience? the answer to that is mostly personal rather than financial. for the last few weeks i’ve been going back and forth on making a package of events (venetian deepstack tournaments and the WSOP ladies event in particular) to sell action on, and i did receive more interest than i expected, from a few investors. i want more than anything to be able to go to vegas this summer and play some stuff, but it may not be realistic given how i like to do things.

i think it is quite feasible i could sell enough action to play the tournaments i want to play if i don’t get my money from online in time. but if i am going to be backed, i want to be backed by people i trust, by people who know me, who understand the way i think, and who have faith in my game and my abilities. i don’t want to have to sell 1% and 2% pieces to random people who i feel i have to prove myself to, and deal with a bunch of paypal transactions or run all over vegas trying to meet up with a slew of creepy forum dudes to collect the buy-ins. one of the things i like best about poker is that i can do it on my own terms, and not have to answer to anyone. i suspect that having to sell myself to potential backers might completely negate that aspect of things. i’d continually be having to explain myself, to justify to them why i was worth their investment. i spent six years in graduate school doing that – having to prove my worth compared to other people, having to beg professors for research funding or apply to assorted institutions for grants, feeling like i was never good enough, never competitive enough, never deserving enough.

in poker i answer only to myself, and i like it that way. i understand that i have done things the hard way by trying to build a bankroll on my own, moving my way up through micro and low-stakes games. i know it might seem ridiculous in this day and age to try to be like durrrr and deposit $50 and never look back. but that’s what i’ve done, and it’s worked for me so far. i know it would be “smarter” to exaggerate my credentials and find some sleazy backer who will stake me for whatever i want to play, run a debt up to 20 or 40K in buy ins for “real” tournaments before i randomly bink something, and then instantly “become” somebody. but that’s not the way i do things.

so the plan for now is, for full tilt to give everyone back their money before late june (pls? whee!!) and for me to go out to vegas and play some nice juicy stuff on my own mini-roll. and of course bink and instantly “become” somebody :) but i am pretty certain i’m not going to make any kind of schedule or sell shares on a public forum in advance. it may be stubborn, but i am determined to do things right, and whether it’s advisable or not, that means playing most tournaments on my own dime. however, if and when i do figure out what events i’m playing, i’d certainly be interested in selling a percentage or two to people i know personally (or internet-ly). if you want to get in on it, you can let me know either here, on twitter, or via email (thegroupie@thegroupie.com).

hopefully full tilt will hurry the fuck up and sort themselves out, and i’ll be seeing you in vegas in a month or so :)

xo thegroupie

and then – just like that – i woke up one day and it was gone. now i find myself surveying the wasteland of my former optimism, wading through the wreckage to see if i can find anything from which to rebuild.

after the initial shock, a lot of the players who have been around for awhile seem to have adopted the attitude of “well, we knew this was going to happen eventually. it didn’t happen the way we wanted, but now we’ll finally get a regulated system in place, let’s suck it up and do other stuff in the meantime while we wait for online poker to come back.” this is a pragmatic and sensible viewpoint. it’s also a viewpoint that is easier to have when (a) you have saved up lots of money to live on; (b) you already have a large bankroll and/or a staking arrangement to play live events; (c) you have already attained some success, respect, and a generally secure footing in the community.

i have none of those things. i was just beginning to lay the foundation for those things. for an established player it might not be a big deal to take a break from playing online for a few months (or even a few years) while the politicians, casino conglomerates, and indian gaming interests hash it out for their share of the future government-regulated online poker market. for someone just starting out, it is the worst disaster possible. i’ve spent over a year nurturing the beginnings of a career in poker, starting from nothing and painstakingly building it brick by brick, doing it completely on my own. no bankroll, no stake, no poker friends, no support system. i was just beginning to figure out the poker world, and now its whole infrastructure has been violently uprooted. and the little piece of it that i’ve been carving out, that i’ve put all my energy into, that i’ve taken all this care to build from scratch, has been toppled right over along with everything else.

my loss is nothing compared to that of a lot of the online grinders who were having really substantial success. i kind of feel like a joke fretting over a few thousand dollars in limbo online and the loss of a budding career, when a lot of people have hundreds of thousands tied up and much more profitable online careers that are now in jeopardy. but in the same way this is probably everything to them, it is also everything to me.

what the fuck shall i do now?

try to grind it out on merge and cake and some other half-baked poker sites? it might be a start. i actually started messing around on carbon a couple months ago, and was amazed at how bad the players were compared to the big sites. i got the feeling that was how it was on partypoker back in the poker boom days. but, i got bored with their sparse MTT schedule, and also my HUD doesn’t work properly with their software which makes it a pain to multitable. i’ll probably start playing a little more there given that it’s one of the only remaining sites still allowing US players, but i don’t think that can be a full solution.

say good game, throw in the towel, and find a “real” job? maybe. i’m sure my parents would love that. a week ago it would have been laughable, but i am now faced with the reality that i no longer have any means of online income. live play happens at higher stakes, and i will no longer have the luxury of bankroll management. my plan for now is to try to make it work playing live cash full time, as i am feeling good about my cash game lately. in general it has been more consistent money than playing tournaments, but i don’t know if it is a sustainable long term source of income, and i also don’t know how many live hours i can realistically put in on a weekly basis. right now i enjoy playing live poker – when i feel like playing live poker. i don’t know how much i’d enjoy grinding it out 8 or more hours every day in that environment. plus the games at my local club suck during the day, filled with the nittiest of nit regs and crotchety old retired guys who buy in for $40 and only play a hand when they have aces. i’d probably have to adopt a graveyard shift schedule if i wanted to maximize my profits, and i’m too fucking old to be staying up all night.

the no-bankroll-management part is probably the scariest part though. i’ve been comfortable playing live cash games that are well above what my bankroll should dictate, partly because the players are just so terrible that it’s not extremely high-variance, and partly because i’ve always had my online roll to fall back on. now i guess my whole roll is going to have to be a live roll, and live buy-ins are huge. i have no cushion and no room for error; once i’m busto, i’m busto. so my last resort is to re-enter the white collar workforce, but my plan for now is to do it up live and (hopefully) not go busto.

i have spent so many months trying to convince my family that i am not wasting my life, trying to prove to skeptical friends that i am on a valid career path, trying to reassure myself that i am cut out for the brutal and precarious poker life. i had so many doubts, which are well-documented in this blog, but i was confident that if i worked hard enough i would succeed. i had no backup plan. this was the plan. this is my identity now – poker isn’t just some “thing” i’m doing anymore. it is all i am doing. i have poured all my heart and soul and cognitive energy and discipline and intelligence and frustration and patience and emotional fortitude and disgust and perceptiveness and hope and bitterness and perseverance and love into this fucking thing. it’s all i want to do, and in many ways, it’s all i’ve got.

these fragments i have shored against my ruins; online poker might be gone, but my dream is not. i am going to play live cash until i drop, and play as many live tournaments as my feeble bankroll will allow. i am still as motivated and as confident in my game as ever, and this is the first time i’ve felt like i’m doing what i want to be doing with my life. i can’t bear to give it up.

yet..

-thegroupie

i actually traveled to krakow and some other places in europe a few years ago, if you’re feeling adventurous you can check out my travel blog from that trip. i meant to link that before since i now have my homepage URL referring directly to this here blog. i like to travel, i haven’t gone anywhere cool recently, but the year after that i went to israel & sweden and then the year after that i spent a summer in belgium, and i keep meaning to organize those pictures in a similar fashion and put them up. so this is my official reminder to myself to do that already. anyway, enough about the long lost days when i used to have a life, we’re here to discuss poker!

as i talked about in my last blog, my online results during the first few months of 2011 were not particularly stellar, and i wasn’t #winning much at all. as my bankroll continued to stagnate, i started getting discouraged, and for the first time in a long time i felt my confidence begin to slip away from me. it was becoming more and more difficult to suppress the nagging fear that i might just not be cut out for this mad poker world. i described in a previous entry how i generally have better results in live cash games when i’m feeling good, and the fact of the matter is, an absolutely critical psychological and emotional element of being a successful player is having confidence in yourself.

poker players always emphasize not being “results-oriented,” meaning that you must focus on the decision-making process rather than the outcome. this is an oversimplified example, but if you get all the money in when you’re a 70% favorite to win a hand, you’re still going to lose that hand the other 30% of the time. and that 30% of the time when you lose all the money in front of you, it sucks. a lot! but you still made the right play. if you continue to make that decision every time you are in a situation where you are a favorite to win, and you play hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of hands (i recently hit 300,000. groupie milestone!), you make money at poker. that’s the whole point of poker! making the decisions that will result in the maximum expected value over time, regardless of the outcome of one particular instance.

but the problem with this, is that you’re stuck in a position where you have no idea if your lack of immediate results means you’re on a downswing attributable to normal statistical variance, or if you just plain suck and need to get better. and recently i’ve had no discernible evidence to suggest that i have been making progress, but i have had plenty of poor results that could indicate that i might, in fact, suck. rationally i know that i can’t be results-oriented, but those nagging feelings of insecurity about my ability and my potential for future success just kept resurfacing and eating at me, and i think it was beginning to affect my game.

so a couple weeks ago, i was chatting on twitter with shaniac, aka shane schleger, who has been a successful high-stakes tournament pro for many years and recently got a sponsorship as a member of the pokerstars online team. he also has one of the most interesting blogs written by a poker player – it’s not a detailed and minute account of poker hands or situations or strategies, or a pointless regurgitation of what time he woke up for the gym and what he ate for breakfast. i think it’s one of the only blogs i’ve come across that has given me any real insight into what life playing the big high-stakes tournaments might be like. anyway, he had read my blog here and decided it would be fun to make me a “poker protege,” offering to stake me in two sunday tournaments on pokerstars: the sunday storm (which used to be the sunday quarter million; it’s an $11 buy in but now with a whopping $1m guarantee), and the sunday million, which is the canonical high-stakes sunday MTT that all the pros play (and that every noob like me desperately wants to play)! of course i gladly accepted this offer. i don’t play much on pokerstars for a few mostly circumstantial reasons – i’ve built my roll up on full tilt and it’s a pain to transfer funds between sites, and i’ve also got a nice database of hand histories on my full tilt opponents since i’ve played so much there. as much as i’ve disavowed academia, i’m still a scientist at heart, and if there’s one thing about scientists – we love data! i consider it a huge advantage to have prior statistics on my opponents; this can be essential for predicting their behavior and determining how to play against them. but in any case, i don’t have the bankroll yet to play ANY $200 tournaments online, so this was a really exciting opportunity for me. unfortunately i didn’t cash in either tournament, so it was a lame and not very protege-esque performance. i actually got close to making the money in the sunday million, but it was not to be. i got in some weird spots, blah blah, i don’t know if i feel like going into specifics about hands in this entry so i’ll just leave it at that.

anyway that was two sundays ago, and i’m pissed i didn’t take down the sunday million because that would have been cool and stuff, but i think that the simple fact that a legitimate pro who i have an immense amount of respect for would consider me a potentially good/random/interesting investment, even if it’s just for twitter kicks, really revived some of my confidence. part of what i love about poker is how individualistic it is, and how i can set my own goals and standards for success – but for someone who is just starting out, it’s so hard to determine whether i’m actually doing anything right. sometimes you can make all the best decisions and get unlucky and lose hand after hand; sometimes you can be doing everything totally wrong and luckbox your way into a major score. because of this disconnect between skill and results, i feel like i’m not necessarily qualified to judge if what i’m doing is working – i need someone with experience and expertise to tell me if i’m on the right track! but that gets back to another problem that i also described recently: so many poker players think they know everything and are the awesomest fucking thing ever. sometimes it feels like people who are trying to “help” me are really just trying to pad their own egos by pointing out things that they know and i don’t.

as corny as this is going to sound, i think i just needed somebody to believe in me. because a couple days ago.. i finally won a big tournament! it was a dinky $3 buy in, but there were over 5,000 entrants so first place came out to over $2100, making this my new largest online cash by about $100! yay! it was also the first big MTT that i’ve won outright, my other four-figure cashes all having come from third-place finishes or lower. winning is pretty fucking rad :) this has also brought my bankroll to its highest point yet, which is going to allow me to work some more mid-stakes MTTs into my routine.

so yeah. winning! i’m finally feeling good again. this has gone a long long way toward restoring my confidence. perhaps that might be results-oriented thinking, but i’ll take it for now :)

-thegroupie

right now i am struggling with some contradictory feelings about poker, in terms of my play and my progress. subjectively, in my own mind, i have the strong sense that i am improving at a rapid rate. it really seems like every day i play poker and watch training videos and rail high stakes games and read pros’ blogs, i learn more and get better. on the other hand, my bankroll online has basically been at a standstill for the last 6 or 8 months. well, not a standstill really – i’ve been playing a lot of volume and it fluctuates quite a bit from day to day – but i haven’t been seeing consistent growth. part of this has to do with shifting my focus to live play for several months, and part of it is certainly attributable to the high-variance nature of playing MTTs. but how big a part of it? how much longer do i essentially need to operate on blind faith that i am going to really win a tournament for $5K or $8K or $20K one of these days? because i NEED TO so i can stop being stuck in this bankroll limbo. i’ll have small losing days and small losing days and then maybe i’ll win $800 or 1K for a 5th or 6th place finish every few weeks. and it just repeats over and over. i’m getting impatient.

when i think about that, i get discouraged. it feels like i’m on a stationary bike, pedaling in place. but then when i think about the bigger picture, it feels like i’ve come insanely far. last march, i decided i would go down to the bay 101 to check out the WPT shooting star. i had been playing micro and low stakes MTTs online for several months and had watched every televised poker event i could get my hands on, but i had never even played in a card room or casino. one year ago, live poker was a completely alien phenomenon to me; even being inside bay101 at all, was intimidating. i recognized all these big time poker players i’d seen on tv shows, and i tried to watch for a couple of hours, but quickly realized that railing a tournament is the most boring thing on the planet. after a beer or two i was on my merry way, and i told myself that the next time i went back there, no way i’d be slumming it on the rail – i’d be playing that tournament!

last week i returned to the bay 101 shooting star, unfortunately not to play (turns out that jumping into 10k events after playing poker for one year was a bit of an ambitious goal, haha), but to say hi to my buddy veerob from vegas who was running the live feed, and meet up with a couple people i’d been chatting with online. just thinking about what it was like to return to that setting, and the enormous strides i have made in the last year, is kind of mind boggling. first of all, i’m not a total random gawker anymore – i actually know some people in the poker world! and i might not be playing WPT events yet, but i’m a real life live poker player now. when i first set foot in bay101 i was nervous and intimidated; i’ve now played there a bunch of times and get excited about popping down every few weeks to take money from silicon valley nerds.

so yeah, i kind of alternate between being disappointed with my lack of progress online, and amazed by my progress as a poker player on the whole. i think one of my problems is i want to do everything all at once, right now. i want to be a great online tournament player and i want to do it while multitabling 10 tables and i also want to be a great live cash player and the most important goal, a great live tournament player. i want all of it!! and i think trying to do it all at once, means it has been slow going. i think if i had focused solely on playing online for the last 6 months, i would have a lot more results there. but then i wouldn’t have all these live skills and live knowledge! so i guess i have to accept that becoming a well-rounded poker player has to be a slow process if i want to do it right, and just have faith that my efforts are going to be rewarded. MTTs are a sick and brutal business and luck is something i can’t control, but i can put myself in the best position i can to capitalize on it when it decides to go my way. one of these days i’m going to win that giant flip at the final two tables. one of these days i’m not going to get 2-outed when we’re down to 5-handed, and i’m going to win the tournament. and the better i play, the more i learn, the more deep runs i will have, the more final tables i will get to, the more chances i will have to acquire that all-important big score. so i’m just going to keep at it online and try to play my best and make good decisions at every point.

live poker has been pretty good to me in the 2011. not live tournaments of course, but live cash games. i seem to win almost every time i play these days. i’m up around $1500 over my last twenty sessions (this is at $1/2 spread-limit). normally those profits would be squandered immediately on live tournament buy-ins, but i’ve banned myself from playing the tournaments at my card club. it pains my MTT-devoted heart to have to do that, but i need to suck it up and admit to myself that tournaments with such abominable structures are not good investments. if i have a skill edge, it is completely negated at the endgame when there is no play left and you literally NEED to luck out with your 8bb average stack at the final two tables. furthermore the buy-ins are too high for my live pseudo-bankroll. it’s just not a good use of my money all around. so i’m saving up my live earnings and using that money for bills and practical stuff, kind of viewing that as my ‘salary’ while i continue to work on my online game.

so what about live tournaments? as i say, i’m off that junk for the moment. i canceled my trip to reno for the ladies event weekend, when i looked closely at the numbers it didn’t seem worth it to eat $400 in travel costs for three tournaments with small buy-ins. the fields don’t get that big in ladies events so i’d pretty much have needed to win one of the tourns just to break even on the trip. plus, the structure sheets weren’t posted anywhere online, so i wasn’t even going to know whether i’d be driving 3-4 hours to play reasonable events or turbo spewfests. there’s a ladies event next sunday at bay101 – the LIPS tour – that i am considering playing, but the structure doesn’t look super great. 10k in starting chips is nice, but 20 minute levels and ginormous antes aren’t; it’s basically like one of my terrible nightlys but with double the starting stack. and it starts at 9:30am which is pretty disgusting, even with the enticement of an 8am players “champagne buffet.” we’ll see if i feel like it; i love ladies events and one with a $300 buyin is going to make for a nice prize pool. i also think there is huge value in getting exposure in live tournaments and making contacts in the poker community. but honestly, that gnarly start time is probably going to dissuade me even more than the questionable structure. i couldn’t even wake up yesterday for the 10am miniFTOPS event.

so i guess i’m putting live tournaments on hold for now, while i save up a roll playing cash games. i think that’s going to be my best course of action. when i’ve got a few more dimes lying around i will return to live tournaments, my one true love..

:)
thegroupie

at this stage of the tournament, the final two tables, every nitty old dude with no concept of ICM is simply trying to get into the money and make the final table, where 5, 7, or even 10-way chops are pretty common. only a few things happen at the final 2 tables:

-everyone folds around, walking the big blind.
-the one guy with a giant stack 3x’es it if it’s folded to him, everyone folds.
-someone open shoves, and everyone folds.
-someone open shoves, and someone calls only if they have a very good hand or a giant stack.
-blinds eat everyone. quickly.

with my stack having just gone from a little under 10bb to more like 7bb, i decided to open shove A7o from early-middle position. the guy with the giant stack called with QQ and held.

why am i so tilted about this? it’s a fairly standard play (unless you are chip leader 3 handed at the main event of the WSOP.. in which case you might want to consider not playing A7 vs QQ for all your chips lol. not the same situation obv but i just realized it was the same two hands). any raise was getting folds around the table unless someone woke up with a hand, which is what happened in my case. it’s just unlucky. am i more pissed about getting unlucky, or more pissed that i could have actually raise/folded in this situation? i keep telling myself about to just NOT SHOVE when i have a hand i’m “supposed” to shove but will certainly be a losing hand if i’m called. i keep telling myself to just fucking fold my way to the money one time so i can get this monkey off my back about not having any live cashes.

i could have 2.1-2.3x’ed it with A7 with the intention of folding to a shove (2x raises are a little dicey when you are talking about live regs. even with average stacks of <20bb, they still make a standard raise to 3x. yes they are dumb, but the point is that a raise to 2x the big blind will not get folds often enough. i made the mistake of 2x’ing with 32o into a guy’s bb who’d been blinding himself down for hours and had about 5bb, figuring he’d just fold as usual. he looked at his cards, said “hmm – i’m suited!” and defended. luckily for me he check-folded the flop hahaha). but i’m not playing the tournament to mincash. i don’t want to fold my way to the final table with 3bb. but, i also don’t want to keep not cashing. it’s just really really frustrating to NEVER RUN GOOD when i get to the end of one of these tournaments. just someone not waking up with a monster hand every time i shove a marginal one trying to pick up the blinds, would be nice. is that too much to ask?!??! not gonna even bother begging the poker gods to let me get there with a 30/70 hand one time when i’m pretty sure my 80/20s hold up about half the time in live tournaments.

anyway, i don’t mind my shove i guess, but i mind it a little in this situation because it didn’t work out, and it NEVER seems to work out. at this point i am starting to need to be results oriented because i don’t have any live tournament results and as i’ve said before, i can’t afford to keep on playing tournaments and not cashing. so i’m feeling bummed and annoyed and generally fed up with poker today.

another thing that really tilted me last night, was this middle aged reg who i chatted with last week in the bar area. he had been playing at my cash table on friday, and it was the first time i’d played with him. he doesn’t normally play the game i do (1/2 spread limit), i think he is more of a high stakes limit player. anyway for some reason he was playing my game that day, and when i got to the table i could tell he was paying close attention to how i was playing and inspecting my moves, blatantly staring at me the whole time i was involved in hands, etc. it was pretty tilting but i tried to just ignore it. i was relieved when he got up from the table after an hour or so. i still didn’t have a good session after that, and maybe that was partly the reason. i have found that my mood is much more dramatically correlated with my success in live cash games than i was first inclined to believe. the night i probably won the most i have ever won in one session (around $1200) was when i found out that my nasty methhead upstairs neighbors were moving out. these people had been stomping around and playing loud music and instruments for months and driving me really crazy. they refused to quiet down even after i involved the landlords, i had to call the police several times, etc. so you can imagine how overjoyed i was when i found out they were leaving. it was really one of the best days of my life. and then i went on to have my largest cash ever in a live game.

of course it could be a coincidence. but on the same token, i have also started to notice that when i have losing sessions, it generally occurs when i’m in a bad mood or annoyed by somebody at the table. not necessarily annoyed/frustrated by their play – this DOES happen to me a lot online if i have a good tricky player to my left who will never let me steal their blind, 3bets me a lot, etc. this kind of stuff really doesn’t happen a lot at 1/2 cash games. it’s just a different situation and people aren’t going to be doing those kind of tricky moves to make you frustrated. but often times there is someone who is just plain annoying at the table, who won’t shut up or who smells really bad or who is trying to hit on me or who is scarfing a big plate of pork chow mein or buffalo wings right next to me. or in this case, who is staring at me for inappropriate amounts of time. it’s fine to look at someone while they are playing. people SHOULD look at people, i look at people, it’s good for information. but in a couple of instances, in a couple multi-way pots, this particular guy was staring directly at me while other players were acting, and also after i had already acted. completely ignoring the other people in the pot who were acting. as i say, it made me pretty uncomfortable at the time.

so yesterday this guy sees me waiting for the tournament and comes right up to me and goes, “would you like some constructive criticism?” uh.. eyeroll. lemme think. i really had no interest in his opinion on my play – obviously i knew he’d been “evaluating” me at the table and suspected he thought i was playing weak (i was involved in maybe like 2-3 pots while he was at the table and i think i ended up check folding postflop in all cases), but i was like “okay sure.” and he starts talking about how i make it too obvious when i’m not going to continue with a hand postflop and he can tell i’m not interested in the pot and etc. actually the main thing i was not interested in was having this creep stare at me for minutes on end, which is probably why i didn’t bother contesting any $20 multi-way pots when he was involved and when i didn’t have a hand worth contesting a $20 pot with anyway. i mean, it might be valid criticism and i’m certainly going to pay more attention to maintaining a standard posture during hands so as not to give away anything. so i was like “okay. thanks for letting me know, i didn’t realize i was doing that. that’s good information.” and in this super condescending way he is like “yeah. you know, it’s just something to think about, if you want to be serious or make any money.” and i’m like “umm. i make money in that game.” and he’s like “..really?” and looks super skeptical. obviously at this point i just want to bitch slap this guy. i could have shown him my stats (which i keep track of using a nifty app for iphone called pokerjournal) or told him to ask any of the spread-limit regs, or any of the dealers for that fucking matter, that i am up a substantial amount in that game and generally win when i play it. but it’s not like i had anything to prove to this doucher. i just said, “yes, i’m a consistent winner in that game.” and ended it at that.

what tilts me so much about this is not that someone was attempting to offer me “constructive criticism.” i welcome criticism if it is genuinely constructive, especially if it will help me with my play. what tilts me is this guy, who has never played with me and who does not regularly play the $1/2 spread limit (it’s basically the same thing as no-limit except there is a cap of $100 on each bet), thinks he has the RIGHT to come in and criticize my play after watching me for an hour. it’s not 30/60 limit holdem where the same eight regs and two props sit there playing mind games and having dick measuring contests. in $1/2 you don’t win money by making fancy moves and blowing your opponents off middle pair. you win money by having or making the best hand and getting value on it. for the most part, people aren’t trying to fuck with you; they are trying to give you money with a hand that is weaker than yours.

occasionally i will make a big play on someone, there’s one guy who is always trying to kinda fuck with me at the table – not in a mean way, but just constantly trying to get the better of me i guess. i called one of his raises with 76 and flopped middle pair, i think the board was like J hi rainbow without many reasonable draws. i bet out like 20 or 30 and he raised me 100 on top (the maximum raise). i thought about it, decided he was full of shit, and raised him another 100. he snap folded and i showed my hand (which i sorta thought was a bluff but which might have been the best hand). everyone at the table was like “whaa.” that shit i will do, when i know the players and i know they are trying to fuck with me. i also recently moved all in on a guy with complete air after he straddled for $4 and then raised it to $30 or so after 6 or 7 people limped the straddle. there are two kinds of straddlers: a passive straddler who will just check it when people limp in his straddle unless he has a hand, and an aggro straddler who wants to “take control” of the pot, mostly with any 2 cards. i knew this was the type of player who was going to straddle just so he could make a giant raise when everyone limped the straddle. i had limped the button with Q9 after all the limpers, and i flatted preflop after they all folded to his raise. he snap bet $40 on the A hi flop and i could tell he was already ready to bet no matter what the flop was. i moved in for $80 or 90 more and he folded. in tournaments obviously it is necessary to make many creative moves if you want to be successful. in live cash games where i am 100+bb deep at all times and playing against amateurs and card club regs, i only make moves when i have a really good read and have a reason to believe they will be profitable.

maybe i have too much pride and just don’t like being criticized, but it’s something i’ve noticed people want to do a lot, with me. i don’t know if it’s just because i’m a girl, or because i’m a relatively new player who is open about just getting started. but a lot of people (i.e. men, though i don’t really know any other female players in person) think it’s their right to criticize every move i make, whether or not they even understand the particular game i’m playing, and whether or not i’ve solicited their advice or have any interest in their opinion. poker players are notoriously egotistical, and confidence is certainly something that will contribute to success. but just about every male player i have met thinks he knows drastically more than me, and has all kinds of random advice that he is absolutely certain i should be following, without really understanding any of the other variables. i should be playing more live. i should be playing more online. i should try online cash. i should be playing PLO. i should read this book or watch this video. i should never open X hand from Y position.

i’m not saying i know more or am better than any of the armchair “coaches” who want to criticize my play and give me advice. i just don’t appreciate being an automatic target for those sentiments. and i do think it has a lot to do with my gender. i want to learn from as many people as i can, but condescending dudes who think they know everything can eat me.

/end rant
xo

well, january & february i’ve been mostly playing online. full tilt’s double guarantee multi entry week was a huge grind; i was definitely glad i’d spent some weeks leading up to that working on my multitabling, because otherwise i wouldn’t have been able to take full advantage. with my new 32″ monitor i’m comfortable doing 6 tables, but that’s pretty much the limit for my visual attention. my eyes have been hurting a lot lately due to the long hours i’ve been putting in online. for the last two weeks i’ve played pretty much all day every day (anywhere from 8-16 hours). yesterday i was doing my usual sunday grind but almost felt i needed to stop after a few hours because of how much my eyes and head were hurting. i struggled through it, and even managed to go deep in a couple things, but it is way not optimal to be playing under those conditions. i don’t want to overexert myself, so i decided not to play online today, and might instead go play a tournament at the card club tonight. i haven’t played live in about two weeks and i’m really itching to!

i’ve played two or three live tournaments in the last few weeks, again with no success. it’s becoming a kind of vicious cycle because i almost always turn a profit when i play live cash, but then i go and blow it on live MTTs, where i have yet to make the money. in my online play i am a huge bankroll management nit; i will almost never play tournaments for more than 1% of my bankroll, and the average tourns i grind online at the moment are the $11 MTTs, which is something like 1/3 of a % of my bankroll. i think this has allowed me to survive through a couple of really bad downswings i’ve taken. but the drawback is, without taking any shots i’m not playing tournaments where i have a chance to have a REALLY big score. i want to get my bankroll to at least 10k before i even think of taking shots at the $200 sunday majors or FTOPSes, for example. and even then that would be a big shot.

however, my live ‘bankroll’ is a total shitshow of a joke. i do not actually have a live bankroll. i have money i make at the cash tables which i then use to play MTTs. there are pretty much no live tournaments in this area that you can enter for under $100; if i wanted to apply proper BR management techniques i’d need a live roll of $10k to play $100 tournaments! which, of course, i don’t have. basically, i need to HAVE a big live cash before i’ll have anything resembling a roll. if i ship one of the nightlies for $3 or 4K, that will be a nice start! so that needs to happen pretty soon because right now i’m stuck chasing my own tail, taking two steps forward and two steps back.

some friends have suggested i stop playing the horrendously-structured live tourns at the card club and just stick to the cash games, where i am clearly profitable. this might be a good idea. but i don’t know if i can do that; i just love tournaments too much. once i went to the card club on a tournament night with the intention of NOT playing but instead sitting at the cash table, in order to take advantage of the tournament bustouts who inevitably sit down at the cash game on mega tilt and spew brilliantly. but while i was waiting for my seat, i saw all the tourn regs heading to the tournament area, the donk nits who fold themselves down to 2 bb so they can get to the final table and chop it 10 ways, and i was like fuck this! i HAVE to play the tournament!

and the thing is, i pretty much only have to win one or two of these live tournaments to pay for all the buyins i’ve lost so far. i think i’m insanely +EV against the field; i guess the main question is whether the structure renders the whole thing a more or less pointless endeavor, and whether it would be better to save my money for tournaments with non-absurd structures. the thing is, tourns like that are not common here in the bay area. they require travel to reno, or tahoe (or LA and vegas obv), and travel+hotel costs are going to add on a few hundred $ on top of whatever the buyins for the tournaments are. so it’s a trade off. neither option is optimal.

there is one series i will definitely be playing: i have made my accommodations to attend the nevada ladies poker championship in mid-march, which i’m very much looking forward to. there are three tournaments as well as some brunches and seminars and other ditzy ladies things :) but staying at the peppermill is going to add $300 to my costs, not to mention gas/food/etc; put together that’s probably equal to the amount of all the tournament buyins! so basically in order to justify traveling to a tournament, i need to think i’m going to be TWICE as much +EV (er if that makes sense?) than playing a tournament that does not require travel costs. so.. yeah. i don’t know. like i say, my main goal is just to win something, anything, so that i have a viable roll to begin my live career from.

there is also the option of seeking out backing for live tournaments, which i think i definitely would have to do if i wanted to play any WSOP events this summer. right now i’m just beginning to even consider the idea, and i haven’t approached anyone about it. i hear horror stories about players being stuck in makeup for years, so i don’t know if i’d want to enter into a long-term arrangement like that. but on the other hand i have no live results to date, so it’s unlikely anyone would want to buy large %s of my action for individual tourns/series or stake me on a tourn by tourn basis. so yeah, right now it’s something i am beginning to research heavily, and that i’ll be thinking about more seriously in the next few months. if anyone has any thoughts/suggestions/advice on staking issues, please post in the comments, i’d love to hear from anyone with experience in this area!

hmm, so. live tourns are expensive, i can’t seem to win them, and i have no roll. writing about that made me a little depressed to be honest. there are only so many times i can let myself down before i am going to get too discouraged with poker and go be a boring scientist or something. perhaps a stop at happy hour before tonight’s tourn is in order! wish me luck :)

xxthegroupie

i think this year is going to bring some incredible things. i have never felt better about my poker game, and after some holiday travel in december i’ve been excited to get back to work. the last two weeks i’ve been working nonstop, putting in some serious hours online and live. i took this morning off to go see black swan, which was a pretty twisted and cool movie. i’m surprised it took me this long to see it, since i’m a big fan of the films i’ve seen by aronofsky (pi, requiem for a dream). i never particularly cared for natalie portman, though i guess the last time i thought about her was like 10 years ago when i lived in boston and she was all smug and snooty about being a harvard student. oh and then when she was just godawful in star wars. but to be fair, the character was godawful; there’s prooobably not too much you can do with padme. ick. but anyway, this was a great role and she did a great job with it. and she looks fucking good, i mean she’s gotta be like.. my age! heh. so two thumbs up from thegroupie.

i grinded (ground?) for like 14 hours online yesterday which made me feel slightly out of whack, so today was a good little break to clear my head. now i’m having a glass or three of champagne and thought i’d take a moment to update the interwebs on my exciting life before i head off to the card club.

i went back to the east coast for the first couple weeks of december to visit family and friends. and one thing i did while i was there was hit up the WSOP circuit event in atlantic city! i would have liked to play more events, but i had limited time on the east coast, and my sister was coming with me to atlantic city (and to new york afterward), so the trip wasn’t all business. with that in mind, i decided to just plan to play the ladies event on saturday, december 11, which was a $230 buy in. my sister and i drove up to atlantic city from DC late on friday night, and i was dead tired but thankfully decided to take care of registration for the tournament that night, because it took me over an hour to figure out where everything was. naturally i headed to the poker room, but then was informed that they were not doing registration for the WSOP events there, and that i had to go to the main casino cashier in harrah’s. at the main casino cashier, there were a bunch of drunk juiceheads in line (oh yes, we picked up some hip jersey shore slang while we were up there) and no one was manning the window for tournament registration, so that took forever. once i finally got the registration taken care of, it took about another half an hour before i found the area where the tournament was going to take place. sheez! then it was off to bed in our rather unimpressive hotel room. the poker rate for friday & saturday was $99 a night, which was cheap compared to usual hotel prices in AC for the weekends, but the room was one of the crummiest i’ve stayed in for that price. no frills, dingy, and the thin walls afforded us way too much familiarity with our neighbors’ bedroom activities. the ONE good thing about the room was that we had a refrigerator that you could actually put things in without getting charged money, because naturally we had a bottle of champagne to celebrate my imminent ladies event win :)

from comments on my twitter and from checking the WSOPC website, i was expecting a bigger field in atlantic city than in lake tahoe. this event was also double the buy-in that the tahoe ladies circuit event was, so with those two factors i was excited for a much bigger prize pool. the tournament began at 11 am on saturday morning, and i barely had time to finish half the bagel i’d grabbed beforehand as i had failed to allocate enough time to account for the snail-paced service at the one coffee shop in the casino. i was beginning to see a pattern at harrah’s: everything took fucking. forever.!!! i hightailed it to the tournament room, which was not the usual poker room at harrah’s, but a hotel-convention room type thing filled with tables. i actually didn’t catch the total number of entrants, but i think it was somewhere under 200 – it looked like 12 tables give or take. the structure was actually quite good for a ladies event – rather than having a turbo-ish structure akin to the daily/nightly tournaments as was the case in tahoe, the ladies event in atlantic city had the same structure as the ring events. this was of course great for me, as better structures and lower starting blinds allow for more play and less reliance on picking up cards.

when i got there (a couple minutes late) i was displeased to find that not only did they not have carts to put my coffee cup on (it is pretty standard in poker rooms to have little carts on wheels that patrons can put their drinks and/or food on), but they also did not even have any of the plastic cup holders that sit on the tables. the dealer joked that i could keep it on the table, because they were $100 clap-trap tables from wal-mart and it didn’t matter if it spilled. they *were* pretty cheapo tables. i just kept my coffee under my chair, which was fine, but that was just another issue that, while seemingly minor, could be very easily rectified and would help things run smoother and make for a better environment for the players. at harvey’s in lake tahoe they had bins full of the plastic table-top cupholders for the players to use, not to mention they provided free food during one of the breaks. in atlantic city, no such nothing.

but as poker players we adapt to our environs and make the best of them, and my attention quickly turned from my awkward coffee situation to my adversaries at the table. from the start i could tell that this would be a tougher field than i faced in lake tahoe, but i don’t know if it was actually possible to face a *less* tough field than tahoe ;) so i was prepared to face people with slightly more of a clue. i didn’t pick up much of anything in the way of cards for the first hour of the tournament, but that was fine, because with my headphones on at a low volume i was picking up massive amounts of information on my opponents. if there’s anything about ladies, they LOVE to talk. a couple of them were local tournament regs, a couple were in these sort of ladies poker leagues, one had come with her husband who was playing a bunch of events. they were all around 40-50 years old, most if not all had kids, who of course they enjoyed talking about nonstop.

while collecting info on your opponents is great, it is only worthwhile if you can use it to your advantage while playing poker. i think i was able to do that pretty effectively; there were a couple spots where i was able to bluff and pick up pots when i could tell that my passive opponent was not going to give me any resistance. for several hours i was playing smart and chipping up. but as always seems to happen with me, i get in a gross spot and make the wrong decision. so a few hours in, maybe near 4:00pm or so, i was hanging out with a pretty decent stack, probably average chips. i had been chipping up and winning the blinds and small pots here and there, but hadn’t been overly active, and hadn’t been involved in any big pots. that’s fine with me, but the blinds were going up faster than i was accumulating chips. there was certainly no need to panic and play any differently than normal with 30bb, but i was starting to get slightly concerned about my stack size relative to the blinds. i had to make something happen pretty soon or i’d find myself getting into short stack mode.

so it happened that a weak-passive, “stereotypically female” player limped in early position, and a lady who i knew was a tournament reg and seemed to play by the book tag, raised it to 3x. it seemed like a small raise given that there was a limper, and while i hadn’t been paying particular attention to this player’s bet sizing, the standard open for the table was at least 3x, so a 3x *after* a limp was on the small side. i put the limper on what-the-fuck-ever-who-cares and the tourn reg raiser on a medium pair or some other medium-strength hand, trying to isolate the limper without committing too many chips. she seemed predictable-tag and i was fairly certain she would have raised bigger with a premium hand. in late position, i looked at my cards and had AK. now, that’s a very good hand, but with my stack size i was in an awkward spot. a 3bet would have been 1/3 of my chips, essentially committing me to the hand. online it’s a spot where i would very often shove that stack size over a standard raise, or 3bet hoping to induce a shove. but in this situation, i had about average chips, and the raiser had me well covered. i didn’t need to flip 30bb against a medium pair, especially when i felt i had a skill advantage against the field. i call. everyone else folds.

we go to the flop and it is K hi with two small cards, with two diamonds. there is no reason for me not to love that flop, and the raiser leads for something around 2/3 the pot. given her pre-flop aggression and general TAG-ness, i’m expecting her to cbet with pretty much all her hands, and with AK i am almost certain i have the best hand unless she has flopped a set. i don’t want to scare her off, so i elect to call and let her keep bluffing if she is bluffing and/or control the pot if she has a set. the turn is another small diamond and she checks. at this point, given the action, i am fairly convinced that she has a medium pair lower than a K, something like 77-TT (because i think she would have raised more with JJ+ preflop), and is now is either in check-call mode or shutdown mode. i bet large, maybe 2/3 the pot, figuring she might call but would probably just fold. she insta minraises me.

now, this is a weird spot. this is becoming kind of a trend online and people do this ALL the time – the insta minraise or check-insta-minraise postflop – as a total bluff or with whatever medium strength hand, figuring that you’ll fold if you don’t have the nuts or at least top pair. these players are quite easy to identify and exploit. but that’s online; this lady is a fortysomething live tournament reg. would she know that move? is she just playing big stack bully? i was getting worried, but for a minraise i wasn’t about to fold top pair top kicker. i called.

the river was an offsuit blank and she asked what i had left. i nudged my big chips into her view; i had 4k in big chips and a few stacks of smaller chips left behind, and i think the blinds were at 300/600 at this point. she instantly tossed 4k into the pot. now i had a rough decision. she had a lot more chips than me; was she just trying to barrel me off the hand? was she ever value betting for 90% of my chips? wouldn’t she bet much smaller if she wanted a call? the line she took was so weird that i was having trouble putting her on a hand. i tanked for a couple minutes, i figured if she had a set so be it, but the way the action had gone i was pretty sure she either had a medium pair i could beat, or something like KQ or KJ which i could beat, or – what i was starting to think was a very likely possibility – that she also had AK.

i thought it was likely enough that i had either the best or the same hand, and if i folded i would have to give up a giant pot and be left with 10bb. i didn’t like it, but i called. she turned over AQ of diamonds for the nut flush. to be honest, the flush didn’t even cross my mind, though it should have. i have to give her credit for confusing me enough to pay her off! i shipped her all my big chips and was left with 4 or 5 bb in little chips, which i shoved in shortly thereafter with AJ only to be bested by K3. and that was the end of that!

so that was my ladies event. maaaaaybe i could have gotten away from the AK when she checkraised me on the turn, or maybe i could have folded the river. but with my stack size, after flopping the K i think i was committed to the hand. i could definitely have folded to one of the more tight passive limpy players, but the woman i was up against in that hand was aggressive and savvy enough to make those bets with a hand that i could beat, so that kind of fucked me up.

on the plus side, i busted before the dinner break, so my sister and i went and had a nice dinner and drank our bottle of champagne! we went down to the poker room, which was buzzing nicely on a saturday night. we drank some dranks and i made a little money back at $1/2 while she sat behind me doing sketches (she’s an artist) of the degens at the table. we went to NYC the next day and saw some old friends and had a great trip, and overall i was happy i stopped in atlantic city, despite not cashing. i’m still so new to the tournament circuit that i feel like every tournament i play increases my knowledge and experience exponentially. i’m planning to play as many as my bankroll will allow in the coming year!

well, that took awhile to write, and now i’ve had a bunch more champagne than i anticipated. watch out card club! and watch out 2011!

xo,
thegroupie