Excessive Variance

So last night I was playing in our regular 2/5 game.  Shiva shows up shortly after I do and the game is kinda slow.  There wasn’t a whole lot of action and we were bored so we decided it would be a good idea to play our own version of Lodden Thinks. For those of you not familiar with it is a prop betting game created by Phil Laak and Antonio Esfandiari.  Apparently while they were in a cash game with Johnny Lodden they decided to prop bet based on a number he thinks of to a question they come up with.  They ask him a question like “What’s the longest distance a person has ever ran” and he comes up with a number in his head, locks it up, then they Chinese auction a over/under number until they settle on it and then Johnny would give them his answer.

So Shiva and I start playing this game using ODB for the most part as our person to come up with a number.  The only problem with that is no one loves to hear himself talk or find ways to interject his personality into something than ODB.  So getting him to settle on a number was sometimes a chore in itself.  Shiva takes an early lead winning 4 of the first 5 while we were playing.  Some of the questions we asked were things like “Number of other casino employees that a certain dealer has slept with” or “Number of songs on my Iphone” etc etc… so even though it was just us playing the whole table was getting involved because it was entertaining, not to mention we were doing our best to embarrass the staff which was working really well.  The frustrating part of the game is that the real number doesn’t matter at all, its what a 3rd party thinks the real number is.  So you could be exactly right and know that 3 is the answer, but if the person who is guessing the number is way off and takes 15, and you lock up under 5 for the bet you lose.  It’s also what makes the game fun and interesting.

Eventually we decided to go down and have dinner at the steakhouse where we continued our game.  This time involving our bartender and a girl who was sitting at the bar eating next to us who was an off the clock server at the restaurant.  Things started to turn my way in the game as I won 3 in a row.  Then we bet on what turned out to be the best question of the night.  I asked our bartender to come up with the number of dates it would take for her server friend to go on before she sleeps with a guy.  It took her barely a split second to come up with a number and I started the bidding off at 1 and over.  Shiva jumped to 2 and over.  I thought about it for a minute and decided that the girl at the bar looked fairly conservative and was the type to really make someone wait.  I decided in my head that the number had to be 4 or 5 dates minimum.  I said “4 and over” and Shiva thought about it for a minute before letting me have 4 and up.  The bartender says “the answer is two” and Shiva celebrates while the poor girl at the bar looks shocked.  So I ask what the actual answer should have been and she tells me “Five dates at least!!!” while looking a bit disgusted at her friend and I tell her that apparently her coworker thinks she is some kind of slut.  The bartender jumps in with her logic which was “well she is young, and when I was young I was easy”.  We get some good laughs out of it and I end up stuck enough in the game that I pay for our fairly expensive meal.  Like I said, the frustrating part is in being right and still losing because someone else has such poor logic that their numbers are way off.

So after I got screwed by bad girl logic we headed back up to the poker room and continued playing.  By the end of the night Shiva won about $120 off me in the game, which meant after losing one of the last hands of the night i had a break even session.  If people weren’t so dumb with numbers I would have been better off.

This game shall continue.

FTOPS Results

I played in a couple of the mini Full Tilt online poker series  events last week.  On Wednesday I played the $22 NLHE 6-max turbo event which went poorly.  I overplayed one hand just before the first break that cost me the majority of my chips and then I flipped for the rest of my stack and lost.

The $55 dollar HORSE tournament went much better.  I cruised through the first 9-10 levels building up a decent chip stack and pretty much having my way with the table in every game.  After the 3rd break I spent 6 orbits extremely card dead and losing my stack to ante’s and blinds.  By the time the Money bubble burst I was a short stack.  I ended up busting out around 170th in a field of nearly 1800 players, not a bad result but I feel like I should have went deeper.

The last event I played with the $33 Razz event last Friday.  Things were going okay until the 100/200 level where on 5th street I capped with a guy when I had 7,5,4,2,A for a made 7 and he had a K84 showing.  He went perfect perfect to make a better 7 and take 2/3rds of my stack.  I grinded for another 30 minutes before eventually bricking out a huge draw to a 6 on the last two streets and busting.  Pretty disappointing but that’s tournament variance for you.

Live Play

Had a nice 2/5 session last Thursday where after starting out stuck my first buy-in I was able to recover and book a nice win.  Nothing to exciting hand wise to discuss, everything was pretty standard.

Sunday I played a 4 man best ball tournament during the day where our team placed second in it’s flight.  It was a good time but it got over early enough I thought I’d stop by and see if there were any good games going.  There was a 1/2 game filled with some loose players so I took a seat and ran poorly for 6 hours.  I was stuck 3 buy-ins where every time I got my money in I was good, but just got sucked out on.   This one really horrible player in paticularly ran so rediculously well againt me that I wanted to kick a puppy.  If he wasn’t so easy to read I would have lost a ton of money to him.  Funny thing was at the end of the night I end up playing this guy heads up for about 2 hours.  In that two hours of heads up play, he never once raised preflop.  The only way we played larger pots was by me driving the action, which worked out since he folded to 90% of my continuation bets anyway.  If he ever made a real hand he bet $50 every time, and were talking only the nuts.  I had the guy fold pocket kings to me when I raised preflop with 54 and put out a continuation bet on a A33 board. Given an infinite amount of time I take every dime the guy has, but since I had to be to work I ended up leaving while he still had money left.  Sooo fustrating leaving money on the table like that.

Since I worked on Labor Day last week I had a three day weekend coming up which was originally supposed to be the start of my road trip.  Since that got canceled another small opportunity to leave town came up where I could hit Chicago for the weekend.  I thought it would be a good chance to go check out the Horseshoe in Hammond since I am now planning on going there to play a couple of the WSOP Circuit events that are taking place there next month.

So after playing 2/5 all night Thursday, I took off for Chicago at around 4am Friday morning.  Got into Chicago around 8:30 and took a little time trying to find a decent hotel to stay at and locating the Horseshoe.  After checking in and getting situated in the room we headed to the casino to check out the local action.  We got there and the room was quite impressive.   The layout is nice with a lot of tables in the lower limit area and in the back of the room is a slightly elevated area for the higher limits including a separate room to one side for really big games.  The design of the room was nice, tables were clean, nice big screen HDTV’s everywhere, comfortable chairs, pretty much everything you need in a room.  My only complaints were the nearest bathrooms were a little father away than they should be, and the service was inconsistent at best.

We got seated immediately in a short handed 5/10 game that had been going all night.  It didn’t take long for the game to fill up.  I triple up early on when I make quad jacks against a slow played AA and Kd9d on a JdTd3h board after getting a three way all in on the flop.  After that I ran horribly though.  Took KK into AA in another 3 way pot that would have been worth 4k or so, and ended up getting stuck for the night when I got it all in for about $800 with Q9 on a Q96 ranbow board againt 96 and 87, ten peeled the turn and I didn’t fill up. I book a 2k loss for the night and go eat dinner while making plans for the night.

A little while later Henry (Bleacherbum3 on FCP) comes to pick me up and we go looking for a sports bar to have a few drinks in.  This wasn’t his part of town so it took us a while to find a bar that looked halfway decent.  We thought about hitting Starbucks for latte’s, but decided we were not that gay.  We go inside and it’s karaoke night so there was a lot of unintentional humor for us to witness.  We sat around and bullshitted for a couple hours while tossing back beers.  Things we spotted in the bar: A shirtless guy getting arrested, a swarm of female midgets hitting the dance floor with a couple of guys who were over 6 foot tall,  the worst dancing wannabe white thug ever, and a random guy trying to hand us tamales out of his cooler.  By the end of the night I was going on two days without sleep so Henry dropped me off at the hotel and I got some sleep.

Day two went much better than day one for me.  Fully rested we got back to the cardroom around 11:am and played 1/2 while waiting for a 5/10 game top open up.  The 1/2 game was really easy, first hand I straddled and flopped a straight that I showed after everyone folded on the turn and that let me get away with winning every pot I played except one for the next 45 minutes or so before getting called to the 5/10 game.

The 5/10 game the second day wasn’t as action packed, but it had it’s fair share of interesting characters.  There was the brain surgeon who was super tight, the young version of Robert DeNiro who just hit the craps table for 30k, the Tony Romo look alike from Detroit, the ex-gang member turned entrepreneur, the chatty short stacked nit who thought he was a professional even though he was the worst player at the table, and the guy who bought this Michigan fan lunch even though he was from Ohio. For the most part it was a fun table to be at, between the table chatter and the bad play I couldn’t think of many places I’d rather be spending a Saturday afternoon.  It was very entertaining.

While grinding away at this fairly soft table I spent a good amount of time watching college football too.  The Michigan/ND game was the talk of the table while it was on.  The Romo look-a-like, OSU guy, and I were pulling for Michigan while everyone else was backing the Irish.  I offered anyone on the table action to let me have Michigan straight up before the kick off and no one wanted to take it, even after one guy was saying his bookie said ND was the lock of the day.  Guess thats why you shouldn’t listen to those guys eh?  Tate Forcier is the man, thats pretty much all I have to say about that game.  He is going to look good running that offense for the next couple of years.

After a few hours I had tripled up and was now  a little ahead for the trip.  I cashed out and went to get dinner and watch the OSU/USC game.  Normally I would never root for OSU, but a win like that would do a lot for the Big 10 as far as perception goes.  It was a pretty good game, and one I think OSU could have easily won if they didn’t stop attacking and tried to preserve the lead in the 4th.

After that was over I headed back to the card room for a few more hours of 5/10 since I was leaving early Sunday morning.  I ended up getting into a short handed feeder game and basically breaking even in that after losing a huge pot with KK to 84os when a guy who called me down with middle pair rivered a second pair.  Another $1600 out the door with KK.  I grinded my way back up and got about 600 ahead before losing a few pots and ending up even for the night.

Overall I was slightly ahead for the weekend, which was sort of disappointing since I easily should have booked a 5-6k win.  Pocket kings alone cost me about 6k over the weekend, but that’s how the game goes sometimes.  What I won more than covered the cost of the trip, not to mention getting familiar with the room and the area will be a nice knowing I’ll be back next month for the WSOP.  Plus getting to kick it with Henry for a night was a good time, so overall a fun experience that I’m looking forward to repeating.

So my leave of absence got rejected and my plans for my month long road trip are out the window.  I pretty much hate my job more and more every day, and have zero motivation to be here.  Unfortunately after I crunched all the numbers I’m just a bit too far in debt with my school loans to comfortably quit right now until I get them taken care of.  So I’ve put together a list of things I want to get taken care of before quitting this job, and now it’s time to get to work on them so I can be done with this place for good.

August was a pretty bad month for me in live play.  I went on the worst downswing I’ve ever had at the beginning of the month, but I’ve since mostly recovered from it.  I haven’t been able to book a big win live at all even though I feel like I have been playing relatively well.  It’s annoying to play well and either lose, break even, or book tiny wins when after you grind for 6 hours some idiot comes in and quintuples up in 2 orbits because they just run ridiculously good.

Went to Council Bluffs/Omaha with Shiva last weekend to play in the monthly deep stack event at the Horseshoe.  They had a great 2/5 game on Friday, one of the best I’ve ever played in.  It’s to bad for me that I was both tired and sort of card dead, so I didn’t make anything in an amazingly good situation.  On Saturday Shiva and I swapped a piece of each others action for the tournament.  We started out at the same table and both of us made it down to the final two tables where he ended up busting me in 17th when I shoved over a guy I thought was weak with my AJs and he woke up with QQ behind me.  I didn’t mind losing my chips to Shiva since I had a piece of his action and ended up coming out ahead overall when he chopped heads up.  While he finished the tournament I played a little more 2/5 and made up for what I lost the night before pretty quickly.

When we got back I went to check out the local action because I had hear rumors of a good 2/5 game happening Sunday nights which is pretty rare, and instead found myself in a 1/2 PL HOE game.  I got stuck in it for a grand but recovered for a really small loss by the end of the night.  I ran incredibly bad in that game.  I had a guy call nearly 300 preflop with 8774 rainbow in a O8 hand and get there against my AAJ3 double suited.  Just sick.  I felted him a little later though so revenge was mine.

Since I can’t take my trip this month, I decided to look at upcoming poker events and find someplace to go.  Canterbury has the Fall Classic coming up, but I think I’m more interested in the WSOP Circuit Event that is coming to Hammond, Indiana in October.  I’m looking to take a week off of work then and go play 2-3 events.   Specifically I plan on playing the $550 buy-in 2 day HORSE event, and probably one of the $330 NL events.  Depending on results I may play something else too.

Also I decided that since with my schedule for live play and how dependent I am on getting good games on certain days that I’m going to have to start transitioning to online play if I ever want to end up doing this for a living.  I’ve spent most my free time early this week looking into the transition.  I’ve started filtering some cash to some online sites and started playing some low limit games.  I’m hoping to put in about 10k hands in September just to get my feet wet and go from there.

I just remembered that today is my mom’s birthday, I better quit doing nothing at work and give her a call.

I got my own plan, handle mine like a grown man
Long as I know I’m nice,  fuck it I’m my own fan…