A Rare Weekend

For maybe the first time ever, I played in two different home game tournaments on the same weekend.  The first was the October SFPT get-together; the second, an eight-person buy in at Oscar's friend Josh's birthday party.  Both went fairly well, though not obviously in some ways.  A couple of quick recaps:

I ended up winning the SFPT tournament, besting an eight player field.  I will admit that I was catching a lot of flops and turns, so the amount of skill required to take home the win wasn't as much as it seemed.  Still, a few things went right.  Namely, early in the tournament, I had donked off a lot of chips before the first elimination, and suddenly realized I really wasn't focusing as I should be.  I got back into the game more at that point, mentally, and the big takeaway is that I actually made the realization before it was too late.

One had stands out, partly because of how I played it, and partly because of who I played it against - Tina.  Pre-flop, there were three players left, Kim being the third.  The flop came J/4/9, and Kim checked.  I also checked, and Tina, short-stacked, moved all-in.  Kim quickly folded, and I just as quickly called, flipping two pair J/4 to beat Tina's pair of nines.  It was exactly what I hoped would happen, and for once, the trap worked perfectly. 

Discussing the hand a couple days later, Tina commented something along the lines of "of course you trap, you love to trap!"  My reply: "yeah, but the difference now is I know when to pick my spots."  She agreed, giving more credence to the idea that I've come a long way.

I ended up playing Ray heads up, and though that battle took a little while (blinds got to 700/1400 for the first time in SFPT history), I was able to prevail.  I made a good lay down early on when I folded top pair after the river; Ray's reaction (motherfucker!") told me he had me beat.  Other than that the play was pretty standard.  I made out good on one semi-bluff holding king high, and the final hand saw Ray's nines lose to my A/Q off when a queen hit on the turn.

The tournament at Josh's party was interesting, and a bit of deju vu, but not in a good way.  Thanks to my apparent illiteracy, I arrived late, reminded only by Oscar's timely text.  To my surprise and happiness, the other seven guys agreed to blind me out until I got there, and I only missed two hands (and one blind).  The deja vu part came when I came inside, said happy birthday to the man of the hour, and sat right down to start to play with no chance to prepare.  Thanks to running late and being embarrassed by that fact, I had the same nervous/anxious feeling that I had when playing my first "real" live session and tournament, and after busting the tournament and moving directly to the cash table at Turning Stone back in April.

But, I also had that experience, and knew how to mentally combat the feelings.  After folding my first hand, and taking my turn as dealer on the next, I stood up and went to get a drink, making sure to concentrate on breathing and calming down.  The result wasn't immediate, but it worked, and a couple hands later I was back to normal.

Knowing only two of the other players at the table (Oscar, and his friend Clint, whom I've played with before) made for an interesting time, but a very good experience - unlike the SFPT, the aspect of the unknown was much better practice for me.  I made one bad laydown post-flop when a guy to my left raised, and the guy on my immediate right shoved all in; I had A/Q on an A/10/5 board. 

The problem with the fold was that my rationale was SFPT-based: if someone already called, let them fight it out.  But, this was a winner-take-all freezeout; I should have called there and saw what happened, because being out in 7th is no worse than being out in 2nd.

It turns out I would have won the hand with my aces. Oh well - it's a good lesson for next time.  File it under "know your tournament structure".

I ended up out in fifth when I chased a straight and missed (adjusting to my "first place or nothing at all" strategy that I realized one hand too late) for most of my stack, and was eliminated when my pre-flop shove of pocket queens lost to a pair of aces in a three-way pot.  I had no problem with that hand in particular - pocket face cards while short-stacked is a no-brainer shove.

One other item of note: the player two seats to my left, John, was from the get-go a very aggressive player, raising almost every pot at least 3 times the big blind.  He won a lot of pots that way, and later claimed when talking to Oscar and I, "I only bluffed twice all night".  Oscar had an immediate and I think accurate retort: "Yeah, and one of them is right now."

Learning to deal with aggressive players is, I think, something I need to work on.  I don't have a lot of experience in that regard, as most of the SFPT regulars are conservative by nature.  I feel like I adjusted well to John's play once I realized his raises were going to be commonplace.  Had I hit my straight, not only would it have won me a big pot, it also might have changed his approach regarding raising when I was still in the pot ahead of him.  So, I'm not upset - it just didn't work out.

Recapping the weekend from a profit and experience point of view:

Buy-Ins: $20
Winnings: $40

Bracelet Hunting Update: $30 added, $80 total ($10 set aside for Add-Ons for Ally for the November tournament)

Race to 10k Update: 4.75 home game hours, 133.50 total home game hours, 243.50 total hours

WSOP-E

My Twitter stream keep tempting me with links to live poker - before it was the EPT, and now the WSOP Europe.  Yesterday I took the bait and watched a little of Event 5, a 2,000 Pound NLHE tournament. 

Right away, I was right back in the swing of things, watching, learning, and putting myself in the pros shoes in terms of the decisions they made and whether I agreed or would have played differently.  It was a good feeling to be back in the proverbial saddle, if even from a distance.

Twitter hit me with the links again today and again I clicked, this time based on my experience the day before, the need to kill some time, and the final-table presence of one of my favorite pros, Erik Seidel.  The 8-time bracelet winner is one of the quietest and most unassuming, yet funniest and most intelligent pros on the entire tour and has been from some time.  He is one of the members of the very short list of pros I look up to.

I watched the tournament on and off, around work and the memorial service/wake for my Great Uncle John.  It was 2:15 eastern time when it finally ended, Seidel losing heads-up in his quest for a ninth bracelet.  Not the result I wanted to see, but good poker nonetheless.

I learned a few things about heads-up play in the process, and a couple about tournaments in general, but mostly I watched how the players conducted themselves at the table.  That kind of thing facinates me for some reason.  I see people all the time who act like complete jackwads when they play live, yet there are guys like Seidel who are so low-key one would think them acting quiet because they are out of their element and thus terrified.  Nothing can be further from the truth.

I'm still trying to determine by "table image", what I want to be known as.  There are cases to be made, even within my own personality, for at least a couple of different approaches.  Maybe it depends on my mood, or the situation.  As I have already written, I won't be taking things too seriously.  Just how verbally and demonstratively I "don't take it seriously" remains to be seen.

Back in The Rut

So here I am once again.

Not only have I not played at all since SFPT September, I don't even have the motivation to do so.  What's worse, I am a full issue and a half behind on "Bluff".  That might be somewhat excusable given I have been reading a lot of books lately, but this next item is what really surprises me:

EPT London is going on right now.  I knew this ahead of time, but when the opportunity came to take a look and watch some live coverage, I declined, in favor of continuing to listen to XM Radio while I worked.  Even a couple months ago this would have been something I jumped at, racing home from the Rec and logging in right before even checking email.

Now?  Not interested, and I don't know why. 

I think part of it is that I have been away from poker for so long.  Reading and watching are fine, but I have been distracted with so many other things lately, I haven't been willing to focus on poker (to be fair, the distractions have not all been bad things; in fact, few of them are, so maybe "distraction" isn't the right word.  Perhaps "occupied" is a better classification.)  However, the November Nine is coming up soon, so I'm betting that will rekindle my interest at least a little bit.

Another part of the problem is one I have discussed many times already: I feel like I have plateaued.  The only way to get away from that is to play, and I haven't had that opportunity at all.  I'm not whining - if i wanted to make it happen, I could.  But there are other more important things in my life.  As much as I love poker, I'm not about to jet off and leave my wife and daughter behind so I can play.  How much of an ass would that make me?

Answer: a big one.  The biggest.  And I'm not doing it.  There is a solution I will find, a balance I can strike.  Stay tuned.

Thoroughly Mediocre

The title accurately describes my play, and my results, at SFPT September.  Part of the issue was lack of concentration, but I also wasn't getting much in terms of cards either.  In some ways it felt a lot like my last TS cash session.

But, I had fun, and my fourth place finish was just barely good enough to keep me atop the points race thanks to Tina taking home the win.  Oscar got his second straight runner-up finish; it's too bad for him that he got off to such a shitty start else he'd be right in the thick of things as we come down to the last three tournaments.

So, I wasn't able to add any money to the bracelet hunting envelope, but I did keep on track to maybe add some in December if I can bring home the points title.  I have decided that if I do take it down, half the money will go to said envelope, and the other half will go to Ally's bank account.

As for details: not many hands stand out, and I did find myself short-stacked when we were down to four players.  I won a hand to get out of that spot but it didn't last long, and I shoved with 8/5 clubs.  Matt and Oscar called, and post-flop, Oscar also shoved to put Matt at risk.  Matt folded, Oscar showed A/J for two pair, and I mucked. 

Not much else to say, really.  It was a fun tournament, but not a lot sticks out.

Race to 10K: 3 home game hours played, 128.75 home game hours, 238.75 total hours

Next up will be the October tournament, which may or may not be the same night as the World Series party.  Looking further into the future, Tina, Rachel, Matt, Danielle, and I are already discussing planning for the annual January Turning Stone trip.  You can bet poker will be played, and I hope to get Matt into the room as well.  Call it my first poker-related goal of 2014.

Poker Mentality

With the next SFPT event looming on Saturday and not having played much since the August tournament, I decided to pop back on to Full Tilt both yesterday and today for a couple tournaments.  Both went pretty well: yesterday I finished 2nd in a 250, 1-table SNG, and today won a 6-handed 1-table SNG. 

In the 9-handed event, I was barely paying attention, but in this case that isn't a bad thing.  I was able to play the math, and let my subconcious mind work picking up trends, patterns, etc.  This isn't new for me, but using that information in real-time is.  I was able to do so, and got my chips in with the advantage, only to have the math bite me once again.  No big deal.  From that tournament, I also took away the fact that if I can play that well not paying attention, I have a lot of upside for when I actually do focus.

The 6-handed event today comes with a huge astrisk.  One player was eliminated on the first hand, and two others were sitting out almost from the beginning.  As soon as I recognized this, I loosened up my play, knowing in reality I was only playing against two other opponents.  I was able to KO one of the others not too long after, and though the second guy was a much bigger challenge (I couldn't really put a read on his betting patterns), I was victorious over him as well.

The hand that finished him off is one I am proud of, not because of how it turned out, but because of how I processed the information.  I raised 4x the big blind pre-flop with 8/8, and was called.  The flop was 4/7/5, and I c-bet half the pot.  A snap call, and turn J.  Here's where I processed what was in front of me: an over pair to all but one card, a straight draw, and a better than 2:1 chip advantage against an at least semi-aggressive player acting after me.  I shoved all-in, and was called with Q/10.  River 6, straight, and to quote Hawk Harrelson, "he gone".  The other two were still sitting out, and the result was a formality.

Which leads me to why I'm really blogging today.  That sequence of events illustrates an area in which I've made great progress over the past few months.  There were any number of hands which could have had me beat, or at least had me behind in terms of what we were drawing to, but I absorbed all of the information available to me and took a calculated risk.  That is the essence of poker.

It's also the essence of life.  Very rarely is there a situation in life that is black and white.  Gray is the new black; there is always ambiguity in every situation you face.  The ability to process incomplete information and make smart decisions is one of the factors that separate the successful from the unsuccessful, no matter your definition of success.  Nate Silver once said that poker players are the best he's seen at evaluating situations correctly.  I'm not sure if that is because of poker, or if people of that nature are drawn to poker and find themselves successful in part because of that attribute.

Either way, there's a very strong parallel.  Mel Levinson and I always talk about "Baseball Mentality", which we have loosely defined as taking a situation as it comes, reacting calmly and without undue angst.  Even the best of all time will fail in their objective six times out of ten.  In that spirit, I am ready to officially christen Poker Mentality: taking all of the information available to you, processing it in relation to the situation, and making a decision based on what you know without being overly concerned about what you don't know.

Poker Mentality shall become one of my attributes - at the felt, and in life.

Trying Something New, and Something Old

For a long time, I have been a fan of the idea of "learning by osmosis".  I'm not sure if I heard that term somewhere or made it up myself, but I feel like the idea is a sound one.  Basically, what I mean by that is that I feel I can gain knowledge of something by just having it around me.  This is one of the reasons I like to have the TV on a science or history program while I am working on something else,because I can learn a little bit of something even if I am not really trying to do so.

In that spirit, I have decided to forgo listening to the radio while I am working, for the most part, in favor of watching YouTube training videos and other poker-related content.  There's plenty of it out there, and more produced every day, so it's not like I am going to run out of videos to watch any time soon.

I have started with Jason Somervville's Run It Up series, and also delved into some of his other videos.  Today, I watched one where he went over the hands of his first ever online final table, in 2007.  I feel like I learned quite a bit about how the game has changed from then to now, as he kept talking about how he couldn't believe he played hands certain ways and would have done it differently today.  From those specific hands, I compared to my play, and saw how I can play hands (and more specifically, situations) differently.

That was the new.  Now for the old:

Inspired by actually seeing poker played in that video, I decided to log on to Full Tilt for the first time since August second.  I had a step three ticket and decided to use that right off the bat.

Right away, I applied a lesson: keep the hammer down: I missed a flop, but c-bet the flop and turn and got three folds on a stone-cold bluff.  That was good, as were a couple of pots where I actually hit a flop but could have lost to draws, but bet people out before showdown.

The bad: four-handed, I shoved with trip queens, got called with 8/9 off, and the guy hit a straight.  A few hands later, I shoved with the king high flush draw, got called with two pair, and couldn't hit.  I finished fourth and won another Step 3 ticket.

Not wanting to go out like that, I cashed in that ticket following a break for lunch.  I lost some of my motivation (read: got distracted), and took a big hit when I gambled to take out a player and lost with AhQh to KK.  After getting some back, I lost another chunk in a similar situation when I didn't hit an open-ender and lost to queens.

At this point I figured it just wasn't my tournament, but before I knew it, I was chip leader again.  That lasted all of about 10 hands; soon I was short stacked again, shoved, and lost with K/Q off to Q/6 off when the turn was a 6.  Oh well.


Playing: 1 hour online
Reading: I started the September issue off "Bluff" the other day, but only glanced.  More to come later on that.  I have been reading the articles that Mike Caro tweets out on an almost daily basis
Watching: So far, two of Jason Somerville's videos, a total of a shade over 1 hour

10k update: 84.25 online hours, 233.50 total hours

Learning By Watching - Being Social Edition

I love watching the EPT, and I get to watch a lot of it thanks to the combination of the pokerstars.tv livestream, and the time zone difference.  The commentators are good, and as with any poker viewing I get to see top players and how they play.  Plus, I get some lessons that aren't directly related to play on the felt; lessons like the one today, an answer to my dilemma from yesterday.

The situation: Liv Boeree was guest-commentating, and action cut from the Main Event to the other event running at the time, the 10k High-Roller.  Daniel Negrenau was at the table, and of course he was chatting it up.  And also of course, he was sitting on a well-above-average chip stack.  This is exactly what I was talking about yesterday.

I stepped away for a couple minutes, and the live stream was still showing that same table when I returned.  They were discussing the table dynamic, and Boeree made a comment in response to a question from one of the commentators about the amount of good-natured talk at the table.  This may not be exact, but it's pretty close:

"Oh, yes, that's why I love these high roller events.  They feel like a home game, they're so much fun."

So the high-roller events, the tournaments with the highest buy-ins, are the most fun because people are treating them like home games.  What I deduce from that is that other people, low-level pros and amateurs playing in the lower buy-in events, take the game too seriously. Why that is, I don't know.  Maybe they feel like that is the best way for them to play, maybe they feel pressure because of the amount of money they have at risk.

That's not me - I don't feel that's the best way to play, I don't feel that kind of pressure (anymore), and I'm certain playing like that would make me miserable, even if I was winning.  There are times where I may shut down and focus to a greater extent, but that's not my typical M.O.

Or, as I said to myself earlier (and this IS an exact quote), "Fuck it.  I'm there to have fun."

This approach may go against me becoming a better player.  Maybe it won't.  Maybe I'm short-changing myself, even now.  I may be terrible.  I probably AM terrible.  But here's the thing: I don't know that for sure.  And in the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I am forced to believe I'm better than average, with even more potential.  It's all relative, but remember - I haven't been playing for very long, and I have a grand total of twenty and a half hours of live, non-home game play.  Or, as Phil Laak would call it, a Tuesday.

Even if results or other evidence point towards me not being very good, I always want to THINK I'm good, because that confidence, even if it's irrational, breeds success.

Let's get to the felt.