WCOOP Event #1 ($215 Razz) Recap

The WCOOP (which my sister has kindly referred to as the world chicken coop competition) kicked off today with a $215 buy-in razz tournament that drew 1297 entrants. First place was $58,365, 8th was $5,706 and 136th paid $259.40.

With 30 minute limits and 2500 starting chips this tournament stood to be a long one by online standards. You can check out this link to learn more about razz if you've never heard about it or don't know the basics. http://www.fulltiltpoker.net/razz.php (it's just 7-card stud where the worst hand wins).

Razz is famous for being fairly boring and notorious for being insanely frustrating. In hold 'em (and many other forms of poker) if you start with a strong hand (like a big pair) you're hand is frequently strong enough to win the pot on it's own, unimproved. In razz, on the other hand, no matter how good your first three cards are you have to catch TWO MORE good cards to make a good hand. I'm not as used to recounting razz hands so I'm not sure there is going to be the level of detail and flavor that you can expect when I'm talking about hold 'em.

In a typical no limit hold 'em tournament online, about half of the field is usually eliminated in the first hour of play. In today's razz event it took 49 minutes for the first player to be eliminated. With limits starting at 10/20 with a whopping 2 chip ante it's not surprising that things started off slowly.

I struggled early on and never had more than 2600 chips at any point. After playing almost no hands in the first level I played a few in the second level and made a few second best hands. First I lost with 87523 to 8652A and then I lost a more disappointing 7532A to 7432A. There was no way I could get off either hand and by the first break (after level 2) I found myself with 1800 chips. You'll notice that even though I lost a few hands I still had 72% of my chips. This is contrary to NL hold 'em where if you make a strong second best hand you'll be on fumes or on the phone telling your friends what happened.

At the beginning of the third level I got a taste of the famous razz frustration when I had two very strong starting hands turn into garbage. In the first hand I started with 235, came in raising and got one caller. On 4th street I caught a 9 and then on fifth street a K fell like a big fat turd. I was forced to fold when my opponent, who had called my raise with an 8 showing, caught a 3 and an A and bet into me.

The next hand was worse. This time I started with A 3 5 and was up against the same guy who was a total whack job. Again I came in raising and he called me with an 8. On 4th street he caught a 9 and I caught a 2. Sweet! I've got this guy right where I want him now. On 5th street I caught a K and he caught a 7. There was heavy betting and raising at this point. Even though it would appear that he has the best hand at that point, I was still the favorite to make the best hand by the time all 7 cards were out. All I needed to do was catch a 4,6,7, 8, or 9 sometime in the next two cards. Factoring in the cards I'd seen in the form of other players up cards and my own cards I had 17 cards left in the deck out of the remaining 38 that would make me the best hand (Of course he could have a pair already which would mean I was in even better shape or he could catch two great cards and improve - these thing balance each other out to some extent). Sadly I paired my 5 on 6th street and my A on the river (the last card is called the river in stud games too) making my best hand K532A. Yuck!

I did have one good hand along the way. During the 4th level I started with A 3 5 and of course came in raising. I got heavy action the whole way from a player who started with 752 and improved to 75432 by 6th street. After my strong start I caught an ugly Q on 4th street and a beautiful 4 on 5th street. 6th street brought an even uglier K and I knew I was in big trouble. On the river, however, I caught the perfect card - the 2! I made a wheel (5432A), which is the best possible hand in razz, and took down a nice pot.

After 2 hours we'd only lost 70 of the starting 1297, but I was in the bottom 20% of the remaining players. During the next 2 levels I hovered right around 1,200 chips. I won a few small pots here and there, but never got much above 1500.

When the 7th level started with a 30 chip ante and limits of 150/300 I knew if I played a hand I'd pretty much be committed to going to the end. When I was down to just over 1,000 chips I picked up a strong hand in the form of A46 and got action from another player showing a 4. On 4th street I caught a J and he caught a 2. I decided to take a stand since the pot already had a significant number of chips in it and I didn't have many left. All of the money went in on 4th street and when the cards got flipped over my opponent showed me 642A. Yikes! He paired on A the 5th street and the 2 on 6th street and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Sadly he caught a 7 on the river and the best hand I could muster was a lowly 10 9 6 4 A. I finished in 857th place. :(

Luckily, like I mentioned before, this event was sort of a warm up, and while I liked my chances against the nut balls I found myself playing against today, razz isn't exactly my best game. While it would have been nice to get off to a strong start the $215 is only about 3.5% of the total that I'll be using for buy-ins so I'm not worried about the loss.

WCOOP Event #1 Preview!!!!!!!

Good news for those of you out in blog land! The World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) kicks off this Saturday! It's just like the WSOP...except it's for 1/10 of the money...and 1/100th of the prestige. I guess it's nothing like the WSOP, but it is the biggest thing in online poker and unlike the WSOP you don't have to dodge 1,400 floosies every time you go to the bathroom.

I am looking forward to playing some non hold 'em varieties of poker and I plan to update the blog daily with results and accounts of the key hands. I am going to play 12 of the 18 events for sure and maybe 1 or 2 more if things are going well. All in all it should add up to about $6,000 in entries. I've got Gerry, Matt, E.B and Jake backing me again (very bravely I might add after the WSOP) and Mike has boldly jumped on the bandwagon and taken a full one percent of my action. Thanks to all of them again for their confidence in me.

All of the tournaments start weekdays at noon and weekends at 1:30 (pacific time). If you want to watch me play you can download the software at pokerstars.com and do a player search for AceSedai (that's me). If you need help with this process send me an e-mail and I'll give you detailed instructions. Of course you won't be able to see what I have, but you can check on my progress and make mocking comments about me in the chat box.

Event #1 is $215 buy in Razz. Razz is simply 7-card stud where the WORST hand wins. Straights and flushes do not count against you (A 2 3 4 5 is the best possible hand). Last year there was no razz in the WCOOP and pokerstars hasn't offered razz in any form until a few weeks ago so I'm hoping to run into a bunch of people who don't know how to play. This is basically a warm up for everyone and while there are 330 players already registered, I can't see more than about 500 more putting their hard earned coin at risk on this silly game.

Wish me luck!

Time Collection vs Rake

Ryan, a survivor from the Cloyne home game where I first learned to play poker, asked the following question in a comment he recently posted: "I remember some time ago that you had mentioned that you liked playing at the Oaks because it was by the hour. I was just wondering if you opinion has changed since then? Personally I prefer to play when there is a rake. My thinking is that if you plan to fold most of your hands pre-flop, why pay until you are ready to play?

There are two main ways that casinos charge you to play in their poker games. The first way is a "rake." The way a rake works is every hand, the dealer takes (or rakes) a predetermined number of chips from the pot. At the end of the hand these chips drop into a locked steel box attached to the table. The boxes get emptied every 8 hours, by men the size of small SUVs in security uniforms. Usually it's $3 (sometime $4) regardless of the amount you're playing for (at the very lowest games like $1/$2 limit it's $2.50). Some places have a rule that if the hand doesn't make it to the flop the casino won't take any money. In the lower limit games (anything $9/$18 or less), in addition to the standard blind structure the player on the button puts out $3 (these are the chips that are physically removed from the game and end up in the steel box). This money "plays" for the player on the button and counts towards any bets they make before the flop. So for example if you're playing $3/$6, there will be $1 in the small blind, $3 in the big blind and $3 on the button. If no one has raised, the player on the button gets to see the flop without putting in any more money.

In some of the dreary, ass backwards poker rooms in Nevada where there are three poker tables sitting in a space that has all the glitz and glamour of an area used for broken slot machine storage, they do the rake a little differently. Instead of taking a flat $3 they take 10% of the pot with a max of $3 (or sometimes $4). This approach works great online and is in fact what almost all of the websites do. In person it doesn't make much sense because it means the dealers are always fiddling around with quarters and dimes and loonies and twoneys and whatever. It's a big pain in the ass for the dealers and since now there are quarters on the table they get tipped 50 cents sometimes instead of a dollar.

At the bigger games the casinos get their money a little differently. They do what is called "time collection." The way this works is every half hour the dealer collects a fixed amount of money from each player. This amount varies with the amount you're playing for (it's $6 at $15/$30, $7 at $30/$60, $12 at $100/$200 etc.). An easy way to think about it is, the players are renting the seats for the half hour.

In the past the Oaks Club was one of the few places that took time collection instead of a rake for all of their games.

Ryan's question is, is it better to pay time collection or a rake in low limit games. The argument for rake is that if you're using proper strategy you'll be playing fewer hands than your opponents, thus winning fewer pots and paying less than everyone else. While this sounds good, this theory has a few holes. First of all let's look at the math for a standard $3/$6 game. Time collection costs each player $8 an hour. Easy right? For a game with a rake it's a little more complicated. A standard dealer will deal 35 hands an hour so with $3 a hand coming off the table in rake we're looking at $105 per table per hour. In a nine handed game you're looking at $11.67 ($105/9 players) per player, per hour which is clearly more than $8 an hour (it's $10.20 per player for a 10 handed game).

But wait, we're playing tighter than everyone and you only pay when you win a pot right? The problem is when you add that extra blind on the button it becomes correct to get involved in many more pots. A third of the hands you're going to be in one of the blinds and even when you not, the action that this extra blind stimulates is going to force you to play more hands. Another way to think about it is in a time collection game you're paying $4 a round in blinds while in a rake game you're paying $7 a round in blinds. If you fold every hand for three rounds all of a sudden you're stuck $21 instead of $12.

Let's say you've found a game where they don't make you post that extra blind and just take $3 out of the pot anyway (a few places do this). You're still going to end up paying more. Your share of the pots is about 4 an hour (3.5 an hour for a 10 handed game). Even if you play fewer hands than everyone else you're still going to need to win 3 hands an hour to come out ahead in the long run, meaning you're paying $9 an hour instead of $8.

Let's look at another consideration. In a rake game there is no penalty for being away from the table. Every time someone want to go to the bathroom or take a short break they get up the hand before their big blind and come back a full round later. Since there is no penalty for being away from the game, in practice at least 1, if not 2 or 3 players are always away from the table. In a time collection game if you're away from the table, you're paying anyway so people have a tendency to stay in the action. Not only is a full game generally preferable, if a few players are missing in a rake game all of a sudden the number of pots you're due to win per hour goes way up. If you're in a game where there are an average of 7 players being dealt into every hand all of a sudden you're paying $15 an hour instead of $8.

Another consideration is it's good to have plenty of money on the table. I can tell you from experience that the games where everyone has three racks in front of them are way better than the games where everyone is nursing 2 stacks. Even if you were paying the same or slightly less than everyone else, If the casino is taking more money, there will be more short stacks and the game will not be as profitable.

While it may hurt to shell out those extra dollars, especially when you're losing, time collection is much better.

Another question might be "why are you squawking on and on about pennies? Who cares what the rake is?" I'll have to address that in another entry about "The evil power of the rake" (AHHHHHH hide the women and children!)

Poker Lessons

I've recently decided to get into the poker lesson for money game. My good friend Matt seems to be doing well for himself in this arena so I'm jumping in too. I've got myself 1,000 business cards and a shiny new website www.huffpoker.com.

I keep hearing from friends that they've all told 8 people about my blog and they've all been reading it. I suspect that some of the readership has long forgotten about me now that the WSOP is over, but if there is anyone out there in blog land interested in lessons, check out the website and give me a call or shoot me an e-mail. Keep in mind I'll gladly do lessons over the phone, if you're a friend I'll give you a generous price break and if you're one of my in-laws I'm going to charge you double. Just kidding. Many people have heard me say that I have the best in laws you could ever hope for (both my wife's family and my sister's husband's family).

Speaking of my in-laws, I've been giving some regular lessons to my brother in-law Damian and he's making good progress. I'll post a blog entry soon about the process of taking him from someone who doesn't know what a flop is, to a poker god who throws flaming bolts of destruction upon the helpless citizens of pokerland, causing massive explosions of chips which then rain down from the sky and land in his overflowing coffers. Either that, or at least I'll help him become a break even player.

Giving them too much credit

When I used to play at the Oaks Club on a daily basis, I often played against a fellow by the name of Walter Brown. Walter is an international grandmaster in the world of chess and won the U.S. chess championship something like 6 or 7 times. It's apparent when you talk to him that he has an IQ that is off the charts. He'll be sitting there and out of the blue he'll mention something about the efficiency of some mundane process that the Oaks Club employees are engaging in or mention some way the world could be improved. It's clear that he's always got that big brain cooking something up.

You'd think Walter would make a sensational poker player. But, while he's always been a solid winning player (and a nice guy), he's never made the jump to being great and I never had any trouble beating him regularly. His biggest weakness is he gives his opponents too much credit. He is so logical in every action and thought that he can't conceive of someone making a totally irrational play that was based totally on impulse.

When people play poker they do some weird shit. It never ceases to amaze me. Sometimes it's out of boredom or anger. Sometimes it's because they "felt like gambling." Other times it's "just because." I had a hand come up recently in a $100 single table tournament that fits into the "just because" category. We were playing 4 handed with blinds of 200/400. The blinds each had about 2000 chips, I had 1300 chips and the other player, we'll call him Mr. X, had the remaining 8200 chips. I was first to act and moved all in for 1300 chips, Mr. X called and the other two players folded. I had a weak hand and was hoping to simply win the blinds before the flop so I wasn't happy to get called. When the hands were turned over I was thinking "If he doesn't have a pair or one of my cards I'll at least have a chance." But instead of a pair or an ace he showed 2 3! This is the worst possible hand to have heads up (yes worse than 7 2). What did he think I had? He couldn't beat anything. Did he have a psychic premonition that told him to get in there? Of course, he wasn't making a judgment about what I had or what he could beat. He didn't think things through at all, he just acted. Maybe he decided that he had so many chips he'd just throw a few around and see if he could get lucky and knock me out (which he did). Maybe he decided he was on a hot streak. Who knows.

The point is, you have to consider what I've heard called (in print mind you) the RBF or the Random Berzerko Factor. If you haven't played with someone before, they could be a berzerko waiting to strike down your AK with 9 5 when you least expect it.

More importantly you can't assume that everyone out there is playing the way you do. This is one of my big weaknesses. Sometimes I'll be agonizing over a decision and shocked at how off I was in my read. I'll have AQ, the flop will come down A, 9, 5, I'll bet, someone will put me all in and I'll think "He's either got Ak or AJ with a slight chance that he could have three 9's, but I have to call because there's so much in the pot already." I'll be crossing my fingers hoping for AJ, my opponent will turn over K9 or 44 and I think to myself "I'm giving these guys too much credit."

What really drives me bananas is when I have what I think is a close decision in a big pot, I decide to call, find out I'm WAY ahead and lose the pot anyway when a terrible card shows up on the turn or the river. That kind of thing might make you throw your dry erase markers across the room, causing your sleeping cat to tear out of the room in horror, leaving you eliminated from your tournament and feeling guilty that you scared your peaceful pet. Not that I have any experience with that kind of thing.

In person it's easy to make some pretty solid assumptions about what kind of player you might be facing, by noticing how they look, act, dress and speak. I can spot a beginner a mile away just by seeing how they hold their cards and if you see someone expertly doing tricks with their chips at least you know you're up against an experienced player. Online it's much more difficult. Everyone is just a blinking name and chip total. It's easy to assume that if you've never seen someone before they are playing more or less the same way that you are (hopefully a little worse). Sometimes when you have a decent hand you just have to get in there and cross your fingers. Hopefully when you do, you'll knock someone out and think "I've got to stop giving these clowns so much credit."

How many games is too many?

When I first started playing online poker in January of 2004 the first thing I did was play a $10 single table tournament (which I won by the way). I was already a seasoned poker player, so It wasn't long until I moved up to bigger games and started playing more than one game at a time. Playing two games at a time wasn't much more difficult than one. After all if you're spending most of your time folding before the flop like you should be, why not get in twice as many hands in the same amount of time. I quickly jumped from two games at a time to three at once, but there I stayed for a long, long time. Of course I tried to play 4 at a time, but adding that extra game really threw me off and I found myself making plenty of mistakes.

Eventually I did make the jump to four games. I recall a time after I'd been playing online for about 6 months when party poker sent me an offer. It informed me that if I played 400 hands in cash games any time in the next week they'd send me a free polo shirt and a hat. There's something about getting a prize that I find exciting. If they had been offering me $20 (which is probably twice what the stuff they were sending me was worth) I almost certainly wouldn't have done it. But I wanted that stupid shirt and hat!

I decided to jump into four $3/$6 limit hold'em games and knock out 400 hands in about an hour and a half. I kindly asked my wife and our roommates to not talk to me at all during the duration of this experiment. I took a deep breath and dove in. It felt like things were moving fast and furious, but since I was nervous about getting distracted playing so many games, I was able to handle it and won $250 on top of the free goodies (which of course went directly to their home in the back of some closet the moment they arrived).

Thinking back it amazes me how much trouble 4 games at a time gave me, because soon after that day I started playing four $55 or $109 single table tournaments (sit-n-go's or SNG's) at a time all day every day. After about a year and a half of that, I felt like I needed a new challange.

I was curious how many games I could play at a time, but I was limited by the fact that my computer was a laptop. Even with just 4 games, the windows (which were not resizable at the time) overlapped significantly and if I added any more I wouldn't be able to see what was going on at all of the tables. Finally I had the crazy idea that I could get 8 games going at once if I used two lap tops ("no need to play 5 or 6 at a time, I'll just jump right up to 8" I thought) So I grabbed my wife's laptop, logged on to two different websites (since you can't be logged on to the same site on more than one computer) and hopped into eight $55 SNG's. I quickly discovered that while I could handle the decisions (barely) using two mice at the same time was not easy. Rather than using two mice with my right hand and potentially getting confused about which one went with which computer, I used my left hand for the computer on the left and my right hand for the one on the right. Not surprisingly, it turns out that it's much harder to use a mouse with your left hand after you've been using your right hand to operate one your entire life.

The first time I tried this experiment I did insanely well finishing 1st in three of the eight along with a 2nd and a 3rd. I did it a few more times with moderate success, but not long after Jen and I moved to a new house and I bought a desktop...a desktop with an uber monitor!

I figured after 2 years of doing this online thing for a living I was ready to improve my equipment. I toyed with the idea of getting two monitors and setting it up where I could have one mouse sweep the magic arrow across both, but then I decided I wanted one big monitor. I thought if I had two normal monitors I'd wish I had one big one, but I'd never wish I had two smaller ones. With great excitement, I went on the Dell website and spent $2,000 on a 30 inch flat screen monitor. It's awsome and may be my favorite possesion. At max resolution it will run at 2560 X 1600 meaning you can run 4 full size windows of internet explorer, or word or whatever with no overlap. More importantly I can run 9 poker games with no overlap. So of course as soon as I got it, that's what I did.

I decided to go with $200 buy-in no limit cash games because apparently I'd been taking crazy pills all morning. In retrospect this was a poor choice, because unlike SNG's where you just sign up and you're in, in cash games you have to do much more just to get in. First you have to join a waiting list and then you have to click on the open seat to join when it becomes avaliable and then tell them how much you want to buy-in for and then decided if you want to wait for the big blind or play right away. Normally this isn't a problem, but when you're alreay in 7 games and you have to go through all this nonsense it's tough. Another problem is once your 9 handed game gets fewer than 7 people in it, it usually collapses as the rest of the players leave to join a full game. It took me the better part of 20 minutes to just get to the point where I was getting dealt in in all 9 games.

Playing this many games at a time in totally insane. Not only can you not talk to other people you can't think about anything that isn't directly related to one of the hands you're in. I'd find myself thinking "what should I have for dinner later...oh shit I just missed three hands." I bet if you looked at me, you could see steam coming out of my ears. I went on like this for about 2 hours during which I played over 1100 hands (I ended up winning a whopping $70). In a casino if you played every hand that was dealt at a table without a break it would take you 32 hours to play 1100 hands. Unfortunately I felt about how you would if you played 32 hours of poker - pretty much brain dead.

These days I usually play 6 games at a time, and I've recently been thinking that I might actually make more money if I scaled it back to 5. Every game you add you make less per game. If you're in one game you can watch all of the players, keep track of what they're doing, and use that information to predict their future actions. If you're in 3 games you can remember what a few of the players have done usually just in the hands in which you were involved. If you're in 6 games you have very little information about the actions of the other players and just have to hope that your general strategy is better than theirs.

Imagine in your favorite online game you can make $10 an hour on average. If you play 2 games you can't make twice as much because your attention is split, but you might be able to make $8 per game per hour or $16 an hour total. Add another game and you might be able to make $7 an hour per game or $21 an hour total. If you go to 4 games at once however you might drop to $5 per game or $20 an hour total so you'd be better off sticking with 3 games. But consider this; what if the gap between you and your opponents is such that it takes almost no thought on your part to make $4 per game per hour and you can handle 8 games at once. Now you're making $36 an hour.

Another thing that goes into this equation is, you can play 1 or 2 games all day long without much drop off in your level of alertness, but if you're playing 7 or 8 at a time it's tough to go for more than 2 or 3 hours at a time without needing a long break. You just start to feel a little fuzzy, sort of how you feel right after you get out of bed in the morning (not how you want to feel with big bucks riding on your decisions)

The Party Poker Monster and an Old School Beat Down

The Party Poker Monster! AHHHH Don't let it get me! No it's not a mythical beast that eats online dollars and spits fiery aces at your fleeing pocket kings; it's a series of "freerolls" on Partypoker.com. A freeroll is a tournament that costs nothing to enter, but has "valuable" prizes to be won. These prizes are almost always cash prizes, but sometimes there are things like entries to big tournaments, various goodies, or even cars (like Ferraris and Porches) to be won. Some of these tournaments are open to literally anyone who wants to enter and are offered as a promotion to get new players to join or to get existing players to log in and start playing (most people once they start will play more than one game at a time or continue to play after they go broke in the freeroll). To play in other free rolls (the good ones) you have to qualify by playing normal games a certain amount in a given period of time.

Party Poker has come up with something a little different which is somewhat complicated, but should be profitable. I'll try my best to explain it and hopefully any of you poker players out there will be able to see the value. The first step is to win your way into the "$100,000 weekly freeroll." There are three ways to get into one of these events. The rarest way is to be playing in a "monster jackpot" game when someone hits a "bad beat jackpot." Everyone who is playing the same game at the same limit at that time wins an entry into the weekly freeroll. The second way in is to finish in the top 3 of a few designated tournaments. In addition to winning whatever they normally would win (except something like 8% of the prize pool goes to the final monster prize pool which I'll get to in a minute) these lucky few also win an entry into the weekly freeroll. This is also pretty tough. The third and easiest way is to win a Monster single table tournament. $5 from every player goes to the final monster prize pool and the rest of the tournament plays out normally with the winner getting an entry into the weekly freeroll. Confused yet?

So let's say you've won your way into one of the weekly free rolls which allow a maximum of 8000 players to enter. They're giving away $100,000 and there are probably going to be 8,000 players so an entry to this tournament is only worth as much as a free buy-in for a $12.50 tournament. Not too exciting. But, the top 2000 players in each of the weekly freerolls win an entry into one of the $1,000,000 monthly freerolls which will also have a max of 8000 players. So making to the top 2,000 in the weekly is worth about $125 in equity. Now we're getting some where. But wait there's more, and this is where it gets really interesting. If you finish in the top 1,000 of any monthly freeroll you get entered into the Monster Final. Do you remember the money from the bottom level that I said was getting added to the monster final prize pool? Well in the Monster Final that's what everyone will be playing for. They "seeded" this prize pool with $5,000,000 and after 3 weeks it's up to about 9.5 million dollars. If everything stopped right now an entry into the Monster Final would be worth over $1,000 in equity. But, there are 32 total weekly freerolls (with 29 left to go) and 7 monthly freerolls so there's lots of time to keep adding to the prize pool. It looks like the final could have a prize pool approaching $50,000,000 if the pace stays the same (and I think it will increase as more people do the math and realize how big this thing could be). To my knowledge the biggest prize pool in online history was the main event of last years World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) which was just over $3,000,000. The largest prize pool in poker history was this years WSOP main event which was around $87,000,000, followed by last years WSOP main event at just over $56,000,000 and the 2004 WSOP main event at around $25,000,000. It looks like this thing could be a piece of poker history, but I get the sense that right now no one cares about it and most of the good players out there aren't going to bother with it (there's a lot of leg work at the begining and no guarentees that it will lead to anything).

So far I've missed the cut in the two weekly tournaments I've played (I went broke with big pocket pairs in both) and I didn't bother to qualify for one since I was at E.B. and Jean's wedding. My wife Jen, on the other hand, finished 675th in today's weekly tournament so she'll be in the $1,000,000 monthly qualifier for sure. I've got 3 more shots before the first monthly event goes off so I still like my chances to get in.

Now for the old school beat down portion. I realized this morning that I didn't have any entries to the weekly events lined up so I sat down at 10:30 a.m. knowing I had until 1 p.m. to win one. Although they offer Monster single tables with various buy-ins the only ones that seemed to be running were of the $11 and $6 variety which were going off about every 90 seconds. So I jumped into 6 of the $11's. I'd forgotten how badly low limit players play and after the dust had cleared, I'd ended up with three 1st's and a 3rd. I've been running kind of bad lately so if felt nice to really beat down some weak competition and now I've got my weekly entries for the next few weeks lined up. Hopefully I'll be able to make it to the Monster Final.

Learning from my sports heros

I saw a Saturday Night Live sketch recently when Lance Armstrong was the host that was funny, but also (intentionally or not) had a great message behind it. In the sketch Lance had entered a triathalon and after the swim found himself in last place. But, of course when he got to the cycling leg he blew past everyone easily and took the lead. Then when he got to the run he started waving his arms and legs around wildly without making any progress. The commentators said things like "oh my god it turns out Lance Armstrong, one of the greatest atheltes of all time does not know how to run."After the "race" he was "interviewed" and when asked what happened he said "geez, I guess I focused too much on the cycling." The point that came out here is that you can't just focus on what you're best at if you want to be great at something.

Larry Bird used to have this idea as the pillar of his off season training. He was always a great 3-point shooter, but instead of shooting three's all summer he'd work on rebounding or ball handling or whatever he was having trouble with.

One of the tough things about poker is there aren't any drills and there is no practice. It's hard to work on your weaknesses even if you know what they are. And most of the time it's tough to tell if it's something you're doing wrong, something your opponents are doing to you or something the cards are doing. The closest thing to a dry run is playing for less money against weaker competition in order to try out some new tactics. Unfortunately there isn't much to be learned about beating down weak competition for not much money. Playing against people better than you is the best way to improve, but in order to do that you've got to put more money on the line than you normally would (the more money you're playing for, the better the players).

A few things I've been working on are stopping to think and challanging convention. It's easy to go on autopilot and just make a standard decision (especially when you're playing 6 games at a time), but sometimes if you think about it you can come up with something better. I tend to act on my first impulse, my first read. But, I'm trying to stop more and take some time, even if it's just 5 seconds, to make sure I've thought about the pros and cons of every reasonable course of action. Usually my gut reaction was the best, and the vast majority of the time decisions I'm making are totally cut and dry. But sometimes I'm surprised at the difference taking a few seconds on a key decision can make. Furthermore, there are certain ways that almost all "poker experts" would recommend that you play certain hands. The problem is all the books and articles, even if they are on one specific topic, aren't written specifically for me; they're written for everyone. I know more about the way people play in my games than the authors. In my specialty, online single table tournaments, I've got more experience than any author writing about general no limit tournament strategy so I need to first look to my own opinion of what's best.

Another athelete that I'd like to emulate is Tiger Woods. Of course he's talented and has a great work ethic, but you'll also hear that he's the best golfer in the world between the ears. I wouldn't mind having the ability to hit a 350 yard drive, but I'm more interested in what it takes to make a 6 foot putt with everything on the line. Furthermore he treats every shot with equal care, whether he's 10 shots off the lead and trying to finish 45th instead of 46th, or he's tied for the lead going into the last hole of a major tournament.

I'm trying to take the emotion out of my poker game. It's easy when I'm winning and have been winning to be logical, calm and cool headed. And this attitude usually leads to more winning. On the other hand when I'm losing, and have been losing day after day, I find it almost impossible to stay calm and play my best. Also I'm trying to take every hand seriously. Sometimes after a long day where I've played literally thousands of hands it's easy to let my concentration slip on the last few (or last few hundred) hands. Some hands are more important than others, but they all need to be treated with care.

I read an article recently that talked quantitatively about winning and losing. The article claimed that for the average person the pain of losing was about 2.5 times as severe as the joy of winning. So winning $250 is as pleasant as losing $100 is painful. This sounds about right to me. If you take this as a given then you can find yourself ahead and still be pretty upset. Give yourself 1 "happy point" for a dollar won and 2.5 "sad points" for a dollar lost. Now imagine a scenario where you play 10 hands and win $100 on 6 of them and lose $100 on 4 of them. You're ahead $200 in 10 hands. Great! But how do you feel about it? Well you picked up 600 happy points, but all that happiness and then some was washed away by your 1000 sad points. Sounds pretty sad to me. As a professional poker player part of my job is to buck these natural feelings and try to stay as logical as possible.

E.B and Jean's wedding

I took a few days off from poker to attend the wedding of our good friends E.B. and Jean. The wedding took place at a beautiful mansion in the Napa valley. We drove up on Friday afternoon and Jen and I were two of the lucky dozen or so people who got to stay at the site for the weekend. At the rehearsal dinner on Friday night, about 50 people enjoyed food provided by Top Dog catering (which is owned by the groom) and while most of them were gone by 9:30 a few of us partied until after midnight.

The following morning, 12 of us, including the bride and groom descended on Gilwood's cafe in St. Helena for some coffee, eggs, an obscene amount of bacon, and other delicious breakfast goodies. I had to be ready for action at 3:00 for pictures, because I was the one performing the ceremony! That's right, I was ordained reverend Dave, by the Universal Life Church to make it legal for me to perform weddings (as well as a few other ceremonies). When 5 o'clock rolled around I was surprisingly not nervous. E.B. had written the bulk of the ceremony and I plugged in a few of my own words here and there.

From start to finish the Ceremony took less than 15 minutes and couldn't have gone better. The only hitch came when E.B. and Jean read their vows which they had written themselves. A professional vow writer couldn't have done a better job and their vows were so beautiful and heartfelt that I found myself getting misty eyed. I think it's ok for anyone to cry at a wedding, but I've never heard of the officiant getting caught up in the moment. I managed to make it through without actually crying and more importantly I got all of the words out in a smooth clear manner.

The reception involved lot's of booze, a live band, dancing, and general merriment. Also the four Sandberg men (E.B., his brothers Paul and David and his dad, Sid) gave 4 of the most eloquent and interesting toasts that I've ever heard. The entire weekend was a Joy...except for the hangover that I had this morning. After another trip to Gilwood's on the way out of town I felt much better. Here are a few pictures.



Here I am performing the ceremony. In my opinion I've never looked smaller. If we could just rid of those silly people standing in front of me this would be a great picture.



Hey! Look at this! It's the greatest thing in the world! A black folder! I bet you've never seen one of these before. Yeah I got a real sweet deal on this baby. Bought it off the back of a truck down at the docks. I could let it go for maybe $150. Who knows maybe it's filled with somethin' worth somethin'. I heard about one guy who bought one of these that was filled with 500 pounds of gold. He just thought it was a folder and then when he go home he opened it and gold came pouring out. Now he's set for life. I haven't looked in this one yet. Could be all kinds of stuff in here. Are you interested? Maybe I could go as low as $125, because you seem like such a nice person. The girl? Yeah what the hell, give me the $125 and I'll throw her in for free.


If you guessed "preparing to smash a huge bug" or "trying to roll a hard 8" you guessed wrong. I'm actually threatening the earth. Not really. This was me on the dance floor doing one of my many signature moves that involves little more than thrusting and flailing with an occasional spin.

Tomorrow it's back to work and I've got a lot left to do. I'm still 600 tournaments short of my goal of 1000 for August. I think I can make it, but my ass is going to be glued to my chair for the rest of the month. On another note you can catch the first hour of coverage of the WSOP Main Event on ESPN this Tuesday at 8 p.m. eastern time. If your lucky maybe you'll catch a 5 millisecond glimpse of the back of my head.

Going Pro and August So Far

I've read countless articles and sections of books talking about "going pro." Almost everyone who's played poker seriously and doesn't love their job has at least thought about playing for a living. All of these writings talk about how much money you need to have in reserve (a ton), what kind of sample size you need to figure out how much you can expect to make at a given game (you need to play every day for the rest of your life and you'll have a close approximation), how you need to take it seriously and treat it like a business, and how you need to pay your taxes (really). But, I've only seen one person mention what I think is the most important thing of all - you better LOVE to play. When you have a 9 to 5, you better be dreaming about getting into a poker game the second you get off. If it hasn't had a negative effect on your performance at work, you don't love it enough. You should want to play so much that if you had a fight with your wife about how much you play, you'd storm out and go to the casino. Of course these aren't healthy behaviors, I wouldn't recommend acting this way and as soon as I started playing for a living this kind of thing stopped happening :) The point is if you only kind of like to play, you'll never be able to make yourself do it when you've had three losing days in a row or its a sunny Saturday and you're friends are going to the beach.

Another thing which they don't mention which I think is huge is having a supportive spouse. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten totally killed in a game and felt like total shit on the drive home (or usually the walk down stairs now). But, when I tell Jen what happened and she gives me a hug I always feel fine again. I don't know how some of these guys can come home to nothing but the TV and get themselves right again. If I say "I lost $2,000 today" she says "are you ok" when plenty of wives would say "You lost how much? Oh no, how could you do that?" which would only make things worse. I think it's because she's been through it all before with the amounts of money gradually increasing. When I started if I lost $100 I'd almost be in tears. Now if win or lose $100 it's a break even day and it takes a few four digit losing days in a row to get me upset. By the same token winning has lost a little of it's luster. I remeber when I had a running count of the number of days I'd won over $1,000 (it's probably at around 75 now) and it was huge deal every time I did. Now I've got a running count on $10,000 days (5) and I'm hoping one day I'll be able to say "I won $10,000 today" and hear in response simply "Oh that's nice."

So far in my quest to play 1,000 single table tournaments in August I've played 352 and won $3,010. I'm a little behind schedule both in terms of tournaments played and my $10 per tournament goal. I've won 8 out of the 13 days that I've played which is also a little lower than I'd expect in the long run (something like 75% is more normal). The main reason I haven't been blogging is I've been trying to stay focused on working as much as possible. In the past the main benefit of my job has been working whenever I wanted and not working much. I'm trying to shift my thinking and focus to the point where my main job benefit is making a lot of money.