A Splash of Glory at Full Tilt

I spent my day working on an old deposit bonus at FullTilt.com. About a month ago I deposited $1,000 and after I earn some number of points they'll give me $500. One nice thing about this bonus which is different from most deposit bonuses is they pay out in $20 increments. So rather than getting $500 or nothing, even if I didn't complete the bonus by the given deadline I'd get credit for whatever I'd earned up to that point. In practice it doesn't make much difference to someone like me because I'm going to get the max bonus every time, but for an average player this is greatly preferable.

I spent the day playing a mix of $60 and $119 SNG's and picked up what seemed like an easy $950 in about 4 hours of play. I get the feeling that for the most part the players on Fulltilt suck. I might have to spend a little more time playing there. I suspect that all of the best players have done the math on the pokerstars FPP program and choose to play there just like me. If that's the case then Fulltilt should be full of duds. I have to decide whether it's worth giving up the FPP benefits to play against the weaker competition.

Another interesting thing about Fulltilt is they have a few dozen of the world's best poker players who own a stake in the website (technically they own the software and marketing company, but in practice they own a piece of the website). Any time these players are in a game or registered for a tournament the listing shows up in red (as opposed to black) and instead of screen names they have their actual name and avatars that look like the real people. So if you're playing against a guy who's name is Phil Ivey, you know it's really him and not just someone with that screen name.

Today while I was playing 1996 WSOP main event champ Huck Seed was also playing. He was in a few $525 SNG's, but he was also in a bunch of $119's as well. I played in a few of the same tournaments as Huck and in one we got down to heads up. After three hands I won! Sure the blinds were huge and when we got heads up I had more chips than him, but now I can say I played a world champion heads up and I won! Take that suckers!

Tomorrow I'm going to shoot for 100 SNG's in one day. I hope my head doesn't explode in the process.

I'd also like to wish some congratulations to my brother in law Damian's brother Shawn and his wife Amanda. They had their first child today at 11:40 eastern. It was a little girl named Sydney and both baby and parents are doing fine. How am I related to my nephew's cousin, you might ask? I don't think I am at all, but I will claim that Sydney is my niece in law even though to my understanding there is no such thing.

EWC Days #5 & #6

My Executive Week challenge came to and end with a fizzle rather than a bang. On Friday I only managed 30 tournaments during 4 hours of play and broke even to the dollar. On Saturday I only managed 23 SNG's mixed in with a few multitable freerolls and over the course of about 4 and a half hours I lost $36. I did a great job of putting myself in position to win, but managed to blow it many, many times. If I was playing my best I would have won $500 today, but instead I lost $36. I definitely felt burned out by the end of the week and think I might have been better off playing 8 hours a day for 6 days rather than starting with 10 on the first day and then 9 on the second day and going down hill from there. It was good to discover that playing 85 SNG's in one day is not as bad as I thought it might be and it's good to know that I can push myself just a little if I need to. It's also clear that I'm not cut out for working a normal job.

All in all the week was a success. I said at the start that my goal was to win $2,000 and I managed to win $2,281. I also managed to generate $468 in FPP's so my net profit was really $2,749. If I could do that every week things would run pretty smoothly around here.

I had hoped to play 400 SNG's and work 50 hours, but I only managed 335 over about 45 hours. Of course if I was counting like a normal person (ie working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. counts as 12 hours even if you take an hour for lunch and a break here and there) I would have been over 50.

Another short coming is I never had a day where I played 100 SNG's. In order to make up for that I'm going to attempt to do it this Tuesday. There's no good TV on on Tuesday nights so I won't face the temptation of knocking off early. Also I'm not doing anything except sitting on my couch and watching football all day tomorrow so even after a normal workday on Monday I should be pretty fresh.

There isn't a whole lot of excitement coming up in my poker future. I don't have any plans to play any big in person tournaments for at least a few months and I've decided to pretty much stick to the unglamorous but profitable world of SNG's. After all I'm going to be taking 5 days off for Thanksgiving and 11 days off for Christmas. This job doesn't come with paid vacation so I'll have to work a little harder before and after the holidays to make up the difference. Jen has her eye on a sweet digital Camera in the pokerstars FPP store which costs 48,000 points (roughly $765) so it looks like she's going to be playing a lot in the next month or two. If she can keep winning like she has been we'll be loaded in no time.

EWC Day #4

My resolve to continue this experiment at full force is fading as the days go on. Today was a casual Thursday and instead of sporting a shirt and tie, I came in to the office wearing a fire-engine-red Party Poker Sweatshirt. On day 1 I played for almost 6 hours straight to start the day. Today it was about 2 hours and 45 minutes before I took my first break. I managed another 58 tournaments and had pretty steady success.

I did have one major bump in the road when I came back after lunch. I jumped into 6 tournaments and found myself bounced from three of them within 5 minutes. Getting three 9ths in a row may be a first for me. In the preceding 258 tournaments I'd played this week up to that point, I'd only ended up with four 9ths so three straight was a real shock. If you consider the fact that I only get 9th about once in every 25 tournaments on average getting 3 consecutive 9ths is a 1 in 15,625 occurrence.

At the end of the day even though I felt like I got pretty screwed a dozen times I still managed to win $530. I'm ahead $2,357 after 280 tournaments which is right in the range I'd hope to be. While winning $8.42 per tournament is pretty solid I'd like to get close to the $10 range and I think I might even be able to get it to the $12 range. At first glance this might seem like a major jump since I'd have to increase my profits by 43%, but when you include the juice I'm actually beating the other players by $13.42. So a jump of another $3.58 is really only a 27% increase and given the fact that $3.58 is only 6% of the buy in I think it's possible. Even at $8.42 I should be able to make 8 grand a month which is just fine with me.

On a completely different note I was playing against a guy who's name was FishNBarrel today and I had the thought that the expression "as easy as shooting fish in a barrel" is totally ridiculous. First and foremost why is anyone SHOOTING fish? There seem like much easier and less expensive ways to kill your fish (bullets aren't free you know). The first two that come to mind are sharp objects or removing them from water. Now we have to ask ourselves is there water in the barrel? If there isn't, then the fish are going to die on their own so there is no reason to shoot them. It seems like it would make even less sense to shoot dead fish in a barrel so it's fair to assume that there is water in the barrel. Do you know what water does? It refracts light. This makes the fish appear in a slightly different position then they actually are. This means that if you shoot directly at the fish (which should be moving by the way) you'll actually miss. The shock wave from the bullet might be enough to kill them anyway, but I think shock waves are pretty far down on my list of ways to kill fish (I'll publish the full list upon request). If we're going to use analogies to express how easy thing are let's stick with taking candy from babies. After all that ends with candy and not a leaky barrel filled with bloody fish guts.

Getting back on topic. I've worked about 36 hours so far this week and I can't see making it to 10 tomorrow (my brain is turning to mush faster and faster every day), so it looks like I'll be facing at least a 5 hour Saturday.

EWC Day #3

My campaign to get fired doesn't seem to be working. I came in to work an hour late wearing no shoes and a checkered tie that had no business being worn with the wrinkly striped shirt I'd chosen. I also left an hour early because NBC's The Biggest Loser is two hours tonight. I guess my insanely intellegent and charming boss doesn't care about those things.

As a result of my shortened day, I "only" played 57 tournaments and despite a streak in the middle where 9 out of 10 of my finishes were either 4th or 5th I had a solid day. I won just under $600 which puts me pretty much back where I was after EWC day #1. This is just fine with me since my goal was to make $2,000 for the week and I'm only $173 short after 3 days. I've also earned about $310 worth of frequent player points which should not be overlooked. If I could make it to $3,000 (including FPP's) by the end of the week I'd be very happy.

Another thing I have working for me right now is a deposit bonus. I talked a little about deposit bonuses in a previous post and today I started working on the best one I've ever seen. I deposited $2,000 and pokerstars is going to give me $1,000 after I earn a specified number of FPP's. It will take me 600 $55 SNG's or 333 $100 SNG's to earn the number of points I need, which at the rate I've been knocking them out shouldn't take me too long. Of course over the course of 600 $55 SNG's I'll be paying pokerstars $3,000 in juice so it's not like they're getting screwed. But I would be playing and paying the juice regardless so it's as if they're just giving me the money out of the kindness of their hearts. With that said it can make you sick to think about the amount of juice I've payed them in the past year. After all they've made $1,110 off of me in the past three days!

I've come up short of 10 hours the past two days, but I'm going to make up that time in the next two days or on Saturday. My real goal has been a 50 hour week. I'm still thinking I'd like to shoot for 100 SNG's in a day tomorrow or Friday, but I've discovered that once I hit about 75 it gets VERY hard to continue and it should take me about 12 hours to hit 100. I'm not sure I have a day like that in me, but we'll see. If I don't do it this week I'll give it a go next Monday or Tuesday after I've had some time to recover.

EWC Day #2

Day two of my Executive week didn't go as smoothly as day 1. The big problem was a lack of 1st place finishes. All of the money is at the top and it's almost impossible to even break even without a healthy supply of firsts. Traditionally I've finished in 1st about once in every 7 tournaments, but it took me 34 attempts to get my first outright victory yesterday. I ended up losing about $650 for the day after playing 81 tournaments.

My businesslike approach also took a small hit as I ditched my shirt and tie about half way through the day and left work 45 minutes early. I thought my boss (that handsome bastard) didn't see me, but on my way out the door he made me promise to make up the time later in the week or on Saturday. Sorry for the half assed update, but fatigue is starting to set in a little.

EWC Day #1

Although I was pretending to be an executive, I wasn't quite as professional as the real thing. I set my alarm for 8:00 and after 5 snoozes, I crawled out of bed at 8:45. I expected it still to be completely dark outside at such an early hour, but to my surprise it was light outside. At first I figured that one of my neighbors was shining a light on our bedroom window, but after further investigation I determined that it was the sun! What is this the freaking arctic circle? I thought 9 a.m. was the crack of dawn?

I was supposed to be "at work" by 9 so I had to rush through breakfast. I gulped down a few bowls of cereal while reading the paper. I actually didn't get much reading done because it turns out that I'm unable to see through cat and one of ours decided I should be paying attention to her and not the recaps of Sunday's football games.

I arrived in my office at 9:05 unshaven, in jeans, with no shoes on and wearing the wrinkliest shirt known to man, but I did managed to squeeze a tie around my neck in the 20 minutes between bed and work. I took a timer from the kitchen and set it to count down from 10 hours. Instead of playing my normal $100 SNG's I decided to drop down a limit to the $55 level. The only thing worse than working 50 hours in a week is working 50 hours when you're losing. I definitely wanted to book a win to start the week and this seemed like a good way to ensure that. I planned to play for about 6 hours but after 5 hours and 19 minutes I decided to break for lunch. In this first part of the day I was right around even most of the time. I played 47 tournaments and ended up with 20 money finishes, but eleven of them were 3rds with only three 2nds and six 1sts. I was ahead about $200 at this point and feeling ok.

I had a bowl of soup while I watched Around the Horn and Pardon the Interuption (a pair of sports talk shows) on ESPN. I have a daily routine where I always eat while I watch Around the Horn and I've noticed that if I TIVO it and watch it later in the day I always get a very pavlovian craving for my lunch time staples. I went for a 30 minute run following lunch and after a quick shower I was ready to get back into the action.

In my second session of the day I had tremendous success. I had two sweet streaks of money finishes. To start I made the money in 10 of my first 13 tries and I had another streak where I made the money in 9 of 10 tries. In the second set overall I had 24 money finishes in 37 tournaments with nine 3rds, seven 2nds and eight 1sts.

On the day I ended up winning a few dollars short of $1,900 and I set a few records. First of all my previous best for tournaments in a day was 62 which I eclipsed with my total of 84 (I'll shoot for 100 tomorrow I think). Secondly I made the money in the fastest time and the fewest number of hands that I can ever imagine. It only took 7 hands and 8 minutes to make the money in one tournament. I hadn't won a pot or seen a flop and wasn't even paying attention to that particular game when I noticed that there were only 3 of us left and one player had 10,500 chips! It typically takes about 35-40 minutes to get down to 3 players and the fastest I can remember making it to the money is about 13 minutes so I was really amazed by this turn of events.

Another thing I saw for the first time was a guy playing in 18 games at a time! The most I'd seen before was 12, but I noticed this guy in all of my games so I did a search for him and saw he was playing in eighteen $55 SNG's. This is TOTALLY insane. I've played 9 games at a time before and I think I could handle 10 or 12 for a few minutes, but nowhere close to 18. And he was playing like that all day. You need at least 2 and probably more like 3 or even 4 thirty inch monitors to run that many games comfortably. It didn't seem like he was doing very well which is not surprising.

If tomorrow goes anything like today I might have to make this work all day thing a habit. I feel pretty tired, but I'm hoping after a good nights sleep I'll be ready to get back to work. Tomorrow I'm planning on wearing my tie that has lobsters putting tobasco sauce on themselves which I love, but never get to wear because it is ridiculous. I'll let you know what happened.

Getting Ready for Some 10 Hour Days

On Monday I'm going to start my executive week challenge. Some people thought it would be this past week so you're not alone if you're confused about the timing. I'll be playing the part of a hard working, nut job executive and working 10 hours a day for 5 days straight. This will be 10 hours at the computer clicking away and I won't be counting any lunch or other breaks towards my total time. Check back for daily updates.

In other news, in the time between my last post and today I have been getting totally killed. It was nice in my last post to deliver some good news for a change, but since then, things have turned really sour. I've been spending my time playing $100 SNG's which is supposed to be the thing that I'm best at, but it sure doesn't seem that way. My results haven't been marginal or even bad; they've been horrific. It's not like I've been winning in the mornings and losing back my winnings plus a little more at night. Everytime I sit down to play $500 evaporates from my account. I'm trying to stay as positive as I can, but when all you do is lose, lose, lose for a week straight it feels like you're cursed.

Even worse, the last thing I feel like doing is playing poker. It's painful to lose hand after hand no matter what you do and it has a cumulative effect on your emotional well being. If you get a 4th place (the most frustrating result in a SNG that pays three spots) when you're ahead even a little or right after you get a first or a second it's no big deal. On the other hand if you've gone 8 straight tournaments without a money finish with two 4th's and three 9ths during that stretch and then you get TWO MORE 4th's when you were WAY ahead in both of the hands on which you were knocked out, it will make you scream "FUCK" at the top of your lungs. Even this kind of thing is tolerable under normal circumstances, but when it happens after things haven't been going well for a few days and there are more very similar stories from the preceding days, it makes you feel terrible. You keep thinking "when the hell is this going to stop?"

It makes me feel bad for professional athletes that get slammed in the media. Sometimes you just can't get it done. It doesn't matter how much you want to win or how hard you try. Sometimes you're just not good enough. I'm starting to worry that maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe I just don't have what it takes.

Even though that's how I'm feeling right now, it's not like I'm going to quit playing. I just have to keep doing my best and hope things turn around. There's a certain security in knowing that you're going to be playing 50 hours in 5 days. Even if things go poorly for the first 25 hours (which is an eternity in online poker) there are still 25 more to be played. Hopefully I'll be able to knock out a few winning days and get myself back on track financially and emotionally.

Executive Week Challenge

Jen and I will be spending the weekend in Southern California and attending Jen's 2nd cousin's wedding in Malibu. When I get back I'm going to take part it a self administered challenge. Starting November 6th I'm going to have what I'll be calling my "Executive Week Challenge" (OOOHHHH AHHHHHHH). Normally I like to work 5 or 6 hours a day 6 days a week. Sometimes it makes me sick to look at my hourly rates and think about how much I could be making if I really busted my ass. So for one week Monday through Friday I'm going to spend 10 hours a day playing. I'm going to pretend that I'm some career driven workaholic maniac executive and work all day long. I'm going to wear a tie as a symbol of my commitment to this theme (I'll post a picture). I'm going to get up in the actual morning and shave every day (it sounds crazy doesn't it?). By day two I'll probably be drinking straight Scotch at the end of the day and neglecting my wife. I'm going to take power lunches! I don't know what they are, but I'm going to take them dammit! I'm going to bitch about my boss (that asshole is making me work 10 hours a day!).

While 10 hours a day might not seem like an insane amount to most of you, think about the amount of actual work that you get done in a normal 10 hour day. How much time do you spend chatting with coworkers? How long do you take for lunch? How much time do you spend just spacing out or getting coffee or in the bathroom? During my work hours I'm making a decision every 10 seconds and every mistake costs me money.

I'm hoping to have one day where I play 100 SNG's in a day. To date my record is 62 and I've always wanted to say that I've played 100 tournaments in one day. I'd like to make $2,000 during the extavoganza and given the amount that I'll be playing that might be a little low. By Friday night I'm sure my brain will be mush. I'll no doubt fall face first out of my chair where a puddle of drool will accumulate and I'll lay there passed out until one of our cats decides to lick my face or attack my wrinkled, toothpaste stained tie (I'll post a picture of that too).

Now that I've posted this blog there's no backing out, and I encourage you all to mock me mercilessly if I fail to follow through on this. I'll do my best to post short updates daily.

(Note: there is also another new post after this one)

Taking a Step back and Jen Kicking Ass

This is a blog post that I wrote on September 10th. I had a few more things I wanted to add, but now I've forgotten what they were. Afterwards I'll have some comments from today.


I've been going through maybe the toughest stretch of my poker career over the past few months. It seems like no matter what I do my wins keep getting washed away by my losses. When you're playing for fun, breaking even is fine and most casual players would be thrilled to do so. When you're playing for a living, breaking even is a disaster. The bills don't stop showing up in the mail box just because you've lost with pocket aces what seems like 47,000 times in the last 2 months.

Not surprisingly, it can be stressful to lose or break even when you're used to winning. It's part of the job and every player no matter how good is going to go through some dry spells. I got the idea that I would write e-mails to any poker authority I could find and ask them how they deal with the losing stretches. Before taking this step, however, I thought I should first answer the question myself as if I were getting the e-mail.

So what's the best thing to do when you've been losing? Nothing will help you win more than winning. Well, what the hell does that mean? It means that you tend to play your best when you're ahead or you've had a string of winning days. When things are going well it's easy to stay patient, confident, have fun, and shrug off short stretches of bad luck. On the other hand when you've been losing it can seem like nothing is ever going to go right for you again and it's easy to start making non optimal plays in an effort to get even quickly. Another way to think about it is, if you're ahead $500 for the day, winning another $20 seems like a nice little bonus, but if you're stuck $500 it's easy to think "who cares about this stupid $20." Most of poker isn't massive bluffs or making full houses; it's taking advantage of small edges many, many times. When you start thinking about any amount of money or chips as insignificant you're in trouble.

So how do you start winning so you can keep winning? After all it's not like you were trying to lose before. One way to accomplish this goal is to take a step back and drop down a limit. You don't need to take it all the way to the floor and start playing the lowest limit you can find, but play for a little less money against weaker players and book a few wins.

Another thing that's important for someone like me is to get back to basics. I play poker in many flavors and varieties and while I'm good enough to win at all of them (I think), I'm certainly much better at some than others. Think about what your absolute best game is and in what form you are best at playing it. Maybe it's limit cash games in person, or 7-card stud tournaments online. For me it's traditionally been single table NL hold'em tournaments.

The most important thing you can do when you've been losing is do everything you can to win. Get plenty of sleep, eat right, drink less alcohol, and get some exercise. Treating your body right will help your mind stay sharp. Take every hand seriously. Set defined hours that you're going to play regardless of your results. Reread any literature that has helped you in the past. Do some critical thinking about your tactics. Do whatever it takes!

Now for my October 27th update. When I wrote the above post, I was feeling really down and my confidence was at an all time low. For the first time in 3+ years the idea that I might have to get a job squeaked into my head. I was still quite a few really bad months away from that possibility, but it just felt like I was never going to win regularly again. Deep down I knew it didn't make sense that I could win 34 of the first 36 months in my career and then just all of a sudden not be a winning player, but that's how it felt.

So what did I do? Well I took a day off and then got back on my horse. I also took my own advice. I started taking better care of myself. I dropped down to the $55 SNG's as opposed to the $100's. I backed off from 6 games at a time to 5 games at a time (it may not seem like a big difference, but it is). Guess what happened? I started winning again. Between September 12th and September 30th I played 17 of the 19 days, had 14 winning days and ended up winning $5,800. Somewhere in there I jumped back up to $100 SNG's and I continued to win through October. I took a week off at the beginning of the month when my friend Brian Ridgeway from Maryland and his girlfriend Andrea came to visit, but I've still managed to net close to $4,000 this month. $4,000 a month is a little below expectation. $5,000-$6,000 a month is par for the course, but considering the week off and the way things had been going I'll gladly take it.

Also thing were going even better until I took a major ass whipping two days ago. I was coming off a $1,400 wining day the day before, when I just got totally smoked. I played 27 $114 SNG's (I usually just refer to these as $100's) and when the dust cleared I had five 9th place finishes and only four money finishes. In the long run I've averaged a 9th place about 1 in every 25 tournaments and have made the money about 42% of the time so this was a real shock. It was like I was playing with a normal deck and my opponents were getting their cards from a deck with 10 aces and 12 kings. I lost with KK vs AA 3 times! That's only supposed to happen once every 5,000+ hands! I ended up losing $1,775 which was my worst losing day online since May. At least I was coming off a solid winning day.

Now back to more good news! As an added bonus to my recent return to respectability my wife has been tearing it up pokerwise lately. She is the only poker player in the entire universe who underrates her abilities. Most people who lose their ass on a daily basis will tell you how great they are at every opportunity. Jen on the other hand will swear until she's blue in the face that 1) she is not a good player 2)she is lucky to have more than $20 in her account 3)she couldn't beat a drunken 10 year old if they were playing their cards face up. This is not the case.

After taking a few months off from playing poker regularly for whatever reason she got back into it effectively because I made her (I'm a fiendish tyrant!). It all started with a pokerstars reload bonus. From time to time the websites will give you incentive to deposit more money into your account. What they do is match some percentage (usually around 20%) of your deposit up to a certain maximum. You can only cash out the bonus money once you've played a certain amount. In this case it was a 20% match up to a max of $120. For the average player it might take them a few weeks or even longer to earn the bonus, but it takes me about 2 and a half hours so I'm always happy to take advantage of these offers. While I knew it would take Jen much longer, I also knew this bonus would add a lot to her bottom line. She'd already started to play a little on the now defunct party poker so I didn't have to push too hard to get her to make a deposit on pokerstars.

She started playing the $55 SNG's which, not surprisingly, is the thing she is best at also (she's had some solid coaching). She was playing 2 at a time while watching TV in the evenings and it seemed like everytime I'd ask how she was doing she'd say "Oh I'm ahead $350" like it was $1.75. She earned the bonus in no time, but was having so much success that she kept on playing. In the beginning of October she picked up some more cash playing something a little different.

Pokerstars also offers what are called "multitable SNG's." There are a few flavors, but the ones Jen started playing were $20 buy in, 20 table tournaments. Basically the way it works is as soon as 180 players register for the tournament it starts. There are always exactly 20 tables of 9 players and they always pay 18 spots with the exact same prizes (18th pays $43, 9th pays $61, 5th pays $234 and 1st pays $1,080 just to give a few examples). Jen played 1 of these every day for 5 days and made the final table THREE TIMES including one 1st place (she also got a 5th and a 4th)! It was pretty sweet for her to pick up $1,500 playing $20 tournaments. It's amazing how much easier it is to beat players who suck instead of players who are just a little worse than you.

In the past few weeks Jen had been working on another deposit bonus on another site. This one is a 100% match up to $550, so it takes MUCH, MUCH longer to clear it. But her success has continued.

How much has she won? She won a fantastic $2,600 in September and an insane $4,200 in October! It's amazing to win that much money in such a short period playing 2 games at a time. Notice that in October, she's made more than me while working 3 days a week and doing the lion's share of the cooking and cleaning. It makes me feel like a real dead beat to read that sentence. I'm lucky to have her.

So why isn't she quitting her job to pursue a career as a poker pro? If you asked her she'd give you three reasons: 1) she is not a good player 2)she is lucky to have more than $20 in her account 3)she couldn't beat a drunken 10 year old if they were playing their cards face up. In addition to those main points I think she doesn't want the pressure of having to play or having to win. If you look back at my post about going pro, you'll notice that one of my main points is if you're going to play for a living you better LOVE to play. It can't be something you sort of want to do some of the time. With that said if she wanted to quit and play more I'd be all for it.

The Past Three Days

I've spent the past three days in action playing cash games in the local card rooms. On Wednesday I started the day off right by getting a cavity filled. AWESOME! It actually wasn't bad at all. After going to dentists who were clearly sub par (I swear to god one of them was located between a dollar store and a fried chicken place) for the past 5 years, Jen and I decided to upgrade our insurance so we could go to one recommended by our friend Chrissy "The Gas" Cowsert. Great nick name huh? I came up with it (it hasn't really caught on yet)! Chrissy works for PG&E as a "gas engineer" so it makes sense in that context, but it also leads people to think she might have a problem with flatulence! HA! Or I suppose if you wanted to pretend it was still the 1940's it could mean she was hilarious. You could say things like "That Cowsert's a real gas! I remember this one time she took my pocketbook off the ice box and threw it right into the face of the milkman!"

Anyway, Chrissy recommended a great dentist and it was best cavity filling I've ever experienced. Afterwards I came home and jumped into 5 SNG's. After a kick ass performance I found myself ahead $700 and got the urge to go to the Oaks. I was planning on playing $15/$30 (a game where a standard buy in is $500 and you could easily win or lose $1000 in a session), but when I arrived, I discovered that there was a $30/$60 game going (As you might imagine this game has twice the stakes of $15/$30). The Oaks never had $30/$60 in the past (at least since I'd been going there) and it's only been in the last year or so that they've started running one every Tuesday and Friday. Since it was Wednesday I didn't expect one to be running, but apparently the Tuesday game had gone around the clock and was still going. There was a seat open so I sat down, counted out ten $100 bills and bought myself a rack of one hundred, lime green $10 chips.

I hadn't played a limit cash game in person since I was in LA in May, so I was a little nervous that my game might not be sharp. But, once the cards started flying I felt right a home. It's a tremendous comfort after going to the WSOP this summer that I've done OK against the worlds best so I'll be fine against whoever strolls into the Oaks. Another thing that helped was there wasn't much in the way of competition in the game. I expected to run into at least one or two strong players, but I didn't find any. In fact after about an hour it was perfectly clear to me that I was the best player in the game. There is something tremendously ego boosting to be in a room with a few hundred people playing poker and to know that you are the best player in the biggest game (there was actually one player in the building that I know is a better play than me (my friend Bombay Jack), but he was playing Pan).

At some point I realized that I was living the dream that I had for myself about 5 years ago. When I was dealing cards for a living instead of playing, all I wanted to do was play. I had the utmost respect for the players in the $15/$30 game and every time I dealt it I dreamed of sitting in that game and competing against those players. Eventually I did start sitting in that game and competing, but while I was a prop player, I only had to play up to $6/$12. I rarely made the jump to $15/$30 and was always nervous when I did so. To think that I could sit in a $30/$60 game at the Oaks, be calm, and be the best player in the game is something I could barely have imagined even 2 or 3 years ago.

It also put a smile on my face to look at a college kid or two sitting by themselves, reading cardplayer magazine waiting to get called for the $3/$6 game. The days when I was at that level were the funnest part of my poker career. I couldn't play whenever I wanted and as much as I wanted so when I did play I really enjoyed it. I'd get more excited about winning $100 in those days than I would about winning $5,000 today. It was nice to remember those times.

I spent about 6 hours playing $30/$60 and won a little over $800 which is a solid, but somewhat modest amount for a game of that size. The next day I came back with E.B. and played a little $15/$30. I'd done well the day before so why not keep the ball rolling. Unfortunately I had one of the worst runs of cards that I can remember. After 4 hours of play I'd won exactly 4 pots, and two of them were total bluffs. I wasn't getting any cards at all and found myself stuck almost $1,500. Yuck! I was playing well and up against weak opposition, but there was just nothing I could do. I got things turned around and only ended up losing about $650. It still sucked, but I was happy to make a comeback.

The next day E.B., Jen and I made the trip 30 miles south to Bay 101, the largest card room in the bay area. I wanted to sign up for two tournaments that are going off next weekend and I heard they were filling up quickly. Unlike big tournaments in L.A. and Vegas the one's around here always have limited number of seats available because of space constraints.

I considered playing $40/$80 but the amount of cash I had on hand was a little light for a game of that size. I opted instead for a $20/$40 game. When I sat down it was the toughest $20/$40 game I'd ever seen. Players can be grouped into two categories. Winners and losers. At the low limits 95% are losers and at the middle limits at least 80% are losers (the reason for the jump is the amount of money the house takes is proportionally much smaller the more money you play for). In this group by my estimation there were 6 winners (not including myself) and 2 losers. Everyone kept commenting on how bad the game was and luckily after an hour or so the game softened up substantially. I spent the early part of the day behind about $700 and the made it back to the point where I was ahead $300. Sadly I made a few bad decisions, lost a few huge pots that I played well and caught a few bad breaks towards the end of the session. I ended up leaving down about $450.

These past three days spent back in the card rooms, although not profitable, gave me confidence that I could in fact earn a nice living even if online poker goes the way of the do do. It was also fun and I expect that I'll be making weekly appearances at the Tuesday $30/$60 at the Oaks.