FTOPS X

The subject line of this post looks like pure gibberish, but as I'm sure you've guessed it's an acronym! In fact it stands for "Full Tilt Online Poker Series 10" which is a series of tournaments that will be running from November 5th until November 16th. This is sort of the WCOOP analog on fulltiltpoker.com and is kind of like the WCOOP's little brother.

They run this series twice a year and while it carries less prestige than the WCOOP, it still has some. The tournaments will have smaller fields than the WCOOP, but they'll still be pretty big. And in general the buy ins are a little less. There are going to be 25 events and 22 of them have buys ins between $129 and $535. By Contrast 9 of the 33 events in the WCOOP had buys ins (or effective buy ins in the rebuys tournaments) of $1,000+.

After a brief look at the schedule my plan is to play somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 in tournaments. The one I really have my eye on is $535 HORSE. If you want to check out the full schedule you can do so here.

While I won't be selling a big piece of my action I will be selling a splash. I'll be sending an e-mail to my usual backers in the near future.

Shifting gears, you may have noticed my new banner ad. I'm never one to pass up an easy buck and I'm hoping this banner ad might just lead to a few. If anyone clicks on my ad and signs up for an account on pokerstars I get a piece of the money that pokerstars makes from them for the life of their account.

So if any of you out there in blog land have been thinking of diving into the online poker world or are thinking of joining pokerstars after playing on other websites, please do it by clicking on my add! If you do so and let me know via e-mail I'll even give you a free 90 minute poker lesson over the phone! That's somewhere between a $15 and $300 value (even though I've given a few lessons for money I have no idea what they're worth on the open market)!

I have no idea what percentage of the rake we're talking about here and the only reason I did this in the first place was my friend Matt Lessinger asked me to. He wanted to do it himself, but he doesn't have a website. Anyway one of the players who he gives lessons to is going to be switching from another site to pokerstars and since Matt had experience with this type of thing in the past (on now defunct poker websites). He suggested that I set it up and give him the money that this one fellow brings in.

What do I get out of that arrangement? NOTHING! But you do favors for a guy who won you $5,000 a few months ago.

For those of you out there that are particularly enterprising (for example, Kristen!), if you get someone to sign up via my banner ad I'll split any money I make off of your referrals 50/50. So tell your friends!

I would give it at least a 60% chance that I never see a dime from that ad other than what Matt's guy brings in, but it didn't cost me anything and wasn't hard to set up so who cares!

40 Days of Pain - Day 21

I played for a little while early today to keep my steak of consecutive days going, but I've finally gotten to the point where I needed to take most of a day off. Luckily I put in some major points last week so I'm still in good shape.

I have 19 days left to go and need to earn 92,000 more points to make my goal, having earned 103,000 points in 21 days so far.

I had a bit of a bad run losing 5 or 6 days starting last Sunday, but the largest of them was $1,300 and after a $2,400 win yesterday I'm still ahead of where I expected to be in terms of profit.

In other news I've taken on a protege of sorts. My sister in law Kristen has a friend (also named Kristen) who wants to quit her job and be a professional poker player or sorts. She is in a great situation since she's currently working part time (her husband is the main bread winner) and only needs to win about $1,000 a month to make as much as she does working 25 hours a week at her job.

She had by far the biggest win of her career recently finishing second in an $11 tournament with 21,700 players (that's not a typo!) winning about $10,800. Clearly an amazing return on an $11 investment. Not surprisingly she's pretty gung ho about playing. We've made a deal where I'm going to give her lessons and she's going to give me 5% of her profits in 2009. Obviously I'm not doing this for the money, but she said she wanted to pay me something and this way if she runs into a big win I'll get a piece. If we have e-mails that might provide good blog material I'll post them. Here is one such exchange we had recently:

Lately I have had a strange run of "luck". I have been maintaining about 300$ in my account for over a month now and when It gets closer to 400$, I'll cash some out and so far have had about 350$ sent to me in smaller checks-I think I mentioned this before. Anyhow, a couple of weeks ago, I lost a big hand at a cash table with pocket queens. It was at a 1$ 2$ table and I raised to 8$ pre-flop. I had one caller who was behind me, I was under the gun. The flop came 10-6-Q, all unsuited-beautiful! I was stoked and bet 10$ just trying to make a little bit more from him just hoping he made a pair or even tripped on the flop. He just called. a 2 feel on 4th, perfect....so i bet 22$ at this point, I felt like i was milking the guy. He just called again. a 7 fell on the river and i bet 36$ he pushed all in for 70$. I had a strange feeling that I might have just been beat by the most ridiculous player imaginable. I called and there it was: 8 9 off suit to wipe me out for over 100$! I was in awe that he would not only call a preflop raise with that hand and then call all the way down for a gut-shot! Is the anything I couldv'e done differently? I'll admit it took me a bit to shake that one, in fact, it probably cost me another 40$ or so not really having a clear head about things. A few days later I got dealt pocket kings in the bb and was left with one caller out of the blinds that had been playing fairly loosely. It seems that pocket kings have been the hand to knock me out o several tourneys lately so I decided not to deal with a possible risky situation so I raised it to 10$. He called. flop is 10-2-5 with 2 clubs. I bet the pot, he calls. a J falls on 4th, but not a club and i bet 30, hoping he hadn't called my preflop raise w-J-10 and if he had, i hoped to outdraw him on the river, he calls and at this point I'm fairly certain he either tripped, made his 2 pair or is really hoping for a 3rd club on the river. River brings an 8 or diamonds and I feel a little better, but jst in case of the 2 pair, I check, he moves all in for 56$-and I call, assuming he had in fact missed that club flush. In reality he had called he had 10 8 of spades! The river killed me. Another 100$+ loss that I felt I couldn't have done anything differently that got railroaded on the river. Is this just part of the game, or should I have played it some other way? Long story short, I had 5$ left in my account and played a 4$ 180 person tourney and came in 5th for 45$ and then played a 20$ single table s-n-g and came in 1st! for 90$ so my account is back over 100$ which I am pretty proud of after those 2 horrendous hands that cost me most of my $! I have the next 2 days off so hopefully I will get in some good playing time. Any suggestions for my cash game blunders is appreciated, as always. Thank you :0) talk to you soon-Kristen

Here is my reply:

I have answers to your questions! First of all let me say that this is just the type of e-mail I want you to write me. One of the best ways to learn is to discuss the merits of different ways to play certain hands.

The first thing that jumped out at me reading your e-mail is that your bankroll is a little (or a lot!) thin. I'm guessing you were playing on Ultimate bet or you cashed out almost all of that $10,000 you won?

$300-$400 isn't close to enough to ride out the swings at $1/$2 blinds NL. When I used to play NL cash games I would have something like 2,500 big blinds in reserve (which would be $5,000 for a $1/$2 game) and would cash out 500 big blinds when I got to over 3,000 in my account. That's not to say you absolutely have to have that much in your bankroll to play at that level, but you should think about trying to get your bankroll into AT LEAST the $1,000-$2,000 range. Otherwise you'll find yourself is just the spot you mentioned where you lose two or three big hands and then your account is empty.

As far as the hand with the QQ goes I think you played it right, but your impressions about the other player are a little off. One of the big differences between tournaments and cash games is everyone's chips stack is much larger compared to the size of the blinds. Most players have somewhere between 50-150 times the big blind in a cash game while in a tournament (other than the first few levels) an average stack might be something like 20-30 times the big blind.

When the stacks are deeper it makes more sense to call a raise or 3 or 4 times the big blind with a speculative hand like 98 suited once in a while hoping to hit the flop hard and maybe win 50-100 big blinds. Also for opponents that are paying attention it makes it much harder to put you on a hand if you play 89 the same way you might play AQ.

The big thing you missed was that 89 was a DOUBLE gutshot. A 7 or a J would have made him a straight. Given that he had 8 outs to a monster it makes it much more reasonable for him to call you down like he did.

With that said, you still played the hand very nicely. In no limit when you have a big hand and you suspect that your opponent is drawing you want to bet an amount that encourages them to make a mistake.

Let say you've played with this guy a million times and you're 99% sure he's drawing to 8 outs. How much should you bet? If you bet too little it's giving him the right price to call and draw, and if you bet too much he'll fold and you won't make anything with your set. On the flop there is $19 in the pot and he has about a 1 in 5 shot of hitting his straight on the turn. So anything more than $5 means he's not getting the right price to draw. You bet $10 meaning he was only getting about 3 to 1 when he needed 5 to 1 to see the next card. Seems like a good bet on your part.

Of course he knows he might make money on later streets if he hits so maybe it's worth the stretch for him even though he's not getting the right price.

On the turn it's similar, but this time he makes a big mistake You bet $22 into a $36 pot meaning he's getting something like 5 to 2 when he needs 5 to 1.

I might be making this too complicated. Let me just say that if you make a set and someone makes a not obvious straight you're going to go broke. If you don't go broke it means you're probably not making enough with your good hands. You bet the right amount the whole way and on the end when he hits your stuck. It just as easily could have been two pair or a smaller set or even AA or KK on a massive slowplay.

The only thing I might have done differently would be to check the river to induce a bluff. If I was in your shoes I would have thought he had KJ. That's hand where it makes sense for him to call before the flop (I'm not saying you should call early position raises with KJ - in fact you shouldn't, but people do it frequently), call the flop and the turn. If that's what he has then he's just going to fold on the end. But if you check he might make a desperate bluff and then you can nail him. If he has something else (like maybe AT) he might decide you don't have much and bet for value.

On to the hand with KK. It seemed in this one like you over bet it a little since you were worried about getting beat. You can't be afraid that someone is going to out draw you and start betting 1.5 or 2 times the pot. All you'll do is drive off the hands that you want calling you and get yourself totally stuck against the monster hands that have you beat. 99.9% of the time you don't want to bet more than the pot and rarely do you want to bet less than 1/2 the pot. Whether you're bluffing or have a made hand or a draw, somewhere in that range is almost always the optimal bet size.

If fact when I play NL cash games I always raise to three times the big blind if I'm going to play before the flop and I'm first in, no matter what my position (If I have one caller in front of me I make it 4X the bb, with two callers it's 5X the bb and so on). If I get 1 caller I bet 3/4 of the pot EVERY time on the flop. If I missed or hit, or the flop is 3 5 8 or AKQ all suited, it doesn't matter. I'm betting 3/4 of the pot. That way my opponents don't have any information about my hand. All they know is I chose to play before the flop. It make it really tough for them to read me.

Another thing is you want to be careful about always putting your opponent on the only reasonable hand that can beat you. There was really no reason to think he had JT and when the river came with an 8 there was no reason to think that helped him. Checking hoping he's going to bet a worse hand or a miss is fine, but I like betting again (about 1/2 the pot) in this spot hoping to get called by a ten. On the river you can go under the 1/2 pot bet size much more often. If you think your opponent has just a little something you might bet 1/4 of the pot hoping to get a call from second pair or maybe a missed draw that hit a weak pair.

Let me know if that made sense or if you have questions about my comments.

Nice work running that $5 back up to close to $100! I'm sure that was satisfying.

40 Days of Pain - Day 15

I started the 40 days of pain on September 22nd with 645,000 points (or base FPPs) for the year, needing to make it to 1,000,000 by December 31st. Clearly I was behind schedule. My goal has been to work for 40 consecutive days averaging 5,000 points a day.

To give you an idea of how hard that is, if I'd earned 5,000 points a day 22 days a month I would have been at a million by the end of September. Most of this year I've considered 3,500-4,000 points a full work day.

So far I'm just a little behind pace to meet my goal. After 15 days I've earned 71,000 points which is 4,000 short of where I wanted to be at this point. I'm definitely getting tired. It's tough working every single day all day, but I feel maybe a little better than I expected.

The good news is I've been winning steadily. I'm ahead about $6,500 not counting the value of the FPPs I've earned. It's much easier to play when you're winning!

I tried something a little different today. I have been playing a combination of 4 $10/$20 6-max games and two $114 SNGs all at once. The SNGs don't require nearly as much attention as the cash games, but they don't earn as many points either.

Today I decided to ramp things up a bit. Well, quite a bit actually. I played NINE 6 handed $10/$20 games at once for about and hour. That works out to about 1,000 hands an hour or 16.6 hands a minute or one hand every 3.6 seconds. If you were to play in person it would take you about 29 hours (with no breaks) to get dealt 1,000 hands. It was not easy!

Amazingly I managed to show a profit of a few hundred dollars over that stretch, but it left me feeling a little overloaded and pretty brain dead. I spent a few more hours playing 6 cash games at at time which was also very taxing, but very productive.

I did manage 6,000 points today though so I'm feeling like playing an insane number of games at once might be my ticket to success in the 40 days of pain. The only problem is if I start running bad, money can fly out the window in a hurry! Hopefully I'll keep playing well and running good!

40 Days of Pain - Day 10

All of this effort is starting to catch up with me a little, which I expected to happen. I lost a little momentum today when my wife Jen woke up not feeling well. I took our son Peyton for a few hours so she could sleep. Happily when she woke up she was feeling better and Peyton and I had a good time playing, but I didn't get to work until 2 or 3 hours later than I normally start. As a result I had kind of an off day points wise.

So far I've earned 48,600 points in 10 days and I've won $3,300 during that time period. This is great news since I was thinking it would be OK if I just broke even or lost a little bit during the 40 days.

In other good news pokerstars in effect gave me a little raise today. I'll try to explain in as unconfusing a way as I can (I do use the acronym "FPP" 24 times in this post!). What I call "Points" on this blog are what pokerstars refers to as "Base FPPs" (with FPP standing for frequent player point).

One of the great benefits of being a supernova is for every base FPP I earn I get 3.5 regular FPPs while the players with the lowest level of VIP status only get 1 FPP per base FPP (poor bastards!). Everything in the FPP store as well as tournaments that you can buy into with FPPs are all listed in regular FPPs.

Another of the great benefits of being a supernova is I can trade my FPPs in for cash at an excellent rate. Players of other levels of status are forced to buy merchandise in the FPP store or trade their FPPs in for cash at an absurdly poor rate.

For example if you are a "silverstar" player you can get $50 in cash for 5,000 FPPs or 100 FPPs per dollar. If you're goldstar you can get $285 for 25,000 FPPs or 88 FPPs per dollar.

As a Supernova I've been able to get $1,500 in cash for 100,000 FPPs or 66.7 FPPs per dollar. Those of you who are super quick at math will have figured out that the 48,600 points I've earned in the past 10 days translate into 170,100 FPPs which at that rate are worth $2,552.22.

Pretty amazing huh? Seems like pokerstars is pretty generous doesn't it? How can they stay in business just giving out thousands of dollars like this? Well I've paid them about $9,000 in fees in the past 10 days and there just giving me some of my own money back! Can you belive it! $9,000 in 10 days! It means I've actually beaten the other players out of $12,300. Amazing.

Back to the point. Today I noticed that they had a new FPP for cash deal in the FPP store. Specifically, I can now buy $4,000 for 250,000 FPPs which is 62.5 FPPs per dollar. It might not seem like going from 66.7 per dollar to 62.5 per dollar is a huge deal. But it means that the 170,100 FPPs I've made are now worth $2,721.60. That's a free $169! That's like finding a pile of money that has 8 twenties, a five and 4 ones! It feels like I should go out and buy myself 8 DVDs and some KFC!

More importantly over the course of all of next year (I won't run you through all the math on this one) it will be an extra $4,282 in my pocket! It's pretty amazing how that small difference makes a big difference! Thanks pokerstars!

40 Days of Pain - Day 8

Well, my brain hasn't started leaking out of my ears yet. I'm 20% of the way there and so far I'm just a tad behind pace. I've made 39,400 points of progress in these past 8 days and while I still have a long way to go I like my chances of at least getting close to my goal of 195,000 points in 40 days.

I had kind of a wild ride over the weekend. On Saturday I found myself losing about $2,500 at one point before flipping it completely around and actually winning $2,000!

Then on Sunday I found myself stuck a little over $5,000 (flirting with my worst day ever), before managing to bring it all the way back to just over even for the day!

Part of that comeback was a good result in the $215 Sunday Million. We started with about 7,300 players and by the time we were down to 100 I'd run my starting stack of 10,000 chips all the way up to 1.4 million and was in the top 10. I caught a few breaks of course (most notably beating AQ with QJ in a big all in confrontation), but I won a ton of pots in this tournament with nothing.

The great thing about this tournament (and the WCOOP tournaments as well) is that it's a big deal for most of the people who are playing. If you run a $215 tournament at the same time on some other day with no satellites you'll get something like 300-400 players, maybe less. Those are the people who are $215 tournament players. Most of them have the bankroll to play tournaments of that size, feel comfortable with the stakes, and have worked their way up playing in smaller tournaments.

That means in the Sunday Million we have 7,000 players who don't really belong. When you get close to the money, these players lock up. If you have a solid chip stack (like I did in this tournament about that time) and the combination of balls and experience to pull it off, you can totally run them over. That's just what I did.

The tournament paid 1,080 places and between the time that player 1,300 went broke and we made the money I probably won 1/3 of the pots at my table and almost doubled my already strong stack without ever showing down a hand. Most of the time I just raised and everyone folded. Sometimes when someone would raise in front of me I'd put them all in before the flop. Other times I'd just call and then raise them on the flop. It's great fun to run over weak players like this!

Unfortunately I finally ran into some real hands, missed with a few of my hands when I was facing resistance and ended up finishing in 68th place. It paid $2,250 and I feel like I couldn't have done too much differently in the period where I went slowly down the tubes, but 9th was $10,000 and first was $184,000 so I did feel a little disappointed to miss out on the final table.

It's hard not playing multitables when that's what I want to do, but there's so gold in the pot at the end of the FPP rainbow that I have to just worry about points for a while. For now my plan is to play a few on Sundays and leave it at that.

40 Days of Pain Day 3

Working all day every day sucks! I've generated a little over 16,000 points in three days which is great, but I have lost about $1,200. Given the swings I've been having that's really not a big deal.

I hope I can find the mental fortitude to make it through these 40 days!

Even More Comment Comments!

Getting back to the hand that has led to so much discussion I have to emphasise that one of the key issues here and what makes this hand so unique is the SUPER deep stacks that we all had. During the first round on the main event of the WSOP you have 400 big blinds in your stack and I had 500 big blinds in my stack when this hand came up. In fact I'm not sure there is a tournament anywhere that gives you 500 big blinds start. It was simple the nature of rebuy tournaments and that fact that this was as $530 with rebuys tournament that led to such insane stacks.

In a SNG if you get KK vs AA you're dead 19 times out of 20. There just isn't enough room to manuver. In fact if just about any normal tournament the decisions would be so much easier. You'd just go all in with your pocket kings on the flop and if it didn't work out, no big deal. In fact if there was a standard raise, a call and then you reraised and got called by everyone, you be talking about a major pot that you could never get away from.

London Dave, you did a solid analysis of the hand. In a normal situation or a smaller buy in tournament if someone acted the way Gavin did it would usually be AK, AQ or a medium pair.

But I really did put him on AA. It could have been a case of "let me put this guy on the only hand I can't beat," or maybe it was the timing of his call, but that was my read and I felt pretty strongly about it.

Maybe it was a hand that happened to me recently that made me feel that way. Here is how that hand went down (this is actually how a good friend of mine who was writing for a certain poker magazine and ran out of material wrote it up after we spent some time talking about it - he wrote it as if it happened to him even though it happened to me!)

I was playing recently in a $320 nightly tournament on Pokerstars. Out of a starting field of 450 players we were down to 60, and the top 45 would be in the money. I had an average stack of about 18,000. Normally I’d feel pretty secure that I would at least make the money, but my table draw was really unfortunate, as I was 7th in chips at my table. With so many players that could bust me, I knew I had to tread carefully, but at the same time I felt I needed to continue playing with first place as my main goal.

With blinds of 300-600, the UTG player made it 1,500. It was folded to me in the cutoff with J-J. I wanted to find out right away just how strong he was, so I made it 4,800 to go. After some hesitation, the button, who had me covered, called. The blinds and the UTG player folded, so I was going to the flop heads-up and out of position.

Before going any further, I’ll tell you that my immediate instinct was that I was up against pocket aces. This was not a case of me seeing monsters under the bed; it was simply his most likely hand. If this was some $11 tournament with 3,000 players, it might have been different. But with a buy-in of $320 on a weeknight, this tournament usually attracted a very tough field of 400-500 players. There was very little dead money, and very few players who would cold-call a re-raise preflop this late in the tournament without a huge hand. I wasn’t completely sure how to proceed, but checking and folding definitely crossed my mind.

In general, I usually have a pretty good idea ahead of time of how I’m going to proceed based on the texture of the flop. For example, if the flop had a jack, I would probably make a small lead bet. If it came with an ace, I would probably check-fold. But when the flop came A-J-3 rainbow, bringing both the ace and the jack, it was one of those rare times that I felt truly unprepared. The flop was there, and I really wasn’t sure what to do.

After some thought I realized that, if he had pocket aces, my goal was simply to avoid going broke. If he had anything other than aces, I probably wasn’t making any decent money on the hand anyway, so there was no reason to get overly aggressive. I decided to check. After two seconds, my opponent checked behind me.

Oh well, that didn’t accomplish much. Upon further thought, I realized that he probably would check there regardless of his hand. Whether he had A-A, K-K, or A-K, checking that flop made sense for him. Whether or not it was possible, I found myself wishing I could have gotten some more information.

The turn paired the three. I decided to lead out for 1,800, a laughable underbet. He flat-called. Again, I realized that this gave me no real information. With A-A he’s calling so he can string me along, and with K-K or A-K he’s calling the small bet into the large pot just in case he has me beat. I still had no information, but as strange as it may sound, I was thankful that I only had one-third of my stack in the pot, as I still thought A-A was his most likely holding.

The river was a blank. I considered leading small again, but then decided against it. It wasn’t too important to get paid off by a lesser hand. Of greater significance was the possibility that I would get raised and have to consider making a sick laydown. Plus, I figured that if I checked and he had A-A, he would probably bet small just to make sure he got paid off, and I’d be able to survive.

With that in mind, I checked. He immediately went all-in. Huh?

So much for all my careful thinking. I was expecting him to either check behind me with a worse hand, or to bet small with A-A, and instead he went all-in? I’ll admit it threw me off. Why would he bet so much if he had A-A? Could he really expect me to call? From the way I played it, he had to figure my most likely hands were K-K or Q-Q, so why bet so much?

I almost found myself wanting to flip a coin to decide what to do. In the end, whether or not it was the best thing to base my decision on, I decided that it was a forgivable mistake to call with jacks full and lose. I called all-in, he showed his pocket aces, and I was eliminated just short of the money.

At first I was a little miffed at myself. I put him on pocket aces the whole way, then convinced myself that he might have something else, and that change of heart cost me the tournament. On the other hand, everyone I’ve talked to says that it was just a bad-luck flop, and I was destined to go broke in that hand.

Either way, I still thought it was worthwhile to go through the hand and think about what I could have done differently. But in the end, I think that - if I try too hard to get away from hands like the second-nut full house - I’ll be doing myself more harm than good.

Meanwhile, this hand obviously worked out perfectly for my opponent, but that doesn’t mean I like the way he played it. I thought his pre-flop call of my reraise was pretty transparent. Whether he calls or raises, I’m giving him credit for a pair higher than jacks, so all he’s doing by flat-calling is giving me a free chance to outflop him. I think his better play is to re-raise preflop, and hope that I have something I can’t get away from. Of course, once it came set-over-set he seemed like a genius, but I still think the flat-call was a fancy play at a time when the straightforward play made more sense.

I also have mixed feelings about his river bet. Again it worked out perfectly, but I think that’s because I had the only hand with which I would call his all-in. If I had Q-Q or K-K he’s simply blowing me out of the pot, instead of betting small and giving me a chance to pay him off for 2,000 or 3,000 in a 14,000-chip pot. I’m sure he wanted me to misread his bet, to assume that his all-in meant that he was weaker than he really was, but that still wouldn’t have mattered. The only other hand I would even consider calling him with was A-K, and even then I think I would have leaned towards laying it down.


This is one where it would have made more sense to dump my hand. My read here of AA was MUCH stronger. I'm not sure my friend captured all of my feelings exactly right, but it was still a nice article and another case of putting someone of AA with great certainty before the flop.

More Comment Comments!

If you're into heavy poker discussion read the comment left on my last post before you read this one! Otherwise, you can skip this post!

Gavin wouldn't have any idea how I play. I know who he is (and actually met him in person at the Commerce once years ago), but I'd just been moved to the table. Another thing to consider in this problem is the fact that we were playing six handed. In a full game it takes a much stronger hand to make plays than it does with fewer players. It might not seem like going from 9 to 6 players is a monumental difference, but it is. As a result he might not fear my reraise as much as you would in a full game.

You make a good point when you say "I can't see him making a play on you here. I wouldn't call your re-raise with AJ but maybe he does and then there's a chance he would push all in, but what would he put you on? You re-raised preflop and called a big overbet on the flop with a player to act behind you. You almost certainly have AJ beat."

It's pretty unlikely that he'd push with a hand that couldn't beat KK. In fact I had some small hope that he might even fold AA if he had it! The one exception might be if he had something like a straight flush draw or a pair and a flush draw and just decided to get it in there and take his chances.

While I presented the case that it was possible that he could have other hands, and even though it was six handed which tends to produce more action, my read was that he had AA. And that's the brass tacks of the hand. It just felt like AA to me. In fact, I would have put the likelihood at around 70%.

To be successful at poker you have to trust your reads. Even if you can't fully justify it (and you never had time in the moment to do full analysis) you just have to go with your feelings sometimes. It happens much more in person when you find yourself thinking "I don't know what he has, but I feel like I'm beat."

If I let the hand go and I was wrong it's a minor mistake at most. If I call 7,500 and then have to fold to an all in, it's a good sized mistake and doing what I did by moving all in was a major mistake. The blinds were 25/50 and I had 25,000 chips! You don't need to take chances for 80% of your stack when you're not sure if you have 500 big blinds left!

Another thing that this hand brings to light is the idea of making big laydowns. That's often mentioned as one of the things that separates the pros from the good amateurs. When you play thousands of hands a day like I do, especially in limit cash games, you don't need to make huge folds because one hand isn't really that much more important than the next. But playing $1,000+ tournaments requires you to sometimes say "This is a great hand and normally I would never do this, but since I have a ton of chips and thus plenty of time, I'm going to wait until I'm a little more sure to put myself at risk."

These are all things I know. I try to remind myself of them frequently. In fact I think I'm stronger than most pros when it comes to theory and justifying action with solid logic. But poker (online poker especially) moves quickly and it's easy to make mistakes. That's why experience is so important.

I'd like to say "the next time I come across a situation like this I'll be ready!" But there is no way in hell I'm ever going to be in a 6 handed game with kings, reraise, get smooth called by someone I know is a world class player, and have someone move all in on the flop for 3 times the pot in front of both of us!

2008 WCOOP Final Thoughts

I didn't reread this post after writing it so sorry for the typos!

This years WCOOP was filled with some major highs and lows. I was going to be super pissed if got blanked on the last day and ended up winning only a few thousand dollars. But happily I played well, got a few key breaks and ended up winning a solid amount. Before the WCOOP I said I wanted to have 4 cashes and make one final table. I had 5 cashes and one final table, so in that sense it was a major success. I also had 5 cashes in the second chance tournaments, and one major satellite win which is also very satisfying.

So what was the final number! Well I ended up winning $16,484!!!! BOOM!!!

More than anything playing the WCOOP has made me really look forward to going back to the WSOP. Hopefully I've generated some good will with my backers and I can roll up a huge pile of money to play 10-15 events.

Now on to a comment response (WARNING: HEAVY POKER CONTENT!) It's regarding a hand in the $530 with rebuys and in order to refresh your memory here's what I wrote about it:

With blinds of 25/50 the first player to act raised to 150 and got called by the next player to act. Then it was up to me and I had KK (I had about 25,000 chips)! I made it 600 to go and Griffen (who had about 20,000 chips) just called out of the small blind. My first thought was "Shit, that looks like AA." The other two players called as well and the flop came down J 9 7 with two spades. Griffen checked and then the original raiser went all in for 7,500 into the 2,500 chip pot. Right away I knew that was a draw. My only decision was how sure was I that Griffen had AA. Could I really lay down KK here?After a short moment I decided my hand was too good to fold and I went all in for 25,000. Griffen called and turned over AA! AHHHHHH! The other player had T9 and after no help I was down to 5,000 chips.

Now here is the comment:

Did you consider just calling the 7500 bet? If Gavin had a worse hand than you (AK, QQ,) he would almost certainly fold and if he pushed you could fold assuming he had either AA or JJ and still have 17,500 chips. I don't think he ever folds a better hand than you so I don't see the point of making the big reraise.You didn't mention this possibility in your recap so I'm guessing you don't consider it to be the correct play. Can you explain it in some depth? Thanks.

This is a great comment! Thanks to whoever wrote it! I did briefly consider just calling the 7,500 chip bet, with the plan of folding in Griffen moved all in, but I don't think it's the right play.

I've actually been thinking about his hand quite a bit over the past few days and while at the time I thought "Oh shit that looks like aces" I think that was just a bit of pessimism coming though. Even though I was right it wouldn't be fair to say it was a spot where he just about had to have AA. Making that call Griffen was only risking 3% of his stack in a pot that was clearly building up for major action. In retrospect I think he is capable of making this call with a fairly wide range of speculative hands like medium suited connectors or most pocket pairs. I feel like I could rule out QQ or JJ since he wouldn't want to take a flop vs 3 opponents out of position with one of those hands. No doubt he would have reraised to clear the field with either of those hands. But he easily could have had 99 or 77 hoping to hit a set and snap off a big pair. Obviously if I had to pick something to put him on, I would have chosen AA, but he could have had other hands.

With all that said I think folding was the best option here. By calling I'm risking 7,500 to win about 9,500. Not only do I have to worry about griffen moving all in after me, I have to worry about beating the guy who's already in the pot! I was all but positive that KK was the best hand at that point, but I was sure he was drawing very live. I was guessing I was about a 2 to 1 favorite (I figured he probably had a flush draw - it turns out he had a pair and a straight draw which also put me at about 2 to 1 to beat him).

Let's assume I'm going to win the 9,500 in the pot 2/3 of the time if I don't get reraised. That means every time I call here I have an expectation of +3,833 chips (two times out of three I'm going to win 9,500 and one time in three I'm going to lose 7,500 - so I average a net of 3,833).

But every time I get reraised I lose 7,500 chips! I'm getting a little screwed up on the exact math here, but to round off if I get reraised a third of the time I lose 7,500 one time in three and gain 3,833 two times in three which is pretty close to break even.

So in order to make just calling 7,500 a profitable call I need to assume that I'm going to get reraised significantly less than a third of the time.

And this is all assuming that I'm 66% to beat the guy who bet 7,500 which is a big assumption.

What I did was even worse than calling! I risked almost 20,000 to win 9,500! How stupid!

Of course the one big plus to moving all in is I'll never get blown off my hand by a reraise from something like AJ or a flush draw and more importantly about one time in ten that I do move all in and get called by AA, I'll spike my king and win a huge pot!

Anyway I should have folded. I hope this put a little light on the subject and I welcome further discussion.

40 Days of Pain!

My wife Jen, my son Peyton and I are off to southern California for a few days starting November 1st. That means between the end of the WCOOP and our little vacation I have 40 days to make some major headway on my year end point goals.

I thought the WCOOP would be good motivation to stay logged in and play for hours and hours thus generating tons of points. While I did spend an insane amount of time playing during the WCOOP, it was all multitable tournaments! I figured I'd be able to seamlessly mix in cash games, but in practice I had trouble playing lots of NL tournaments and limit cash games at the same time.

Now I'm way behind! My solution in to literally work for 40 days straight. I've had stretches where I've worked for 10 or 15 days in a row and not really noticed (my record is somewhere in the 20's) so it's not going to be like a normal person trying to pull off 40 work days in a row.

At the start of my 40 days I was at about 645,000 points for the year needing to make it to 1,000,000 by December 31st. My plan is to alternate days of 7,000 points which will take all the effort I can muster, and days of 3,000 points which I can either do at a leisurely pace or get up early and bang out before lunch.

My goal is to make it to 840,000 points by the end of my 40 days. That means I need to average 5,000 points a day (with one emergency day off built in) to make it. This IS NOT going to be easy. But since I'm taking a five day vacation and a seven day vacation in November and another seven day trip in December now is the time to make it happen!

I've got extra money in my pokerstars account from the WCOOP, my real world bank accounts are topped off and 840,000 points just so happens to be the point where I'll clear my $8,000 yearly milestone bonus so if I get rocked I'm OK with it. While I always plan on winning it's going to take playing more games than optimal, for longer hours and while I can't be specific about how my results might be affected, it might not be good.

When it comes down to it the difference between making it to 999,999 points vs 1,000,000 is worth about $50,000 so there's no way I'm not making it! I don't care what it takes!

Since I knocked out just under 7,000 points today and wrote this post you'll have to wait for WCOOP recap! Backer checks will be in the mail by the end of the week!