Rush Poker

As I mentioned in my last post FTOPS event #6 is Rush Poker. This is new thing so let me explain it to those of you who don't know about it.

I've never played a rush poker tournament, but I have played a little bit of the cash games. The way it works is you join a large pool of players (something like 100-500) all playing the same game and stakes. When you start you get plopped down at a table and dealt a hand. If you choose to "quick fold" you instantly get sent to a new table and get dealt a new hand. To the other players at the first table you appear to still be there waiting to act. If you get crappy cards you can just fold, fold, fold and instantly get more hands at new tables.

Of course you're facing a different lineup of players each hand so there isn't much playing the player going on unless you get to know the regulars.

In this FTOPS tournament there will probably be a couple thousand players to start and it's a turbo tournament. That means 2,000 chips to start and 3 minute levels. While the blinds start at 15/30, 30 minutes into the tournament they'll be at 150/300. The whole tournament will be over in a couple hours.

I'm definitely going to play and will tweet updates when I can. I should be interesing if nothing else.

FTOPS Event #5 and #6

Event #5 is NLH $109 with rebuys, and event #6 is $216 "Rush" poker turbo. The first one is at 1 PT and the second is at 3 PT. Right now I'm not sure if I'm going to play neither, one or both, but I wanted to give my backers and my fan(s) a heads up.

FTOPS XVI Event #1 ($216 NLH) Recap

I got the schedule a little mixed up and wasn't expecting to start the FTOPS for another day, but when I woke up I decided to see what was going on. When I saw that event #1 was a standard $216 NLH tournament I decided to log on and give it a shot.

We started with 3,673 players with 5,000 chips each. I won a few pots early and had 8K or 9K when the following hand came up. The blinds were something like 40/80 and my opponent raised to 250 from early position. I was on the button with TT and I made it 900 to go.

The raiser called and the flop came down Q 9 5 with two spades. He checked and I bet 900 which was about half the pot and instantly my opponent went all in for 3,500. I had about 7K left in my stack so I wouldn't be out altogether if I called and lost, but the most likely hand for him to have there is a queen. In the end I made what looking back was a terrible call, but it turned out my opponent had AK of spades, missed, and I was up to 13K chips.

The next big hand came up a good while later, although my stack was still around 13K. The blinds were up to 250/500 and I made it 1,500 to go from the button with AJ off. The big blind who had 25K chips instantly pushed all in. I knew this was total bullshit and snapped called. He had QT off, I flopped an ace, and was up to 29K.

At that point there were 950 players left, 540 spots paid, and the average stack was around 20K.

I worked my way up to 45K with pure aggression and that's how much I had when we made the money. 540th paid $300.

After taking it up to 53K, I'd fallen back to 30K when the next big hand came up. The blinds were 1K/2K and the under the gun player limped in which was very suspicious. I figured it was likely AA. I had Q9 in the small blind and fired in another 1,000 hoping to hit the flop big and double up.

I didn't really hit the flop big, but I got some of it. The flop was 6 7 8 giving me an open ended straight draw. I checked, the big blind checked and the limper bet 3,000. At this point I talked myself out of my original read. "It doesn't have to be aces" I thought somewhat foolishly. Restraint has never been one of my strengths and I decided to be bold and move all in. My opponent didn't have pocket aces...he had pocked kings! ACK! Happily I hit a 5 on the turn making my straight and taking my stack to 62K.

I drifted up and down a little and the caught a break busting a player who had 55 when I had 88. That took me to 77K.

That's when I smashed face first into AA with JJ. I was down to about 5K when the big blind was 4K and the ante was 500 a hand. I was in last place about as broke as you could be without actually being on empty. I folded three hands and had 3,100 left when I got dealt A5. I got it all in and won. And then got the next hand all in and won. All of a sudden I was back to 30K with some hope.

Two hands later someone short moved all in with 56s and I called with A9. They missed and I was up to 67K! I'd increased my stack by 20 times in 4 hands!

One round later I got AK suited and was able to reraise all in vs AQ. Now I had 117K. What a comeback! But that wasn't the end.

I got ground down to 70K when I got dealt JTs in the big blind. It got folded around to the small blind who had 250K. He moved all in, but I thought he might move all in with just about anything here given that the blinds were 5K/10K with a 1K ante (there was 25K in the pot already) and I had the perfect size stack to attack. So I called. He showed me A3 which was more than I expected. I bricked the flop and the turn, but hit a ten on the river putting my back to 140K.

Then I got REALLY lucky. I had a little over 100K and a player made it 25K or so to go from late position. I had A8 suited and decided to shove. He called me with A9. Whoops!

The flop came down 6 7 9 giving him a pair and me a straight draw. Sadly the turn was an 8 taking me from 8 outs to win to 8 outs to chop and 2 outs to win. But the river was another 8! HA! I was up to 225K.

But this is where the story ends. I wish I could say the insanity that took me from 3,100 to 225,000 kept up. Instead I got ground down and the blinds went up and I ended up moving in from the button with 66 and got called by the big blind's AA.

I finished 38th out of 3,673 which paid $1,575. First place was $134,000 and I wasn't that far away from the final table, but this result was not bad for a tournament I almost didn't play. If I'd gone broke when I had 3,100 chips I would have gotten paid $525.

It's Go Time!

FTOPS starts today. $216 NLH. I'll be posting updates via twitter which will show up on the right ride of the blog. Full details will come later.

SCOOP 2010!

The Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) starts May 2nd. It seems like much more than a year ago that I was cashing for $37,500 after finishing 4th in a $1,000 HORSE tournament with 444 entrants. Ahhhh the good old days.

The cool thing about the SCOOP is while there are 38 events there are actually three times that many tournaments since each event comes with a low, medium and high stakes variant. For example event #1 which stars at 13:00 ET and is 6 max NLH has a $22 buy in tournament, a $215 buy in tournament and a $2,100 buy in tournament all starting at the same time. If you want to check it out here is the full schedule.

Last year there were 22 or 23 events and I think I played all of the low stakes, and maybe 15 of the medium stakes, and 4 of the high stakes tournaments. This year since there are many more tournaments, I'm not coming in with the $15,000 SCOOP bankroll, and I probably won't have a mid five figure cash I don't expect to hit everything so hard.

Instead I'm going to put about $5,000 into play and my goal is to get that up to about $10,000 which will be enough to play the 5 or 6 WSOP events that I'd like to hit this summer.

After a quick glance at the schedule I see 17 low stakes tournaments that I plan to play (with buy ins totalling $685) and 14 mid stakes tournaments (with buy ins totalling $3,429). Of course if I do well I'll add in more of the medium stakes events. And if I do really well I'll play the $2,100 HORSE, the $3,150 8-game mixed event, and maybe the $5,200 6-max limit event.

The latest iteration of the FTOPS is going off just before the SCOOP. While I'm not going to play many of those tournaments I am going to play the $216 6-max limit, $535 HORSE and $216 7-game mixed games tournaments.

I feel like I'm due for a big win. I'll keep you posted.

Not Broke, Not Dead

One of my regular comment posters asked yesterday if I was "broke, dead or both." I'm happy to say that I'm still breathing and playing poker every day.

The main reason for the lack of posts in the last month in a half is I've been trying to play as much as I can and at the end of the day more time in front of the computer to write a post hasn't fit into my time budget. I guess I didn't realize it had been a month and a half since my last post either.

I wish I could say that things have been going well, but they haven't. Actually it's more of a good news bad news situation. The bad news is I was ahead about $8,000 for the year in the middle of march (a VERY week number for 2+ months for me) and then I lost $7,000 over 5 days. Clearly that's bad news.

The good news is I've made some significant changes to my standard tactics and I think I'm back on track.

I knew I needed to change something, so I finally spent the time to download Pokertracker (the easy part) and get it working (the hard part). Pokertracker is a piece of software that records every hand you play and allows you to look at how much you've won and lost with different hands in different situations. If you want to know how many dollars per hand you won with A6 off suit in the cutoff (or any other hand in any other position) it will tell you.

Happily the websites save hand histories to your hard drive if you have a certain setting enabled. They don't save forever (there's another setting for how long they save), but when I got Pokertracker running it found about 125,000 hands from pokerstars and 20,000 hands from Absolute poker. That gave me a solid group of hands to look at and a few things stood out.

There were a few spots where I noticed that I was making more money with a lesser hand in the same situation. For example I'd be winning more with A8 off than with A8 suited or more with 88 than 99. Of course some of that could be sample size aberration, but more likely is I was misplaying those hands stronger. Specifically I know I was three betting (to thin) with A8s in spots where I'd just fold A8 off. Similarly with 88 I was treating it more like a small pair and playing 99 like a big pair (ie capping it vs two opponents or three betting it out of the big blind vs an early position raise).

In fact I was getting into the habit of calling or three betting KTs, KJs, JTs, QJs, and QTs against a solid player's raise. The games I play in are very aggressive and players have a wide range of starting hands that they are capable of raising, but I was taking it too far. These hands were costing me a fortune and since I've been MUCH more apt to just dump them I've felt much more in control and my results have been great.

Another thing I started doing is looking up all of my regular opponents on www.pokertableratings.com. While the database for this site is certainly not comprehensive (they've been tracking hands for about 2 years and I don't think they're catching them all), and I'm sure it's not 100% accurate it will give you an idea if the player you're up against is a winner, a loser or a break even player and since you can see how many hands they've tracked you can find out if you're up against a rookie or a regular. The best news about it is it's free.

I've gotten into the habit of looking up everyone who I've seen more than once and then making a note with their vital stats so I don't have to look them up again. In fact pokertableratings has a "PTR" score for every player. It's a 1 to 100 number that would be easy to put in a note. It doesn't seem that precise to me. Most people seem to fall in the 30's or 40's and they have Tom "Durrrr" Dwan as an 83 even though he's probably the best online cash game player in the world and is up $7,000,000 over 250,000 hands. But still use full.

The last bit of good news is that I have been working really hard in march so I should be getting a nice fat load of about $4,000 in rakeback on the 15th of April.

Looking a little farther into the future the Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) comes back on May 2nd. More on that in a post coming soon.

Pounding Mr. Terrible

Yesterday I ran into a fellow who was off the charts bad. The thing about players like that is they usually buy in short and when the go broke they give up. This guy bought in for $200, but reloaded 4 or 5 times before finally bailing out (He went through $1,000+ in less than half an hour playing limit $10/$20).

Anyone who plays poker can tell you about a time they played someone really terrible and thought with dollar signs in their eyes, "If I can get any kind of cards at all I'm going to kill this person!" Sometimes it's really frustrating playing against a terrible player. If you're against some joker who is going to call you down every time no matter what, the only way to beat them is to make the best hand. Of course if you make a few hands you'll destroy them, but if they get lucky a few times you'll want to pull your hair out.

Happily I got a fabulous run of cards against Mr. Terrible. I kicked his ass left and right and in one span of 8 hands I flopped two sets, got dealt AA, and made a flush. One of the sets was in a 4 way capped pot preflop as were the pocket aces and I won all of those pots at showdown with heavy action from Mr. terrible.

The hand with the flush was amazing. Look at how the hand played out.


Stage #1911311267: Holdem Normal $10/$20 - 2010-02-17 13:59:04.009 (ET) [ 2010-02-17 13:59:04 ]
Table: BELUGA Dr (Real Money) Seat #5 is the dealer
Seat 5 - KAON STRANGE ($205.50 in chips)
Seat 1 - BUCKEYE_BOB ($369 in chips)
Seat 2 - ACESSEDAI ($525.50 in chips)
Seat 3 - LIUHAMPTON ($506 in chips)
Seat 4 - BONSAIHUGGER ($442 in chips)
BUCKEYE_BOB - Posts small blind $5
ACESSEDAI - Posts big blind $10
*** POCKET CARDS ***
Dealt to ACESSEDAI [Ks 7s]
LIUHAMPTON - Folds
BONSAIHUGGER - Folds
KAON STRANGE - Raises $20 to $20
BUCKEYE_BOB - Folds
ACESSEDAI - Calls $10
*** FLOP *** [5s 6d 6s]
ACESSEDAI - Checks
KAON STRANGE - Bets $10
ACESSEDAI - Raises $20 to $20
KAON STRANGE - Raises $20 to $30
ACESSEDAI - Calls $10
*** TURN *** [5s 6d 6s] [9s]
ACESSEDAI - Checks
KAON STRANGE - Bets $20
ACESSEDAI - Raises $40 to $40
KAON STRANGE - Calls $20
*** RIVER *** [5s 6d 6s 9s] [10c]
ACESSEDAI - Bets $20
KAON STRANGE - Calls $20
*** SHOW DOWN ***
ACESSEDAI - Shows [Ks 7s] (Flush, king high)
KAON STRANGE - Mucks
ACESSEDAI Collects $222 from main pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total Pot($225) | Rake ($3)
Board [5s 6d 6s 9s 10c]
Seat 1: BUCKEYE_BOB (small blind) Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 2: ACESSEDAI (big blind) collected Total ($222) HI:($222) with Flush, king high [Ks 7s - P:Ks,B:9s,P:7s,B:6s,B:5s]
Seat 3: LIUHAMPTON Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 4: BONSAIHUGGER Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 5: KAON STRANGE (dealer) HI: [Mucked] [4h 3d]


Do you see the call on the end! He called me with 4 high! If I have 23, 24, or 34 we split the pot. If I have any of the other 166 combinations of two cards I win. He just gave me $20 to see my cards. Amazing.

I went on to book a $1,300 win yesterday, put another $400 on it today and brought my streak of winning days to 5 in a row. Everything seems to be back on track.

Avoiding Total Doom!

I took another big step away from poker doom today winning $800 over the course of 2,000 hands of moderate stakes limit hold'em. I matched wits with certified geniuses that go by the names: Clowntastic, King_of_Farts, and Boner_me. Somehow I managed to come out on top.

In other good news I'll be picking up all the rakeback I earned last month on AP in one big load tomorrow. It's in the $1,500 range and I'll also be picking up about $500 in rakeback on Cake. Put that together with two modest but significant winning days and all of a sudden I feel like I have enough money to play again. Don't get me wrong, I'm still playing short money, but I feel confident that if I put in enough hours I'll be able to turn this thing all the way around in no time.

Of course there are a few awesome things on the horizon that are going to put a hurting on my productivity. I'm turning 30 on Tuesday so I'm not going to be playing at all that day. Then on Thursday my wife and I are going to eat at the Ritz dining room in San Francisco (think jacket required, 9 course chefs tasting menu with wine pairing) and are going to spend the night at a hotel in the city. Then later this month 16 of us are headed to a 7 bedroom 5,000 square foot cabin in Lake Tahoe for 4 days.

Hopefully tomorrow I can book another win and go into my birthday with a positive feeling.

The Streak is Over!

After losing 10 days in a row, I won $500 today. It feels more like $5,000. The only (and I mean the only) positive of getting my ass kicked for so long is winning is greatly appreciated. It's nice to get pumped about winning pots that are fairly standard.

Hopefully I can keep this new winning streak alive tomorrow!

My Worst Run Ever?

I am in the midst of a staggering, mind numbingly awful run. My last winning day was February 1st which was $800 and came the day after a $3,000 loss. Since then I've played every day but Superbowl Sunday and lost every single day. Some big losses, some small, but any way you look at it, it's 10 losing days in a row.

It's been over 20 tournaments since the last time I made the money let alone a significant cash.

I know I've had worse runs in terms of dollars, but they were all following major booms where I was flush and playing big stakes. This time I've lost 85% of my bankroll.

In December I had a run of 11 winning days in a row and 6 $1,000 plus days in a row. I can't think of what I'm doing differently. I have a hard time thinking that all of the same players have just figured me out and have gone from total suckers to blowing my doors off.

It's making me crazy! Every day I sit down and think that the bad beats have to stop at some point. Eventually I'll get a fair run of cards. But day after day I keep losing and losing. It sucks!