There's always next year

I was eliminated a half an hour after midnight when my AQ lost to a pocket pair of 10's. I'm too emotionally and physically tired to give to full recap now, but you can expect in tomorrow or the next day. I'd like to sincerely thank my backers for their full support and apologize for not doing better. I'd also like to thank all of my friends and family for their kind words of encouragement and good luck wishes. Even though the WSOP is over I've enjoyed writing this blog so much that I plan to keep writing about my poker career, what's going on with Jen and general ruminations about the world. I plan to make Friday morning blog day for me so you 9-to-5 ers can start every Monday off with a little procrastination. There will still be plenty of poker stuff, but there will also be more (I'll gladly accept topics for discussion).

I definitely spent a lot of time day dreaming about returning a conquering hero with stacks of hundred dollar bills, my name in print and my face on ESPN and it's just hitting me that this is not going to happen...this year.

So what goes on at the WSOP besides Poker?

Hello, Jen here!
I just got back to the MGM after having dinner with Dave and everything is going pretty well. At that time he had around $12,500 chips and felt he had everyone at his table pegged. He just called me on break to report that he's down to around 7500, but still anything can happen. Last night they played until around 3:00am, so hopefully we won't hear the full story until around then.

So what, might you ask, did I do all day? Well if I didn't know it before, I do now, that poker is a huge industry. In a second room about the same size as the monstrous tournament room was a Poker Expo housing just over 100 vendor booths. A few of these were offering products such as books, t-shirts, card cappers, and bobble heads fashioned after all your favorite poker stars. The vast majority, however, were online poker sites hoping to get you to sign up. In exchange for your name and email address they were willing to trade you all sorts of things, including, but not limited to, hats, shirts, mints, chapstick, pens, bags, baseballs, stickers, swimsuit calenders, notepads, gum, sunglasses, matches, bracelets, card cappers, mini frisbees, stress balls, beachtowels, and keychains. I went a little bit overboard. Here's a picture of my haul:


I also won a one handed "tournament" which allowed me to meet Mike Sexton and have my picture taken with PartyPoker floozies. I was told I would be able to download that picture from their site, but no luck so far. I earned my beach towel by defeating a sunpoker.net floozie in a heads up one handed "tournament". I also won a raffle which allowed me to play in an actual single table tournament with $100 going to the winner, but unfortunately I really had to go to the bathroom and my fast and loose play was quickly squashed by pocket aces. Another prize in that same raffle was a chance to go into one of those "cash grab" tubes where money flies all around and you try to grab it. Instead of money they had pieces of paper with different values written on them and I saw a guy win $500.

After convincing myself I looked like a bon a fide bag lady and just could not in good conscience collect any more free stuff, I went over to Ceasar's where our friend Matt was playing in an invitational craps tournament. That's right, a craps tournament! What will they think of next? He made it to the semifinals and won $500. Yay Matt!
If you were wondering, here's what a craps tournament looks like:

Pretty much like a craps table. But it was in the convention center, which I thought was cool, and they had cookies, cheese and crackers, sandwiches, a bar, and pretzel machine. It was all very fancy.


And that's what I did today!

Let's get this party started!

Group A kicked off the World Series Main Event today with over 2500 players (after you account for the alternates - I've actually gotten conflicting info about this number so I'm not really sure) and according to the reports I've read, the "real" celebrities showed up in droves. Among the celebrities putting their money on the line on day 1 were Toby Maguire (spiderman: who plays tons of big poker tournaments), Wil Wheaton (aka Wesley Crusher from star trek who is also a serious player and now works for pokerstars.com), Mekhi Phifer (from 8 mile and other movies), Matthew Lillard (from Scream 1 and Starship Troopers), James Garner (who's been in a ton of movies), Danny Masterson (Hyde on That 70's Show) and Norm MacDonald (from Saturday Night Live). Laura Prepon (Donna on That 70's Show) was among the only 55 women who started in group A. Here are a few other fun facts and plagiarized blurbs from the cardplayer.com recap.

It took 7 minutes for the first player to go down the tubes.

A Card Player reporter was confirming the name of Full Tilt online qualifier Mike Wrublik when the player sitting next to Wrublik, John Coito, seemed particularly interested in the name. When a reporter returned to the table, Wrublik explained the interest further. Apparently Wrublik had beaten Coito heads up in the Full Tilt qualifier to get his seat and now they're sitting next to each other in the main event.

Joe Sebok has arrived at the tournament dressed as "Robin" from the Batman and Robin comic book. Sebok lost a bet to Gavin Smith on who would perform the best during the preliminary events at the 2006 WSOP. Sebok must make an appearance dressed as a different super-hero for each day of the main event (Smith gets to choose which character).

The oldest entrant is 91 years old (he's already been eliminated).

Table 134 has an empty seat. The player that was supposed to be in seat 8 has not been inside the Rio once today as 11:30 p.m. approaches us. The player is being blinded off and is now down to $1,800. (This one makes me cringe - and double check my receipt to make sure it wasn't supposed to be me)

Jack Mahalingam is all-in for $5,000 and is called an opponent in late position. Mahalingam shows 8c8s and his opponent has 55. The flop is 6s5s5c and his opponent flops quads. The turn is a 9s giving Mahalingam a gut-shot straight flush draw (his only way to win). The river is the 7s giving Mahalingam the straight flush and the hand.

Jen read me the above and said "some guy" instead of Jack Mahalingam. It turns out that I know this fellow (he's an Oaks Club regular and came over to our house to celebrate once on a day when we both had five figure wins) and Jen didn't recognize the name because he goes by Bombay Jack and that's what we always call him.

Jen and I (and Matt for some of the time) spent the Day at the Aladdin Casino. While Jen did some shopping, Matt and I played in a low buy-in No Limit cash game. After about 2 hours I was ahead a whopping ten bucks and decided to get out of there quick before I blew it all back. Matt headed off to hang out with one of his friends (a Vegas local) and I headed to "Betsey Johnson" (not to be confused with Betsey Ross or Magic Johnson - I was expecting to see basketballs wrapped in American flags) to help Jen choose between 1 of 3 dresses. Afterwards we spent a few hours playing Pai Gow and Craps and then had a nice dinner at Oyster Bay Seafood Restaurant. After a short walk (yes we walked!) back to the MGM we've been watching some T.V. and Jen's been forcing me to eat an insane number of cookies. I keep saying "honey I couldn't possibly eat anymore cookies" and then she says "I'm moving out and taking the cats with me when we get back to California if you don't eat more cookies!" Then she snarls at me like a wolf. What choice do I have, but to keep eating cookies. If I look fatter the next time you see me, at least you'll know who to blame.

I'll be up around 10 a.m. tomorrow and after what is hopefully a satisfying breakfast I'll be headed to the Rio around 11:30. I'm going to do my best to focus on making the best decisions at every possible moment and let winning take care of itself. It's unlikely that there will be any up to the minute updates on the blog so you'll all have to wait for my recap which hopefully I'll be writing very late at night.

The more the merrier

After waiting in a line behind about 100 people I registered to play on day 2. I was surprised to hear that days 3 and 4 were already sold out. Originally I supposed that anyone who signed up well in advance chose day 3 or day 4 so they wouldn't have to spend so many day in Vegas with lot's of downtime. I later heard that as of about 7 p.m. 7,800 players had already registered. I've also heard that they are going to cap registration at 2,080 per day or 8,320 total, but are going to allow alternates. The way alternates work is every time someone gets eliminated they replace that player with a new one with a new stack of chips. I suspect that they'll allow alternates for the first two hours of each day and the total number of players is going to be over 9,000 (more than all of the experts guesses). There is a rest day built into the schedule and I wouldn't be too surprised if they cut that out and added a 5th starting day. We'll have to wait and see. Jen and I plan to have a nice relaxing day tomorrow and then it will be time to get down to business on Saturday.

We've made it to Vegas

We've made it to Vegas. After a rocky flight that almost led to some in flight vomiting we made it from the door of the plane to the door of our hotel room in record time. We're staying at the MGM grand which is the largest hotel in the world with 5,005 rooms. One of the features of this huge hotel is a lion habitat right in the casino! While strolling around looking for Emeril's seafood restaurant we stopped and watched the lions for about 15 minutes. I've seen these lions a few times in the past, but they've always been asleep. Today, however, there was a guy in with the big cats tossing around two large plastic balls. The lions would paw and bat at the balls much like regular cats, but the big difference came when the lions would trap the ball. With a normal cat you can just take their toy away and keep tossing it around, but clearly no one was going to try to take a toy away form a full grown lion.

I haven't yet registered for the main event, but shortly Jen and I are going to head over to the Rio to register and have dinner with my good friend Matt (who is also playing the main event) and a few of his friends. I have 5% of Matt's action so in addition to rooting for a friend I have a tangible interest in his success. But, we also have a $200 last longer bet, meaning whoever gets eliminated first owes the other a pair of C-notes. Clearly this bet doesn't mean much compared to the other dollars at stake, but it's a matter of pride. Our dream in to both make it to the final table, so we can really play up the $200 bet for the TV cameras. I would really enjoy saying things like "yeah I know there are millions of dollars on the line, but all I care about is sticking it to Matt and getting his money" Nominally the odds of us both making the money are 100 to 1 and the chances of us both making the final table are roughly 1 in 790,000 so I'm not going to spend too much time scripting my hilarious comments.

Speaking of odds, thanks to Erik for the correction on my odds of ending up with one of the top 100 players at my table and implying that I could be one of those players. Or perhaps I should be insulted that he thinks I'm so delusional that I would put myself in that category. In reality I think I'm somewhere in the 5,000th best player in the world range. I'm not really sure, but I think that's at least that's the right order of magnitude.

If you read my Main Event Preview Extravaganza you'll know that the first day of the tournament is split into 4 days and when you sign up you can request which day you want. I'm going request group C which will play on Day 3, Sunday the 30th. I'll have plenty of time to kill between now and then so I'm glad Jen (and Matt) is here. I'll probably blog it up a little tomorrow to let you know how any stupid gambling we do goes, talk about any interesting happenings, or share a little WSOP main event history.

Performance enhancers in poker

After my post about what makes a good poker player my friend Erik posed the question "you ever hear of people taking beta-blockers, which block adrenaline in the body, or use other anti-anxiety drugs to get an edge in the game?" This was in response to the section where I mentioned that during a big hand when players get nervous (myself included) their heart rates go through the roof and you can notice a visible change in their breathing which can help you figure out what cards they might have. I've certainly never heard anyone admit to doing this kind of thing, and certainly haven't seen anyone recommend doing it in print. However I do have a little experience with this type of medication. As some of you know I developed an intense fear of flying in my early 20's (which I've overcome for the most part) and for about 3 years whenever I'd fly I'd take anti anxiety medication (either valium or addavan). While I was relaxed I also felt kind of out of it and I think in poker the negatives would greatly outweigh the positives.

On the other hand medication designed to treat ADD or increase focus could certainly help improve your performance. Some people might even put Red Bull into the category of performance enhancers. Right on the can it says that it's designed to improve focus in high stress situations. Behind bottled water Red Bull is the second most popular beverage at the tables (and it's free so why not have a few!).

There is really no governing body for poker and to my knowledge, while I would consider it unethical, it is not against the rules to use mental performance enhancers. Although you could certainly get barred from all Harrah's (the company that owns the Rio and the WSOP) properties for a variety of infractions, there is no one to bar you from all major poker tournaments. The closest thing to a governing body is the Tournament Directors Association (TDA) which has only been formed in the past few years. The main purpose of the TDA is not to regulate poker, but rather to standardize rules. These days if you play a tournament in Atlantic City you can expect the same rules as you would find in Mississippi (I bet you didn't know that Biloxi Mississippi is the third largest gambling area in the country behind only Vegas and Atlantic City -bigger than Reno!). The TDA tends to focus on things like what do you do if the dealer puts out the flop before the action is complete before the flop (you reshuffle the deck and deal out a new flop after the action is complete) or how many cards can you find face up in the deck before you declare the hand a misdeal (five!). Situations that don't come up often, but happen from time to time.

As far as conduct goes I can only think of two specific rules. First of all if you say "fuck" in any form, for any reason, you get a 10 minute penalty (meaning you must leave the table and any blinds or antes that you owe are taken from your stack). In fact if someone called you a mother fucker and then you told the floorman "he called me a mother fucker," you'd both get a penalty. Sorry if I offended anyone with the coarse language there. The second rule is while folding your cards if either or both fall off the table for any reason you get a 20 minute penalty. Of course it's up to the floor people to use their discretion to hand out penalties for other misconduct that is not explicitly spelled out. I once saw a guy who's hand was declared dead for using his cell phone at the table (which I guess is another conduct rule) have a pretty strong reaction. Sometimes there's a little room to maneuver with this rule, but this guy was on the phone for most of the hand and was asked to get off several times, by the dealer and the other players. By the time the floorman got there, the hand was over and the guy in question was showing a winning hand. The floorman told him he had a dead hand and gave the pot to the other player who had missed a draw and had nothing. At this point the guy with the dead hand threw his cell phone at about 90 miles per hour directly into the wall. He was expelled from the tournament (with no refund), escorted out by security and his chips were removed from play (also his cell phone broke into several pieces so he lost that too).

Another time, I was in a tournament in L.A. and I saw the card off the table rule come into play in a crucial situation. In a $500 tournament that paid 27 places, with about 35 players left a guy threw his cards at the dealer and one fell onto the floor. The dealer called the floorman who told the player he was going to get a 20 minute penalty. The guy spent at least 5 minutes arguing and it wasn't until after he was done that the 20 minute clock started. They'd announced the rule several times and it was one of only two rules that had been written out on the paper that had the blind structure and other information about the tournament. While walking away from the table the player, who was a phenomenal jerk, asked the rest of us to "play slow" so he wouldn't lose too much in the way of blinds and antes while he was gone. In one united voice we told the guy that he was crazy if he thought we'd play slow. If he was eliminated we'd all be that much closer to the money and whatever chips he lost would be going into our stacks! If he wasn't a huge jerk we might not have gone out of our way to screw him, but he was, so we did. About every 5 minutes he'd come back and say "come on guys slow it down for me would ya." At which point 3 or 4 of us would thank him for reminding us to play as quickly as possible. With 1 minute left on his penalty it was his turn to put in the big blind which amounted to about half of his stack. He made it back for his small blind, but didn't get lucky and was eliminated in 29th place. If he hadn't thrown his cards at the dealer he probably would have made the money. Furthermore, if he hadn't argued for so long about the rule or asked us to play slow so many times he would have at least given himself a chance. You never know when being a jerk is going to come back to bite you in the ass.

Getting back to performance enhancers, I've often wondered how many people use them in poker and my guess would be not very many. I've also wondered what other players might think about the ethical implications of using them, but I've never seen the topic discussed in person or in print. If you use steroids or other physical enhancers it's easy to measure your improved strength or stamina, but with mental enhancers in poker it's not so clear. I know that if I play after I've had a few drinks (which I never do for significant amounts of money) I feel like I'm making the same decisions and playing the same way, but my results tell me other wise. Similarly I'm not sure you would feel like you were making better decisions if you were on something so unless there was a dramatic change in your results you might not give credit to the enhancers. Also I think many players underrate the focus aspect of playing good poker so they'd never try to improve that aspect of their game chemically.

MAIN EVENT PREVIEW EXTRAVAGANZA!

Welcome to my main event preview! I’m sure some of you are asking yourselves: what’s the big deal about this one? Isn’t it just another tournament for a little more money? NO! This event will have the largest prize pool and largest first prize of any poker tournament of any kind in the history of the world! Every year the winner of this tournament is crowned the world champion!

To put it into perspective let’s say you were the best golfer in the world and the best tennis player in the world and you won all four of golf’s major tournaments (The U.S Open, The Masters, The PGA championship and The British Open) and somehow found time to also win the four major tournaments on the tennis circuit (The U.S. Open, Wimbledon, The Australian Open and The French Open). You’d win just shy of 9 million dollars, but you’d still be a million dollars short of the $10,000,000 the WSOP main event champ will get this year for winning this one event.

Last year there were 5,619 entrants and this year they expect around 8,000. In order to handle this huge number of entrants (there isn’t a room big enough to hold that many poker tables and they certainly don’t want to hire 700 or 800 new dealers for one day’s work) the 8,000 players will be split into 4 groups of 2,000 (groups A, B, C, and D). On July 28th, the first day of the tournament, group A will play from 2000 players down to about 700. Group B will do the same on July 29th followed by group C on the 30th and finally group D on the 31st. On August 1st the 1400 players left from groups A and B will return and play down to about 600. The next day groups C and D will return and do the same. When August 3rd rolls around on the 7th day of the event everyone’s who is left (around 1200 players) will play together for the first time. After a rest day on the 4th play will continue 12-15 hours a day every day until only one player remains on August 10th.

The longer a tournament takes the more skill comes into play and clearly this is a long tournament. If you play 10 hands it’s mostly luck who wins and loses. If you play 100 there’s more skill involved but still a large luck factor. When you start to get into the range of 1000 hands skill is going to shine through most of the time. But no matter what you do bad luck can still sink you at any time. As long as someone at your table has more chips than you, you can be eliminated in 1 hand. You could play perfectly and get eliminated on the first hand of the tournament. But for the most part, avoiding situations where your entire tournament is at risk on 1 hand is part of the skill involved.

So how do they make this tournament take longer so skill can play a larger part? Three factors determine how quickly a tournament will progress: the number of chips you start with, level length (how frequently they increase the blinds and/or antes) and what amount the blinds start at. In the first tournament I played at this years WSOP we started with 1500 chips, 60 minute levels and blinds starting at 25/25. In the main event we start with 10,000 chips, 90 minute levels and the same blind structure. It’s easy to lose 1500 chips in one hand. In the first event if you lose 1500 chips you’re gone, while in the main event if you lose 1500 chips you still have 8500 left and plenty of time to make a comeback. In fact, you can have a couple bad hands and still have the chips you need to maneuver your way back into the action. Also, 90 minute levels means after 12 hours of play we’ll be finishing level 8 instead of level 12. If you play a $100 tournament at your local casino the whole tournament will be over in 4 hours. In the main event you could walk into the tournament 4 hours after the first hand is dealt (or fold every single hand you’re dealt for 4 hours) and still have 90% of your chips. But…lose your focus on one hand and you could find yourself busted and wondering what the hell happened.

Another interesting thing about the main event is despite the big buy-in the field will be loaded with weak players. About 75% of the field will win their way into the tournament by winning a satellite. A satellite is a tournament with a relatively small buy-in where instead of a normal prize structure the only prizes are entries to a larger event. For example, if you have 500 people all put up $200 you’ll have $100,000. Instead of paying 50 places with various prizes, everyone who finishes in the top 10 will win a $10,000 entry to the main event while everyone else will get nothing. Sometimes you’ll have situations where 10 players who put up $1,000 play for one entry and other times you’ll have 1,000 people put up $10 to play for an entry. I played in the largest satellite in history a week and a half ago where over 7,500 people all put up $370 and the top 234 players won an entry into the main event. The guys (and gals) who are willing to risk $1,000 to get in probably don’t suck, but thousands of amateurs will win their way in via small buy-in satellites. Many internet qualifiers will be playing their first in person tournament. Even if their poker skills are up to par it takes hundreds (if not thousands) of hours at the poker table to learn to control your movements, recognize what the movements of other players mean, and just feel comfortable sitting around the felt. Also let’s not forget that this is the World Series. If a pro like me can be nervous about it, players who’ve never played a tournament with a buy-in more than a few hundred dollars or who’ve never sat face to face with their opponents are going to be a total mess.

What does all this mean? It means that I’m going to have plenty of time to out play what will hopefully be a somewhat weak field. Don’t get me wrong, ALL of the best players in the world will be there, but they’ll be hiding mixed in with some total chumps, lot’s of semi-skilled amateurs, and plenty of mid level pros like myself. After all, with 8,000 players there’s only a 1 in 8 chance of having one of the top 100 players at your table.

Tell me more about the money! Like I said before last year there were 5,619 entrants and here are a few of the payouts:
1st $7,500,000
2nd $4,250,000
3rd $2,500,000
9th $1,000,000
10th $600,000
20th $304,680
30th $274,090
40th $235,390
50th $173,880
75th $107,950
100th $77,710
150th $46,245
200th $39,075
300th $24,365
400th $18,335
500th $14,135
560th $12,500

Obviously, I’m going to do my best and I’m confident I can compete, but I’m sort of looking at this year as my rookie year. You don’t expect rookies to win championships and I’m certainly not expecting to win, but I know I’ve got what it takes to make the money and there’s always the chance that something crazy could happen. I give myself a 1 in 5000 chance of winning, a 1 in 500 chance of winning $1,000,000, and a 15%-20% chance of making the money (which would still be one of the top three or four accomplishments in my poker career).

Jen and I leave for Vegas on Thursday and will be staying at the MGM for 3 days and the Paris for 4 days (hopefully I’ll have to extend my stay). I’ll do my best to update the blog from Vegas, but I’m not sure what kind of internet access I’ll have so it might be a little more sporadic and less detailed than past updates. Wish me luck.

What makes a good poker player?

When I'm at parties or other social functions and people hear that I'm a professional poker player, they always ask "god damn, how did you get to be so good looking?" Once we have that out of the way they also ask "what separates the pros from the amateurs?" Or "isn't it all just luck?" Or "Isn't poker just gambling? I thought you couldn't win at gambling? Doesn't the house always win?" After that about 40% of people say "is it all bluffing or what?" The first thing I tell them is in order to be a good poker player you need to WAY overuse parentheses in your blog (seriously, have you see how often I use them; it's ridiculous). The second thing I tell them is there are a ton of things that go into being a good poker player.

First and foremost you need solid fundamentals as far as strategy goes. You can get a good deal of this kind of information from books and articles, but it takes putting theory into action to really internalize good strategy. If someone raises in front of you before the flop and you have AQ, I can make a good argument for folding, raising or calling in most situations. It takes experience to identify the correct times to do each. Furthermore, just like there are many different kind of attacks in chess, there are many different general strategies in poker. Some players like to see a ton of flops in the hopes that they'll win a few big pots when it will be difficult for their opponents to put them on a specific hand. Others see very few flops and only proceed when they have strong cards. Neither is correct or incorrect and part of being a good player is finding the style that suits you best. Other parts of good fundamentals are knowing the odds of certain things happening and having some math skills. This aspect of poker is often over hyped and really anyone can learn this part of the game without too much effort.

Secondly you need a lot of patience. Poker can move really slowly and can get boring if you're not getting good cards. It's much more fun to play than to not play and fighting the urge to get involved with marginal cards is something every poker player faces from time to time. You've got to wait for good cards or wait until the situation is right to make a move with weaker cards.

What about looking for "tells?" In the movies you'll see the hero spot the villain's nose twitching every time he bluffs and his lip curl up every time he makes a full house. In reality this kind of thing never happens. And while everyone always talks about having a good poker face having a good poker body is really much more important. Looking at an opponent’s posture, what they do with their arms and hands and even their breathing is much more important (if your heart rate goes way up because you’re nervous about something it's really tough to control your breathing and look relaxed). How a player puts their chips into the pot is also very important. Do the throw them in violently or do they slowly push in a neat stack? Did they sit there for 10 seconds or bet right away? Did they say anything as they bet or were they silent? Most importantly you have to remember what they did before so you can interpret all off this information. The same action will mean different things for different players and you have to know who you're dealing with.

At the highest level people don't give off much information with their movements (and on the internet you can't see people at all) so you have to use betting patterns to make your best guess about what they have. Sometimes your hand is so good (or so bad) that it doesn't matter what the other players have and your only goal is to get as much money in the pot as possible, but for the most part you need to try to figure out what they have. There are 169 possible combinations of two cards (neglecting suits) and your job is to eliminate as many of those as possible. When the hand starts you have no information and each player could have anything. As soon as a player calls or raises your information gathering starts (if they fold we don't care about what they had) and at this point you can usually limit what they have to about 20 of the possible 169 holdings. After the flop you can usually narrow it down to something like 10 possibilities. Hopefully by the river you can narrow it down to just a few (or sometimes just one), think about the likely each possibility is and then you look at how much is in the pot and how much you need to risk to win the pot. In order to do a good job at narrowing the possibilities you need to pay attention to how the other players play in various situations so you can interpret (and predict for that matter) their actions on future hands. If you've read my blog I'm sure you've heard me say "I knew this guy didn't have X because of this and thought he might have Y because of this other thing." Being good at making these guesses based on you opponents past betting patterns is a huge part of poker.

On the other side of the coin is making it difficult for your opponents to guess what you have. The way that the other players at you table perceive you and the way you play is called your "table image." You have to understand how the other players perceive you and use it against them. If they think you're a wild and crazy player who's always bluffing then you'll do better to wait for a good hand and if they think your captain conservative you should try bluffing more. Sometimes it's important to make non optimal or non profitable plays from time to time in order to throw your opponents off and make it tougher for them to figure out what you have in the future. If they see you do something ridiculous they'll remember and will always have to consider that maybe you're doing something else ridiculous when they come up against you in a future hand. The easiest players to beat are the ones that are totally straight forward and predictable.

Having the right mindset is also important. Risking thousands of dollars on a card game can be some scary shit and having the fearlessness to do the right thing is very important. The best play is oftentimes the most risky (and scariest) and it takes guts to go ahead with it anyway. Confidence is also very important. You have to believe that the guesses you’re making are correct if you’re going to act on them. Good poker is aggressive poker and a lack of confidence usually manifests itself in timid play which is a recipe for failure. You can never be 100% sure of what someone has until the cards get turned over and sometimes you have to be willing to put all of your chips at risk when you’re 75% sure or 60% sure.

Having good focus is also important. It's easy to watch the game on TV while you're playing or talk with the casino employees or just space out, but if you do that it will be much more difficult to guess what your opponents have when you're involved in a hand. Believe me it can be EXTREMELY difficult to pay attention to the game when all you've been doing is folding for an hour and a half, but it's still important to do so.

Intuition also plays a part. Sometimes you'll hear players say "I don't know what he had, but I knew I was beat" or "It just felt like he was bluffing." Somehow your subconscious has picked up on something the other players are doing and it just gives you a gut feeling. Learning to trust those gut feelings is tough, but important.

Last, but not least on my list is emotional control. Have you ever seen a baseball player kick the shit out of a water cooler or throw bats onto the field? Or seen a golfer slam their club into the ground? Poker players have the same kind of reactions. Think about how you'd react of you had $1,000 riding on the turn of one card and you were a 10 to 1 favorite and lost? What if the same thing happened to you again a few hands later? You'd probably go bananas. When a poker player let's his emotions affect his play negatively it's called going on tilt and believe me it happens to everyone. Usually if things aren't going well the first thing to go is patience. Players on tilt tend to play more hands than they should. The next thing that comes is bluffing too much. A player on severe tilt will have a sense of desperation to get their money back as quickly as possible, but what happens is they make poor decisions and lose even more. But, among strong players tilt comes in more mild forms. It might be calling a raise with a hand that isn't quite good enough or raising when the situation doesn't warrant it instead of just calling. The thing I like about tournament poker is if something really bad happens to you, you're usually out of the tournament and can't make any more mistakes or do any more damage to your bankroll.


There are certainly other things that make a good poker player, but for my money these are the big ones. Now if someone asks you, "isn't poker all just luck?" you can tell them that it's not and have something to back it up. About 25% of the time I tell people that I'm a professional poker player they imply (sometimes not subtly) that I'm a big fat liar. Everyone's been taught from the time that they are small children that they can't win at any endeavor that involves betting. "The house always wins" is the mantra that goes along with this lesson. Of course it's true that casino's make money, but just because the house wins doesn't mean that you can't win too.

Back to My Specialty

I was once again reminded of the power of internet poker yesterday. The key to winning on the internet is volume. At the WSOP every decision is critical. Watching your opponents and learning their betting patterns and mannerisms over a period of hours helps you eventually take them out. In a live game you get about 35 hands an hour (which may sound like a lot, but it's really not). In the same game online you'll get 60-70 hands an hour. Why so much faster? Well it takes all of about 1.5 seconds to shuffle and deal the cards online, you don't ever have to count out chips and every action is just a click of the mouse. Also you aren't limited to playing just one game at a time. After playing online almost full time for the past few years I've gotten really good at managing multiple games and making quick decisions (plus I have a 30 inch monitor so I can see everything that's going on). The most games I've ever played at once is 9, but I usually limit it to 6 at a time. I was thinking that yesterday I played more hands before I had lunch (about 2,000) than I did during the 9 WSOP events I played (about 1,500). The bottom line is I played 62 single table tournaments (starting with 9 players with the top 3 spots playing - in a $100 tournament 1st pays $472.5, 2nd pays $283.5, and third pays $189) yesterday and won $3,702. Nice timing for a good win.

Well what was the damage?

I lost $17,239 playing WSOP events (I didn't actually play any other poker while I was there). Of that my share of the loss is 51.5% or $8,878. But let's not forget that I won $3,500 playing stupid casino games. There was also something like 1800 worth of expenses (I have exact records but have yet to add it up) so far and of course the opportunity cost of not working for 2 weeks. A decent showing in the main event could easily wipe all of this away, but you'll have to wait for the preview to get the full details.

I'll probably keep blogging a little between now and when I head back to Vegas and may continue after that. At the very least look out for the "Main Event Preview" which will be coming some time soon. For now let me just say that after 13 days in Vegas it's great to be home. Jen cooked me a FANTASTIC home cooked meal yesterday (she's turning into a super duper cook) and we caught up on some TIVO'd reality shows. I'll probably have a half assed work day today and then get back on my horse tomorrow. Thanks again for all of the good luck wishes and support I've gotten from everyone reading this blog. If anyone out there want's to get into online poker, wants recomendations about poker books (strategy books or interesting reads about poker), or has any poker questions send me an e-mail (or post a comment) and I'll help you get started, recomend, or answer.