Main Event 2012

Good luck to all my friends playing the Main Event!

It's been two years since I posted anything here. I don't play any poker these days. However, life is very good.

Before and After

I decided that I don't want to write up any hands from the triple draw event. None of them are particularly invigorating. The most interesting ones involve somebody getting there on the last draw. For the first 90% of the tournament, it was me. During the 4000-8000 level, it was them.

Following up on the LA Times piece, some online articles have recently been written about me. These inevitably include a picture of me playing poker circa 2004-2007 (aka 25 pounds ago). Listen, I'm not asking anyone to write anything about me, but if you do, could you please use this nice Pokernews picture from last week?

Look, I'm even representing Brooklyn.

In order that you might see the amazing changes that happen when you quit poker, here are some carbohydrate-rich, frowny-face "before" pictures:


Anyway, thanks, my ego appreciates it.

Triple Draw Recap

I finished 14th in the triple draw event. I was the chip leader with 24 left. Oh well. I'll try to write a longer recap later.

WSOP Triple Draw 2010

As promised, I'm back for my annual blog update coinciding with the WSOP triple draw event.

Having been away from the day-to-day grind of the poker life for a couple of years now, I've been surprised by how brutal and miserable it seems to me now. The players are rude, the house is incompetent, the chairs have caused a recurrence of my back woes, and they still charge you twenty bucks for some rubbery beef with broccoli and a bottle of water. None of this is news, I suppose, but being away from this world has made me acutely aware of its shortcomings. About a half dozen old poker friends have told me that I seem happier, more relaxed, and skinnier. It's all true!

The tournament started yesterday evening. We got 291 runners, of which 96 made it to day two. I ran my 7500 starting stack up to 30,100 over the course of day one. The winner will get $181k tomorrow night.

My starting table was tougher than average, with Ted Forrest, Hansu Chu, and three other young guys who knew what they were doing. Luckily I made a lot of hands early and had $16k by the first break. Michael Binger filled Hansu's seat to my left about halfway through the day and Scott Seiver came and sat to his left a little later. I managed to only lose three bets to Scott with 76432 vs. his wheel late in the day after we both drew one on the last draw. Overall, a pretty uneventful day. If you're only going to play one tournament a year, it's nice to run good. We'll see if I can keep it up today. There are a lot of very good triple draw players left, so table draw will be crucial. We start at 3 PM local time.

LA Times Article

A couple of weeks ago, Nathaniel Popper of the LA Times wrote an article about poker and trading in which I am mentioned. Other than mis-stating my borough of residence (Brooklyn 4 lyf), I really thought the piece was well done. It got picked up by a number of different print and online sources, though the Gawker headline has to be my favorite ("Wall Street Ignores Irony, Literally Hires Gamblers").

363

My last post here was 363 days ago. In my defense, I haven't played a lot of poker in those 363 days. I finally stopped whining about how sick of poker I was and got a job on Wall St. in February. And it's great.

I did make it out to Vegas last week to play the triple draw event and catch up with some friends who I don't see anymore. Learning baduci* conjured up memories of liking poker, but after a few days I was ready to come home and resume my normal life.

I have a bunch of friends with chips in the main event, but it's too early to start posting sweats. If somebody makes the last few tables, maybe I'll chime in.

Otherwise, I guess I'll see you guys in about 363 days.

* Baduci is a split-pot five-card triple draw game in which half the pot goes to the best 2-7 lowball hand and half the pot goes to the best badugi hand. Ace is high, so the nut badugi hand is 2345 unsuited.

In an effort to avoid turning this blog into the Matt Matros Fanboy Assocation (MMFA) (tm), I haven't talked about this yet. But Matt's still alive in the main event with 79 people left. Gooooogogogo. Other roots: friends Chino Rheem and Victor Ramdin.

The triple draw games have been fast and furious on Stars this week. Last night there was a full 200/400 with a waiting list and a 4-handed 500/1k! A certain Team Pokerstars member dropped by to spice up the action.

...But I'm getting out of this business, remember?

Hmm...

I have played enough hands of triple draw that you would think I would not see anything new at this point. And then:

PokerStars Game #18710560330: Triple Draw 2-7 Lowball Limit ($30/$60) - 2008/07/10 - 00:37:21 (ET)
Table 'Edasich II' 6-max Seat #1 is the button
Seat 1: mogli64 ($1596 in chips)
Seat 2: SaveMySkin ($2172 in chips)
Seat 3: bobbybagpipe ($704 in chips)
Seat 4: maroni ($1062 in chips)
Seat 6: sandman651 ($2186 in chips)
SaveMySkin: posts small blind $15
bobbybagpipe: posts big blind $30
capt g: sits out
*** DEALING HANDS ***
Dealt to SaveMySkin [9c Kh 8s 5d 3s]
maroni: folds
sandman651: folds
mogli64: raises $30 to $60
SaveMySkin: calls $45
bobbybagpipe: folds
*** FIRST DRAW ***
SaveMySkin: discards 2 cards [9c Kh]
Dealt to SaveMySkin [8s 5d 3s] [Ad 7d]
mogli64: discards 1 card
SaveMySkin: checks
mogli64: bets $30
SaveMySkin: calls $30
*** SECOND DRAW ***
SaveMySkin: discards 1 card [Ad]
Dealt to SaveMySkin [8s 5d 3s 7d] [6s]
mogli64: stands pat
SaveMySkin: checks
mogli64: bets $60
SaveMySkin: calls $60
*** THIRD DRAW ***
SaveMySkin: stands pat on [8s 5d 3s 7d 6s]
mogli64: discards 5 cards


Also, someone anonymously posted a comment to this blog this afternoon that Matt Matros was out of the main event after flopping an underset. But apparently Matt is still in. There are two possibilities here:

1) This person who posted was mistaken/confused Matt with someone else/got bad information from a third party.
2) Someone tried to use the comments of my poker blog to spread a rumor that Matt busted out and/or trick me personally into thinking this.

What. The. Fuck. People.

As Joe Pelton said in a recent blog (I am paraphrasing): "Phil Hellmuth showed up in a tank and there are more than 100 people in line to meet Joe Hachem. This is not a world in which I belong."

That's how I feel about poker these days.

Main Event Plea

Over the next two weeks (or four months and two weeks, as the case may be), I'm sure I will get into the main event sweating. I know enough of you poker players that somebody will make a run in the thing, more likely a bunch of somebodies. But it's early enough that I'm not paying attention to any hands or chip counts yet, as I continue to extricate myself from the 24-hour-poker-culture. So please, if you could refrain from giving me any updates on how Ray Romano is doing in the main event, I would appreciate it.

(Thanks Jesse)

gl sir

Best of luck to my good friend Matt Matros at the final table of the $1500 NLH event today. Matt's so good he should give lessons on how to maneuver through these enormous tournament fields. Oh yeah, he does.

Random Musings

- Mike DeMichele and Matt Glantz finished top four in both the $50k HORSE and the WSOP mixed game event. That's fuckin' strong.
- My good friend Joe Pelton is still in the $1500 NLH with 12 left. Goooo Joe.
- I'm going to play a bunch of WCOOP events and am especially excited for the "variety tourney."
- If I didn't make it obvious in my last post, I think that if you're sitting at a 6-player public poker table and you expect people not to join the game because you prefer to play heads up, that's crazy.

HU

Two people are playing at a six-handed table online. A third player sits down, and the first two request that they be allowed to play heads up. Should the third player accommodate this request? Why or why not? Assume that a heads up (2-max) table is not available.

(I am not interested in a discussion of what is generally done now in this situation.)

Triple Draw Recap

I didn't do anything in the triple draw tournament. I had a pretty bad starting table, including John Juanda for the second year in a row. I won a few small pots during the first level and had my 5k starting stack up to 7k but then went pretty cold. I got all-in and won a big pot right before the second break but the tight old dude who had all the chips finished me off about an hour later. My gameplan was to play pretty straightforward and not mess around but there were a few spots where I wish I had tried some tricky plays. I don't think I played all that well. Live poker is really brutal. To echo the sentiment of my last post, this just isn't my life anymore. I say that to people out here and they get a concerned, sad look on their face. But it's really a good thing.

Back to Brooklyn tonight.

WSOP

About six months after I graduated from college, I went back to campus for the first time. The people were familiar, the place was familiar, but I got this strange feeling that I just didn't belong there anymore. I'm having that same feeling now as I spend some time in Vegas at the WSOP. It's nice to see all of my friends, and there are some things I enjoy about the atmosphere, but I'm really not all that excited to be here and am mostly kind of walking around with nothing to do. Tomorrow is the triple draw event, which is the one thing I am excited about. After that I'll probably just come home. My life just doesn't revolve around poker anymore, and I am so happy to be able to write that.

I played a HORSE satellite last night, which was pitched to me as a soft field and ended up being me and a bunch of HORSE experts. One funny anecdote:

Mike Sexton (to Dewey Tomko): "I'm proud of you Dewey. You've got $100 million and you're playing a satellite."
Everyone Else: *Silently wondering if Sexton sees the irony*

One hand from the satellite...

Playing razz, three of us put in five bets on third street. I have 2(A3), and the other door cards are a 4 and a 7. On fourth, I catch an 8, the 7 catches a 5, and the 4 catches a K. They check to me, I bet, the 75 raises, and the K4 calls two cold. Would you reraise here? I decided to. When I ran the numbers, I have very close to 33% equity.

WSOP Schedule

Harrah's website says the triple draw event is on the 22nd. People are telling me they have printed schedules from the Rio that says it's on the 25th. I just called them and the woman told me her schedule says it's the 22nd and she hasn't heard about any schedule changes. Does anyone have any info on this? Maybe they printed up some schedules with a misprint?

Old WPT

I just watched the Shaniac/Kevin Saul WPT episode. I don't really want to talk about any hands from the show or anything. I'm sure this has been covered in the blogosphere, but there is something that really bothers me about the WPT broadcasts:

Can someone teach Mike Sexton that "raise" and "reraise" are not synonyms? If it folds to the button and that player opens the pot, betting more than the big blind, it's not appropriate to say, "So-and-so looks like he's going to reraise on the button here." You are just using the wrong term. You don't have baseball announcers who see a home run and say, "Wow, he hit a deep ground ball there!"

...Although there is the curious case of Joe Morgan, so what do I know?

Stoxpoker

Hi guys. I just wanted to let you all know that I'm now coaching and doing triple draw strategy videos for stoxpoker.com. If you've never checked out the site, I encourage you to do so. My friend Nick runs it and has turned it into the best poker coaching site out there. So, click this banner to check it out and tell them I sent you:



I'm still finalizing my Series plans. I'll definitely be out around the triple draw event and I may try to get out there for a few days this week or next. If anyone is out there already, what mixed games are they running at Rio/Bellagio?

I'm Not Dead

Hi guys. Sorry I never post anymore. I took a long break from playing any serious poker. Then I played about 700 sit-n-gos this month because some friends of mine told me they were easy and low variance. I broke about even and didn't enjoy one minute of it. Then yesterday I played some triple draw and booked a nice win. The same happened today. So, back to this for a while, I guess.

I recently had a realization about my poker "career," and it went something like this. When I started playing for a living, I was doing just that: playing to make money, to pay the rent, to put food on the table. Then I worked hard/played a lot/ran good for a while and got to a place where I was comfortable financially. I didn't need to make money playing poker on a day-to-day basis to support myself. This had some bad consequences. I got really lazy with my play and my game selection. For a while I just played whatever game I felt like playing at whatever stakes they were spreading it. I played against some of the best players in the world at games I was not very experienced or very good at. Not surprisingly, I lost.

I feel kind of silly about it in hindsight, but there's no use in dwelling on the mistakes I've made. Let them be a lesson to you. Or something. Anyway, onward and upward. I'm going to play smaller for a while and probably only play triple draw. A little grinding will be good for me.

I'm planning to play the WSOP triple draw event on June 22nd. I probably won't be in town for more than a few days, but I want to see all you idiots who I've missed while I haven't been traveling this year. Let's play some golf.

Stars VIP

Well, well, well, I'm actually playing some poker this month. I've been working on my O8 game on Stars and have had some good short-term results.

I've also gotten myself up to "PlatinumStar" for the first time and have a bunch of FPPs I should do something with. You guys are more up on this than I am these days: what's the best thing to do with these points? I could take the cash awards, but I think the tournaments/other services may be a better value. The problem is, I don't really want to play any tournaments on Stars and I don't really want to play any televised WSOP events. Their support told me they won't buy me into the triple draw event (non-televised). I could also try to make it to Supernova this year and then use their "concierge" service, but I'm not sure I will keep up the pace required to get to Supernova. Any thoughts appreciated.

I'm also thinking about going out to LA in the next few weeks.

Who am I and what happened to the guy who hated playing poker?

Wow, I Am The Worst Poker Blogger Ever

Wow, I never post anymore. Sorry guys. I played this hand tonight and it is awesome and post-worthy. If every hand was like this, I would like poker a lot more.

I'm thinking about going out to LA next month. The Commerce tournament is always fun and I haven't seen my poker friends in six months. The trip sort of depends on some other things in my life though. So we'll see.

Hope you're all doing well.

WCOOP Razz

If for some reason you feel like railing a razz tournament, I'm doing pretty well in the WCOOP with about 1/4 of the field left.

Don't forget to check out my new fantasy sports site.

My New Business Venture - Instant Fantasy Sports

Hi everyone. As some of you know, I have been working on a new business venture for a number of months. The project is a fantasy sports website called Instant Fantasy Sports. We launched the site last night and I'm very excited about how it turned out. You can find it at www.instantfantasysports.com.

The basic idea behind the site is that we take the time frame of season-long fantasy sports leagues and shrink it. Our football games, which we launched last night, only last a week. On our site, there are no long-term commitments and you don't have to worry about injuries or poor performance ruining your whole fantasy season. The site will look familiar to many of you who are reading this blog because it's set up a lot like an online poker site. The way I have described my project to poker people is, "It's like sit n gos for fantasy sports." If you take a look at the site, you'll get a better idea what I mean.

Given the current state of online gaming, the next logical question is, "Is this site legal?" Happily, I'm able to tell you that fantasy sports games are explicitly protected by the UIGEA (the same law that has given online poker so much trouble in the USA). Instant Fantasy Sports is 100% legal in the USA and Canada.

Okay, this is the part where I ask you for help! If you're interested in fantasy sports, I hope you will check out the site, sign up for an account, and play in some leagues if you like the idea. If you know other fantasy sports lovers, please let them know about the site. I feel that we have put together something special here. One of the initial challenges is getting people signed up for the site so that we can run drafts regularly. I hope you'll help me meet this challenge by signing up and spreading the word to your friends who like fantasy sports.

If you have any questions or comments about the site, please leave a comment here or send an email to support@instantfantasysports.com

Bobby FTW

Frankly this is the best thing I have seen all week.

Poker

I played some poker tonight. Here are some hands:

KK vs QQ vs 43o, capped preflop, board K526J
K9 vs AK, board QJxTx
AQ vs Q2o, capped preflop, board KQT22

And my favorite, from O8, A34Q vs 57JJ, board K335J

I'm glad I don't do this every day anymore.

Bellagio Cup

I want to also wish good luck to Shane Schleger and Kevin Saul at the Bellagio Cup final table today. Should be an interesting one to watch when they broadcast it. Ray Henson is third in chips with 27 left in the Main Event. Gooooo you three.

Seriously Harrah's?

There are a lot of stupid things that people running big poker tournaments seem to keep getting wrong, no matter how often these mistakes have been made before or how much press said mistakes have gotten. But I think the one that baffles me most is having different denomination chips that can easily be mistaken for each other because of similar coloring. How hard can it be to come up with a chipset that's not confusing to the players?

Seriously Harrah's? You run the World Series of Poker? You're making $3 million or so in juice just from the main event? The 5k chips are orange and the 25k chips are.......a slightly lighter shade of orange? Are you people fucking kidding me?

I'm pretty sure none of my close friends are left in the main event. This sucks. I wish I had someone to sweat. I know Danny Alaei a little bit from playing mixed games with him and he's a great guy and a great poker mind, so he's who I'm rooting for now. Goooo Danny.

*EDIT* Various people have pointed out that Ray Henson, a friend of mine, is also still in. I never knew Ray's last name and nobody told me he was alive until today. Goooooo Ray.

Main Event

If you had told me two years ago that I would have been where I was one year ago (so pumped up, playing so big, etc.), I would not have believed you. If you had told me last year that I would be skipping the main event this year, I would not have believed you. I wonder what I'll be doing next year at this time.

Good luck to everyone playing. I thought I would at least have a twinge of wanting to be out there when this thing started without me, but not so much. Playing no limit hold em for days in that room with those people in that atmosphere is very low on my list of things to do, eV and 12 million and all that be damned.

2-7 Day 2

I ran my 12k up to 35k by making three seven lows in the first five hands of the day. From there, I lost every hand that I played and busted in short order. I had not experienced the "the day you bust out of the main event is the worst day of the year" feeling, but I had it after yesterday. Luckily I ran into my boy Brandon Schaefer a few minutes after I busted and we got Mexican food and he cheered me up.

I'm heading home tomorrow and don't know when my next poker will be, other than the one game in New York I've been playing.

Congrats and good luck to:

- Joe Pelton at the 2k NL final table today
- Eugene, Rafi, Lenny, and Anthony at the 2-7 final table (are we surprised that I know everyone at this particular final table? no)
- Tom Schneider for bracelet #2 this year

WSOP 2-7

I made the second day of the 2-7 tournament with a below average stack of 12,200. We will be playing 600-1200 when we start up today. While my friends all had people at their tables who didn't know whether an ace was high or low, my table draw was absolutely brutal for this tournament. It looked like:

1 - John Juanda
2 - Hoyt Corkins
3 - Chris Gentile
4 - Mel Judah
5 - Me
6 - Joe Cassidy

Before 2-7 was being played in every mixed game, Juanda was the best in the world at triple draw. As he said when he drew out on me early in the day, "Don't you know this is my best game?" Hoyt is from Alabama and they play a loooot of lowball in the south. Chris Gentile, aka superfish is in my opinion one of the best mixed game players around and was probably the biggest winner in the big triple draw game we used to play on UB. If there is one guy I didn't want to see at my table for this event, it was definitely Chris. Mel hadn't played a lot of triple draw, he admitted, but has been around poker for a long time and played well. And of course Joe Cassidy is a superstar at any game you put him in.

I rebought immediately and had to rebuy three more times in addition to the double add-on, so I'm in for $7k and have to come in the top 12 to win money. We got 209 runners, which was more than I expected, and first place pays $227k.

With about 20 minutes left in the day I got moved to a table with Greg Raymer, Rafi Amit, John Murphy, and Chris Bjorn. I mean come on. Can I get a guy who doesn't know what he's doing, one time? Chris busted right before the end of the night, so we have two open seats which will probably be filled by some other good lowball players. I sort of hope the table breaks because Rafi and Greg are very strong at this game and have more chips than I do.

These limit tournaments are sort of a crapshoot when the blinds get so big, so I hope I make some hands early on. You should be able to check in on me at pokernews.com if you so desire. Cards get in the air at 4 PM Vegas time.

Bank

I just went to the bank to get money for my trip to Vegas later today. So I filled out the slip, went to the teller, went through the usual steps for a large cash withdrawal (photo ID, etc.), and then something weird happened. The teller got the money out and then said "My manager wants to know what you're going to do with the cash." Aaaahahaha. Obviously I said something like, "That's sort of a strange question" or "That's none of the bank's business" or "Tell your manager to go fuck himself," and the guy gave me the money and I left. I sort of felt bad for the teller because he looked sort of nervous asking a customer a question like that and agreed with me when I said it was strange. What I want to know though is what happens if I say the money is for hookers and blow or something? Are they going to refuse to give it to me?

Anyway I'm off to Vegas tonight and the triple draw tournament is Friday. This is like the main event for me so I'm pretty excited.

Main Event

I'm thinking about selling pieces of myself in the WSOP Main Event. If you're interested, email me.