Catch the PokerMutant on today’s Poker In the Ears podcast (#215), head-to-head with Joe Stapleton on the Superfan vs. Stapes segment with James Hartigan officiating. We’re answering questions about the 1985 Martin Scorsese film After Hours, a quintessential film about life in New York City 25 years ago. The fun starts at 54:30.
Oh, and there’s an interview with Parker ‘tonkaaaap’ Talbot, too.
UPDATE: It took an entire weekend—the weekend where the Mike Postle/Stones Gambling Hall cheating scandal broke, nonetheless—but the account did come off restriction the morning of 30 September.
For some reason known only to the folks at Twitter, my @pokermutant account has been restricted since about Friday (27 September) at 8pm. No indication that it’s been hacked or that I did something untoward, though my last tweet was about the Bellagio 5 Diamond series, and I’d been discussing Galaxy Quest with Dara O’Kearney. That didn’t seem so offensive at the time, but I guess it was.
I just get routed to a page telling me to confirm my phone number, saying it’ll send me a text message, but I tried that so many times while I was playing the Friday night Final Table $10K GTD NLHE that eventually Twitter said I was restricted from doing that, too, even though I never got a message. Tried changing my passsword, which means I’m going to have to update it on the numerous devices where I use it, but I’m still restricted. Not the greatest timing for a reason I’m going to sit on until I can tweet again.
The Poker Mutant will be retiring (mostly) from poker on 1 January. This is the latest installment in his thrilling countdown to the End of Times.
Not playing anything today because I’m trying to finish off Lab Girl by Hope Jahren—a National Book Critics Circle Award-winner—for my book club tomorrow night. Reminds me a bit of my mom; some of my earliest memories are of the labs she worked in while I was a small mutant.
Have a great poker weekend! Click the boomplayer link.
https://twitter.com/ArtySmokesPS/status/995030918829133825
A discussion during last night’s home game (I busted on the bubble) about the number of times it was necessary to shuffle a deck of cards to achieve randomness led me to a little research.
It was the general consensus at the table that seven was the correct number of shuffles, I had never really paid much attention to it, having only managed to overcome a little physical abnormality (it’s why I’m the Poker Mutant) to manage an awkward shuffle in recent years. But even though there was agreement about the number, the particulars of whether it mattered that the deck had been used in a hand or was fresh out of a new pack posed some question, and was it seven professional riffles, a machine shuffle, or just some guys around a folding card table-type shuffles?
On the first, I was pretty sure that the answer was no. Random is random, and if a data set can be considered random , it should make no difference how orderly it was before randomization.
As to the other, I found an article in the New York Times from nearly thirty years ago, about a paper by Drs. Dave Bayer (mathematics and computer science, Columbia) and Persi Diaconis (mathematics and statistics, Harvard as well as a magician), who used observation of card games and computer simulations to determine the optimum amount of shuffling required for single- and multiple-deck card games (like blackjack).
By saying that the deck is completely mixed after seven shuffles, Dr. Diaconis and Dr. Bayer mean that every arrangement of the 52 cards is equally likely or that any card is as likely to be in one place as in another.
The cards do get more and more randomly mixed if a person keeps on shuffling more than seven times, but seven shuffles is a transition point, the first time that randomness is close. Additional shuffles do not appreciably alter things.
…
In the meantime, he also worked on ”perfect shuffles,” those that exactly interlace the cards. Almost no one except a magician can do perfect shuffles every time. But Dr. Diaconis showed several years ago that if a person actually does perfect shuffles, the cards would never be thoroughly mixed. He derived a mathematical proof showing that if a deck is perfectly shuffled eight times, the cards will be in the same order as they were before the shuffling.
The flight to Las Vegas went well, at least. I upgraded to one of the exit aisles to get a window, met a potential business contact, then the fun began. Last time I’d rented a car, I’d had a wait in line that lasted as half as long as it took to get from Portland to here, so I made sure I got a different rental agency, only to realize that Thrifty and Dollar are the same company. So, fifty minutes in line, with all sort of extortion attempts to upsell.
Just made it to the Venetian for the start of the $400 buy-in. First hand I’m in BB ad I see [ax ax]. I 3-bet the original raiser, he calls and hits two pair on the flop, and while I play it semi-cautiously, I still loose a quarter of my stack in the first hand. My SB with [9x 9x] gets three over cards on the flop. A little while later–still in the first level, I have to lay down [qx qx]. It’s a huge tournament. The $30K guarantee ends up with about $30K for first place. I go out with just 2,400 of the 12K starting stack left, holding [ad 8d], with a re-shove from the slightly-less-short stack on my left with [ax 7x], and the formerly short stack on my right holding [kc tc]. A [tx] its on the river and it’s over for the short stacks.
Met up with DV and BP who are down here for the WSOP Colossus. DV had already busted the first flight. BP is playing Saturday, and invited us to meet up at Orleans for their Friday evening 7pm. Didn’t even make it out of level 2.
Media stuff at the Rio tomorrow, I think. Met up with some of the real names at PokerNews: Chad Holloway (I did not see a bracelet), Remko Rinkema, and Donnie Peters, among others. Hope to see you there!
Playing one of the non-turbo $1K NLHE buy-in tournaments sometime this summer? Here’s some stuff to keep in mind that might be of use getting through Day 1. I couldn’t completely anticipate that the increase in the starting stack wouldn’t extend Day One, but as soon as it went up, the WSOP put this advisory out about the Colossus, which has the same structure.
I’ll be in Las Vegas tomorrow morning (29 May) for the first weekend to pick up my media pass. I hope to meet up with as many Pacific Northwest players down for the Colossus as I can, catch up with anyone who’s read the blog or one or more of my articles over the past year or so and liked it (or had a bone to pick with it), and other members of the poker media that I’m trying to weasel into. I’ll be tweeting info about OR, WA, ID, and BC players in restarts (and other info) with the hashtag #PNW_WSOP_15.
It’s been just about four years since my first post here, just before my 49th birthday in 2010. So at the end of this week I turn 53. I’m still not making a living playing poker, but as I wrote in my first article for PokerNews.com earlier this year, that’s not an easy task, mathematically. (On a related subject, there’s an interesting long thread on 2+2 that I just ran across yesterday).
I’ve always been interested in games, but due to disposition and a lack of money in our family, nobody I knew was ever involved in gambling or ‘gaming,’ so I never played poker until I was in my early 20s, when I hosted a five-card draw game at my house where the guys I worked with in a book warehouse got together after work once in a while after our weekly payday for some nickel-ante cash games. No casinos in Oregon at the time (or much of anywhere else in the West outside Nevada since this was before the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act). I hadn’t ever seen poker played outside of movies and TV. But I liked the social aspect of it, and I was just as enthusiastic about it as I had been a couple years earlier when I set up spreadsheets to manage a baseball fantasy league back at the beginning of the craze, even though I have never had any interest in sports. After I moved out of Eugene, I didn’t play poker again for nearly twenty years.
The Moneymaker book completely missed me. I was completely oblivious to Texas Hold’em and tournaments though I’d worked on some prototype online video poker and casino games in the late ’90s. Didn’t watch sports, didn’t see ads for the online sites, just went my own way until I was talking games at a holiday party with the husband of one of my cousins, and he invited me to a little bi-weekly $30 home tournament. I played infrequently through most of 2008, and didn’t cash in any of the one or two-table events until the spring of 2009. By that time, while I’d been working as a freelance programmer for over a decade, had written several programming and multimedia development books, and gave presentations at national conferences from time to time, I hadn’t had a steady paycheck for more than two years, and I had a fair amount of time on my hands, so I’d set up accounts online, playing qualifiers to live events (I ran across an email to a friend mentioning I’d made it to 77th place in a 7,500 player field on PokerStars in May 2009). I started winning in the home game. I took 2nd in a 200 entry Full Tilt tournament in July 2010 for nearly a 40x prize. But I wasn’t that good and kept shooting for big money which increased my variance more than I knew. And I was broke, so when I cashed out and then ran my online bankroll down, there was no way to prime the pump.
As a self-improvement project in late 2008, I’d started learning iOS programming, eventually releasing a game on July 4th weekend in 2009 (you can still get the free version). As my second act, I started doing something poker-related, mostly to have something to show to prospective employers. I wrote a tool that an accomplished user could manipulate while their iPhone was in their pocket, which would give audio feedback on the hand’s strength. So you could hit a button that specified there were 9 players, tell it you had an ace and a king and that they were suited, and it would repeat back the particulars and that it was a 22% favorite against eight random hands all in, with a 2% chance to tie, all without anyone knowing you had that info, assuming you hadn’t forgotten your headphones. First, I had to generate the hand equities, so I wrote a program to play out half a million hands between two players and twelve players (just to be thorough). Not really marketable, but an entertaining exercise.
I worked on that, off and on with breaks for paying projects, until the summer of 2010. I’d been following more and more poker news, and as the World Series of Poker got under way that summer, I kept an eye on the reports. Early in the series, skimming over the list of final tableists, I ran across a name that was very familiar to me from my work as a programmer, as someone I’d first met a decade earlier at conferences developing extensions to the software tools I used. I hadn’t talked to him for several years, and I wasn’t sure it was the same guy, but a quick email led to a confirmation that it was, indeed, the same Tomer Berda I knew who’d placed fifth in a $1,500 NLHE event. I had no money, but I did have some frequent flier miles and went down to Las Vegas to have lunch, catch up, talk about my goofy tool, and learn a lot about playing poker for a living. Then I did my best to sweat Tomer from afar through the rest of the series, where he had a tough time of it until the day the Main Event began, when a 1,941 player field in the last preliminary event turned it into a four-day affair, which he won. I was hooked. Not because it looked like easy money or because I thought I’d win big early on, but because at that point anything looked good as an option for making a little money, even something my family and my wife considered degenerate gambling.
I played (necessarily) small stakes online tournaments, with and a lot of satellites to live events like the Irish Open, then went up to Seattle to watch Tomer grind some games and play $1K pots on $25/$50 cash tables. I was doing a self-analysis of pretty much every tournament I played, with a write-up of at least a sentence or two (sometimes much longer) here on the blog (shout out to Brad Smith, one of my other former multimedia colleagues, for encouraging me to put it together). Despite having some excellent advice, I wasn’t playing smart, playing bigger than I was bankrolled, and then Black Friday happened in the spring of 2011.
I’d played a few small tournaments at the local Portland poker clubs before Black Friday, first at the daddy of the clubs: Portland Players Club, the late Aces Players Club, then Encore Club in February. After accounts were closed on PokerStars and Full Tilt, I started making the rounds a bit more often, spiking first place in an 80-player freeroll in early May on my first time back at PPC after a year. Our home game season was drawing to a close. I’d been in the lead for Player of the Year for the middle of the season, in the winter, but by spring I’d dropped to third place in the running for a seat in a 2011 WSOP side event, then needed everything to run my way in the season ender in order to make enough points to win. They didn’t. My first month of concentrating on live play turned out about even.
The end of access to the big online poker sites in the US was good business to the poker clubs, which started to ramp up their game selections. I played my first live $10K guarantee just over a month after Black Friday, my second a week later, and cashed for 7th place in a 141-entry $10K (my fourth) by the two-month mark. My recording here started to go down. I kept notes as well as I could during live games at the time, but found it difficult to follow action as well as I wanted to when I was typing about the last hand played.
Played poker for the first time in a casino on a vacation trip to the Washington beach that summer. That might seem odd for someone who’s been working towards a life of poker, but I hadn’t ever been in a casino before I was in my mid-forties, and that was only because I did a presentation on podcasting in Vegas, and they’d put me up at the Rio. Stayed at the Stratosphere one night a couple years later before my wife and my parents headed off for a trip to Bryce, Zion, and the Grand Canyon. Didn’t have any time to play when I went down to visit Tomer on a one-day trip. So it was a new experience.
Luxury view at the Stratosphere
Got back home, took second place in a 140-player invitational at Encore for winners of their daily tournaments, then went into a long slump through the summer, as I was working my way up to my 50th birthday, trying to steamroll my way to the European Poker Tour Prauge event that ran through December. A rare business trip to Boston gave me a chance to see (and fail at) Foxwoods, which was a bit bigger than the little coastal casino in Washington state or Spirit Mountain here in Oregon, where I’d just played a tournament. It wasn’t until almost exactly three years ago that I had my first big win, in the Encore $10K. Only 75 players, but good for more than $4,000 in profit.
Regrettably, while I’d learned a lot about poker, I hadn’t learned much about bankroll management. The $4K represented a big chunk of money to someone without a job, but I was kind of fixated on running it up for a trip to Prague. and blew it on a last-ditch (with my 50th just a couple weeks away) effort by flying down to Vegas within a couple hours of my win, regging for a Venetian Deepstack Extravaganza Main Event, and busting out after about five hours.
For a short time, my Encore win was the largest prize in regularly-scheduled Portland events, because most of them ended in deals.
It was a few months before I had another four-figure cash (in fact, nothing in-between November 2011 and February 2012 over $200) and I took off to Vegas again to catch part of the DSE I at the Venetian without any success. In the spring, Tomer invited me down to play a WSOP Partners tournament with him, and I started putting together plans for a longer trip. Did some more trips out of town, first to the Tulalip Poker Pro Challenge in March, then my first trip out to Pendleton for the Wildhorse Spring Poker Round-Up, neither of which was successful. Met Brad—who’d read my blog—over the table; he and his friend Steve have become my live-play poker buddies.
That summer was the beginning of some of the deep number crunching I’ve been doing, based on in the money percentages, prizes, and volume for tournament players. Mostly it’s been an attempt to determine whether or not I can actually make a living playing poker as opposed to just having it as one of my revenue streams.
Drove down to Vegas for a two-week stay in the summer of 2012 and—apart from a bounty I took in a game at the Venetian—bricked 21 live tournaments. I owe big to my fellow Portland poker player/Reed alum Mark who put me up in his condo the first week and to Tomer, who paid for dinner almost every night, which kept down the living expenses, at least. Played my first WSOP event, sitting down to a starting table with Ivan Demidov and Keven Stammen. And that Partners event that Tomer and I played? Well it wasn’t me who lost all our chips.
That fall was the night I won a seat into Wildhorse’s Fall Main Event a few hours before my wife had a heart attack at her sister’s house and had to have emergency surgery. The cash came in handy at the emergency room.
The spring of 2013 was pretty uneventful, until a trip to Spirit Mountain in May perked things up with my first cash in a tournament outside of Portland (I’d been down to Lincoln City in February for the first Deepstacks Poker Tour series there, as well as back out to Pendleton, with no results at either). Made a couple short trips to Vegas that summer, scoring my first cash outside of Oregon in a small Caesars Palace tournament and busting out of the first WSOP Turbo tournament in record time when I tossed in the wrong chip and had to follow through on my mis-click to stay viable. I put in a fair amount of time on Carbon Poker that summer, as well, doing reasonably well in 6-Max and Deepstack Turbo events and min-cashing in a $70K guarantee Poker Maximus event.
Two top-three finishes in Aces Players Club $10K events within a month sent me back down south in September 2013, where I had my first significant cash in Las Vegas at a small Caesars Palace Seniors tournament. A month later, I won a daily Venetian bounty tournament after changing my travel plans when Grand Sierra Resort in Reno cancelled most of a series when the first event fell far short of the guarantee. A couple weeks later, I min-cashed the Main Event at the second DSPT series on the coast, where I met Toma Barber, who was living in Vegas but is now a regular here in Portland. After another deep run in a Final Table $10K and an incredibly bad read in the first $2,000 High Roller tournament at the Fall Wildhorse series, I popped down to San Diego in December for my first (and only, so far) WSOP Circuit events.
Won another Final Table $10K in January this year and started playing on Bovada the same month (taking in my best-ever single-tournament ROI in mid-February), then went into a two-month slump where I didn’t win anything big in actual dollar value. I made it into the money in a Bovada $100K guarantee with over 1,200 entries, but nothing major until a second place at DSPT’s third series at Chinook Winds, in the HORSE tournament. Meanwhile, I tentatively passed an article to Martin Harris at PokerNews.com, which started me on the path to a lucrative sideline of poker writing as well as some vitriol and condemnation online.
My mother died in May, and I took some solace in the sort of meditative state I, at least, get into when I’m playing poker. I’d just taken second in an Encore $7K guarantee a couple days earlier, then I won a 65-player Bovada 6-Max, and topped that off with 3rd place in a $20K at Final Table and a fifth at an Encore Club $40K in consecutive weeks. Went back down to Vegas a couple times during the season, skipping the big buy-in tournaments and cashing small at Planet Hollywood and the Orleans. Got busted out of a tournament at the Wynn by a billionaire. Won a satellite seat into an $800K guarantee tournament at the Venetian and busted, then played a tournament at the Flamingo where I was all-in almost every hand.
The fall’s been pretty thin. I had some deep runs in the daily Bovada $5K tournaments (fourth, sixth, and twentieth in fields between 400 and 500), but had several long stretches without a cash through the fall.
The last week of November was pretty good, though, with seven profits in 13 tournaments, just missing the final table in a $10K at Final Table and in a $15K bounty tournament at Encore on consecutive nights, a couple of successful Bovada Quadruple Up PLO8 games, and a win in an 11-player Big O tournament at Portland Players Club, I even soon the home game where I hardly ever cash any more.
Looking forward this week to a couple of events at the 2Pair Poker Tour series in Eugene. It ain’t Prague, but it’s going to have to do for this year.
Mother’s Day weekend was a couple weeks back, and everyone in our family had a good time getting together Saturday at my brother’s place for his son’s birthday party, then on the day itself at my house for dinner and a viewing of 20 Feet From Stardom, which had a lot of music that my mom loved. Then, a week ago, last Wednesday morning, while I was at my folks’ house to do some work on their computer, she died.
Don’t know exactly why, yet; it really doesn’t matter and it’s not going to change anything.
I don’t think Mom understood my interest in poker. Our family never had any money to speak of so they weren’t exactly in the gambling demographic. Both my parents grew up poor during the war and then the “boom years” of the 1950s. My father made a lot of trips to Las Vegas for conferences during his years working with the union, and he’d put a few nickels in the slot machines, but never more than two dollars worth. We certainly never took a family vacation there (did they allow camping?) and back in the day, there really weren’t a lot of places outside Vegas to gamble.
My folks played a little pinochle back when they were in college, but Dad was never into card games. Mom, on the other hand, played solitaire. Anyway, I got her a couple of solitaire programs for her computer which were used almost to the day she died. Dad didn’t see the appeal, but I think it was the puzzle-solving element of the game that attracted her.
She was a quality-control chemist at a plant that made glue and resin for the wood-products industry, so she solved a lot of puzzles in her job, like how to affect hundreds of thousands of pounds of a chemical mixture to get it back into tolerance. She fitted flooring and tile pieces in homebuilding projects, and she made a huge number of quilts. But she didn’t gamble, and neither did Dad.
Not having gambling in my background, I never made it to Vegas myself until after I was in my mid-40s. Even then, it was to present at a conference preceding the NAB, not to play cards or anything else. The conference paid for my room at the Rio, but no idea how much time I’d be spending there in later years. I wasn’t even playing poker at that point.
When I did start playing, several years later, my interest in the game probably looked more like mid-life, career-dead guy desperation to Mom (if so, I’m hoping she was uncharacteristically wrong). Risking money goes against everything my folks taught my brother and I. I remember being aghast when my brother had us meet him and his (then) future wife at Harrah’s New Orleans as we watched them lose a couple hundred playing blackjack in ten minutes; my wife and I just drank free beer. It was one thing to invest in something, or put money into a business, as my brother has very successfully (and me, not so successfully), but gambling? That’s just crazy.
And it hasn’t exactly been easy. I’ve had a number of low-to-mid four-figure wins, but not regularly enough to make it possible to cover living expenses. If I do get a large cash sometime in the future, Mom’s not going to see that I haven’t been wasting my time and effort the past three years since I got into poker seriously.
But I was at Dad’s house to keep him company the other night and played a little no-guarantee 6-Max tournament on Bovada, getting in at 15BB and taking top place. Not a big score, but I dedicate this one to Mom.
Bovada NLHE 6-Max (T1,500)
Hand 1 [7d 6s] UTG 1,500 50/100
It’s hand 1 for me, but the tournament itself has been going on for a while. I muck this baby.
Hand 9 [kd ad] BTN 1,200 50/100
Pretty standard disaster/windfall hand. UTG1 bets all but a fraction of his 1,980 chips, I go all-in, there’s a king on the river and his jacks lose.
Hand 12 [6c 7d] BB 2,550 75/150
One of those hands where slow-playing can work against you if you let the big blind in for free. UTG1 [as 5s] and SB [tc jd] limp in. The flop’s [4h 3h 3c] and I donk bet 230 with the gut-shot straight draw. UTG1 calls with his own straight draw. I bet 500 on a turned [4c] and took it down.
Hand 16 [ad kc] UTG 3,005 75/150
Open-raise to 450 and take it down.
Hand 19 [ac 6c] BTN 3,005 75/150
UTG raises to 450 with [js qs] and gets called by UTG1 ([th ts]), me, and SB with [tc 8c]. The flop is [ad jc 9h]. SB only has 475 remaining and shoves his open-ended straight draw. UTG1 drops out, but the shove is called by UTG and myself. [qc] turn makes two pair for UTG and gives me the flush draw, but completes SB’s straight. UTG shoves. I have him covered by only about 500 chips, but I call, and a [7c] is the card for the river, making flushes for both SB (almost a straight flush) and myself.
Hand 35 [kc td] UTG 6,565 100/200
I opened to 600 and UTG1 shoved his last 1,325 into the pot. Everyone else folded, I called, and the board ran out a very unlucky (for him) [as qh 6c 8h jh] to give me Broadway.
Hand 40 [jd 9d] UTG 8,290 100/200
Standard 3x open for me and everyone folds.
Hand 41 [4s kh] BB 8,590 100/200
A losing hand! And quelle surprise, it’s a big blind defense! Both my cards are outclassed when SB limps in holding [ad 5d]. I’m nominally ahead on the [td jh kd] flop, and I bet 200, but he calls my bet and and I go from being down 8% in equity to drawing dead on the [6d] turn. I bet 400 to rep the flush, and naturally the nuts calls. He’s probably hoping I’ll try to bluff him out of it and checks to me on the river [9s], but mama didn’t raise no idiot boys, even if one of them plays poker, so I just checked my top pair and took the hit.
Hand 43 [ac 8s] BTN 7,690 100/200
I don’t usually play this here unless it’s suited, but I was still in decent shape at the table, and had position when UTG raised and UTG1 called. The flop was a pretty decent [qs ah ad] and we all checked it. The turn [6s] was checked to me and I bet 1,000, UTG folded his [jh 9h], and UTG1 called, drawing pretty much dead. [3c] on the river and I checked it through, just in case I was against a full house, but no.
Hand 44 [ad 8s] UTG1 10,190 100/200
I guess I was feeling frisky and raised this to 600, getting called by the blinds (both with better hands). The flop was [4s kc 5s], BB bet 600 with his [kh qh] and both SB with [as qc] and I folded.
Hand 45 [qd kh] UTG 9,590 100/200
Not one to be daunted, I raised this and took the blinds.
Hand 47 [jh ad] SB 9,615 125/250/25
The power of aggression takes one. BTN limps in, I raise to 1,000, and he calls. The flop is [5d 5c qc] and I c-bet 1,000. He goes all-in for just over 1,000 more and despite getting a good price (5.5:1), I fold. He had [as jc].
Hand 48 [ac ad] BTN 7,590 125/250/25
If only I’d had this the last hand. Raise and win blinds.
Hand 50 [as kc] UTG 8,040 125/250/25
Raise and win.
Hand 61 [qs th] SB 8,615 125/250/25
A couple more raise and fold hands then some action. BTN called with [qc 8c]. I raised to 750, BB called with [ad td] and BTN continued. The flop was [8d js jc] and everyone checked. With a turn [9h] I bet 1,000 and everyone folded.
Hand 65 [jd js] UTG 10,165 125/250/25
Significant movement and a knockout. I raised to 750 and SB called with [qs ks]. The flop was [3s jc ts] and got checked by both of us. The turn [7s] put me top set hand in peril, and I got into a raising war which had him all in and me down to a couple thousand chips if I lost. Fortunately, the river [7c] made my full house and I won.
Hand 67 [tc as] SB 18,018 150/300/30
UTG2 limped in and I raised to 900. He came along and the flop was [kc 4d jh], He bet 600 (with [8s 7s]!) and I called, which slowed him down. We checked through the turn [kd] and [9s] river, and my ace-high took the pot.
Hand 68 [ac qc] BTN 19,968 150/300/30
UTG1 went all-in with just under 3,000 and I raised all-in to isolate. He showed [4d 4c], which ended up being the best hand when a four hit the flop and the last one showed up on the river. The best hand I had was the pair of fours on the board.
Hand 69 [4s 4d] UTG2 17,086 150/300/30
Figured if fours were working that well on the last hand, I’d raise these, but we didn’t even get to the flop.
Hand 74 [qh th] UTG1 17,086 150/300/30
UTG limped in and I raised to 1,000. He called, which put us heads-up to the flop. We both checked it to the [qs] on the turn and he went all-in for about 2,250. I called and beat his [qd 7d].
Hand 75 [6h jh] BB 20,918 150/300/30
We’re four-handed at the table and the first two actions fold, SB limps in and the flop is [qs ks 5s]. Not exactly my color. [9h] on the turn gives me a gut-shot draw, and I call a bet of 600, but fold on the [9s] river and a bet. SB had [kd 6s] for a made pair on flop and flush at the end.
Hand 76 [ad 4d] SB 19,988 150/300/30
Still 4-handed. BTN limps in, I raise to 1,000. and we’re HU on the [8c 9s 2h] flop. I c-bet 1,000 and he calls again. Turn [7c], I’ve got nothing, and I’m drawing to a pair of aces at best. I check/fold to a 2,210 bet, which is good, because with [jc tc] he’s got a made straight and a draw to a straight flush.
Hand 89 [ah 6c] BB 18,058 200/400/40
It’s down to three of us (seven players still in the tournament and the other table has four). Seat 1 is BTN for this hand, with less than 8BB. Seat 3 has been knocking players out and has 86BB in SB. I’m down in the middle with 45BB. SB min-raises to steal with [qd 9h] and I call with my ace. We check through to the turn and the board reads [3s 7s 2s 7d] when I bet 600 and he calls. [4h] on the river and we both check; the ace in the winner.
Hand 94 [as 3s] BTN 18,578 200/400/40
Everyone gets an ace this hand. Seat 1 has been draining away, and folds to me 1,200 opener. Seat 3 calls. The flop is [8h 2c 6h], BB checks and I bet 1,300, which he calls. We check the [9d] turn and the river is a [4h], which he bets for 2,660. I fold to his [ac jd]. This would have been a winning hand for the short stack; he would have had the only pair with [ad 2d].
Hand 95 [5s 7c] BB 16,038 200/400/40
I defend to a SB min-raise again and get a pretty good flop of [4h 3s 4d], then call a c-bet of 800 with my gut-shot draw. neither the [ts] turn or [2s] river get me there and I fold to a bet of 1,660 on the river. SB had [8d 8c] this time.
Hand 102 [ah ad] UTG2 15,388 250/500/50
It’s final table time. I’m in Seat 2. Seat 1 has 40BB and sits in second position. Seat 3 has just over 9BB; Seat 4 is at 35BB, a bit more than me; the extreme short stack from my previous table is down to 3BB before the hand in Seat 5; and the big stack from our table has 77BB in seat 6. This is the hand that makes me for the tournament. UTG1 raises to 1,199 and I call. BTN folds (a pair of eights) and it’s HU to the flop of [9c ts 7d]. UTG1 checked and I shoved, thinking it might look like I was trying to steal a pot because no high cards hit. Sure enough, he called, showing [kh kc] for a big old cooler. That put me in second place with 63BB and dropped him into the sub-10BB zone.
Hand 107 [th ts] BTN 30,776 250/500/50
Seat 1 put more than a quarter of his stack in as a raise with [kh 3h] and I shoved ion him despite that the big stack was in BB and still to act pre-flop. He folded. I think having the kings cracked must have tilted him, because a couple hands later he defended deuce-four off-suit to a pre-flop raise from the big stack and went all-in for the rest with bottom pair on the flop.
Hand 111 [tc ah] SB 32,280 250/500/50
A little tangle with the big stack, in which I manage to get off relatively lightly. I call a raise to 1,500, we get to the turn with the board reading [9h 3s 4d 2c] and I call another 1,000 on my straight draw, which doesn’t come. We go to showdown and he has [ad ks] for the win. Starting the next hand, I have 59BB, Seat 3 has under 5BB, Seat 4 has 47BB, and Seat 6 has 83BB.
Hand 115 [jd qd] SB 29,080 250/500/50
The big stack made consecutive full houses against the other two players in the game, chewing out most of Seat 4’s chips and eliminating Seat 3. I raised this hand to 1,500 and Seat 4 shoved his last 11BB in with [9d 9c]. He was good until a queen hit the river, then there were just two of us.
Hand 116 [qd 8d] BTN 34,690 250/500/50
We start HU with me having almost 70BB and Seat 6 having about 126BB. That didn’t last long. Seat 6 picks up the exact same two cards that Seat 4 had when I eliminated him the previous hand. I open to 1,500, he raises to 4,600, and I call. The flop’s [qc 5s 5d] and he bets 9,300. I’m going nowhere with top pair here, even with the paired board. Heck, I might even shove (which I do). I guess he thinks I’m bluffing, or he just wants to get it over with, and calls another 20,740, which all goes to me.
Hand 121 [qc th] BB 69,380 250/500/50
With 57BB left, Seat 6’s all-in shove pre-flop seemed either really weak or really strong. I opted for vulnerable and anyway, I had the Portland Nuts (or “The Butcher”, if you prefer). And I had him covered. He had [kh 9h], a queen hit the flop, and after six hands, HU was over, with me in first.
VPIP: ~29%.
Two hours and twenty minutes. 121 hands. 1st of 65 entries. 1526% ROI.
Here’s a little something for you stats junkies.
This data’s taken from the Encore Club’s posting of point leaders near the end of last month. Yes, I took a grainy snapshot of the top sheet when I was working on my post about median ROI and ITM the other day, then coded the basic number of tournaments entered and xash (or “place”) information into an Excel spreadsheet. This is what you get:
The point leader sheet doesn’t have any info about dollar values of cashes or field sizes (it does give the number of times the player made positions 1-5), so there’s no ROI calculation, but I’ve added the break-even median ROI for each ITM value on the vertical axis, just for reference.
So here it is. 46 live game players from a single venue in town over most of a month. The median number of games played is 21. The median number of games in the money is 6. The median cash percentage is 24% (yes, that’s different from the games ITM/games played; that’s statistics for you). The sample size is relatively small in terms of games played, but you can see a definite progression downward to the mean as the number of games increases.