5 | October | 2015 | Mutant Poker

I don’t play much online these days. My entry into poker (after a twenty-year hiatus from nickel-ante five card draw games) was well after the poker boom was on its post-UIGEA downswing.

The first posts on this blog—in early 2011, pre-Black Friday—were mostly recounts of tournaments on Cake (in an attempt to get to the Irish Open), Full Tilt (still waiting for my $20 bucks back, DOJ), and—to a lesser extent—PokerStars. Obviously, the risks now are even greater than before Black Friday, with the possibility that unless you’re playing on the state-restricted sites like WSOP.com in Nevada or New Jersey (and presumably PokerStars in New Jersey in the near future), the US Department of Justice could shutter them just as quickly as it did Absolute, Full Tilt, and PokerStars.

But I’ve taken a flyer on Bovada from time to time because I’d heard their payouts were pretty regular from people I knew and via online forums. Carbon Poker (on the Merge network), not so much, though I like their software, and it runs on the Mac. I did like it when they had the daily HORSE freerolls, I think those gave me the experience to take second place in a live HORSE tournament last year.

America’s Cardroom, on the other hand, I’ve never put money on. I did play a freeroll there earlier this year. On the Winning Poker Network, it hasn’t been plagued with the same stories of lengthy delays for payouts like the Merge network; they’ve even implemented a debit card payout system to circumvent the kind of shenanigans with payment processors that underlaid the Black Friday lawsuits.

Still, I’ve been curious about ACR, particularly with its Million Dollar Sundays. They ran one in December that ran into problems with a dedicated denial of service (DDoS) attack, then the same thing happened last month, and apparently yesterday. Both of the tournaments in the past month had around a $200K overlay, which may have been the DDoS attack or not enough players willing to pony up the money, or a combination. There are three more scheduled each Sunday in October, ACR stands to lose more then $1.2M if things don’t improve for them.

I wasn’t curious enough to plunk down $540 for a seat (there are freeroll satellites daily at 4:15am, 6:30am, 8am, noon, and 8pm Pacific, according to their schedule), but I did check in on things yesterday, knowing about the overlay in September. At 8pm, I snapped the tournament lobby.

Registration was closed, players were in the money with nearly $200K in overlay (the amount guaranteed to the winner of the tournament, as a matter of fact).

I watched a couple tables with short stacks break, then clicked on Table 81 and noticed something odd.

Randomly checking in on a table ITM Americas Cardroom $1M. Right now. Nothing to see…. pic.twitter.com/MpOzQXr4Yc

— Poker Mutant (@pokermutant) October 5, 2015

For anyone who followed poker news even casually this summer, pro Brian Hastings was accused of (and admitted to) multi-accounting on PokerStars by fellow pro David “Bakes” Baker, in order to play on PokerStars from the US through the use of a virtual private network (VPN) which would allow him to appear as if he was logging in from outside the country, and in order to prevent PokerStars from linking use of his own Stinger88 account to reports of Hastings playing live in the US, he used an account named NoelHayes owned by an Irish player.

No idea whether the account names on ACR are Hastings or the owner of the PokerStars NoelHayes account, or simply inspired by them, but it was an odd coincidence that they both ended up at the same table in a 1,600+ entry tournament and both made the money.

The Brian Hastings account busted within a few minutes of my tweet.

Personally, I like Final Table’s $20K tournaments. Heard some grumbling from a player at Friday night’s $20K about the structure being crappy, but I like it better than comparable games in town. Final Table has maintained the 25/50 level, so with a 10K stack it starts 200BB deep instead of just 150. After the first break, there are three rounds with antes of 25, 50, and 75 before those yellow chips come off the table. It does play rather short in the later stages, but that’s a problem with most tournaments of more than 100 entries that play down in a single day.

They’ve been pretty good for me, as well. Over the past three years, I’ve played 28 of them, cashed in 5 (just under 18% ITM). I’ve done five rebuys, which brings the actual ITM down to 15% (none of the cashes came after a rebuy) and I made three final tables in events with between 120 to 200 entries.

The week had gotten off to a decent start, with a chance to play HU with my friend David Long after playing down a single-table PLO8 tournament at Portland Players Club. Nothing else, but it was my first HU for a while—tournaments here tend to chop at two or three players minimum—and a long time for live PLO8.

The $20K also kicked off well. I was seated at Final Table’s final table (on a dais with a surrounding fence), on the other end from Steve Myers, a sort of poker colleague, for the first four hours. The guy on my right drew to a straight flush against a full house, then flopped quad kings (and got Steve to pay him off) in the first three levels, but was gone by the time the table broke with just under half the field (133 entries and 26 re-entries) remaining. I was cruising along with about half again the average stack.

Twenty minutes later, things had changed. I’d 3-bet [kd qd] and gotten a fold when I was on the button, then picked up exactly the same cards on the next hand and shoved over a min-raise from the button. Who had [kx kx]. I plummeted down to 11K. At least I got two pair.

A couple of lucky shoves got fold, even with my 5BB stack, and I got up to 33K before the cards started slipping away and I drifted back down to 15K over the next hour.

A three-way hand with me shoving [9x 9x] put me back near average at 65K when I flopped a set against a shorter stack with [8x 8x] and a big stack who called with [3x 3x] (and also made a set on the river). We were down to four tables five hours and twenty minutes in, and Steve got moved to my new table after his broke (though he was only there for about five minutes before a balance moved him again). Then we picked up Angela Jordison, who was riding a short stack.

Twenty places paid, with positions 18-20 paying $160, essentially a bubble payment, since that’s the cost of the door fee, a buyin, and an addon. I was up to 70K by the time we hit three tables six hours into the tournament, and we lost four more in the next twenty-five minutes, putting us within grasp of the money. I had 90K, which was about 11BB.

And here’s where things went horribly wrong. I was on the big blind at 4K/8K with a 1K ante in seat 9. It was the last hand of the level, with blinds going to 5K/10K/1K on my small blind. It was seven-handed, seats 1 and 2 had large stacks (actually, Angela Strode-Haugen—one of the honchos at Final Table—had an enormous stack), seat 3 was comfy. Angela Jordison had chipped up a bit from the short stack she’d had coming to the table with some aggressive plays—a few minutes earlier I’d cold-folded [ad qd] preflop to a 3-bet shove from her that would have cost me most of my stack if I’d lost. Seat 6 was on the button with a stack shorter than mine, and seat 8—the guy who had kings when I’d lost most of my stack—had drifted back down to my level, as well. Seat 6 had also been aggressive, which had made it a bit difficult for me as the last of the small stacks to act to find a good spot. I had just asked the TD about whether we’d be going hand-for-hand (something Final Table is just starting to implement on the bubble). We are down to the stone cold bubble. The first four players fold. Short-stacked seat 6 shoves. Seat 8 in the small vlind folds. I have [ad qd] again. I’m almost certainly ahead in this situation, a knockout puts us in the money and essentially doubles me up to 150% of average stack. So I call, he has [kx jx], a king flops (or maybe turns, the sequence doesn’t matter in this case), and I’m busted down to 18K.

I fold [jx 3x]—what would have been the winning hand—on my small blind, then with just over 1BB shove with whatever doesn’t win against the two big stacks in the blinds. Not a pleasant way to go.