Category Archives: General Poker

W-Day Plus 3: Do Not Sit On the Tongue

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tongueParking at the Rio is always tight during big events, and I think the Colossus II counts as a big event. But I have my tricks. No, the KISSed-out VW Bug isn’t one of them, but it is one of the first things you’ll see if you park in the Masquerade garage at the Rio. Instead of a long trudge in 115° F. heat across a hot parking lot, it’s a quick pop up to the 4th floor pedestrian bridge, then a long trudge through the air-conditioned halls of the Rio. Things have changed here since the last time I came in this way, with the addition of the KISS Monster Mini Golf feature. I’d hoped there was a way I could win the car for my wife, which is the only reason I got this close, but no luck.

Lots of big names in the Colossus Day 1F. Like with the $150K at the Venetian the other night, it’s sort of odd to spot big poker names playing in a tournament where the buyin is more or less affordable to the average Joe (neglected to mention that I saw Max Pescatori watching soccer with a couple of buddies at the Venetian the other night).

Up at the top of the food chain was 2013 Main Event champ Ryan Riess. I felt a bit proud of myself for being the first person to spot him in the field (at least I think I was), considering how many more faces the more experienced (and let’s face it, everyone’s more experienced than I am at the moment) live reporters are. Our flight (the last of six) had Mike Matusow, Jack Salter, PokerNews Podcast‘s Rich T. Ryan, Loni Harwood, David Pham, and a slew of others.

The day started out slow for me, though. I walked through my assignment area looking for faces I recognized and bricked out, though I felt a bit better when a veteran went though the same group of forty or so tables with me and found only one person he felt was worth mentioning at that stage.

Later in the night/morning, I got to write up a post about Rich Ryan, co-host of the PokerNews Podcast. I picked up a great hand without any “name” players in it just after the money bubble, though my original wordplay title ended up changed to something that just sounds funny. I spent half an hour or more—spread out over a longer period—railing Athanasios Polychronopoulous, who was nursing an ever-dwindling handful—nay, fingerful—of chips through the bubble, watching for a bustout, only to have someone else catch it.

I got the assignment of writing the intro for Day 2, and started working off a previous event’s report, got told that wasn’t a good place to start from, then redid it and eventually brought it into some semblance of acceptability. Got a few hours of sleep, though it doesn’t feel like nearly enough, and it’s already getting to be time to think about heading back over to the Rio, after a short turnaround here at the house.

Tomorrow’s a day off, but I’ve snagged a seat in the Mid-States Poker Tour Media Event from Chad Holloway. The prize is a seat in the MSPT/Venetian $2M event this week!

W-Day Plus 2: Colossus

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You sort of have to wonder what the artist was thinking when he depicted the Colossus as just barely large enough to admit a ship into the harbor of Rhodes. Was it a commentary on his opinion of engineers that the statue is shown with nearly zero tolerance to the sides of the yard? Or to the top of the mast itself, which nearly spikes the Colossus’s nether regions? Maybe that was the whole point of doing the painting, some sort of inside joke where an artist can slip a titillating concept into a work that’s supposedly about one of the Seven Wonders of the Classical World.

In any case, you also sort of have to wonder what the people who came up with the World Series of Poker Colossus were thinking when they decided to make the biggest-ever live tournament last year. There’s about as much spare room right now at the Rio as there is between the mast and the Colossus’s dingle in the picture. And if the estimates are correct, it’s only going to get crazier today, the last day of entries for this year’s event.

I hung some picture, moved some furniture, and assembled a vacuum at the house during the day, then headed out to the Rio with what I though was going to be plenty of time to get there. Somehow, between traffic, finding a parking space, and walking in the hot sun to the entrance, I lost twenty minutes of lead time (maybe I can blame Joe Brandenburg, who I chatted with on my way in from the car….)

I got to the live reporters’ room with just a few minutes before the event start. The Colossus is spread out through most of the rooms, and since everyone’s already out on the floor, I don’t have anyone to ask in person about where to go. Messages on the Slack channel are flying fast and thick, and I can’t get anyone’s attention—or I can’t see anyone’s instructions. Can’t find our reporting table in the Pavilion Room, then finally go over to Brasilia and find some of the team.

However, I’m the only person in the room covering the afternoon flight. Most of the room is Flight C, so I get to work familiarizing myself with the players in the quarter of the room that are in Flight D. Even within the rails of that quarter, some of it is ‘C’ tables, which I realize after wondering how such big stacks got built up in less than a level. Then I have to figure out where the demarkation line is.

I get to work doing chip counts, looking for big names, and writing up some hands. Run across a guy early on who’s a “character” that I follow through the rest of the night off and on.

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Had Greg Raymer and Carlos Mortensen and Leo Wolpert all at the same table. Scotty Nguyen. Spotted some local players and dealers. But after a while, I noticed that none of my updates were getting onto the site. So I had to get that technical issue fixed, but by then hand histories I’d posted were rather stale. Overall, not a great start for my day. A day that started at 4pm.

Eventually, tables started to break and I was moved into the Pavilion Room with the rest of the Flight D reporters. Got a little section, got told who to cover (Kessler), and kept on the move, trying to work on my chip-counting skills and face memory. Why can’t we put numbers on the players like they do for marathon runners?

The day wrapped up sometime around 3am and I headed back to the house. More folks are arriving, the rooms are full, there was someone sleeping on the living room floor. I collapsed and got ready to do the whole thing again (hopefully, without the hitches) tomorrow (today?)

W-Day Plus 1: Memories

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palazzo

No exhaustive post today. I’m not exhausted, either, after getting my first good night’s rest since leaving Portland.

Didn’t do much in the early part of the day. I had been scheduled to cover the first day of the Colossus, but due to a couple of live reporters wanting to play the Casino Employees event, that went on my ticket, so I had about 36 hours until my next event, the afternoon flight of the second day of entries.

I did head over to a computer shop here in town to get some RAM for my trusty MacBook. I’d intended to upgrade the memory for a while. It’s one of the late 2008 aluminum-body models that came with 2GB of RAM, which was perfectly fine a couple of years ago, when I started to do some 3D modeling in Cinema 4D for a Civil War battlefield visitor’s center, but the newer operation system upgrades have made it grind to a halt just opening Safari. A very nice young tech named Jessica at Century 23 here in Vegas had the 4GB modules I needed in stock and popped them in for me in just a few minutes.

Went back to the house, rested for a while, then headed out to the Venetian for the 7pm bounty tournament (Deepstack Extravaganza #14). I chipped up quickly, knocked out an angry old man who was like a tall version of Portland’s Sleepy Don, took another bounty from a kid with a Muckleshoot cap, then lost a race against a female player from Portland, and doubled up another player when I called his all-in with A♥ T♥ on a Qx Tx 6x board. He showed Kx Kx, I got an ace on the turn, then the jack on the river took a big chunk of my chips. My final downfall was when I shoved K♣ 9♠ from the button and Qx Jx called all in with a shorter stack from the small blind. I had him covered by 600 chips at 800/1.6K/200, he caught a jack on the flop and stayed ahead. I went out the next hand.

Thought I might try my hand at the 1/2 Big O game. There was a seat open and I was able to sit without waiting. I won a little hand that put me ahead after twenty minutes of folding and paying blinds, making top and bottom pair on the flop, then top two pair on the turn and a full house on the river. Then:

Of course, the guy who was driving the action on the flop lost everything, too. Big O is The Devil’s Game.

Headed home after managing to turn a partial loss into a total loss. Slept like a baby in the A/C. Off to cover the second day of the Colossus today!

W-Day: Frying Pan

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jordison

It was still a little warm back art the house with the A/C malfunctioning. And by “a little warm,” I mean that between trying to get everything settled in the past couple of days, playing at the Venetian into the early hours of the morning the other day, and a bit of excitement at my first day of live reporting, I’ve been operating on about three-and-a-half hours of sleep each night since I left Portland.

Since I woke up early, I got myself together and headed to the Rio. The early bird gets the nearby parking spot. The MutantMobile (aka a baller 1998 Ford Escort wagon). I set up my stuff in the live reporting office and saw that “Jammin'” Jay Zeman was planning to fortify himself along with some friends in the Hash House a Go Go down the hall. So I trekked over and was scanning one section of the restaurant when Angela Jordison hailed me from one of the benches near the entrance where she was also waiting for Jay. We chatted about her dinner the night before with a group that included Allen Kessler and the owner of the Lotus of Siam restaurant, among others. And we speculated on where Jay was, as the hour drew nearer to the time I had to go to work. Eventually, she made another pass through the restaurant, and not seeing Jay, walked down to the tournament area with me.

My first post ever as a live reporter was a lucky catch. Just a few hands into the tournament, I was watching a table when a young man from Mississippi won a pot for nearly half the starting stack with quad nines. Then I ran into Jay, who pointed me to one of the players at his table who’d busted another player’s aces on the first hand, knocking him out and doubling up.

It was a long first day, though, and I made my share of mistakes as we covered 20 half-hour levels. By the end, after an editor pointed out to me that I’d tried to color up a hand with some analysis that was completely wrong because I mentally swapped the cards the players were holding, I was happy enough to be assigned to these important posts:

level19Action ended at about midnight and we scurried around to all of the tables to get the chip tallies of the last 23 (of 731) players. A bit of confusion when we were trying to figure out the count for a player we appeared to have missed. I had a name that was completely different from the missing player, and another reporter had made the same mistake transcribing their last name. Not writing it down wrong like me, but writing it down wrong exactly the same as I had. We sorted it out.

Went back to the house and sat out back in the “cool” Las Vegas evening. The pool’s ready to go! And despite the fact that I haven’t been in the water for a long time, I somehow had two pairs of trunks that looked like the right size in the drawer at home.

W-Day Minus 1: Orientation

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Yeah, that’s the Amazon Room in the Rio Convention Center, and while it looks like it’s empty, on the far side of the room are the 500+ entrants in the first $235 Daily Deepstack of the series, which had a prize pool of nearly $100,000 (I’m changing up my notation so I don’t have to switch back and forth between what I’ve used for the blog in years past and what I’ll have to do as a live reporter for the series.

I had started the W-Day countdown referencing the series rather than my first day of coverage, but due to a scheduling change because one of the other reporters wanted to play in the Canino Employees event, I’m going to be covering that instead of having a day off after our orientation today.

Lots of stuff to cover about not upsetting players, how to get hands correct, how not to upset players, how to bring a wide variety of voices into a unified style, and stuff about not upsetting players.

I haven’t done a day of live reporting standing on my feet scribbling notes and running back to write them up yet and I’m already feeling pretty old. People are laughing at how dated one of my superiors’ My LIttle Pony reference is, and that wasn’t even a thing until I was well into adulthood.

Still, everyone’s excited because we’ve got one of the best jobs in the shop. Everyone I’ve talked to loves poker and I suspect most of them—like myself—love to write, so actually getting paid to write about poker is worth what are sure to be some long grueling hours over the next couple of months. I mean, I’ve been doing it for free or—in the case of PokerNews—less than $1 per hour considering the amount of time I’ve put into some of the articles I wrote for them. I mean, I would have written the stuff anyway, it’s just that hardly anyone would have seen it.

Nice post-orientation mixer with the live reporting gang with some delicious Southeast Asian-influenced food (garden rolls with peanut sauce, pot stickers, stuffed mushrooms). There were some yummy-looking fruit cocktails in tall glasses that I thought were just decorative pieces until I saw that a couple of them were gone and looked closer, but by then it was time to head back to the ranch and get some sleep before covering the first bracelet event of the summer.

#PNWPokerCalendar Planner for 1 June 2016

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WSOP

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Oh, and the first day of the 2016 World Series of Poker. Live action, single table satellites, and Daily Deepstacks got under way yesterday, but the first bracelet event of the series—the Casino Employees NLHE—starts at 11am. Start it right with Total.

Portland Meadows Regular Schedule

Now that their big $100K capper to the opening series was a success, the new Portland Meadows Poker Room is kicking off their regular schedule with the (so far) largest daily noon tournament guarantee: $2.5K.

Just a note to everyone. Facebook is not a great option for posting information. It makes it difficult to find information for people who aren’t already subscribed to your page. And if you’re going to tell users of your web page to “CLICK ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE FOR ENTIRE WEEKLY SCHEDULE,’ then put a damn link on the web page to your Facebook page.

IMG_2794W-Day

Despite my promise to myself that I was going to ramp back on writing for the blog, I started a daily recap of my next seven weeks in Las Vegas as a live reporter for the WSOP. We’ll see how long that motivation lasts. In the first couple of installments (“Let There Be Light” and “Leaving Money On the Table”), I recap getting here and cashing in one of the Venetian’s Survivor tournaments.

This Week in Portland Poker

  • PDX Poker Club is running a special for players in their weekday noon $2K NLHE tournaments: Show up before the game starts and you get a $10 free door fee card, $10 off a joint (you’ve got to love the Portland poker scene), and free coffee. Offer good until they pull it. They’re also adding $500 in house money to the prize pool of the noon tournament through Friday.
  • Just going to mention Rialto and Claudia’s and Brekken’s for a change. No specials that I’m aware of.

Only a Day Away

  • This weekend’s big event at the Venetian’s Deepstack Extravaganza is a $600 buyin $250K guarantee, with starting flights Saturday and Sunday mornings. Sunday evening is a $600 PLO8 tournament with a $60K guarantee.
  • A lot of grumbling at the Planet Hollywood Goliath 2016 after they rescinded the guarantee on the opening event after a number of players had already scheduled trips. The amount on version 3 of the schedule was dropped from $150K to $100K, and “guaranteed” was changed to “estimated.” This weekend’s $1M event still says “guaranteed.”
  • The Grand Poker Series at Golden Nugget hosts Poker Night in America this weekend. Ladies first!
  • As mentioned, the first day of the WSOP is today. This weekend will be consumed with the Colossus II. Also of note is the $10K Seven Card Stud Saturday afternoon, Sunday’s Top Up Turbo NLHE, which lets you win extra chips online at WSOP.com, and the Dealers Choice 6-Handed, also on Sunday. Tuesday is HORSE  and next Wednesday is 6-Handed NLHE.
  • The Bicycle Casino Summer Poker Series starts today.
  • The Wynn Summer Classic starts tomorrow.
  • Binions starts a series Friday.
  • Coming up Tuesday is Bay 101 Summer Madness, with a series of mostly $350 buyin tournaments through 12 June. Mega satellites on Sunday and Monday get you seats to the whole series.
  • The new Medford Poker Club has a Grand Opening 10 June. If you’re down south, drop in for a look.

Check out the #PNWPokerCalendar for more poker.

W-Day Minus 2: 86 In the Shade

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IMG_2797Can your baller Vegas lifestyle beat this? Our host just bought the new house and things dragged out a little longer than expected, so it didn’t close until a week before Memorial Day weekend. Thus, there wasn’t really time to get things ready for people to start arriving when they did. I arrived in town just a few hours after he got here Saturday with a truckload of bedframes and accessories. The fridge just came today. And the AC, which seemed to be working indifferently when we got here, apparently has some issues, and it being a holiday weekend, it’s tough to get service, so it’s not working at all right now.

A quietish day for me today. Did some reading and paperwork in the morning, dropped in as a late-seated alternate into the Orleans Omaha Hi-Lo noon tournament (got rivered by quad 2s after turning the nuts for a high-only straight to go out), grabbed a chimichanga at Roberto’s (open 24 hours in Nevada!) instead of a burger or sandwich, and went back to the house where I called folks back home while dealing with hot sauce and guacamole dripping through holes that had been melted in the styrofoam take-out container. The Omaha tournament was a gas—not in a good way—with one early hand where a player who raised every street to the max showed down with a paired five on a non-low board. Then again, he managed to outlast me.
 IMG_2796Got caught up on Game of Thrones from last night (are there any good memes from that one like last week’s Hodor doorstops?), then Silicon Valley and Veep. Thank you Apple Developer Program for my $1 Apple TV. Now if I could just figure out why I can’t find PrimeTime Poker Report from Poker Central on it. I can find re-runs of old poker shows, you’d think they’d make their own content available for replay.

Late-regged the $100 guarantee freeroll on WSOP.com and built my bankroll back there back up to 55¢ by coming in 25/600. I held the chip lead for a while while we were still at 200 players, then slipped down. After about three hours of playing while I was chatting with one of today’s arrivals and watching Bryan Cranston play LBJ in All The Way, I got it in shoving J♠ T♠ over a raise from A♦ K♦. Still half a buck!

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W-Day Minus 3: Leaving Money On the Table

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Yesterday got off to a slow start, as I hung around the house for a while working on the computer. I followed up a response to the WSOP’s soon-to-be-official Twitter boss Kevin Mathers about the sizes of the Daily Deepstacks with a link to my article from last year with a chart of the prize pools through the whole season. You might find it useful. Cliff’s Notes: Mondays are usually the largest prize pools, probably as everyone takes one last shot before they head home from a long weekend.

Played a little microstakes NLHE 6-Max on WSOP.com and lost the last $5 I had on there. K♣ A♠ called after the two-diamond flop by 8♦ 6♦ and I lose 45BB. Onward!

Headed over in the afternoon to the Orleans. There was a long list for the 4/8 O8 game, but 4/8 Omaha had a seat open and I popped in there. Before I get my chips, I’m in BB with a couple of tens in my hand, but fold after the flop. There’s a crazy guy in seat 1, raising every hand. As it happens, I should have played with my tens, because by the river I would have made a set in a huge pot, and it would be the only hand in the session that I would have won. Crazy guy was literally shoveling chips into other players’ stacks and it felt as if vultures were swarming to get at the carcass because every time a seat or two opened, it would be instantly filled. He was blowing through buyins so quickly that he’d put a hundred on the table after getting felted, and half the chips would be “in the pot” before the runner arrived with a rack. Frustrating not to be able to get a piece of that. After a hand where I made three pair on the Tx 7x 4x flop, I lost a good portion of my chips when an ace made a better two pair and it was downhill from there.

I had a few hours to kill before either of the tournaments I wanted to play, so I went to the restaurant Tomer and I went to almost every night when I visited him during trips to the Series. Krung Siam’s just a couple minutes drive up Valley View Road from the Rio—though it’s a long, hot walk in the Vegas summer. Then again, what isn’t? Got Drunken Noodles at a 7 on a scale of 10. Either I’m getting older or my memory of their heat scale is faulty. After the first bite, I was wondering if this was a good idea before I needed to sit for several hours in a tournament. And yes, I am trying to smile there (this was pre-dinner). That’s just the way it comes out.

My choices for the evening were the 7pm HORSE tournament at the Orleans or the $15K guaranteed NLHE Survivor at the Venetian. I love playing HORSE, and the buyin was a third of the Survivor—which was an advantage on my poker blogger bankroll—but the median ROI advantage of the Survivor’s flat payout structure overcame my aversion to putting more than I’d just lost in the Omaha session in play, so I drove over and parked at the Venetian, registered for the tournament, then went looking for something like some ice cream to counteract the Drunken Noodles. Walked down to the Ben & Jerry’s at Casino Royale, but they didn’t have anywhere to sit; checked in at the new White Castle there but the line was incredible. There were any number of places in the Venetian itself to get gelato, but I wanted real ice cream, and finally found it after I went back up to the second level of the Venetian and found a Johnny Rockets, where I could get a chocolate shake.

The game did not start off well for me. I quickly lost half my chips by somewhere in Level 2. Not doing anything bad, just having hands go wrong. There was a fair amount of aggression in the early stages, so the pots got large fast, and that meant some punishment when I had to fold. After a while, things turned around and I beat my way back up to starting stack and above.

A couple of tables away, the final table of the first event in the Deepstack Extravaganza III was playing out. It was rather odd to think that both Carlos Mortensen and Joseph Cheong—each of whom has more than $11M in live tournament earnings—were playing in a $400 buyin tournament with a top prize of a little over $50K, but there they were, sitting next to each other without all the hubbub of the WSOP or WPT surrounding them. (Mortensen ended up 5th, Cheong took 4th.) Then again, I got knocked out of a $300 tournament by a billionaire a couple of years ago.

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Somewhere in the middle of the tournament, I picked up Qx Qx and shoved from the BB over a bunch of callers and a short-stack raise. One of the big stacks called, and the short stack went all in to show Ax Ax. The big stack had Tx Tx. The aces held up, and the player tripled her stack, but I had her covered by enough that I came out with a gain. From there, for a while, I had a run of very good hand and the position to take advantage of them. People folded when I raised with not-so-good hands, and they called when I had monsters. And the monsters held up. I took out several players as the tournament played IMG_2794down to three—and then two—tables. We’d started with 73, so the Survivor format (please, someone in Portland start a series of these!) paid out $2.5K for seven players as a straight chop, with an eighth getting $750. Starting stack is 12K, average stack at chop time is 120K (a little more than that in the nice, clean, new Venetian tournament chips in the photo—I forgot my card protector at the house), so if you could get up to 100K or more, unless you did stupid stuff like try to knock more players out, you were golden. Some people can’t help themselves. One young guy who’d looked me over and given me the “I’m letting you get away with it this time” speech before laying down his SB to my UTG raise with A♥ 6♥ blew away a stack comparable to mine, and ended up with eighth place.

We survivors congratulated ourselves—I had a good time talking to my table neighbor Jason T who just swapped sides after the final table redraw and squeaked into the big money after falling victim to several of my three-bets—and picked up the payout chips from the desk. This almost proved to be my undoing. I stopped on the way to the payout cage to take a picture, then picked the chips up and got in line behind a guy with a couple racks of considerably more cash game chips. He asked if I’d been in the tournament (he may have thought I was in the $150K or the SuperStack that was still running), then asked about the payout, saying “Everyone get $2K”? I looked at the chips in my hand and there were indeed just the two $1K chips. I didn’t see how I could have dropped the $500 chip—I had a death grip on the yellows—so I walked back over the short path I’d taken and sure enough, there on the table where I’d taken the picture below was the $500. If you look close, you’ll see it’s a little smaller than the $1K chips; I’d stacked it on the bottom when I was picking them up, and didn’t notice it got left behind. Vanity may not kill you but it could cost you a pretty $500.

W-Day Minus 4: Let There Be Light

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I stopped overnight on my way south to Las Vegas at a Motel 6 in South Sacramento. My wife’s rule of thumb is that if there’s a directional modifier attached to the name of the town or city, there’s probably something wrong. Bend v. North Bend (it may work even if the cities aren’t near each other), St. Louis v. East St. Louis, Sacramento v. South Sacramento. That’s not to say that the non-direction place names are necessarily good, just that the directional makes the city less savory.

I got to the motel about 8pm on a Friday night, and half the driveway was coned off. There were two guys in uniform at the entrance to the motel driveway, and on closer examination, they both had handguns strapped to their waists. The good news was, they weren’t police responding to some sort of horrible crime. The not-so-good news is, they were armed security hired by the motel, presumably because they feel there’s some sort of need for armed security. I checked in, went to my room, hauled all the computer equipment into the room (which was the plan, anyway) and hit the air conditioning. All I know is, when I go to Lincoln City, there’s no armed guards at the Motel 6.

Sacramento’s about halfway to Vegas on my route through Bakersfield. In the morning I hauled my stuff back out to the car, chatted up the morning duty guard (I did actually work a stint as a guard myself a couple of years ago), and got back on the road.

On the way south I listened to a mix I put together a few years back, specifically targeted to keep me awake while I was driving, then switched over to the PokerNews Podcast, where I caught Chris Sigman of Vancouver calling in to Donnie Peters and Rich Ryan with an idea for generating some more heat at the November (or whatever it is this year) Nine.

Once I rounded Bakersfield and got to Interstate 15 toward Las Vegas, my trusty Ford Escort was overtaken by a steady stream of Porches, BMWs, Mercedes, and other luxury and semi-luxury sedans, most of which seemed to have been just driven off the lot that day without any type of license plate. I was doing anywhere between over the speed limit and way over the speed limit myself. Had to laugh at the absurdity of a distance sign with LAS VEGAS and SALT LAKE CITY stacked above each other. Then, after rounding a bend coming down out of the mountains, I found myself drawn to the collector of the Ivanpah solar farm, which I assumed at first was simply reflecting heat at the position from which I’d first seen it. As I drove down the incline and around the plant, however, it felt as if the bright light was following me, and I realized that it reflected sunlight in all directions. It was hot, and I started to wonder how long it would be before I burst into flame like an ant under a microscope.

I’m renting a room from an incredibly gracious host in Las Vegas, whose new house in town just closed last week. He and his folks just got into town in the morning with furniture and spent the whole day setting up beds, and even though it wasn’t really ready for room tenantry, he allowed me to come on in. Which is a good thing, because there are literally no rooms left in town for Memorial Day weekend.

Got my big computer set up (I’m travelling with a large contingent: my iPhone, four tablets of various types, two laptops (Windows and MacOS), and my main workstation, though I left one of the big screens at home. Wifi was already set up in the house. First things first. Played a tournament on WSOP.com for the first time in a year while my host and his folks went out to buy a few items and get some dinner and busted 30/82 after refusing to rebuy or add on. Then headed over to the Orleans for a little 4/8 Omaha Hi-Lo and made enough in fifty minutes to buy a nice little late-night steak dinner. Best hand included A♠ 2♠ to make the nut-nut kill pot.

Part Time Nit

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As mentioned in this week’s Planner, I appeared on the Part Time Poker podcast with game designer and poker writer Alex Weldon and 2015 WSOP $10K HORSE champion Andrew Barber. The topic of discussion was originally about setting a betting line on the age of the 2016 WSOP Main Event winner, but it grew to encompass the Poker Central/Amazon Coins poker vs. Hearthstone match earlier this week, as well as tournament ROI(a subject near and dear to my heart as everyone knows) and strategy.

The ROI discussion grew into a spirited debate, with Andrew questioning my data selection (more on that at a later time), and there’s the possibility that we may have some sort of upcoming wager on whether the Main Event champ this year will be over 40.

On the strategy segment, this was the situation. 20K starting stacks. Blinds are 150/300. The Hero in the hand has 22K, and HJ has 25K. UTG has about 10K and is described as “a short-stack maniac.” UTG opens for 1K in the hand. HJ–an older, tighter player–flat-calls the 1K. On the button, Hero calls with Ax Tx. They are the only three players to the flop, which is K♣ Q♣ J♣. Hero has Broadway, but no clubs. UTG leads for 3K and gets called by HJ. The question is, what does Hero do at this point? My advice was to fold, which led to Alex remarking “Steve is no longer the biggest nit we’ve had on the podcast.” I think people who’ve played with me know that I’m not exactly a nit, but here was my reasoning on this hand.

The game discussed is an $80 tournament. Alex mentioned that his chosen game level was in the $200-$300 range (with Andrew’s far above that), so they may be a little out of practice with lower-stakes play. My read was that the UTG maniac has put in 4K of a 10K stack, with the intention of pounding the rest in on the turn, with a pot of 9K (or 12K if  Hero calls the flop). HJ–a guy described as “tight”–can see that as well. When UTG shoves on the turn, HJ is either going to call or shove. It’s reasonably likely that one or the other of them has a club. And if it’s HJ, and he hits, then you’re risking either half your stack (if HJ just calls the UTG shove) or your tournament life (if HJ shoves).

If it’s just UTG, I’m calling every day.

Onward to Las Vegas.