Well, I asked for a mincash and I got one.  So I’m off the schneid.  Still, I’m in a nasty  mood.  A really foul horrible mood.

I’m not unmindful of the fact that I’m privileged to be part of a very small group who can actually earn a living at tournament poker.  I also have no plans of quitting.  And I’m well aware that I’ve cultivated a style for myself that leaves me prone to long droughts.  Still, the accumulated effect of so much losing for such a long time is beginning to wear on me. I’ve been doing a LOT of fuckin’ losing lately.  I know its affecting me because I’ve caught myself acting unusually.

I take some pride in the way I comport myself when I’m playing poker.  One of my rules stems from the fact that I expect to win and therefore act as if nothing unusual has happened when I do win.  The football players who just hand the ball the ref after they score a touchdown are the baddest, and those are the guys I try to emulate.  Jumping all over the room when you win a big pot means you’ve probably not won too many big pots in your life.

I try to maintain a consistent and corresponding attitude about losing.  Bad beats and coolers are inevitable in poker; going nuts over them is tiresome and a waste of energy. Plus the guys who complain about bad beats and coolers are often masking the fact that they misplayed the hand.  I also consider myself a generally stoic loser and try and act that way.  I strive to have a reflective attitude about the big hands I lose and to understand them and learn from them.

Also, I can’t stand poker players who walk around with a sense of entitlement, thinking that they are either owed something or that they have some kind of special aptitude that the rest of us are missing.  I think that poker players who lack humility are incredible douchebags and I refuse to be one of them.

Finally, I never tilt.

In the past week or so I’ve followed none of the guidelines mentioned above.  I’ve found myself veering off into a bad place, behaving in ways that I don’t like.  I’ll illustrate by briefly discussing the end of my last three tournaments.

In the first tournament, I finished 21st in a $500 deep stack event.  I ran into some bad luck late, losing with AK to AQ all in preflop and then getting coolered, JJ > 99 in a blind-on-blind hand to bust out.  None of this is especially surprising, but my attitude was. When the tournament was reduced to three tables, I looked around the room and realized that I was the most accomplished player left.  I played the rest of the tournament with a chip on my shoulder, disdainful of my less experienced opponents, working myself into a lather and even laughing out loud when players were making amateur-ish moves like open limping and opening pots to six times the big blind.  When I eventually busted I actually slammed a fist into the table.  Then when the payout lady congratulated me, I rolled my eyes then stared at her incredulously.  Just gimme my mincash bitch. I spent the entire ride home thinking how unfair it was that I should run into bad luck against a dream field of idiots who would have been so easy to abuse if I could only have run better.

In the second tournament I went deep but finished out of the money in a $1000 event.  I played at the same table with a metrosexual Asian guy for probably eight hours.  By the middle of the second hour, I hated him.  He was a good player–active and dangerous–that much I was willing to concede.  But he was also very confident and chatty and he played very slowly, all of which annoyed me.  He talked his way through his hands, looking right at his opponents and saying the things that normal players internalize.  (“You bet flop, checked the turn, and now you want me to believe that king on the river helped you?  That makes no sense.”).  Normally this kind of stuff wouldn’t really register with me, but I was actually enraged by this guy, slowing down the game with his expensive watch, elegant shirt and nonstop jibber-jabber.  I couldn’t wait to bust his ass.

When the field was down about 45 players, the average stack was around 20 big blinds.  The tournament (like most tournaments) was boiled down to the old openshove/open-reshove game.  I picked up two tens on the button on Metro Asian’s big blind.  We had similar stacks of around 25 big blinds.  It was folded to me and I made my standard openraise.  The small blind folded and M.A. started in with his usual routine of staring at me and shuffling his chips around.  I lowered the bill of my baseball cap and thought to myself:  “please, please shove on me.  For the love of God shove all in now.”  After over a minute of grandstanding he did just that.  He pushed all in and I snap called, opening what I was sure was the best hand.  The guy hesitated, his eyes lit up, and he tabled pocket jacks.  The board bricked and I was out a few minutes later.  I spent that particular ride home trying not to drive off the road (I was exhausted) and obsessing over how absurd it was to have played eleven hours of poker and have nothing at all to show for it other than the heartache of losing to a jackass.

The third tournament was the Borgata Summer Open main event.  In that one I started out at a typical passive table with a few soft spots.  Then after a couple of hours I was moved to a new table and placed to the immediate left of a very loose and very bad player with a lot of chips.  His VPIP was about 80, which translates to “he was playing almost every pot” for those of you who don’t speak pokergeek.  He also didn’t like folding postflop.  While this type of player is a virtual ATM machine when you make a hand, they can be very annoying to deal with when you don’t have a hand.

Also seated at this table two seats to my left was a Russian guy with whom I was already familiar.  We were both regulars at the Upper East Side’s Ace Point poker club circa 2004.  Lately he’s been trying his hand at tournaments; I’ve seen him at Borgata a few times this year.  I know his game (from five years ago, anyway) very well.  He’s capable of being aggressive postflop but is otherwise straightforward.  He’s also usually pretty loud and dumb, full of silly jokes.  Nothing totally out of line, but enough to occasionally annoy.  Yesterday he was drinking Coronas and had already begun to annoy me since I was in a mood that rendered me susceptible to annoyance.

My stack fluctuated from around 50k up to near 70k after winning a couple of pots off of the loose cannon, but then dropped back to around 43k after making the kind of hero call that is often required against that breed of maniac.  My hero call (with 99 on a board with an A, K and 10) was no good in this instance, and I was pissed off about it.  I stewed in my seat awhile, then this hand took place:

Blinds were 300-600 with a 75 ante.  We were less than a minute from the dinner break and I had AQ offsuit on the button.  It was miraculously folded to me (i.e., the maniac didn’t openlimp!) and for the very first time in two plus hours at this table, I finally opened a pot.  I made it 1600 to go.  It folded to my Russian friend (stack size 50k) who instantly reraised to 5600.  What now?

Against a known loose/aggressive player who likes to three bet, this is an easy reraise all in.  Against a tight player who never three bets, this is a fold.  Russkie fell into the latter category.  Yes, he likely knows my reputation for opening wide on the button, but the way this particular player would combat my aggression would be to call lighter, not to three bet.

I considered the options, decided that Russkie’s range crushes mine here and was about to fold and head to dinner.  Then I reconsidered and decided that we were sitting deep enough to pursue a third option:  take a flop in position.  Is AQ off a great hand to do this with against this particular player’s range?  Not really.  I tossed in a grey 5k chip.

The flop came A Q J rainbow.  Bingo, right?  Wrong.  That was a bad flop for my hand and I knew it.  Three of the hands he’d three bet with just made sets, 10-10 and whatever random shit he’d get out of line with (i.e., almost nothing) whiffed, and only KK and AK just made a hand that I’m crushing.  I thought to myself “I’m probably gonna go broke here” as Russkie made a lead bet of 10,000.  I stared at the board forlornly, knowing that the only play was to jam all in and pray that he had something I was ahead of.  There was no turning back.  I announced all in and Russkie reacted by looking at the dealer and saying “did he just say all in?!!”  Right then I knew I was toast.  The dealer confirmed and Russkie called, tabling QQ.  I was in my car five minutes later.

This ride home was the worst of all.  I say that because I spent the entire trip deluding myself.  This time, all I could focus on was how I’d been coolered.  How could he show up with QQ on an A Q X board?  What horrid luck I have!

No.  What a horrid display of displacement and scapegoating.  It actually took me until this morning to realize that I had tilted and then played the hand terribly.

This realization doesn’t make me feel any better–probably worse–but at least it is helpful.  I’ve run afoul of all the rules I set for myself and mentioned at the outset of this blog entry.  But I’m now aware of the emotional turmoil I’ve inflicted on myself, which is the first step towards changing it.

The second step:  making a nice score in the WSOP main event?  🙂

Sorry I’ve been so quiet lately.  In my mental state you’re lucky to get anything from me.

This blog’s most tired and oft-repeated theme is probably my never ending struggle against the cold reality that is tournament variance.  I just won’t shut up about the same old freakin’ topic.  God, I have been writing this blog for three years.  Will I please shut up?  I’m like a broken record.

“Yayyy, I make a score.”

“Oh noes, I run bad.”

“Oh noes, I still run bad.”

“Oh noes, more running bad.  This is terrrrible.  What am I gonna do?”

“Yayyyy  I make a score!”

No, I will not shut up.  I have more in store.

I’m kind of digging this Sisyphus (no, not Syphilis) thing I’ve got going on. That’s because I really do grapple with this bullshit on a near-daily basis, same thing over and over again, and right now is no exception.  Since I am an astounding 0 for my last 19 live tournaments (that’s zero for nineteen), I’m officially nearing the “do I really know how to play this game?” level of frustration for the millionth time since I went pro.

You see, in 2005, 2006 and 2007 I made the WSOP look easy.  I cashed in practically everything I played and even came within an eyelash of a shipping a bracelet.  (By the way, for those keeping score at home:  Jason Warner is alive and well, we shook hands and briefly reminisced a couple of weeks ago).  No matter how many times you tell yourself that you just ran good when you made all that money, the success has an impact on your ego.  You begin to believe that you’re the man.  And why not?  It feels nice to think you’re the man.

But 2008 and 2009 have been entirely different stories.  Turns out I’m not the man.  In 2008 I mustered a single solitary WSOP cash.  In 2009 I’ve really outdone myself, building on 2008’s momentum by posting exactly zero WSOP cashes thus far (and I’m afraid to say that I’m not nearly done).  Oh dear.

This last trip was actually so demoralizing and annoying that it would have been cut short sometime last week if it weren’t for my good friend Jonny Y’s bachelor party, which took place this past weekend.  My temperament is a tad unusual for a relatively new poker pro: I can get enough poker.  I actually tire of being a punching bag.  I’m just not degenerate enough I guess; losing doesn’t increase my determination, it just pisses me off.  By sometime in the middle of last week my quota had been reached.  “Keep truckin,” “Hey, it’s the WSOP,” “True degens don’t quit,” and “WTF else is there to do?” be damned.  Fuck all of that.  I’d had enough poker.  And I’d definitely had enough of Las Vegas:  that wondrous desert hellhole that magically turns the average American housewife into a stumbling drunk cackling cougar.  I missed my wife, my puppy, my block, and my bed.  I wanted life to make sense again.  It was time to go.  I even vowed not to try more than two consecutive Vegas weeks ever again (and I’ll likely keep that vow).

But did I go?  No sir I did not.  I stuck around a few more days in the desert in Jonny Y’s honor.  Let me say for the record that in its own scary way the party was well worth it. Jon is a good guy and I knew that I must stay in Vegas to celebrate the end of his bachelorhood.  Which is to say that I got obliterated in his honor as I stumbled aimlessly around downtown Vegas with him for a couple of days.  Cheers to you buddy!

Now you might think that my (purposely vague and mostly detail-less) anecdote about Jon’s bachelor party has no relevance vis-a-vis my poker career, but you’d be wrong.  In fact Jon’s festivities spawned The Worst Hand of Poker I Have Ever Played™, which I will now recount for your amusement.  Now it takes a big man to admit to butchering a poker hand this badly, so when I’m through please have the common decency not to bust out laughing.  My poor ego is already in a sorry state.  It’s bruised like an old woebegotten asymmetrical casaba melon and can take no further prodding.  Instead, please reassure me.  Tell me that everyone makes mistakes.  Lie through your shitstained teeth by saying that you may have done the same thing.  Okay, here goes:

On Monday morning–despite sleeping away Sunday in its entirety–I was in rough shape, limping around with a tilted leer that suggested the onset of Tourette’s.  I wasn’t all there just yet.  I was graced with one of those hangovers that leaves its recipient in a dissociative state of semi-lucidity:  your body is walking around in its own skin, but your brain is observing it shuffle around in the the world in a detached state of amusement.  The brain recognized that this was not the time for the WSOP $2k event that day.  Instead I drove slowly to the Rio and staggered along until I reached the single table satellites: the one form of poker that had been good to me in Vegas.  I can push/fold in a coma.  I registered for a $500 sit ‘n go.  My brain approved.  I plunked down my lammer, was handed a receipt, and my brain directed my body to its assigned table.

When I took my seat I looked around at the cast of unfamiliar faces, then proposed a $200 last longer.  My offer was accepted by six or seven of my opponents, including a short, portly, swarthy fellow with an accent of indeterminate origin that I imagined was Middle Eastern.  He looked like a larger, happier, stupider Freddy Deeb.

We started to play.  Although he was pretending to read the latest issue of Bluff Magazine between hands, Bizarro Deeb was in a capital mood.  He was well rested and was doing things I was incapable of in my stupor:  things like smiling, having fun, and sharing stories that I couldn’t quite hear about things that I couldn’t quite bring myself to care about.  He was also playing nearly every hand, and within the first five minutes he took down two large pots, both of which were raised preflop, one with Q-4 suited (rivered flush) and one with 4-3 suited (flopped bottom two pair).  He busted one guy on the latter hand and was sitting on 4200 chips.

Now I was in the cutoff and Bizarro Deeb limped under the gun for 50.  The player two seats to his left called.  My hands peeled my cards up and my weary eyes took a gander:  a blurry ace of clubs accompanied by a red jack, the jack of hearts.

The action was folded to me and I observed my fingers grab 325 chips and fire them in.  It folded back to Bizarro Deeb and he flipped in the 275 as the other limper folded.  The dealer burned and turned:  ace of spades, king of hearts, ten of hearts.  Bizarro Deeb checked.  My brain considered this flop and determined that I would likely vomit if B.D. checkraised me here (and probably would vomit in the near future even if he didn’t), so it instructed my hand to tap the table, which it then did.

The turn was the five of hearts.  B.D. checked again.  My brain now deduced that my fingers were clutching the best hand along with the better draw, so it instructed my hand to put some money into the pot.  I stuck 400 chips in.

Then Bizarro Deeb did something odd.  He looked at me, smiled broadly and said “you win buddy,” then began to toss his hole cards forward.  But just as he was about to complete the act of folding, his expression changed to a look of surprise, and he grabbed desperately at his airborne cards at if they were a set of house keys headed down an elevator shaft.  He fumbled a bit but managed to recover them without turning them over, then stammered “I call!  I call!” as he reached for four black chips.

I sat there feeling impassively half-retarded as the table erupted in a cacophonous medley of differing opinion over whether Bizarro Deeb had just done something illegal.  The dealer had no opinion of his own on the matter and raised his hand to call the floor.  As he did so, my brain instructed me that since I had far the best hand, I should welcome the presence of 400 more B.D. chips.  I thusly settled the debate by announcing:

“Whatever!  Let him call.  Deal the river please.”

Everyone duly shut up and the dealer placed the 400 chips in the center and followed my instructions, burning and neatly delivering the ace of hearts.  The final board was:  As, Kh, 10h, 5h, Ah.  I had trips.  No wait, I had the second nut flush.  Okay.

So now it was Bizarro Deeb’s turn to act.  He looked at me, smiled a beneficent smile, then turned over one of his cards:  queen of hearts.  He fixed me with another charitable look then he said “I’m all in.”

A millisecond later I heard my voice say “I call.”

Two nanoseconds after that, my brain pieced together what my eyes had just finishing viewing.  Then my right hand fired my cards into the muck face down.

An even louder, more cacophonous medley of confusion erupted around me.  Everyone was screaming bloody murder.  I stood up, looked at no one and walked out of the room.  I proceeded to the hallway, fished my cell phone out of my pocket and punched in 1-800-JETBLUE.  I was on the redeye home a few hours later.

While seeing Janeen and Ruthie (she bounded out of doggie day care and into my arms!  swoooon) has been an elixir, I continue to get pooped on otherwise.  My two-day trip to Atlantic City for a couple of tournaments featured two difficult drives on the Garden State Parkway in teeming rain, more of the same at the tables, and a flat tire in the Borgata surface lot.

Either this period will break me or I am going to bust out in a big, big way.  Which will it be?  Wheeeeeeee…..

No matter how thoroughly you rationalize it and no matter how many poker euphemisms about variance, running bad, etc. etc. you apply, going 0 for 10 in live tournaments plays games with your psyche.  There is nothing you can do to avoid feeling shitty about a stretch like the one I’m currently on.  “Hapless” is a good descriptor.  

A streak like this is also way easier to digest on the east coast.  When I brick a bunch of tourneys in Jersey or Connecticut I can just bail out, get in my car, zoom home and mope there.  At the WSOP that’s not an option.  All  can do is reload and try again the next day.    

There is some much-needed good news, however.  Last night, after meeting a couple of friends for a beer (hi Mr. and Mrs. Ult!) I played a desperation sit ‘n go and took the entire thing down (actually I chopped for 4/5 of the money), cutting my Vegas deficit fully in half.  A major shot in the arm for both my bankroll and my sanity.

I’m taking today off and might go to the Hoover Dam.

My WSOP 2009 is beginning to feel a lot like my WSOP 2008.  I’m 0 for 4 and counting in the WSOP events, and 0 for 6 overall.  I’ve won a bit of money in the sit ‘n go’s, but not nearly enough to offset the drubbing in the multitables.  

I feel I’m playing pretty well overall, but I’m very unhappy with my bustout hand in the $2000 NL Event, which took place less than an hour ago.  I played it like shit.

One thing I’ve noticed this year is that the quality of overall play seems high.  The younger, more aggressive players seem to have multiplied.  Internet-ish openraises of 2.3x and frequent three-bets have been fairly standard at my tables.  I have sat a lot of difficult tables, including two hellacious ones that were so tough that they were definitely not +EV for me personally.  Since I have yet to go especially deep in any of these tournaments, that says something about the quality of the fields.

I hope there will be better news soon.

My 2009 WSOP trip got off to such a slow start that I was starting to wonder.

I arrived here in Vegas late Wednesday night, in time to catch a few hours of sleep before a 1k Thursday event at Caesars.  Then when I showed up for the tournament the next day, something felt off.  The turnout wasn’t what I envisioned, the field was way tougher than a “Vegas in June” field ought to be, and I had to force myself to concentrate.  It was the start of my big trip and I felt tired and uninspired as I sat there watching the cards fly by.  I’m not sure which was more disappointing:  busting out quickly or the realization that I couldn’t muster up much excitement about being out here in the desert right now.

Friday and Saturday came and went without much poker.  I thought a little respite might have a rejuvenating effect, but even after a couple of days away from the grind, the looming Series felt more like a daunting task than something to look forward to.  I had some fun going out at night with Mincash and The Mayor™, but I still didn’t feel right.  It didn’t help that I was working through some legitimate homesickness.  I was mildly depressed, and wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get things cranking for the 1k “stimulus special” event, which I played today (Day 1B).

I’m happy to say that my doubts were resolved as soon as I got to the Rio this morning.  Although this is my fifth WSOP, when I walked into the Rio’s convention center area today and found it packed to the gills and literally buzzing with donk chatter– I still got charged up.  It’s our Mecca, period.  As I walked to my table, found my seat and looked around, my mood brightened and I instantly remembered how much I love this stuff.

The tourney didn’t disappoint in most aspects:  it was sold out (6,012 runners!) and the quality of play was comedic.  So much so that it has earned my ultimate stamp of weak field approval:  MUPPET SHOW status!

Here is a sneak peek at what I witnessed when I played cards today:

Unfortunately, when you’re cast in a Muppet Show you will occasionally suffer the indignity of a Muppet beatdown.  And that’s what happened to me in Level 5, when I opened a pot under the gun with QQ and called a Muppet’s massive inexplicable reraise all in.  I wasn’t expecting pocket eights, but that’s what the Muppet turned over. Obviously I had no chance.  Maybe next time.  Next:  Venetian 500 tomorrow, WSOP 1.5k Tuesday.

I’m closing with this great picture of my two favorite ladies.  I miss you guys so much right now.

hi guys!