I’ve taken a pretty long break from poker and plan on resuming live tournament play tomorrow at Mohegan Sun.  This cannot stop me from sharing with my loyal readers my observations about poker fashion.  Oooh child, it’s time to dish! Let’s tawk about what’s in and what’s out. *snaps*

Poker In:  Monster™  Headphones.

Look around any large poker room and you will find a shitload of kids wearing the same exact set of headphones with a “9” or a “6” (or is it a “q” or “b”?) on them.  There has been a noticeable and rapid proliferation of these things in pokerland.  Mildly annoying!  It seems that no one wants to use their crummy old ipod earbuds or any other headphones, they’ve gotta have these.  I’ve asked people why, and have been informed either that “Monster headphones are the best!” or that “Monster headphones are endorsed by Dr. Dre!”

I happen to know a lot of true audiophiles (even some who work in the business) and I’ve now asked them about this product, and I also did a little bit of research on my own.  These headphones are actually demonstrably not the best; most experts have given them lukewarm reviews and some call them overpriced.  That leaves us with the second theory:  that a West Coast rap producer who was last seen either jacking every hook in the P-Funk catalogue 18 years ago or “discovering” a white rapper 11 years ago is the driving force behind the popularity of Monster headphones in the modern poker community.  Okay.  I’m convinced that a third theory must hold the real answer.  Perhaps Tom Dwan or some other young poker demigod served as a trendsetter?

Poker Out:  Ed Hardy gear.

In a development as surprising as the sun rising this morning, heterosexual men have grown tired of bedazzled mesh caps.

Poker In:  Facebook Spew.

Facebook status updates are fascinating.  And by fascinating, I mean morbidly fascinating.  Car wreck fascinating.  I’m sure that some good sociological studies on them have already been done, but allow me to state the obvious:  these spur-of-the-moment ramblings are an enlightening glimpse into the minds of your “friends,” and Facebook doesn’t discriminate.  Even your dumbest, weirdest and most deranged acquaintances are allowed to share with the class, and the burden’s on you to either “hide” them or remain exposed to the spew.  I prefer rubbernecking.  I stay exposed.

I have accumulated a lot of poker friends on Facebook.  And this has been a rewarding experience—poker players love to update their status!  I’ve been reading them religiously for some time now.

My primary finding is that there is no correlation between skill at poker and the ability to type coherent thoughts.  And I’ve noticed that there are certain character profiles.  Here are a few:

• Mr. Itchy Fingers.  This guy updates his status four times per tournament level.  He does this well before the money bubble in $300 events.  Who are these updates supposed to appeal to?  The other poker players could care less and everyone else has no idea what the hell you’re talking about.
• Mr. Amnesia.  This guy wins $250,000 in a weekend, then waits less than 48 hours before resuming his daily vitriolic “fuck my life!  OMG aces cracked again!  I hate poker!” rantings.  Classy.
• Mr. Birdseed.  “I’m at the final table of the $7 rebuy on Absolute!!11!  Plz come root me on!  I’m gonna ship this one!  Run good one time!”
• Mr. Fame Whore.  This dude’s is so desperate for the world to recognize his accomplishments and superior skill level that all he does is complain about being under-promoted.  He may even dream up a bizarre, unintelligible motto and spam you with it every few hours.  Awesome!

Poker Out:  Humility, a Sense of Perspective.

I can’t recall if it was Al Alvarez’s book or Anthony Holden’s, but there is a telling passage about playing poker in a Las Vegas card room on the day Ronald Reagan was elected president.  The author (an Englishman) announced that the United States had elected a new president, and the only remark made by another player at the table was that the odds posted on Reagan winning the election a few months earlier turned out to be good value.  The game moved forward without further comment.

This is an accurate depiction of the world unto itself that poker exists in.  The day after the heath care reform bill—which is likely the most controversial and far reaching political event the US has seen for some time—was passed, my facebook page was filled with commentary thereon (some frightening in its own right).  But then you had the poker players, who littered the page with the usual updates about relatively stupid shit like running kings into aces again.  I don’t think other professions work this way.  Obsessed much?

Poker In:  “Muppet,” “Monkey,” et. al.

Poker players devote a lot of time to coming up with new ways to describe morons.  These are just two of the terms of art that are currently in favor.  I have always loved the Muppets, so that one’s my personal favorite.  It is of course roughly synonymous with:

Poker Out:  “Donkey.” 

Poker players are finally giving the time-worn “donk” a rest.  You’ll still hear it quite often, but it’s no longer on the tip of everyone’s tongue every freakin’ hand.

Poker In:  The Intimidating String Call.

You’re a live tournament poker pro doing what live tournament poker pros do:  playing a live tournament.  You could be at The Borgata, The Rio, a cruise ship in the Caribbean or in your cousin’s basement.  It really doesn’t matter.  The buy in could be $100, $1500 or $10,000.  It really doesn’t matter.  The blinds are 300-600.

The bad guy opens under the gun for 1700.  The bad guy could be an internet kid wearing Monster headphones, an obese Italian-American in a sweatsuit, or a woman with monstrous tits.  It really doesn’t matter.  It folds to you in the hijack, cutoff, button, whatever (it really doesn’t matter).  You decide to call.  You’re heads up to the flop.

The flop comes 10-6-5 rainbow.  Or it comes K-J-10 of diamonds.  Or maybe it comes 7-2-2.  Or it could be three aces.  That’s right, it really doesn’t matter.  The bad guy bets 2800.  Now the stage is all yours!

You are gonna call this bet.  You may be calling because you have top pair. Or possibly a flush draw.  Or maybe you’ve flopped the nuts and are gonna trap the bad guy.  Or maybe you’re attempting the old double float river bluffraise with eight high and no draw.  It really doesn’t matter!  What does matter is that you are about to execute the coolest, most amazing, fantastic move in the book, and you’re going to relish every second of it.

You look at the bad guy, then you look at your stack of chips.  Gee whiz, there’s a lot of ’em.  Now you start to dig in.  Do you pull out 2800—two yellows, a purple, and three blacks?  Nope.  Here comes the really sick part.  You  remove only three black chips from your massive stack and fling them into the pot.

Three hundred? What the fuck is this?  Have you been daydreaming?  Are you retarded?  Color blind?  Hell no!  None of the above!

It’s… an Intimidating String Call!  You’ve now stated your intention, looked incredibly suave, and maybe even scared the living shit out of the bad guy using merely three black chips!  You will get to the purples and yellows when you’re good and ready. WOW!  SICK!

Poker Out:  Chip Tricks.

And good riddance.  The standard flipping and riffling that most of us do subconsciously will be with us for the forseeable future, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about sophisticated chip dance routines that take weeks of practice to master. You used to see a lot of that, but I’ve noticed very little David Copperfield stuff lately.  Maybe people are actually concentrating on playing well?  I dunno.

I am still trying to digest what I witnessed this weekend.  My alma mater’s basketball team just reached the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.  Cornell University is part of the Ivy League, which means no athletic scholarships and teams that trek across large swaths of America’s Northeast by bus to play basketball in small decrepit gymnasiums.  The games are never scheduled on weeknights and are not televised.  There is relatively little fanfare, the rivalries are extremely insular, there is no conference tournament, and critics rightly claim that it barely resembles Division I basketball.  However, Cornell’s current squad is senior-laden and has been building momentum  and chemistry for years.  This was their third straight trip to the big dance.  Still, a total dismantling of Temple and Wisconsin, two serious basketball schools?!  Unthinkable.  I’m over the moon.  They play Kentucky—probably the biggest powerhouse of them all—next.  Wow.

When I was in college, my friends and I treated NCAA tournament games with reverence but also open resentment.  For my money the NCAA tournament is America’s most captivating sporting event, particularly in its first weekend, when the games fire nonstop and strange matchups abound, giving kids from even the most obscure schools a moment in the sun.  The telecasts are filled with shots of students and alums from these varied institutions going absolutely bonkers.  Being a huge fan of this event and going to one of the Ivy League’s perennial bottom-dwellers has always left me with bittersweet feelings about it; I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve looked at the crowd and thought to myself “I want to be them.”  The frustration is captured nicely by the plight of my good friend Sherm, who was my freshman roomate at Cornell and has been my NCAA Tourney watching partner for nearly 20 years now.  Sherm has always despised Duke University even more than the rest of us, because Duke is the perfect school for a kid who loves hoops—perennially ranked as one of the country’s top schools both academically and in basketball—and they rejected him, relegating him to a lifetime of interested but non-fanatical observation of March Madness.  Until now.

It’s finally our turn!  I appreciate the fact that this will likely be the only time in my life that I will be able to say that, and it makes it that much sweeter.  GO BIG RED!

the slipper fucking fits!

See you in Syracuse.

Okay, so I’m back from Las Vegas.  The trip was a bad one overall, and I’ve been doing some heavy meditation about things since I returned.

When you take repeated trips to the same city you (should?) end up making some choices about how to shape your life while you’re there.  Vegas is a town with two separate and distinct economies:  tourist and local.  If you add up all the time I’ve logged in Vegas I’m practically a local, and I’ve now reached the same conclusions that they have.  Namely, one should eat, drink and sleep in places that offer some semblance of value and/or sanity and one should avoid the strip at all costs.  I do this by renting a car (my sole contribution to the tourist economy), then staying away from the so-called action, either at a “locals-friendly” hotel or at my friend’s house in Summerlin.  For someone who lives 3,000 miles away I’m now fairly expert at navigating my way around Las Vegas; if someone tells me that a restaurant is located on Spring Mountain and Rainbow, I know exactly which way to point my Ford Focus.  I also know where I like to eat breakfast, buy toiletries, gas up my car, go for a jog, find decent iced coffee, and I know where I like to go when I invariably get sick of being around other people.  I guess this means that I’ve reluctantly adopted Vegas as a second home town.

On this trip I purposely stayed in two distinct modes:  poker and non-poker, with nothing in between.  I therefore experienced a few things I’d never considered before, such as taking in a movie, excursions like Hoover Dam and Red Rocks, and I also went bowling.  I go bowling once every couple of years and each time it reminds me of how much I love it.  I grew up making frequent trips to my local bowling alley, and I turned out to be pretty a pretty decent bowler.  I ended up doing three years of competitive high school bowling, a college bowling course and two years in a pretty tough NYC league after that.  At times my average has crept into the 180’s, which is pretty serious biz.  Compared to what I’m used to, the bowling alleys in Las Vegas are amazing—massive, immaculate and very cheap.  When I velcro’d my red and white rental shoes at The Orleans I was transported to a very happy place.

Alas, for the serious bowler, there are problems with bowling far from home—it’s a sport where personalized equipment is vitally important.  I’ve already bored you with a lot of bowling chatter, so I won’t go into the details of why serious bowling is impossible without your own stuff, particularly your own ball.  Suffice to say that it becomes an entirely different game.  In the end, because I find bowling to be such a pleasant diversion, and because traveling with a sixteen pound sphere stuffed into your luggage is a major drag, I have resolved to visit a pro shop during the WSOP and buy myself a serious Vegas-only bowling ball that I will store in my friend’s closet and use frequently.  I will then have my own nerdy special escape from poker when I’m out there.  Dropping $150 on a Vegas-only bowling ball may strike you (pun intended) as strange, but I will quickly earn that money back in the form of tilt and boredom reduction.  Woot.

plastic hard hat = baller.

Now let’s talk about poker.  First how about some good news.

Pokerstars’ NAPT is an obvious smash hit and a boon to tournament poker.  872 players showed up to play the 5k event at Venetian last week, which is a very big turnout for a $5,000 buy-in event during any time other than the WSOP.  Consider that last year’s non-NAPT February Venetian Deep Stack main event was a $2,500 buy in and drew only 263 players.  The direct-online entry aspect of the event was an obvious shot in the arm, as was the excitement generated by the new NAPT brand.  Plenty of big names turned out to play and the field was remarkably tough for its size.  I had the opportunity to play against a host of big names.  At my tables alone, the draw included David Benyamine, Jon Turner, Vanessa Rousso, Paul Wasicka, Andrew Robl, Burt Boutin and “PhilDo” Collins.

Now for the bad news.  I achieved nothing for the entire trip.  I had zero (0) positive sessions.  No MTT mincashes, no second place finishes in sit ‘n go’s, no $80 wins at 2-5 NLHE.  Zero positive sessions.  I went to bed a loser every single night.  Some days my stack withered away and died.  Some days I got drilled with a two-outer.  Some days I committed hari-kari running elaborate bluffs.  On one day I even suffered the cruel injustice of finishing on the exact bubble of a live tournament (a $500 event), a catastrophic feat I had never before accomplished.  The effect on my psyche of this ultramagnetic critical beatdown was predictable.  On a couple of mornings I arose in my hotel room and found that I was truly disappointed to be awake.

My main event went like this.  I got off to a nice start on Day 1 but then stumbled, paying off a river check-shove from the kid who eventually finished second.  A rivered full house over flush.  It was a stupid call.  I spent the rest of the day regulating with a small stack, painstakingly regrouping, waiting for a spot to get my money in good.  One never materialized and I went into Day 2 with a short stack.  On Day 2 I doubled up on the second hand, AK > A9.  This left me with a still below average stack, but I was able to turn up the heat at that point.  This included a well-conceived cold 4 bet jam with K-10 against Robl’s button 3-bet.  This gave me some gamblin’ chips, and I was able to play more aggressively from there, and I was just below the chip average with 300 players left when my bustout hand occurred.

I suffered the indignity of busting out against a player who is well known to many casual poker fans, owing to his appearance on a televised WPT final table back when people watched the WPT, in the show’s first or second season.  His name is Paul Magriel.  For 20 years he held the title of the greatest backgammon player in the world, and he has authored several books on that topic.  He is also credited with conceiving of the concept of “M” (named for him), which famously appears in his buddy Dan Harrington’s seminal books on tournament poker.

All of this is really beside my main point, which is that Paul Magriel is an absolute loon.  Extremely unkempt with a tumor-looking fleshy little friend connected to the side his left nostril, he suffers from some sort of neurological disorder that makes his movements choppy, abrupt and sometimes scary.  This includes the constant flopping of his tongue, which meanders back and forth and doesn’t confine itself to its home in Paul’s hygienically-challenged mouth.  The best I can do in describing Magriel’s overall look is “nutty professor on a meth binge.”  Magriel also slows the game down to a crawl by painfully agonizing his way through every decision posed to him at the table.  When it’s his turn to act he exhales sharply, pulls at his hair, mutters things to himself, stares into space and flops his tongue around.  Only then does he actually fold his cards.  Probably my favorite part of the act is that he only bets in multiples of 22, owing to his backgammon-world nickname “X-22.”  Now, a deuce in poker is sometimes referred to as a duck and a duck quacks, so 22 becomes “quack-quack” in Magriel’s world.  When he bets “quack-quack” it means 2200, “double quack-quack” means 4400, and “triple quack-quack” means 6600, etc. etc.

My initial double up on Day 2 (AK>A9) was actually at Magriel’s expense, and when the flop rolled out 6-6-2, he began begging the dealer for “quack” (another deuce, for a chopped pot) as I protested by chanting “no quack, no quack!”  Back to my bustout hand.  Burt Boutin raised under the gun to 4500 at 800-1600 (200 ante), and I held two black kings.  I elected to flat UTG+3 because I had determined that while Burt is a good player, he has a slight bet sizing issue and I probably would be able to get my entire stack in against him on a favorable board.  It folded over to Magriel in the cutoff, who also covered me, and he sized Burt and I up for a few moments before announcing “double BIG quack quack,” which of course meant a massive bomb of a reraise to 44,000.  I did my best to hide the erection rapidly forming in my pant leg as Boutin mulled the bet over.  When he eventually folded I announced that I was all in and Magriel concluded that he had to call.  I dumped my kings onto the table and he looked at me sideways and said “oh well, I need an ace.”  As he turned over big slick I replied “yes sir, you do.”  When the flop came J-9-4 I began chanting “quack quack quack” but I was quickly silenced by an ace on the turn.  Oh no.  Standard.  Except for Magriel.

I suppose I’m now officially in a rut.  This drought doesn’t approach the magnitude of the No Haircut drought of 2007, but a drought it is.  The really bad news is not the drought but my reaction to it.   Past ruts have made me hungry and determined; this one leaves me pondering my future.  I continue to be visited by bouts of boredom, even in the midst of my poker battles.  I’m pretty tired of the scene and of poker in general.  I’m tired of the same conversations about tournament structures, who the hottest players on the circuit are, and whether I should sometimes be checkraising top pair to balance my range.  I’m tired of telling bad beat stories, of hearing bad beat stories, of the same fifty faces popping up in the same eight venues over and over again.  I’m actively considering making some changes.  Also, the answer isn’t to simply start winning.  History suggests that I will eventually pull through and end this drought, but winning isn’t a cure-all this time.  Even as I was making deep runs in the two January Borgata tournaments I (sort of) final tabled, I found myself half-jokingly asking friends if they’d like to play my stack and wondering when those tournaments would be over already.  I’ve lost a bit of my mojo.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking to go back to a square job.  I’m not that deluded.  I know that I would suffer from a deep and desperate despair on the very first day that an “honest day’s work” was asked of me.  I just want to diversify—not just financially but also mentally.  In the end, grinding tournaments gets boring just like anything else, and truthfully it’s not where the big—the really big—money is.  I’ve made plenty of money at poker tournaments and I’ve got a bunch of it in the bank.  I’m not going to commit the stupid error I’ve watched so many of my colleagues commit by reinvesting poker money in poker.  The top of poker’s economic pyramid is a long, long way from guys on my level.  Trying to get there is a great way to go broke (and look stupid to boot).  What I’m looking for is something new to hold my interest, and if it’s something I can make money at, that would be nice too.

Some people have told me that I’ve got a great book in me.  I like the idea but I’m not convinced.  I see myself as a decent writer, not a gifted one.  If I was truly gifted this blog would not only come effortlessly but would have reached critical mass by now.  Sitting down to write a book about my experiences in poker would require a greater leap of faith than the one I made in 2006 when I started all of this.  I don’t think I’m ready for that.  Instead I will probably invest a chunk of my savings in some sort of side business(es) and see where it goes.  Right now I only have vague ideas about it, but I’m serious about doing it.  I’d like to make some moves soon.  Open new doors, find new challenges.

It’s all gambling in the end.