My 2010 Borgata Winter Open Main Event was a disaster.  That may sound like a harsh assessment but unfortunately it’s true.

My first misstep was innocent enough.  This past Sunday was one of the biggest online tournament days in a long time.  Apparently Pokerstars ran a two million dollar guarantee, Ultimate Bet ran the main event of some big series, and all the Full Tilt guarantees were doubled.  So when faced with the decision of playing the Borgata Main on Sunday (Day 1a) or Monday (Day 1b), I chose Sunday.  I envisioned an army of online pros sequestered in their hotel rooms dumping thousands of dollars in online buy ins and I aimed to avoid them in the real world.

When I took my seat at Table #1 I was in for an unpleasant surprise.  There were two excellent high stakes live cash game players there along with a LeggoPoker instructor who crushes online heads up cash games.  There were also a few other competent pros in our midst.  I was the fourth best player at the table at best. So much for my crafty plan of matching myself up with donkeys.  I’m fully capable of holding my own against tough players, but by the middle of level two I had managed to destroy that possibility.

I played a hand atrociously at the 50-100 level.  I’m not ready to discuss this hand in detail, but the despicable fact that I lied about my hole cards when recounting this hand to a couple of people tells me all I need to know.  The long and short of it is that I made an absolutely hopeless call on the river, giving away three streets of nearly pot-sized bets to a strong player who was obviously value betting every street.  A nitty player would have folded the turn, and any sane/observant person would have snap-folded the river (and a true baller would have check-shove bluffed the river).  So what did I do?  I called him down the whole way.  I’m very disappointed with how I handled this hand and it will probably haunt me for awhile.  I had not made a blatant, stupid, “WTF was that?” type of mistake in quite a long time.  I saved my first one in awhile for the biggest tournament of new year.  Oops.

In closing, I’d like to announce that I now have a new leak in my game:  I’m a calling station.  Making correct hero calls is so goddamned exhilarating that I can no longer restrain myself, even in big spots early in a $3500 Main Event where any moron can see that I’m beat.  I just hate folding, and it’s gotten out of hand.

Possessing this particular leak is an amusing development because my progress as a tournament player has closely tracked my de-nittification; my ability to sniff out bluffs and make big calldowns has served me well over the years.  I’ve undressed a lot of clowns in my day.  But now I’ve gone a bit overboard.  I’m a total station!  At least I’m capable of diagnosing the disease.

Good luck to my friends who are still alive in the BWO Main Event.

My next live tournament action will be at a dog track in Fort Myers!

Just yesterday a longtime reader of this blog told me he thinks that discussion of specific poker hands has always been the best part about my blog, and that my recent reluctance to discuss specific hands here is a shame.  It just so happens that I just played an interesting poker hand about two hours ago, and I am going to talk about it now.  And I’m probably going to get a little obnoxious.

The situation was as follows:

$560 Borgata Deep Stack Event.  I worked my 25,000 chip starting stack up to about 130,000, which was well above average with approximately 240 of 730 players remaining.  Seated at my table were your garden variety of live poker players, but most pertinent was my friend and competitor Joe Cutler sitting two seats to my left.

It was my button and Joe’s big blind.  I held the Ac4c.  The blinds were 1000-2000 with a 300 ante.  A young aggressive player (~100k stack) opened to 5,000 in middle position and was flatted by a calling station (stack covers mine) to my immediate right.  I had not been out of line at my table for a long time and decided that I was in a nice spot to three bet, so I made it 17,500 to go, intending to fold to a 4-bet from the original raiser.  It folded over to Joe in the big blind and he jammed all in for a total of approximately 71,500.  The original raiser folded and so did the calling station.  I thought for awhile and the more I pondered the more I realized that I ought to call.  I thought it through and asked myself if I wanted to do it.  Yes, I did.  I cut out the 54,000 additional chips and called.  Joe turned over AK offsuit.  There was shocked silence when I tabled my small suited ace.  The board improved neither of our hands and Joe won a big pot with ace-king high.  And then the uproar began.  In one fell swoop that confused the hell out of everyone else at the table, my stack was cut more than in half.  (Two levels later, I ran QQ into AA to bust).

Word spread pretty quickly about my out-of-the box call with a trash ace.  I am told that people at other tables had witnessed the hand and were discussing it.  For their part, my tablemates were alternately dumbfounded and highly critical (one announced that I’d had  “senior moment”).  I was approached on the next break by a couple of my friends asking me what in the world I was doing.

The answer is that I was making a mathematically sound decision and trying to win a poker tournament!  At the risk of sounding a bit obnoxious, hands like the one I just described indicate to me that my ability in poker tournaments far outstrips most of my competition, including many fellow pros.

In the aftermath of this hand, I had the strong inclination that my decision was correct.  My decision was made on intution and feel, not pure math.  It is impossible for me to actually calculate percentages while sitting a the table.  However, upon returning to my room I sat down and actually worked through the numbers.  My goal was not to justify the decision but to get an honest read on it.  Here’s what I came up with (and please, because I don’t run these calcs often, I’d love to be corrected if I’m doing it wrong):

Preflop, there were 6,000 chips in the pot.  The opener’s 5k and the caller’s 5k added an additional 10k and my reraise put another 17.5k into the middle.  That brought us to 33,500 in the pot before Joe acted.  When Joe pushed all in, he was calling 15,500 additional chips and raising 54,000.  Therefore there was 103,000 in the pot, and I had to call off 54,000 to win it.  This meant that I needed 54/157, which amounted to 34.4% equity, to make this call correct.  I needed to be roughly a 2-1 dog or better to make this call-off.

I ran pokerstove, and giving Joe a range of 88+, AQs+, AQo+, KQs for his re-ship, I found that Ac4c has 32.95% equity against this conservative estimate of what he might shove with.

Now let’s consider a few other factors.  First, Joe happens to be a very good poker player—a poker player who knows my reputation for three-betting light and a poker player who puts in a lot of online volume (where 4-betting is standard practice).  Joe knew that he was in a very nice spot to cold four bet jam—even with shitty hands that I was actually favored against.  Even without  putting those hands into the mix (i.e., presuming that Joe is never bluffing) and assigning Joe a very tight range, I am getting very close to the right price to call.  Adding in just a handful of bluffs easily tips the scale in favor of a call.

Let’s further consider the implications of winning and losing the pot.  If I won the pot, I’d be sitting on a monster stack and my entire table would become very reluctant to play pots against “Mr. Crazy.”  It’s safe to say that I could begin opening pots with impunity without fear of being three-bet light for the remainder of the night.

If I lost the pot (as I did), I would not be knocked out of the tournament nor crippled.  I’d have a solid reshove-type stack.  It is key to remember that the structure of the tournament in question is incredibly slow, and that the money bubble is not reached until well into Day Two tomorrow.  This is a $500 event and is NOT the kind of tournament you want to cockroach your way through.

Finally, there is some residual value in long-term advertising.  Joe is bound to remember my “crazy call” for some time, and word has (and will continue to) circulate about it.  The more loony my reputation becomes, the less I will have to deal with opponents playing back at me.

In summary, to all the tightwads out there who can’t wrap their brains around calling off half of a big stack with a marginal hand:

I’m not crazy.  I’m just better than you.

At the end of 2008 Janeen and I were newly wed and had just returned from our honeymoon.  While our wedding and honeymoon were wonderful experiences, I came home with a smoldering sense that I had unfinished business to attend to.  On the professional front, the last half of 2008 had been a disappointment, a poker washout lost to the rapturous world of wedding planning.  I showed up for 2009 hungry and determined to have my best year of pro poker yet.  When it was all said and done, I believe I accomplished that goal.  Here’s a look back:

Key Accomplishments:

PPI Elite:  When Poker Players International was created, I made the short list of players they initially asked to join their “Elite” team.  I was bestowed this honor despite not having compiled the minimum amount of lifetime winnings supposedly required.  This was a tacit acknowledgment of two things:  that my peers think I can play and that I am not a douchebag.  If my agents thought I was either a moron running above expectation or a douchebag, I would not have made the cut.

Lock Pro:  Without PPI Elite status I wouldn’t have been able to land my Lock Pro deal, as the initial roster of Lock Pros was culled from the PPI Elite group.  Becoming a resident pro at an online poker site was the biggest “off the felt” accomplishment of my career.  By the way, does anyone want to sign up for a Lock Poker account?

One Million:  When the bubble burst in the August Foxwoods Megastack event, it became official.  I had over $1,000,000 in reported live tournament earnings, all compiled since 2006.  Not bad.

Back to Back Final Tables:  In March, again at Foxwoods, I ran really good.  I ran so freakin’ good that I made appearances at back-to-back final tables, creating a small, barely audible buzz in the East Coast poker world.  Hey, a buzz is a buzz!

Shipping Mohegan:  On August 1st, I took first place in the main event of a summer series at Mohegan Sun.  It was my first outright win since January of 2008 and my first six figure score since 2007.

Another WSOP ME Cash:  It took some more serious rungood (I was drawing to two outs on the river twice along the way), but I was able to put together my third WSOP Main Event cash in five years.

The Bad Side:

Traveling so much was a drag:  Traveling around from casino to casino gets old.  I’m over it. Does it beat a regular 9 to 5 job?  For me, yes.  But it does get old.  I was away from Brooklyn probably one-third of the time this year, and that is a lot of time away from the comforts of home and the people I love.  There is nothing like the sight of Ruthie sprinting back to me at the dog park after catching a dirty tennis ball.  She’s exhilarated, silly, stupid and proud all at once in that moment.  I don’t get to see that in Atlantic City!

“The Circuit” gets pretty stale:  I spent 2009 playing a lot of poker with the same people.  With the state of the economy keeping a lot of recreational players away from all events with a buy-ins of $500 or more, the East Coast poker scene was like an extended home game.  I could give you a pretty decent scouting report on almost any East Coast regular (go ahead, try me).  While familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt, being around the same people all the time isn’t so great when only a select few are trusted friends.  I wouldn’t mind an infusion of new blood, but that seems unlikely right now.

Hideous Dry Spell:  At the 2009 WSOP, I threw up more bricks than Chris Dudley.  It was comical.  It was like getting punched in the face for a month straight.  Spending most of the summer in Las Vegas while steadily losing money is probably more fun for 23 year olds than it is for me.

I’m bored: I hate to admit it, but this year wore on me.  I’m bored.  I just am.  I guess I’ve been doing this for awhile.  I expect this feeling to fade soon, but it’s there.

2009’s Big Hands:

I’ve lost my mojo with respect to describing poker hands.  All I can do is approximate the stack/bet sizes and boards in these hands, but I will convey the general idea for each.

Slowrolls:  2009 was the year I got slowrolled.  I was the victim of poker etiquette’s biggest no-no on three occasions.  They were:

a)  Day 1 of the WSOP Main Event, we are playing the second to last hand of the night.  I picked up QQ and got into a raising war with an aggressive Brazilian guy.  I put in the final raise, all in for my tournament life.  He agonized for probably around a full minute before making a resigned call with… two kings!?  The board wasn’t particularly interesting until a queen rolled off on the river.  Oh hi!

b) My bustout hand from the same tournament (WSOP Main).  We were pretty deep in the money, and I’d scratched my way up to having a decent sized stack.  I had JJ in the hijack and opened to around 2.5x.  It folded to Fabrice Soulier in the big blind and he put in a hefty reraise.  I had no read on him but figured that he was an accomplished player who might do this with a pretty wide range, and it looked like a standard late position vs. blinds battle, so I simply four-bet all in.  He proceeded to go into a chip shuffling routine complete with a series of pained “woe is me, this is such a tough decision” faces.  The chip shuffling and hemming and hawing went on for so long that I reached the conclusion that I was trailing exactly one hand—an unlikely QQ that he couldn’t possibly have tanked that long with.  I waited patiently, for probably at least 90 seconds, for what felt at that point like an imminent fold, until Mr. Soulier announced “call” and turned over two kings (again).  I was both dumbfounded and irate as I watched the board brick out and exited the premises.  My best guess is that he was waiting for ESPN’s TV cameras to come over to cover the hand, which they never did.

c) I was pretty deep in the last Borgata deep stack event, maybe 20 or 30 players from the money bubble.  I had a large stack and was in the big blind with the 9-5 of spades.  A good young player opened in early position and got flatted by a lunatic by the name of Tae Baik two spots behind him, then by Bagels Cavezza, and then again by the button.  Both Baik and Bagels covered me, and I liked my implied odds in this very unusual five way pot.  I tossed in the chips to call.  The flop came J-9-5 rainbow, giving me bottom two pair.  Rather than risk seeing the flop checked all the way through, I decided not to mess around with this already sizeable pot, and led at it with a nearly pot-sized bet.  The early position raiser was visibly unhappy about it but chose to reraise all in for just a bit more.  Then it folded to the lunatic—an unpredictable, strange and (frankly) sometimes terrible player who I have history with—and he tanked for a long time before flat calling the all in.  Flat calling in this spot was simply ridiculous.  The size of the pot already made it one of the biggest in the entire tournament, and any normal player would decide whether his hand was good enough to go with, and if so, try and shut me out.  But not this idiot; he flat called the gigantic bet.

It folded back to me and I asked the dealer if I could reraise.  I knew that the correct answer was no, but I gave it a shot anyway.  He said no, so I put in the chips to call, planning to jam the turn unless it was a jack.  But then turn was a really bad card:  an eight.  I aborted the plan.  Q-10—which this dumb-dumb was actually capable of flatting the flop with—had just got there.  I chickened out and checked.  The guy thought about this briefly before making a big bet which amounted to almost my entire stack.  This sent me into the tank for a very long time, probably ranking in the top three timebanks of my live poker career.  A big crowd gathered to see what would happen.  I asked the guy, whose command of English wasn’t strong enough to answer anyway, “you really flatted the flop with Q-10?” and he reacted by standing up, grunting and pumping his fist.  Ummm, okay.

In the end I decided—based on my history with him and by his flat call on the flop—that he had AJ and KJ and even AA often enough for me to go with the hand.  I said “Okay, I’m all in” and pushed my stack forward.  His reaction, incredibly, was one of horror.  Fist pump time was over.  He slunk bank into his seat forlornly.  He had to put in something like 1/16th of the amount in the pot to call but for some reason he wasn’t doing it.  I had the best hand!  Bagels laughed aloud and said “oooops!”  The moron looked like he had seen a ghost and again went into a long period of silent contemplation.  Now half the room was watching.  Finally it must have dawned on him that he had to call with any two cards, so he did.  I flipped over bottom two pair like it was the nuts and he showed us:  pocket nines for a flopped middle set (for the record, the short stack had KK).  He had a powerhouse hand from the start and I was drawing dead!  An epic slowroll.  My tournament was over.  If looks could kill this guy would have been dismembered in the two seconds it took me to gather myself before I stormed out of the room.

Ballsy Barrel:  I was really frisky on the money bubble of the WSOP Main Event.  I pulled off a preflop four-bet pissing contest with QJ to pick up a bunch of chips, and then only around fifteen players off the money, this:

An excellent internet player was seated two spots to my right.  He had a very big stack and was abusing the bubble.  I waited for a chance to possibly make a stand, and chose to do so when I picked up AQ on the button.  The internet player raised and I three-bet him.  Everyone else folded back around to him.  He chose to flat the three bet and we saw a flop of J-5-3 with two spades (I had no spade).  He checked and I made a half-pot continuation bet.  He called rather quickly.  I now had a pot sized bet left in my stack.  I decided that the kid had to have something in the 1010-77 range or top pair at best, as a stronger hand or a draw would likely check/shove the flop.  I felt strongly that it was a pocket pair that didn’t connect.  The turn came a blank, a red seven.  He checked, and it was time for a huge decision.  I could give up on this hand and comfortably fold into the money, or I could do what a professional poker player ought to do:  go with my read and try to bluff him off his medium strength hand.

When you are near the money bubble of the WSOP Main Event, poker hands are not played in a vacuum.  I had been though a terrible summer in Vegas.  I was taking an awful beating, with zero cashes over a month’s time and I was now finally on the cusp of getting off the schneid in the biggest event of the year.  There was a strong argument to be made for the sub-optimal play of taking the safe route, checking the hand down, and locking up the money.  That would ensure a profit in this tournament, but true professionals do not play simply to profit.  True pros play the way Herm Edwards once famously exhorted:  we play to win the game.  In Herm’s honor, I conjured up my most impassive expression and pushed my stack in.  “All in.”

The internet kid was well aware that this kind of a bluff was in my arsenal.  And he didn’t fold immediately.  He took his time.  After a long think, he made several attempts to engage me in conversation.  I passed on the chit-chat.  In fact, I was incapable of talking.  As the seconds ticked by I became acutely aware of how upset I would become if he called me down.  I envisioned him making a ballsy call with two eights and busting me.  I then imagined the cold-blooded, ruthless, evil scrutiny I would subject myself to in the aftermath, along with the ensuing havoc it would wreak on my psyche.  It was not a pretty picture at all.  He better fold.

For the first time in a very long time—probably for the first time in over two years—I was scared at the poker table.  Straight-up scared of this kid calling me down.  I was consumed in the gravity of the moment, on the verge of fucking up my biggest event of the year.  My genitals shrunk to the size of peas and I could feel the perspiration coming out of every pore in my body.  I was helpless.  I stared straight ahead and silently begged this kid to please have mercy on my poor tortured soul and fold his fucking cards.  After what felt like an eternity, he complied.  I tried to hide the massive relief that washed over me, into me, through me, to my very core.  I flicked my cards into the muck like they were on fire then did my best to collect the pot with both hands, which were shaking violently.  I haven’t been scared at the poker table (or anywhere) since.

A Thoughtful Gift:  At the final table of the aforementioned Mohegan main event, I came in with the chip lead.  However, it was really a co-chip lead because there was one player with only a few thousand chips fewer than my 1.4 million.  He’s a deceptive player by the name of Steve Fiorentini.  I call Steve “deceptive” because there is an incongruity between his appearance and the way he plays.  He’s probably in his fifties and looks like a happy-go-lucky recreational player who decided to play poker instead of golf that day—the kind of player who generally gets eaten alive in the bigger events.  But that’s not what he is.  In actuality he is a very sharp player with a dangerous wild streak.  He is a live wire who can and will try crazy things.  At the time, I had relatively little experience playing with Steve, but I was given a scouting report on his play the night before from a reliable source.

I came out of the gate quickly at the final table, winning a few uncontested pots, thereby surging into the chip lead by a small margin.  I probably won five or six of the first ten pots.  Then I picked up two black sevens in early position and dutifully put in another raise.  It folded around to Steve in one of the blinds, and he put in a very large reraise.  Based on what I knew about Steve, the size of his reraise and the previous ten hands, I felt that he was making this play pretty light.  I called the three-bet to play the flop in position.  It came Q-4-3 with two clubs and he fired a big continuation bet.  I still felt I had the best hand, so I called immediately.  A big pot was now brewing.  The turn card saved me a tough decision, because it was gin:  a red seven.  Steve moved all in and I snap called.  He turned over 55 and missed his gutterball on the river.  I had ALL the chips and cruised to a four way chop that netted me over $120k.

The hand was immense, worth tens of thousands of dollars in equity.  This is a fact that is not lost on Steve.  To this day, he greets me with a cordial “you’re welcome!” instead of the more traditional “hello” whenever we see each other.

Goals For 2010:  I’m going into 2010 without any specific goals, just some general ideas of what I’d like to accomplish.  I honestly don’t know where this year will take me.  It might look just like last year and it really might not.

Travel less:  I have an online deal with Lock Poker and a very comfortable life at home.  It’s obvious what I should do.  I am going to play more online poker this year, which means I will spare myself the rigors of traveling the circuit.  I’m currently encouraged by the fact that a few nights ago I made a couple of final tables online.

Play more cash and learn other games:  I’ve been saying this forever, so take it with a grain of salt.

Do something in a major:    The final frontier in live tournament poker is for me to do some serious damage in a tournament with a big (defined as 5k and up) buy in.  This is the only obvious tournament accomplishment that has escaped my grasp—the elusive monster score.  This is partially because I refuse to play majors unless I satellite in.  My policy of not buying directly into majors will not change in 2010.  Even though I am convinced that my expected value is positive even in the big events, I consider totals exceeding $5,000 to be too large a chunk of my bankroll to put at risk.  If I choose to chase the goal of hitting a major in 2010, I will need staking.  And therein lies the problem.

I abhor the idea of staking.  I am convinced that long term staking arrangements are bad deals for both the player and the backer, unless the backer has the capital to create a huge stable that reduces the variance by effectively carpet bombing the poker world.  Even the best players in the world have only a razor thin edge in poker tournaments.  Chopping that edge into smaller pieces makes little sense.  Add in the concept of makeup (i.e., the debt incurred by a player with a negative return for a period of time) and you put both parties, but particularly the player, in an unenviable position.

I will only be staked on my own terms.  These are: absolutely no makeup and I personally select which events I will be staked in.  I also want my backers to be friends and family that come from outside the poker community.  My only brush with staking in 2009 was positively disgusting.  This blog is not meant for drama, so I will provide only a cursory description of what happened.

I received an unsolicited offer to be backed in a single tournament.  Because the terms of the offer were for a single tournament outside my typical price range, I quickly accepted the offer. The offer came from individuals with whom I was not friendly.  They were, however, close with one of my so-called friends.  This particular so-called friend caught wind of the offer and ended up procuring it for himself, to my exclusion.  The facts stated in this last sentence are partially disputed (of course), but after twelve years of developing and practicing the skills of weighing and analyzing evidence followed by four years of observing the behavior of liars, I know when I’m being fucked over.

The end result is an increased conviction that any backing I accept will come from only people I know and trust.  It’s a matter of deciding how important the big tournaments are to me.

Shameless pitch:  if you are an actual friend of mine and are reading this, do not hesitate to contact me if you would like to be part of the great DZ staking conglomerate that I have yet to form!

And that about sums up my 2009 in poker.  In current, more exciting news, Janeen and I are headed to Southern California on Friday to a) visit her family; and b) witness the New York Jets shocking the world in person.  On the live poker front, I have no interest in playing anything until the Borgata Winter Open begins in about ten days.

Happy New Year loyal readers!

In 1984, then-owner of the New York Jets Leon Hess decided that his franchise needed a new field.  So he made an announcement that saddened my father, who was a relatively new holder of Jets season tickets:  the team’s games would no longer be played in their quirky but cozy Shea Stadium home.  The announcement of the Jets’ new home was as bad as it could be:  far from its fan base (in another state, no less) and already occupied by—and named for—another team.  The commute from my childhood home on Long Island to Shea Stadium was a mere fifteen minutes, and parking at Shea was a breeze if you knew the stadium’s neighborhood well, which my father did.  Even before his first disastrous encounter with the New Jersey Meadowlands’ Byzantine concentric highway parking entanglement, he knew that the average Jets Sundays would become a major hassle.

My dad—who was among the legion of those feeling betrayed by Hess—had a decision to make:  dump the tickets or soldier on.  In the end, he chose to commit:  to his team but mostly to his son.  I was only 11 then but already in the throws of a relationship with the Jets that the word fanaticism doesn’t do justice.  The Jets games were the unquestioned focal point of my existence.  I begged for and received the renewal of our season ticket plan for the 1984 season.

We quickly discovered that Giants Stadium was nothing special; a big ugly concrete oval sporting four ugly spiral concrete ramps.  It was just as windy as Shea, had a hard, ugly Astroturf playing surface, and was outfitted in the Giants’ colors of blue and red.  For the Jets’ home games, exactly two extravagant measures were taken by Mr. Hess:  the blue walls surrounding the playing field were draped in a green fabric, and the turf in the end zones featured the Jets’ logo.  Getting to and from the stadium proved worse than ever imagined.  Our old commute was 40 minutes combined.  Now we suffered through interminable traffic that turned Jets’ Sundays into total washouts.

dump.

The good news was that our seats were slightly better than they were at Shea.  Thanks to some season ticket deserters, our mezzanine level seats were moved up one row, to the very front.  Our blue seats in Section 220 were in the front row, seats 15 (Dad’s) and 16 (mine).  Because my father was then involved in a side business co-owning a photocopy store, I determined that we would imitate the guys at Shea who threw confetti out of the front of the mezzanine whenever the Jets did something good.  On game weeks, Dad and I would visit the copy store and use its giant paper cutters to shred up a week’s worth of New York Daily Newses, the tiny pieces of which were then stuffed into two giant shopping bags.  Before 9/11/01, no one looked at you twice if you carried two large shopping bags full of shredded newspaper into a stadium, and we did so religiously.  I took great pride in covering the entire windswept North end of Giants Stadium in confetti whenever the moment was right, which unfortunately was not very frequently.  Many times our two bags of confetti sat untouched for the duration of the game.  On these occasions Dad and I would unceremoniously dump the full contents of our bags onto the heads of the poor people below us in section 120 after the Jets’ opponent had delivered the game’s coup de grace.  I like to think that on these occasions the confetti dumps served as an announcement that it was time for everyone to head for the exit ramps, get in their cars, and join the traffic delay.

The confetti bags are no longer part of our routine, but my father and I have been to most of the Jets home games at Giants Stadium.  I was a pre-pubescent child when the Jets played their first game there; I am now a middle aged man.  The games remain a crucial part of my life, and while I have learned to temper my emotions in the wakes of wins and losses (mostly losses), a Jets Super Bowl is still my singular fungible lifelong dream; the holy grail of my existence.

Tomorrow night Dad and I will sit in section 220, seats 15 and 16 for the final time.  Giants Stadium is being razed and the Jets are moving into a building that has been built, fittingly, in the Giants Stadium parking lot.  The Jets’ lease of Giants Stadium lasted 25 years, which is a long time.

In the modern world it’s hard to find places that achieve real permanence.  Most of us live transient lives, we move from place to place.  If you remove obligatory gravesite visits from the equation, a quarter of a century is a long time to regularly and repeatedly return to the same exact place.  I’ve heard stories about men who have met to play chess on the same table in the same park every Sunday for 75 years, and of old widows who lived on the same hilltop their entire lives, but I personally don’t know any people like that.  My father and I nearly replicate the feat, always reporting to our two Giants Stadium seats like migrating birds who return to their hatching site.  We’ve sat there in searing heat and bitter cold, through rain and snow (and always) wind.  We’ve seen lots of wins but many more losses.  We’ve seen jubilation and heartbreak (often in the same day, and usually in that order).  Our lives have changed and so has the world around us, but we’ve always returned to our two seats.  A time lapse study (let’s erase the two Giants fans who occupied the same space on the other Sundays from the frame) of the seats would be an interesting watch.  In 1984, I was barely old enough get into my seat without holding Dad’s hand.  Today I can feel a twinge in my back when I ease into #16’s luxurious ass-shaped plastic.  I’ve progressed through adolescence, my college years, post-graduate years, yuppie years, pro gambler years—hell, all of my years— while making my eight yearly visits to my blue Giants Stadium seat.  My father has progressed himself, from a relatively spry fellow only a few years older than I am now to the grey-haired grandfather who sits beside me at the games today.  We are pilgrims.  Tomorrow night is our final visit.

For the record, the Jets closed out Shea Stadium with a loss.  We were there then too.  Jets fans said goodbye to Shea the classy way, by taking mementos.  Seats were ripped from their concrete moorings and thrown, the field was stormed, goalposts were torn down, most of the sod was removed.  The cops just watched.  No such memento-removal will take place tomorrow night.  Not only does the world work differently now; they remember 1984 well enough to make tomorrow night a beer-free event.

While a list of our worst days would likely be longer and more amusing, here are my personal six greatest days at the Meadowlands:

6. January 5, 2003.  Jets 41, Colts 0.  On bizarro-Jets day, the Herm Edwards/Chad Pennington led team can do no wrong in a wild-card game.  It’s hard to fathom right now, but at this stage in his career Peyton Manning was considered a choke artist and everyone laughed at his no-huddle pre-snap histrionics at the line of scrimmage.  The trouncing is highlighted by Manning’s futility and by Richie Anderson taking a little screen pass 80 yards for a touchdown.  The stadium is a party from beginning to end and no one left the building ashamed of thinking that the Jets might go to the Super Bowl.  The Raiders had other ideas the following week.

5. October 23, 2000.  Jets 40, Dolphins 37.  My father and I were treated to a rare Monday Night Jets game.  Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the Jets were not up for the challenge and were trailing 30-7 at the start of the fourth quarter.  Then out of nowhere Vinny Testaverde proceeded to engineer one of the most furious and unlikely comebacks in NFL history, passing the ball at will against the suddenly defenseless Dolphins.  The game-tying touchdown occurred when Wayne Chrebet made a diving catch in the end zone, but the Dolphins quickly retook the lead on a bomb of their own.  The game re-tying touchdown came on a ridiculous tackle-eligible throw to Jumbo Elliot (!).  John Hall’s game winning overtime FG took place well after 1:00 am.  A sad admission must be made here:  my father and I exited the building with the Jets trailing 30-7.  I listened to the Jets’ comeback unfold on the car radio and actually made it home in time to watch overtime on TV.  The old man in Seat #14 (our neighbor for all 25 years) makes fun of us to this day for leaving this game early.  He makes a good point.  Wins like these are few and far between in Jetland.

4. January 10, 1999.  Jets 34, Jaguars 24.  A very chilly but happy day at the Meadowlands.  This game marked the apex of the Bill Parcells era for the Jets as the 1998 team won the AFC East going away and then beat the Jags easily on this day in the Divisional Playoff round.  Keyshawn Johnson tore the Jags up.  The Jets led 17-0 and never turned back.  I left the stadium feeling numb from the cold but deliriously excited.  I began cooking up plans to attend the Super Bowl.  The Jets—of course—had other ideas.  The following week, they wrested control of the AFC Championship game in Denver from the Broncos, then proceeded to play the worst half of football they’d played all season, washing away the Super Bowl dreams.  Testaverde tore his Achilles in the first quarter of the first game in 1999, Belichick didn’t want the job in 2000, and that was that.

3. December 28, 1986.  Jets 35, Chiefs 10. The Jets opened the 1986 season 10-1 and were an honest-to-god juggernaut.  They had a solid defense and an explosive offense with a myriad of weapons.  The long awaited trip to the Super Bowl seemed possible.  Then without warning everything fell apart.  The Jets dropped the final five games on the schedule, looking horrible in the process, and limped into the playoffs to host the Chiefs in the wildcard round.  Coach Joe Walton made a ballsy move, giving the untalented but plucky backup QB Pat Ryan his first start of the year in the game.  Dad and I came in with low expectations but Ryan and the Jets delivered.  Probably my single favorite play to occur on the North (our) end of the Meadowlands field took place in this game:  on the Jets’ first possession of the game, they faced a 4th and 6 at the Chiefs’ 30 yard line.  Walton elected to go for it, and pulled a QB draw out of his nosepicking ass.  The play caught the Chiefs completely by surprise and Ryan executed it perfectly.  He capped the run off by spinning out of a tackle and bulling his way down to the nine yard line.  I nearly jumped out of my skin.  The Jets went on to trounce the Chiefs and re-ignite Jets fans’ hopes that they could go all the way.  The following week they lost an insane double-overtime game in Cleveland that probably ranks as the #1 most disgusting, most hideous loss in my long history of watching them.  Obviously.

2. December 29, 2002.  Jets 42, Packers 17.  The Jets season looked like it was over.  Then they beat the Patriots in Week 16, giving them dim but viable playoff hopes with one week left to play.  But they needed help:  a Pats win over the Dolphins followed by a victory over the Packers was the only way in.  The Pats/Dolphins game was at 1:00 and the Jets/Pack was at 4:00.  My father and I got to the stadium parking lot around 2:00.  Things looked very bleak when the Dolphins took the lead 24-13 with 5:00 left against the Pats in Foxboro, another season down the tubes.  But then the Jets’ fortuned changed.  In 2002, the current all-media Sunday barrage of NFL coverage was just beginning to blossom, and the best I could do to stay abreast of the Pats/Dolphins in real time was watch a TV that was set up in the back of some guy’s Mazda hatchback in the Giants Stadium parking lot.  About forty other chilly Jets fans and I huddled ‘round the back of the Mazda as if a bonfire were burning therein.  We erupted in jubilation as Brady hit Brown for a touchdown and then converted the all-important two-point conversion.  Then Pats got the ball back and got into field goal range.  Was this really happening?!  The hatchback group fell silent as Vinatieri lined up for the game-tying field goal… and went bonkers when he nailed it.  Enlivened, we all sprinted into the stadium as the Pats took the Dolphins to overtime and the Jets and Packers kicked off.  The Pats/Dolphins game was on the luxury box TV’s as Jets/Pack unfolded before us, and at certain points in the game most of my section was facing backwards, glued to the television set in the box rather than the action on the field in front of us.  When Vinatieri beat the Dolphins in OT, the Packers were huddling up before the next play from scrimmage—a lull in the action.  Still, the entire stadium incongruously erupted as if the Jets had just won a football game on an overtime field goal (which they essentially had).  Even the players on the Jets’ sideline were going wild.  The Jets then finished the deed, laying a major smackdown on the Packers, giving them the AFC East title.  Total euphoria.  The Colts win (#6 above) followed, but that was all the Jets had in the tank that year.

1.  September 21, 1986.  Jets 51, Dolphins 45. During his prime, Dan Marino owned the Jets the same way Michael Jordan owned the Cleveland Cavaliers.  But worse, if that’s possible.  When the Jets played the Dolphins the question wasn’t whether Marinso would tear the Jets to pieces, but just how bad it would be.  On this particular day, Ken O’Brien, Al Toon and Wes Walker had an answer to every one of Marino’s darts, and there were lots and lots of darts.  The total passing yardage in this game (around 850 I believe) remains the NFL record.  Despite their best efforts, the Jets tailed by 7 with 1:04 left and started their final possession of regulation on their own 20 yard line.  They hit a big play on a hook-and-ladder, O’Brien to Shuler to Hector, which set up the final play of regulation from the Dolphins’ 21.  Miraculously, O’Brien evaded pressure and then uncorked a bullet that Wesley Walker leapt for and caught in triple coverage at the goal line with the clock at 0:00, forcing an unbelievable game into an unbelievable overtime.  Confetti everywhere.  On the first possession of overtime, O’Brien went for it all and hit Walker with another perfect throw, in full stride down the sideline, and he sprinted in untouched for the score.  Pandemonium.  The confetti bags were already empty.  It took hours for my exhilaration to fade (I probably should have been institutionalized).  Thinking about this game still gives me goose bumps.

Back in August and September a lot of praise and adulation was heaped upon me by my poker playing brethren.  I had just finished final tabling a few tournaments in a short period of time, and members of the East Coast poker community apparently took notice.  I got a lot of “you just ship everything you play, huh?” and “easy game for DZ!” type of stuff on a daily basis.  My studied and ever-so-humble reply to each new compliment was “talk to me at the end of the year after I’ve run dry for three months.”  My predictive powers rival my poker skills—it has come to pass.

This is not the first slump I’ve endured nor will it be the last.  This dry spell finds me in a melancholy mood once again, but the tenor is different this time.  In the past, long losing streaks have led me to wonder about my security in the poker world and prompted periods of agonizing self-doubt.  This time around I’m not experiencing any fear of failure.  In its stead is a distasteful ennui.

After spending much of 2009 on the tournament circuit and finally integrating myself into the “poker community,” I have no lingering skepticism about whether I have the skills to compete.  Poker ain’t rocket science (it ain’t even lawyering).   The people who play poker for a living run the gamut from cerebral to simpleton.  Thankfully for the less intelligent amongst us, poker ability is only loosely correlated with intellect and there are no secret formulas for success.  While I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer I now feel confident that my capacity to selectively apply memorized tournament strategies rivals most pro’s.  After communing with them for a full calendar year, I can say with near certainty that there is nothing especially daunting about my competition.  For me, the challenges in this profession lie elsewhere.

As evidenced by their long term absence on this blog, poker hand histories and strategies are of little interest to me these days.  I’m no longer fascinated by all but the most complex no limit tournament hands, which by nature are almost never very complex.  On the occasions that a recent play of mine has been widely criticized (word of these things boomerangs quite quickly on the circuit), sitting down and running the math has actually proven my intuition correct and my detractors wrong.  My game remains sharp and adaptable.  I’m still a winning player.  So if I’m not scared of slipping, then why am I unhappy right now?  The unfortunate answer is that I’ve grown a bit tired of my day-to-day routine.

It’s less a function of the game than the environment.  There’s been a lot of driving, a lot of hotel rooms, a lot of elevator rides, lots of shitty food, too many zombie-walks through the stupid lights and white noise of your average casino floor.  It gets monotonous, and with so many obsessed, single-minded people around me, there is rarely any relief.  Even with all my new friends—and I’ve met some amazing people this year—the tournament circuit is an isolating environment for an intellectually curious newlywed.  A big part of the disconnect is that I’m simply not poker obsessed.  I struggle to find the motivation to play live cash or online sessions, and I have little desire to talk about poker when I’m not playing.  I can’t relate to someone who gets mesmerized grinding fifteen tables on their laptop; that’s just not me.

Many tournament pros harbor dreams of becoming famous or seem to think that after four thousand live tournaments, the game will magically become easy for them, granting them universal respect and admiration within this community.  But it doesn’t work that way.  It is remarkable how few of my colleagues have internalized and accepted the fact that they have chosen a profession in which they will fail to achieve anything on nine out of ten days.  I’m continually surprised by how few approach variance logically.  Earth to my fellow poker pro:  I am enduring the same daily grind as you, so your temper tantrums come across as absurd and your bi-hourly complaints about bad beats and idle threats about jumping out your hotel room window are falling on deaf ears.

And while my discovery of poker partially cured me of my raging puer aeternus, most touring tourney pros have full-blown, untreated cases.  Many outsiders equate our lifestyle with “living the dream,” so I suppose it’s only natural that the practitioners of this craft spend their lives in LaLa Land.  Some tourney pros are grown men who live at home with their mothers but spend 95% of their waking hours in a casino playing poker, talking poker, just being around poker, oblivious to all else, pausing only to eat, sleep and to occasionally try and get laid.  This kind of a life might be almost acceptable if these guys were prodigal poker talents, but most are not.  They’re just dreamers, plain and simple.  Peter Pan is alive and well on the poker tournament circuit.

Restlessness is a common human condition.  People like new things; people want to find out what comes next.  I am currently wondering if there is something new and next on the horizon for me.  I don’t want to move away from poker entirely.  I just need a change, and winning a tournament isn’t necessarily the answer.  I love the life I’ve created for myself, but it may be time for some new games, new goals, new ideas, new experiences.  At the very least, some new places!  If I have to pull into another casino self park garage I might vomit.

I find myself suddenly motivated to write so maybe I will do a recap of 2009 in the year’s waning days.  It was a pretty interesting year for me.

What’s better than a plate of delicious buffalo wings? Consider that when wings are consumed, beer and football can’t be far behind.  That’s right—wings rule. While other greasy staples like burgers and pizza have long had online publications dedicated in their honor, until recently the interwebz have been suspiciously silent regarding the greatest bar food of all. That is, until my friend Pete created the fabulous Wings & The City, which is now home to Pete’s wingy adventures and witty reviews.

Janeen and I were recently selected to be among Pete’s guests of honor for his review of the wings at one of our local watering holes. Check it out!

Mmmmmmm, wings.

For those keeping score at home, I have done nothing since my incredible August. And I mean “nothing” in one sense only: I haven’t made any money.

The truth is I’ve been working as hard as ever at playing live poker, which makes the “nothing” more frustrating. In my effort to come up with one final big score for the year, from September onward I have been tirelessly traveling the East Coast circuit with nothing to show for it. Since I love my home and my wife’s company, September, October and November have involved an epic amount of driving, mostly up and down I-95 and the Garden State Parkway.

I feel a sharper and more poignant sense of exasperation from a fruitless poker tournament after a 6:00am wakeup and a three hour drive than I do when I simply walk downstairs from my hotel room. Either way, it’s a lonely way to live. The pile of coffee cups and fast food wrappers that reside in front of the passenger seat are a constant reminder that there’s little separating my lifestyle from a traveling salesman’s.

I know that one more final table would erase some of these feelings. I know that I’ve had a great 2009. I know that I don’t want my old life back. But I think I’ve overdone it recently. I’m officially tired of the scene. My days feel monotonous. The same people are always telling me the same stories. The stories always end the same way. I listen dispassionately, sip my second coffee of the day, and walk away.

Lest I forget: the melancholy I’m feeling these says is exacerbated by the near certainty that my Sug D’s sweatshirt is gone. I’d call it my “lucky” sweatshirt, but that’s not quite accurate. I’ve lost my taste for superstition (a.k.a. mild OCD) over the past year or two, but my sentimentality remains. I have worn that Sug D’s sweatshirt for every big moment in my poker life, dating back to the days when poker was not my career. Nearly every picture of me playing cards, in both my times of triumph and failure, finds me in Sug D’s cozy confines. Now it’s gone. I haven’t worn my it since Aruba, and after turning my apartment upside down, I’ve reached the conclusion that it didn’t make the trip home with me from the Caribbean. I feel like I’ve lost a close friend.

I’ve spent most of the past ten days playing cards in a dingy basement called Foxwoods.  I’ve been sick with some kind of persistent cold the entire time.  Sleep has been difficult to come by and I’ve felt distracted and out of focus for much of this trip.  I’m not playing as well as I can; I’ve made some marginal decisions that have cost me in a couple of spots.

None of this would matter much if I’d been running good, which I traditionally do at DumpWoods (the only thing that makes the place tolerable).  Alas, my luckbox has deserted me.  I’ve done nothing in the MTTs I’ve played.  I am having my typical success in sit ‘n go’s, which is keeping my bottom line from looking too ugly.

I’ll be focusing my energy on winning a main event seat for the remainder of my time here, and if I fail to achieve that, at least I can leave!

So Janeen and I arrived in Aruba on Saturday to enjoy some fun, sun and poker. She left earlier today, leaving me all by my lonesome but providing me with time to write a blog entry.

This trip started off well when I made an unexpected and thrilling discovery: Mexican Jumping Beans are for sale in the Jet Blue Terminal at JFK Airport!  On a family vacation during my childhood I was given my first batch of Mexican Jumping Beans, whom I treated like valued pets during that trip (until they sadly perished before our flight home).  For those unfamiliar, MJB’s are little brown nut-like objects harvested in Mexico that bounce around because larvae of some sort live inside them.  Awesome!  When I saw MJB’s on sale at JFK on Saturday, I couldn’t help but flash back to my OCD-level dedication to my very first set of beans and could not resist adopting them.  Janeen was puzzled by all of this until she witnessed these little guys in action!  I’m happy to say that Hopper, Skipper, Jumpy, Bounder and Phil have been clattering way on the nightstand in our hotel room each night and are gleefully leaping about on the table beside me as I type this.  Hooray for my Mexican Jumping Beans!

Aruba is the most developed Caribbean island in the world.  Has to be.  This place is so developed that it shouldn’t be able to call itself Caribbean. Caribbean connotes nice beaches and near-perfect weather that is heavily subsidized by the tourist, who is subjected to impotable water, shitty food, bush league entertainment options and slow-ass service from grumpy locals.  Aruba (“one happy island!”) has none of those things.  Aruba has everything you get in the continental United States, including lots of white residents.  You don’t even need to exchange currency here, they’re happy to take your dollars.  This place is essentially a more tropical Miami.

Among the amenities is a real-deal sports bar called Buster’s Garage, the equal of any place found in New York City.  To Janeen’s delight (love you hon!), I was thrilled to discover that I would be able to watch every NFL game this past Sunday, all on giant HD screens.  Buster’s is owned by an ex-pat New Yorker to boot.  Big up to Al Riccobono for the recommendation and for picking up the tab!

This Sunday brought an extra special treat:  I watched Sunday’s Jets-Saints game in the company of a legendary person—quite possibly the coolest semi-celebrity you could potentially watch a New York Jets game on television with.

As the game was kicking off, I noticed that a couple at the next table were decked in green Jets gear from head to toe.  The man was broad-shouldered, square-jawed and bald, staring intensely at the flat screen TV on the wall in front of him.  He looked a lot like superfan Fireman Ed Anzalone, the guy who leads the “J-E-T-S” chant at the Meadowlands.  Upon closer inspection it was definitely the man himself, down here in Aruba, apparently vacationing with Mrs. Ed.

I had consumed quite a few Balashis by this time, so I quickly ingratiated myself with the Anzalones by commending his recent radio appearance (on Joe Benigno’s radio show, obviously) and flashing my credentials:  season tickets since 1981 (long enough to have witnessed the full evolution of the J-E-T-S chant), a wealth of Jets knowledge and die-hardedness to match his own.  Realizing we were kindred spirits, Ed & wife allowed me to watch the game in their company, and I shot the shit with them for a couple of hours.  Although I have been on record in the past few years as being tired of Fireman Ed, I have now changed my mind.  He’s a nice guy.  The answers to a few of my questions are:  1) no, he is not on the Jets payroll and never has been; 2) no, he has never taken credit for inventing the chant; 3) no, he cannot afford the PSL’s for his two seats, he’s moving upstairs; and 4) the game ball he received on behalf of the fans sits in the team’s training facility, not in his house.

Unfortunately, the Jets were down big in this game from the outset, and there was never occasion for me to hoist Ed onto my shoulders for a Arubian rendition.  Ah well.

Anyway, this has been a nice vacation for Janeen and I.  We’ve walked along pristine beaches, tanned beside a picturesque pool, chatted with tropical birds and iguanas and eaten at gourmet restaurants.  Oh, and there was a poker tournament.

I avoided the poker room until Monday night, when I promptly and rather easily won a supersatellite into the main event by pushbotting into the money without ever having to show down a hand.  The $5,500 buy in for the Main Event was going to be my largest ever unbacked personal outlay for a single tournament, so I was relieved to win a seat in my first and only try.

The supersatellite also allayed my concerns regarding the fields here.  Coming in, I was convinced that everyone here would have either won a seat online or felt comfortable enough to buy directly in to a $5,500 tournament, i.e., they’d all be internet pros or top notch live pros.  Bad read on my part.  The players here fall into one of four categories:

1) internet pros;

2) live pros;

3) non-professional internet qualifier; and

4) local.

Categories 1 and 2 are capable players and difficult to deal with, but the others, particularly category 4, are not. Cateogory 4 is made up of mostly Venezuelan guys who are pretty terrible at poker, and they are here in droves.  These category 4 players create a significant edge for guys like me.  Edges are good.

Day 1 of my Main Event was a lot of fun.  I drew a bad table with no category 3 and 4 players.  Instead I found Shawn Rice, Robert Mizrachi (to my direct right) and Gavin Smith (to my direct left).  I’m past the point of being intimidated by anyone, however, and I did a nice job.  By the end of the day my starting stack of 15,000 was sitting at over 32,000.  Proof that I’ve come a long way in the past few years:  In May of 2006 I was terrified of Gavin Smith; on Tuesday I found myself wondering what he was thinking quite often and I outplayed him in a couple of spots.

Day 2 started out even better.  After I picked up about 6,000 additional chips I was moved to a very soft table, there were no fewer than three 4’s and two 3’s seated there.  It didn’t take me long to tangle with the Venezuelan guy to my left.  With about 38,000 in my stack and the blinds at 200-400 with a 50 ante, I picked up two red eights under the gun and made it 1050.  The Category 4 player to my left (32,000) called and so did the player in the cutoff.  The flop rolled out 9-8-5 rainbow (set alert!) and I bet 1700.  Mr. 4 raised to around 5,500 and the cutoff folded.  I smooth called, knowing I would likely stack the guy if the turn was a safe card.  The turn was indeed a safe card:  a deuce.  I checked.  Mr. 4 bet 12,300 and I quickly moved all in.  I got instacalled by… the old 9-7 of diamonds.

I was licking my chops at the thought of having over 70,000 chips at my disposal at this spectacularly bad table.  All I had to do was fade a six on the river.  The dealer had other ideas, however, and she stuck a six out there.  I got four-outed by a #4.

Adding insult to injury, Mr. 4 was thought he was drawing dead on the river and was sitting there moping even after I tapped the table and said “nice hand.”  It wasn’t until the dealer actually pushed the massive pot to him that he realized that he was not eliminated from the tournament and had sucked out on me.  Must be nice?

The same guy would bust me about a half hour later when I pushed my remaining chips in with A-10 vs. his A-Q.

I’m gonna get a nice tan and dabble in a little more poker before I get out of here on Saturday.