I’m happily back home now with nowhere to be for a little while.  It feels like I’ve been gone forever.

My 262nd place finish in the WSOP Main made my summer a profitable one.  All it took was a little bit (okay, maybe a lot) of rungood.

It’s a shame that I’ve dispensed with my old habit of taking notes during the breaks of the WSOP ME.  My trajectory in that tournament was probably the wildest ride I’ve had yet.  It was the closest thing to the uber-clichéd “CHIP AND A CHAIR!!!1!11!!” comeback that I’ve ever experienced.  There were at least fifty hands of interest that are worthy of discussion, but there’s no way I’ll remember all of them.  I’ll try my best to put together a good recap sometime soon, though.  I wouldn’t want to let my adoring fans down.

Thanks to everyone for all their support on Twitter, Facebook, email, here… yayy for the interweb!

We’re in the money now, my third cash in the WSOP Main.

The bad news is I’m short again.  Can I stage yet another comeback in this tournament?  I’m cautiously optimistic.

When you bluff all in with air only ten players from the bubble in the WSOP Main Event when you have enough chips to easily fold to the money, you either have a lot of heart or a screw loose.   Maybe both?  That’s what I did today.  I also did a few other wacky-ass things that I didn’t think I had the courage for.  Who knew.  In the end, I didn’t have enough tricks in my bag to take over my table, but I tried my best.  You have to make a hand or two at some point, and I never did today.

Back to work tomorrow with a reshove stack.

Day 2b was an up and down day.  I ran lousy early and waited.  Finally I found a spot to double up after dinner and got my game into cruise control.  All for naught:  I lost a 100k pot in a cooler-ish type spot.

I patched things together from there and bagged around 54,000 chips. Difficult day but I’m alive and kickin’.  Medium/short but not desperate as we head into Friday’s Day 3.

I’ve been down this road before.

I’m not saying this to justify the dry spell I’ve been on, but during the past couple of months, the amount of times I’ve been victimized by a hideous bad beat far outnumbers the amount of times I’ve laid one on an opponent.  Then there was Sunday.  Sunday was a different story.

I was knocked out of the 2009 WSOP Main Event no fewer than three times Sunday, yet I’m still in with a nice stack.  I was drawing to two outs for my tournament life twice, both times I found one of the cards I needed.  I just wouldn’t die.

I’m hoping to turn my lucksack Day 1 into a real story.   I’ve got 65,750 chips and will be back in action Wednesday.

The WSOP Main Event starts tomorrow for me.  I have lots of fond memories related to this tournament, particularly from the years I cashed in this behemoth, 2005 and 2006.  Although I don’t get as nervous and worked up as I used to, the night before the WSOP Main Event still feels special.  There is a quiet intensity about this time.  Tomorrow isn’t just another day at the office.

I feel focused and confident  right now, probably because I’ve had a lot of success in the single table satellites I’ve played in the past couple of days.  I expect that I’ll continue making good decisions.  Beyond that all I can do is hope to run good.

Because of the low turnout on Day 1a (and it was even lower today for 1b), the tournament directors have decided that we’ll be playing only four levels on Day 1, which means that most of the field will advance.  The antes don’t even kick in until the final level of the day.  My general strategy is to play patient and snug early, identify the soft spots (and there will be soft spots) and try to attack them.

I’ll be Tweeting periodic updates for those who wish to follow my progress.

Off we go!

I’m tired of all the negativity on here.  So today I would like to talk about something completely different:  music.  Specifically Auto-Tune.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but mainstream hip hop and R&B mostly sucks right now.  A big reason for this is Autotune.  My understanding of everything I’m about to mention is rudimentary, I read exactly one article about this.  So if you’re some kind of music nut and you happen upon this post, feel free to correct me.

Auto-Tune is a music editing program that was invented about ten years ago. It fixes off key shit and makes it sound right.  When you run sounds through Auto-Tune, it automatically adjusts the pitch so that it’s perfect.  It makes singing a lot easier, I would imagine.  Your singing voice could sound like a cat in a Cuisinart and then you can run it through Auto-Tune and the end result will somehow become melodic.

Actually, fixing shitty singing is just one thing that Auto-Tune can do.  Another thing it can do is make your voice sound all computer-y.  The program has a setting that can give your voice a Kitt-like quality.  I’m not talking about Eartha Kitt either.  I’m talking about Kitt, the car from Knight Rider.  Auto-Tune can take your voice and make it sound all robotic like Kitt’s.  So you can sing a hook or whatever, and Auto-Tune will make that shit sound like Kitt after he took voice lessons from Pavarotti.  Or if you prefer the female equivalent, Auto-Tune can make you sound like a cross between Aretha Franklin and one of those automated answering service lady voices.

Auto-Tune is like the modern day talk box or vocoder.  It is possible that someone reading this is old enough to remember Peter Frampton.  If so, you surely remember the epic Frampton Comes Alive and that talking guitar thing he had going on.  Do you remember smoking a doobie on your beanbag chair in your bedroom, all alone, while your folks were out to dinner, when your Hi-Fi speakers said, in a weird robot-guitar voice:

Do you feeeeeel like I dooooooo?

Yes?  Do you remember sitting straight up and saying in wide-eyed amazement:

“Far out maaaaan, the guitar is talking!”

Of course you do.  Frampton was using a talk box, which involved running this tube type thing from the guitar (or the amp or something) into his mouth, and then using his mouth to “shape” the sounds that came out of the guitar.  Stevie Wonder actually happened across this technology first, which made this incredible once-in-a-lifetime convergence of FunkyTown and Sesame Street possible:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN_CIn7Z8rk%5D

fuck yeah!

So after the talk box came the vocoder, which any Kraftwerk fan is likely familiar with.  I’m not sure exactly how that one worked, but it accomplished the same thing:  cool robot voices!  The thing about the talk box and vocoder were that you had to actually work to implement them, there was some kind of labor involved.

Not so with Auto-Tune.  Auto-Tune is a behind the scenes adjustment. Auto-Tune was originally just a tool in a music producer’s arsenal, used in the studio to touch-up the smattering of “oops” notes that are bound to happen when no-talent teenage hacks sing pop songs.  No one fucked around with the computer-y voice effect until 1998, when Autotune played a vital role in the creation of the robo-Cher voice you have undoubtedly heard on her horrific 1998 comeback hit “Believe.”

DO YOU BELIEEEEVE IN LIFE AFTER LOOOOOVE?

Ugh.  Yeah, that piece of shit song.  (I hope it gets stuck in your head all day now!  Mwahahahaha!)  Her voice is all computer-y.  It’s Auto-Tune.

I could have lived with that song if it had been a single isolated abomination.  And I would have been positively thrilled if Daft Punk’s One More Time (a song I’m not ashamed to admit that I love) was the end of the road for Auto-Tune.

Alas, hip hop discovered Auto-Tune like two or three years ago.  And the barrage of dogshit music hasn’t stopped since.  I don’t even know the names of the artists who produce the songs or the names of the songs, and I’m not gonna bother finding out.  But popular music has been infiltrated by a shitload of songs that employ the same exact formula:  bad MC’ing surrounded by computer-y voices singing hooks. But not just any hooks.  Really stupid hooks sung by robots about cars and money and whatever.  Never before has the art of making pop music seemed more formulaic.  And a huge part of the formula is Auto-Tune.  I guess these bozos go into the studio and lay down tracks with their horrible voices and then have the engineer Auto-Tune the crap out of them.  Yuck.

Back in the day you had to hire Nate Dogg if you wanted a really badass sounding hook on your song.  Not anymore.  Had Auto-Tune existed in Biz Markie’s day, would we ever have been blessed with Just A Friend?  Would the Biz have opted to sing the hook in the voice of David Hasselhoff’s car? We can thank our lucky stars that he was never presented with that option.

And now I’ve finally gotten to the real reason for this blog entry!  An excuse to post Steve Porter’s work with Auto-Tune.  This guy is miles ahead of the hip hop producers.  Mr. Porter is a house music DJ/producer out of Boston who I’ve been a fan of for awhile.  I once had a healthy respect for him, but now I simply idolize him.

Without further ado:

[youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CztvSpKdCeY]

and

[youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWRyj5cHIQA]

and the pièce de résistance:

[youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exOxUAntx8I]

Thank you Steve Porter.  Thank you Auto-Tune.

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.