Dark City

On the last hand of the final preliminary event of the 2009 WSOP, the $5K 6-handed event, I lost with AKs to French pop star Patrick Bruel's pair of tens.

This was shortly after dinner break, around 9PM. By 10 o'clock, I decided to drive home to Santa Monica despite having played three full days of poker and being exhausted. I had no real reason to go home, except to clean out the mailbox and take care of a couple errands, but I had a yen to spend a night or two in my own bed. Making the drive at midnight enabled one extra night and despite a fatigued, four-hour trek through the desert, it was worth it.

When I stopped by the Vegas rental apartment to pick up a couple of items for the drive, the living room looked barren, paper cups full of soda and remote controls decorating the area. The preliminary phase of the WSOP definitely felt over. Whatever wishes and dreams lived in that furnished sublet had now evaporated into the flat desert air.

Prior to the $5K event, I had my first and only cash of the 2009 WSOP event in the $3K "Triple Chance" event, which was added to the 2009 schedule as a superficial attempt to fill the absence left by the elimination of rebuy tournaments.

"Triple Chance" is basically a dumb gimmick that has nothing to do with rebuys and just allows players to start with 3k, 6k, or 9K chips, or to take the extra 6K chips whenever they feel like it. It seems clear to me that the best move 99% of the time is to just start with the full 9k, but many players experimented with different proportions of chip allotment. I generally think the gimmick, while nothing even close to a substitute for rebuys, did make for a better tournament, since it added an extra layer of strategy (however illusory) and that caused people to over-think things and basically to play worse.

After the first day of play, I had exactly 100K in chips and by the time we were near the money bubble the next day, I had well over 150K. After dinner on day two, I lost with AK to KK, which brought my stack down to the 50-60K range. I doubled up with JT vs A7 to a young, annoying player who celebrated at literally every street of the deal and then cringed when my ten hit the river. I couldn't even see the winning river card from the one-seat, but after watching his reaction, I knew I didn't have to get up from the table and instead counted my stack down.

I had 115K or so and two hands later I got it allin with AK vs the 77 of Jon Van Fleet, a famous internet player also known as "Apestyles." He won the coinflip, and I took 46th place for $9145. As I was collecting the piece of paper needed to claim my cash, the annoying kid approached his entourage on the rail and said, "at least I made a little bit more money" indicating the slight prize jump from 46th to 45th place.

***

I returned from California on July 2nd and mostly vegged out at my room at the Palms, where I will be staying until I am done with the $10K main event, over the following two days. They gave me a nice spacious room, and the bed is extremely comfortable. I saw Jay-Z perform at the theater here last night, my first time seeing one of my favorite MCs perform live, and it was a great show. So far this seems like a good spot for me to be during the main event.

***

The 2009 WSOP is still in effect, which means you can also find this blog at PokerTips.org.

Scrambling, Gambling

I finally made a day 2 this series in event #39, $1500 NL. In prior WSOPs, making day 2 usually meant you were in the money or at least close, but the increased starting stacks have created longer, more stretched-out events, so we were still 40-50 players out of the money when the second day began. Although I had a nice 60K starting stack to begin the day, I busted before the money (around 285th with 270 places paid) after losing two big hands to the heavyweight boxer Audley Harrison.

On the last level of play the night before, there was a hand where a guy raised and then got re-raised. The original raiser went into the tank for a while and then, in a burst of acute misplaced anger, turned over a pair of jacks and threw his cards in the muck so violently that one of them almost bounced off the felt and into my neck. He quickly calmed down and changed his tone to the extent that the rest of the players at the table could joke about the situation without fearing further outbursts, but his reaction to making a big-ish laydown of his own volition was bizarre and unpleasant nevertheless.

Meanwhile, I was chatting with a nice guy named Mark who was originally from the Bronx and owned an adult novelty business. "Dildos," he clarified. With just minutes left in the night, Mark re-raised the same guy who had mucked his jacks super-aggressively, and this time the guy decided to go allin with the same hand he had before, a pair of jacks. Mark had aces and called. The guy almost did the same violent-mucking thing as the time before, but instead regained his composure, placed his cards in front of his stack, and made some kind of "one time" speech. He spiked his jack on the flop and then did some kind of lame celebration. Given all the aspects of the situation, it was one of the worst beats imaginable.

Mark was left with very few chips and just a few hands remaining in the evening. He was visibly dejected, and I thought about people who think there such a thing as "karma" or "justice" in poker. After the hand, Mark said stuff like "I just wanted the guy to fold, that's why I re-raised so much." I told him, "Look, you didn't want him to fold, that was a great situation, and you just got very unlucky." He then looked at his 8K stack and facetiously said he shouldn't even bother coming back to play day 2.

I saw him on day 2, lingering outside the Rio Pavilion with his wife before play resumed, and we chatted. Ultimately, he managed to finish the tournament in 46th place for $9k while I, who came into the second day of the tournament with a strong stack, basically bubbled the event. That's actually part of what makes NL tournaments awesome.

Ray Foley, who won the event, was an extremely friendly guy from Michigan with whom I had played earlier on day 1. Congratulations to him and to Alex Jacob and Brandon Cantu, who finished 4th and 2nd respectively in the same event.

***

After busting event #39, I wasn't sure what to do. It's that typical, yet indescribable, WSOP feeling of directionless emptiness. I called my girlfriend Sheila, who is working on a TV production in Detroit and whom I have not seen since late May, and asked her to look into flights from Vegas to Detroit. It was 3PM and the only direct flight left at 4PM, the next one being some overlong connecting flight leaving at 11PM and arriving in Detroit at 9AM the next morning. All flights cost well over $1,000, making the option of visiting Sheila untenable.

While she was browsing internet travel sites and I was walking through the parking lot, she started to complain that her iPod was incomplete and she couldn't find a particular song from our shared library.

"You know, the Jay-Z song with 8Ball, where he talks about his friend's baby dying."

"'This Can't Be Life'? And it's Scarface, baby, not 8ball," I told her.

"I knew you'd know it," she said.

***

I got in my car and started to drive, briefly entertaining the idea of playing the remainder of the Sunday online tournaments, but it was too late to register for the FTP 750K, so I scrapped that plan and decided instead to play a single-table satellite in the Brasilia Room. I entered a $275 satellite and won a big pot right away with aces vs. someone who decided to bluff off his entire stack with jack-high on one of the first few hands.

Around this time, players began filtering into the room for the 5PM event, event #42, labeled the "Mixed Event," aka the 8-game event, a $2500 buyin. I have been playing a bit of low-stakes 8-game on PokerStars and sort of spontaneously decided that if I won the satellite, which I did, that I'd put myself into the event and take a shot.

I wasn't under the illusion that I had a huge edge in the event, but I thought I had at least a slightly positive expectation, considering that some segment of the field would be less skilled in more of the eight games than I was. And with the exception of a few spots, particularly in the hi/lo games, where I made mistakes, I felt pretty comfortable playing the format, which switched from game to game every eight hands. Each table played the same cycle at its own pace, so you could conceivably be at a table which was playing 2-7 TD and then get moved to a table that was in the middle of the PLO segment. It was definitely a change of pace from the vanilla NL tournaments that I've been grinding.

On the very first hand of the stud (high) portion at our table, I was dealt rolled-up aces, the very best starting hand in stud, and possibly the first time I was ever actually dealt rolled-up aces. I completed the bring-in and got action from former Survivor contestant and notorious poker world figure Jean-Robert Bellande. On fourth street, Bellande had open tens and bet, I raised. By seventh street, he made a straight to beat my unimproved trips.

I built my stack up to 17K (from 7500) at one point after the dinner break, but ultimately met my demise after being moved to one of the toughest tables I've ever played at, consisting of Doyle Brunson, Eugene Katchalov, Joe Tehan, Amnon Filippi, Bryan Devonshire, Nick Frangos, who complained constantly about various procedural aspects of the tournament, and some young "online player," who complained constantly about various structural aspects of the tournament.

Playing with Doyle is actually a pretty cool experience for all the obvious reasons. He's a living legend, an old man who who resembles a Chinatown-era John Huston and has been playing poker since before I was born, but who is extremely sharp and still one of the best poker players in the world, possessing an indefatigable ability to maintain his card skills despite how radically the game has evolved over the decades.

Even though the man seems at least halfway uninterested in most of the conversation and goings-on at the table, he is still very engaging when the topic interests him, and will come alive when, say, discussing the one strategic aspect of 2-7 TD (drawing or standing pat with a J7432 when your opponent draws one in front of you) from Super System 2 on which he differed with Daniel Negreanu, the author of the book's excellent lowball chapter.

I lost most of my stack on two hands in the limit hold 'em section, first to Brunson, who made two pair with KT to crack my A8 on a board that ran out AKx-T-Q, then to Tehan, whom I doubled up preflop A5s vs his KQs. Filippi busted me in the next round of 08.

***

The last four NL events are taking place Saturday through Tuesday, and I will probably play Day 1D of the $10K Main Event, which starts a week from Monday. In the downtime, I'll probably try to grind out more of those single tables, and hopefully Sheila will be able to visit me around July 4th.

***

This, and other WSOP blogs, can be found at PokerTips.org.

The Heat Is On

Thank you to all my friends and readers who inquired about my father's health: He was discharged from the hospital in Poughkeepsie earlier this week, and he is back in his NYC apartment doing fine. When I talked to him, he told me he was probably going to switch doctors to deal with his heart problems going forward, making a change from the Cardiologist Acquaintance whose house he was visiting when my father started to feel chest pain. Citing among other issues the fact that his cardiologist is semi-retired, my dad commented, "I thought maybe it was time to find a wartime consigliere."

My father was also not pleased at his Cardiologist Acquaintance for reporting that my father resisted the idea of going to the hospital for one or two hours, and he thinks that the doctor should have insisted in no uncertain terms on that course of action (although my father does admit that he himself didn't go out of his way to insist upon this either). In a letter to the doctors at Vassar Brothers Medical Center addressing some followup issues, my dad finished by writing:

Now, and this is the big point. I was led to understand by 2 people who had spoken with [Cardiologist Acquaintance] that I had somehow waited an hour before suggesting we get to the hospital. [The Vassar doctor in his report] writes that “The patient refused to go to the hospital.” The corollary to that would be [Cardiologist Acquaintance] insisted I get to the hospital the moment I felt discomfort.

Granted I was a house guest. Perhaps [Cardiologist Acquaintance] was in host mode, not doctor mode. The feeling I had I have never had prior. I hoped it would go away, yes. [Cardiologist Acquaintance] would have been happy to have it go away. His wife thought I had eaten too much sharp mustard. We talked about who to call. [Cardiologist Acquaintance] went to take a nap. I went outside to walk it off. Finally I asked him to make some calls. Then we drove to the E.R.

Had a cardiologist, even any physician, told me to get to the E.R., I would have gotten to the E.R. I sense there is a defensive posture here…in case there would have been an “if only we would have gotten to the hospital sooner” component to that day.

It all ended well. I am grateful. However, I never, ever refused to go to the hospital.

***

As for me and the World Series of Poker, I can vaguely remember building up a 20K stack in last Saturday's $1,500 NL event before three-bet bluffing off all my chips shortly before dinner with Jh9h on a board that contained 864 and one heart. I managed to turn 15 outs for what would have been an epic suckout, but I missed them all. After Monday's $2K NL event, in which I suffered my first bona fide cooler of the WSOP (QT vs 22 on a QT2-3 board), I took a trip back to my home in Santa Monica that coincided with a stopover by a childhood friend, now living in Thailand, who was heading from Bangkok to New York for a month.

Needless to say, it was nice to be home and breath in Pacific Ocean air, catch up with my friend and with the DVR, and going back to California during the WSOP is always a necessary respite that helps put things in perspective.

Even with four years' WSOP experience behind me, Vegas in June always seems to have a disorienting, depleting effect. I am amazed by the people who seem to have all their shit together during this time, who probably wake up every day and exercise, post daily blogs on their progress at the WSOP, and who seem to find that perfect balance between grinding poker, resting and indulging.

One of the paradoxical aspects of the WSOP, I have come to accept, is that you are surrounded by countless friends and acquaintances, many of whom you don't see often throughout the year, yet it is often logistically impossible to actually find time to gather with all the people who have said, "let's do dinner" or "don't be a stranger."

For the most part, people are very busy and focused on whatever poker agenda they have outlined for themselves and coordinating free time is a true task: You bust out of an event early in the day, and your natural instinct is to look for someone to hang out with. But many of your friends are still in the event you just busted, while most of the rest are planning on playing that day's 5PM event, are still in the previous day's event, or they are sleeping off a long night of poker or partying.

It somehow feels like bad form to text someone and say, "If you bust out, call me" and the few people with whom I am comfortable enough to send such messages wind up being the same few people I socialize with.

As a quasi-loner (and someone who doesn't really like large social groups, either), I don't particularly mind the need for solitary activity, but the distance between people in the poker world despite our geographical proximity during this time winds up being another slightly frustrating facet of the WSOP.

For my part, I am mostly just dissapointed in myself for not slipping into a well-balanced routine this summer despite being well aware of the need for it during the WSOP, and it feels like the sand in the WSOP hourglass is rapidly sliding. I haven't been overtaken by any overriding negative impulses, but I also haven't been living a particularly healthful existence--my diet is poor, I have been smoking again and too much, and I have hardly exercised, except for a couple of weak tennis sessions and the one day on Lake Mead.

For the first two-plus weeks here, the June Vegas weather was unseasonably mild, so I have no one but myself to blame for my level of sloth, whereas usually the oppressive heat is a major barrier in establishing a normal daily balance. Mostly, I am just disappointed in myself when I consider how much more vibrant I felt during the time period in February and March, when I was focused on improving my physical and mental health. I know that I'd be better poised to deal with the harsher aspects of the Series, would be better organized and happier, if I had stuck with it. Of course I should just get up tomorrow and do 30 minutes on the treadmill before going down to the Rio, but it never seems that simple in practice when I am in a dyspeptic mood.

Now the Vegas weather has finally broken, and it is 90+ degrees here every day and will probably get steadily hotter through the main event, which begins July 3rd. It's been a disappointing, hapless WSOP so far, but my only option remains to find a way to deal with it and try to emerge successful.

***

Check out my WSOP blogs this summer at PokerTips.

Week Two

After busting out of the $2,500 NL event on Friday June 5th, I played my first single-table of the trip in the Brasilia Room, a $1,030-buyin that paid out 10K in chips to one winner. We were 4- or 5-handed (and I had recouped $600 of the $1,030 from last longer bets) when I got a call from my brother in New York, who told me that our father was undergoing "emergency open heart surgery" to treat what we later found out was an aortic dissection.

The old man was visiting his cardiologist, socially, at the doctor's house near Poughkeepsie, NY and had started to feel chest pain. He resisted going to the hospital for an hour or two before finally acceding to the doctor's suggestion, and they drove to the Vassar Brothers Medical Center.

Despite the news, I believe I kept my focus fairly well, but I wound up taking third in the satellite after some unfortunate hands. A little while later, I met my friend Cory during his dinner break from the $2,500 (we made it to and from Fix, across the highway at the Bellagio, in perfect time), and during the meal I booked an 11:45PM Jet Blue flight to JFK.

When I got to New York City around 8AM on Saturday, I stopped at what was easily the shittiest Hertz outlet I've ever been to. The first car they tried to give me appeared to be stained with blood on the upholstery of the left door and the brakes made weird loud noises. The word I got was that my father had made it through surgery but it was still unknown whether or not he had a stroke during the procedure. I picked up my brother in Manhattan and we made the two-hour drive to Poughkeepsie, exhausted and uncertain.

When we got there, the nurse told us that our father seemed to be fine, was vaguely cognizant of our presence and could verbally identify the name of his cardiologist friend. I spent the night at the Holiday Inn Express while my brother visited an ex-girlfriend who lived nearby. By the next day, the anesthesia had worn off to the point where my father could converse with us, and he seemed in good enough shape that I felt comfortable leaving him to recover and my brother to be the man on the scene. I was back in Vegas by 10PM on Sunday.

***

Picking up where I left off in the last blog, the $2K NL tournament on June 4th was the only event where I built a stack and sustained it for a while. I took an early hit with AK vs KK and was down to less than half my starting stack after getting moved to a new table early in the second level. I doubled up on the last hand before the first break to 6K and pumped up to about 15K when it was time for dinner break. We ate at Pasta Mia, a serviceable, but far from great, Italian spot located in a strip mall a few blocks west on Flamingo.

I won a coinflip after dinner to get my stack somewhere in the 22-25K range and busted my stack shortly after with KQ vs AQ on a Q-high board in a 50K+ pot. I may have overplayed it.

On Monday, just after returning from the NYC hospital visit, I played the $2,500 6-handed event, which was basically the coolest tournament I had played yet. I nearly doubled my first stack during the first two levels, then lost it all back and more in level three after a series of coolers and lame spots. Shortly after the second break and getting moved to a new table, I busted my short stack to Andy Black.

I phoned it in for Tuesday' $1,500 pot-limit hold 'em event. Not sure why, I like PLHE tournaments. After having my stack crippled at the 25/50 level to 150 chips (getting it in with QT on an KQT board in a spot where bottom-two is almost never good), I tripled-up with A7s to get me to around 550 chips. Then, five people limped when it was my big blind, and I looked down at A6 and decided to "pot it" to 350.

While two of the limpers were making their decision, a middle-aged man in the three-seat with a heavy southern accent said, "You're fi'in to get picked off" in a strangely menacing way. Slightly taken aback, I just kind of smiled and asked, "Is that a threat?" The British guy on my let out a laugh. The man with the drawl responded without seeming to miss a beat, "It's an agreement." He was one of the two limpers who called my allin, and he busted me with KJ on a K77-xx board.

I was looking forward to today's event, the $1,500 shootout that was capped at a 1,000 players. In order to make the final table, you have to win two consecutive STTs on consecutive days (and the final table on the third). But before the first orbit was complete, I was making the long walk back to the parking lot. My table was great, very soft in my relatively limited observation with the exception of a couple of tough players and a "maybe" or two. The button started in the 10-seat and it was in the 7- or 8-seat when my bustout hand took place:

I was in the 1-seat and my neighbor in the 10-seat, a young-looking Asian guy who was mostly out of my line of site and whom I didn't have a read on, opened at 25/50 to 225. Some random guy two to my left (we'll call him "Randy"), who seemed like one of the softest spots at the table, had 225 in his hand, telegraphing his decision to call. I made it 725 with kings and when the man in between us, a CPA who has lived in Vegas for 30+ years, folded, Randy briefly rethought his decision but eventually reached back into his stack and called the 725 cold. Then, the small blind called the 725 cold! The original raiser called the 500 and with the pot at 2950, we saw a flop of 974 with two clubs. I had the Kc.

The SB and the Asian dude checked, and I bet 1800 of my remaining 3400-chip stack (I started the hand with 4125). This was actually a pretty big mistake in bet-sizing that I only recognized after I had dropped the chips in the middle. 1200-1500 would be way better here. Randy thought for a limited amount of time and went allin. The small blind pretended to agonize for several seconds but folded. The Asian guy didn't labor over the act for too long, but he showed his cards in frustration to Andy Black on his right before mucking. I called, and Randy revealed QcJc for an 8-out flush draw. He turned the flush.

I didn't hit my king-high flush draw, and, after taking my first legitimately bad beat of the 2009 WSOP, I made the way back to my car. Not long after, I talked to my father, who is recovering at the same hospital, for the first time since I left the East Coast and by his own account, he is "bored and miserable but otherwise fine."

***

This summer you can also check out my blog and others at PokerTips.org.

David Carradine, 1936-2009

I didn't even know there was a TV-show version of Shane and that David Carradine, who died yesterday in Thailand, played the title character. Although most of his acting work took place "before my time," I love him in Kill Bill and in this scene from Roadside Prophets, which is a great on-the-road movie that I think most readers of this blog would enjoy a lot:

Rambling, Gambling

The first event I played was the inaugural $1K “Stimulus” event, which began this past Saturday and Sunday and concluded yesterday (a day or two behind schedule) with Steve Sung, an excellent gambler and extremely nice guy, winning the bracelet and more than $750K.

For my part, I started off a bit unsteadily in the event, slightly distracted by the hoopla of the first huge-field event and underwhelmed by the prospect of having to look at poker players for the next five weeks, but I got into the groove in the middle of level 1 and worked the 3K starting stack into 15K by level 5 and then busted by level 6, just before dinner, after losing three medium sized pots on hands that I thought I played well.

The next day, Sunday, I spent playing my normal regimine of online poker tournaments and had a typical online Sunday with a few deep runs but no success. During the WSOP, online tournaments are usually totally off my radar, but Sunday is the one exception. I actually think the contrast between the live action and the online rhythm works well, and I believe I play relatively well when I play on Sundays during the WSOP, moreso than when I’m at home and the Sunday grind is just another aspect of the quotidian.

On Monday, I latched onto a group of friends who had a plan to spend the day on Lake Mead. We rented a speed boat and got onto the lake around 11:30AM. In my summer camp days, I used to be a fairly decent, although not competitive-level, waterskier, and I still love the sport immensely, even though I’ve only probably held a towrope in my hands twice since my teenage years, the last time being during the Aruba poker tournament I played in 2005 or 2006. It was exhausting then and even more this time. Turns out I was in better physical shape when I was 15 than I am now.

The boat, unfortunately, did not have much power, and it was impossible for me to get up on one ski, which is basically still like riding a bike. I had to revert to the “dropping” method, in which one gets up on two skis, then wiggles free from the second one in order to slalom (and after the run looks for the jettisoned ski on the lake). In five years out here, this was the first time I did any water sports on Lake Mead, and it was one of the most best things I have ever done on a WSOP day off. I plan on bringing out my Kidder waterski that has been collecting dust in my garage at home and to hopefully get out on the lake at least one or two more times before this series concludes.

It was fun as shit but physically taxing and the next day I was extremely sore. My friend Chris Bush, one of my boatmates who succesfully got up on two skis during his first-ever attempt, texted me during the next day’s $1,500 NL tournament to say, “I got muscles I never knew existed.” I replied, “I know, it even hurts when I muck.”

By the next day, the feeling in my limbs went from a sort of “good sore,” the type of minor muscle strain that serves as a reminder that you did positive activity the day before, to strict pain that was almost overbearing. Despite physical and mental exhaustion, I was unable to fall asleep due to the stiffness in my left leg that prevented me from fully extending it to stretch. I finally faded off by 3AM but woke up prematurely at 7:30AM and could not get back to sleep.

As a result, I was essentially hopeless to play well during the following day’s $1,500 six-handed event, which I had been really looking forward to playing. I got my money in with the nut flush draw on the turn, missed against two-pair, and made my way back to the apartment.

Today is a $2K NL event, my fourth event of the series and the biggest buyin so far. I feel ready to play and to avoid the potential psychological downfall that comes with playing a new tournament each day and busting out. It can be a real mindfuck, but if you maintain perspective and equanimity you can also find yourself with an edge over people who don’t deal with the stressers and defeatism well.

The weather has been unseasonably mild so far and a calming cloud cover has engulfed Vegas for the past two days. In contrast to my feeling on level 1 of the $1K event, I am content to be here, looking forward to playing as many tournaments as I can with a fresh mindset and doing healthy stuff like playing tennis, going to the movies, and waterskiing on my days off.

***

This entry also appears on my WSOP blog at PokerTips.org.

WSOP 2009

Note: This blog, and probably all of the entries I publish during this year's World Series of Poker, will also be appearing on PokerTips.org, and I will be linking them accordingly.

***

The first critical decision that every poker player needs to make before coming to the WSOP is where to stay during the five week poker marathon, and this bit of planning is actually somewhat tricky to sort out. It's also perennially interesting to see what options people choose.

One classic formation is the "WSOP house," in which a posse of poker playing friends piles into a furnished five-plus bedroom house in, say, Henderson that comes equipped with a swimming pool and a ping pong table.

When I participated in this type of venture for the 2006 World Series, there were five people in our house paying rent but, at any given time, there was also an average of five or more girlfriends, relatives and visiting acquaintances hanging around. Often, these McMansions will house eight or more young poker players and the number of guests multiplies accordingly.

As someone who values solitude and privacy to a large degree, living in this kind of setup turned out to be a mistake of some magnitude for me. I was good friends with my four other housemates (and most of their girlfriends and relatives too, for that matter), and we are all actually still good friends, but I do not have too many fond memories of that house or that summer. The idea of hosting a beer-pong tournament in the place I am staying and trying to relax during poker tournament downtime is loathsome in retrospect.

As a result, I am always amazed when someone informs me that they are voluntarily subjecting themselves to this type of arrangement. Even if I was a highly social, alcohol-consuming type of guy, I can't think of many actual advantages to living with this many people during a period of time when concentration, relaxation and settling into some kind of daily balance is of paramount importance. Similarly, I don't really like dining with large groups of people. I think that as the size of a group gets larger, the lowest common denominator gets lower: One becomes forced to settle on little lifestyle choices in order to accommodate everyone in the party.

Another popular housing option is to stay at a casino hotel/resort, and I know of a few young "online" players who have actually decided to stay at the Rio, where the WSOP is being held for the fifth year, for the duration of this poker odyssey. The Rio is offering a very affordable room rate this year, and although I haven't heard anyone express regrets about this choice yet, I am eager to see how that sentiment evolves as we get deeper into the Series.

I consider the Rio in particular to be an awful casino in terms of the way it's laid out and designed, and the sensation I get whenever I walk through the casino part (something I try to avoid--the actual tournaments are held in the convention center, a safe distance away), I am reminded far less of Ipanema and Copacabana than I am of a cruise ship in hell.

A friend of mine stayed at the Bellagio during the '07 and '08 Series, and even though it's a hotel where I enjoy staying, I think a five-week stretch there would be unhealthy for me in a variety of ways, even if I could afford it (his bill ventured well into five-figure territory both years). There are so many ways to become jaded, distracted, disheartened, and debauched during this Series, and staying at the Bellagio or a similarly nice luxury casino hotel/resort majorly increases the chances of my falling into one of those psychological pits, not to mention the actual casino pit, which destroys more lives and poker bankrolls than any other single "leak" I can think of.

Last year, I stayed with my friend Owen Crowe at an apartment in the Panorama Towers, a very short distance from the Rio itself and a popular high-rise residence for poker players in general. The lady we rented from was mostly weird and uptight, harboring a strange affinity for cheap drugstore air freshener and an unrealistic phobia of cigarette smoke and her ex-husband. The coffee machine in the apartment was some fancy bullshit contraption that was designed to grind the beans and brew the coffee at the press of a button, but which never worked correctly and instead left a mess of caked-on grinds and muddy water every time I attempted to use it. Most days, I got in the car (never a desirable option before consuming caffeine) and went to Starbucks before the tournament.

Our landlady also apparently didn't believe in curtains that properly covered the windows, and the rooms high up in the sky were constantly affected by sunlight early in the morning, preventing even one good night of sleep. Crowe, a much deeper sleeper than I am, made the final table of a prelim event and made the final two tables of the main event for a very profitable summer, while I managed to score tiny cashes in two small events, a terrible WSOP result. Also, despite having relatively few suicidal thoughts in general, I hated the isolated way the balcony in our Panorama condo was constructed, and whenever I was out there smoking, I had to resist nearly constant thoughts of jumping onto the bus depot that our apartment overlooked.

As a result of the Panorama's proximity to the Bellagio and the Strip, there was also this artificial, nagging desire to do something and a feeling of emptiness whenever it turned out there wasn't really anything worth doing.

Here now, in my fifth year in Vegas, I am finally content with the apartment I secured, again with Crowe, who is one of the few people I can get along with for extended periods of living and traveling together. We are in one of Las Vegas' generic gated communities, 15 minutes northwest of the Rio. Critically, the place is properly equipped as a "vacation rental" with plenty of utensils, paper products, a simple Mr. Coffee machine (there are even two mason jars filled with coffee filters), a reliable wireless internet connection and a good cable-TV hookup.

The twenty minute drive to the Rio each day presents a good opportunity to clear my head, listen to music in my car, and there is a bagel place on the way that compares favorably to some of the New York spots I remember fondly. The management company we rented from is efficient and responsive, and the overall vibe here is far more stress-free (so far) than any of my previous housing experiences at the WSOP.

I have a singular goal for this year's WSOP--to make money--and I think this setup gives me the best shot of obtaining that goal.

All that said, there is a long way to go. Something weird happens to time at the World Series of Poker--it becomes unnaturally compressed--and after five days in town and only having played two events, it already feels like I've been here for several weeks. Still, there is a uniquely energized feeling that I am overcome by each year here, and it has totally erased the apathetic, wan feelings towards the WSOP that I was dealing with during May.

Tomorrow is the $1,500 six-handed NL event, my third opportunity to accomplish my goal for this summer, and even if I bust out on day one like I did during the first two events, I will enjoy the bagel with cream cheese that I munch on during the ride down to the Rio.

Wu Artifcats

I've been getting into Shyheim's records lately. You can buy his 1999 release Manchild on iTunes, and the harder-to-find early albums like AKA the Rugged Child (released in 1994, when he was either 14 or 15) and The Lost Generation are findable with a little bit of Googling. He's a great lyricist and has a storytelling style that incorporates an attention to detail in a way that stands out while seeming offhanded. The production on the records is mostly excellent and you can hear his voice changing from album to album, which is kind of a cool oddity.

Anyway, while scratching around for Shyheim stuff on You Tube, I found these pre-Wu Tang videos by RZA and GZA, which some of you might know but I had never seen before.

According to this entry on Wikipedia, RZA went to jail shortly after this Prince Rakeem EP came out, which might have influenced WTC's eventual sound. Look how young and stoned he appears here:



Here's "Come Do Me," the track from GZA's pre-36 Chambers album Words from the Genius. I can't quite put my finger on what the quality and style of this song and video remind me of, besides maybe New Jack City and eighth grade. In any case, it seems like it was released just before the crest of some evolutionary wave in hip-hop:



Here's the awesome title track from Manchild that started this little digital age archaeological dig:



There's a video for the song, too, but it's censored and choppy and has a weird acoustic quality:

My Own Personal Blog

John August wrote this article, Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur, more than three years ago, and it is still completely pertinent to the current crop of casual writing. August articulates in excellent detail why writers--whether bloggers, letter writers or editors of major periodicals--should take care in what they write and how they write it.

He identifies the same basic thoughts that pass through my mind when I read a poorly organized rant or a piece of sloppy, half-assed expression from someone trying to market his persona as a poker player or trying to sell his coaching services or a subscription to the poker site he is affiliated with. Those thoughts are similar to how baffled (and usually irked) I am when I reach the voicemail of a friend of mine who is conducting business of some kind--any kind--and the outgoing message is something cutesy or indecipherable.

In cases where a poker blogger is criticized for something he wrote, the author's stock reply is usually something like, "Well, it's my own personal blog, I can write whatever I want in it!" Well, yes, sure, but not really.

August outlines five aspects--presentation, accuracy, consistency, accountability, and peer standards--that separate amateurs from professionals and describes why the difference between an amateur and a professional has almost nothing to do with getting paid and much more to do with the fact that a person has undertaken the task of writing to begin with.

He writes, "...in the age of Google, everything you’ve ever written, even that snarky comment you left on the message board, is linked back to you...If you feel like writing 1500 words about your cat in your blog, go for it. I’m just asking you, pleading with you, to spellcheck. Mr. Whiskers deserves it. Tuck in your virtual shirt and take even the frivolous stuff seriously."

I highly recommend this piece to any and every poker player who has a blogspot account and occasionally presses the "publish post" button and to anyone in any field who chooses to represent himself in print or online at any point in his life (so, basically, to everyone).

***

There hasn't been much else worth writing about around here. FTOPS has been underway for almost a week and despite some nearly promising results--a cash in the $1K last night, another in last week's Stud8 event, and some kind of deepish run in the Mini-FTOPS $10RB over the weekend--nothing has gelled yet. For better and worse, richer and poorer, a lot of the juiciest action takes place between now and Sunday.

Matt Woodward, EPT Final Table

Matt Woodward is among the final eight players at the EPT Grand Final, second in chips to Dag Mikkelsen, and the only American at the final table of one of the most prestigious events on the live tournament circuit. They're playing for a life-changing $3M USD (with a minimum $225K locked up) when the game resumes tomorrow in Monte Carlo.

I guess I blew it when writing the entry for the GCC by pairing it with an entry for Get Crunk himself. Or maybe doing it that way helped light the proverbial fire under Woodrow's ass (he helped me with some of the details about the GCC). Or, really, it had zero effect whatsoever, and Woodward, on the heels of a nice run at the LAPC, is "due."

Anyway, although I don't know Matt too well, my experiences with him (including a recent meal at Nobu in the Bahamas) have been positive, and he's a clear "root" from my end. Good luck, dude.

Poker Term of the Day, 5/1/09

Matt Savage.

The California State Poker Championship starts today at Commerce.

Poker Term of the Day, 4/30/09

Full Tilt Down?

I got a call the other day from a company that runs focus groups in Manhattan saying that I had been selected to possibly participate in a focus group about Full Tilt Poker and that the compensation would be $200 "deposited into [my] Full Tilt account." I thought it was kind of weird overall, but the conversation ended anyway when I told the lady I don't live in NYC anymore.

Ironically (or appropriately? Who knows anymore), the last time I participated in a focus group was when I was transitioning into becoming a full time poker player, and the guy running the group asked about our interests, and I told him I played poker, and he said, "Have you been at any of those TV final tables?" And I said, "Not yet."

Poker Term of the Day, 4/29/09

Ride It Out.

I got in touch with my tennis coach today finally. Apparently he was holed up for about five days, but other than that he seems fine. Looking forward to getting back onto the courts sometime in the next week and hoping the wrist is functional.

Poker Term of the Day, 4/28/09; 'Show & Prove' by Big Daddy Kane and Posse

Meh.

I know because George Clinton said so that "an attitude is all you need to rise and walk away," but it's still hard to change your life. This turns out to be the case even when you're motivated and have built a strong support system around yourself to do it. It's just so common for old behavior patterns to creep back into your life, to fall into familiar ruts.

A month ago, despite some superficial chaos in my life, things were going well: I had abandoned a lifelong love affair with weed and replaced it with a therapy regimen that included consulting a psychiatrist who specialized in uniting chemically imbalanced people with the correct chemicals.

He told me that Wellbutrin wouldn't work so well with the recreational drugs I was doing, and, shortly after, I took his advice on the matter as well as a referral to another therapist whose specialty was talking to substance abusers.

In the absence of an eighth of weed a day, I had a lot of extra mental and physical energy and fell into a regular exercise routine and started updating this blog more regularly. I took a session with the trainer at my gym and started making a more concerted effort to organize my workouts. I was taking a tennis lesson once a week and trying to get onto the courts at least one or two more hours per week. I quit cigarettes (again), and I was ready to embrace a lifestyle that centered around cardiovascular efficiency and lots of fresh air.

Then I went to Foxwoods, spent some time in New York City around Passover, and that's when my routine started to falter. I had injured my wrist the day before leaving for New York, so hitting the courts with my NYC tennis friend Kiki was out of the question even if the weather hadn't mostly sucked. The injury also prevented me from doing normal exercise shit like pushups and other upper-body strength training.

I went straight to Vegas from NYC and got into the gym during only one of the four days I spent at the Wynn. By the time I left Vegas, I had a severe head cold that rendered me useless for the brief period of time I spent in Santa Monica resting before having to return to Vegas for the Bellagio $25K.

I aggressively rooted-out the head cold with some help from my friend at the Whole Foods vitamin department, but the stale, overly-conditioned air at the Bellagio fostered a vestigial reminder in my throat each morning that I was a little sick. My wrist still hurt, so serious exercise was out of the question, but I substituted that with a stretching routine and a swim in the cold-pools at the Bellagio each morning.

Yet, by the time I left Vegas, I was buying packs of Camels again.

When I got back to LA, my tennis coach was nowhere to be found, and now he's essentially AWOL, probably dealing with substance issues of his own.

My wrist still hurt when I got home, so I found an orthopedist. Over the phone, the woman told me that the x-rays would cost about $100 and that since I was paying with cash, they'd try to keep the consultation fee "on the low end" of $200-$500 and that cash customers also got a 20% discount. The x-ray revealed nothing, the physician's assistant told me that I should just give the injury more time to heal, and the bill came to more than $450 total, firmly in the "middle" of that $200-$500 range. What about the 20% discount? Oh, that's included in the price already.

I smoked pot over the weekend here at home, and I hated almost every minute of it. I felt like a slurring, babbling buffoon and spent most of my high time marveling at how much training I must have put my mind through in order to adapt to smoking strong weed all day every day for more than 10 years.

So, it's a new day, and I'm feeling alright, but I also still have the remainder of a pack of cigarettes that I bought yesterday after going three days without nicotine, and my tennis coach--part of the foundation of my lifestyle change--is still missing. All in all, it's enough to make me want to smoke crack, at least in the Beck sense.

***

Seeing this video recently--for the first time since before the You Tube era (I honestly can't remember how people shared videos with each other before You Tube)--has put me in a good mood. Hopefully Adam Heimlich is out there somewhere today enjoying this:

Poker Term of The Day, 4/27/09

Monte Carlo.

The EPT Grand Final starts tomorrow, and I kinda wish I was there.

Poker Term of The Day, 4/26/09

Last of the Mohicans.

Poker Term of the Day, 4/25/09

We Play This Game We Wait for F*ing Cocktail.

Scotty Nguyen is at another enormous final table, the $25K WPT championship that plays out this evening starting at 5PM PST.

Excerpts from an IM conversation with my friend Cory Albertson, in which we tried to determine some truths about the nature of Scotty's personality:

Cory: alcoholic luckbox asshole? genius? some of both?
Shane: yeah all of that, he's a character; he has a mystical aspect to him also
Shane: and maybe all of it is hiding a deep rooted inner pain
Cory: could def see that...like a lot.

Poker Term of the Day, 4/24/09

One Time.

GTFO!

Poker Term of the Day, 4/23/09

In The Hunt.

Good luck to Owen, Eugene, Marco and Christian.

Bellagio $25K Conclusion

My third and final day of play at the Bellagio $25K WPT Championship was even more fucked up than day two, and my swings were even more insane.

Early in the day, at the 1200/2400 level, I bumped up to 300K. During the next level at 1500/3K, I picked up a bunch of good hands, ran a crazy but successful bluff against Vivek Rajkumar, sucked out twice, vs. Matt Graham and Beth Shak respectively, and ended the level with almost 700K in chips. By the end of the next level, after missing a draw vs. Quinn Do's set, losing a close hand vs. a young British player named Javed Abrahams, and not properly adjusting to being card-dead, I was down to 300K. Near the end of the next level, 3k/6k, I was busted.

***

Sammy Farha was moved to my table sometime during the 2k/4k level; it was my first time playing with him, and he was basically a lot of fun to play with, as suave and charming as one might expect. The table was also filled out by David Kim and, briefly, Steve Brecher. For a moment or two, we had some fun talking about why there's no mainstream sponsorship in poker and about how Brecher was involved in computer programming at UCLA a solid seven years before I was born: "So, like, they had computers back then?"

"Well, they had one," Brecher quipped in his deadpan way.

"Sammy," I asked, "How much is Lacoste paying you to wear that hat?" Sammy just gave his trademark wry smile underneath his Lacoste baseball cap.

"Shit," I said, "By now you should be sponsored by Nike...Air Sammy...No, wait, better yet, Air Farha!" David Kim let out a hearty laugh. "And Phil Ivey ought to be the face of American Express."

Then I told Sammy that I wanted to come work for him next after I quit poker, and he said, "Well first I gotta get the job as Dealer Supervisor."

"Perfect," I decided, "I'll be Assistant Dealer Supervisor."

While this was going on, I was playing too loose on my shorter stack, which had dipped just below 200K. An orbit later, as I was rebounding and had built my stack back up near the 250K mark, the crucial hand that would have restored my tournament health was played:

I raised a pair of jacks UTG and Sammy, two players behind me, said "re-raise." He threw out the 17K to call and another 30K or so for the re-raise.

While I was waiting for the action to come back to me (and quite sure that I would wind up putting Sammy allin and most likely with the best hand), the overzealous dealer screwed up some aspect of the raise-take-in-the-chips procedure by bringing the 6K big blind into the center of the pot and then taking 6K out of my stack and then Sammy's, making it as unclear as it possible which player had to call what raise size while Abrahams, in the big blind, was still deciding what to do.

Farha, the would-be Dealer Supervisor, started giving the dealer a hard time and was totally correct. I got frustrated too, and in that instant I had a sinking premonition that after the dealing debacle was resolved, I was going to wind up getting a bunch of chips in the middle with the best hand yet losing.

Sure enough, the action was eventually folded back to me, and I said, "OK, Sammy, I'm allin."

Sammy, who will usually not fold a hand once he has touched his chips, much less put in a re-raise, called my allin without any further contemplation.

"I got a pair of jacks, Sammy, can you beat that?"

"Of course I can't beat that," he replied in his perfectly-toned accent, "But I'm gonna try," and he tabled a pair of eights. Before I knew it, the flop was dealt and Sammy hit his set, the hand was over, and I was paying him the 134K he had in his stack, leaving me with around 130K chips. Winning would have put me back up into solid 400K territory.

As soon as I paid off Farha, Yevgeniy Timoshenko, a young Ukrainian-American online poker superstar who was sitting on my direct left, did something which got under my skin and represents my number one pet peeve about online players in live tournaments: the way they deal with ascertaining chip counts.

"Sorry," he said, "but how much do you have left now?" Fuck, go screw yourself, I thought. But instead, I just frustratedly splayed my remaining chips out in front of me and said, "I dunno, what, 130K or so?" There was no reason for him to ask me how many chips I had at that point, as it was information he didn't need until he was going to be involved in a hand with me.

Several hands later Quinn Do called my raise out of the big blind when I opened with AA, and he put me allin for my remaining 85K stack on a flop that contained two spades. He had something like 87ss and spiked his flush on the river to bust me.

***

Meanwhile, I wound up getting interviewed twice during the day by female poker reporters, and for a decent change of pace, I got to speak a little about my evolving relationship with marijuana instead of entirely discussing dumb poker shit.

The first interview was with Lora Leviev, who is the newest poker media reporter on the scene, doing interviews for the new Poker Battle website. This was after the 1200/2400 level. Her first question was about the "holiday" 4/20, which was the day before:



Two levels later, after going up to 700K and back down to 300K, Amanda Leatherman grabbed me for an interview on break and we covered some of the same topics:

WPT break interview.