Sunday Million Result

Sometime around 2004, my usual Sunday activities--going to Central Park, brunch, the movies--were supplanted by a complete dedication to sitting in front of the computer and gambling. Sunday has always been the highest-volume, highest-value day for online poker players, at least for tournament players. As the years have gone by, Sunday has just gotten busier and more juicy with the sites adding more high-buyin, high-value tournaments for "regulars" to play.

Back in '04, though, a grinder might have started his day at 4:30PM EST with the Sunday Million (which was, and still is, the largest and most elusive of all Sunday tournaments) and been done whenever he busted from the 7:30PM $109 rebuy. If memory serves, it was the only regularly scheduled $109 rebuy on PokerStars at the time. These days, there are at least two of those rebuys per day, and the "Sunday grind" begins at 10AM PST and stretches well into the evening, commonly 10-12 hours, and that's often before a player has even come close to making serious money (the serious money finishes don't start popping up until about 11PM or midnight on the West Coast for the most part). The money you can win or lose on any given Sunday is also considerably higher in 2010 than in 2004.

At the end of the summer this year, my steadfast devotion to the Sunday Grind took a dramatic turn, and for a host of reasons, including the nagging awareness that my steadfast devotion to the online tournament grind contributed to the demise of my relationship, I was almost totally uninterested in sitting in front of my computer in search of the big Sunday score.

Gradually, on Sundays when I had no plans in the outside world, I would play one or a few of the bigger tournaments, approaching it more like a recreational player taking a shot as opposed to a professional trying to maximize his time and equity. This approach is pure anathema to an online tournament grinder, and when I told my friend David this past Sunday that I was thinking about one-tabling the Sunday Million (as opposed to multi-tabling as many tournaments as I could play well), he openly mocked the idea and said it "sounds like the worst use of time ever."

I told him I wasn't interested in maximizing my time in the sense he meant, that I used to grind tournaments on Sunday "like it was temple" but that it just wasn't in me anymore. And I guess I took his rebuke as a direct challenge--about 11 hours after registering for the Sunday Million at 1:30PM PST, I wound up finishing in 6th place for a much needed $50K score.

But how much did you lose? Fifty thousand dollars sounds like a lot of money, but when you're a broke tournament player, it isn't. Without getting into the gory details of my finances, the most important function of hitting the score was that it enabled me to pay back a lot of debts to people who had helped support me over the years when I was down and out.

It's a strange but touching aspect of the poker tribe: for the most part, poker players do not let each other go hungry. More illustratively, while people in the non-poker world might reluctantly give a broke friend a $100 loan and fixate on it until the friendship is ruined, it is not uncommon for one poker player to advance a five-figure, interest-free loan to his friend, confident that the player will turn his luck around and pay back the debt eventually but also aware of the other possibility.

A flurry of transfers followed my finish, to a variety of people who had helped me tremendously during my bad run without ever stressing me about it, and each repayment was a little monkey off my back. I even owed one friend money for buying me the laptop from which I played. My problems were far from solved (I'm still favoring the idea of transitioning into some other kind of occupation and being more of a recreational poker player), but for the first time in several months I had some breathing room, a slight reprieve from the loserish feeling embedded in being stone cold broke.

I hadn't eaten, or drank much water, since before the tournament started that day, so I drove to the diner to sit down and eat a nice cheeseburger. Before leaving my car, I was overcome by all of it. Not just the generic luck needed to hit a nice cash in an enormous (8,000+ entry) poker tournament at what seemed like the 11th Hour, but how lucky I am to know people in the poker community who have been there for me in my darkest days, year in and year out, and for no apparent reason. I doubt I can ever fully describe how appreciative I am for them.

127 Hours of Thanksgiving

I had almost got sucked into couchland and ordered food from the diner last night when I decided instead to leave the apartment and see 127 Hours. It turned out to be the perfect entertainment choice for the eve of Thanksgiving. I have enjoyed the majority of Danny Boyle's movies, and early in this film, there's a nice reference to 28 Days Later, in which the sight of a jet plane passing overhead represents the exact opposite of what it did in the zombie-apocalypse thriller: helplessness instead of hopefulness.

I expected him to tell the story of Aron Ralston's adventure in a way that would keep me interested despite my knowing the ending, but I had no idea how succinctly the movie would nail a bunch of really tricky themes, or themes that happen to resonate deeply with me. The main character finds himself trapped in a rock, alone and on the verge of an inevitably slow and lonely death. He doesn't want to go out like that, though, and, for seemingly the first time in his headstrong existence, he is forced to think about how the subconscious, often selfish choices he made seem to have consigned him to this fate.

Stuck inside the rock, Ralston has the mental space to reminisce, hallucinate and contemplate on the core elements of what he believes and how he operates. He reflects on the role solitude played in his life relative to companionship; his individuality vs. his place in a community; his appreciation, or lack thereof, for the people whose calls he wish he had returned; his regret for spurning the love of a woman who just wanted to be let inside his world; his more immediate regret for not leaving a note telling anyone where he was going, even though it would have previously been out-of-character.

I related to Ralston's story for a couple reasons, and a good basis for "giving thanks" is to be thankful that you're not stuck in a rock today. Like Ralston, I was born into this world with plenty of comfort and privilege, and I don't often forget it. I am constantly grateful for where I live and the opportunities that I have had, and I am very thankful just to have one shot on this earth.

Also like Ralston, I am in a deep, dark chasm, and it feels like it was created mostly of my own design, however inadvertently. What might have started three years ago as a standard kind of slump or rut has steadily fractured into what now looks like a bottomless pit of failure. Whatever I was building towards (or thought I was building towards) during the first few years of my poker career has steadily unraveled, and I am objectively very disappointed in myself for the choices I made.

There are too many nuances and subtleties to the story to give it justice in a blog post, and there are also a couple simple facets that tell the bulk of the story more plainly: Six years ago, when I was 27 years old, I was embarking on two wonderful and unexpected journeys in my life--becoming a professional poker player and, after one extremely fortuitous night in December of 2004, meeting a woman who loved me and appreciated me for exactly who I was. My first adult career and my first adult love.

Well, I am now coming to the end of my third consecutive losing year in poker, and the relationship is also over, and I know that if I had handled my life more responsibly, I would not be presented with the shambles of an existence that was very promising not too long ago. I know what did me in, and it was not a lack of passion, hard work, or intelligence, but rather a lack of organization for too long and, in many cases, a flippant disregard for an important detail or too. I took a lot for granted.

I've listened to enough Curtis Mayfield to know that all I can do now is pick myself up, ride it out, keep on moving. Figure out a way to revive my poker career or a way to find a new, more rewarding career. There is no surrender and no retreat. I also can't beat myself up over it too much--some of the elements of my downfall were out of my control, rooted in chance, logistics and the infamous path created by the "best intentions."

And although it is a somewhat lonely Thanksgiving for me, I really am grateful for the California sun shining out the window, my health, my family, my friends and acquaintances, and a million other little things. For that matter, I am even thankful for the failures I endured and the mistakes I made, because I got to experience plenty of the good before the bad.

"U Should Know Better" by Robyn and Snoop Dogg

Just heard this one on the radio; seemed worth $1.29 and worth sharing:

"You Only Live Once" by the Strokes

Great song, great video, too. I thought this would be a huge hit when it came out.



"Twenty ways to see the world/twenty ways to start a fight."

Grinder to the Core

"I knew the Grinder when that name still meant something," Gene Todd is fond of saying.

Indeed, Michael "The Grinder" Mizrachi was a legend before his time, one of the original 100/200 LHE players on PokerStars, one of the earliest and most memorable WPT winners. I remember Mike Matusow agreeing in laughter when I described Grinder's play: He always raises, and he always has it. I also remember asserting to Keith "The Camel" Hawkins in 2007 that Grinder was among the best tournament players around, alongside his peers JC Tran and Nam Le. Keith and I made a small prop bet, with Keith taking JC's results vs. Grinder's for a year.


Well, The Camel won the bet, but The Grinder is in the midst of making poker history by book-ending the 2010 WSOP, having won the inaugural $50K 8-game championship that started the Series and now making the final table of the famous $10,000 main event, which concludes this weekend.

By the time I met Michael, sometime in 2005, I was already friendly with his brothers Eric and Rob. I was quickly disabused of the impression that might have been left after their rowdy performance on Mike's appearance at the LAPC final table earlier that year. It was Grinder vs. Haralabos "Bob" Voulgaris, and they were a study in contrasts. Bob, the staid playwright and sports bettor decked out in a suit that he bought for the occasion. Michael, the brash-seeming, meathead-looking dude who, in those days, was often seen wearing a hat that said, "The Grinder: I Am a Machine" and rolled around with an entourage of family and friends from Florida, sometimes in an RV.

But it turned out that he was no meathead, rather one of the most sincere and warm people I have met on the poker circuit: Someone who can smile just as broadly in the midst of life crises that would destroy weaker men as he does after winning an enormous WSOP event; the type of person who pays tribute to the loyalty he maintains for his roots and his family by requesting the Israel national anthem be played during his bracelet ceremony; someone who could wear a hat saying, "The Grinder: I Am a Machine" with the perfect mix of irony and bravado.

I didn't bother to look up payouts and chip-counts, because it doesn't matter if Michael wins this thing--he has cemented a level of poker heroism with this year's 2010 WSOP that few, if any, will match.

But, man, I do hope he wins.