The challenging aspect of the setup is trying to balance my desire to spend time in California with the necessity of being in front of a computer that is not on US soil. The absurdity of not being able to play online poker on this laptop as I write from Santa Monica, but being able to do it 150 miles away, is rarely lost on me.
I like to play poker, and I need to put in hours to make a living, so it becomes frustrating to be separated from my profession on occasions when I want to spend time with family during the holidays, or when I need to find a new apartment with my girlfriend, or when I need to do a variety of errands that require me to be in LA.
Getting back to the advantageous aspect, it was not too difficult to justify a one-day getaway to my enclave in Rosarito Beach in order to play a full Sunday schedule on January 1st, 2012. I had already missed the action the week before on Christmas Day, and I generally can't stand missing Sundays, so I was champing at the bit to play some Sunday tournaments.
We had to be back on Monday, but we went down Saturday night anyway, New Year's Eve, and had a low-key night at home. We went to the hot tub on the property, overlooking the ocean on an extremely foggy night. Later, Sheila made delicious salmon and rice and string beans, and we were in bed before midnight.
I overslept slightly and didn't start grinding until 9AM (I usually like to start by 8:30AM, and sometimes as early as 6:30AM on Sundays), but 13-14 hours later I found myself at the final table of the Sunday Million, which has been the biggest Sunday tournament for years.
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| The screenshot the DOJ doesn't want you to see. |
There is absolutely no better way to start a new year than by final tabling the Sunday Million on New Year's Day. (We wound up chopping 7-handed, see below for more detail). If I had to write Shaniac: The Movie, I could not have scripted it better.
More broadly, it felt like a result that came from my dedication to the online grind, to play poker on days when poker pros are hungover and watching too much football, and an overall validation of the strange choices I have been forced to make in the past 7 months since the Dept. of Justice wedged PokerStars, and me, out of the United States.
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Some notes about the tournament:
- In the spirit of reporting the often sobering reality of my nice-looking tournament results, I'll break this one down for you: I had sold 60% of my action for the month of January, so I was playing for 40% of my cash, and the score made me about a $30K winner on the day after taking into account ~$5k in buyins. Which is still awesome, and nothing to sneeze at. But the other reality is that I had been on a solid 5-figure downswing to finish off 2011 (the reason I decided to sell a large chunk of January action to begin with).
So it's worth remembering that, for many MTT players, amazing results are often a relatively small part of the big picture, in which we are trying to apply a small but consistent edge and accumulate enough money to avoid going broke while playing all the big-buyin tournaments we have that edge in.
- Chopping 7-handed was a new one to me. In fact, in my seven-plus years playing online tournaments, hundreds of final tables and headsup encounters, I think I have chopped at most two times. Truly, I can't even think of one instance of chopping before this past Sunday, but I am leaving room for error in my memory.
It's not even a hard-and-fast rule, like Daniel Negreanu has on the issue. It just rarely comes up and, when it does, I decline to consider it. I can only remember one time recently when I even agreed to look at chop numbers (3-handed in the $8 2x turbo that runs at 10:45AM PST), then got so frustrated with the process and trying to figure out what my edge is vs. what my payout edge in should be in a chop, that I pretty quickly just said, "let's play."
It goes back to something an acquaintance told me in 2004,when he won a big online tournament. He said he didn't want to think about a chop because that would take him out of the zone he had been in up to that point, in which he was focused entirely on winning. I usually just apply that philosophy and it seems to work out well.
In this case though, I was down to 12BBs and the chip leader was on my direct left, playing well. Although I had a lot more experience and better results than my opponents, I am all too familiar with what can happen with 12BBs, no matter how significant your edge is, and I didn't feel I could compromise the utility of being able to lock up (40% of) $84K relative to the chance of busting 7th and getting (40% of) ] $31K.
If we had not have made a deal, there's no doubt the cosmic card distribution and actions of the players would have been different, but I did wind up losing AJ to A6 and then allin KK to QQ, with my opponent spiking a queen on the river, to take 7th place and miss my shot at the $20K that was left on the table for the winner.
- Maybe the most interesting side note to this whole thing is that it is my biggest score by a small margin (about 11 months ago, I won ~76K in the Sunday $109 rebuy) and that it shares a very peculiar similarity with the second-biggest score:
On both occasions, the result came exactly two weeks after I had quit a lengthy smoking habit. It's uncanny really, and corresponds with my belief that it takes two weeks for a serious scumbag smoker like I am to stop craving a cigarette in the morning and start functioning semi-normally day-to-day.
Last time, in Feburuary, I went out that same night and bought a pack of cigarettes to celebrate. This time, I am still trying to tough it out, even though I can feel the surge of craving rising in me now as I complete this blog entry...just like I could feel it surging on Sunday on occasions like when I won the crucial coinflip with less than 50 players left that gave me the chiplead to coast to the final table.
Smokers take note: I think two weeks is all it takes to detox and hit a 75K+ score on a Sunday.
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Here's wishing you and yours (and me) the best of luck in 2012. Happy New Year!