tp's table talk

I went to the Charity Casino at the Ex last night, but after an hour of waiting, I decided to head home to take care of some laundry. Only a quarter of the names in front of me had been called and I didn’t expect much movement between 7:30 and 10:00. The room is not great, and is ridiculously smoky, as I have read elsewhere online. But it is a live game and only a ten minute walk from my office. I’m going to try to get out there a few hours earlier today when the list should be a little shorter as most people won’t have time to get there from work.

Well, you have to give Pacific Poker some credit. They have said that they will be making up for the missed Monty Memorial tournament by crediting all the entrants with $25 (the buy-in was $20) and offering to add $500 to the prize pool should we reschedule. So, essentially they are giving us a nearly $2000 freeroll to try to make up for missing the originally scheduled time. That goes a long way in my books and though I’m still frustrated that the tournament didn’t come off yesterday, this is suitable restitution and I will not be taking any special measures to boycott Pacific.

Now if only they’d been able to give us an adequate response last night when everyone was still trying to figure out what was going on then perhaps we could have given them full marks. As it is, many people made a special effort to attend the event and while it’s nice that they are trying to make it up to everyone, it’s still a mark against them.

I hit another milestone this evening, though it took longer to happen then I had hoped. My bankroll now sits at $3084 (US). The last grand took just over two months to achieve, mostly at the Party family 25PL tables. I had hoped to pull that jump in about half the time but with the combination of vacation and internet outages adding up to nearly 3-4 weeks, I suppose the pace is reasonable. Either way, I think this puts me in a reasonable shape to take a shot at the 5/10 tables at the CNE casino starting in a week. My bankroll works out to approximately 4K Canadian, so that gives me a solid 400BB to support myself in this reputedly high variance games.

I’m still holding on to my outside chance dream of hitting 10K Canadian by year end (7500 US). That’s going to take a bit of doing however, so instead I’m just going to focus on playing my best poker (and I feel that I’ve been shoring up my limit game recently) and hope the profit follows. Then again, I’m going to have to start thinking about when to make the next jump. Maybe playing the 50PL tables more regularly as well as dipping my toes into some of the 3/6 games out there.

When I got home from volleyball last night (1-1, for 6-2 on the season) I decided to sit down at the poker tables for a little bit after I washed all the sand off. Just a short session while I watched another episode of this year’s WSOP coverage (ep 8, the ?K seven card stud event). Managed to pull off a very nice little hit & run session when my pocket aces held up at a 2/4 Pacific table for a 26BB pot ($104 for those who don’t want to do the math). Biggest limit pot (by far) I’ve pulled and a happy $70 profit quick. Also managed to finish up 6BB at two 1/2 Pokerstars tables when I managed to bust AA with T6 from the big blind when I hit runner-runner straight. I just wouldn’t believe that he beat my flopped top pair after limped from the small blind. Oops.

It’s always nice to follow up a bad session with some solid cards. Monday night I got right back in the saddle at Pacific and posted a +17BB run at 2/4 in a little over an hour to bring my overall Pacific numbers back to the green (if only barely, and far too little for the amount of games I’ve played there).

I also two tabled (and eventually three tabled) 1/2 at Pokerstars. The clearing rate is 50% better than at .5/1, but I was worried that the better players at Stars compared to Party would cause me some difficulties. Not so. I managed a nice 15BB performance in a few hours. The CNE charity casino is coming in a few weeks and I’m trying to play more limit poker to prepare myself for the reportedly crazy games there. They only spread 5/10 and 10/20, so it’s a bit more than I’ve played for. But it’s well within my bankroll and I’ve read this games can be very lucrative (though very swing-y). I’m very much looking forward to it.

I was just going through the daily slate of blogs and over at College and Poker I read about a site he stumbled across (Poker Portal) that has links for just about every poker site under the sun, including many of the poker blogs out there. Unfortunately for my own ego, my blog was not listed. I will have to comfort myself with the fact that my webstats are hovering around the 90 daily visits mark for August, so while many of those probably come from me dropping by checking comments and posting, I probably more than five people who read this on a regular basis, regardless of what some cheesy tripod site might indicate.

Pauly, what does someone get when they have their pocket aces cracked by the Hilton sisters? On the river no less. Lost more than a buy-in worth at the 50PL table at Multi and it was a sign of the way my day was going to go.

For once I can lay my woes at the feet of bad cards. Nothing was holding up and I took a beating. I managed to claw my way back as the day wore on to post a small profit after the $125 Multi bonus was taken into account.

But then I decided to play a table of 2/4 at Pacific and 2 1/2 tables at Stars. I got slapped around pretty bad at the Pacific table and managed to throw good money after bad trying to get people to lay down their hands. I eventually recovered from a bad start at the Stars table, but managed to dump a full $100 bucks at Pacific, ruining any chance of a profitable day. This is the second weekend closer in a row where I posted a huge loss that was bearable only because of large bonus. And these bonuses were even on Party skins, where I’ve made a large chunk of my profit. Oh well, everyone is supposed to have bad runs. Hopefully these are some of mine.

Started in today on my new bonus at Multi Poker. I told myself I was going to stop chasing bonuses, but since it’s a Party skin I won’t be giving up any of my usual juicy games to work off the bonus.

Unfortunately my usual juicy games were a little tougher than usual. Actually, the games were normal but my play was substandard. I was struggling with my decisions and played impatiently when cards didn’t hit. I quickly went through 4 buy-ins at the 25PL tables.

So, for a change of pace I joined one of the daily $100 freerolls. The payout wasn’t great, but I figured it would be good practice. And it definitely was, even if the level of play wasn’t that high. I went from T2500 when the chip average was T10000 with 20 left in the tournament to heads up with nearly a 3-1 chip advantage.

The third hand heads-up was the last. I was in the small blind with 89o and I decide to limp and try to see the flop. My opponent obliges and the flop comes 2Q2. Check, check. Turn is a J. Check, check. The river is a T and my opponent quickly pushes all-in. I waste no time calling with my straight and he flips A2 for the flopped set played a little too slowly. Only $30 for first, but it’s always nice to beat a large field (241 in the case) in tournament play. If only I could contrive to get one of these final table finishes in a real tournament.

The later afternoon/evening went a bit better for me as I continued to run well on the Pacific 2/4 tables and I waited for a spot at the sole 50PL table. It was there that I managed to win my largest ever pot.

I was sitting with about $75 in the big blind. I’m dealt KK and five of the first six players limp into the pot. Then the seventh player raises to $4. It’s folded to me and I decide I want to make things simple and re-raise the pot ($17.50) . UTG calls my re-raise and everyone else folds. The flop comes perfect, Kxx rainbow. Only trouble now is how to get him to call me. The one thing I had noticed about this player was that he was very suspicious. If he thought you were bluffing, he would call you down. So, I wait about 20 seconds and throw $20 into the $43 pot. He pauses only a second before re-raising me another $20 and I nearly beat him into the pot with an all-in re-raise. He calls and shows 8c5c for second pair. No miracles for him and I rake $159, my biggest pot to date.

I’m slowly getting more comfortable at the 50PL tables, now if only they’d spread just a few more of them at once.

I forgot another funny incident from the game last night. At one point, shortly after midnight, the security guard for the building came by on his rounds and we asked him if he wanted to play.

“Wait, how much do you know about poker?” asks one of the other players, laughing.

“I am an experte,” he answers, with a bit of a French accent. Everyone laughs. “I play online,” he continues.

“What sites do you play?” I ask.

“Party and Pacific,” he replies. “I like Pacific. I just cashed out $2000 yesterday.” Suddenly we aren’t laughing quite so loud and we’re a bit glad that he’s on the job and can’t sit down with us (though I suppose that might have made for the better story). Still, I was drunk enough that I would have wanted to take a shot at anyone over the green – well, blue in our case – felt. Probably an even better reason to appreciate his dedication to his job, at least for that night.

It’s Friday night. It’s been two weeks. My ten two regular readers know what I’m talking about. Except it didn’t happen. With a lot of last minute bail outs, my bi-weekly home PLHE tournament didn’t happen this week. Not enough people, so I had to pull the plug. But one of the regulars was really jonesing for poker and kept pinging me on IM all afternoon. So, at 5:30 I made one last concerted effort to try to get enough to at least play a little dealer’s choice. In the end I could only line up four guys, but they were the hardest of the hardcore in our group, so I figured we could get a few hours of poker in before people decided to bail.

Instead, we had the most fun I’ve had at the poker table in a long time. Part of that may have been the beers that were flowing freely (often during the tournaments I’ll drink a couple beforehand while I wait for people to arrive and then a bunch afterwards, but I try to stay pretty sober during the actual tournament). Part of it may have been trying out some new games (we ran the gamut of WSOP event games with a few specialty dealer’s choice thrown in)

The most interesting hand of the night, by far, was an Omaha HiLo hand. I had AA27, triple suited if I recall correctly and I raised and was called by the three others. The flop came A55 and I was giddy. I call the flop bet in front of me and it’s called by one other to take it to three-way. The turn is a second ace. I’ve hit quads and there may not even be a qualifying low. I just called the opening bet (a mistake) and we were again three heading to the river. It came with the third five, which was potentially the best card I could have hoped for. I expected the guy behind me to have the case five after his previous, so I checked the bet to me. I realized that was a huge mistake when he simply called the single bet.

But here is where things got interested. I started moaning about not raising and the first guy in the pot said he would have re-raised. I said “Really? Well, I’ll bet a side-pot that I’ve got you beat.” He immediately agreed and re-raised me in the side pot. I re-raised him and asked how far he wanted to go and he pushed the rest of his chips into the middle. At this point I felt I may have been taking advantage and said we could just bet on the first $2 after his re-raise (we generally play .50-1.50 stakes). He was adamant that he wanted to play like this and then flipped his hand, declaring that he only needed one card. Of course he had the five. I told him I actually needed two cards and turned my aces. The stunned look on his face was classic. Thankfully he was satisfied with the way the hand turned out (unorthodox side-bet and all) and he bought right back in to continue the night. The other player in the regular hand had KK, which was certainly a reasonable call with the size of the pot (though I guess he should have expected at least one ace out there, in which case he was drawing dead, well, except to the low. Lord, there’s too much to think about in Omaha HiLo)

So, in the end it was a great night of beer, pizza and cards. I was the victor for the night, even after a brutal game of Murder By 7s early on (which we vowed we would never play again) It was a combination that it is difficult to beat, particularly with the great core of guys I have in my regular game. And it reminded us how much fun it could be to toss the cards without the constraints of a tournament. (Special curses go to Pauly for the Anaconda rules I kept reading about. We had a simpler version we tended to play but when I told them I read about some other rules online, we adopted something similar to the Blue Parrot version which we quickly dubbed Fuckedaconda. I leave it to the reader to fill in the details)

I’ve had this post half-written in my queue for the past couple days, but this is the first chance I’ve had to finish it off.

I haven’t played much at Pacific Poker recently. I still have a $100 bonus sitting there that requires a lot more play before I can withdraw it. I had a great run at the 2/4 HE tables when I started, but after giving much of it back in a string of losing sessions (courtesy of some extremely cold cards) I hadn’t visited in a while. Monday changed that when I stopped by for a little Omaha Hi action in my quest to master learn a new poker variant. A $20 profit in less than an hour at .5/1 reminded me of how crazy the fish can be.

Of course, that lead me to the $15+$1.50 Pacific 10K guaranteed NLHE tournament. Pacific holds one of these every night at 10 and I played a couple back when they were still giving a small overlay on them. Now they tend to get 700+ entrants so the overlay is gone, but the bad players remain.

After playing for one night, I was reminded of why I stopped playing these tournaments months ago (and why they are still tempting for all that)

My very first hand is dealt and the client freezes, leaving me unable to see any cards. But neither can I exit because that message may go through and I’ll lose my entry fee. For the first time since I started playing poker online over 6 months ago, I called support. I explained my problem and the CS rep told me they had just received a call from someone with the same problem, they said someone would be with me shortly and then put me on hold. For 20 minutes. Then someone comes on the line and tells me that I need to go in and stop the application in Task Manager (basically circumventing the regular exit procedure, a tactic of choice for all-in protection abusers) Then restart the client and I should be fine, if not, send them an email and they’ll refund my entry money. Then she hangs up. Of course, this has to be the worst “fix” I’ve ever heard of, but I don’t want to lose my entry fee, so I give it a shot.

That’s all well and good, and a restart gets me connected back to the tournament. But by that point we’re a few levels in and I’ve already lost more than 10% of my stack. And the limits are rising fast.

The structure for these tournaments are ridiculous. T800 to start, blinds going up every ten minutes. And not only do blinds go up that quickly, there’s a break 55 minutes in that takes the last 5 minutes of the 5th limit. That’s just ridiculous. Now, I might understand this when they were still giving an overlay on the tournament and they just want to get the tournament over quickly so that people head back to the ring games, but now that they are getting full entry fees, they could run the tournament at a more reasonable pace.

But even with all that nonsense, it’s still very tempting to play. The play is generally awful and there is potential to make the money (as long as you hit a few hands). Unfortunately, the small hit I took to my stack combined with the fact that blinds were already getting significant meant I had to play my whole tournament in “short-handed mode”. I managed to steal a few blinds and even doubled up to keep ahead of the blinds. At the 150/300 level with only T1350 chips UTG, I went all-in with 77. When it folded around to the big blind, I was feeling pretty good because he had just doubled up on the previous hand and had only a few hundred more in chips then I did. Unfortunately he decided to call with AT and hit two pair on the flop. And I was out 165 of 720. Not horrible, but still a ways from the money.

165 of 720 If I’d had an opportunity to play a few hands before I was in a short stack situation, I may have actually made the money. But my 77 was called down by AT in the big blind with myself UTG with T1350 at 150/300. The structure at these tournaments is awful, but so is the level of play, so it’s still a very tempting opportunity.

I feel a bit better now that I’ve aired my grievances. I’ve since been playing Pacific a bit more and have been having good success at the 2/4 HE tables. But I cannot help but hear the siren call of the 4-digit payday and horrible players of the Pacfic 10K guaranteed, despite all these issues.

Monday was a statutory holiday here in Canada, so since I’d gotten my chores taken care of earlier in the weekend, I was going to take advantage of the opportunity to play some cards and maybe blast through the 700 hands I needed to unlock my new $100 Party bonus.

I spend the early afternoon pounding the 25PL tables, but I just can’t seem to get it together and the cards certainly aren’t helping. So, after posting a smallish loss, I opted for a change of pace and decided it was time for me to learn a new game.

So, that’s how I found myself 3-tabling .5/1 limit Omaha Hi. I’ve been meaning to try the game out and with bonuses to work out, I figured I couldn’t lose too much. I had intended to play at Pokerstars, but when they didn’t have any limit tables going, I opened a couple at Party and one at Pacific. Unfortunately I was wrong about losing too much and managed to drop a decent chunk at Party in an hour or two. Made half of it back at the Pacific table, but in the end it was a nice change of pace. But it did whet my appetite for some more poker, so I decided to return to the tables after an early dinner. My plan was to open a couple 50PL tables and enter the nightly 10K guaranteed at Pacific (more on that in another post, maybe).

Now, generally I’ve been killing the 25PL tables at Party and I’ve read many bloggers that have been consistently beating those games up to 200NL. So, it’s probably well past time that I move up to try my hand at 50PL. I did venture there once before and got my ass handed to me as I adjusted to the different dollar amounts. Losing a $50 buy-in seems to hurt far more than twice as much as losing $25 for me, even though it is well within my bankroll. And the dollar amounts have become so second nature to me at $25 that I have a good feel for what certain sized bets mean. And even though intellectually I know just to cut all the bets at 50PL in half to read them, I don’t seem to have the same feel…yet. But I did have one read on Monday that I was proud of.

I have AKo UTG+1. Sometimes I limp with, sometimes I raise, this time I raise the pot. I get called in two places. I check the jack high flop and it’s checked around. The turn comes with another rag so I bet the pot, figuring there’s a decent chance my hand is good. I get called in one spot. Another rag on the river, but there is a straight chance out there. I’m still playing a bit too cautious at 50PL as I get used to the potential swings so I check. My opponent proceeds to raise the pot, $33 at this point, putting me virtually all-in. My first reaction is to fold but then I think for a second. If he had the J, he would have bet on the flop. And I just don’t believe he came into the pot with A-low and hit anything else. I realize there’s a very good chance I have him beat so I call and my AK holds up over his AQ for a decent sized pot. Nothing feels quite as good as analyzing a hand like this and coming up with the correct read.

Of course, this read was counteracted by a poor read on another table where I re-raised the made flush on the flopwith my two pair (I just couldn’t believe he’d seen the pre-flop raise with 2 low clubs to match the high club board). The poker gods bailed me out with the boat on the river, but that was a small favour they bestowed in a day full of cruel cards.

I’m up and down throughout the evening, but when I finish the Pacific tourney (I’ll talk about their support and structure in another post) I decide that’s it’s probably a good time to shut it down, hanging on to the 30 or 40 I’m up so far.
One of the tables is breaking and it’s my last hand before the blinds and it’s down to 3 handed. Button folds and I raise with K2 from the small blind. He throws a small re-raise in and I call. Flop comes K-high and I think I’m good. Through in a pot size bet, I get raised. For some reason I figure it for a steal from a big stack and re-raise all-in. He has AA and there goes $60.

On the other table on the very next hand; I limp with JJ and instead of the full table, only 2 others see the pot. The flop comes 3JJ rainbow. I let it run hoping for some kind of action but when the two-flush hits on the turn and it’s checked around to me, I throw a dollar in the pot just so there’s something to play with at the river, but both others fold. Neither of those hands was a bad beat per se, but they were not likely outcomes that can throw a man off his game.

99 on the very next hand and I’m tilting, though I don’t realize it quite yet. Pot bet on the rag flop, one caller. Turn is a K and I bet the pot again. I’m re-raised and somehow think the size of the raise (about 1/4 of the pot) justifies my call. He shows K9 and I’m down again. I can feel the wheels coming off at this point and disengage from the tables quickly. I even abandoned this post halfway through.

It’s too bad, as I was having a decent night testing the waters at the 50PL tables until those two hands lost me nearly $100. Combined with the losses earlier in the day in the 25PL and the money spent learning Omaha, even the $100 bonus at Party was not enough to make up for the day’s bleeding.

I’ll just need to get back on the horse again and try not to get bucked again..

Speaking of getting back on the horse, I was wondering if anyone plays, or has played, the NL games at Pokerstars? I’d love to be able to work on my bonus there, but the limit games are trying my patience and I’d like to be able to stick to the NL/PL games. If anyone has any experience there, particularly at the .25/.50 tables, I’d love to hear about the quality of play.

I got my dates confused for the monthly $3000 and $1500 freerolls at Intertops. Now, I would have been busy for this evening’s 9pm $1500, but I could definitely have played in the 3K at midnight yesterday. I just went with the unthinking assumption that it would be at midnight on the Sunday and 9 on the Monday like it was last month. Really should have thought to look a little closer. Oh well, at least I have the $100 bonus to work off at Party.

Saturday afternoon I got my internet back again (hopefully for good this time) so I was able to take advantage of the $100 reload at Empire. I then proceeded to play some of the poorest poker I’ve played in a long time. The cards were cold and I was impatient so I pushed second best more than once. But I was getting lucky. The combination of hungry fish and lucky rivers helped me to post an extra $136 for the 500+ hands it took me to unlock the bonus. And this was after being down $75 early.

The worst was when I pushed someone all-in with AQ on a KJxx board on a bluff. I’m called quickly and when I see no A or T on the river, I figure I’ve just donated a healthy chunk of change. Except that my A high was good enough to take the pot. He called me down with AT and the flush draw. Biggest pot I’ve ever won with only A-high.