Matt out in 29th

Matt finished in 29th place which left him with a net profit of $20,000! Way to go Matt!

He gave me the details of a hand that he played really well just before his demise. With blinds of 2,500/5,000 a tight player with a huge stack (over 500,000) open raised to 13,000 from under the gun. Another player with a big stack who was fairly aggressive just called and Matt who was in the big blind with 130,000 chips found KK when he looked at his hand.

Let me start by saying I would reraise here 100% of the time. If it were up to me I would have reraised to 40,000, but for some reason Matt decided to just call. He said he thought he might be able to double up if he just called since there was no way anyone would put him on a big pocket pair.

The flop came down Q33 and first to act Matt led out for 25,000 (This is also different that what I would do - I would check raise here 100% of the time). The original raiser called and the other player made it 55,000 to go. Now Matt went to the tank. He stopped and thought for almost 5 minutes. Let me say that I would have moved all in here, but Matt said he just couldn't think of a way that he could have both other players beat. Sometimes it's hard to trust your reads, but Matt did, made a monster laydown and mucked his pocket kings.

At this point in the story I thought I wasn't going to get to find out what the other's had, but I was wrong! The original raiser moved all in, the other guy said "really?!? I have Aces. I have to call you." He called, turned up AA and lost to QQ!

Normally with those hands you'd expect all the money to go in preflop, but Matt got saved by the way it went down.

On the very next hand he went down the tubes after making what a positive person would say was a bold call (other people might use other words to describe it). A player with 70,000+ moved all in from middle position and thinking "that could be anything" Matt called him with 44. It turns out that "anything" was K5, a 5 came on the flop and that took Matt down to fumes. The next hand he was out.

Once again, way to go Matt! Thanks for the easy $600!

Matt on to Day 3 at the shooting star!

I am currently squirming with envy. Matt is on to Day 3 of a MAJOR tournament. He is down to 64,000 chips, which is well below average and put him in 33rd place with 36 players remaining. But he's in the money (guaranteed a $15,000 profit at this point when you factor in the bounties) and still has a shot.

Since this is a WPT event and the final 6 players will be on national TV, the tournament has shifted gears from full tables to 6 handed tables. At Matt's table there are two players who's names I know: Joe Sebock and Vivek Rajkumar.

Other players of note still in the tournament are: Hoyt Corkins, Paul Wasicka, Kathy Liebert, and Farzad Bonyadi (there are probably a few more world class players who I'm just not familiar with).

Here is the full list of payouts:

1 $1,025,500
2 $550,000
3 $291,500
4 $230,000
5 $180,000
6 $135,000
7 - 8 $90,000
9 - 10 $60,000
11 - 12 $40,000
13 - 18 $30,000
19 - 24 $25,000
25 - 30 $20,000
31 - 36 $15,000
37 - 45 $12,500

Play resumes today at noon. I'll let you know what happens.

Matt at the Shooting Star

Every March Bay 101, the largest of the Bay Area cardrooms, hosts a World Poker Tour stop called "The Shooting Star." This tournament has a $10,000 buy in and 50 of world's best players (the "stars") have a $5,000 bounty on their heads. If you bust one of these players you istantly get $5,000 and a T-Shrit that says "I busted So and So."

Coming off his glory at in Reno, my good friend Matt Lessinger collected a pile of money from his usual backers and entered this event. On Day 1 he busted Layne Flack (Who I busted once in the WSOP! We own your ass Flack!) and picked up one $5,000 bounty. They started the day with 20,000 chips and by the end of the day he was among the chip leaders with 108,000.

Today is day 2 (there was actually a Day 1A and 1B) and they are down to 54 players from a starting field of something like 400. Matt just picked up another bounty meaning he's already got his buy in back. He's a little short of average with about 90,000 chips and the blinds will be 1,200/2,400 when he comes back.

The tournament pays 45 spots with the edge of the money being $12,500 and first place being just over $1,000,000. I have 3% and I'm thinking about all the things I could do with $30,000. I also have Jake on the hook for a trip to the Royal Hideaway (A resort in Mexico where my wife and I had our honeymoon) if Matt actually wins. He has 10% and said we should all go to celebrate and I somehow got him to agree to spring. So that's an added bonus.

You can follow the action on pokerpages.com or cardplayer.com if you are so inclined and I'll let you know what happened when it's over.

Shifting gears I'm going to quickly respond to my sister's comment on my last post. She wrote: "Considering your last post, does that mean that your goal when gambling in Reno or Vegas is to get as crazy as possible for the maximum fun factor?"

Gambling is always more fun (in my opinion) when you are with a lot of people and you are drinking and acting stupid. We all know that we're going to lose in the long run playing craps and Pai Gow and black jack. The goal is to lose as little as possible and have as much fun as possible. You would think that would mean betting the minimum and drinking the maximum, but everyone has an amount they can wager where the get a little excitement when they win, but it's not devestating when they lose. That amount is not the minimum for me. Since I make best just about every day the amount I need to bet to get any excitment at all is relatively high - about $25 a hand (or a spin or whatever) on most casino games. For some people that would seem insane. For E.B. who plays at least $100 a hand, that amount would be boring. Before I go on any gambling trip I have a certain amount of money with me and that's the absolute max that I would ever lose but I usually have a plan to "go big" and try to generate a ton of comps or "go small" and make sure I don't lose very much. Reno was a go small kind of trip.

Setting Goals

I'm a believer in setting goals, even though I'm not so great at meeting those goals. I never finished college even though I have about 80% of a Berkeley mechanical engineering degree. I'm always at least 20 pounds overweight (I'm 6'5" tall and I carry it pretty well though - at least I think so). And I always seem to make it about 3/4 of the way to achieving the goals I mention on this blog (with all of that in mind, it's a minor miracle that I made it to Supernova Elite last year).

But that doesn't mean that I'm a failure. I'm really quite the opposite. And it doesn't mean that setting goals has been a waste of time for me. If I set a goal for myself I always try to achieve it and that trying in and of itself helps me be more successful that I would have been otherwise. I might not lose that 20 pounds, but I might lose 5 or 10 before I stop giving it my all. I might not play 100,000 hands in a month, but I'll end up playing 10,000 more than I would have otherwise.

Setting SPECIFIC poker goals helps keep things in perspective. It's not helpful to say "I'm going to play as much as I can and try to win as much as I can." On the other hand saying "I'm going to earn 15,000 points in the next five days and win $1,000 during that stretch" (which are my two goals for this week) is very constructive. If I win $1,000 four days in a row and then get killed and lose $3,000 on the next day it would be easy for me to think "ACK, I just had $3,000 more dollars yesterday," but now that I have this goal, I'll still be able to think positively about a week like that even if I get smoked on the last day.

Looking at it from another angle setting a five day goal will help me think long term. Most poker players tend to think about how much they are up or down for the day. It doesn't matter if they've won $1,000 ten days straight, they'll stay in a game they otherwise would have left to try to get even if they're down $100 for the day. No one would think "I've won each of the past few hours, but I have to get even for this hour." Splitting wins and losses into days is just as arbitrary, but for some reason it comes naturally. This tendency is something I'm constantly fighting and setting goals that are for longer than a day, but not as long as a month really seems to help keep me in the right mindset.

So I'm going to win at least $1,000 this week and play enough to earn 15,000 points. If I can do both of those things in four days I'll take the 5th day off, and if I've earned the points, but am not up $1,000 I'm going to keep playing until 7 pm on Friday or until I hit that goal too.

I'll let you know what happens.

A Result So Good It Made Me Sick!

As I'm sure you all know I occasionally sell part of my action in poker tournaments. But I also take other people's action from time to time.

This weekend my good friend Matt Lessinger took the short flight to Reno to play in the $3,000 buy in event at the Grand Sierra World Poker Challange and I invested $300 for 10% of the resulting win or loss.

The tournament kicked off with 118 entrants and a VERY strong field that contained at least a dozen of the top 100 tournament players in the world as well as many other accomplished players. At the end of day 1 they were down to 16 players and Matt was in 13th chip position with the edge of the money being 9th place which paid $7,500.

Happily Matt rallied, got back into the thick of things and ended up finishing in 5th place. While 1st place paid a whopping $130,000, 5th resulted in a net profit of just over $21,000, which meant $2,100 was headed my way!

When they were down to 7 players or so I got on the horn with my good friends E.B. and Jake (who were also lucky enough to have 10% of the action!) and we agreed to throw some clothes in our overnight bags and head to Reno ASAP. Since it was going to be a three and a half hour drive we knew we probably wouldn't catch the end of the tournament, but we also knew it would be fun to go gamble it up and celebrate with Matt whatever the final result ended up being.

We made it to Reno at around midnight and met up with Matt and another friend of ours (Cole) who made the trip with Matt. We then procedded to play a hodge podge of casino games which was anchored by a spirited craps session that involved as much yelling and dumb ass behavior as they will allow. Of course we were all sending down the booze as fast as the waitress would bring it to us and by 6 or so Jake and I had had enough and called it a night. I'm not quite sure when Matt broke down and went to sleep, but I know Cole was out until 9 and in classic E.B. style he played straight through the night and met us for brunch at noon.

After a splash of additional gambling it was time to pack up and head home. Jake in true man style took a flight directly to Vegas from Reno to meet his wife and some of her MBA classmates who were headed there at the same time to blow of some post finals steam. The rest of us were headed to the car to drive back to the bay area.

Desipite being up $2,100 from Matt and being good and drunk the night before I'd kept my negative expectation gambling in check and was actually ahead $20 as we were headed out the door. Of course someone had to go and drop a $20 bill on black at a roulette table and in a matter of about 6 milliseconds we all had $20-$50 on the table.

One roll turned into a few and after assorted wins and losses I found myself with the same $20. We all declared that the next spin would be the last and I slid a $5 chip out on to the number 16 (My birthday, my anniversery, and the day I proposed to my wife are all on the 16th of various months), and a $15 bet on red. And then...BANG - 16!!! 35 to 1 on $5 and even money on another $15!

With the little roulette splash and Matt's excellent result I picked up a very easy $2,300+ and had a nice 24 hour Reno trip. Actually it was a nice 21 hours and three hours of tourture when a hangover, a huge lunch, and some sever motion sickness collided! There's nothing like having to use the emergency puke box, and then puking more as you open the car door and more into a bush and then A LOT more 2 hours later on the side of the freeway. I think it's going to be about a week before I get into a car for any reason!

A Few SCOOP Satellites

Even though the SCOOP doesn't start until April 2nd, satellite tournaments with buy ins ranging from $1.50 to $500+ are going off around the clock.

Satellites are a big part of why I've done so well in the FTOPS and WCOOP as well as the big weekly Sunday tournaments. They create a field packed with weaker players who are out of their comfort zone.

If you run a $55 Satellite to a $530 tournament and get 100 entrants you can give away nine $530 tournament entries and one $230 cash prize. The players who enter that type of tournament probably feel comfortable playing tournaments with buy ins ranging from $20 to $200. But 9 of them are headed to a $530 tournament that they would never play in if they had to put up the money right out of their pocket.

Every single SCOOP tournament has dozens if not hundreds of satellites (maybe over 1,000 to one of the main events) so when that $530 SCOOP event goes off with 4,000 players, maybe 1,000 of them bought in directly. Those are the $530 players. Those are the people who can really play (for the most part). The other 3,000 are the ones that make the tournament so profitable.

I've put together a $15,000 bankroll for the SCOOP and as per usual I've collected some of that money from investors.

Mostly out of boredom, yesterday I decided to play a few smallish satellites to the medium stakes SCOOP events. I played an $11 with rebuys satellite to a $320 event, an $82 satellite to a $215 event, and a $64 satellite to a $320 event.

I came up one spot short in the $82 tournament, but I picked up a $30 cash prize so I got a little refund. Happily I made it to the end of the $11 with rebuys. The prize breakdown in this one was a little different. It was a small field and you had to finish in the top 2 to win the $320 seat. Places 3 and 4 paid $31 and place 5 paid $20. When we got down to 6 players I was in first place and had everyone covered by a significant margin. I could tell that they players I was up against were not good and were trying pretty hard to pick up those small cash prizes (a big mistake - you have to go for it when the top two spots are 10 times the edge of the money).

So I started moving all in on every single hand no matter what I had. Everyone folded something like 8 or 9 hands in a row and when someone finally did call I had a real hand and won. By the time we were down to three players I had twice as many chips as my opponents combined and easily finished in one of the top two spots.

These were pretty much bullshit tournaments and tomorrow I expect I'll play something with a little more spice. Maybe something where I have to put up $215 or $320 to win a $2,000+ seat.

Anyway, my $15,000 starting bankroll has gotten a mirco boost up to $15,163!

A Professional Play

I made a strong read in a hand that I played great today and I thought I'd share it with you since I know there are some budding players who read this blog.

I've moved back to playing a mix of $10/$20 and $15/$30 limit 6 handed games in the past 10 days or so and I've had some strong results. The advantages of playing $10/$20vs $5/$10 are pretty staggering. First of all at the higher stakes I generate points 40% faster! That is huge. Also the rake is pretty much the same, but the stakes are twice (or three times in the case of $15/$30) as big which neutralizes the house take to some degree. Of course the players are better, but lately it seems that many of the tough pros have either been playing bigger or smaller stakes. I haven't exactly been banging out $2,000 wins every other day like I did for a while last year, but I've had a few solid wins and no big losses.

Anyway I was in a $10/$20 game today, I got dealt AA in the cutoff and the player just in front of me raised it to $20. I three bet making it $30 to go and everyone folded to my lone opponent who just called. The flop came down 3 3 4 and my opponent checked and called my bet.

The turn was a great card - a Q. My opponent came out betting and I thought "Ah ha, he has a queen! That's probably KQ or QJ." I raised and my opponent just called. The river was a king and my opponent bet out again. I raised again and he reraised me.

This is the part where I played the hand well - I capped it. I figured if he had QQ or KK he would have reraised me before the flop instead of just calling my three bet, and if he had a three or 44 he would have check raised the turn instead of betting out and just calling. That covered all of the hands that could beat me and none of them were likely. On top of that it just felt like KQ which it was. Most players would have just called the three bet on the river. They'd think they were up against a three or a deceptively played full house, but I made the max.

It might not seem like a big deal to pick up another $20 in a pot that is already around $300, but it's huge. If I can make one more big bet every 500 hands and I'll make another $150 or so a day which is another $37,000 a year.

It's hard to trust your reads sometimes and I was really proud of myself for trusting mine in this hand.