Cheap Thrills

The Time Has Come

2006-09-19T01:41:00.000-04:00

Well, we are safely arrived in Santa Monica, and have been here exactly two weeks since yesterday. Moving was kinda tough -- driving a moving truck over the Rockies was particularly scary -- but we're here, and hopefully this willl be our last cross-country move. I will be consulting for my former company for the next several months, then . . . who knows. I'm tempted to write about how fun it is being back in California, how big L.A. seems compared to anywhere I've ever lived before, how psyched I am to get back into surfing . . . but none of that has anything to do with poker.

So I feel the time has come for me to announce that this blog is on indefinite hiatus. My poker playing had been on hiatus for a while now, partly due to the financial stress of our move, but also partly because poker is just not as big a part of my life as it was in the first two years of this blog.

I'm certainly not giving up poker. I love the game and plan to play regularly for the rest of my life. I'll just no longer be posting about it on a frequent basis.

Nor am I going to take down this blog. For one thing, I still get a kick out of going through the archives and reading my more naive 2004 self. But I also think I'll be posting here now and then -- B and I still plan to visit Las Vegas regularly, especially now that we're so much closer to it, and sooner or later we'll be hitting the Commerce Casino and the other L.A. card rooms. I always felt my trip reports were my best posts, so I'll still write a few of those a year. Maybe with the wonders of RSS, some of you might actually read them.

The poker blogosphere is a wonderful thing -- I'm happy to have been a small part of it, and grateful to the founding bloggers who commented and encouraged me in my first nervous weeks. While I won't be posting much, I'll remain an avid reader, so keep the quality posts coming!

Loadin' Up the Wagon

2006-08-28T09:12:00.000-04:00

As I type up this post, the laptop is one of the few things in our apartment that is not in a box. We go get the rental moving truck tomorrow, spend the day loading it up, and then we leave for Santa Monica on Wednesday. We will arrive on Saturday, get all moved in Sunday, and then we plan to spend Labor Day at the beach!

Our last few weeks in Minneapolis have been really hectic. Two weekends ago I was in Indianapolis for work (GenCon), then last weekend I was in Montreal for a friend's wedding, then this last week at work was exhausting, as I tried to get several projects at work finished, squeeze in a couple fantasy football drafts, attend a very nice farewell barbeque, and box up everything we own.

So poker has been on the back burner.

But as Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I keep reminding ourselves, we're hoping that this will be our last big, cross-country move. We're gonna settle down to be fun-loving Californians, complete with regular visits to Vegas and those crazy L.A. card rooms.

OK, back to the boxes . . .

Texas Hold'em Gumball Machine

2006-08-06T17:09:00.000-04:00

Saw this in the window of a candy store at the Mall of America today:

I love that is says "Let It Ride" at the base.

Mrs. Cheap Thrills found us an apartment in Santa Monica this weekend. We head out on August 29th. . . .

The Perfect Poker Gift

2006-07-29T22:36:00.000-04:00

We've all seen the poker-related junk that retailers have been hawking for the past 2 years. The most recent example to really make me take notice is a store at the Rosedale Mall called the World Poker Store (it's like a subliminal rhyme). It's filled with poker tables, poker chip sets, poker books and CDs, poker clothing, etc. And it's always empty. It almost makes me feel guilty -- like maybe, as someone who loves poker, I should be supporting my local poker-related businesses. But I already have a poker table, three poker chip sets, plenty of decks of cards (including Kem cards), a poker gremlin, a Scotty Nguyen bobblehead, Tommy Angelo's CD of poker songs, and a rather large library of poker books. What else could I possibly need?

I mention this because recently my buddy Campbool got married, and one of his good friends gave him the perfect poker gift: a stake.

Just a little background here: Campbool actually met his bride-to-be at the poker night we used to host back in Providence. Yes, I can proudly say that they met over my poker table. And at the wedding they even had a few poker-y touches, such as decks of cards and chocolate poker chips in the out-of-town gift bags. For their honeymoon, they went to Vegas, and at Campbool's bachelor party, they sure as hell played some poker.

Campbool being in New England and me being in Minneapolis, I missed the bachelor party, but I heard about. Campbool's good friend Sue (he is actually male, yes it is kinda like the Johnny Cash song) has been very into online poker for the last several years -- he makes more from online poker than I do from my regular job (although that's not saying all that much, heh heh). Anyway, for a wedding present Sue gave Campbool $400, with some stipulations. Campbool was only allowed to use the money to buy into a live WSOP satellite in Vegas, or to play $10/$20 limit Hold'em. If he won anything, he had to use the first $100 winning to buy his new wife a gift. Beyond $100, Campbool had to split his winnings with Sue.

So cool.

The way their honeymoon plans worked out, a WSOP satellite wasn't really an option, so Campbool looked for a $10/$20 game. This was a fairly big deal for him, since he'd only played live casino poker a few times before (one of those occasions was $3/$6 at the Mirage last October with me).

So how did it turn out? Well, Campbool stayed at the Bellagio, and it ended up being a lot harder to find a $10/$20 game (or an $8/$16 game, as the Bellagio spreads), than it would have been to find a lower-stakes game. So he headed over the my favorite poker room in Vegas, the one at the Mirage. He actually sat down with $560 rather than just $400, cause like me he likes to have more than 25 big bets in a live game.

And then he went up $350! Freaking cool. He said that many of the people at his table were there for the WSOP -- having won satellites online, or come to Vegas that weekend specifically to play in a $1500 event or just to watch -- and we speculated that the WSOP is a good weekend for cash-game poker, just cause you have a lower proportion of regular grinders and a higher propertion of poker-playing tourists, whatever their skill level.

Campbool of course did not sustain the insane win rate he set the first day, and ended the honeymoon up $170 after some serious swings. To my mind, that he rose out those swings for a win, having fun the whole time at stakes he wasn't used to, is the coolest part of the whole thing. As per Sue's terms, Campbool's lovely bride went shopping with the first hundred, $100, and Campbool now owes Sue $35.

The $170 is great, but I gotta think the experience is more valuable. Now Campbool's got the confidence of having won at a higher limit than he might have ever played at otherwise. That's what all the guys in Vegas do, right? Well, at least the impression that I get is that between a lot of the regulars it is "Dude, you're smart but broke, here's some cash, go make me and you some money and then remember that you owe me a favor." Well, Sue gave a gift instead, and I can't think of a better one for a poker player.

OK, so now everyone knows what to get me this Christmas, right? :-)

The Dread of Running Short

2006-07-29T21:00:00.000-04:00

When I play online, I always sit down with 23 big bets. There's no tipping or drinks to buy, and more cash is just a couple clicks away. But live play is different.

When Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I go the Canterbury, she usually plays $2/$4 and sits down with $100 -- that's 25 big bets. I usually play $3/$6 and sit down with $200 -- that's 33 big bets, and she's made fun of me for it in the past, but the truth is I like to have even more on hand. Leave it to Tommy Angelo to explain this feeling better than I ever could.

California Here We Come

2006-07-18T21:16:00.000-04:00

So the big news that I alluded to in my last post is that we are moving to Los Angeles at the end of August. Mrs. Cheap Thrills has been offered a really great job in Santa Monica, and she's gonna fly out there in a couple weeks to find us a place to live.

I know many people have mixed feelings about L.A., and yeah, traffic and smog are not fun, but B and I are incredibly thrilled to be moving back to California. A quick recap of our moving around the country:

-B's from NYC, I'm from Philly. We met in college in upstate NY.
-In summer 1997, one year outta college, B gets a good job in San Diego and we move out there for 3 very fun years.
-In summer 2000, we move back east to Providence, RI, so that B can get her PhD.
-In summer 2005, B graduates and gets a job in Minneapolis, so we move again.

And here I am following her again. What can I say, she's worth it.

We are kinda bummed to be leaving Minneapolis so soon. We never really thought we'd be here permanently, but we thought it'd be 2 or 3 years at least. And Minneapolis is really fantastic city (with a helluva poker room). I can honestly say that I could live here for the rest of my life and be quite happy, and I can't say that about a lot of cities. I also would've liked to stay at my current job a while longer. Working on board games is fun.

But moving back to California is basically a dream come true. We didn't realize just how much we loved the ocean, the sun, the palm trees, and California's unique culture until we left San Diego. I can't wait to surf again.

And we will be less than a 4-hour drive to Vegas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For the next few weeks, however, poker is going on to the back burner. We've got all the financial headaches of a cross-country move, coupled with my impending unemployment. I'm pretty much scared money right now. It feels a lot like last summer!

Oh well, I'll still be able to watch High Stakes Poker, read about the WSOP, and all that. And as soon as I'm bringing home a steady paycheck again, B and I are gonna make that drive across the desert to celebrate.

Plus, in my last post I talked about how my game was in a rut. Well, there's no cure for stasis like a really huge change, right?

Stasis

2006-07-15T12:48:00.000-04:00

I'm on a temporary break from poker, both online and live. It's a rough time of year to do this, because all the WSOP coverage on the Internet makes me want to play. A lot.

But the truth is that I have been treading water for about 6 months. No incredibly bad losing streak, no variance kicking me in the junk I've just been playing mediocre, break-even poker for a long while now. I hate to use the term break-even, because losing players always say they're breaking even, but my online bankroll really has been fluctuating around the same point, plus or minus about $100, for most of this year. If stasis = death in poker, I am not a healthy man.

A lot of this is a function of my job. When I started this blog in April 2004, I was a freelance book editor working from home. But then we moved to Minneapolis and I got a "real" job. And as I've said before, this 8-hours-a-day stuff is rough!

When I play nowadays I tend to alternate between two approaches to online poker. The first is playing for fun, where I play tournaments (and am actually doing better than I used to at those) or play very loose-aggressive in cash games, and if I drop a buy-in I tell myself it was worth the fun. The second is when I decide to play for a night or two in serious mode, where I grind myself back to even. I rarely chase bonuses anymore. That doesn't really bother me, but the really bad thing is that I haven't challenged myself, I haven't set goals or tried higher limits (I'm still putzing around at $2/$4 online), and I haven't been studying my game.

So I tried to tell myself, OK self, you don't have the time to be as devoted to online poker as you once were. But you love the Canterbury. You should concentrate on improving your live game.

But then I had several losing sessions at $4/$8. This all culminated 2 weeks ago when, on July 3rd, Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I headed to the Canterbury for a day of races, followed by poker and fireworks. I stepped down to $3/$6 hoping it would boost my confidence. And then I dropped $200. This puts me squarely in the red at the Canterbury. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

We couldn't hit a single race all day, which probably put me on minor tilt. And I drank my share of beer, which didn't help. And I played kinda like a maniac. But the thing is, I used to be able to drink beer, play kinda loose, and yet never really worry that $3/$6 was -EV for me.

So I've decided that I have lost a certain something, poker-wise.

I want to get it back. And the silver lining to all this is that I am confident I will get it back. But right now, and for at least the next 6 weeks or so, there is something that's going to get in the way of poker. That'll be the subject of my next post.

Pressure Poker

2006-07-10T20:41:00.000-04:00

Doubleas's book, Pressure Poker, arrived today. I probably don't need to tell anyone who reads this here blog that doubleas knows his stuff, but there are a couple other reasons I'm psyched about this book.

First, it's been a while since I seriously read a poker strategy book, so this should do me good. Second, I've got a fairly large library of poker books, but I wonder how much of the advice in them (aside from the basics) is still relevant online, post-boom. Just reading the TOC, this book feels "current."

Hope to be back with a more detailed review soon.

HSP QotW

2006-06-27T22:38:00.000-04:00

Cheap Thrills used to boast a little feature called the Vince Van Patten Quote of the Week. I no longer have the mental fortitude to carefully dissect two hours of VVP's musings, looking for the tiny gem among all the fool's gold. But I was watching High Stakes Poker tonight and Sammy Farha had one line that was so good I knew I had to blog it. So I present you with the High Stakes Poker Quote of the Week.

With Jx suited, Sammy threatens to bet blind preflop - but pulls his chips back at the last second. Jennifer Harman jokingly calls him a chicken. Flopping a flush draw, he jokes back, then makes a (5k? 10k?) bet into a $20,000 pot. Then he tops it off with:

Don't ever call me chicken. Never ever. You know why? Because I'm drinking.

I am going to steal this line next time I am drunk at a home game (if I can remember it). Also, I want to see a heads-up battle between Farha and Scotty Nguyen :-)

High Stakes Poker - Best Ep yet

2006-06-25T01:36:00.000-04:00

OK, just gotta say that I watched this week's (the 3rd of the second season?) episode of High Stakes Poker, and it was the best ep I've seen so far. (It aired Monday the 19th but I had DVRed it.) Without giving too much away to anyone who hasn't seen it, it had:

-Some of the funniest commentary from Gabe Kaplan yet, and he didn't even have Phill Hellmuth to work with. (No offense to Norm Chad, but I wish Gabe was still involved with the World Series. I watched him host a couple of the World Series back when the film quality was awful, and he did a fine job.)
-Daniel Negreanu talking like a gansta.
-Lots of fun trash talk between Negreanu and Mike Matusow.
-Mike Matusow committing a breach of poker etiquette, Antonion Esfandiari calling him on it, and Mike actually apologizing. The pros argue about these things too.

This is the best poker show on TV, and this was the coolest ep so far.

He Looks into Your Soul!

2006-06-24T00:16:00.000-04:00

OK, I'm in a $20 + $2 tournament on Full Tilt. This chat occured on the 3rd freaking hand and just cracked me up:

Dealer: thedoubleupkid raises to 165
Dealer: snbrdsummit folds
Dealer: sbpats36 raises to 665
Dealer: Lucky37556 folds
Dealer: ajc9725 folds
Dealer: thedoubleupkid has 15 seconds left to act
thedoubleupkid: 10 10 good
Dealer: thedoubleupkid folds
Dealer: Uncalled bet of 500 returned to sbpats36
Dealer: sbpats36 mucks
Dealer: sbpats36 wins the pot (405)
Dealer: Hand #737906247
sbpats36: who had TT?
thedoubleupkid: u
sbpats36: ok
thedoubleupkid: 9's maybe

I know, posting ridiculous chat is so 2004. What can I say, I'm old school :-)

Fun Players

2006-06-21T23:54:00.000-04:00

I've been playing many more multi-table tournaments lately than I usually do. I'm not doing particularly well in them, but I'm enjoying them much more than I ever have. I was going to devote a post to this phenomenon, and I still might, but I got sidetracked by a funny quote I just read. I've been reading Deadman's Poker and Deadman's Bluff, two fictional mystery novels set in the world of high-stakes poker (I became aware of these books via fellow bloggers).

Anyway, in the second one, Deadman's Bluff, an Amarillo Slim-like character says (when asked about the chip leader in the "World Poker Showdown"):

Being the chip leader doesn't mean much. . . . Neither does playing in a tournament. People who play in tournaments for a living are what gamblers call fun players. When they're not playing, they're singing in the church choir or playing volleyball at the YMCA.

This just struck me funny, cause it captures a feeling I've sometimes expressed in this here blog (no offense to anyone who sings in a church choir or plays volleyball regularly). Shit, I'm definitely a "fun player," but something about cash game poker lets me feel like a badass for a while. Tourneys ain't got that. But I've been having fun with them.

High Stakes Poker Season 2

2006-06-11T01:40:00.000-04:00

You know how if you're multitabling, the flop you want on one table always appears on another? Well tonight the flops I wanted were coming up on High Stakes Poker. A bit frustrating but kinda neat. What a good show.

My only compaint is that those cameras covered in blankets behind the players look like some kinda bad 60s sci-fi robot monsters.

Victorious B II

2006-06-10T00:28:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I haven't blogged in forever. I believe there is a club I can join.

But this week I have news. I have often referred to B as the tournament guru of the Cheap Thrills household. And yet, the other night when she snagged first place in a $5 Stud-8 tournmanent, she tells me that it is her first multi-table tournament win. The short-hand phrase for what I was thinking is WTF!? B's won a ton more sit-n-gos than I've ever played. She says that yes she has won multi-table sit-n-gos, and free bar tourneys (see the previous Victorious B post), but she has never won an online, multi-table tournament. I think she may be splitting hairs but that won't stop me from saying,

Congratulations B!

Oh, yeah, B plays with my account (Cottonmouth) on Full Tilt. You've been warned.

Opening Day at the Canterbury

2006-05-09T22:10:00.000-04:00

So Mrs. Cheap Thrills was out of town this weekend. Usually when left to my own devices I drink too much beer and/or play too much online poker. This weekend was a little different.

My birthday was last week, and I got an iPod. Yes, I am a few years late in realizing that these things are pretty darn cool. However, I found myself spending a lot of time organizing the hell of out of my collection of 5000+ songs, and when the weekend rolled around I was determined to get away from the computer and out of the house.

So Saturday I went down to the Canterbury for the opening day of racing season. It was also Kentucky Derby day. I figured the poker room would be packed, but I was wrong. I arrived at 1:30 and there was open seating for $3/$6 and $4/$8. But it was too nice outside, so I went out and watched the races. Placed about $20 in bets that went nowhere: I enjoy the ponies but boy does it feel -EV to bet 'em. Oh well. I had a very nice time just sitting in the sun, listening to music, and sipping a beer. (Miller Lite -- I realize I'm as heavy as I've ever been -- I blame my first Minnesota winter -- so I'm on a diet). Definitely gotta get down to the track a lot this summer. Mrs. Cheap Thrills had taken the camera with her on her trip, or else I would've snapped some photos.

By 3:30 the grandstand was in the shade, and it was getting just a bit unpleasantly windy. Plus I thought the poker room might fill up aftere the Kentucky Derby ran at 5pm. So I placed $10 on my Kentucky Derby pick (#17, Lawyer Ron).

To my suprise there was still open seating for $4/$8. I sat down and won my first hand with a set of 2s.

I kinda wanted to listen to my iPod as I played, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. For one thing I was worried I'd miss some part of the action, but mostly I just felt like it would be rude. Maybe as I get used to wearing the headphones they'll feel less conspicous.

Unfortunately, the session did not go all that well, and I lost $140. Not so bad for $4/$8, but certainly not good. I can't even complain about the cards -- I got my share of good hands, but I also misplayed several. Notably I made a couple "good laydowns" that in retrospect I think were mistakes. I think I still have a lot more hesitation in tossing the chips out there at $4/$8 that I do at $3/$6, which annoys me because rationally I'm not that worried about the extra money. But irrationally I guess $4/$8 still bothers the cheapass in me. Gotta work on that.

The other factor is that my live game suffers when I haven't played in a while. But Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I are set to head back down in 2 weeks for the first Friday night race session, which I'm sure will be followed by poker. So hopefully I'll get my mojo back soon enough.

Low-Limit Badugi in Vegas!

2006-05-02T15:50:00.000-04:00

I may have to stay at Treasure Island next time I'm in Vegas. Check it out:

Take a seat at any of TIs eight live action tables 24 hours a day. While testing your skills on the felt you can enjoy the sports action on the seven widescreen televisions.

The poker room has eight (8) Holdem size tables with live games offering:
... BADUGI: $3 & $6 Limit (Badugi is a four-card triple-draw low-ball game requiring four different suits and the Ace is the lowest card the best hand is 4, 3, 2, Ace with four different suits)

FEATURE GAME:
The feature game of the TI Poker Room is the TANGERINE MIXER - $3 & $6 Limit (rotate through the games of Holdem, Omaha High, and Crazy Pineapple)

Heck, I am just as excited about the mixed game as I am about the Badugi! Great to see another casino bucking the all-hold'em-all-the-time trend. Now if they'd just throw Stud-8 into that mixed game . . .

Update (later that evening . . . ): Upon a reread of my own post, I realize that TI's one-line summary of Badugi is pretty funny -- "Oh yeah, I totally understand the game now." ;-)

High Stakes Poker on GSN

2006-04-01T16:13:00.000-05:00

So way back in October 2004 I posted that I wanted to see ring games on TV. Then back in October 2005 I first heard about "High Stakes Poker" on the Game Show Network, but at the time I hadn't seen it yet. Now that it's on I can finally say -- loving it!

When B and I first moved out to Minneapolis in July, we tried life without cable for a couple months. But then football season started and we broke down and not only got cable, but also a DVR. That thing is awesome. I don't watch all that much non-football TV, but just knowing that the few shows I watch -- Lost, Veronica Mars, My Name Is Earl, the WPT -- will be there on DVR whenever I want, and that I don't need to worry about taping them or taping over them, etc., is great.

And one of the shows I've been DVRing is High Stakes Poker. My initial impressions were:

1) The coolest part about the show is not the commentary from Gabe Kaplan and his co-host, nor even the actual action at the table, but rather the banter between the players. The players all know each other much better than say, the players at the average WPT final table, so there is much more joking around and ribbing one another. Great stuff.

2) The best way to watch High Stakes Poker is while you are playing online poker! You don't need to watch so much as listen to the banter. I kinda like to pretend that I'm at the casino and the High Stakes Poker players are at the high stakes table next to mine. Yes, this makes me a big cheesy fanboy :-)

But the show has really picked up recently, with the new episodes where Phil Hellmuth and Antonio Esfandiari have joined the game. Phil Hellmuth has been hilarious. I will refer you to Mean Gene's post on Phil's antics for details. You can ponder all day whether Phil's behavior is good for bad for poker, or real or faked, but I cannot deny that Phil is just plain fun to watch. Like Mean Gene, I laughed out loud when he "instacalled" Barry Greenstein. Also, Phil has given Gabe Kaplan a great source for material and his one-liners have been much funnier than in previous eps.

Then there's Antonio Esfandiari. Evidently he's never played at such high limits before, and after one bad beat he said [paraphrasing] "I can honestly say that's the biggest pot I've ever lost." Awesome stuff.

Anyway, great show. B is out of town this weekend for a conference, and I've got a few eps on DVR, so it's gonna be an online poker evening.

-------------------------

Oh yeah -- it's this blog's birthday! I foolishly made the first post to Cheap Thrills on April 1, 2004.

Predator

2006-03-21T01:36:00.000-05:00

Dang, this past week or so I'm not playing much and I'm not playing well. I'm sure one of these two things will turn around soon and I'll post about the anomaly ;-)

Til then, go read some pure gold from Felicia:

Learning to Think Like a Fish

Learn to Act Like a Loser

Some highlights to live by:

I realize that poker is not chess, it is poker, and that I rarely have even as much as 5% of an advantage over the worst player at the table, because of the luck factor.

If you are truly angry and upset, you are the one with the problem, not the fish. . . . Be a man. Just buck up and smile.

Why would you want anyone to know you are good? Why would you want your opponents to play better against you?

I can tell huge lies at the table, if it means that I keep the fish happy, smiling and throwing their chips around. I never want the game to go silent, or get tight.

Love that second line. Felicia is one of the few bloggers I read who unflinchingly discusses the nature of real, cash-game, casino poker. You're not participating in a glamorous contest, you're not competing with fellow gents from the country club to see who's best at the game. Your are not a beautiful poker-playing snowflake :-) No, you are (or at least you should be trying) to sit down with players who are worse than you, preferably much worse, and take their money.

Usually when I try to explain this basic truth, folks think I'm kidding or just talking tough. Maybe I not as articulate as I want to be? I guess the next time someone tells me they don't like playing against fish, I will just have to send them the above links.

Loving Full Tilt, Hating March, and Drinking Too Much

2006-03-13T02:14:00.000-05:00

Bit of a rambling post today, please bear with me. There is Actual Poker Content toward the end.

Without getting off on too much of a tangent or sounding too much like Tom Cruise, I will say that I am ambivalent about psychoanalysis. One the one hand, I think a lot of it is BS, on the other hand, it seems to help some people. I mention this because I think I have a mild form of season affective disorder, but I really hate that term. First, I don't like giving a clinical name to the basic human frailty of being bummed out by lack of sunlight. Second, I think it is more a personality trait than a disorder. Finally, I hate the damn cutesy acronym. But everyone knows what I mean by "seasonal affective disorder," so there it is.

Anyhooo, every winter I go through a few bouts of depression. They usually happen in January or February, and I thought I'd escaped relatively unscathed this year. But looking at my post from last week I can see that it was starting. I'd been getting pretty down about some aspects of my job the week before that. Then this week I just felt totally drained, and it's been overcast and muddy lately. My bad mood culminated this Saturday morning with a fight with Mrs. Cheap Thrills that was all my fault. The fight made me more depressed, then I added alcohol to the equation, and my Sunday has been exactly like the one Johnny Cash sings about in "Sunday Morning Coming Down."

I mention all this not because I want to bare my soul -- on the contrary, I am embarassed about the whole thing, and in general I have always intended this to be a poker blog and not a diary. I mention it because in my Saturday night stupor I played some interesting poker.

I think I posted once, way back in late 2004, that for a while I had a big sticky note at the top of my monitor that said "No Drinking + Poker," by which I meant no playing online poker while drunk. At the home games and the casino I have no problem playing reasonably well while under the influence, but in front of the computer my attention just wanders. I started playing online in April 2003, and for the whole first year or so I had a cycle where I'd grind out a few hundred playing at .50/$1, playing for an hour or so every night, then once every month or so I would come home from an evening of drinking and being merry, and foolishly decide to play some poker. Often I'd step it up in limits, and usually I would lose a good portion of the bankroll I'd built up. So after a while I developed the "No Drinking + Online Poker" rule.

But the rule always struck me as overly strict. After all, poker and booze go so well together! ;-) There must be some way to enjoy a bit of online poker after an evening at the bars or wherever, without being a total idiot about it. So I started allowing myself to play microlimits -- but it was too hard to resist the urge to step it up and play for "real" money. And then it hit me: tournaments. They have a built-in loss limit.

I've blogged before that I don't generally care for tournament poker. Mainly, tournament chips just don't seem like real money to me, so tournament poker doesn't feel like real poker. I just don't get the same feeling of excitement about each hand. Also, I don't generally like the idea of playing for a long time just to get to a final table with other better-than-average players, when I can sit down at countless cash games where I know I have an edge. And I hate busting out!

But I like to take my shots now and then. And since I don't let myself play online cash games when I've been drinking, I often play tournaments a bit tipsy. Last night I was downright sloshed.

All my money these days is at Paradise and Full Tilt. I love that Full Tilt has Razz, and I love that they have H.O.R.S.E. tourneys. So I played in a 7-Card Stud Hi-Lo sit-n-go at Paradise, and took third. Then I played in a NL Hold'em tournament at Paradise and went out on my first hand. I have AKs and make a 4x big bet raise, a guy shoves all-in at me, I call, he has KK, I feel like an idiot but I think I'd do it again. Perhaps I have taken this article too much to heart.

Then I popped over to Full Tilt for the "main event" of my all-nighter: a $10 H.O.R.S.E. tourney. I really love Stud and Razz, so I feel like I have more of an edge in these things than I do in hold'em events. However, I am an omatard. Omaha was a regular staple at my home game in Providence, and I was a consistent loser at it. So in the H.O.R.S.E. tourneys I just play super-tight in the Omaha rounds. B insists that I need to work on this.

I ended up finishing 10th out of 111, for a whopping $12 profit. But the fun part was that Layne Flack was at my table for much of the tourney. Andy Bloch was also in the tournament, and while I was never at his table, I finished ahead of him :-)

I got out to an early lead and was the chip leader at one point. I have a screen shot of that but I'll spare you. I will, however, share a screen shot of virtual Layne Flack on my virtual left:

In the hand pictured, Layne hit a set of 4s on the turn. Doh!

Drunk as I was, I found it incredibly amusing that I was seated next to Layne Flack who, before he got on the wagon, was known for playing even better drunk than he did sober. In the tourney he was very loose and aggressive and it worked well for him. I think I actually learned a bit.

The painful thing was this tourney started at 3am, and I didn't get to bed until after 6. I can't be doing stuff like that to myself! Damn winter.

OK, hope I didn't come off in this post as too much of a depressed drunken fish. I was that for much of this weekend, but usually I am not, I swear!

The Killer Instinct

2006-03-04T13:04:00.000-05:00

So I haven't played any poker for a week or so. Last weekend my family flew into town for a weekend visit, and B and I showed them around the currently frozen, but still fun, city of Minnefabulous. (It was their first time out here.) Then I had an extraordinarily busy week at work, which has left me a little drained and tired of looking at computer screens, so no online poker.

I had planned to get down to the Canterbury today, but I'm just not feeling it. I know my poker-playing self well enough by now to know that I have to be completely in the right frame of mind in to play well. The way I recognize this frame of mind is that when I contemplate playing (either sitting down to play at the computer or heading down to the Canterbury), I am filled with anticipation, touched with a little bit of testosterone and/or adrenalin. Basically, I feel like I am ready to kick some ass. I'm psyched to play. Not screaming and bashing-my-locker-in psyched, but filled with confidence and contained energy. I have the killer instinct.

I imagine that many good poker players have the killer instinct all or most of the time. I do not. I want to kick ass at poker a good portion of the time, but there are also plenty of days where I want to get out of competitive mode and do "normal" stuff like shooting the breeze with friends or family, staying home and veg-ing on the couch, getting out and enjoying nature, etc. Today is pretty much one of those days, even though part of me wants to head down to Canterbury tonight.

I also imagine that many good poker players don't need to get as psyched up as I do just to take a few pots off of bad players. That is, maybe they don't really have the killer instinct all the time, but they're able to grind it out well enough that bringing their B or C game against certain types of players is pretty much always +EV. I think this is how many players approach the online game a lot of the time. But if I am not truly psyched to play, I will not focus well. I'll get impatient and I'll play crap hands. I'll get distracted by TV or (when playing online) the Internet. Or if I'm feeling lethargic, I'll play too tight and ABC-ish, hoping to just get good cards and not paying attention to my opponents. (I've made money playing just the cards, but it's not very much fun and it isn't improving my game.) Finally, without the killer instinct, it's harder for to stay off tilt. When I'm in the right frame of mind, losing a big pot just makes me more focused. But when I don't have the killer instinct, I become tempted to engage in self-pity (whining about luck) or slip into turtling or maniacal modes of play.

So I don't want to sit in front of the computer today, and I'm not really in the right frame of mind to tackle the Canterbury. And yet I kinda want to play some poker. But what kind of poker should one play when lacking the killer instinct? Then it hit me: I miss my home game in New England. Playing with friends and having a blast whether you win or lose. Being competitive but also enjoying real comraderie. My buddy K and I had a bit of that when we'd player together at the Canterbury or in a free bar tourney, but (I don't think I've mentioned this) K moved back to his home town of Detroit a couple months ago :-(

Well, I'm sure I'll get the killer instinct back soon enough. And if any of the UG or Providence home game crowd is reading this, play a few hands of Badugi for me!

The Road to Recovery

2006-02-12T16:07:00.000-05:00

I've seen those "them's quads, beetches!" posts, but I never thought it would happen to me. . . .

Got this hand less than an hour after posting about my Canterbury loss. Thank you, poker gods.

"Football Season's Over, Let Poker Season Begin" Post Marred by Painful Loss

2006-02-12T14:22:00.000-05:00

I was all set to write up a big post that's been percolating in the backof mind for the past few weeks. See, I took the whole month of January off from poker, and the weekend after the Super Bowl was gonna be my triumphant return to the tables. I have this pet theory that lots of casual poker players will fill their weekends with poker now that football season's over, and that the weekend after the Super Bowl should be very +EV. (This theory is predicated on the shaky assumption that lots of people are like me.) Unfortunately, losing money at the tables tends to sap my will to blog.

The weekend started off well: Friday night I won $160 playing $1/$2 Hold'em and 7-Stud at Paradise, plus another $40 from a $2 multi-table tournament (I was up til 6am . . . totally screwed up my circadian rythms). Unfortunately, my return to the Canterbury Saturday night did not go as well: Dropped $350 in my first go at $4/$8, so I am now in the red at the Canterbury for the first time since moving out here. Doh! The tough thing is that I don't think I went on tilt or strayed from my usual game. I thought my table was quite beatable, which is why I rebought halfway through the evening. So was the loss due to variance or does my usual game need serious work? Some of both, for sure, and the lack of sleep couldn't have helped, but my cards were pretty rough. Two pair losing to a set was the big theme for the night. Sigh.

Oh well. I don't like to whine, but right now I am tired of tying to decide whether I am total fish or the poker gods just decided to kick me around for an evening. Gonna have to get myself centered before I take another shot.

On the bright side, the tables I played at were perfectly pleasant, with none of the obnoxious behavior that was really starting to make the Canterbury less enjoyable for me back in December. B also had a small win at $3/$6, although she did run into one asshole. Some 20-year-old puke got upset when his AQ lost, and accused B of trying to see his hole cards. He actually said the words "you cheated," so she pretty much tore the guy a new one, telling him to protect his hand and watch what he accuses people of, and he ended up apologizing. (She's a lot more confrontational than I am.) On the way home she was still fuming, to the effect of "I kinda wish it was the old west and you could shoot a guy for saying something like that." But we both agreed that the worst behavior at the Canterbury is still nothing compared to Foxwoods.

Go Read Tommy Angelo

2006-02-07T21:59:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned Tommy Angelo a couple times before in this blog but I've never devoted a full-blown, "you must go and read this guy" post to him. Well, here it is. I read a lot of poker blogs and I hardly ever see this poker pro mentioned, yet on his website Tommy Angelo's got some of the funniest, most insightful poker writing I've read. He doesn't actually blog, nor, unfortunately, does he have an RSS feed, so I actually have to (gasp) remember to go and visit his site every month or so. Here's an excerpt from his latest article, which is one of his best yet:

By 1990 I was folding enough to support my food and rent habit. This freed up lots of time for lots more folding. Before long I got so good at folding that I could afford to get stupid at first one flavor of gambling then another and another. My tether line to solvency was always the folding. Anytime I was low on money, all I had to do was stop betting and stop eating and get back to the folding.

If he's new to you, you can have the fun of reading through all his archived poker articles and Tommyisms.

Paradise Chips Arrived

2006-02-01T21:48:00.000-05:00

Back in September I posted about Paradise Poker/Sportsbook.com's bonus offer: Make a $10 bet every week of the regular NFL season, win a chipset. Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I both worked this offer (thank you honey for being such a degenerate football bettor), and last week our two 300-chip sets arrived. I don't think they're quite as nice as the Paradise chips I tried so many times to win via their Big Buck tourneys back in 04, but they're nicer than the standard metal-insert, plain-color, suits-on-the-edge chips they'll be replacing.

Poker's Most Wanted

2006-01-28T12:18:00.000-05:00

Mrs. Cheap Thrills saw these mentioned on Card Squad a couple weeks ago and ordered me a deck. This is one of the nicer artifacts of the poker boom, and the decks' not-super-high production value only adds to their charm. http://www.pokersmostwanted.com/home.htm

WSOP H.O.R.S.E.

2006-01-15T22:13:00.000-05:00

I haven't played much poker since Christmas. In fact, all I've done is donk off about $60 playing Razz hyper-aggressively on Full Tilt. ("Donk" is an overused piece of slang but sometimes it really is appropriate.) I plan to get back on the horse after the Super Bowl.

Speaking of horse, heh heh heh . . .

I don't think I ever mentioned that since moving to Minneapolis in July, I haven't recieved any issues of Card Player, even though I am subscribed and have e-mailed them about my address change twice. Bummer. Anyway, I may be a few dates late in learning about this, but boy is it awesome news! I hope ESPN gives it the full treatment.

Whole Lotta Canterbury

2005-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00

I am flying home to Philadelphia tomorrow, and mostly I wanted to get a post up saying "Merry Christmas!" to everyone.

But I guess I might as well blog some of the details of my last 7(!) sessions at the Canterbury before whatever lessons I learned during them are completely forgotten (this is all $3/$6):

Friday night, November18th (the Friday before Thanksgiving): Lost $160 over about 4 hours of play, but this loss didn't really bother me very much at all. What happened was I was that I went up $140 very quickly and was having a great time, so I decided to have a beer -- a tall Leinenkugel Honey Weiss, to be exact. Five tall Honeys later (Mrs. Cheap Thrills was driving) I was down a bit, but still having a great time . . . laughing it up, making crazy plays, joking with everyone at the table . . . it was the most fun I've had in a card room outside of Vegas. Seven tall Honeys later I finally admitted it was time to go, and vowed to make back the drunken loss ASAP.

Saturday, November 26 (the Saturday after Thanksgiving): I make my return to the Canterbury after my first loss there, ready to play tight and aggressive, and most importantly, sober. Unfortunately things are a little off, since a coworker, EL ends up tagging along. My buddy K was supposed to come too, but he backed out. EL and I end up at the same table . . . I don't like the table too much, but don't want to switch for fear of being rude to EL. This is one of several dumb decisions I make involving EL. The others involve me trying to steal a pot off EL with crappy cards, even though I know EL plays like a total rock. I end up giving at least $60 to EL through these dumb plays. I also run into set over set and two-pair AK vs. tripped KK . . . ugh. First lesson: I can make some dumb plays and still come out ahead, and I can catch some painful cards and still come out ahead, but I sure as hell can't do both. Second lesson: Don't play with friends when your main goal is to make money rather than screw around and have fun. I finished down $145.

Sunday, November 27th: Frustrated by two losses in a row, I return to the Canterbury to prove to myself that I can still win. I manage to eke out $63.

Monday, November 28th: Still not satisified, I play my first weekday night session at the Canterbury, and win $103. Was up more than than at several points. Plus there was a very good Monday Night Football game on TV. This was a very enjoyable night.

Saturday, December 10th: After a couple hours of Christmas shopping at the Mall of America, B and I hit the Canterbury around 3pm, telling ourselves we'll be out by 8pm. We leave at 9:30 -- I won all of $5 and B lost close to $100, after I talked her into playing $3/$6 (she usually plays $2/$4). Lessons: Don't play too long, and let B stick to $2/$4 if she wants to (even though I know she can kick ass at $3/$6).

Saturday December 17th: I play for way too long (about 3pm to 11 pm) and lose $140. Most upsetting because I was up $140 early on -- being up $140 is turning into some weird poker ceiling for me. Big lessons here: Don't play more than 6 hours in a session. Also, maybe think about leaving whenever I get up to $140. But mainly, I need to stop playing so loose.

Sunday, December 18th: I played tighter but ran into cold cards and some tough hands. Finished down $25.

So again, total thus far: Up $101 at the Canterbury. It's a way crappy hourly rate, but better than being down.

New Year's poker resolutions: Take my play at the Canterbury a little more seriously. Get up over $1000 and give $4/$8 a try.

Have a great Christmas and Hanukkah everybody!

Whining and Condescension, Ugh

2005-12-18T18:45:00.000-05:00

So I'm at the Canterbury today ($3/$6) as usual. On one hand I get AQo. Guy in early position raises. I call, big blind calls. This is a loose table so only 3 players seeing the flop is pretty unusual. Flop is 3 small hearts. I have no hearts. Checked to me and I bet, cause why not, especially with only 3 players. Call, call. Turn is an non-heart ace. Checked to me, I bet, BB folds, EP calls. River is another non-heart rag. I bet, EP calls, I show AQ. He mucks and says "Nice chasing."

This is from a guy who I *hadn't* pegged as a total asshole, and I am surprised/confused. Seemed to me like he was the one who called 3 of my bets. Moreover, the hand didn't really seem out of the ordinary to me. Why the hostility? So I say "AQ was chasing?" and he says "Yeah. No heart and only two overcards on the flop? I had you smoked."

The worst part is that this left me speechless, and I spent the next minute thinking of what he could have had to make him say that. KK, QQ? Then I spend 10 minutes thinking of things I *should* have said to him, such as "Quit being a whiney little bitch" (although I would never say that) or more realistically a sarcastic, "Yeah, that was a really bad beat." Damn my slow wit.

I have noticed some serious assholes at the Canterbury lately. Last night I was at a fine table, then one guy sits down with headphones on: Not a sure sign of anything (some people just like music), but definitely a warning sign. He's fine until 20 minutes later his friend sits down next to him. Off come the headphones and the chatter starts, like a couple of clucking hens, but hens that are really obnoxious and dress like Josh Arieh. I swear if you were writing the screenplay for Rounders II or some such and you wanted to have the protagonist take down a couple of smarmy young know-it-alls, all you'd need to do would be to tape these guys for 10 minutes. Their two favorite terms were "donkey" and "tasty" as in "he's a tasty little fish" and "ooh this table is so tasty," which they'd say when someone showed down an awful hand. Yes, it sounded pretty gay. Also things like "Yeah, that's right, go ahead and call, I want your money," which is just getting hostile, not good for a fun table at all. It was just astounding how completely condescending these guys were, with nothing to back it up. A $15/$30 game was going on one table over from us and these guys were talking about how there were plenty of "tasty fish" at $15/$30 if only they could catch some cards to get the bankroll to play there. Just ridiculous. Happily, they sucked, and I had a good hour of schaudenfreude as the one guy dropped $100, rebought, and dropped another $100. His friend had sat down with $158 (???) and was also losing. If either of them had been catching good cards I definitely would have switched tables.

As long as I'm going off, I'll mention my other big pet peeve with these condescending whiners: Cell phones. The Canterbury lets you talk on them at the tables. So these whiney little idiots are calling friends and bitching about all the bad beats they're taking, going on about how stupid the people who put the bad beats on them are, right in front of everyone. I saw that last night and today. (I can't imagine who the people on the other end are that are willing to listen to bad beat stories.) Aside from the guy who accused me of chasing with AQ, I have not been in any direct confrontations with these kinds of idiots, but I am going to have to remember to control my temper if I am.

I'm used to this awful behavior online but it's depressing to see it in real life. These whiners are bringing down the otherwise pleasant atmosphere at the Canterbury.

Perhaps I am just upset because I am no longer winning a ton. After going up $388 in my first four visits to the Canterbury this summer, I am now only up $104. That is over about 10 sessions, so it is a crappy hourly rate. I am playing way too loose -- and I was very drunk during one of the sessions, heh heh -- but I have really been enjoying getting to play so much live poker, except for the assholes this weekend. I went yesterday and today because the NFL was on and I was hoping that would bring out the casual-player crowd, but I think I that was a bad assumption -- as I have blogged before, I think the holiday season tends to thin out the "happily lose a couple hundred playing every hand" player that I love so much and leave a higher proportion of regulars at the tables, whether online or live. Oh well. I know the $3/$6 games are very beatable if I would just stop horsing around with very marginal hands, it's just that I was having so much fun winning *while* horsing around. I'm headed home to Philly for the holidays, then I'll be back at the Canterbury in January. I'll have to post one more time before I leave and say "Merry Christmas" then -- this post has just been too negative to leave it at the top of the blog through Christmas.

Update 12-20-05

Shelley left the following comment:

I'm surprised at the allowance of cell phones at Canterbury. That's a pretty wide open door for cheating - and it invites horrible etiquette. People should NOT talk on the phone at a poker table. Leave the table if you want to talk on the phone. We need those "rules" to keep people from being rude and lazy. (I'll even admit taking a call at the table when I'm feeling too lazy to get up...) I hope they at least restrict people from talking on the phone during a hand.

First, I agree completely. Second, I am not totally sure, but I believe the Canterbury *does* let you talk on the cell phone while in a hand. What I do know for sure is that they do not kill your hand if you are on the phone while you'e in a hand. In many Vegas rooms they will consider your hand dead if you answer your phone (or make a call) while in a hand, but not at the Canterbury. So I guess they either ask you to hang up, or just allow it. So odd because the Canterbury is otherwise very well run.

So's Your Face

2005-12-10T23:50:00.000-05:00

I haven't been playing much online poker lately -- I was hooked on Razz at Full Tilt for a couple weeks but a couple ass-whoopings have put me off it for now -- but tonight I got home from the Canterbury (more on that in my next post) and realized I had $18 in my Absolute account.

So I sat down at .50/$1 7-Card Stud Hi-Lo. And, playing with all these polite Minnesotans at the Canterbury lately, I forgot how rude people can be online. One idiot was going off about how he lost with three of a kind and how that never happens anywhere else he plays. Three of a kind?? The he's going on about how people are stupid for chasing, etc., etc. After one pot that he and I were both in he types "moron chaser." I'm not sure he was talking about me, although I did win the hand so who else could he have been talking about? Anyway, I type back, inspired by Dawn, "So's your face." He replied with "what?" This gave me a good, stupid chuckle, but the best part was he shut up after that. All the best insults I learned, I learned in kindergarten. And then was reminded of in the blogosphere.

High Stakes Drifter CCG

2005-12-01T01:20:00.000-05:00

I've been to the Canterbury 4(!) times since my last post. After each session I've told myself I'll blog about it, but I keep getting caught up with work, Christmas stuff, etc., etc. Anyway, I will have to blog about these Canterbury trips but for now I just wanted to mention a new game called High Stakes Drifter.

It's a collectible card game. You know, like Magic: The Gathering. I haven't actually played it so I'm not necessarily recommending it, justing posting about it as just another product of the poker boom. CCGs aren't really my thing, but it has some poker mechanics and a western theme (which I am a sucker for), so I think I'll be buying some cards soon. I'd first heard of the game months ago, but it wasn't released til this month, and today was the first day I saw it in my local game store.

Anyway, I know a lot of poker players are recovering CCG addicts, so I thought it might be of some interest.

VS "Sexy Poker"

2005-11-18T10:22:00.000-05:00

I love these odd products of the poker boom:

WPT at the Canterbury and NASCAR Tilt at Treasure Island

2005-11-12T23:23:00.000-05:00

I am a little late in blogging two live poker sessions from this past weekend.

First, B and I went down to the Canterbury on Saturday. A WPT event was being held -- a charity tournament benefiting the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. B and I had seen flyers for the event back on Labor Day, when we went down to the Canterbury for the last day of racing season. Strangely, however, we didn't see a whole lot of advertising for the event after that, even at the Canterbury.

I guess because it was a charity event, they were actually charging people just to watch -- $75 for a normal ticket, and something like $150 for some kind of "premium" ticket. Of course B and I did not pay these prices, we just we'd play some poker and maybe catch some pros walking around or something.

As it turned out we didn't see too much. We got there at about 5:45 and put our names on the waiting lists. We had time to kill so we headed over to a small area adjoining both the poker room and the bigger racetrack area room where the tourney was being played. Even though the tourney was supposed to start at 5:30, we could overhear Mike Sexton introducing the pro players who had come from the tourney, and B caught a glimpse of Marcel Luske. But we felt silly hovering around the outside of the tourney like that, so we headed off to get dinner.

I ended up having to wait about 45 minutes before I was seated at $3/$6, and B waited another half hour after that for $2/$4. From now on we will get there before 5pm on weekends.

My table was pretty fun. There were 3 18-year-olds at our table, and one kid was the subject of several jokes because he looked like was about 12. All 3 of them went broke, heh heh. Also we were at the #2 table near the entrance to the poker room, and people who busted out of the tourney kept walking in in 2s and 3s, and in every group one guys was explaining to his friends the beat that knocked him out. It was pretty funny after a while. Also one guy came in basically shouting about Men the Master had knocked him out when he (the shouter, not Men) had pocket Kings. The dealer was saying a bunch of Vikings were playing in the tourney. But no celebs strolled in.

I played for about 2.5 hours and left up $6. Woo-hoo. B won $76 so that was pretty nice.

Then on Sunday I met up with 2 friends from work, K and GB, and we headed down to Treasure Island, a casino just outside Red Wing, MN. They opened a poker room on October 12. I read some session reports about it on 2+2, and when I told K about he insisted we check it out. So we met at work at 11am on Sunday and headed down. We took a wrong turn and what should have been a 1-hour drive turned into 2. Also GB was driving and got himself a $142 speeding ticket. Doh! But eventually we got there.

The casino was . . . smoky. Like after being there 5 minutes I knew my clothes would smell all day smoky. Oh well, the poker room was non-smoking at least. Only 4 games were going in the 12-table room, but one of them was $3/$6 and we were all seated quickly. I won a big pot early when my KTs hit the flush on the turn in a 6-way pot. The other highlight hand was when K tried to "make a play" (his phrase) at GB. GB raises preflop, K reraises, one other guy comes along. Flop comes A88 and K and GB cap it. Blanks on the turn and river, with heavy betting. There's even speculation at the table that if one of them has 88 and the other has AA, the hand will qualify to win the $30,000 jackpot and we'll all be happy. But then GB turns over AK and K turns over A7. The other guy had AT. Doh! K, you silly, silly boy.

All the while I am enjoying football on some swanky widescreen flatscreen TVs. The Vikings game was pretty boring and I was looking forward to the 3pm games. And then . . . some boor sits down on my left and requests NASCAR. Evidently he is something of a regular so they hook him right up. Because of where I'm sitting, I have to turn around to see any other TVs. The Steelers game comes on and I'm dying to see how they fare without big Ben. So I'm pretty annoyed at Mr. NASCAR. And I can't stop thinking that there must be at least 100 TVs in the whole casino, and the one in front of me is the only one not showing football. In the race they are on lap 62 or so of 334 or something. I start calculating how long it takes them to do a lap to try and figure out how long the damn race will take. I'm looking at everyone else's chips, hoping someone busts out and gets up so I can get a better seat. And then of course Mr. NASCAR goes on a rush. He's playing any 2 and hitting trips, weird straights, etc. And when he wins he throws his cards down on the table in an obnoxious way. In short I am hating this guy and itching to win a big pot against him.

And it would have been nice to do that. But instead I realized I was on tilt, and got up (cashed out for $78 :-). I headed over to a bar where the smoke was slightly less thick than the rest of the casino, got a Captain and Coke, and enjoyed the game. After about 20 minutes I felt better and put my name back on the $3/$6 list. I watched the game for another half hour in the poker room (I just sat at one of the empty tables), and then K and GB decided it was time to go. This was because GB was up $145 -- just enough to tip the dealer and use the rest to pay his speeding ticket!

So that was my weekend. A few main things: 1) I do go on tilt over some random things, but at least I'm getting better at realizing when I'm on tilt and doing something about it. 2) Screw NASCAR. 3) The Treasure Island poker room was fine, but why would I play there when there is the much nicer Canterbury? (Not to di them, but I am guessing that K and GB were so keen on checking out TI because they've taken significant losses at the Canterbury.) 4) Though I dread jinxing myself by sayings this, so far I have not lost money in a session of live poker in the state of Minnesota. Woo-hoo!

Televised Cash Games on Game Show Network

2005-10-31T21:56:00.000-05:00

I just read this story (which I found via http://loveablerogues.blogspot.com/) on cash game poker on TV. I've blogged before that I want to see ring games on TV -- so, like, cool.

However, I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the first few lines of the article:

It's what's known as a "cash game." Unlike the tournament-style shows that currently dominate cable networks, players will risk large amounts of their own money, and can cash out--or dig into their wallets for more funds-at any time.

[text-based sarcasm alert] Players risking their own money? Cashing out? Digging into their wallets? Surely you jest. [end text-based sarcasm]

From the Mirage to the Canterbury

2005-10-30T19:47:00.000-05:00

So B and I were in Las Vegas this past weekend . . . arrived late on Thursday, left Monday afternoon, stayed at the Mirage for the first time and played a lot of poker there. I'll cut to the heart of the matter . . . how'd I do?

It was the most strangely low-variance weekend I have ever spent in Las Vegas. I played about 20 hours of poker (I know the number of hours I played because we got the poker room rate, and so we each had a time card to track our play), and finished down $21 (I played nothing but $3/$6). I'm sure that I tipped more than $21 just to the cocktail waitresses, and since I got a ton of drinks out of it I am not really unhappy with my results. But the lack of any big ups or downs even within individual sessions was really weird. For example, I played 11am to 4pm on Friday afternoon -- finished down $6. Then we went to Margaritaville for dinner, spent a few hours walking the Strip and getting hammered, and I played from 11pm to 3am -- playing like a maniac and having a ton of fun doing it -- and finished down $6 again. Weird, weird, weird.

The $3/$6 tables were for the most part even weaker than when B and I last played at the Mirage in August 2004. Most players were very laid-back, with fewer players taking things too seriously or complaining about their luck than I expected. Which was nice. There was also very little raising pre-flop, which was very, very nice. I probably could have had a significant win on the weekend if I had played more sensibly or not gotten stinking drunk on both Friday and Saturday nights, but I had a ton of fun playing the drunken clowny semi-maniac.

Funniest poker moment of the weekend (or least the funniest one I remember): B, myself, and two of friends from New England are all at the same table, late Saturday night. I've been raising with any pair preflop and second pair post-flop, losing a lot of small pots but winning some big ones from players trying to police me. Basically I'm being the kind of player I hate to play with, but I like to think I do it in a drunken fun way; I play aggressively but don't act cocky or malicious, and concsciouly try not ot make anyone angry at me. Or at least it seemed that way after 10 Captain and cokes. Between our New England friends and two Indian women in their 50s who were laughing at my antics, I was really hamming it up. I kept knocking my chips stacks over so finally I mushed them all together into a big pile in front of me. Yes, I was very classy. Anyway, at one point I raised with A9o (something I'd never do online) and I get reraised by a guy in his thirties who is playing fairly solid poker and thinks I am an idiot. And he's pretty much right because I hit my 9 on the raggedy flop and bet into him the whole way. He shows Kings and B is just sighing and shaking her head when I show my hand. I start rambling: "Oof. Ouch. Guess that not a good play. I thought he might have Ace-big or maybe a lower pair. I think I might be playing too loose. Blah blah blah . . ." I ramble on for like a minute, then drunkenly realize I am drunkenly rambling, so I stop myself and state, deadpan: "Yeah, but I'm a solid player." The entire table erupts on laughter, the dealer actually puts down the cards and is wiping wetness from his eyes, and everyone is parroting the line the rest of the night. Never before have I played the buffoon so well.

So you could say that I did not take my poker all that seriously. Long term this could become a problem for me, but I've always said that people have different reasons for playing poker: There's fun, there's profit, and there's the satisfaction of improving your game. For me, in Vegas, the poker is primarily about the fun. And that's what I love about the Mirage: At $3/$6, at least, most people are there for the fun.

Wearily plodding through work this week, and thinking about the weekend in Vegas, I decided I definitely wanted to play at the Canterbury this weekend. First of all, I wanted to see if I could take the looser, more aggressive play that worked for me in Vegas and apply it when sober and well-rested, for profit rather than just kicks. Second, I wanted to see if the Canterbury players would still be as laid-back and passive as they were during the racing season (which ended on Labor Day). I was not disappointed and won $110 yesterday. Of course it could be variance, but with my bankroll having survivd Vegas intact, and now with a boost yesterday, I am going to commit to heading down the Canterbury at least once a month.

Back to Vegas. This was the first time we stayed at the Mirage, and we really liked it. The room was not that different, and I think the Flamingo actually has a better buffet and a better pool, but we really liked two things about the Mirage. First, the service: Checking in was easy as pie, whereas we've had problems in the past with that at other hotels, and it can really put a damper on your weekend. Second, it just seemed so much less crowded. [Update/edit: Oh yeah, and the poker room!]

So, we played poker Friday afternoon, then headed over to Margaritaville Friday night. We had a group of twelve people -- my mom, aunt, sister, and cousin, and 3 other couples -- but after an hour of hanging out and downing rum drinks, we got a table. A guy came over and made balloon hats for everyone, and much silliness ensued. Leaving the Margaritaville and heading north, I popped into the liquor store that's right before Harrah's and got a bottle of champage and opened it right on the Strip (which I knew would impress a couple of the Vegas newbies). One of my non-poker-playing buddies got the blackjack itch and we ended up sitting down at a $10 table even though none of us really wanted to risk that much. Happily I left up $120, my buddy left up $60, and my other buddy only lost $10. Then we headed back for more poker -- on Friday night I played at the same table as my buddy Campbool and wasn't quite a big a buffoon as I descibed above (that would be Saturday night).

Saturday we hit the pool. I rented one of those rafts, which for whatever reason I've always wanted to do. Then it was more poker and I had another low-variance session. For dinner on Saturday we hit the Bellagio buffet. Getting there early, we checked out the poker room and saw Daniel Negreanu and Erik Lindgren entering the room. Negreanu was walking around saying hi to a lot of players; several people also approached him for autographs and pictures. I urged B to say something to him but she, like me, just felt too silly playing the fan. We also spotted Mel Judah. We never did make it over to the Wynn, which is where I had thought we might spot Negreanu.

Saturday night my one buddy was still itching for low-limit blackjack, so we headed Downtown. That was also a better place to manage the big group, since we could all just meet under the light show on the hour. I ended up playing mini-baccarat (what a dumb game) and blackjack at the Plaza, and I lost back most of the $120 I had won. I was a bit diasppointed to find that the Golden Gate no longer sells their shrimp cocktails at the bar -- you have to go back to the deli area, and there was a long line. Oh well. Later that night we ended up back at the Mirage poker room, where I engaged in the buffoonery described above.

In retrospect drinking so much on Saturday night was not the best idea, because I had already organized for everyone to meet at the Mirage sportsbook at 9 on Sunday morning so we could grab good seats for the football games. Somehow I managed to get up at 8am (after going to bed at 3) and place my $55 bet on the Bungles, who lost. But it was pretty good time. I bought mimosas for all the ladies present and that went over very well. Unfortunately, drinks are not free for bettors in the lounge area -- you have to be up in the inidividual theater seats. The Eagles won but failed to cover the spread, so my family (who are from Philly) were happy but not thrilled. Everyone else wisely went and took naps or hit the pool once the afternoon game started, but my sister and I stayed to watch the later games. I made back $50 on Dallas (again, it was a low-variance weekend), and my sister hit 7 out of 8 on a crazy parlay in which you pick whether each teams's score will be even or odd and things like that. If only Denver had kicked one more field goal . . . I'd always wanted to do a day of football at a Vegas sportsbook. It was a lot fun, but it's not something I'll want to do every time I'm in Vegas.

I took a nap after the late games, but I was still pretty much a zombie playing cards on Sunday night. So I mildly regret drinking quite so much on Saturday night, but Vegas has that effect on me.

Hmmm . . . I think that's it. Just like last year, I had a great time, and playing at the Mirage reminded me how much I love live poker. Last year that enthusiasm was dampened by several so-so sessions at Foxwoods, but so far I am really loving the Canterbury.

One Week Til Vegas

2005-10-16T10:32:00.000-04:00

So I am not playing in the online poker blogger championship next Sunday. Not because I have no chance of winning, and not because I haven't been much of a poker blogger lately -- the event looks awesome and I'd be there if I didn't have a big something else going on. But on Sunday the 23rd I'll be in Vegas, at the Mirage, either playing $3/$6 or making -EV NFL bets, or who am I kidding, both.

For B and me this is partly a 2-year anniversary celebration, but also a get-together with friends we no longer live near. We got married in Vegas two years ago, and we decided we'd back out to Vegas as an anniversary present to ourselves every couple of years, and we figured why not invite a bunch of friends and family, since everyone had such a good time together in Vegas at the wedding. So this coming weekend B and I will have my family plus 6 or 7 friends to carouse with. Should be awesome.

I have been a little more active on the online poker front. One incident that spurred this along was when, about three weeks, ago I played in a free bar tourney with B and K, my friend from work. K loves tournament poker and plays bar freerolls like 3 or 4 nights a week at least. This one was right around the corner from our apartment. It was on a Sunday, so K came over and we watched some football, then we headed over to the tourney at about 5pm. I got very cold cards, then went out on a pretty rough beat. (QT from the big blind, floop has 2 tens, I get my opponent all in, he has a jacks and on hits on the river.) I was quite frustrated til I realized "wait, what is the damn prize in this freakin' freeroll anyway? A $50 bar tab? Screw this." So I head home, hop on Party $2/$4, and go up $120 in about an hour and a half. Then I felt much better.

I liked Felicia's post on why she doesn't play tournaments anymore. Her reasons are not exactly the same as mine, but I sympathize with the feeling of "tournaments are just not for me."

Another recent post that struck a chord with me was Chris Halverson's 2-year review, in which he talks about poker taking a backseat to other things in his life. I've definitely been focused on things besides poker since our move in July, and while it's hurt this blog it's been good for my life.

But poker definitely has its time and place, and for me next weekend is it. B and I had great success at the Mirage poker room last year and I hope to repeat that. We got the poker rate at the Mirage, so the more we play, the less our hotel bill will be. As if we need the incentive. My plan is to play a lot during the day, and hang out with all our friends all night.

Looking beyond Vegas, I also want to start getting down to the Canterbury on at least a monthly basis, but for now I am focused on the Mirage. Party gave me a free $50 to play around with, so I am 2-tabling .50/$1 to clear it. Based on just about every session live poker that I've played in a casino, online .50/$1 is much better practice for live play than $2/$4 is.

OK, I hope everyone has a blast in the Pokerstars tourney, and I hope to have a trip report next time I post.

Paradise/Sportsbook Chip Set Offer

2005-09-24T12:44:00.000-04:00

Yes, I am still here and still reading blogs. No I have not posted since mid-August, nor have I played a lot of online poker. But I'm going to Vegas in October (2-year wedding anniversary), so I'm planning to jump back on the horse in the next couple weeks.

Just wanted to do a quick post to mention a Paradise/Sportsbook offer I received. Place one $10 bet each week of the NFL season, and you get a poker chip set. Big whoop, you say, another poker chip set. But look at the offer here. I can't tell for sure from the photo, but these chips look like they might have the Paradise Poker logo on them. As a parrothead I have always thought that Paradise Poker had the coolest "theme" of any online poker room, and I have always wanted a Pardise Poker chipset, the kind they give only to frequent high-limit players or as a prize in the occasional $1 tourney. Making a $10 bet each week of the NFL season is something I'll probably do anyway, so I'm happy to do it at Sportsbook and get a chip set out of it -- and if it is a Paradise chip set, well, that'd just be the bomb yo.

Victorious B

2005-08-13T15:49:00.000-04:00

This past Wednesday B again played in the Riverush free bar tourney. For the 5th time in a row she made the final table, and this time she won!

Her prize was another t-shirt, a $20 credit at the bar where the tourney was held, and the WPT "Complete Texas Hold'em Book and Card Set," which consists of two decks of WPT cards and a book titled WPT Official Poker Rules.

On the cover of the book, in italics, it says "Featuring Texas Hold'em." This reminds me of a somewhat funny thing that happened this past Christmas. I was at a buddy's house and his brother gave him a WPT folding poker table -- it was kind of like a normal circular card table but the cover was felt with the WPT logo and it had a nice bumper. Anyway, it came with a box that had a few chips, decks of cards, a dealer button, etc. As he was opening this present he started setting up the poker table, and I said "check out what's in the box," wondering exactly how many chips were there and so forth. But to my remark the gift-giving brother's wife replied in all seriousness "Probably Texas Hold'em." We gave her a good ribbing over that one: "Oh, is Texas Hold'em in there? Can I borrow it some time?" "I hope it comes with Seven Card Stud too," etc.

Anyway, congrats to B. She will playing in the Riverush finals a week from today, but unfortunately I will miss it (I'll be attending a convention -- Gen Con -- for work).

The Top 10 Reasons Why the Canterbury Is Better Than Foxwoods

2005-08-06T21:24:00.000-04:00

As I hinted at in my previous post, I really liked the Canterbury. Maybe I'm just excited about being in a new state -- and maybe I'm just bitter about my last loss at Foxwoods -- but here I present:

The Top 10 Reasons Why the Canterbury Is Better Than Foxwoods

1. Better dealers. The dealers actually enforce the rules of the game, such as "show one, show all," and don't talk about what you folded during a hand, and no foul language.

2. Better floor staff. The floor staff is friendly and helpful -- for example, you can actually a get a table change to the specific table you want. At Foxwoods getting a table change always seemed not worth the trouble. Or maybe I'm just not pushy enough.

3. Nine-handed as opposed to ten-handed tables. With more space between the tables. If you're gonna sit for 5+ hours straight, the value of leg and shoulder should not be underestimated.

Tangent: Numbers 1, 2, and 3 have the same root cause: Foxwoods is just so overwhelmed by the crowds that the service suffers as a result. The same could be said about the entire Northeast, but I digress . . .

4. The ratio of polite Midwesterners to NYC hard guys is much higher. What can I say, I like polite people.

5. The Canterbury lists your first name and last initial rather than just your initials. This, coupled with fact that you can actually hear what's being said over the microphone, is a plus since it leads to people giving more creative fake names. On my first visit to the Canterbury I heard "Sparky," "Las Vegas Joe," "Mailman," and "Jackie Chan." Nothing to bust a gut over but anything that provides amusement while you're sitting there folding is welcome.

6. Chip runners. And track-bet runners.

7. Better food for less money. I had baked chicken with carrots, mashed potatoes, and a roll for $5. Unusually wholesome for a gambling establishment. You might be able to get a meal for less at Foxwoods, but it will definitely be fried.

8. Automatic shufflers. Most of the tables at the Canterbury have them, which means more hands per hour.

9. More TVs. About twice as many TV as Foxwoods for about half as many people.

10. Better wait service.*

Number-11-that-doesn't-really-count: The Canterbury is closer to our apartment (20 minutes) than Foxwoods was to our old place (1 hour).

*Because although you can *get* a drink more easily at the Canterbury, and non-alcoholic beverages are free, alcoholic beverages are not. Doh! However, I may have won at my first poker session at the Canterbury largely because there was no temptation of free drinks :-)

My own weakness for free, delicious beer aside, even if we count the Canterbury's lack of free booze as a triple negative, it's still up by 7 points over Foxwoods. Go Minnesota!

Oh yeah, an underlying assumption here has been the crowds at the two card rooms are equally fishy. At the lowest limits I think this assumption is valid but only time will tell.

First Trip to the Canterbury. Cha-Ching :-)

2005-08-06T21:18:00.000-04:00

So after a full month of living in Minneapolis, B and I finally got down to the Canterbury Racetrack and Card Room to play some poker. Although I was totally joking in my previous post about needing to win more than Mrs. Cheap Thrills in order to defend my masculinity, I am happy to report that I did come out on top in our little competition. I played $2/$4 and won $194, which is the most big bets I've ever won in a single session of live poker. B, on the other hand, lost money. Mwah ah ah ah ;-)

We got there at like 9:45am. This was partly because I'd heard from other Minnesota poker bloggers that the waits at the Canterbury can be really bad, and partly because we were meeting my friend from work, K, and he also insisted we get there by 10 at the latest.

10am seemed just a touch early there was no wait for $2/$4, and the one $3/$6 game was short-handed, but by noon waits were an hour+, so I can see how you'd want to be better safe than sorry.

I had planned to play $3/$6, but K was not comfortable playing above $2/$4, so I said what they hay and sat down at $2/$4 with him. B sat down at the short-handed $3/$6 table and very soon had her pocket aces rivered by T9o, costing her half her buy-in. I wont say that this put her on tilt (cause shed smack me), but it certainly did put a damper on her day.

I stayed about even at the $2/$4 table with K, while K slowly lost. He seems to be a very smart guy, but is a textbook example of how being good at no-limit tourneys can ruin you for limit cash games. He kept trying to raise people out with marginal handson the turn or river, and kept getting called (because people don't fold at low limits). Then he would raise with a really solid hand pre-flop, and get drawn out on (because people don't fold at low limits). Which led him to conclude that it's all luck at the low limits, whereas I feel that really it's just very different from both no-limit and tourney play. (It certainly requires more post-flop play than the average fast-structured NL tourney.)

Oh, and then I took a bundle off K with pocket Queens that flopped a set. Kinda felt bad about that.

Anyhoo, K busted out and left, but I stayed at the $2/$4 table. I liked the table -- it was mostly older guys there just passing the time. Visions of my future aside, I liked that they liked to play every hand and didnt like people who raised. Calling stations are my favorite type of player. Duh. Also, all the players were polite and one guy was pretty funny, so it was pleasant enough. (I think one big leak in my live game is that if there's one or more assholes at the table itcan really distract me.)

I must now document one of the funny guy's best lines. He was sitting between two fellow older guys and they were all joking about "being too old to take beats like this" and such. At one point, one of the play-any-two older guys got rivered and started whining about it, and the funny older guy said simply:

Don't you know that life is painful? And poker is like life.

That's gold.

I proceeded to go on quite a run, which in a self-fulfilling prophecy led me to play well and with more confidence than if I had started out badly. Since I haven't ridden the online horse much since the move, it felt great to get a victory under my belt.

Oh, and I bet the ponies a bit too. I hit my exacta in the first race. The exacta box bet cost a total of $4, netting me $18 in profit. That was enough betting money to carry me though the day, ponies-wise. I know enough about horse racing to know that I'm not very good at it, and therefore I only bet small amount. Still, it was very enjoyable to handicap the races in between folds. I finished up $8 on the ponies.

All in all it was a really fun Saturday morning and afternoon. In addition to the win, though, a big part of our enjoyment came from how nice the Canterbury is. That will be the subject of my next post.

I'm Used to the Emasculation

2005-08-04T20:01:00.000-04:00

So Mrs.Cheap Thrills took 3rd last night in the Riverush tourney. She went without me -- I had previously committed to playing board games with some guys from work instead.

So let's see, that's 4 Riverush final tables in a row for B, and 3 unremarkable bust-outs for me. Sigh.

We're headed to the Canterbury this Saturday. My hope is to win more than B so I can at least claim that I still wear the cash-game poker pants in the Cheap Thrills household. No pressure.

Wireless Poker and Riverush Revisited

2005-07-31T19:50:00.000-04:00

Our new laptop -- a Dell Inspiron 6000 -- arrived Friday. I then spent much of Friday night, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday afternoon trying to get our wireless network set up correctly. The laptop connected to the Internet just fine, but we were unable to get print and file sharing to work. Evidently this is a common problem, and I will spare you the boring details of how I finally, mostly got everything working correctly.

The main thing is that Friday and Saturday evening B and I played online poker in the living room, which was really nice because in our new pad the living room has A/C but the office (where our desktop is) doesn't, and it's been hot out.

And right now I am blogging from the living room couch while watching bad Sunday TV. Lap of luxury baby.

The wireless-online-poker dabbling we've done so far isn't very blogworthy, so instead I'll talk again about the Riverush Bar Poker Tour. Mrs.Cheap Thrills headed to downtown Minnefabulous Tuesday night for another stab at the Riverush freerolls. Our results were very similar to last time. I went out fairly early, although not quite as early as last time, and this time I'm not, um, freakin' embrassed about the way I played. Along the way I also hit a straight flush, for which I won a free beer. Woo-hoo! Mrs. Cheap Thrills got tothe final table, just like last time, and went out 8th, one place higher than last time. This was good enough for her to win another Riverush t-shirt, and this time she chose a men's shirt for me. So even though I was out of the tourney early I got a free beer and a t-shirt out of the evening :-)

We went on Tuesday with a new friend from my workplace, who I'll just call K for now. He's very into poker and seemed to know what he was doing on Tuesday -- had a decent-sized stack before going out with KK vs. AA. But then on Wednesday night K went back for another Riverush tourney. This time there were 45 people, which I think is Riverush's biggest turnout so far, and K won the freakin' thing! He received $50 in gift certificates to a local book-comics-CD store, and more interestingly, a seat at the Riverush finals. So now it looks like I might have to go watch that tourney, if only to root for for both K and Chad.

K and I have made plans to head down to the Canterbury either Saturday this coming Saturday the 5th or Sunday the 6th. So I'm gonna have to get back on the online horse this week in preparation.

Cableless and Kinda Computerless

2005-07-21T20:32:00.000-04:00

Well, this blog has been languishing since our big move. What can I say, moving is tough. We are now mostly unpacked--except for a lot of boxes of books--and this week we actually stocked the kitchen with groceries and started cooking dinners instead of just eating out or ordering in almost every night.

I haven't played any online poker since the move. Doh! A big reason for this is our computer situation. In Providence we had an unusually large apartment, and Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I basically each had our own office and our own computer. It was no problemo for us both play poker all night. But here in Minneapolis we're both working in real offices instead of home offices, so in the move we ditched the old computer. Now when one of us is playing poker, the other isn't. I realize in retrospect that we wouldn't have gotten as into online poker as we are if we hadn't had two computers for the past couple years.

So I am not *really* computerless, but I don't have the access I used to: There's the time that B is using the computer, and then there is the guilt of using the computer while B is twiddling her thumbs with nothing to do.

Speaking of twiddling thumbs, I also have come to appreciate how much the computer has come to replace the TV as the primary source of prime-time entertainment in the Cheap Thrills household. Between blogs, online poker, and general Internet surfing, B and I spend much more time at the computer than in front of the TV. Many's the time in Providence that we discussed getting rid of cable TV, but we never did.

Now we're in MInneapolis, and we haven't ordered cable yet. I'm pretty happy with the situation--we're saving about $40 a month, and our apartment has a decent antenna set up so we're still getting the four major networks and a couple other channels.

But then this week I realized that ESPN's coverage of the WSOP has started, and I am missing it. Doh! Doh! Doh! What to do? Are the WSOP and the WPT worth the almost $500 a year that cable costs? As much as it pains me, I have to answer no.

I am going to really, really miss poker on TV. Back when I started this little blog, the WPT was one of my favorite post topics. It's not like I've ever posted serious strategy dicussions here--my focus has always been on the lighter aspects of the game, including poker in pop culture. Not having cable is gonna really, really hurt that.

We may eventually get cable (or set up a dish). Not having ESPN is gonna hurt come football season, etc. But for now I think it would be better to try life without cable, then set it upf if we want--cause the last 2 years in Providence proved that if we have cable set up, we won't get rid of it even if most nights we'd rather play online poker than watch TV.

But of course, with our current situation, we can't both play poker.

Time to remedy that. We may not have cable, but dammit we're gonna have wireless Internet and a laptop! I plan to put in an order for a Dell this weekend. Poker on the couch, baby!

The Riverush Poker Tour . . . and Making Some Adjustments

2005-07-14T21:18:00.000-04:00

So as B reported in the last post, we got out to the Blarney Pub last night to take part in the Riverush Poker Tour, which we learned of from Chad, who won one of the tourneys last week (besting 3 other players). And we met Chad at the tourney. I've finally met my first fellow poker blogger: Cool.

The freeroll last night attracted 22 players, a new record for the tour. I busted out early with a very impatient move holding a medium pocket pair. It was just a dumb move borne of impatience and the general scatterbrained feeling I've had since returning to the 9 to 5 (or in my case 10 to 6) world. B, on other hand, stuck around to finish 9th (out of 21), and would have had a real shot at winning the thing if her pocket aces hadn't been cracked shortly before they merged the two tables into one. I've said it before and I'll say it again: She is just a much better tourney than I am.

Anyway, the Riverush Poker Tour is a pretty cool idea. Instead of one bar just holding a freeroll, this is essentially several bars that have gotten together to hold a series of freerolls over the course of six weeks. The winner each night gets a seat in the final tourney, the prize for which is (I think but am not sure) a trip to Vegas. Other top finishers get points on a leaderboard. There are other special prizes, like the winner last night got a chip set, the winner of the first tourney in which there are 50 players will get a PS2 or XBox, and the first person to get a royal flush will win an iPod Mini.

It's all organized by Jason and Mary, who ran a similar thing in Milwaukee, where it was a big success. Evidently it's all sponsored by liquor and beer companies, with contributuons from the hosting bars. Neat--I woulda loved it if they'd had something like that back in Rhode Island.

As it is though, I'm wondering how often I'll be able to make it to these freerolls. For the past 5 years I was a freelancer--as in, work from home, no set hours, plenty of free time. All that free time is one of the big reasons I got so into poker and blogging in the first place. Now I'm back in the workaday world, working a whole freakin' 8 hours each day, and evenings just seem to fly by. (We still haven't set up cable TV here and thus far I haven't had time to miss it.) So right now I am going through a period of adjustment.

One thing to get used to: Wearing acceptable work clothes every weekday instead of shorts and a t-shirt or just pajamas. My lack of adjustment to this led to an icky mishap yesterday before the tourney. I wore a polo shirt to work, but wanted to a wear a t-shirt to the bar. I get out at 6pm so I figured I wouldn't have much time to go home before the freeroll, which started 7. So I left the t-shirt in the car, and changed into it, in the car, after work. I also brought some deodorant, correctly assuming that what I roll on at 8am isn't gonna be very effective at 8pm. Problem was, it was 93 degrees hot yesterday, which was enough to liquefy my deodorant. So I'm sitting in the driver's seat of my car, and when I take the cap off the deodorant, it pours out all over my hands and into my lap. Gross. So I drive home to change, with the A/C, and as I'm driving the deodorant solidifies on my hands and crotch. Very unpleasant indeed!

Anyway, that's why I was a bit later to the bar than expected, and why I was a bit frazzled the rest of the evening. Great story, huh? I'll definitely have to play in another Riverush tourney in order to redeem myself.

In other poker news, we fixed what was wrong with our Internet connection out here, and B sucessfully played Absolute Poker for an hour today, using my account. She got me to 10,000 AP points, so now I can host private tourneys. Woo-hoo! Now I've gotta organize one with some of our friends back east.

I think B and will head down to the Canterbury this Saturday. They'll be running the Claiming Crown, which is the track's biggest race of the season. I'm assuming the lines for poker will be looong but we'll put our names in and bet ponies while we wait.

OK, now I'm gonna go read Pauly's update on the WSOP.

Riverush Poker

2005-07-14T00:29:00.000-04:00

We actually managed to play some poker in Minneapolis tonight. Our internet connection still sucks (although I think may have just fixed it) so online poker is out. But, based on Chad’s recommendation, JD and I decided to check out the Riverush poker tour tonight. I won the last longer bet so I’m blogging tonight. As Chad said the chips, tables, and cards are pretty high quality, and the organizers are real nice, and it gave us an excuse to check out a local bar on a Wednesday night.

You start with 10K in chips and the structure is actually pretty decent (blinds start at $100/$200), and you can earn extra chips by ordering beers and dinner, whooohooo. I took the bus over from work and JD was late to meet me for reasons which I’ll let him explain, So, I was up a chip by the time he showed up.

The level of play was pretty awful—but truthfully, that makes sometimes makes it harder rather than easier. JD busted out on the early side with pocket 8s, but I think the play was solid though since you are basically playing to win with the freeroll structure.

I played pretty tight, mostly because I was getting crap, and was just trying to bide my time through the testosterone fest (yes, there were sunglasses being worn at a freeroll). I was up to about $25K when I raised to 5x the big blind ($1K) in late position with pocket aces and got called in three spots. The flop came rags 10, rag, rag and there was an all-in and a call before me. I went al-in with the Aces. One caller besides the all-in—I was up against K10o and A5o. The turn was a 10 and I was the short stack. The guy with the K10 was the ultimate Seth Green in “Can’t Hardly Wait” imitator. Despite not knowing jack about poker he managed to take most of my chips. I made it to the final table and busted out 9^th. I got a cute ladies tank top for my trouble. I really do love it when they think of the ladies and they were very enthusiastic about getting the ladies out in full force.

All in all it was a fun time. I got to drink beer and check out a new bar and play poker. I think I might like the downtown ones a little better as this one was near campus and made me feel a million years old. I met my first poker blogger besides JD so that was cool. I'm looking foward to going back again.

First Post from Minneapolis

2005-07-04T13:05:00.000-04:00

So on Thursday, Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I (with the help of several friends) loaded the moving van, then hit the road for Minneapolis on Friday morning. We arrived Saturday night and unloaded all our stuff yesterday. All in all it was a successful and trauma-free move, and for that I am very happy, but boy am I tired! And sore. We both start our new jobs tomorrow, so today will be a day of rest, even though the apartment is a total mess with lots of unpacked boxes everywhere. But the really hard part is over.

Hope everyone has a great 4th!

Last Post from Providence

2005-06-27T13:16:00.000-04:00

Just a quick note to let everyone know this blog is not abandoned. Our apartment is mostly packed up, and the computers are next, so I won't be able to post for another week or so. We're packing up the moving van this Thursday, then leaving Friday morning for Minneapolis. It's a 20-hour drive which we're going to do in 2 days, with just one hotel stay because we'll have our cat with us. Then I start my new job the Tuesday after the 4th of July.

Bummer we're so busy during the WSOP. I've been hitting Pauly's and other blogs when I can, but I'm missing a lot.

Not much online poker lately -- I figure there'll be plenty of time for that once we're settled in the new city where we don't know many people! We did host a going-away party on Saturday night, and a poker game broke out around midnight and went past 3am. We played dealer's choice, and I got burned on some badly-played hands in wacky wild-card games (e.g., I had a straight flush lose to 5 of a kind that I should have seen coming). I was drunk off my ass but managed to less than a buy-in.

I was drunk of my ass on purpose: It was kind of an emotional evening for me, saying goodbye to so many good friends, so once I reached that point in the evening when I'm most prone to becoming maudlin, I quickly drank right past it, going to that point of inebriation where my sense of humor is that of a seventh-grader's -- lots of crude jokes that I don't remember all that well and was embrassed to have Mrs. Cheap Thrills recount for me. Heh heh.

OK, hopefully in a couple weeks I'll be posting about my first big win at the Canterbury. Until then hear are a couple quotes I came across recently that struck me as good poker wisdom:

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
--Mark Twain

There are two cardinal sins from which all others spring: impatience and laziness.
---Franz Kafka

(Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is good bathroom reading.)

Good Hunting in Minnesota

2005-06-13T21:35:00.000-04:00

Ha, I bet that title will lead some Internet searchers astray.

Last week Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I were in Minneapolis, or Minnefabulous as it is known by, um, well, maybe its not really known as that, but you do get a few hits if you type it into Google. We had dual objectives heading out to the land of lakes:

Priority 1: Find a place to live. Mission accomplished! We arrived in Minneapolis last Saturday and stayed through Wednesday, but we found a great apartment (near the West Bank of the U) on Sunday.

Priority 2: Job interview for yours truly. At a board game company, so I was pretty psyched about it.

And I got the job! For the last several years I've been a freelancer writer and editor, and for all the freedom associated with that, it'll be nice to go back to a regular paycheck and paid benefits. I start in July. Working at a board game company! Cool.

So we found an apartment on Sunday, and my job interview was over with by Monday night. That left us with nothing important to do Tuesday and Wednesday so we just went sight-seeing: Uptown, Downtown, several lakes, the sculpture garden and that cool spoon, the Mall of America, and last but certainly not least, the Canterbury!

We didn't play, since we were just popping in on our way to the airport, but damn did it seem nice. I was following the recent comments-discussion on Bill Rini's blog and no less a poker authority than Chris Halverson described the Canterbury Card Room as "Quite possibly the best run card room in the country. The Wynn took a couple floor people and a ton of dealers to staff the new poker room. That’s how good it is." Freakin' sweet! (Even if it doesn't end up being the site of a WPBT event.)

So: new city, new job, new apartment, new card room. Wow.

Victorious JD!!

2005-06-03T15:09:00.000-04:00

I won the $1 Stud-8 tournament on PokerStars last night, beating out 534 other players for a win of $133. Woo-hoo! I've won 2 or 3 other MTTs before, but this was definitely the largest field I've won in. I only play a few tourneys a month, always for low buy-ins, so this is a decent win for me. Cheap thrills.

(I need to get better at screen-capturing.)

I went into the final table with by far the biggest stack. The poker gods had been kind to me and granted me many aces. Boy is playing with a big stack fun. Plenty of times shorter stacks gave me free cards, and plenty of other times they folded hands on 4th or 5th street that might've beat me, because they knew I'd make them pay to go to the river.

At the final table, it came down to heads up very quickly, but then my opponent and I duked it out heads up for what seemed like at least a half an hour. Have you ever played Stud-8 heads up? Two words: split pot. I'd played heads up a few times before in Stud-8 sit-n-gos, but in those the blinds are usually really high by the time it's heads up. Last night they weren't that high, and we basically played until they were. Most of the railbirds got bored and left! With my much larger stack I probably should have made shorter work of my opponent, but what can I say, it took a while. I got the victory and that's what counts :-)

Those $1 tourneys on Stars are really a great value. They offer them in every game they have on a regular weekly schedule, and they're in the evening, unlike so many other sites that only offer cheap tourneys in the middle of the day or middle of the night. And of course, Stars has the best tourney interface around. And there's no juice on the $1 tourneys! I try to play in at least one a week, usually in a non-Hold'em game. Heck, I've even played in Omaha tourneys, figuring it's a cheap way to get practice in at my very worst game.

I won't get in any more poker before we leave for Minneapolis tomorrow to go apartment-hunting, but I guess this little victory can hold me for a few days :-)

Brief, Painful Friday Morning at Foxwoods

2005-05-31T15:14:00.000-04:00

This weekend both my family and B's parents were up visiting for B's graduation ceremonies. Since we'll be moving to Minneapolis in July, this was the last time they'll be visiting New England for a while. So my mom calls me last week and says, "Why don't we meet at Foxwoods Friday afternoon for lunch?" See, my mom and my aunt really like the slots, and my my cousin just turned 21 and had never been to a casino. Plus, two Fridays ago B went down there for a day of low-limit thrills and doubled up. So we happily agreed to blowing off work for the morning and playing poker instead.

B and I arrived at Foxwoods at about a quarter to 11am and were quickly seated at $2/$4. It was pretty quiet for Foxwoods, but what can you expect in the morning. Two guys at my table were drinking beer, which surprised me. Then they mentioned that they'd been there since 7, and I thought, "wow, these guys guys are hard-core arriving that early" until I realized that they meant 7pm and that they had been playing all night.

Everyone was playing any 2. Seven or eight players would see most flops, which is even looser than normal for Foxwoods $2/$4. There were very few preflop raises and the players would make general sounds of disappointment and tsking when anyone (such as me) did raise. This table should have been easy money but I didn't stay long enough to make that happen. Instead I caught 3 beats in a single orbit that convinced me it wasn't my day:

Pocket queens: Cracked by a river flush. No biggie, that's the kind of thing you have to expect at this kind of table.

very next hand . . .

Pocket kings. I go to the river on a raggedy board with one of the up-all-night guys. He bets into me on the river and I call. He's been playing most hands and I'm sure he'll show me a small two pair but instead he shows me pocket aces. Ouch! Beat the whole way. The poker gods are toying with me.

two hands later . . .

ATs. I raise it preflop, in what surely looked like evidence of tilt (and perhaps was since I was under the gun). Flop misses me completely and I fold. Again, no biggie, but at this point I am a little exasperated.

next hand . . .

KJo in the big blind and I see a free flop -- and it's top two pair. "Finally," I think to myself like a fish. Me and the play-every-hand SB cap the betting, and a third player stays with us. The third player has Q4o and makes the K-high straight on the river. The suckout I could handle, but the really painful part is that the SB had KK! So again I had been beat the whole way but never suspected it. Ugh.

Lessons learned:

1) Don't play the lowest limit in the casino unless you're going to have a lot of fun doing it. It's not like Foxwoods $2/$4 is hugely +EV with its awful rake and it's not like playing it is really improving my game, so the main reason to play is fun. On a Friday night that game can be a lot fun (and having a few beers helps shake off the awful suckouts), but sober on a Friday morning, I was just grumpy. Only in Vegas should I play before noon. I am never grumpy there :-)

2) It's hard to play well when you have no respect for your opponents. Sitting there watching everyone play poker slots, I didn't really think about my opponents' actions once I was holding any decent hand -- it was just bet and raise, and don't make the mistake of folding in a big pot. There's much more to base decisions on in poker, even at the low low limits, but I was too frustrated and contemptuous of my table on Friday to do it.

So I got up, cooled down, and played some $1-$5 Stud while B floated around even at her table (her Foxwoods results now blow mine away). I won $5 at Stud. Then we met up with my family for lunch. The rest of the weekend was poker-free but a lot of fun.

-------------------------------

We're flying out to the Twin Cities on Saturday to look for an apt. I've also got a job interview there on Monday. We certainly wish we could be in Vegas for the blogger convention, but at least we'll be keeping busy with other important stuff and not just sitting around wishing we were there. Hope everyone has a blast and I look forward to the trip reports!

Badugi Hand Rankings

2005-05-23T17:28:00.000-04:00

We have been playing Badugi a wee bit wrong. For those who think the game is stupid, please skip this post because I am about to get into some Badugi minutia.

I had previously described the game here, based on info I gathered on 2+2. But revisiting the 2+2 forums I found this post by Greg Raymer describing the game. Here's the part that surprised me:

If nobody has a 4 card hand, then the lowest 3 card hand wins. For example, Ah2d3s4s beats Ac2c3d4h, as the former is a 3 card hand of A23, and the latter a 3 card hand of A34.

I would have thought the two hands would split the pot. I guess I was wrong (I'm inclined to believe the WSOP champ on this one).

Now, I really do not think this situation -- two non-rainbow hands of the exact same ranks -- has come up in our home games, although I could be wrong. But it certainly might have affected the way people have been playing their hands. If you're drawing 1 card, and you've got Ac2d3h and then you get the king of hearts, that's not nearly as bad as we thought. We had been playing that you'd have a "king-high double," and would lose to any lower double, but according to Raymer's explanation you've actually got the best 3-card hand there is, and will therefore beat any non-Badugi hand. That's a pretty big difference.

But wait, there's more.

We were mostly right that paired cards are bad, but they're not as bad as we thought. Raymer writes that "If you hold Ah2d3s4s, you cannot play the 4s, as it is the same suit as your 3s. Similarly, Ah2d3s3c, you must not count one of your 3s, as they are paired." We had been playing that pair absolutely kills your hand, as it would in standard lowball. That is, we'd been playing that any non-paired hand, even if it had two or even three of the same suit, would be better than a pair. I guess we were wrong on this count, too, and I'm certain that that situation has come up in our home games.

This "can't use cards of the same suit or rank" rule is confirmed in this RGP thread. Toward the end of it, Steve Badger explains that AKJT, all hearts, would beat quad queens, not because unpaired cards are better than quads (as in standard lowball), but because the first player has a better one-card hand (ace vs. queen).

So if you've got Ac2d3h and draw for one card, then any club; any diamond; any heart; any ace; any deuce; and any three all have exactly the same effect on your hand -- they don't improve it, but they don't make it worse. Cards that you "can't use" don't matter in ranking the hands. Wacky. Strategy-wise, I think this gives players even less reason to fold at the river, and makes it even more of a gambling game :-)

So to be clear, here are several examples of (really bad) Badugi hands and how they would rank, from best to worst::

KcQdJhTs (4-card hand, aka a Badugi)
KcQcJhTd (3-card hand)
KcQhJdJs (3-card hand)
KcQcJdTd (2-card hand)
KcKdJcJd (2-card hand)
KcQdQhQs (2-card hand)
KcQcJcTc (1-card hand)
KcKdKhKs (1-card hand, the absolute worst there is)

If you overthink all this, it can make your head hurt. But really it's not that bad. You just can't use cards of the same rank or the same suit, and 4-card hands are better than 3-card hands.

Silly Position Effects in Live Low-Limit Play

2005-05-23T13:34:00.000-04:00

In her visit to Foxwoods on Friday, B witnessed a phenomenon at the $2/$4 tables that we've encountered several times before: At the low low limits, where players are either clueless and/or playing just for kicks, you tend to make friends with the players next to you and enemies out of the players across from you.

There is no rational reason for this. The player on your left has the biggest advantage over you out of everyone at the table, and eveything else being equal, the players on either side of you are the ones you should be picking on most. But the players next to you are the ones you end up making conversation with.

What usually happens is that one of the players next to you will feel the need to make under-his-breath comments about the play of the players across from you. A little less often, this will evolve into general chit-chat. Either way, it often develops into an "us vs. them" vibe at the table. It's most pronounced between the players at the two far ends of the table. Many times I've sat down at a low-limit table where one end of the table is disgusted with the maniacal pay of the other-end players or, alternatively, one end considers itself the fun end of the table and is frowning on the rockish play at the other end.

Eye contact is also a big factor. When the guy across from you raises you it just seems more aggressive, more personal, because he's looking right at you. I see this happen in board games all the time -- if it's any kind of war game, you can expect the players across from each other to duke it out first, even though it's the player on your left you should be most worried about. Even if you're playing smart and not letting this silly macho dynamic affect your poker game, you should be aware that most low-limit players are letting it affect them. Bottom line is, you're more likely to get re-raised by, or have your raise called down by, the player across from you than a player who's not in your direct line of sight.

Compound this with the conversation factor and the effect is really pronounced. The guy on your left raises you and you're saying "Mike, you're killing me here!" and everything is jovial. You've made friends with Mike so there's less chance he's just bullying you, plus you can often use the table talk to glean some info. Compare how often you see two players who are next to each other cap it, vs. two players who are across from each other. With two players across from each other, there's usually little chit-chat because they don't "know" each other as well, plus they can't do any table-talk without the whole table hearing, and then the other player just perceives it as posturing. So they let their actions speak for them, which leads to capping. And if there's a staredown, forget about it. The distrust and aggression between those two players is likely to last until one of the players leaves (or switches seats).

IMO, anyone who says that live low-limit play is just automatic and that there's no playing the players is ignoring some basic social dymanics. Or not doing a very good job of chatting up Mike.

I'll Take 2

2005-05-23T00:34:00.000-04:00

My name is JD and I have a Badugi problem. The problem is that I am losing a lot at Badugi.

Overall, this weekend was a good poker weekend. On Friday B (who is largely goofing off until we move to Minneapolis in July) went down to Foxwoods and doubled her buy-in at $2/$4. Well done. Also, I've returned to the $2/$4 Party tables with good results so far. My reasoning in overcoming my financial concerns about $2/$4 was not too far of "Shit, if she can do it, so can I." So thanks B :-)

Then Saturday night, Campbooool hosted an 18-player tourney at his pad. $20 buy-in. This was something of a sequel to the tourney I played with these guys slightly over a year ago. I took second in last year's tourney, just a few weeks before I started this blog. But everyone's gotten much better at poker since then. Dammit. :-( This time, I went out midway when my pocket aces were cracked by pocket tens. What are you gonna do.

To my happiness, a side game started up. We played HBO (Hold'em-Badugi-Omaha). Had to explain Badugi to most of the players, go figure.

Unlike our usual cheap-cheap-cheap House of Cheap Thrills home game limits -- .25/.50 -- we played .50/$1.00 limits. Crazy! I started off okay and then lost way too many big bets at Badugi. I lost what I felt were a couple tough hands early -- a made Budugi 8 on 2nd street, followed by a made Badugi 6 straight out. But that is the nature of Badugi. I also, as per usual, did lousy at Omaha (I love raising with second-best!).

Anyway, I ended up down $29, and that's just too many big bets. Mostly, I blame the half-bottle of Cutty Sark that I drank. But I really think that I stank the joint up with my Badugi play. I seem to have a problem folding in that game.

Overall, a really fun weekend, even though I got trampled in home game poker. Just a little note to myself here: Tighten that Badugi game the f*** up, dumbass!

My Poker Fantasy

2005-05-21T12:25:00.000-04:00

This is from Roy West's column in this week's Card Player:

There are, in most areas of public poker, some excellent players whose names you have never heard — and they want to keep it that way. They don’t enter tournaments, but they are at every major tournament, playing the side games. While the tournament players are trying to grind their way to the final table, with most of them never getting there, these no-names are playing and winning each day of the tournament. They have no desire to have their names known. (A good hustler has to remain anonymous.)

There are players with whom I’ve talked who say that if I ever mention their names, they will beat me silly with one of my own books. They want no limelight; they just want to sit quietly and win. They are the pros of the game whose names you never hear, but many of them make as much money as those whose names you do know. Don’t underestimate your competition just because you don’t see their names in Card Player every issue.

If tomorrow I were to suddenly acquire the bankroll and develop the skill to go pro, that's the kind of player I would want to be. The WPT is fun to watch, and sure, having a WSOP bracelet would be pretty cool, but my secret poker fantasy has always been to be the hustler.

I'd be at cocktail parties with my wife's high society friends (just kidding B) and the conversation would go like this:

Polite chitchatter: "So, what do you do for a living?"
Me [acting slightly uncomfortable]: "Me? Oh, I, um, play poker."
"Oh, like on TV?"
"Kind of."
'Do you make a lot of money?"
"I do okay."
"Have you been on TV?"
"No."
"Have you won any tournaments?"
"No."
[Polite chitchatter, assuming I must not be very good, changes subject.]

I can't really name you many pros who are true hustlers. By definition, if a low-limit playing WPT fanboy like me knows who they are, they can't really be hustlers. Tommy Angelo might come close: He plays for a living, and he sticks mostly to live cash games. (I like this article by him on the subject.) But mostly I think of him because I saw him once at Foxwoods and was struck by what he was wearing: Blue jeans, nondescript white t-shirt, uttlerly plain black jacket, and a black baseball hat devoid of any logo. That is what a hustler should wear.

Coming back to reality, I am not a hustler. Since I don't get to Vegas that often, when I do, I'm more likely to dress like Hawaiian shirt guy and, wherever I'm playing, I like to go for the Dean Martin routine as described by Joe Speaker. But I do own a nice plain black jacket.

Internet Famous

2005-05-18T01:42:00.000-04:00

I enjoy the Pre-Shrunk blog. This post isn't poker-related, but reading it I thought of the poker bloggerati.

Interesting Legal Mumbo-Jumbo

2005-05-16T12:52:00.000-04:00

I was reading Card Player this morning over breakfast. An odd thing about subscribing to Card Player is that they put up the web version of each new issue 3 or 4 days before I get my print copy, so by the time I read the issue, more timely poker bloggers than me have already posted about the most interesting articles in it. But the upside of subscribing is that I get to read at least some poker content away from the computer.

I particularly enjoyed this week's article by I. Nelson Rose, discussing the relatively recent Pennsylania law legalizing slot machines. (I grew up in a suburb of Philly and I'm down there several times a year visiting friends and family.) I posted once before on the Naragansett Indians' attempt to get a casino here in RI, and Rose's article on the PA law really captures the messiness of the politics that tend to surround such attempts.

Then in catching up with blogs this morning, I see that Jeremy linked to a blogger named Moneyball, who's written a paper titled Pocket Aces: A Comprehensive Look at the Legality of Off-Shore Internet Gambling Within the USA. It's a pretty great overview of the history of the issue and, more usefully, a concise summary of recent legal developments and what they may mean for online poker.

So I've had a morning full of reading about gambling laws. Now back to work!

That's Gold, Baby, Gold!

2005-05-16T12:40:00.000-04:00

B and I spent the weekend in Vermont with friends. Our buddy Campbell (aka Campboooooool) has got a cabin up there. Muy nice place and we had a great time. We got in a little low-stakes poker action on Saturday night -- at which my drunk ass somehow managed to lose $10 in under and hour -- but for me the best poker-related moment of the weekend was Saturday afternoon, when, while sitting around channel surfing, we happened upon this season's WPT Mirage event. B, Campbool, and I had aready seen it, but our other 3 friends had not, and 2 of them had never even seen the WPT. Campbell and I turned up the volume for Scotty Nguyen's exit interview with Shana Hiatt, where he says stuff like "You're too fine to be walking around while I'm playing, baby," and she doesn't catch on to what he's saying until he's already gotten in 3 great lines. An absolutely golden WPT moment, that.

The Good Side of Variance

2005-05-12T15:46:00.000-04:00

I haven't been playing that much online poker the past few weeks, and when I have played it's been Triple Draw at UltimateBet, or the Stud-8 tourneys at Stars, or an occasional sit-n-go at Paradise or Absolute. I haven't really improved my Hold'em ring game in months, but I like to think I'm broadening my poker game in general by improving at other games and formats. On Tuesday, however, I deposited at Empire for the 50 percent reload bonus, and yesterday I got in a good number of hands. I caught great cards and was reminded just how profitable a night of grinding at Party et al. can be. Here are the happy numbers:

$1/$2 Hold'em
421 hands, 415 of which were raked
$135 won
15.96 BB/100

$1/$2 Stud-8
About an hour and a half of play
$45.50 won

Joy joy.

Canterbury Here We Come!

2005-05-02T22:53:00.000-04:00

B (aka Dr. Cheap Thrills, now that she has her PhD) and I have been deliberating for a couple of weeks now, trying to figure out where in the hell we're moving to this summer. A couple posts ago I mentioned that the choice had come down to Washington, D.C., or Minneapolis. . . .

Minneapolis it is! (Or perhaps St. Paul, we haven't decided on that yet :-) B has taken a 1-to-3 year postdoc at "the U" of Minnesota. The hope is that the research she does there will set her up to get her academic dream job down the road.

What this means for me, of course, is that I will be joining the esteemed ranks of Minnesota poker bloggers! Chris Halverson, Drizztdj, Chad, Jarooty, Stripper by Night . . . is there something in the water out there? (I'm betting there are others I'm missing -- if so, please clue me in.)(Update: Whiskeytown, who I've read before but missed was from MN. Another update: The Fish Tank.)

I've only ever been to Minnesota once, for a wedding in 1999. In the days before the wedding, we went to the Mall of America, got drunk on a boat on Lake Minnetonka, and went to the Minnesota State Fair, where I ate pork chop on a stick (yum) and cheese curds (not so much yum) and saw the state's biggest sow. Oh, and I drank Leinenkugal at a bar in downtown Minneapolis after the rehearsal dinner. All in all it was a blast.

Anyway, we're looking forward to this new phase of our lives. We're planning to move in late June (the plans are still very vague), so for the next few weeks we'll be trying to squeeze in all the time we can with our friends and family here.

Which reminds me of something I've known this for a while but haven't actually blogged: As much as we want to, there's no way we're going to make the poker blogger convention that'll be happening in Las Vegas next month. We're going to have our hands full with the whole moving halfway across the country thing. Doh! I know it's going to be an incredible event . . . at least I'll get to read about it :-)

Well, things are going to be hectic for us for the next couple of months, but I'm already psyched about the Canterbury!

Three Month Lag

2005-05-02T13:01:00.000-04:00

I was just sorting through some junk mail from last week, and I opened a large envelope from Intertops Poker. It contained a cheap plastic (as opposed to foam rubber) mousepad with poker hand rankings and the recommended starting hands for Hold'em, along with a letter informing me of their February reload bonus and freeroll tournaments. Geez.

Online Triple Draw and Home-Game HBO

2005-05-01T18:48:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I relaxed and played poker for the first time in more than two weeks, and it was a lot of fun. (This weekend is was the first weekend that I haven't been either out of town or busy as hell in about two months.)

Tomorrow is my birthday, and so yesterday Mrs. Cheap Thrills organized a game day/poker night with a bunch of our friends. We played a few board and party games in the afternoon, then ordered pizza for dinner and switched to poker. It rained all day so it was a perfect day for just hanging around playing games.

I was up by 9am, and at 9:30 I hopped on to UltimateBet for some triple draw. I won $60 playing $1/$2 in about 45 minutes. I've just been really enjoying that game since I started playing. Most of my money is actually in TruePoker right now -- I'm planning to clear their recent reload bonus -- but I'm having a hard time tearing myself away from UB's triple draw.

The most interesting parts of triple draw are, well, the three draws. UB puts a little number above each player showing how many cards they took. It's a very clear signal of how strong an opponent's hand is, much more so than in 5-card draw, where players can use some deception in the draw phase. (You can snow in triple draw -- that is, bluff by not drawing -- but it's pretty rare in the low-limit games at UB.) Seeing how many cards each player draws on each street is just a huge piece of information that has no counterpart in Hold'em, Omaha, or Stud, and I'm finding myself thinking about my decisions in a hand in a different way.

Anyway, up $60, I was feeling very happy. I then spent a few hours generally cleaning and preparing for the day, and by 2:30 we had 10 people over. I'll gloss over the non-poker portion of the day here, but games played included Diamant, Fabrik der Traume, Ticket to Ride: Europe, Queen's Necklace, Split Second, Loopin' Louie, Werewolf, darts (Cricket), and Smarty Party.

Poker didn't get underway until 9pm, but it was a blast. We played for our usual low limits (.25/.50), but instead of our usual rotation of Hold'em, Omaha, and Stud (HOS), we opted for HBO -- Hold'em, Badugi, and Omaha. Badugi has most of the fun of triple draw, but accommodates more than 6 players (we had 7 for poker) and you hardly ever have to deal with reshuffling the deck for the later draws as you do in triple draw. As with the last time I introduced Badugi at a home game, there was much discussion of what strategies were correct for the game, and of how much of the game is skill vs. the luck of the draw.

In the original Super System, Joey Hawthorne writes of lowball in general, "You're dealing with a game where luck will appear to be the dominant factor." I don't think 2+2 is going to publish Badugi for Advanced Players anytime soon, but there is certainly good play and bad play. My basic take is that breaking up a made "rainbow" is generally a bad idea, even though a bad rainbow will usually not win, and that you shouldn't draw with more than one high card or when you're paired and double-suited. But I'm really liking Badugi for home games in part because the strategy is so straightforward. You end up playing the players more than the cards. First, there is the obvious info gained from how many cards each player draws. But second, in a home game it's a lot of fun watching people react to the draws. Players who are careful to keep their expression neutral for the turn and river in Hold'em express obvious disgust or joy at their draws in Badugi, and watching this is fun. More so than with home-game Hold'em, I end up making a lot of decisions about whether to bet, call, raise, fold, or even snow based on the signs other players are giving.

We only played until 1am. Our poker nights have been known to go to 3 or 4 in the morning, but everyone was pooped from the long day of gaming.

Not me. The day had been a blast and I was still charged up. I was also pretty drunk. Mrs. Cheap Thrills crashed, and I then broke my rule of "no online poker when I've been drinking," and returned to the UB triple draw tables. Happily, I made another $50 at $1/$2. I'm sure it would have been more had I been sober -- when I've been drinking my aggression goes up (just my poker aggression; I am a jolly rather than an angry drunk) and my respect for an opponent's raise goes out the window. On at least 3 different hands I capped the betting on the river, only to be shown the wheel. Whoops!

$110 (plus $4 at .25/.50 HBO!) is more than I've won at poker in a single day in a long time. And of course spending the day and night with so many friends was priceless. In general yesterday was a great reminder of how much fun poker can be, whether online or off.

Quick Update

2005-04-20T12:16:00.000-04:00

So I spent all of last week at a board game convention in Ohio. It was a blast. I will spare you most of the nerdy details and concentrate on the poker. I played in two tournaments in which the blinds went up very, very quickly. I cashed in neither so I lost a total of $20 in buy-ins. I also won $40 in a NL cash game (.50/$1 blinds) for an overall poker profit. That game broke up all too quickly as people lost their initial buy-ins and refused to rebuy. I tried to start a limit cash game a couple times to no avail. I got odd looks from a few people I considered to be competent beginner poker players -- a couple of them merely scoffed at the idea of playing limit, while one -- the guy who had just won $90 in the NL game -- said had actually never played limit before (let alone anything besides Hold'em)! Amazing.

Oh yeah, B (Mrs. Cheap Thrills) was out on the first hand of one of the tournaments. (She was the highest-finishing female player in the only tournament they held last year.) Her AQs flopped an ace with a flush draw, and the K-10 on board also gave her a straight draw. The turn gave her another ace and she was all-in. Her opponent had QJ for the straight and that was that.

B also sucessfully defended her thesis yesterday. The formal graduation ceremony won't be until Memorial Day, but she now has her PhD and is joking about making everyone call her Doc B. She's still interviewing for a job -- right now it looks like we'll have to make a decision between a potentially permanent position in DC or a postdoc in Minneapolis, but nothing is really concrete yet.

We're off to a wedding in LA this Thursday night, so not much poker or blogging for me this week. Once we get back from that we will take a much-needed break from traveling and spend most of May at home. I also hope to get our home poker gaming going again in May. There's nowhere else I can scratch my Badugi itch. (Ugh, that sounds unpleasant.)

Socially Acceptable Game-Playing

2005-04-10T07:49:00.000-04:00

I am off today to Columbus, Ohio, for a boardgame convention of sorts called the Gathering of Friends. Basically I will be hanging out with a bunch of friends (many of whom I game with reguarly here in southern New England) and playing board games. If it sounds geeky I guess it is, but I expect it to be a great time, just like it was last year. The board games we play are often called "German" or "Euro" games because they are somehwat more popular in Europe than the United States (although U.S. publishers are taking note). Check out Boardgamegeek.com or Funagain Games for examples of what I'm talking about.

I have a pet theory that one reason behind the poker boom is that Americans are just happy to have a game that is fun and socially acceptable to play. Most games Americans grew up playing are simply not that much fun. When it comes to board games, most people think of 1) Monopoly and 2) Risk. Many people have had bad experiences with these games because 1) they take hours and hours to play 2) you're mostly just rolling dice the whole time and 3) players are eliminated in painful ways -- by having either all their armies annihilated or by going bankrupt. The "Euro" games I'll be playing all this week do not have these features -- they play in about an hour, usually no one is eliminated before the end, and they usually don't use dice.

But back to poker. Not only is poker more fun that the games most Americans grew up playing, it is also "cool." Game-playing is somewhat stigmatized in the United States as an activity for children or nerdy teenagers or, in the case of card games such as Bridge or Hearts, senior citizens. Before the poker boom, American game publishers pretty much told everyone that party games such as Cranium and its ilk were the only games that adults should be playing on a weekend night.

Then along comes poker, providing people with a socially acceptable reason to have a game night. (Of course plenty of people were playing poker already -- TV poker really just reminded everyone how much fun it can be.) The vast majority of home poker games, both tournament and cash game, are played for paltry stakes. In many cases, the amount won or lost in the poker game is exceeded by the cost of the beer and pizza consumed while playing. So while poker is certainly a gambling game, the gambling is not the main reason for playing -- the social aspect of game-playing is.

I also believe that this is the reason that many people love going to casinos. They don't care so much about the money they win or lose, they just like playing games -- even mindless games such as roulette -- and in their minds the casino is the only place where adults are "supposed" to play games.

I have a lot more to say on this topic, but my I have to be out the door in less than 20 minutes. I'll just wrap up by saying for most people, poker can be viewed as part of the broader family of card and board games people grew up playing, rather than as a unique and special pursuit, which is how most serious poker players, including many people reading this blog, view the game. I love "serious" poker. But when I play in most home games, I do it for the fun, not the money. And as long as we're just playing for fun, I figure why not play a good board game. For me, less-than-serious poker is not very different than a board or card game played for no money.

I will almost certainly play some poker at the Gathering, and I may try to blog about it depending on the hotel's Internet options. On the online poker front, I cleared the Empire bonus this weekend. Also, last week I deposited in UltimateBet just so I could play Triple Draw. Man is that a fun game. The only problem is that there isn't always a game going.

A Year of Cheap Thrills

2005-04-06T19:57:00.000-04:00

This past Friday, April 1, was this blog's first birthday. Looking back on the year, I am happy to say that I've gotten a lot better at poker.

I am a winning poker player. Definitely not a big winner, but a winner nonetheless. I haven't gone broke or into the red. In fact, I can honestly say that if you include bonuses, poker has been nothing but profitable from my very first deposit of $50 into Paradise Poker. However that profitability is something I am only so proud of: The price of being so consistent is that I have been pretty risk-averse in terms of the games and limits I play at. More on this below.

Looking back over my blog, I realize that I don't usually post about my day-to-day play. For one thing, my day-to-day play isn't usually that interesting. But after a year of blogging I've also realized that when I'm losing, I don't enjoy writing about it. And of course I have plenty of losing days. Some bloggers are brutally honest about their highs and lows, and I respect them for it.

So here are my numbers.

When I started this blog I had already been playing for almost exactly one year, almost entirely at .50/$1 limit Hold'em games, occasionally delving into $1/$2 and $2/$4. In my second-ever post, in April 2004, I wrote "Currently I'm down $99.27 after almost exactly one year of playing online (home and B&M play not included in this figure). I've also cleared $454.10 in bonuses, for a net of $354.83." In case that's not clear, I like to separate what I've actually won at poker from what I've cleared in bonuses.

A year later, I've won exactly $503.53 at poker, and cleared another 1,584.95 in poker bonuses, for a total of $2,088.48.

Whenever I update my poker log, my first reaction to these numbers is usually disappointment -- even embarrassment, which is another reason I rarely blog about my own results. I know that there are plenty of online poker players (many of them bloggers) who have taken far, far more cash out of this game, often with much less effort than I've put in. And like any poker player should, I question whether or not I have a clue what I'm doing.

But then I think, hey, I'm making $1,000 a year playing a game I really enjoy. And that usually makes me feel better.

In my gut I know that my overall poker profits should be much higher than they are. In the past year I've identified what I feel are my two main "leaks," and neither of them have to do with poker strategy:

First, I tilt when I'm up. I get cocky. I get loose-aggressive. And then I lose. This "tilt when up" phenomenon can happen in a single session or over the course of many sessions. In the latter case, as my bankroll swells, so does my poker ego, and I'll start not paying enough attention to my game because it has seemed "so easy" for so many sessions.

Drinking severely exacerbates my tilt-when-up problem. I am quite certain that I lost more than $500 in late-night drunken sessions in my first year of play, but (bonuses included) I stayed in the black. I started this blog as part of my effort to stop screwing around and take the game seriously, and in this past year -- while there have been a few nights I regret -- I've been much better behaved about not playing when I've been drinking.

In general, I feel I've learned some big lessons and have the tilt-when-up problem mostly under control.

Unfortunately, the second thing stopping me from being a more profitable player is harder to remedy. It is lack of funds. Mrs. Cheap Thrills is a grad student and I am freelance writer and book editor. Our household income is scarily low. (There is a reason I named the blog Cheap Thrills.) Mrs. Cheap Thrills graduates this May and looks to have a very nice career ahead of her, but this summer we will be faced with relocating to a new state (not sure which one yet). And once do know where we'll be living I will start looking for a non-freelance, higher-paying job. But in the meantime the impending move exacerbates our money problems.

What this means is that I don't keep thousands of dollars tied up in online poker. I have never totally maxed out a bonus. I typically have between $500 and $1000 in various sites, and will free up two or three hundred for a good bonus. So that limits my bonus-whoring potential.

I also end up feeling like scared money when I take a shot at higher limits. More on this below.

Here's a brief overview of the year as I recall it:

March-April 2004: Spring rolls around and it is a time of new beginnings. After a winter slump at online poker, I dive back in and start winning. I discover the poker blogging scene and decide to dive into that too. I also build a nice poker table and document it in the blog.

May-June 2004: I continue grinding at .50/$1. I also play a few times at the Foxwoods $2/$4 game, getting comfortable with playing in a casino. I also started using PokerTracker in May.

July 2004: Several things happen that help my game enormously. First, I read a book on 7-Stud and started beating up the Paradise .50/$1 and $1/$2 tables. Second, I started two-tabling, which both increased my profits-per-session and helped me reduce "boredom" tilt. For the first time, I started doing better than break-even at Party's .50/$1 Hold'em tables. Prior to this, the bad beats had always driven me crazy and I had preferred Paradise, but now I started getting the hang of extracting cash from very loose games.

August 2004: I read Bob Ciaffone's Middle Limit Holdem and started playing $2/$4 at Party almost exclusively. I go up about $1000 in August, which turns into my bankroll for a Vegas trip. Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I take the $3/$6 game at the Mirage for a couple hundred each. I am feeling very confident.

September 2004: I have another Vegas trip planned, this time a bachelor party. With little time to get my money back into Neteller, I don't play much online this month. In Vegas, I play a ton, often tired and drunk (deep down I know it is the tilt-when-up phenomenon, but I'm having too much fun to care), but surprisingly only lose about $150.

October-November 2004: My online win rate drops considerably. I'm not losing, but things don't seem as easy as they did. Is it the tilt-when-up problem again or something else? I decide that I like live play better than online and make a few trips to Foxwoods and one serendipitous stop at Turning Stone in NY.

December 2004-March 2005: Just like in the winter of 2003/04, I start losing. Not a lot, but I'm not winning. I don't know if fewer fish play in the winter or I just play worse in the winter, but this is two years in a row it's happened. I think what might happen is that I'm more worried about money with the holidays going on, and it hurts my play. I'll take a $100 loss in $2/$4 and totally freak about it. So just like in the winter of 2003/04, I start playing a lot less. When I do play, it's mostly at .50/$1, fooling around with low buy-in tourneys, or grinding out bonuses.

April 2005: The renewal of spring is upon us again. Winter doldrums are lifting. Confidence is rising. But with our financial situation, returning to $2/$4 still doesn't seem like a great idea. Question is, how long will that stop me? :-)

So that's the year in review. How about right now? Where does my game stand?

The main thing I've developed in my past two years of playing online poker is the ability to whomp on very bad players. I am proud of this skill. In the end, I think that whomping on very bad players is where the profit in poker really comes from. I think they'll be bad players at the low-limit tables in Vegas for years and years to come.

I would like to be playing at a higher level, though, and I do fear stagnation. I worry that financial issues are keeping me not only from making as much as I could, but also from getting better as fast as I could. But on the bright side, I am getting better. I look back at the player I was year ago and laugh, both at how bad I was and how good I thought I was. I hope that next year I will look back at myself now and do the same thing.

So that's my year-in-review post. I'm glad I took the time to write it: It's important to think about how well I'm doing vs. how well I could be doing, and to look back on the highs and lows of the past year. But I am now in the mood to just go play some poker!

The Massachusets Lottery $10 Million Texas Hold'Em Challenge

2005-03-31T19:57:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of this here blog. Yup, my first post was on April Fool's Day. I want to write some kind of year-in-review post but tomorrow morning I am headed to Philly for a wedding, and I want to play some poker tonight. So the bigger post will wait until next week. For now, another weird by-product of the poker craze:

The Massachusets Lottery $10 Million Texas Hold'Em Challenge -- in association with the World Poker Tour!

On Tuesday, March 29th, the Massachusetts Lottery launched its newest $10 instant ticket, $10,000,000 HOLD’EM POKER® which features a play style similar to the wildly popular card game. With more than $645 million in prizes, the new game offers a grand prize of $10 million - the largest single instant ticket prize in U.S. lottery history.

The $10,000,000 HOLD’EM POKER® instant ticket also features a unique “Bonus Tournament” event to be held at a later scheduled date, where 560 lucky players will win entry into a drawing with over $15 million in prize money. Four players will win $1 million and one lucky player will take home the $10 million Grand Prize.

“$10,000,000 HOLD’EM POKER® continues the Massachusetts Lottery’s proud tradition of offering players the most exciting and entertaining games in the nation,” said State Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill, whose office oversees the Lottery. “With a record-breaking prize structure, this game is certain to attract players and generate new revenue for the Lottery. And the more successful we are at the Lottery, the more money that can be returned to the Commonwealth’s 351 cities and towns.”

Hold'Em Poker has gained worldwide appeal due largely to televised tournaments like the World Poker Tour™. The Massachusetts Lottery teamed with Scientific Games to produce its instant ticket version of the game which features the patented Hold'Em Poker® play style, yet does not require any poker skill or knowledge to participate.

“As the national leader in instant ticket sales, we know that our players expect games with innovative prize structures,” said Lottery Executive Director Joseph C. Sullivan. “That’s what we are offering with the $10,000,000 HOLD’EM POKER® instant ticket When this game is finished, one lucky player will win $10 million, and make Lottery history.”

More on Those WPT Previews

2005-03-31T19:28:00.000-05:00

Well, my last post generated a little more discussion than, well, most of my posts. (I got 2 comments on it and it was mentioned it in one other blog.) I had complained about the WPT's previews for next week's WPT.

For those who don't know, they do these cheesy voice-overs of the player's "thoughts." Last week, they had David Pham giggling and bragging. Also, the guy "voicing" Pham was doing a very affected Asian accent. Then they had Carlos Mortensen "replying" in a very affected Spanish accent.

In my post I said "Please, WPT, please stop these offensive attempts at humor. I'm fairly thick-skinned PC-wise, but there just aren't even a little funny." My two commenters both said that they weren't that (or at all) offended and they found the spots pretty funny.

OK, let's get specific. There are at least two versions of the spot. Below I am going quoting both of them, although I admit I don't remember them exactly:

In one, Pham says "I just bluffed you with 3-2. No one can stop the Dragon now!" and Mortensen replies "The dragon, huh, did your mommy give that lame nickname?" (By the way, having watched this week's ep, we know that Pham *did* bluff Mortensen with 32, so maybe these spots have more info than they should.)

In the other, Pham also says something like "No one can stop the dragon," but then a big-busted waitress comes over and the camera catches him gawking at her.

Both of my commenters felt that the second version was funnier. I agree. (The second version is also less hostile to Pham -- it's just booby humor, as opposed to insulting his nickname.)

I'm not primarily upset about the bad Spanish and Asian accents, nor do I think racism is the issue here. What I dislike about these spots is that they are juvenile and portray the subjects (in this case Pham and Mortensen) as fools. It also has them denigrating each other. The race issue was just flavor for this week. Two weeks ago, they had the young kid going up against Doyle Brunson saying "when you were young the cards were made of stone," and for next week, they have Layne Flack telling Mike Matusow he needs a back wax.

Mike Matusow, who many feel *should* be made fun of for his behavior at last year's WSOP, is distracting from my point, which is that these spots are taking away from the aura of the WPT. For two freaking hours, Mike Sexton and VVP build up what a colossal contest among true poker masters we are so privileged to watch. Then the preview spots for next week come on and they make the players seem like buffoons, and the game just a pissing contest.

So to clarify and re-emphasize my original point, the racial humor aside, these spots are just stupid. Maybe some of them are little funny in a juvenile way, but I'd rather see them dropped.

P.S. I missed the WPBT event last night. NL tourneys aren't really my thing. I would've played for the banter as I have in the past, but I was feeling pretty beat.

P.P.S.
I wrote a little post this past Monday and thought I posted it. But I thought wrong:

For the past month I have been either working or out of town. This Sunday I finally got to spend the weekend at home. Unfortunately, I spent most of it working, but happily, on Sunday afternoon I *finally* finished the book I've been working on (a nonfiction text for middle school students -- not the most exciting stuff, and it took most of the writing energy out of me to the detriment of this here blog).

I've rewarded myself mostly by playing poker. Mostly low buy-in tourneys, which I usually find frustrating because I so rarely cash in them. I'm sure they're -EV for me, but I'm in the mood for stress-free fun and therefore attracted to the loss limit aspect.

Anyway, this evening I sat down and watched the western classic High Noon -- I had it in my Netflix queue and I've put off watching it for almost a month. A very good movie, but I'll cut to the poker content: At one point in the movie the lead character's wife is very upset that her husband is about to go into gunfight where he's outgunned 4 to 1. Someone says that her husband is the marshal of the town and clearly "in the right," and she replies something to the effect of "Yeah, well, my father and brother were both killed in gunfights. They were both in the right but it didn't help them once the bullets started flying."

All I could think of was poker. You might have the best hand going in, and therefore be "in the right," but that doesn't mean much once the chips and other cards start flying. And multiple opponents decrease your odds of "surviving" . . . I know poker-as-a-gunfight is a cliched metaphor, but it is apt enough that I couldn't listen to all the talk about gunfights in High Noon without thinking about it.

VVPQotW: WPT Grand Prix de Paris

2005-03-23T23:22:00.000-05:00

A few notes on tonight's episode:

1) Watching all those Europeans stew over Tony G's boorish behavior was just as much fun as it was last year.

2) Watching all of Tony G's suckouts somehow made me feel better about the low limits. The high-level pros have to deal with variance and obnoxious know-it-alls too!

3) There was a commercial for Austrialian tourism during the last break. Pretty funny given that Tony G was representing the country so well.

4) The WPT's promos for next week's episode have crossed the line from "not funny" to "just plain offensive." A couple weeks ago they had voice-overs giving us the "thoughts" of Doyle Brunson and whatever young kid made that week's final table. They had the young kid thinking something like "when you were young the cards were made of stone." Making fun of elderly folk with a lame joke--that's, um, lame. This week, though, they had David Pham's "thoughts" done in a stereotypical evil-Chinese-wizard's-sidekick voice straight out of Kung Fu theatre dubbing. Then they have Carlos Mortensen "reply" in similarly stereotypical voice. Please, WPT, please stop these offensive attempts at humor. I'm fairly thick-skinned PC-wise, but there just aren't even a little funny.

OK, onto the Vince Van patten Quote of the Week:

"Well, I guarantee you one thing. Tony G really doesn't have a whole lot of friends."

Click here for the previous VVPQotW.

Don't Forget Your Green Beer

2005-03-17T13:06:00.000-05:00

Happy St. Patrick's Day everybody.

I am still buried in work, and have a nasty deadline on Monday, so no online poker. I did make time to watch the WPT last night -- there were an unusually large number of big-name players at the final table, and Daniel Negreanu is fun to watch. I'm also going to make time for the requisite beer or 3 tonight, then tomorrow night I drive down to Philly for a buddy's bachelor party. So I am behind on work, but at least I'm having fun.

Mrs. Cheap Thrills convinced a friend of ours to buy into Absolute Poker this week. Monday was his first night playing. He freaked out about an initial horrible run of cards, then went up 30 big bets and is now hooked. Pretty fun to talk to him and remember going through those first jitters myself.

Okay, I am going to put on some Pogues and try and get some work done.

H.O.R.S.E. Wrap-Up

2005-03-14T17:38:00.000-05:00

I just want to echo all the thanks to Iggy and Felicia for organizing the WPBT H.O.R.S.E. tourney. It was a lot of fun, especially for someone like me who's not a NL specialist.

I thought that I would have an edge in the Stud portions of the tourney, since so many bloggers had posted about not even knowing how to play Stud-8 and such. Sure enough, I seemed to do best in the Stud games, and lost the most money in Hold'em. This was so apparent that I started to worry whether I was subconciously not playing my best Hold'em game, but I think there really were just a lot of very good Hold'em players giving away a lot of chips in Razz and Stud-8. In Omaha, I just folded a lot, as that is definitely my weakest game.

I finished 5 or 6 places shy of a cash, but I made my buy-in plus $10 or so back playing low-limit Razz after I busted out. Fun game. I seem to have developed a new fascination with lowball games, fueled in part by how badly so many people play them. I'm gonna have to deposit in UltimateBet and try online Triple Draw. I am still really busy with work though so no online poker for me this week.

Replacing Annoying Sound Files

2005-03-10T14:38:00.000-05:00

I am still swamped with work this week so just another quick post. In a brief bit of procrastination yesterday I was browsing through the 2+2 forums, and found this post. Briefly, the poster explains that, annoyed with the chip, card, and "it's your turn" sounds at Party, he took the corresponding wav files from his Paradise Poker folder, renamed them, and put them in his Party folder. Just an easy way to get less annoying sounds. I did the same thing last night for Absolute Poker -- the sound that AP makes if you exceed your 15 seconds or whatever is just awful. Not that I exceed my time limit very often, but when I do the damn bell-buzzer sound that AP makes always startles me, so I replaced it with a soft "ding" wav that is less likely to induce heart attack.

Replacing annoying sound files with more pleasant ones -- why didn't I think of that?

In a neat bit of coincidence, the day after I discover this little sound file trick, Bill Rini posts a lament on The Sorry State of Online Poker. I know that whenever I log on to a poker site, and I get the "a software update is available -- click to install" message, I always hope that there will be some noticeable improvement in the site's lobby or interface. But there usually never is. Anyway, great post, check it out if you haven't already.

H.O.R.S.E.!

2005-03-09T12:06:00.000-05:00

Just a quick post to say that I am very excited about the WPBT H.O.R.S.E. tourney at Full Tilt. I will be out of town this weekend (down near Gettysburgh, PA, about a 7-hour drive, doh!) but am going to make every effort to get back in time for the tourney Sunday night.

Note: My screen name is Cottonmouth on Full Tilt.

As I have said many times on this blog, I am primarily a limit player. Also I have really been enjoying Stud-8. Right now I am working on an Absolute bonus -- play 300 hands of Stud or Stud-8 at $1/$2 or above in the month of March, and get $50 free. I cannot find this promo on their website. I got it via snail mail. Actually, Mrs. Cheap Thrills got it via snail mail -- we used to both get mailings but now only she does. I have no idea why. Anyway, the promo is play the 300 raked hands, then e-mail promotions@absolutepoker.com with the words "$50 Stud" in the subject line along with your Absolute Rewards number (you need to get one of those for this promo). I cleared about 80 raked hands last night and won $40.

I have also been playing the $1 Stud and Stud-8 tourneys on Pokerstars. I seem to to do better at Stud-8 than regular Stud, at least in tourneys. I have also been playing Stud-8 SnGs at Stars, but boy do they take a long time. I do not have much of a head for Omaha, though, and I have never played Razz outside a home game. Still, I'm reading a lot of posts from bloggers who say they don't play anything besides Hold'em, so I have to think that my chances in a H.O.R.S.E. tourney are better than they are in a standard NL Hold'em tourney. However, that is not saying much!

I do have a bigger post brewing, but I am swamped with work this week.

Now at Netflix

2005-03-01T11:04:00.000-05:00

I've seen the ads for some of these "Learn to Play Poker" DVDs, and figured I'd never watch them because I'd never purchase them. I forgot about Netflix:

Masters of Poker Volume I: Phil Hellmuth's Million Dollar Poker System

Winning Strategies: Texas Hold'em Poker with Mike Caro

Poker for Dummies

Okay, I'll probably still never watch these, but it's good to know that if I'm ever feeling like I need more Phil Hellmuth on my TV, Netflix is there . . .

Home Game Badugi

2005-02-27T15:22:00.000-05:00

I play in about 2-3 home games a month, but for some reason I usually don't blog about them. Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I have been hosting a semi-regular Thursday night game where we play for mere .25/.50 limits. Usually we drink and laugh and push a few dollars around, and the overall experience is more about the socializing than the poker. In the last one we hosted we played some Triple Draw, which was kinda neat. We've hosted a few small tournaments in the past, but at some point I decided that running a tournament was a lot less fun than playing in one, and that doing both is just too hectic.

Then last night we attended the monthly game with some friends of ours closer to Boston. They play dealer's choice, .50/$1 limits for half the evening, then we do a $10 buy-in No-Limit tourney for the second half of the evening.

In the dealer's choice portion of the evening I introduced Badugi, and it turned out to be a big hit! I explained how this game is played in a previous post, but I'll recap briefly: The game is played like Ace-to-Five Triple Draw Lowball, but you only get 4 cards. This makes it a slightly better game for 7 or maybe even 8 people, whereas Triple Draw is best with 6 (since with more than that you end up running through the deck and having to reshuffle the muck for draws). The best hand in Badugi is A234, all of different suits. Having two of the same suit is bad. As2c3h4h would beat Ac2s3d5d, but both hands would be beaten by 3s7c9hJd.

(Update, May 23, 2005: Some of the strategy musings below are based on a misunderstanding of how the hands rank in Badugi. Check out this post for details.)

There are some interesting decisions. For example, in the first hand, everyone played loose and drew several times, but no one improved to what we called a "rainbow," and instead the best "double low" (2 cards of the same suit) won. But then in 2 later hands I started with a good double low, such as an 8. I had to make a decision whether to draw to a "rainbow" (all 4 different suits), or stick with my double low. If someone else stands pat on the first draw, they may have a rainbow, but it's unclear how good it may be. Or they could be standing pat on a decent double low. Position is a huge advantage in this game -- after seeing how your opponents' draw, you can decide whether to risk a draw, "snow" (bluff by standing pat), etc.

One thing is that if you do have a decent double low, it is tough to improve on a draw. Let's say you have an 8 double low, like Ac2s3d8d, and one of your opponents has stood pat. (I was in this kind of situation twice last night.) If you toss away the 8 on a draw, you need to catch a heart. You'd prefer it be a low heart, but not the Ah, 2h, or 3h, otherwise you'll pair up and will be beaten by any non-pair rainbow, and won't really have improved at all. So you have 10 outs to a non-pair rainbow, but you can't really like the Kh, Qh, or Jh at all. So make that 7 outs. Realizing this, you might not like your chances to improve to a decent rainbow.

However, once the group realized the difficulty of improving on a draw, we started standing pat with good double lows . . . which then made standing pat and raising with rainbows all the more sensible! All of this made decisions like those in the above paragraph much more about reading your opponent.

Going beyond first street, in one hand I stood pat on a Q-high rainbow, and after the second draw it was clear that one of my opponents liked his hand. I probably should have folded, but this being a low-limit home game, I instead drew on the third draw. By that time the pots odds might have even justified it. . . . Very interesting stuff.

Also, I came in second in the tournament :-)

Big Loss in What Might Be My Last Session at Foxwoods

2005-02-26T10:43:00.000-05:00

Let's start with the cold hard facts: I went down to Foxwoods again last night and lost. To the tune of $260 -- my biggest loss in live casino poker yet! 32.5 big bets.

The usual mix of factors account for my loss:

First, I got the coldest cards I've ever gotten in a casino. Oh well, it happens, and I dutifully folded Ace-little offsuit again, again, and again.

Second, I took 3 or 4 very painful river beats. Stuff like a flush that loses when the board pairs on the river, a set that loses to a backdoor river flush, and a flopped boat that the river makes into second-best. If I had taken down 1 or 2 of those pots, my loss wouldn't have been so big. But dwelling on them would be loser talk, and I don't want to indulge in that. The river was very unkind to me last night, but that is poker.

Third, finally, and most importantly, I grossly misplayed at least 2 hands. (Possibly because tilt set in from the cold cards and river beats, even though I was really trying to to guard against that.) One I really kicked myself over -- in the interest of exorcising this demon, here it is: I have QKo on the button. 5 or 6 people limp and, for whatever tilty reason, I do not raise. The blinds limp and check. Flop is QKT rainbow. BB bets, one player bets, 3 or 4 call, and I decide not to raise. My thinking was something like "well, AJ and J9 have me beat, but more likely, anyone with a J or A is staying in on a broadway draw. I will wait and raise on the turn provided we get a blank, and that will protect my hand better than raising now will." Way to out-think myself. The turn is another ten. Shit. The BB bets. Double shit. I call him down like a good fish, he has T7o. I could have given him 2 different chances to fold but I didn't, and then I pay him off when it's pretty clear I'm beat. Wow, what an awful, awful hand.

So much for how the loss came to be. The question now is what I'm going to do about it, and unfortunately the answer may be "nothing." Last night's loss puts me well into the red at Foxwoods. What I really want to do is head back there right now. But I can't tell if that's a commendable sort of tenacity talking, or if I'm just on tilt.

The thing is, I really don't want the statement "I can't beat the Foxwoods $4/$8 game" to be true. I really, really don't. But that's what my results show.

"Don't be results-oriented!" says tenacious JD, "There's only one way to change those results!"

However, a big development in the House of Cheap Thrills makes it possible, even likely, that that was my last Foxwoods session. B and I are moving this summer. We are not quite sure where to yet, and frankly, I'd like to save the details of it for a happier, "big announcement" post. Briefly, B is a graduate student at Brown, and she is finishing up her PhD thesis. She's been doing the whole job interview thing, and in the next couple weeks, we'll be making a decision on where we're going to end up. It's an exciting time for us, but also quite tense!

Anyway, back to poker. Partly because of our impending move, and partly for other reasons, I will be very busy for the next couple months. I'll be out of town for something like 7 of the next 9 weekends. Ugh. And as the weeks go by we'll have to think more and more about moving, which will be expensive. So in addition to lack of time, it'll be difficult to justify heading down to Foxwoods and potentially dropping another couple hundred dollars.

This was very much on my mind last night. After I dropped my first 20 big bets or so, one reason I rebought was that I knew it was unlikely I would return, especially if I did not book a win. Not a good reason for staying, I know, but there it is.

Again, I hate the fact that I have not been able to crush the $4/$8 game at Foxwoods. Foxwoods is hardly on my list of favorite poker rooms, but I do love live casino poker. I've never really posted concrete goals for myself here on Cheap Thrills -- such as "I will grow my bankroll to X amount by this time next year," as some bloggers do. But I have been thinking a lot lately about what my poker goals are, and I've decided that improving my live casino play is more important to me than anything I do online. I certainly enjoy online poker for its own sake, but it is also my way of funding my live casino poker sessions.

Hmmm . . . I fear I am rambling now. To sum up: I lost hard last night, and I am definitely a losing player so far at Foxwoods $4/$8. I like to think that a lot of that is variance and a few big mistakes, and that I can beat that game. But I could be kidding myself, and unfortunately I don't know when or if I'll be taking another shot at it.

Of course, now I'm looking at the title of this post and thinking to myself "No way I want that lousy session to be my last one at Foxwoods." I will try to get into a more clear-headed frame of mind before posting again.

VVPQotW: WPT Poker by the Book

2005-02-23T23:05:00.000-05:00

Sklansky beats Doyle heads up! I hope that Mean Gene provides us with some perspective on this unsettling development. My take: No way it would happen if real money were on the line.

Much less surprisingly, Phil Hellmuth got busted out and whined about it a lot. Next week: John Juanda, Scotty Nguyen, and Gabe Kaplan! Boy have I missed the WPT.

Vince Van Patten Quote of the Week: "You can get hate mail for knocking out Doyle."

The previous VVPQotW was for the season 2 championship game.

Return to the Online Tables and My First Stud-8 Tourney

2005-02-22T22:11:00.000-05:00

I reurned to the online tables tonight. Well, actually it was last night. I've been a little sick, lots of coughing and congestion, and last night I hopped on to Paradise using my wife's account and played a little .50/$1 7-Stud. I had to use Mrs. Cheap Thrills's account because, to enforce my break from online poker, I had cashed everything I had out of Neteller. I had redeposited Sunday night, and since it takes 4-5 business days for deposits to clear, I planned to return to the online tables this weekend. But, feeling sick and sorry for myself, I asked B her password at Paradise and indulged myself a little early.

So last night I won $10 in a quick 45 minutes or so of play. Then tonight I planned to do the same, but as I sat down at the table someone typed into chat that there was a "7@7" private tourney going on -- $7, 7pm, Stud-8, and the password is simply "STUD." The chat message said see http://hi-lo.net for details. So I did. Seems they host regular private tourneys on Paradise, at games and buy-ins that Paradise doesn't think are worth offering on their own. I had been wanting to try a Stud-8 tourney for a while -- they have regular $1 Stud-8 tourneys at Stars -- but I figured why not spend $7 of the $10 I won last night. I finished 8 out of 37, no money but it was fun and I plan to try a few more of them.

Anyway, I am back online. Now I have to decide where I want to play for what are to me "serious" limits, that is, $2/$4. I'm trying to decide between going for the current bonuses at Pokerrom or Intertops, or trying to bonus-whore a new site like The Gaming Club or Doyle's Room. Right now I am leaning toward Intertops.

P.S.: Hi-Lo.net also has some cool alternate graphics for the Paradise software.

P.P.S. http://www.7stud.net seems to offer the same thing as Hi-Lo.net -- 7-Stud and Stud-8 tourneys on Paradise at low buy-ins. Cool.

California Split

2005-02-21T14:14:00.000-05:00

I've been receiving 5th Street magazine for the past couple of months. I don't know why, since I don't remember subscribing -- I assume the first few issues are free as a promotion. Anyway, the February issue, with Michael Madsen on the cover, had a story recommending the movie California Split, calling it "arguably the greatest poker movie ever made." (In addition to the article, a shorter 5th Street review of the film is here.) So I put the film in my Netflix queue, and on Sunday Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I watched it.

My very brief review: I did not enjoy it all that much. Two scenes, one at the beginning and one at the end, were very good, so I'm glad I saw the film. But the hour+ in between was pretty rough going. In addition, the film is really about gambling in general, not poker.

I will now proceed on to my longer review, in which I will reveal what little there is of a plot in this movie, so click away now if you hate spoilers.

California Split was released in 1974. It was directed by Robert Altman and stars Elliot Gould and George Segal (whose major recent role was the boss in the TV show Just Shoot Me).

The movie is a character study of two gamblers who become friends. The first half of the film follows them as they play poker and bet the ponies, pro basketball, and boxing. I think the idea is that we are supposed to be fascinated by the wild and carefree gambling lifestyle that these two share. Except that George Segal's character (Bill) is not really as carefree as Elliot Gould's (Charlie): Bill has a job he doesn't like that much, and he owes a lot of money to a loan shark. In the final third of the film, the two head up to Reno for a fairly high-stakes poker game, so that Bill can pay off this debt. They end up going on quite a run, winning at poker and several table games. But the rush of it all leaves Bill exhausted, and in the final scene of the film he tells Charlie that the gambling life is not for him.

There were two scenes I really enjoyed in the film. The first was the opening sequence, which takes place in a California card room. This scene is a snapshot of a bygone era. These were the days when only draw poker (played for either high or low) was legal in California. In addition, the players dealt themselves, rotating the deal around the table as in a home game. (I couldn't help but think of all the opportunities for cheating there must have been, but the film does not focus on that.) This scene is very realistic and the people playing poker certainly do not look like Hollywood types. This opening scene almost seems like a tourist's video recording of the spectacle that is a crowded card room.

However, this "capturing reality" style approach is employed throughout the film, and it soon began to wear on me. Altman just seemed to turn the camera on and film whatever happened -- I just don't go in for what 5th Street calls "Altman's improvisatory, free-form style." There are several scenes of Bill and Charlie hanging out at the home of two call girls that I think were supposed to funny or shocking, but just seemed pointless. For example, after staying out all night, Charlie has a breakfast consisting of Fruit Loops and a beer. I guess this was a more striking image in 1974 (4 years before Animal House) than it is now.

The movie was slow enough that B wanted to quit watching about a third of the way into it. But I persevered.

Finally, when Bill and Charlie head to Reno, things picked up a bit. Bill sits down at a high-limit 7-Card Stud game. Amarillo Slim is among the players at the table, and he has a few lines, but no poker action is actually shown. We mostly just watch Charlie as he waits anxiously for Bill outside the poker area.

When Bill comes out to tell Charlie how he's doing, there is some real tension. In fact, throughout the Reno scene, as Bill plays blackjack, roulette, and then craps, I really got caught up in the rush that Bill and Charlie were experiencing. This Reno sequence is certainly the main reason why the film gets some decent reviews -- more than any movie I've scene, it captured what it is like to be on a winning streak at a casino -- both the thrill and the edge-of-the-cliff anxiety of knowing that the streak could turn around on the next bet.

So as a film about gambling, this movie has a really great final sequence. But it is not really about poker. And the hour+ of plodding "character study" before the Reno scene was just tedious.

The final "message" of the movie -- that some people have what it takes to truly be a gambler, but most do not -- was thought-provoking enough, but it is better explored in books such as The Biggest Game in Town or even 24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas. I can imagine that this kind of character study of gamblers was really remarkable in 1974, when gambling was more taboo. But in 2005 a character study of two guys who do nothing but gamble all day is just not inherently attention-grabbing. Rather than gambling being some arcane subculture, nowadays Americans regularly visit Las Vegas or a local casino precisely so that they can, for a few days each year, live out the "wild and crazy" gambler's lifestyle depicted in the film. California Split is most interesting as a precursor to the current prominence that gambling has in popular culture.

I recommend California Split to anyone who is both a film buff and a gambler, both because of the Reno sequence and because of its place in the history of films about gambling. But you should fast-forward to that final act if you start getting bored. Certainly, folks who enjoy Altman's style of movie-making might really like California Split. As for myself, I think California Split fits the cynic's definition of "classic film": One that you would like to have watched, but not one that you want to watch again.

Table Rejection

2005-02-20T17:58:00.000-05:00

In my last post I chastised myself for not leaving a very juicy $4/$8 game at Foxwoods once it started to get a little too wild for my tastes. This reminded me of a quote that went something like

"A lot of players practice table selection, but very few practice table rejection."

I thought it was a Tommyism, but the closest thing he has is

"Game selection to me is not so much about getting in games when I have way the best of it as it is about getting out of games when I don't."

Which is the same wisdom but is not as catchy as the term "table rejection." I guess I read it in CardPlayer.

Very Small Win at Foxwoods

2005-02-19T12:52:00.000-05:00

I am at the end of the first week of my 2-to-4-week break from online poker that I discussed in my last post. So far the interesting thing about this break is that I have more time on my hands. Weeknights when nothing is on TV, I'm not just sitting down at the virtual poker tables. I've used the extra few hours for various errands, put some old stuff up for sale on Ebay, etc.

But I've also been reading a bit more . . . about poker. Something that happened to me in recent months is that I would be reading poker blogs, or a book on poker, or rec.gambling.poker, or whatever, and after a little while I would say to myself "OK, I don't have all night -- enough reading, time to start playing!" With my self-imposed break from online poker, I've been reading about poker in a less hurried manner. I've even spent a couple hours reading archives in the 2+2 forums, which I never used to do.

I've also read through some of my own archives. I should do that more often. After all, this blog is a record of my thoughts on poker, my ups and downs, and my place to write down the lessons that I've learned. This week, I re-read some of my Vegas and Foxwoods trip reports, and it brought back just how much I enjoy playing in a casino -- and how confident I was about my poker game before the winter doldrums hit.

The last time I had been to Foxwoods was in November. On November 15th Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I had gone down to celebrity-spot during the WPT event, and I just played a little $1-$5 Stud. But the time before that, November 4, a Wednesday night, I had sat down at $4/$8 Hold'em and dropped $160 over the course of a few hours. Ugh. Short version is, I ran into one total maniac and several other loose-aggressive players, and I lost. I really want to be playing $4/$8 rather than $2/$4 at Foxwoods because the rake hurts less. I think the lesson I should draw from that night is not that I shouldn't play $4/$8, but rather that I should walk away from a table that is too loose-aggressive. I know these games are supposed to be "high variance but high profit," but they are not my preferred type of game. Why try to bust a maniac when I can switch tables and play with loose-passive and tight-weak types that I know exactly how to beat? I also wonder if I should avoid weeknights at Foxwoods and stick to the weekends, when the more recreational players are at the tables.

Of course, it may be that the $4/$8 games at Foxwoods are all more loose-aggressive than $2/$4, in which case I'll have to adapt if I want to play $4/$8. Friday night I decided to find out if this was the case. (Remember, my self-imposed break is from online poker, not live play.) Mrs. Cheap Thrills has been pretty sick all week, so she was content to stay home and rest.

Things Go Well

I left at 4:40pm on Friday; was walking in the casino doors at 5:50. I put my name on the list for $4/$8, but there were about 25 names ahead of me, so I also put my name in for $1-$5 Stud, which rarely has a long wait. Fifteen minutes later, just as I was finishing up a cheeseburger at the grill by the race book bar, my name was called for Stud. It was the usual senior citizen crowd: Kinda loose, kinda passive. With the spread limit structure, it's pretty easy to take free or cheap cards when on a draw, and to drive others out when you have a vulnerable hand like a big pair. I don't remember any specific hands, but when my name was called for Hold'em 45 minutes later, at around 7:15, I was up $42.

The Hold'em table I was seated out dispelled any worried I still had that all $4/$8 games were totally loose-aggressive. The table I was at was pretty much just like a $2/$4 table. In fact it was almost ideal. The two seats to my right were occupied by two guys who were friends. The one guy had never played in a casino before; his friend had, but he sure wasn't teaching his buddy good habits. They were playing about 80 percent of their hands and rarely. Total calling stations. They got outckicked again and again and every time they blamed bad luck.

One very good line of the evening. In one pot, one of the calling stations was betting aggressively, and by the river, an older giy on my right who I ended up chatting with quite a bit, was the only player left. The calling station turns over Aces, spade and club. The guy on my left says "Yeah, I got the red ones," and turns them over. Great line.

There were 2 other loose players at the table, 2 rockish types, and the rest in between. In general there was an occasional preflop raise, but a 3-bet or cap was rare. I loosened up and was playing suited connectors from late position. They paid off twice for me in a big way, which was nice. I also bluffed one of the rockish types out of a pot when I had Q8s from the SB, and the flop came with 2 Jacks (she called my flop bet and folded to the turn bet). A few hands later that player called down my Kings over Queens boat -- I like to think it was because of my earlier no-show. In short, I was getting cards and I felt like I was "in the zone." At about 9:30. I was up about $110 (plus I had the $42 from Stud).

In retrospect, this is not as much money as I would have thought -- less than 14 big bets. I had really been getting cards, and felt like I had doubled up. Was my surprisingly low profit the effect of the rake and tips? Or was I not playing aggressively enough? Several times I checked the river when holding a great hand that was not the nuts. For example, I play 67 of spades on the button, flop gives me a straight and a straight-flush draw, I bet on the flop and turn. But by the river there are 3 hearts, and with 3 others still left in the pot, calling me the whole way, and having watched hand after hand of players getting lucky on the river, I fear runner-runner flush and just check. When there is no flush, I look and feel like a wuss for not betting the river. Plays such as this are variance-reducing, but also profit-reducing. And it is the higher stakes that cause it for me. Online, at .50/$1 or even $2/$4, I would usually not hesitate to bet unless I had a real Mr. Sooted at the table. Even at the Mirage $4/$6 game I was making these kind of bets. But for $8 at Foxwoods I checked. I will have to get over that if I am going to keep at $4/$8.

Things Go Downhill

Things started to go downhill around 10pm. The two guys to my right busted out and were replaced by tighter players. One guy sat down with $400, in very neat stacks, and he had 2 poker chips with pictures of his kids in the center. The first thought that came to my mind was that this guy was some kind of semi-pro, grinding out a few extra bucks for his family a la Knish. A little paranoid, I know. But he was clearly a regular since all the dealers and floormen knew him. From their chat I gathered that he may have been a former employee. But he played like a rock, and he was on my right, so I decided not to worry too much about him.

I was in the 4 seat. Down in the 10 seat, a semi-maniac sat down. He played every hand. What annoyed me about him was that he pretended to not know how to play -- "How much can I bet?" "Can I check?" -- and then 10 minutes later he is discussing how many outs he had on some hand. He was also acting more drunk than he was, chatting everyone up. I have done this drunk fun guy bit a few times myself, but I like to think that I am not nearly as annoying about it, and I certainly never pretend to not know how to play. Anyway, although he would call down almost every hand, he was only raising with pairs and other reasonable hands, so I decided he wasn't a big problem. He really ticked off the older guy to my left, though. Geez, that guy was like an older verison of me!

I didn't like the mood that was overtaking the table. The pretend-drunk was annoying everyone; friendly conversation ceased as everyone got more aggressive with their bets, and focused on what the semi-maniac would show down with this time. I got up and asked the floorman for a table change. He told another floorwoman to notify me when another spot was available.

She promptly forgot about me. The difficulty of changing tables at Foxwoods sucks.

Things went down the toilet when an aggressive young woman sat down in the 7 seat. She had a demeanor that screamed "regular," and she was raising about half of the many hands she played. Her presence at the table was the catalyst I had been hoping to avoid. The other loosie maniac-wannabes at the table at the table, who at this point had kept getting more or less isolated by reraises from me and other reasonably tight players, and bleeding chips, now had a leader. Henceforth, all pots would be raised, and most would be 3-bet or capped. The loosies delighted in showing down with each other with things like 48o, bottom pair. The money didn't seem to matter to them; it was all about action and winning with an unlikely hand. I had Kings cracked, and foolishly tried to limp in with hands like AXs a couple times.

The table had become completely loose-aggressive, and I suck at loose-aggressive games. One or two maniacs I can deal with: Isolate them, stay out of their way, whatever it takes -- I can usually adapt. But once there are 3 or 4 maniacs at a table, forget it -- they are going to squeeze the other players with raises and reraises on every street, and I rarely do well in that situation. This is a lesson I need to remember. I know loose-aggressive games are supposed to be profitable, and there's a big part of me that doesn't want to admit that I have such a big poker weakness, but my refusal to accept it is costing me money: I suck at loose-aggressive games. I need to learn to walk away as soon as things turn sour.

At about 11:45 I left the table up $39. Almost exactly 1 big bet per hour. My biggest regret of the evening is that I did not leave sooner. Coupled with my $42 from Stud, I was up $81.

I should have gone home at this point. But of course I didn't. This is something I noticed in re-reading my trip reports on this blog: I almost always stay too late at the poker room. This is a problem I have in general -- at any kind of party or whatever, I will be willing to stay up long past what is sensible, and usually past the time that everyone I'm with wants to. Even on weeknight Mrs. Cheap Thrills has to drag me to bed, and on a lot of night I'm successful in getting her to stay up way too late with me. I think part of the reason I love live poker so much is that in a casino poker room, I am surrounded> by other people who are just as foolish as I am about staying up late.

But the fact is, I was tired. I generally start to crash after about 5 hours at the poker table. I always get my second win, but that roughly half-hour period when I'm a little foggy is never profitable. Something to try and work on in the future

$5-$10 Stud

Anyway, I put my name in for $5-$10 Stud, which I had never played before. Trying a higher limit for the first time, late in the evening when I knew I was tired, was not smart. But I was up $81, and I wanted to give it a shot.

The table stunk. Players were either too serious, and/or whining about their bad cards. I am not sure of this is a function of it being $5/$10, or if it was the hour. Foxwoods seems to really get to be less fun around midnight. It always seems like most of the fun casual players have gone and all this is left is either regulars, or players that have been losing and are trying to salvage their session. You would think this latter group would be profitable to play against, and maybe it is, but they are not a fun bunch! Last call is at 1am, so you also lose the drunks them or if they stay, they are surly at the lack of any more beer.

The less fun atmosphere, couple with how tired I get after 6 hours at the tables, makes for another Foxwoods lesson I need to remember: Think about leaving at midnight. [Insert Cinderella reference here.]

One interesting thing happened in the first hand I played. This was my first time playing casino 7-Stud with a fixed, rather than at spread, bet structure. The ante was .50 and the bring-in was $2. I got dealt split aces and, wanting to make it $5 to go, I threw out my chip and -- revealing the fact that I am book-learned at Stud -- said "Complete." The table looked at me like I was speaking gibberish. Greenhorn! The woman to my left said "You need to say raise, or else it's just a call." I said, "I said complete." She said, "You need to say raise." The dealer allowed my "raise" to stand, and I said "raise" from then on. In retrospect, "complete" does sound a bit like "call," so in the noisy atmosphere at Foxwoods, just saying "raise" does make more sense.

The play at $5/$10 was tighter and more interesting, but for me less profitable, than at $1-$5. Usually pots were heads-up. I got dealt split aces three times but wasn't able to win much with them. I lost two big pots: One to a guy who made a full house on 5th street. He seemed loose and I did not respect his paired door card. (He had (88)558.) In the other big hand, I had split Kings that didn't improve, and my opponent just decided to call me the whole way, making the wheel on the river. In retrospect, I wouldn't have played either hand much differently than I did. Well, I could've saved the crying call on the river against that straight. But I am more upset about not leaving the maniacal Hold'em table sooner than I am about losing those 7-Stud hands.

After about an hour and half of 7-Stud, I was down $62. I knew I didn't want to turn my overall session into a losing one, and it was after 1:30am, so I left.

Total winnings for the evening: $19. Enough to pay for gas! Woo-hoo!

Seriously though, I was happy that got a chance to "freeroll" a shot at $5-$10 Stud. I have to say I wasn't too taken with it, and in the future I think I will stick to the $4/$8 Hold'em game, and play $1-$5 Stud when waiting for a table.

When I woke up this morning, I had a very strong urge to play some online poker. It was the most tempted I've been to play since I went cold turkey all of 6 days ago. I've killed about an hour now by writing this. Now I will have some lunch and try to stay away from the computer . . .

Taking a Little Break

2005-02-14T15:56:00.000-05:00

I am taking a little break from online poker. Nothing major, I'm just going to go 2 to 4 weeks without playing online.

My decision to take a break was prompted by a bad session at the tables yesterday. I took 3 or 4 bad beats within the space of half an hour -- and I got much more upset about it than was warranted. These were beats put on by loose calling stations getting lucky on the river -- the kind of beat you should almost be happy to take. I have gotten pretty good at shaking off such beats and continuing to play solid poker. But yesterday I got upset -- and the fact that I got upset made me upset! Rather than continue playing and risk major tilty losses, I logged off, took a walk around the block, and pondered.

I think what it boils down to is that winter has finally started getting to me, and I have the February blues. This happens to me around this time pretty much every year. I'm not really depressed, just feeling very bleh, and that ain't good for my poker game.

It always comes back to the three reasons I play poker -- fun, profit, and the challenge of improving my game -- and how to balance them.

Profit. Lately, with so many bonuses out there to chase, I sometimes put pressure on myself to clear them and not waste a good opportunity. It's kind of a "Don't let the poker boom pass you by!" mentality. Sometimes I have to remind myself that online poker is a hobby for me -- not a job, and not even a major source of supplemental income. It is mainly just cheap thrills. Which is to say, I should only be playing when and because I want to, not because a good bonus is being offered or whenever I have a couple hours of free time.

Improving My Game. Last winter, I didn't play online from mid-December to March, and when I did return to the tables, my game had really suffered from lack of play. So this winter I had been trying to avoid taking such a break -- to the point of playing even though I knew I wasn't in the right mindset. I always want to improve my game, which I know requires practice, practice, practice, but it also requires the right mindset, and I think a shorter break than I took last year will help me get that.

Fun. We'll still host our home game in the next couple weeks, so I'm not taking a break from poker, just online play. I think I also may head down to Foxwoods this coming weekend or the next. There's nothing like real live casino poker to help remind me why I love this game. The convenience of online poker is great but it's exacerbating the cabin fever that I get around this time of year. The main thing I need to do is have a couple weekends where I don't spend hours in front of the computer.

Season 3 of the WPT starts next Wednesday, February 23rd, with "WPT Poker by the Book," a single-table invitational event. Watching a new WPT episode always makes we want to play, so I'll be tempted to return to the online tables next week. But I'll try to hold out until at least March 2.

Games Other Than Hold'em

2005-02-11T17:02:00.000-05:00

Badugi is a form of poker that they played on Live at the Bike last night. Unfortunately I missed it. I had heard the announcers mention Badugi before (actually I thought they were saying "Padugi") and that it is some wild and crazy form of lowball. Then I saw Chris Halverson mention it:

I watched a bit of Live at the Bike on Thursday. They were showing 300/600 mixed, $10K buyin. Whoa! They played some weird triple draw game called “Badugi” and it generated a ton of action.

So I do a Google search and don't get much, then I head over to 2+2 and get this tidbit:

This "badugi" sounds exactly like a game that I have played on several occasions that is called "padukah" (at least that's how I always thought it was spelled).

The nuts in this game is as follows:
As 2d 3h 4c

And any hand that contains one of any suit beats any hand that has two of a suit and so on. The first determining factor is the suits of the cards, and the second is the value of the cards themselves.

Another post gives an example:

In badugi, what would win:

Ad 2h 4c 5c

Or

2d 3h 4s Qc

OR

Ah 2h 3c 4c . . .

the winner is: 2d 3h 4s Qc

Nothing on 2+2 gives any indication of how the game is actually played (how many cards are dealt, etc.), but since Chris says it's like Triple Draw I'm assuming it's played with Hold'em-style blinds, the players get 4 cards, and draw three times, with the bet doubled after the third and fourth draws as in Triple Draw. Dealing the players only 4 cards would presumably let you play with 7 players or maybe 8, whereas Triple Draw is best with 5 or 6. (Update: This is correct, but see this post for more specific info on how the hands rank in Badugi.)

It's just funny that as soon as I heard of the game, I had to know how it was played. I definitely have a fascination with exotic poker games. This is probably because, before the WPT and the poker boom, poker night in college and afterwards was dealer's choice, and we played all the usual crazy games -- Follow the Queen, Baseball, Chicago, Spit, Anaconda, etc. -- and many more I don't remember. By the end of the night we were usually making up games.

A lot of players seem to frown on wild-card games, with good reason. The optimal strategy in those games is very rigid -- fold unless you have one or more wild cards early on. And that simplistic "strategy" is just not that much fun.

But not every "crazy home game" relies on wild cards, and there is plenty of room for strategy in some of them. Anaconda, aka "Pass the Trash," was always one of my favorites. This game is 7-Stud Hi/Lo, but there are several phases of passing cards to, and receiving cards from, your neighbors, before the betting starts. (Anthony Holden talks about this game in Big Deal.) You can usually keep track of the info and have a good idea whether you have the nuts hi or lo -- and squeeze the other players accordingly. Before the betting starts, you arrange your cards in the order you want to reveal them, which creates some room for deception and bluffing. So the strategy is not as basic as "just wait til you are dealt the best hand."

Anyway, Badugi, like Triple Draw, seems to be a game with some room for strategy. Chris notes that Badugi "generated a ton of action," and that is what players say about Triple Draw as well. (Click here to read a Phil Hellmuth CardPlayer article on an action-filled Triple Draw hand.) In Super System 2, Daniel Negreanu writes that

Triple draw has caught on so quickly because of the allure of action and big pots. Typical triple draw pots are larger than those generated by a hand of Omaha high-low, for example. . . . Triple draw is an action game, no question about it. You'll need to have your seatbelt on at all times.

Why are Badugi and Triple Draw such "action" games? Two reasons stand out:

First, there is luck. With three draws, a lot can happen. But Negreanu writes that "There is a common misconception among some high-limit players that triple draw is a game of pure luck. That's simply not the case." As with any form of poker, there are decisions to be made, and making the right ones will increase your EV.

But second, and I think more importantly, these are fairly new forms of poker and most people don't know how to play them well. Many poker players are, as Bob Ciaffone puts it, "aggressive optimists," and tend to focus on the ways their hand can win the pot rather than all the ways it can get beat. Most players tend to play loosely in games they're unfamiliar with, and only tighten up with experience.

This is a common theme in the history of poker. In Thursday Night Poker, Peter Steiner talks about how 5-Card Draw used to be the dominant form of poker, and how it fell by the wayside once players began to understand the optimal strategy for the game, which relies heavily on good starting hands. Five-Card Draw was replaced by 7-Card Stud, which has in turn been replaced by Hold'em.

In this "evolution" of poker, games with more rigid optimal strategies (including starting hand guidelines) have become less popular, while games with more room for bluffing and deception have become more popular. Simultaneously, games with more luck have become more popular than games with less luck. I know that is a controversial statement. Many people would take issue with the idea that there is more luck in 7-Stud than 5-Card Draw, or more luck in Hold'em than in 7-Stud. "Luck" is a loaded word when talking about poker. Clearly, there is a skill element to all these games. What I should say instead is that each new form of poker is "friendlier" to players with little knowledge of the game than the one it preceded. A newbie will go broke in 7-Stud a lot quicker than he will in Hold'em. It is not that good 7-Stud players are better poker players than good Hold'em players. It is just the nature of the games.

Getting even more specific, what I mean by "new" or "bad" players is loose players. Hold'em is more forgiving of "looseness" and bad starting hands than 7-Stud is, and 7-Stud is more forgiving than 5-Card Draw is.

This is something that every poker player should understand. The fact that Hold'em doesn't punish the very worst players as badly as 7-Stud is why Hold'em is more popular than 7-Stud. Think on that next time you take a bad beat.

And as Gus Hansen fans know, the extra room for bluffing and deception on Hold'em often allows looser players to gain an edge.

Back to Badugi and Triple Draw. To say that a game has a lot of luck is not that informative. The question is, Can players overcome the luck -- that is, gain an edge -- by outplaying their opponents over the course of the hand, or is gaining an edge mostly about tightening up? In short, How rigid is the optimal strategy?

Take Omaha for example. For a while, it seemed that Omaha might become as popular as Hold'em. If the appeal of Hold'em is that "any two can win," then it's easy to think that giving players 4 cards would be even better. And pot-limit Omaha is very popular in Europe. But it certainly hasn't succeeded Hold'em. I think one reason is that the "two and only two" rule confuses newbies too much. But, more germane to my point, is that to win, you generally have to play much tighter in Omaha than you do in Hold'em. The game that would appear to be "wilder" than Hold'em is actually less forgiving of loose play. Optimal strategy is more rigid and straightforward, with less room for deception and bluffing. To get those elements into the game, you have to play pot limit.

So how rigid is the optimal strategy for Triple Draw and Badugi? Having played only a few hands of the former and none of the latter, I don't pretend to know. I've read Negreanu's chapter in Triple Draw in Super System 2, but you can only tell so much from reading about a game. Time will tell if these games are interesting enough to rise out of their current obscurity.

A side note here is that I wonder whether any game will ever surpass Hold'em in popularity, now that the poker-on-TV phenomenon has made Hold'em king. On the 2+2 discussions of Live at the Bike, posters were complaining that the hole cameras were only being used for the Hold'em game (that is, they did not have graphics showing the players' hands for Badugi and other games), so it was hard to follow the action. So Hold'em is the game of choice among those who watch poker, even if the players would rather play a different game!

I love Hold'em but will continue to enjoy other forms of poker. Last night I spent a couple hours playing $2/$4 Stud-8 on Paradise. (I got the 2+2 book on Stud-8 for Christmas.) I made all of one big bet but I thoroughly enjoyed myself, mostly because the game still seems new to me.

We tried Crazy Pineapple 8 and Triple Draw in our home game last week, and I will continue to push for a multiple-game format in the home game, even though a lot of the regulars would like to play nothing but Hold'em. In addition to my enjoyment of the variety, we've got a lot of players who are pretty inexperienced, and playing non-Hold'em games helps level the playing field to some degree. I think Badugi might be a bit too weird for everyone though . . .

Live at the Bike

2005-02-04T14:54:00.000-05:00

Back in October I posted about how I want to see ring games on TV. The gist of it is that I watch the WPT just like everybody else, but for me, it's not really poker unless you're betting with real money rather than tournament chips.

So I was happy today to see this article in the Poker Gazette, discussing the Bicycle Casino's plans to stream video of their high-stakes ring games live via the Internet:

According to the Bike's Managing Partner, Haig Kelegian, "What makes this exciting and different is the fact that it's real ..... real money, really high stakes. Tournament poker is great, but doesn't translate dollar for dollar. We are focusing on real players who have their money on the table ... and its unscripted, unedited and uncensored. That's exciting!" . . .

Fourteen cameras will pick up all of the action and drama of the game, including players' cards and their faces, while skilled commentators call the action play by play. Poker enthusiasts world wide will have their chance to experience the Bike, thanks to universal web availability and cutting edge technology.

I just checked out the link for the live feed, but it says they will only be streaming Wednesday through Saturday, 6-10pm. I will have to check it out again tonight!

Friday Night Update

Okay, I registered with the site and watched some of the "show." It's pretty interesting to a casino trying out one of the ideas I had back in October -- of course, it's a somewhat obvious idea. And so far they are not implementing it all that well, but they did say this is only their third night broadcasting and they are still working out glitches. I have to agree with ToddCommish's comment that it would be much better if you could hear the dealer call the action, and if you could hear the players' conversations. As it is the two commentators are sort of mumbling over everything, and they're rarely talking about the current hand -- instead it's stuff like "Friday night is clam chowder night at the Bike . . . " Still, this is pretty cool. I played about a half hour of online poker, and kept the Live at the Bike feed going in the background -- the sounds of a real poker room lent a certain ambiance to online play that is nice :-)

Wish I Had the Hand Histories

2005-02-04T12:43:00.000-05:00

We hosted a pretty rowdy home game last night at the House of Cheap Thrills. I haven't posted about it much, but Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I have been hosting a regular Thursday night game. We only play for .25/.50 stakes, and it is mostly an excuse to hang out and drink beer, but it is fun.

Last night we had 10 people, pushing the capacity of my poker table to the max. We played alternating rounds of Hold'em and Crazy Pineapple Hi-Lo 8 or Better. I ended up winning mostly in Pineapple 8, but the following hands are all from Hold'em:

In the 4th hand of the evening, we saw 3 boats. Betting had been capped preflop, pretty unusual for us. The flop was something like Q74. Turn was a 4, river was an ace. The three players had QQ, 77, and AA. Holder of the Queens is actually the girlfriend of the holder of the Aces, and that made for some interesting post-hand arguments over whether she had taken a bad beat or whether the best hand had simply won out, with me defending the Aces.

Later, Mrs. Cheap Thrills got "Spaniel" Daniel to fold a pair of tens heads up. She then showed the hammer!

And finally in one of the funniest hands I've seen at the home game, Gilbert, aka "Big Bert," decided to play his hand blind. With a lot of action and two tens on the board, Big Bert turned over pocket tens at the showdown for the 4 of a kind, causing quite the stir.

There were a lot of other interesting hands, but those 3 stood out as blogworthy.

Toward the end of the evening we got down to 6-handed, and rather than play a split-pot game with so few players, we switched to alternating rounds of Hold'em and Ace-to-5 Triple-Draw Lowball. This is a game that UltimateBet spreads and that the new Super System 2 has a chapter devoted to (my copy of SS2 is on the way from Amazon). We only played about 12 hands of Triple Draw, but I thought it was pretty interesting and would like to play again.

WPBT Wrap-Up

2005-02-03T11:26:00.000-05:00

The Pokerstars WPBT event sure was fun last night, even if my play was not so good. I ended up finishing 63rd -- bleh.

At the first table I was seated between Iggy and Otis, with ToddCommish also at the table. I've been playing a lot of low-limit no-limit cash games lately to clear the bonus on Hollywoodpoker.com, and it's taught me bad habits. In the first couple levels I kept trying to limp in with weak hands, and of course I kept getting raised. Otis in particular was dominating the table, and did show one hammer.

I tightened up. In the 2nd or 3rd level I was on the BB with A-10, and got to see a free flop. Broadway. ToddCommish bet into me on every street. I was happy to improve my stack, but it wasn't much of a "skill" play on my part. That knocked Todd down to only $600 in chips, but he still managed to finish ahead of me.

Then I was moved to a new table, and short-stacked, when all-in with 33 and doubled up through Dane67. Then HDouble was moved to the seat to my left, but he was sitting out. By the time he joined the tourney, he only had 6x the BB. He went all in with K7 on the hand where I was the BB; everyone folded, I called with A8, and busted him. HDub was the only scalp I took in the tourney, however. I was eventually busted by Jerge, who went on to place 12th, so at least he made good use of my chips. I added his blog, Poker in Iowa, to my Bloglines blogroll, and will have to get him up on the links to the right.

I had to be up early this morning to pick Mrs. Cheap Thrills up at the airport, so I didn't stay up to watch the whole tourney. Congrats to THG, and thanks again to Iggy for organizing!

Bring on the WPBT

2005-02-02T11:08:00.000-05:00

I just signed up for the blogger tourney on PokerStars. As usual, my game plan is to just catch incredibly good cards throughout the tourney :-) But really, while I have often posted that tourneys are not my thing, I have been playing more NL ring games lately so maybe that will help my game. (I'm beginning to "get" NL in a way that I never really did before--and actually started winning decent amounts--but that's a topic for a future post.)

Statement of the obvious: The new WPBT Leaderboard is a very cool idea.

Once again I'll just post a little reminder that my screen name on PokerStars (and Party, and Paradise, and Absolute) is LanceyH. What can I say, I created my accounts at most of the major poker sites before I started this blog. LanceyH is a reference to the character of "The Man" in The Cincinnati Kid, and even if I could I don't know that I'd trade it in for "CheapThrillsJD" (IMO LanceyH is a pretty cool poker screen name, and besides, "CheapThrillsJD" is too long a screen name at some sites, while JD is always taken or too short). The only time the LanceyH/JD thing becomes a problem is when I interact with other bloggers--and as many scribes have discussed recently, who could've known the poker bloggers would be interacting so much?

Poker Nickname Generator

2005-01-31T18:54:00.000-05:00

This link was sent to me by a friend today: http://www.pokernickname.com/

It's sponsored by Pacific Poker. I don't know how new it is, so maybe you've seen it before, but if not, it's worth a minute's amusement. The name it gave me was "Cheap Shot" -- not that far off Cheap Thrills!

"someplayers refer to 72 as the hammer"

2005-01-22T19:52:00.000-05:00

I was googling for info on Gametime+ and happened to stumble across this thread on the internettexasholdem.com message boards. It begins:

Ive read somewhere ( cant remeber exactly) that someplayers refer to 72 as the hammer and have competitions to see who can take down the biggest pot with it?

Has any one heard of or had any eperience of this?

Click here to see the replies.

The snow is falling here in Providence--we're expecting close to 2 feet. A good night for poker!

Clash of the Titans

2005-01-17T01:16:00.000-05:00

Poker Gremlin squares off against Bobblehead Scotty Nguyen.

Jets-Induced Tilt

2005-01-15T20:36:00.000-05:00

Mrs. Cheap Thrills, aka B, huge Jets fan, 20 minutes after their loss: "Boy I feel like playing some poker, but I know I shouldn't."

Me: "That's because you want to punch someone in the face right now, and raising somebody in poker feels a little bit like punching them in the face."

B: "Nah, taking down the pot feels like punching them in the face. That's what I wanna do."

Me: "Yeah, but without good cards, you're likely to settle for the next best thing--raising with whatever you got."

B: "Which is why I said I shouldn't play."

That's More Like It

2005-01-15T14:49:00.000-05:00

So as I mentioned in an earlier post, I cashed out of Empire this week. I was tempted to go play the bad beat jackpot tables at Party that everyone keeps talking about, but I decided to buy into Pokerroom for the signup bonus instead. I'm happy to report that I'm up about $160 after playing Thursday and Friday night, which goes a long way toward reversing the slide I've experienced the past couple weeks.

I had a couple notches of Jameson while watching Tilt on Thursday night, so following my new rule of not playing $2/$4 online after drinking, I stuck to $1/$2. (Actually the rule is "no beer + online poker," so I was in a gray area.) Boy did I get a soft table, very loose-passive. I finished up almost $100. Unfortunately, I screwed up and didn't realize until after a couple hundred hands that you need to turn the "statistics" option on in Pokerroom in order to get hand histories, so I'm not sure how many hands I played.

Then last night I played $2/$4 and there were a lot more rocks. Still pretty passive though. I finished up another $60 there last night. Interesting that $1/$2 might be overall more profitable, but really I think I got with the deck on Thursday, and of coirse I'm really being too results-oriented with all this anyway. Playing weak opponents probably isn't helping me improve my game much, but it sure is good for the bankroll.

The Pokerroom bonus is slower to clear than Party--more along the lines of Absolute, but still way better than UB. Table selection of course can't compare to Party--it's a little worse than Paradise but much better than Absolute. The software is above average (I consider Paradise and Pkerstar's to be the best). Good note-taking interface.

Mostly I'm enjoying a change of pace. And did I mention the passivity? I'll return to Party & affiliates soon enough, but for now I'm enjoying seeing the same players more than once--I'm using PokerTracker's real-time window, which I rarely do at Party since people table-hop so much and then you never see them again. It is definitely nifty.

I added a bunch of new blogs to the links on the right. Some were recently pimped by Sir FWALGMan, Double Through, and of course Iggy, while others have been in my Bloglines blogroll for a while and I just hadn't gotten around to updating my template.

I'm going to play a little today, then it's football football football. Mrs. Cheap Thrills grew up in Brooklyn and is a huge Jets fan. I was raised an Eagles fan, and of course we live in Providence so we've grown to like the Patriots (obviously that's been more of a conflict for B than me). So right now there's several different Super Bowl matchups that would make us very happy. An all-Pennsylvania Super Bowl is the 11/5 favorite in the team props bets at Bodog right now (not that I'd take those odds). Go keystone state, get on with your dominating-the-NFL self.

Whoops, I just broke my rule about not blogging about football. What can I say, I'm psyched about the playoffs.

ESPN's Tilt

2005-01-13T22:13:00.000-05:00

Ouch. It was awful. Did ESPN learn nothing from the way-over-the-top Playmakers? Did ESPN management actually tell the writers "Nothing resembling subtlety will be allowed"?

Of course, I'll be watching every week. Some of the lines did give me a chuckle. Here's hoping the chuckle/cringe ratio goes up next week . . .

Boy I miss Lucky.

Last Call by Tim Powers

2005-01-13T15:54:00.000-05:00

So in my last post I talked about how I play less poker in the winter--and seem to do worse--than in the summer. That reminded me of a book I've been meaning to recommend since I started this blog: Last Call, by Tim Powers. The title does not refer to closing time at a bar, but rather to the final action in a poker hand.

It's one of my favorite books. Before I try to describe it, let me say that it does have an element of fantasy--in the sense of mysticism and mythology rather than the sword & scorcery that most people associate with the term. But it is found in the "Fantasy/Science Fiction" section of most book stores, and I know some people don't like to read anything from that section. To them I say, "Give it a shot anyway. There's poker in it."

The story centers on Scott Crane, a retired professional poker player. Scott retired because, 20 years prior to the start of the book, he lost his soul in a poker game where they were playing with Tarot cards. So let that be a lesson: Never play poker with Tarot cards! :-)

At the start of the book, Crane decides to come out of retirement, and there's a great opening scene where he takes a home game for a decent amount of cash, but loses a few pots at the end, on the theory of why chase the fish away when you can keep them coming back for more.

But I digress. Turns out that playing poker was a bad idea, because doing so alerts the Bad Guy who stole Crane's soul. Decks of playing cards, as symbols of fortune, have a ton of mystical significance in Last Call. Crane himself has a glass eye, and throughout the book the turn of the one-eyed Jack of Hearts always means something big is about to happen.

The reader soon learns that the Bad Guy is the mythical Fisher King of the West (think King Arthur), and his seat of power--this is great--is at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. In the weird history that the book spins, Bugsy Siegel was the previous Fisher King, and that's part of the reason that Las Vegas originally flourished. Crane ends up going to Las Vegas and, well, I don't want to give anything more away.

So to sum up: There's a lot of mystical craziness going on, but there's also several cool poker scenes (including one in an LA card room), and most of the action happens in Las Vegas, around 1990.

Last Call actually spawned two sequels: Earthquake Weather, which is set in Los Angeles, and Expiration Date which is set in San Francisco. Both involve the Fisher King, but not poker. Instead, the LA book has a weird theme in which the bad guys consume people's souls as if they were drugs, and the San Francisco book centers around wine and to a lesser extent, alcoholism. So it's sort of a trilogy about America's 3 great western cities and its 3 vices (gambling, drugs, and alcohol).

Oh yeah, back to the winter/summer thing. The Fisher King is mystically tied to the land; he prospers as it prospers and vice versa. The king is at his full strength in summer, and weakest in winter, and roughly the same goes for the fortune of those who inhabit his realm. In the book, Crane's poker mentor taught him this, and so when they were grinding out a living at poker they would only play in the spring and summer.

Not that I really think there's anything mystical about my recent bad streak ;-)

Crippity Crap

2005-01-12T21:57:00.000-05:00

Stagnation. Treading water. Slowly sinking.

That's how I feel about the way I'm playing poker lately. I'm posting the following numbers in the hope that they will help give me a kick in the pants:

	# Hands	Won/Lost	BB/HR
August	635	$189.25	7.45
September	476	$98.01	5.15
October	2,363	$160	1.69
November	2,651	$86.50	.82
December	341	$45.50	3.34
January 1-12	870	(186.50)	(5.36)

(This is all from from $2/$4 at Party & affiliates and doesn't take into account some profit from 7-Stud at other sites, and some losses from foolishly dabbling in low-limit no-limit--NL just still is not my game.)

The holidays definitely distracted me. This same thing happened last winter. Back then I was thinking maybe the games had changed, like maybe I had done well in the summer because more bad players were playing then--people have more free time, college kids have the summer off, etc.--and maybe in the winter only the more committed players are at the tables. At least this winter I'm not making that excuse.

Mostly I just haven't been focusing enough. One thing that happens when I'm two-tabling and not focusing is that I fail to notice when the game conditions change from loose to tight and vice versa. So no more two-tabling for a while. For much of the summer I was specifically seeking out tables that were mostly tight-weak, then playing a rather bullying style (which I'm terming "Ciaffone-style," in reference to Middle Limit Holdem Poker). I like to think I play a good tight-aggressive style in that type of game, but of course everyone likes to think that. Then I read SSH in September and started trying to get more comfortable with looser games. Hmmm . . . that's about when my slide started. It could be that I just still am not understanding optimal loose game strategy, but I think what might be happening is I've been playing SSH-style in games that are too tight, and Ciaffone-style in games that are too loose. Like I said, failing to pay attention to changing game conditions.

I've also been too passive post-flop. This is a general problem, in that I'm always feeling like I could be more aggressive, but it's been particularly bad lately because I've been playing when I'm just not in the right mood.

I am jealous when I read about bloggers playing every night and clearing a dozen bonuses in a month. For me, I have to be in the right mood to play poker: kinda fired up, ready to engage in raw mental combat. And I just don't feel like that around the holidays. My competitive urges seem to go down in the wintertime and up in the summertime, presumably because of the weather: It's cold and wet here in Providence, the kind of weather that makes you feel like just taking a nap. Tonight I just watched Lost, and I once I post this Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I are going to continue to slug on the couch--gonna watch Shaun of the Dead if we don't decide to turn in early. Part of me wants to hop online and start reversing my poker slide, but I know I just don't have the killer instinct tonight. (I havem't read Killer Poker but I identify with the idea.)

On the other hand, when I wasn't "into" poker around the holidays last year, I ended up going about 2 months without playing, and when I came back I felt like I had to re-learn too much. So this winter I've been making a conscience effort to play more--sometimes when I know I'm not in the right frame of mind.

So the solution is to get in the right mood and the right frame of mind. That's where my own and other folks' blogs help.

I just cashed out of Empire. Next I'm gonna hit one of the signup bonuses at PokerNow, PokerRoom, or Bodog (haven't decided which yet), to help get the bankroll back into healthier shape. Mrs. Cheap Thrills has something of a girls night planned for Friday, so my plan is to psyche myself up and play some killer poker while she's out.

OK, that's all for now then. Ending note to self: Get psyched! Dominate! Every play will be +EV! Kill! Kill!

:)

1 in 9 vs. 9:1

2005-01-06T09:39:00.000-05:00

As into poker as I am, I can still sound like a moron when I talk about math. There's something I should work on.

In my last post I summarized a little chart of odds and outs that I have near my desk, and I didn't type it up well. I said, for example, that is you have 5 outs, your odds are 9:1. Duh, what I meant was that your odds of hitting your card are 1 in 9, which of course is not the same thing, as an anonymous commentor pointed out, and yes, I did forget that after 3 beers last night :)

The correct chart, adapted from Abdul:

5 outs, odds of hitting are 1 in 9.
6 outs, 1 in 7
7 outs, 1 in 6
9 outs, 1 in 5
11 outs, 1 in 4
15 outs, 1 in 3
23 outs, 1 in 2

And again, these are rough numbers. When I wrote it up, it was just to help me get a feel for the relationships between odds and outs.

Poker Stuff in Front of Me

2005-01-05T22:05:00.000-05:00

Okay, so now that all the holiday craziness is over with, I'm all caught up on my poker blogs. Back to not just skimming through them to stay current with the poker world and the blogosphere, but actually reading through entries in an unhurried manner and enjoying them. I even added a couple new blogs to the right that I had missed in Iggy's last several weeks of pimping. One entry that stood out for me was Ice's (of My Little Poker Blog) list of 12 reminders he keeps in his wallet, which he acknowledges he got from another blog, but can't remember which, and boy do I know that feeling. Anyway, I printed the list out and stuck it on the wall my desk faces.

Some other things on my wall:

My Excel summary of Small Stakes Hold'em's starting hand recommendations for "tight" low-limit games. (Interesting to compare that to Ciaffone's recommendations in Middle Limit Holdem Poker.)

My little summary of Outs and Odds. I'm sure you all know this one -- I just have a rough version up:

5 outs, you needs 9:1 odds.
6 outs, 7:1
7 outs, 6:1
9 outs, 5:1
11 outs, 4:1
15 outs, 3:1
23 outs, 2:1

(Update: These numbers should be 1 in 9 and 1 in 7, not 9:1 and 7:1, etc. See my next post.)

Then I have 3 small sticky notes taped to the top of my computer monitor. These have been there since before I started my blog.

One says "PATIENCE + DISCIPLINE"

Another says "PLAY POSITION MORE" (this one is a much less necessary reminder than it was a year or so ago.)

And just this week I added a new one that speaks to a more personal issue -- it says "NO BEER + POKER." Cause as much as I love a beer while I'm grinding it out, it is just plain -EV for met. I did add a little caveat: "Play microlimits when drinking," for those night when I'm just having fun.

Looking back on my year of poker I think several big (for me) things happened:

First, I learned how to 2-table and whomp on many of the .50/$1 games out there. In 2003 I had just barely been winning at that level (although I had been winning a lot in bonus money).
Second thing, directly related to the first, was my bankroll started really growing, and I moved up to $2/$4.
Third thing: After winning in Vegas, at Foxwoods, and at Turning Stone, I became quite comfortable with live play, which had been one of my poker goals from the outset.

None of these 3 things are bad. But going back to my 3 reasons for playing poker -- fun, profit, and improving my game -- I feel I've been concentrating on the first 2 more than the last one. I've been having a lot of fun playing live, and somewhere I think I started viewing online play as just a way to build my bankroll for my next Foxwoods trip. I admit I haven't seriously thought about moving up to $3/$6 in a long time -- I've just been content to get my few BB/hour at $2/$4. So my goal for 2005 is to change that, and to do that I need to stop grabbing a beer and going on 2-table autopilot when I play online, hence the new sticky note.

As a matter of fact I had 3 beers tonight while watching the new episode of Lost, so no poker for me tonight. I shall return with a vengeance tomorrow, tackling the new Empire reload bonus.

Poker Stuff I Got for Christmas

2005-01-03T16:04:00.000-05:00

I'm so behind. While everyone else in the poker blogosphere has already moved onto year-in-reviews, future resolutions, and such, I'm here blogging about Christmas. Oh well.

First off, on the serious "Life > poker" side, my family had one of our best Christmases ever thanks to my mom beating colon cancer. It's kind of amazing how quickly it all happened. On November 11 she had a colonoscopy and the no-bedside-manner physician who found the tumor told her then that "It doesn't look good." Nice. Three weeks later she went under the knife, and that was just scary as heck for everyone. But it went as well as it could have. She was out of the hospital in 4 days (they said it'd be a minimum of 5), and we all were just happy to be together on Christmas. Then on Monday, December 27, my mom saw the doctor again to find out what type of radiation or chemotherapy she'd have to go through. The answer was none: They can't detect any sign that it has spread. They'll monitor her blood for 3 years, but she's got as clean a bill of health as she can. Wow. My whole family is still in this weird, but very good, state of surprise and relief.

Okay, back to poker. This was the year of poker gifts, and I got a bunch. (Mrs. Cheap Thrills told everyone in my family what I'd like.) Here we go:

Two decks of Kem cards. I've been wanting to try these out for a long time, and now I will. To my mind this was the only serious card player's home-game item that I didn't already have.

Ray Zee's High-Low-Split Poker: Seven Card Stud and Omaha Eight-or-Better for Advanced Players. Sweet.

The Rounders Collector's Edition on DVD. B and I already watched a lot of the poker-players' commentary with Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, Chris Ferguson, and Chris Moneymaker. Hellmuth dominates the chatter, of course, but I loved Moneymaker's everyman perspective on things. When Mike McDermott has to go to his law professor for money, the professor writes him a $10,000 check. It's nighttime, and Moneymaker was the only one to note that Mike would have a hard time cashing that check (and would have to pay an exorbitant fee at a check-cashing business in NYC). Also, we forwarded to the parts with Johhny Chan so we could hear him comment on his own performance. Actually Chan is pretty quiet during those parts -- I wouldn't know what to say either. During all the best parts of the movie, actually, the pros are quiet -- caught up in watching the movie rather than commenting on it. Very funny to hear them being fanboy-ish about.

Four ceramic suits-of-cards coasters. They're from Restoration Hardware, and each one has a suit -- a big heart, a big spade, etc. B had already gotten me a set of 6 dice coasters -- one to match each side of a die -- so now we've got nice little coaster set for the game room we plan to have some day.

Four pint glasses with playing cards on them. These will certainly see a lot of use.

A Scotty Nguyen bobble-head! Now the poker-playing Gremlin pictured at the top of this page has someone to play with. (I have them sitting, facing each other, on a shelf in our dining room.) B knew I wanted only the Scotty Nguyen bobble-head, since it serves a practical purpose: to remind me to call people "baby" as much as possible.

An automatic card shuffler. Useful? No. But I think these were going for like $7 at mall shops so it's not surprising I got one. B later told me that she had to convince my family that I didn't also need a dealer's shoe.

And last but not least, Mrs. Cheap Thrills got me a poker blogger "Hammer Time" t-shirt designed by Badblood. How awesome is that?! The funny part was that I got B the very same thing! So now we can look dorky wearing the same thing at our home game. Actually, we'd never do that, so we'll have to fight over who gets to wear it first.

That was all I got on Christmas day, but then when we visited friends after Christmas I actually got 2 more things: A nice little wooden box for holding 2 decks of playing cards (hello, new home for the Kem cards), and a a revolving wooden chip wheel with decent 8.5-gram chips in it. This won't replace my standard, in-the-aluminum-case set of 500 11.5-gram chips, but it does look nice on the bookshelf next to my poker book collection, and the chips will come in handy if we ever do a big enough tournament.

A pretty good haul, huh? Now, next year, will I be able to explain to my family that I have all the poker paraphernalia I could want, but that my poker bankroll could always use more padding? Probably not.

Happy Holidays

2004-12-15T22:42:00.000-05:00

Ugh, long time no post.

In addition to the usual holiday craziness, things have been especially hectic in the Cheap Thrills household. The week before Thanksgiving, Mrs. Cheap Thrills had minor surgery (from which she is now fully recovered). That same week, my mom found out she had a tumor in her colon, which was removed the week after Thanksgiving. That was fairly major surgery, and we've been down visiting my family in Philadelphia for the past two weekends. But the surgery went well, and this very morning my mom got very good news on her test results -- there's no evidence that the cancer has spread. Hard to put into words what a relief that is.

And because I like to keep my posts as poker-related as possible, here's some wisdom I've taken from the past month: There's nothing like the ups and downs of Real Life to give you some perspective on the swings of fortune at the poker table!

The only poker I've played since Thanksgiving was the day after my mom's surgery. She was still pretty weak and delirious from all the medication, and after a visiting her at the hospital all day, B and I shared a couple beers with my aunt, uncle, sister, and cousin before hitting the sack. Actually, everyone else hit the sack, and I stayed up to kill a couple relatively relaxing hours playing low-limit 7-Stud. I've blogged a lot about the reasons we all love poker -- that session stands out as one in which poker was primarily a way to relax and take my mind off other things. And I even left a slight winner!

In addition to not playing poker, I also fell behind on my blog reading. Interestingly, though, in 2 weeks of letting the blogs slide there were only about 300 unread posts in my Bloglines blogroll. For comparison, when I didn't keep up with the poker blogs for about 2 weeks this past August, I had over 800 unread posts -- and I was reading fewer bloggers then. I think the holidays are slowing everyone down to some degree.

By the way, in catching up with all the blogging, I must give a big Thanks to everyone for all the posts about the WPBT event in Vegas. Very fun reading.

I haven't been playing much poker, but I have been seeing it everywhere: Is anyone else amazed by all the poker stuff being peddled in the gift stores this year? Chip sets are everywhere, and it just goes on from there to poker clothing, glassware, you name it. I'm seeing poker gifts everywhere I look. I guess anything that gets more players in the cardrooms must be a good thing, right?

I am definitely going to log some hours online this weekend. As I've mentioned before, I pretty much stopped playing poker in the winter months last year, and when I came back to the tables in the spring I was rusty and lacking confidence. I do think that there are fewer fish in the aquarium during the holiday period, but I'm determined to keep my game sharp (or at least not let it get too dull) through these hectic weeks.

I'd like to say that I'll post again before the holidays but the way I've been going I'm not so sure -- time is limited and for the restof the month my poker priorities are going to be first playing, then reading more interesting bloggers than myself, then posting here. So in case I don't post again, I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Gobble Gobble

2004-11-24T13:30:00.000-05:00

Just a quick post to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving.

Although I haven't posted much, I have played a lot of poker this month. I haven't been losing but I haven't really been been lighting it up either. The numbers paint the picture:

Party/Intertops $2/$4 Holdem, July 1 - November 1: 3,938 hands, $494 won, 3.14 BB/100 hands
Party/Intertops $2/$4 Holdem, November 2 - today: 2,406 hands, $157.50 won, 1.64 BB/100 hands

MY VP$IP is down to 20 percent for November, vs. 23 before. But my pre-flop raise percentage is up to over 10 percent in November, vs. about 8 percent before. But my overall aggression factor is 2.15 in November, vs. 2.29 before.

I can't believe that my tightening up preflop is a bad thing. I'm pretty much following Miller's "tighter game" guidelines. I think what might be happening is that I have been playing at looser tables than before (I have been putting less effort into trying to find the most tight-passive game I can find), and not adjusting to the no-folders. Or I could just be running kinda cold.

Interestingly, I actually thought I was losing at $2/$4 Hold'em in November, but really I was losing at Stud. What happened was I was playing Hold'em a lot, and treading water a lot of days, and in between I was dabbling in Party/Intertops $1/$2 and even $3/$6 7-Stud, and having some really wild variance. After 2-3 weeks of this, I knew I was losing a little overall, but I mistakenly thought I was winning at Stud and losing at Hold'em.

I guess since Party went to storing hand histories on one's hard drive, I had gotten less diligent about importing hand histories and looking at my stats. Normally that's not a big deal, but in this case it took a look at PaokerTracker for me to realize where I was winning money and where I was losing money. In this case winning a bit at Hold'em and losing a lot at 7-Stud.

So no more 7-Stud at Party for a while -- if I want to play Stud I'll play at Paradise. It's funny, because I was only ever barely able to beat the Party .50/$1 Hold'em games. Ultimately I stopped trying, went over to Paradise, and built my bankroll at the Paradise .50/1 games, then came over to the Party $2/$4 games, where I've been winning. It may be that I need to do something similar for Stud -- build a bankroll at Paradise's tight-passive games before tackling the loosies at Party.

The other interesting thing that happened to me was yesterday I got a call from a guy at Absolute Poker, and he offered me a free $10 plus 20 percent on my next deposit, so I said OK. Is poker telemarketing the next big trend for online poker? I played at AP a little last night. Their lobby's gotten a little nicer-looking and it seemed there was a bit more traffic. It was a real shock playing against tight opponents, though. I'd gotten so used to Party that it felt really weird, but also fun, to raise and successfully steal the blinds.

OK, I gotta go. Got people to see, turkeys to brine . . .

Poker PJs

2004-11-16T12:57:00.000-05:00

B stumbled across these:

Diva Las Vegas PJs

Suits & Stripes PJs

Gamblor Bikini Pack

Oh my my my.

Update (thanks Chris)

Get Lucky Thongs

Celebrity-Spotting at Foxwoods

2004-11-15T19:42:00.000-05:00

This past Saturday night Mrs. Cheap Thrills and I headed down to Foxwoods to play some poker -- and do some people-watching, since Saturday was the first day of the World Poker Finals, which is Foxwoods's World Poker Tour event.

I had read that the Foxwoods poker room was a mob scene with the WPT in town, and we had planned to get there early, but Friday night the House of Cheap Thrills was host to a somewhat rowdy little party, and I ended up sleeping til 2pm. We didn't get to Foxwoods til 6pm. As we walked into the poker room, Annie Duke was walking out. Cool.

The poker room was a bit of a mob scene, but actually not as bad as I feared. We had to wait in small line just to put our names on the waiting list -- we signed up for $2/$4 Hold'em (60 people ahead of us) and $1-$5 Stud (20 people ahead of us). I didn't bother signing up for $4/$8 Hold'em (200+ on the waiting list).

While we waited we scoped out the room. I didn't spot any pros along the wall opposite the race book, which is where I thought the higher-limit stuff tended to be spread. In the very back of the poker room, though, I spotted Barry Greenstein, and walked up to the back of sports bar/race book area, which provides a sort-of balcony-like view of the poker room, to get a better look. Barry G was playing with Jennifer Harman and, in a big beige cowboy hat, Doyle Brunson. I am enough of a fanboy that being in the same poker room as Doyle Brunson made the one-hour drive down to Foxwoods very much worth the trip.

Then B and I headed downstairs to the Sunset Ballroom, where the first flight of the first day of the World Poker Finals was being played. The railbirds had a real treat down there, since T.J. Cloutier was sitting at a table right by the rail. That guy is really big, in a way that just doesn't come through on TV. James McManus talks about how big Cloutier is in Positively Fifth Street, but I thought he was just being melodramatic! We also saw Erik Seidel, John Juanda, Humberto Brenes, David Williams, and David Phan.

Then we came back upstairs to the poker room. Our names had already been called for $1-$5 7-Stud, but we weren't yet in the top 20 for Hold'em, so we got back on the 7-Stud list and were seated about 15 minutes later. I was the only person at the table who didn't have gray hair, but that's OK with me. I'm planning another post on how much I enjoy playing 7-Card Stud live, but for now I'll just note that if we only played Hold'em, as so many of the people in the room did, we would've spent the whole night waiting to play. In the space of about 2 hours I went up $60 and then lost it all back on expensive draws (hello implied odds), and left down $1.50 (so I beat the rake and tips but got nothing for my trouble except about 6 beers).

B played 7-Stud for a little while but then quit to go back downstairs and watch the tourney. She spotted Cindy Violette and Scotty Nguyen. She said Scotty Nguyen was over by a merchandise counter they had set up, which was selling WPT t-shirts, jackets, and a few of those poker bobbleheads Iggy linked to a few weeks ago. Scotty Nguyen was trying on a jacket, and B resisted the temptation to run up, buy the Scotty Nguyen bobblehead, and have him sign it! She said it would have been just a bit too embrassing, but she probably also could've gotten him to call her "baby," so that plus the signed bobblehead might've been worth it :)

B also got a cheeseburger at the sports bar, and while she did, there was John Juanda, waiting for his food like anyone else. Kinda funny seeing just how regular Joe a lot of the pros are.

We took a final walk around the poker room before leaving. Doyle et al. were still playing, and had a bouncer of sorts so you couldn't go right up and gawk at the flop. Paul Darden had joined Greg Raymer's table (they were playing $200-$400 H.O.E.), and Amir Vahedi was standing around watching along with half dozen or so local yokels like B and I. On the way out, we also passed Antonio Esfandiari.

All in all it was a pretty cool Saturday night. Now that I'm done with with all my fanboy gushing, I'm off to grind it out at Intertops $2/$4 :)

Wednesday Night at Foxwoods: Ouch

2004-11-04T13:43:00.000-05:00

I made it down to Foxwoods last night. I had thought I'd be going alone but at the last minute Mrs. Cheap Thrills decided to come along. We both wanted to give $4/$8 a try -- her for the first time, me for the first time since last November, when I lost $100 in a very bad session.

A couple new things at Foxwoods. First, there's a Hard Rock bar and restaurant near the poker room now. Second, there is a nice bar/lonuge kinda near the poker area. I'd first dicovered this back in August, but B contents it is fairly new and was not there at the beginning of the summer. Either way, it is a much nicer, less crowded and smoky area to grab a beer and relax than the sports bar right next to the poker area.

Most interestingly, the Foxwoods poker room has implemented a new system for waiting lists. There are now two very big projection screens on the wall, which show all the games currently being offered, how many tables of each game are going, and the initials of players currently on the waiting lists. This is a very nice feature since you can now see the waiting lists from almost anywhere in the poker area -- whereas before everyone crowded around the the two desks with the whiteboards to see their status on the waiting list. You also now put your name on the waiting list at a different desk than you go to when your name is called. Actually the desks are right next to each other, but before, they were the exact same desk, and this just added the confusion and traffic in the poker room.

Also, the floor staff are now apparently able to communicate through the computer system, or perhaps they have upgraded their walkie-talkies: Whatever it is, they need to yell across the room less and the poker room is a little less noisy and I was better able to hear when my initials were called.

We didn't have to wait very long. B was seated at a table in the front of the room, I was way in the back.

My first table was awful. One guy was a maniac. To his credit, he was the friendliest maniac I've ever played with, and he wasn't trying to hide, deny, or justify to others the fact that he was on a rush and making crazy plays just for the fun of it. The mood of the table was pretty fun, but he was a maniac nonetheless. He played every hand, raising it preflop 75% of the time, and seeing the river almost every time. He went up $200 in the first half hour I was there. The smart voice inside my head said, "Leave." Then I was on the big blind, the maniac did not raise, and I got to flop two pair for "free" (sevens and fives, but two pair is two pair). I bet the whole way -- the maniac actually folded, but another person stayed in with A2o -- he had deuces on the flop and got his ace on the river. Not really a bad beat, but not a good omen.

I think it must have been tilt that I did not leave then. I was also looking at the big waiting list board, and it was still only showing 2 tables for $4/$8. I didn't want to go to B's table, so I figured the table I was at was my only choice. Not a good reason to stay. Bad JD.

I resolved to play the right way against a loose table, and if I got blinded down or sucked out on, so be it. I folded quite a bit. Tried to limp in with pairs or AXs a couple times and the maniac made me pay another bet each time. Flop kept missing me. Finally I get AQs and raise, maniac calls. I get my queen and bet the flop and turn. By the river there is also a J and a 10 on board. The maniac loves drawing to straights so I check the river, he bets, and he shows AKo. In my mind I'm screaming "F***!!!!!!" I think I made my brain hoarse. That doesn't feel good.

Nothing too special after that. The maniac has been saying he has to leave at 8:45. I had sat down at 7:30. I decide to wait it out, and I don't get any more cards during the wait. But around the time the manic finally left, so did 3 other people. Again I'm still thinking that this is the only other $4/$8 table, so I agree to play short and hope to keep the game alive. Lost more money 4-handed when I flopped top pair and my opponents flopped a set and a straight, respectively. Ouch. Finally our table just breaks up. I am down $140 and feeling like a total moron.

On my walk out of ther poker area I see 2 more $4/$8 games being spread. Turns out that since $4/$8 had gone to open seating, they stopped updating the number of $4/$8 tables on the waiting list board. And when people did ask to sit at $4/$8, they seated them at the front of the poker area, near the main desk, and that's why our game didn't get new players when it was short.

I go to the bar/lounge area to recoup. I had dropped $120 at the Mirage in Vegas and thought nothing of it: At the time I just bought more chips and made back my losses plus a lot more. But I was on vacation then and having a blast. This was a Wednesday night and I had just given $140 away to a bunch of hard-guy no-folding regulars. I was not happy.

I got a beer and reviewed my play. I decided I definitely made some small mistakes, and definitely got shitty cards. But there was no getting around the fact the I *knew* it was not my kind of table and I stayed anyway, trying to justify it by erroneously thinking I had few other options. Big, big mistake.

I shook off the lousy feeling I had and decided to suck it up, get back on the horse, etc. I rebought up to $180 and put my name on the waiting list (open seating had ended while I drank my beer). I'm seated at a table that is almost the exact opposite of my first table. It was still loose as hell preflop, but no one was raising and people were actually folding on the flop and turn. Hands were being taken down without showdowns. I won my first pot of the night with bottom pair from the BB when everyone made it obvious that they had nothing. Only an Ace-high called me down. Then I limped in with 45s -- something I never do online -- and got my straight. I think I won one more pot, then I lost it all and more when I had KJo, flop came AKK, and my opponent slowplayed AA. Doh!

This table was much more my bag of chips, but it was in the back! As players left they were not replaced, and the table broke up after maybe 40 minutes. I ended up down $45 due to screwing around with top pair when it was short-handed. Dumb, dumb. I was relocated to a game in the very front.

This one was an awful table, the kind I had worried I might find at Foxwoods on a weeknight. It was pretty clear that 4 players on on end of the table, all twenty-ish and looking like New York or Boston hard guys, knew each other. On the first hand I was there the flop came K-Q-rag. One of the tough guy types says "That's the sugar," and the NY tough girl next to him says "Yeah that's definitely my sugar." They bet and raise the flop, I think 2 others come with them. They're betting the whole way, at the end she shows Q7o and he shows K3o for the win. Two more hands go by with similar aggression. On the third hand I was there for, one of the hard guys berated the player on my left for "rivering him" with JJ (another J on river) when NY guy had 55 and a set on the flop. On the final hand I was there for (I was UTG), the tough girl was whispering to the guy next to her, in the middle of the hand. It looked like blatant collusion to me. I left without posting a single BB.

B was doing OK at her table, though. At this point it was a little after 10pm, and we had agreed to leave around 11pm. I sat down at $1-$5 Stud. It was the most pleasant table of the evening in terms of the people. And also I won a bit, going up $50 before losing $25 of it on one crazy big pot where I had a draw that pot odds would not let me fold.

B left up $27. Her table had stayed full the whole time because it was in the front, while two of mine had broken up because they were in the back. Let that be a lesson.

She said her table was also mostly no-folders, but no real maniacs and was friendlier than any of mine had been. She said the guy next to her had played at Turning Stone a couple times, and agreed that the games there are much softer. I also believe the tourist-filled $3/$6 tourist games in Vegas are much softer. On a Wednesday night, it seems that Foxwoods is full of regulars, and regulars = bad.

All in all, it was a lousy night for me. Down $160, a full 20 bets at $/$8. I've lost twice now at the Foxwoods $4/$8 game, and so far I am really not liking the feel of those games. I'll be at Foxwoods on November 13th, which is the day the big WPT event there starts. I think I might try $4/$8 one more time since that will be a Saturday; I don't want to play $2/$4 because of the rake; if $4/$8 goes badly again I will just stick to Stud. Irrationally, part of me wants to grow the online bankroll and try the $5/$10 game at Foxwoods. Even if I do try such folly it will be a good ways off.

Trying to find the silver lining here, this was a good lesson in how to deal with a bad session -- I've been doing really well at live games this summer and had starting expecting things to go my way a bit too much. Even with weaker opponents I was not going to win much with the cards I got last night, and sometimes that's just the way it goes.

Poker quasi-celebrity spottings: I saw John D'Agostino (the young guy who took 2nd to Phil Ivey at the Turning Stone American Poker Championship, aired live on Fox Sports Net) and a guy whose name I can't remember -- he was in one of the WSOP final tables, and on ESPN he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and eating shrimp cocktail at the table, had a Boston accent, I remember he was quite the character. One of the players at B's table said he saw James Woods earlier in the day.