Moving On

Having successfully extricated my funds from FullTilt, I signed up on Absolute Poker (Highwaytime) and UltimateBet (SevenCities).

Playing the small PLO games on UB, the overall quality of play is about the same as on FT. There are more decent and good players on UB, but there are also more ridiculous maniacs and true donators.

On a different note, who do you think was out of line here?

Online Poker Cashout Rant

When you deposit money into an online poker site they don't give a damn how you do it. Prepaid credit cards, virtual visas, offshore bank accounts, phone cards, third party vendors, doesn't matter. You can rob an elderly couple at gunpoint outside the poker site's offshore offices in Antigua while they watch yukking it up from the windows of the employee lounge. They will smile and give you the thumbs-up. Welcome to the party. Ready to poker.

But try to take some of your money off their site, and suddenly these same people turn into anal retentive lawyer-banker-ombudsmen, looking for any excuse to fuck you up:

Site1Rep: "Oh, you know that service we let US players use to get money in and out of the site, which you used?"
Me: "The one I used when I signed up just two weeks ago and which your site instituted only a month ago?"
Site1Rep: "Yeah, that one. We decided to cancel that service the week after you signed up. So your money is, like, stuck online."

Or...

Site2Rep: "Hey, you know that account you set up to get rakeback? The one we let you load funds onto and cleared with your rakeback site?"
Me: "Of course, what about it?"
Site2Rep: "Yeah, well, we decided not to let you do that after all. We want you to have only one account, so we're suspending the new one. And oh, also we're not letting you withdraw that money you wanted to take off. Just letting you know. Have a nice day!"

The Infamous One-outer

Can't remember ever doing this before.

Five Water Pump

Played at Planet Hollywood yesterday and made a couple hundred bucks. Most of my earn is still coming from live play.

On FullTilt I've been playing PLO and it's going good. I'm still at around 40 BB/100 hands and I passed the $1K mark for the ElHajjh account today, to go along with a lump sum rakeback payment coming next month. No big deal I know, but this is how we get there. I'm looking to live off my casino play for now while not withdrawing anything from FT, just letting it build up and moving to higher stakes once I hit 20 max buys for the level I want to play.

I met the Duke's girl Stephanie today. A shout out to my readers in Spokane.

By special request, ElHajjh's greatest lines from FullTilt tablechat:

"cj, you have little chip. i have big chip."

"dabadbeat, because of player like you i buy five water pump for my village"

"you see? you must not try to bluff ElHajjh. it is a thing of fantasy. a dream of madmen and prophets."

"yes we go now, we have funtime pokertime"

"the time has come for ElHajjh to take his rest"

Nice Flop

When I heard that Steve (dabadbeat) and Todd (monsterholdings) were sitting at the same PLO table, it sounded like too much fun to pass up.

In regards to a question on my last post, the guy would have flopped a gutshot straight-flush draw and you couldn't drive him out of that pot with a dumptruck.

Our Friend the Randomizer

Back to live poker. Planet Hollywood, $1-2 NL.

I go on a good run and am kinda in the zone. I am insta-calling with AQ-high for $150 preflop because I know it is good. My hands are holding up. I am up to $800 off my $200 buy-in within a couple hours.

The main action in the game is a kid from Oklahoma. A $2-5 NL game is starting and Oklahoma is going to it, along with a local player who just got to the room, a textbook calling station, a European who resembles a poor man's Pancho Villa. I don't want to play $2-5 cause my bankroll isn't there yet, but Todd says the game is too good to pass up and offers to go halves with me in the game to decrease the variance. I agree to this but my instincts tell me it's a mistake.

As suspected I play weak-tight in the $2-5 NL because I'm sceered to lose a big chunk of my bankroll. Fortunately this is a game where playing weak-tight is no disaster. Nobody except Oklahoma is being aggressive, and most of the time you can just call preflop for cheap and get paid off when you hit. I am up a couple hundred when the following hand comes up.

I limp with JJ in early position, Oklahoma makes it $30, Pancho Villa calls the $30, then a guy who just does weird random stuff makes it $60. I am considering what to do when I see Oklahoma sitting behind me, $1K deep at this point, taking a couple more stacks out to reraise. I muck my hand. Oklahoma makes it like $250, Pancho Villa mucks, Randomizer2000 pushes for $400 and gets called. Randomizer2000 has A2, Oklahoma has AK.

I would have flopped quad jacks and won a huge pot if I'd stayed.

But that's just part of the story. See, if Randomizer2000 hadn't decided to reraise with A2 and reopen the betting, I actually would have lost almost my entire stack because Pancho Villa would have made a straight flush with the 78 of hearts.

I love live poker.

The Vienna Debacle

The past week I've been sick and so I haven't played live. But today a useful doctor gave me a prescription for antibiotics, and I'll find my way to a casino soon.

In the meantime I've been on FullTilt playing PLO. I've been experimenting with a strategy Rolf Slotboom discusses in his book, called the "Vienna Strategy," which basically involves shortbuying and then doing a lot of limp-reraising and checkraising while sitting to the immediate right of an aggressive player. Well, I figured I would give it a shot as I am trying to give myself a thorough education in this game, even if I knew this was not the way I wanted to do things in the long-term. I guess it didn't go so well. It seemed like every time I got it all-in with AAxx preflop, the other guy made a straight, and every time I got it in with QJT9-ds, the other guy had AAxx and made Aces full. Over 5k hands can this really happen again and again? Apparently so.

So reviewing my Pokertracker stats I did way, way better when I just bought in for full. How much better? Well, I was + 60 BB/100 hands when I bought in full, and -5 BB/100 hands when I went "Vienna." That little experiment is now over.

This isn't to say that Rolf's book sucks. It's actually really good. I think I just got unlucky employing that particular strategy, which is just one tactic he outlines at the beginning of the book, in addition to big stack strategies he later describes.

So why have I been playing almost exclusively Omaha when I play online? Couple reasons. First it is a change from the constant NLHE cash game grind, which I think I needed. Learning a new game could help me think about poker in new ways and ultimately make me a better NLHE player, anyway.

Second, I can tell you for sure, having stopped playing online for about a year and just having got back into it, that the online NLHE games are tougher than they used to be. I'm not saying they're unbeatable or that a good player shouldn't make money, but the edge is not as big as it used to be. So I am looking for a new edge and am trying to get good at this game. Omaha is a deceptively complicated game and you need to develop your card sense for it as well as learn the tricks. There's a reason that if you go on FullTilt you will see David Benyamine, under one of his aliases, crushing the $200-400 PLO on a regular basis. It's not unusual to see him with 10 buy-ins in front of him, having destroyed the top online pros at this game yet again.

The Pilgrimage

Pot Limit Omaha players on FullTilt were shocked this morning to find sitting at their tables....no....yes!!!...ElHajjh.

I think Saruman summed it up when he said, "There will be no dawn for Men."

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Addendum: I just kinda liked the sound of ElHajjh and it gives me an excuse to say things to assholes in player chat like, "We are pleased to welcome you the poker play."

I was hoping it didn't actually mean anything in any language, but I decided to check it out today.

Oops.

I doubt I'll be offending anybody because devout Muslims don't play poker.

Still, though. This account was set up for rakeback, so if it goes through for that purpose I don't want to ditch it.

Full Tilt: "Learn, Chat, and Play with the Donks"

The past couple days I've been playing PLO on Full Tilt (sn Highwaytime). I've found the games to be fishier than on Prima network and my results have been good so far, running at about +25 BB/100 hands.

Todd was also on FT last night (sn Monsterholdings) and we decided to go halves in the $12K-guaranteed tournament with 560 entrants. Early on I was down to 400 chips when I got my KK cracked but I made the famous comeback and finished in 12th place.

Kevin's Rush & The Duke's Demise

There's an aggressive local player who frequents Planet Hollywood named Kevin, an Asian guy in his late twenties. Every other local I've talked to hates playing him. Actually some say they hate him personally, because of the way he plays cards. This shows he's doing something right.

Tonight he went on the sickest cardrush I've seen in a long time. It started when he isolated a bad player with an AK reraise. Then the table went crazy with calls and pushes behind him. He caught his ace and more than tripled up from his original $200 stake. Then he played AT in a raised pot and checkraised the QJ9 board. His opponent pushed for nearly $200 more with JJ, and Kevin decided to gamble and rivered a K for the nut straight. Then Kevin raised with JJ, the bad player bet into him on the rag flop and he raised to $200, another deep-stacked player behind him pushed all-in for close to $300 more on top, and Kevin eventually called the deep-stack's 88 bluff. Finally the bad player, who had won a couple big pots in the interim, went broke with top pair against Kevin's set for another $500. When the dust settled from this run of hands, which transpired within the space of an hour, Kevin had close to $2K in front of him.

Meanwhile I was up a couple hundred in the game, but the Duke was struggling. He was in the game for $400. He was actually down to $20 when he tripled up and then went on a rush and had $300 in front of him. He was satisfied with the comeback and planned to leave when the blinds hit him. With two hands to go before having to post his blind he picked up my favorite hand, pocket nines. He limped with it, and when a shortstack raised behind him, he decided to play the hand heads-up and raised enough to put the guy all-in. The guy had QJ and rivered a Jack.

The very next hand, the Duke went into a full-blown Tony G routine. Feigning extreme tilt, he shouted, "Go ahead, take it all!" He pushed his remaining $250 across the felt, knocking his stacks over in the process. "You want it? It's yours! You think this is a joke? Take it all! I'm tired of this!" I knew he had a monster even before he turned to me and said, "I have King Kong." The bad player called and showed T9. The flop was all blanks, but then the turn was a 10 and the river was a 10. Runner-runner for trips and the Duke says he's done playing for a while.

All Hail Re-bet

Today was the final day of the Monte Carlo Freeroll Tourney and I drove down to the Strip to watch "Re-bet" Todd. I had a third of his action so it's fair to say I had a strong rooting interest.

After a couple naysayers got busted, the remaining field made a deal to take $1,200 each and play for the other half of the prize pool.

Re-bet played great and was actually the chip leader until donking off a lot of chips making a preflop play with pocket deuces. He still made the final table, though, where everyone agreed to a chop. The chip leader got $10K and everyone else got $6K. After taxes and a three-way split between Re-bet, the Gambling Duke, and myself, it came out to $1,300 each.

The Duke had come stright from a baseball game and was still in uniform, and we all ate a celebratory Sbarro lunch in the food court. Then I drove home to play an internet freeroll tourney I qualified for on Intertops. I won a couple races when I needed to and I placed second for $240. Not a bad day when you've made over $1,500 before dinner without putting a dollar at risk.

The key to getting Re-bet to loosen up and play well was our hilarity over recently viewed Tony G YouTube videos. We agreed that the Duke should embrace and incorporate the Tony G style, since it works well with his pre-existing super-aggressive preflop strategy and penchant for confrontational table-talk.

February is Really Over

I bust out of the Monte Carlo Freeroll when I run my beautiful KQ of diamonds into two black Aces. Re-bet is through to Day 2 and I have a third of his action. The Gambling Duke plays his Day 1 tomorrow and I have a third of his action as well. Team Holdem: "You can't stop us, you can only hope to contain us."

Planet Hollywood. I forget to bring my bankroll, wtf. New rolling chairs for the poker room and I lounge in one until Todd rolls in and spots me two bills. I quickly build up to a $300 stack when the following hand comes down.

A reasonable-looking but very aggressive preflop player makes it $12 and I call with 4-5 of hearts on the button. The big blind says, "I raise with my Charlie Murphy chip," and throws in a call. He only means to call, but the dealer, Mike Manchester, holds him to his verbal commitment to raise. So the three of us put in another $12 each.

Flop comes KJ3 with two hearts. BB checks. Preflop raiser leads for $20. It's a weak bet and I think there's a good chance of catching him on pure air, plus I have a draw with position, so I raise to $60. BB cold-calls the $60 and then the preflop raiser calls, too. I don't like my hand. The cold-call set off alarm bells, and with the overcall I'm not 100% my draw will be good if I hit. I have a draw of questionable value along with position and a camouflaged hand.

Turn is an offsuit 6, giving me an OESD to go along with my 5-high flush draw. It's checked to me. Do you guys push here? There's $240 in the pot. If you push AI there's a good chance you get a better draw to fold, and usually only a good made hand will call, against which you have many outs. The thing is, I really feel like I'm going to get called. I take the free card.

The river is an offsuit 7 and I am in shock because I have the Royal Brass Brazilians. All I am thinking is how February must really be over because this kind of thing never happened last month. BB leads out for $50. Preflop raiser mucks. I shove it all in for $140 on top and he calls with K3 for a flopped two pair. The preflop raiser says he had A8 of hearts for the nut flush draw.

Wow, I got really lucky. If I'd pushed the turn I'd have been in terrible shape but I might have stacked them both, because the BB was going to call with his two pair, and with all the money in the pot the nut flush draw might make the overcall.

For the coup de grace, I win a free commemorative Aladdin coffee mug for filling out a questionnaire describing my reaction to the new leather-bound slot machines (not a fan).