Brett's One-Liner

Today I was playing $1-2 NLHE at Planet Hollywood with the Duke.

Brett was dealing and had put out a fourth diamond on the river. The pot was heads-up between the Duke and an action player, but when the fourth diamond came down the guy slowed down and checked. The Duke bet the size of the pot and then tried talking to the guy into a call, saying he knew the guy didn't have a diamond since he checked, and that he, the Duke, hadn't even looked at his own holecards this hand.

This went on for a while, and eventually the guy said, "I think we're probably chopping."

I looked at the board. I didn't see how a chop was anything but a remote possibility. It's not like this was a double-paired board where if they both had bare aces it would mean a split pot. The board contained five distinct ranks, with four diamonds. But it was obvious from this guy's tone that he was completely serious. He was really agonizing over his decision.

"You might have a diamond," he said, "but I don't think it's higher than anything on the board."

Okay, so now at least I knew how he was confused. He had misread the board and thought there were five diamonds on board, even though the other card happened to be black.

But it was clear that the illusion under which he was operating was quite complex. Because one of the diamonds on board was the deuce of diamonds. So even if there had been five diamonds out there, if the Duke had a diamond in his hand he beat any sans diamond hand.

The guy eventually folded. I couldn't help myself and confided to him, "Yeah, my read was you guys were chopping."

"Yeah," he agreed.

Brett was shuffling the cards for the next deal. When it comes to playing cards, Brett may be the best of the Planet Hollywood dealers, and he had on his poker face when he said, "Part of me died during that hand."

Anna Wroblewski and a World without Justice

Things can go really bad in poker, and they can go really, really good.

Like pummel-me-with-a-tire-iron-just-to-let-me-know-this-is-real type good.

As I write this, Anna Wroblewski is among the chip leaders at the end of Day 2 of the $25,000 buy-in WPT Championship at the Bellagio. First prize is $3.9 million.

Her main games are the $1-2 NL games at Ballys and Paris Las Vegas. I say they are her main games but that may change after her recent score. I've played with her a half dozen times. She's a 21-year-old self-described "crazy Asian girl." At the tables she is joking, flirting, playing mind games, drinking. She probably doesn't break 100 lbs. on the scales, so she gets drunk fast. She has a dangerous, spewy playing style. She went broke recently and had to wait tables. But she got together a bankroll (with or without help from friends, I don't know) and took a shot at a $3,000 buy-in preliminary event a week ago. She felted Barry Greenstein and Shannon Shorr in a single hand with a two-outer on the river. Then she won the whole thing. The score? Close to $350K plus entry to the WPT Championship. Sweetness and light.

Re-Bet played with Anna just once and his opinion of her game is such that when he found out about her recent success he asked, "Is there no Justice?" Yes, he said it with a capital J.

Carolina John told me today that I reminded him of Sylar from the show "Heroes." So I was trying to think of who he reminded me of and I realized that Danny Nguyen not only plays like him but looks like him.

Sidebet Challenge, Final Day

Total Profits
Highwaytime: $1,337
Re-Bet: $1,327

Biggest Stack
Highwaytime, $853

Yahtzee!

Sidebet Challenge, Day 6

Total Profits
Highwaytime: $1,072
Re-Bet: $959

Biggest Stack
Highwaytime, $853

Scoreboard!

Sidebet Challenge, Day 5

Total Profits
Re-Bet: $861
Highwaytime: $547

Biggest Stack
Re-Bet, $849

Short session today as we met up with the Duke and his girl Steph at the 51s baseball game. Serious session tomorrow.

Sidebet Challenge, Day 4

Total Profits
Highwaytime: $505
Re-Bet: $871

Biggest Stack
Re-Bet, $849

Finished an early afternoon session ahead $260, which is fine but it could have been much better since I was up $450 at one point. I started taking beats in rapid-fire succession. Feeling myself steam I decided to rack up and leave, even though it was a good game and I had position on a deep-stacked mega-calling station.

Todd was in the hole for quite a big number when I left, so as of this moment I am ahead in the total profits sidebet. But despite wanting the sidebet bloodmoney, I have to root for him to make a comeback and he is a huge overdog against that lineup. Will update later.
----
Update: He didn't need to make that much of a comeback.

Sidebet Challenge, Day 3

Sidebet 1 (Total Profits)
Re-Bet: $666
Highwaytime: $245

Sidebet 2 (Biggest Stack)
Re-Bet, $770

Bubbled in tournament, and both times I picked up KK in the cash game I was up against AA. Still got a $65 profit on the day, but ugh. Time to put on the rally cap, or maybe even the "conductor hat."

Sidebet Challenge, Day 1-2

Todd is in town for about a week and I thought we would make the rivalry more interesting by having a couple sidebets going. The first is total profits, and the second is on who accumulates the biggest chip stack during his trip. Here is how it stands after a couple days:

Sidebet 1 (Total Profits)
Re-Bet: $422
Highwaytime: $180

Sidebet 2 (Biggest Stack)
Highwaytime, $490

Of course this sidebet action is all just a dim foreshadowing of what will happen in a couple weeks. What happens in a couple weeks? Well, Re-Bet comes into town again, but also arriving will be the nightmare-maker known as...no....yes!!!...Carolina John.

Return to the Strip

I cashed out $1,100 last night from UltimateBet to give me something of a live game bankroll. After cashing out I played a little and cleared more bonus money--I thought the rest of the bonus would be voided by my withdrawal but apparently that's not true.

Re-bet is getting into town today, too, so I'll be easily found the next week or so in the Planet Hollywood cardroom.

Witches' Sabbath?

I was walking to my car from my apartment and heard a noise. Passing the tennis courts, I looked inside. I saw a man in street clothes, not tennis clothes, and wearing a bright blue-and-yellow rubber mask. If he'd had the jumpsuit to go with it he'd have passed for an overweight superhero. It was the kind of mask you saw a lot of in late '80s pro wrestling. He was unlocking the tennis courts for two guys in white shirts and black slacks. I recognized them. They're evangelists and I often see them bicycling around my neighborhood with their huge backpacks and always wearing the same slacks and white shirts.

When you see something like this, you just keep walking. You do not pass Go, you do not collect $200. I got in my car and drove off.

If any of you are skilled in interpreting signs and portents or just otherwise have excellent insight into things, what the hell do you think this means? Mind you, this was broad daylight and I'm sure of what I saw.

In the meantime I'll get my mind off it by reviewing raw data, specifically my PokerTracker Omaha stats for April.

Okay, for the month I've made a profit of about 120,000 Yen on UltimateBet, not counting bonuses and rakeback. The rough equivalent of $1,000.

I'm running at +10BB/100 hands.

I thought I was losing money playing heads-up and shorthanded. I find I'm actually slightly ahead playing heads-up but down like $400 playing 3-handed and 4-handed. Hmm. I feel like I've been getting run over shorthanded and/or choosing bad spots to play back. Strangely the numbers are better on 6-max tables overall than on full nine-handed ring games. My highest profit is when there are specifically five players at a table: I'm up about $750 there. I think my technical challenges right now for PLO are learning to manage hands as the aggressor, since I've been doing more preflop raising, and adjusting my play shorthanded.

That's it for now. And again for any of you with interpretive powers, help us out here.

Triple Draw Rush

The plan to change my schedule was just a moderate success, at best. I woke up at 2 pm today. I go to my computer and check my IM's and see one from Re-bet saying he busted on UltimateBet.

We get on the phone and I find out he's not actually busted, he has like $40 on there. I'm like, that makes all the difference! Empires have been created from less. So like a good friend, I offer to help him get healthy again by playing him heads-up in some of the obscure poker games featured on UB. One of those games is A-5 Triple Draw, which I have played only once, in a dealer's choice home game, and the rules of which I don't even remember.

Well, I must have won about the first 15 hands. It was pretty sick. I got dealt a pat A-5 as my starting hand one time and got paid off. Finally I had to hit the "Sit Out" button cause I was laughing so hard. There is no way to evaluate my triple draw game based on that session, because the deck completely hit me in the face. I could have been playing anybody in the world and it wouldn't have mattered. In a way it's annoying cause I wish that would happen when I'm playing a live $2-5 NL game instead of when I'm playing a friend for kicks at micro-stakes triple draw. Anyway, we stopped while he still had some money, and I am glad to say he is now up to over $300 on UB.

Highwaytime Becomes "That Guy"

So I've been thinking about getting down to the Strip for some exciting live action no limit holdem poker, like the kind I saw on the TV...

But I'm having something of a problem, cause I placed my entire bankroll minus $500 or so online, and that cash is really for me to live off. My roll is on UltimateBet and Absolute, and the problem I'm having is that these sites have deposit bonuses that are voided if you withdraw funds before they're cleared. You clear them by playing a certain number of raked hands for enough money.

I'm thinking about just taking my $300 off Absolute and saying screw the bonus, cause their software is so ugly and they don't have many players, anyway. But I've been playing on UB and I have a good chunk on there now and I intend to clear that bitch. So my goal this week is to play there as much as I can so I can finally withdraw and put in some live hours later this month.

But it'll have to wait. Today I won't be playing cause I'm sick of waking up when the sun sets. It's 9 am here and I haven't gone to bed yet and don't intend to til late tonight, and I don't want to play sleep deprived. Plus there's the Sopranos tonight and I gotta watch that.

So last night I finally became, as The Gambling Duke likes to call him, "That Guy." I went onto a $50-max PLO table on UB and just ruined it inside of 10 hands with some really loose play, highlighted by this hand where I was up against two players who both had AAxx. My cold-call of the pre-flop reraise is laughable, but I had good enough equity in a three-way pot given the actual hands I was up against.

The very next hand one of the guys goes on monkey-tilt and reraises me when I pick up AAxx. Honest012 goes on a rant after I take him to the felt but I don't really know what he says cause UB turns obscenities into ***** in tablechat. I don't think he likes me, though.

Here I get bad-beat on another table when I'm a 7-3 favorite. Yeah, I know I have no pair but how do you call that with top-and-bottom pair in Pot Limit Omaha? If I could play against you every day, thelittleguy, I wouldn't have to work. Oh, wait...

Links

Just gonna post some links today you might find fun or useful.

Think you're just unlucky? Take the donkeytest.

A good article. It's written by a shipithollaballa who plays $200/400 NL on FT as OMGClayAiken.

Two of the best blogs in North America, for different reasons: Daut and Brian Townsend.

Two Ivey hands, one where Brad Booth gets street cred for life, the other with some Aussie pro annoying the shit out of Ivey by talking in the middle of the hand.

And so I can continue my tradition of thinly veiled brag posts, a fun PLO hand.

The New Room

I drove to Planet Hollywood today to check out their new poker room.

The old room was on the mezzanine between the high-limit area, guest check-in, and the convention halls. It kind of had a big space to itself in the middle of it all, which I liked. It didn't feel like playing in a casino so much as playing in a hotel lobby.

The new room is downstairs between the main street entrance, Starbucks, and the table games. Its location is good cause more potential players will see the room and make their way to the games. The downside to the location is that it's noisier, especially given the cabbage patch of slots planted on the Starbucks side. But it should be noted the back wall is specially sound-proofed with the kind of insulation used to dull background noise. The entire room is partitioned with a sloping chest-high wooden barricade, the only foot entrance being over a speck of marble floor. Overall it's kinda themeless in its style, relatively minimalist for a casino like most of the new Vegas builds where they've figured out adults don't want to gamble in kitchy theme parks. Lots of wood paneling and support pillars. I especially like Table 5 and Table 8 cause they are at the back, walled in on three sides and isolated from the main casino. A secret door leads to a staff office.

They don't have the plasma screens and card-reading comp system set up yet, but I am told they soon will.

As for my play at PH, I got in a hole early when my top set of 9s lost to runner-runner flush. Then a hand came up where the Duke, after losing the previous hand, raised to $15 on the button, and after the SB called I repopped it to $50 with QQ. The Duke came over the top, making it $150 straight. I mucked, and the shortstacked SB called and his 8-7 clubs made a straight vs. the Duke's KK.

I did turn the session into a decent win, but I was annoyed at myself for playing in the first place since almost my entire bankroll is online right now and I don't really have a live game bankroll.

La Pura Verdad

Thank you, Sir. I think I'll do that.

The Hazards of Free Speech

In his latest post, Monsterholdings lets fly a bunch of spurious lies. I won't dignify them by answering directly, since it's pretty obvious he's doing this to draw attention to himself and provoke a reaction.

I don't ask anyone to flag his content to blogspot for containing objectionable content. Repeat: I do NOT. This is America and he has a right to his "opinions."

He does point out one item of interest: both of us now have a program called Camtasia, which allows users to record, among other things, their online poker play with real-time or post-event commentary.

Just to test it out, I did a 6-minute video playing a 6-max table of Pot Limit Omaha on UltimateBet, and I added audio commentary afterwards. I may post vids in the future. For now just let me know if you're interested in seeing it cause the file is small enough to email. It's eventful enough for six minutes cause I doubled a guy up about two minutes in and busted him on the last hand.

I plan to really put in the hours in the weeks ahead, to run really well, and to make April my best month ever.