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This is all stuff I’ve been meaning to mention but haven’t gotten around to doing so yet.

-I saw “The Wrestler” a couple of weeks ago. It was my favorite movie I’ve seen in quite a while, maybe even since Under Siege: 2, and I think it’s a must-see. If you’re put off by the fact that it’s about a professional wrestler just get over it: Mickey Rourke is as good as all the critics are saying and his character is one of the more compelling characters in recent movie history.

-I saw “Gran Torino” and it was kind of lame. Clint Eastwood was awesome in it but the other actors were all decidedly sub-par and the basic premise of the story (hardass old fart turns friendly) was both cliched and executed poorly.

-I went to “Osteria Mozza” in Los Angeles. Easily my favorite meal I’ve ever had. Even with a disappointing main course (the beef brassato), the dinner was amazing. Everything was great but the ricotta raviolo with browned butter, which our waiter brought out for us for free because we were full but he insisted was too good to not have, was exceptionally good. If you’re ever in L.A., you have to go there.

-With everybody talking about Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, it’s worth going to Wikipedia and reading about what Ponzi’s scheme was. It’s actually fascinating how he was claiming to arbitrage millions of dollars worth of coupons when there weren’t enough ever printed to even come close to making his claims feasible, yet nobody bothered noticing.

-I finally finished reading “Nixonland.” I’d recommend the first 100 pages to most people just as a taste, and after that you can figure out whether you want to read the next 650 pages.

-Two things that made my downswing even worse: one was being woken up at 8:00 a.m. California time by my New York doctor after my first big losing day. I managed to wake up and find the phone just in time to answer the phone and have him tell me that the MRI is back and I definitely have a torn labrum.

The second thing was day 2 of the 2-day downswing. I’ve just lost about 150k and I’m supposed to go to a friend’s house (we’ll call her Amanda since I don’t know anybody named Amanada) in Beverly Hills to watch the sun set (no homo, she just has a ridiculous view of the city). But as I’m getting ready to leave, my brother tells me he might need a ride to the airport since his ride might not be able to pick him up. So I enter the airport into google maps on my iPhone to see how far away it is and realize it’s prohibitively far and I can’t give my brother a ride.

Then I enter my friend’s address into my phone and realize I have to haul ass because I’m going to be late. So I’m driving along, making good time, and what a coincidence! The exit that I have to take to get to Amanda’s house also takes you to the airport. I start to have thoughts such as “hmm, I wonder how far away from the airport Amanda’s place is?” and “That’s weird, Amanda supposedly lives in the bomb neighborhood, I thought being by an airport brings down property values.”

All the pieces of this not-particularly-tough puzzle started coming together when, following my google maps directions, I turned onto World Way, which according to my phone, was the end of my trip. Oddly enough, World Way did not lead to the top of Beverly Hills and there was no great view of the city. Instead, World Way is the road that takes you to all the airport terminals at LAX. As I drove by Terminal 1 I realized what had just happened.

Somehow, I must have calculated the route to LAX on my phone instead of to Amanda’s place. I guess I looked up Amanda’s place to see how far it is on my computer or something, because it wasn’t even in my search history on my phone.

So yeah, I guess I could have taken my brother to the airport after all, given that I went there anyway. I google maps Amanda’s place to see how far away it is, and it’s 20 miles away. And I’m in Los Angeles in rush hour. In an old Acura (had just returned the rental car, was using my cousin’s car). And I’m half an hour removed from losing 150k. And then, as I start flooring it to make it to Amanda’s less egregiously late than I’m going to be anyway, my iPhone warns me that it’s on 10% juice. There’s simply no way it’ll make it all the way to Amanda’s. Now I have to start committing the complicated directions to memory or else I’ll be lost in a strange city with no means of communicating with anybody. Panic starts to set in.

By some miracle I manage to keep the phone alive by exiting google maps and quickly checking the next step of my trip at the end of each step just long enough to make it to Amanda’s. At this point I’ve panic-driven basically all across Los Angeles in record time, and I managed to make it just in time to miss the sunset. My friends ask me why I was so late and, too embarrassed to explain to them what happened, I just tell them that I had to take my brother to the airport. Close enough to the truth right?

The last two days were absolutely brutal. I lost about 4 buy-ins at 200/400 HU, 2 of them against Patrik Antonius (who I quit because he was playing really well and I was running very badly) and 2 of them against luckexpress (he flopped a set vs my AA in a reraised pot and got it all in with top pair with a flush draw vs my better top pair on the turn and hit for a 110k pot).

I also lost about 4 or 5 buy-ins at 500/1000. I took a very big piece of myself in those games (and in 200/400) and I’d estimate the damage to my roll over the last few days to be ~$300,000. Needless to say, that sucked. In all, there were only a couple hands at 500/1k that I wish I’d played differently and those weren’t even hands in which I lost a buy-in. Just for the most part I made absolutely no hands and ran really poorly when I did hit a flop. I think I can remember about 6 pots in which I won more than 40 BBs (KsQs vs trex’s AJ on 8s9sJd for 50 BBs, KK vs Ozzy’s QQ for 50 BBs, AJ vs Ike in the blinds on an ace-high board for ~60BBs, AA vs Ike’s 66 for 60BBs, and 7s9s making a flush vs Ike’s trip Kings in a battle of the blinds). It’s kind of hard to play many many hours of poker and only have 6 pots in which you win anything more than a preflop call and a flop c-bet. I wouldn’t say I ran terribly like most of my friends have ran at Rail Heaven, I would say I ran poorly, with long stretches of not being able to make anything happen interrupted by occasional losses of my all-ins.

I did, of course, lose a big pot on my last hand with 7hJh. The game was breaking because the spot in the game was gone and I raised and got called by Phil otb and trex squeezed. I thought that trex would be reraising unusually light because he knows it’s probably my last hand and most people just mail it in, so I 4bet him. Without getting too much into my reads on trex, when he peeled a flop and I flopped a jack I thought I was highly likely to have the best hand and that he would get it in with worse a lot since he should be expecting me to bet 32k to win 80k with just about all of my bluff range. He turned out to have TdJd (surprised he called another 23k with it oop, but whatever) and had me drawing pretty close to dead. So that sucked.

Anyway, I am in a surprisingly decent mood considering the big hit I took (and the fact that I’m about to mail two insanely big checks to the IRS). The hit I took was one that basically just wipes out my heater of the last 3 weeks and at this point I’m kind of inured to the pain of a huge loss: I’ve been through enough insane downswings to know how it plays out: I’m going to feel like never playing poker again for a week or so, I’m going to worry about how hard it is to get action at high stakes anymore and whether I’m ever going to be able to play enough poker to make some $ back, then some games are going to start here and there and I’ll get some random HU action at 25/50 while thinking “well, i have a long way to go before I get back to peak,” then I’m going to play enough 25/50 and 50/100 that I forget about peak and am comfortable grinding. Then I’m going to make a ton of money and be completely over this short-term psychology.

As much as I always tell myself “you’re so lucky to be where you are, stop thinking about where you were” after a downswing, it’s even easier to tell myself that now: I will still be able to play 25/50 and 50/100 very comfortably so I know I will continue to make $ and this is just a set-back. But more importantly, I still have enough money to pay for law school, invest, buy a house (or start on that anyway), and live very well. I’m not set for life, but I wasn’t set for life before the downswing anyway. At this point I’m aware that my poker money probably isn’t going to last me my whole life on its own and everything I make is just more cushion that will enable me to live better/retire earlier/take more risks with my life. So I have slightly less cushion now, but my overall quality of life over the next decade isn’t significantly affected and I’d say my life is going to play out almost exactly the same as it would have if I hadn’t lost the money, so knowing that helps me deal with the hit I just took.

There are two things though that suck about the downswing. The first is that, despite everything I just wrote, you can’t help but have an adverse physical reaction when you sit around playing so much poker and lose a ton of $. I’ve just been out of it the last day. I went and hung out with some friends yesterday and had a very good time, but my energy levels were just very low and I was a bit off my “A-game” socially. But I think that hanging out with a ton of people I’m close to immediately after losing 160k probably helped me get over the loss a lot more quickly than if I just sat around browsing the internet or watching t.v. or whatever.

The other thing that truly sucks, by far the worst part of this whole thing, is losing my friends a ton of money. It’s just an absolutely awful awful feeling and even though everybody involved knows that it happens and that there’s risk involved, looking at the spreadsheet of what you’ve lost everybody is just a sickening feeling. It really is a uniquely awful experience to be in a bad mood over losing money and then having that bad mood compounded by the realization of how much you’ve lost them.

Anyway, I’m about to get on a plane to go back to NYC. Happy New Year’s to everybody reading this.

After a family get-together, Brother and I went to Commerce Casino to do some gambling. There was no real NL action going on (shockingly enough, not many people go out to gamble on Christmas Eve) so I played some $150/300 limit. The game wasn’t that great, we were 5-handed but there was one big fish playing. The following hand occurred:

I raised UTG with QsTs. It was folded to the fish in the big blind who 3-bet me. I called. The flop came down:
2d 4c Th

The fish bet and I raised. At this point he jumps out of his seat and goes “Really? What do you have? 44?”

I point out that he only put $75 in, instead of $150 for his bet and joke that if he folds I’ll only make him put in $125. For some reason, this prompts him to turn his cards face-up (he had AKo), call my raise, and exclaim, “All right, let’s see how good you really are!”

Undaunted by the challenge of playing against an opponent who is out of position, has exposed his cards, and has a worse hand than me, I prepared myself for the turn.

The turn was an off-suit 9. He checked and I bet. He looks at me with curiosity and starts sighing about his tough decision. I help him out by exposing the Qs. He immediately calls.

The river, of course, comes an off-suit K. He pumps his hands in the air and cheers. I ask him what he’s going to do. He bets. I fold.

Fortunately I won just about every other pot I played and made a quick 12k. That gets me even on the trip after my flipping session the other day.

Some idiot in NVG, in response to my claim that slippery slope arguments are always awful, asked for a link to evidence for such a claim. Since this guy seems to be stupid enough to think that claims such as this are somehow given credence if there’s something supporting them on the internet and he believes that there can be “evidence” for claims of such wide scope and subjective nature instead of arguments for them, I figured I’d indulge him by showing him a link giving him evidence.

I did competitive speech and debate for 7 years. I was a philosophy major in college. In both settings I came across more slippery slope arguments than I’d care to count. They were almost always awful, totally lacking in nuance, blithely asserting that one of numerous states of affairs will obtain after the initial action in question is taken when there is no reason to assume such inevitability (or even increased probability), and ignorant of the disanalogy between the initial step that is taken and the supposedly inevitable and disastrous steps that will automatically follow.

Slippery slope arguments tend to be a weak thinker’s magic wand for conjuring up an evil world when arguing against a rather innocuous position: postulate a future consequence of an action and justify it with a cliched heuristic instead of an actual account of how the world works.

Guy with experience on the subject talking about it on a website. How’s that for evidence?

So I’ve been playing a ton of high stakes lately. I played some Rail Heaven over the weekend and took a very big piece of myself. I owned ziigmund in a reraised pot where I called his turn overbet with second bet, but then he backdoor flushed me in a 4-bet pot for a $400,000 pot (I’m not going to divulge what I had but I bet the river with the intention of calling a check/raise, so that should give you a clue whether or not I had a big hand). I’m planning on playing a lot of Rail Heaven when the games are good now that my bankroll is swoll and my confidence is high. I’ve also been taking a big piece of myself at 200-400 and playing 100-200 on my own money, so the swings are starting to get pretty big but the games have been very very good lately so it’s worth having to deal with the variance.

I’m taking a bit of a break from poker as I’m out in Los Angeles on vacation (my parents and brother are in town and some of my friends from NYC are here for the holidays, so between that and the great weather it was a pretty obvious decision). If I’m bored I might sit on some empties at the nosebleeds and see what happens, but I plan on keeping busy for the next week or so.

What little poker I did play involved logging onto FTP to do 2k flips with trambopoline on FTP. We did 10 flips and he won 8k off me (meaning he went 7-3 while running like god obv) so we did one last 4k flip. I had 48o and he had 26, I flopped a pair, and he backdoor straighted to win that also. So there goes 12k. Nice sour taste to have in my mouth before taking a week respite from playing.

I’ve played poker all day today. 6 hours, mainly 1-tabling. Not only has it been boring as hell, but I”ve also run pretty awful. I’ve been taking all of myself at 100/200 lately and taking half my action at 200/400. The swings are pretty big and I had a -86k day today, which is only 4 buy-ins but is still a lot of money. If I lose another 100k or so I’m going to have to cut back on how much of myself I take, but for now here’s a graph of how I did (-65k at 200/400, the rest was 25/50 and higher with mainly 50/100 and 100/200) on the day.

Definitely the worst part is being stuck 80k and 1-tabling a weak/passive fish who’s already up 1 buy-in because in the first couple hands you made some plays that if you had 20 more hands on the guy you wouldn’t have lost money on. Just trying to grind this guy down who’s losing a little bit of money at a time. Then one flop check/raise doesn’t work, you’re back to where you were 20 minutes ago, and wanting to quit because it’s so boring but knowing you expect to make like $800 against the guy per hour so you keep on grinding and then he leaves without warning. Bleh.

Actually, never mind: even more tilting is wanting to bitch about your bad day and not being able to post graphs because my shitty blog interface can’t fit the image into the column space or resize the graph. So no graph, it looks something like this: 1556 hands, -126k.

I played one of the crazier hands of my life yesterday. I am very familiar with my opponent’s play and am fully confident this is the right play. I would do so again. I don’t even think it’s particularly close. And all of you guys will probably think I’m crazy.

And yes, for those newcomers seeing my blog due to my amazing marketing campaign: this is all real money.
Full Tilt Poker $200/$400 No Limit Hold’em - 2 players
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

Hero (BTN/SB): $61996.50
TheJOKER-JSB (BB): $64182.00

Pre Flop: ($600.00) Hero is BTN/SB with 7 J
Hero raises to $1200, TheJOKER-JSB calls $800

Flop: ($2400.00) 6 Q Q (2 players)
TheJOKER-JSB checks, Hero bets $1200, TheJOKER-JSB raises to $3333, Hero calls $2133

Turn: ($9066.00) K (2 players)
TheJOKER-JSB bets $5555, Hero raises to $16500, TheJOKER-JSB raises to $27445, Hero raises to $57463.50 all in, TheJOKER-JSB calls $30018.50

River: ($123993.00) 9 (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $123993.00
Hero shows 7 J (a pair of Queens)
TheJOKER-JSB shows Q K (a full house, Queens full of Kings)
TheJOKER-JSB wins $123992.50
(Rake: $0.50)

A friend of mine plays in a high-stakes live game and I buy a quarter of his action.  I told him I’d do so as long as he had a 60k stoploss.  Today I get a call at 2:30 a.m., just an hour into my sleep, from this friend.  I’m not in the best of moods from being woken up, and I’m in a complete haze.  He tells me he’s lost the 60k already but that the game’s really good.  He asks for permission to buy in for another twenty thousand.

Semi-delirious from exhaustion, I just mumble incomprehensibly for a bit (I’m one of those “awful when just waking up” people).  He asks me to clarify, and as I think to myself “well, the most I can lose is another 5k, why not?” I manage to get my wits about me to tell him “sure, whatever, just buy in, later,” hang up, and collapse back into bed.

I woke up this morning with the vaguest recollection of what happened, and I realized I probably lost 20k overnight.  Then, while in the middle of coaching a student, I got the following email (names deleted for the privacy of the participants):

“ok so the first 20 i busted AK vs XXXXX all in with KK.

reload get no hands for an hour pick up a blind or two maybe.

then XXXXX opens 3500 like 4 callers i ship AJhh XXXX calls, XXXXX calls.

flop AT7x river 5 XXXXX has 75o gg.

reload XXXX opens again to like 3K few callers i raise with A8dd only XXXXX calls, flop K84ss i ship like 1/2 bet left he calls 88.

gg.

so i’m stuck 60K game is insane good i call ariel he picks up in a haze asleep and ok’s one last 20K shot.

i run that down to 13K and then back up to 134,500.
so + 54,700

holla.”

It’s not exactly a common occurence for one of my horses to win me money, let alone after being stuck 3 buy-ins and taking one last shot.  I guess my heater is starting to rub off on my friends as well.

One man’s “opportunistic douchebag” is another man’s “visionary genius”

http://valleywag.com/5111509/24+year+old-poker-player-buys-own-tv-ad

Some of you who have Dish Network and watch WPT, ESPN2, or Oxygen network may have come across an advertisement for this blog  I wanted to see how long it would take until somebody saw the ad and posted about it on the forums, but now that there’ s a 2plus2 thread I figure I can blog about it.

My roommate works for Google in their ads division and he was telling me that you can make television ads and target them to only certain programs or certain stations and that you can get a ton of people to see your ad for relatively little money.  So for $500 last week, 330,000 people saw my ad on their television set.

The ad can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocekqhrmPNo

All of the pictures were pics I already had on facebook or photobucket and putting together the ad took about 20 minutes.  A lot of people have been wondering what motivated me to do this.  I just thought the ad was hysterical  and that having it on t.v. was worth the $500 bucks.  It’s half egomania and half dedication to comedy.  I targeted poker programming on ESPN2 and whatever channel airs the WPT because I thought that’s my demographic.  I targeted the Oxygen network because I thought it would be funny to do so and who knows, maybe some ladies out there will be impressed by the PT graph!

I think I might change the ad every week until I’m tired of spending money on this little joke, but for now the ad’s going to stay on as is.