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For a while I’ve been conflicted about whether or not to keep blogging: on the one hand, I no longer enjoy it and the original purpose of my blog (directing traffic to Deucescracked) is no longer particularly relevant as DC has blown up.  On the other hand, I felt obligated to keep blogging because I know how much it means to all my readers to be able to know where I happen to be at any point in time or whether I’ve been having lunch with friends lately.  But then I read this touching, brilliant piece by Sports Guy and it was like a sign.  It’s time to walk away from the blogging game.

I’m going to law school in a month and once I’m there I don’t anticipate I’ll have too much interesting stuff to say, I’ll be too busy doing the typical law school routine.  I’m also going to cash out my $ from Stars and FTP so I won’t be distracted from my studies, which means I won’t have too much value added as a blogger.  All the trip reports, sick screenshots, and hand histories are a thing of the past, and I don’t want to just be blogging about what it’s like to be in law school.

My only real involvement with poker is I’m going to continue to coach and make videos for Deucescracked.  It’s possible that my next deal with DC will involve some sort of blogging for their main site, in which case I’ll return to the blogosphere (and I guess I’ll bump this blog to announce any such return).  But for now, I’m done.  Thanks to all my readers, all my Google Reader sharers (mainly just Tom and Ilan I guess), and, to a lesser extent, all the people who commented on the Reader shares of my posts.

I’m burnt out.  I haven’t played poker this long straight in a couple years now.  I had an opponent on UB who was 2-tabling me for at least 8 hours.  He’s a grind to play but not very good, and I was clawing back to even when I fake misclicked to 5600 instead of 600 with QQ 13k deep and he jammed AQ and hit an ace on the river.  The next 6 hours consisted of us playing 400BB deep poker on two tables and me finally getting up on him. Just as I started to think “wow, I’m up on the day!” some random player showed up at Stars 25/50 and took 28k off me in like 200 hands.  Next thing I know, I’m playing a 100/200 Stars table HU, a 25/50 Stars table HU, 2 UB tables super deep, and playing a shortstack on FTP at 50/100.  5 tables of heads-up against 3 different opponents, it reminded me of my grinding 5/10 days (two Februaries ago where I played 60k hands of HU NL).   I’m totally burnt out and all my games are done.  I was supposed to go to a Q-Tip concert and a friend’s birthday party (a so-so friend so not like I’m being a degen missing his party), but instead I got wrapped up in this shit.  I’m on a huge heater so I normally don’t care about winning 10k, but I’d say this is the most rewarding 10k I’ve won in a while.  Enjoy this crazy swingy graph, which is too big of a file and I’m too lazy to resize right now:

http://i177.photobucket.com/albums/w239/FoxwoodsFiend/crazydeay.jpg

No, I didn’t buy any property (too illiquid an investment, not sure where I’m settling down, all the Green Plastic arguments, etc.).  But I did sublet an apartment for the next month and moved in today.  I know this isn’t that big a deal, but it’s a huge relief for me because it has been over 4 months since I’ve had my own place to stay.  I was getting pretty tired of living out of a suitcase (or 2 or 3), and just having some order in my life again should be pretty sweet.  I got a studio in Greenwich Village right around the corner from an Equinox, so the location is pretty much ideal (when I paid for my month’s membership and personal trainer sessions by pulling out a bundle of cash and peeling off some hundreds, the guy told me “You’re a brave man.” Which is probably the first time anybody’s ever said something along those lines, normally they just try not to stare).

As for poker, I’ve had a good couple of days.  I think I’m up like 50k in my last few hours playing 25/50 HU.  I’ve been running well, playing some fishy opponents, and playing well.  I played a late session last night (until about 3 a.m., and I rarely play past midnight these days) and then the sun hit my eyes at 6 a.m. and I couldn’t get back to sleep.  With no idea what to do in the morning (yoga’s not until 11, that left me 5 hours to kill!), I decided to try getting some work done.  First, I paid my 1st semester’s tuition for Harvard.  Twenty-two thousand, eight hundred and seventy dollars.  Uggggh.  Fortunately I played some 25/50 and before 8:00, I’d made practically that same amount, due to such genius hands as these:

Full Tilt Poker $25/$50 No Limit Hold’em - 2 players - View hand 184704

The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

BB: $8543.00

Hero (BTN/SB): $13913.50

Pre Flop: ($75.00) Hero is BTN/SB with K Q

Hero raises to $150, BB raises to $500, Hero calls $350

Flop: ($1000.00) 5 4 T (2 players)

BB bets $650, Hero calls $650

Turn: ($2300.00) Q (2 players)

BB checks, Hero bets $1350, BB calls $1350

River: ($5000.00) 9 (2 players)

BB checks, Hero bets $11413.50 all in, BB requests TIME, BB calls $6043 all in

Final Pot: $17086.00

BB mucks J J

Hero shows K Q (a pair of Queens)

Hero wins $17085.50

(Rake: $0.50)

Full Tilt Poker $25/$50 No Limit Hold’em - 2 players - View hand 184707

The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

BTN/SB: $5948.50

Hero (BB): $10071.50

Pre Flop: ($75.00) Hero is BB with K J

BTN/SB raises to $100, Hero raises to $400, BTN/SB calls $300

Flop: ($800.00) Q 4 T (2 players)

Hero bets $550, BTN/SB calls $550

Turn: ($1900.00) 8 (2 players)

Hero checks, BTN/SB checks

River: ($1900.00) 9 (2 players)

Hero checks, BTN/SB bets $1700, Hero raises to $9121.50 all in, BTN/SB requests TIME, BTN/SB calls $3298.50 all in

Final Pot: $11897.00

BTN/SB mucks J T

Hero shows K J (a straight, King high)

Hero wins $11896.50

(Rake: $0.50)

Absolute Poker $25/$50 No Limit Hold’em - 2 players - View hand 184708

The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

BTN/SB: $7986.00

Hero (BB): $10373.00

Pre Flop: ($75.00) Hero is BB with T A

BTN/SB raises to $150, Hero raises to $550, BTN/SB calls $400

Flop: ($1100.00) 9 7 9 (2 players)

Hero bets $600, BTN/SB raises to $1200, Hero calls $600

Turn: ($3500.00) K (2 players)

Hero checks, BTN/SB bets $3500, Hero raises to $8623 all in, BTN/SB folds

Final Pot: $10500.00

Hero shows T A (One pair, nines)

Hero wins $10499.00

(Rake: $1.00)

Absolute Poker $25/$50 No Limit Hold’em - 2 players - View hand 184710

The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

BB: $7081.66

Hero (BTN/SB): $18127.00

Pre Flop: ($75.00) Hero is BTN/SB with 6 6

Hero raises to $100, BB raises to $350, Hero calls $250

Flop: ($700.00) 4 J 9 (2 players)

BB bets $450, Hero raises to $1000, BB calls $550

Turn: ($2700.00) 3 (2 players)

BB checks, Hero checks

River: ($2700.00) J (2 players)

BB bets $1700, Hero calls $1700

Final Pot: $6100.00

BB shows Q T (One pair, jacks)

Hero shows 6 6 (Two Pair, jacks and sixes)

Hero wins $6099.00

(Rake: $1.00)

All told, I won 25796 in 190 hands today, so even after paying for law school I’m up for the day!

Ain’t forget where I came from

I busted out last night, and I’m in New York right now.  It’s only 11:00 Vegas time and I’ve been getting to bed at 4 a.m. or later every night, plus I slept on the plane so I’m not tired at all.  What better time than now to write up a bunch of hands I played?

Day 1: Button limps, sb calls, I raise to 5x with QT.  Button (recreational old player) calls, sb folds.  Flop K67 rainbow.  I bet 6 BB, he calls.  Turn 2, we both check.  River 2, I check, he bets 2/3 pot, I call.  He shows 89, I win.  The table looks at me confused.  My reasoning on this one is simple: I think his limp/calling range is weighted more towards suited connectors than good kings and I think on the river a recreational player probably only bets that big (in a tournament context when everybody normally value bets smaller, 2/3 pot is strong enough to polarize my opponent’s range) with huge hands, none of which he can have since he checked back the turn.  So his range is weighted more towards busted straight draws than value bets and I beat all the draws.

I raise the button, the sb reraises, I call with AhJd.  Flop KhQd6h.  SB checks, I bet half pot, sb calls.  Turn Js.  Check, check.  River 4h.  SB bets out 5k into 10k, I run the naked ace bluff on him (not that he had a flush obviously) and jam on him for 20 more.  He tanks and folds.  My reasoning here: my hand looks a lot like a nut flush draw that checked back the turn because I picked up outs and it’s a bad card to two-barrel.  It’s also important to note that my opponent can basically not have any flushes here and that people in general are reluctant to call off their stack in a tournament with a very soft field without big holdings.  His bet looked like he was valuebetting two pair or a set, and I thought he would fold his whole range.

I also turned trips into a bluff.  UTG raises to 2.5BB, 2 callers including a VERY passive old guy, I call on the button with 69s.  Flop comes down 899 rainbow.  Checked to the passive old guy who bets 2/3 pot.  I’m worried, but call.  Turn J.  He bets 2/3 pot.  I think one of the only mistakes I made in the tournament was calling the turn, but I called and got bailed out by the river.  The river was a T.  The bettor stands up to see the card because he’s got bad vision, asks the dealer what it is, and when the dealer says “ten of spades sir” he sits straight up and immediately checks.  At this point I realize he’s scared as hell of that river card so I figure he must have K9 or A9.  I also realize that that hand is 3 of a kind and it’s hard to fold trips, so I bet 12k into a 7k pot.  He folds what I assume was better trips.

Day 2, I played very few memorable hands.  I had a table with basically nobody who had any chips and I had a ton of chips, so I just stole a bunch of blinds and antes.  We only busted 2 people the whole day before our table broke with an hour left.  When I got moved to the new table, I had 205k which was a ton at the time but I was 3rd in chips at the table.   One hand: I raised to 2k at 300/600 on the button with AT, some biker guy reraised me to 4k from the BB.  Super small raise.  I asked him how much he had and he just goes “I don’t know, this many” and shows a stack of oranges that’s about 90k.  I call.  Flop: 89T flush draw.  He bet 6k, I crying called.  The turn came another 8.  He bet 17k.  I should have folded as it’s obvious he has KK or AA at this point, but I thought I could probably take it away from him on any 67JQ and maybe even a heart.  I called the river came a 3, we checked, and he showed KK.  That turn call was probably bad.

The SB limped against me, I don’t remember the blinds, but I tapped in the big with 37o.  The flop came 379 rainbow.  He bet halfpot, I raised him 3x, he called.  The turn was a 5 and he c/c 60% of pot.  The river was a T.  There was 24k in the pot and he checked.  At this point I didn’t know how much to bet as I have basically the bottom of my value range for this line.  He’d been playing a lot of pots so I figured that he was probably a thinking player who could make a big call, but on the other hand I was pretty tight at the table so far.  I decided to bet 22k because it would look so strong that he might think my range was polarized and make a hero call.  Instead he tanked for a bit, said “this almost seems like I’m slowrolling you,” and called with 57.  We talked later and he said he thought my bet size was great and he probably would have called w/a 9.  Who knows though.

I was down to 60k from 205k very quickly at this new table and won a couple pots to get up to 90k.  With an hour left, this friendly young player at the table asked who wanted to do shots.  I said sure, why not, and he ordered shots and beers.  The tequila shots they brought out were more like triple shots and we ordered another round.  With 6 shots of tequila and a couple beers in me, the following hand went down: this player, before the hand starts, tells me to not bust him yet because we still have Crown on the rocks coming.  I joke that I don’t think that’s about to happen.  Then a player raised to 3k at 500/1k, the guy doing shots reraised to 10k, I looked down at JJ in the sb and cold-4bet to 26k.  The reraiser jammed with QQ for 80k total, I called, and spiked a J to bad beat him out of the tournament.  The Crown got there just in time for him to walk away.

Day 3 was frustrating because I played great poker and kept chipping up and then losing half my stack on a coinflip.  I lost 66 to AJ, JJ to AK, and 77 to AQ.  I was never crippled, the lowest I got was 150k, but I had an insane table.  Everybody at the table had 200k minimum when the average stack was 150k.  We had 3 players with over 300k stacks.  Trying to chip up in a table where everyone is seeing flops or willing to reraise because they have chips is really hard to do, but I managed to keep doing it over and over.  And every time my hard work got paid off by losing all my gains on one dumb flip.  Truthfully, with my stack at any other table I’d be a mortal lock to have made day 4, but when everybody at the table covers you and the table’s playing huge, it’s a lot likelier that you go bust.

The insane thing about day 3 is that I got KK vs AA 3 times and lost a total of 3 bets.  I should have been out on 3 separate occasions.  One time, I raised UTG and UTG+1 called.  Flop 248 rainbow, I bet he calls.  Turn 9 that puts up a flush draw. I bet 23k, he jams for 100k more, I make a trivially easy fold and when the player busted I asked him what he had that hand, he said AA.

The next time I folded KK there were 3 limps and somebody raised to 6BB.  A super tight player then reraised to 30 BB with about 90 behind.  This is a very tough fold to make but I really didn’t think he would put in such a big rr without AA (even though AA is the hand you least want to make a big 3bet with since you want to induce action, I felt this player was just too scared to do it with anything other than AA), so I mucked.  The raiser jammed QQ, and I got to see AA.

The last time was the hardest fold by far.  I’d been completely running over the table and probably looked like a ridiculous LAG, but nobody was doing anything about it.  This guy had limp/called with AA twice in the past hour and had limped AA another time, all the limps being in EP.  Still, he was getting AA a ton and limping a ton with it.   He limped the HJ, the SB called at 800/1600, and I made it 10k in the big.  The limper called, SB folded.  Flop came down 99Q rainbow.  I bet 12k into 20k, and the limper raised to 37k with 100k behind.  I had 220 to start the hand.  A lot of thoughts raced through my mind.  I thought about jamming (obviously awful), calling and hoping to get to showdown (reasonable but optimistic), or calling and calling any turn.  Finally I decided to just fold.  I thought to myself: what is this guy bluffing with? He limp called 10k.  I doubt he has TJ almost ever, and if he does he also has 89 and 9T.  He could have QQ or AA easily.  It wouldnt’ make much sense to raise those hands but maybe since I’m such a lunatic he thought he’d induce ab luff or an ugly calldown from me by raising.  I finally mucked.  At the end of the day I asked the guy what he had and he said AA.  His jaw about dropped when I told him I had KK that hand.

My final hand was the last hand before the break.  The table fish raised the hijack, I called the button with JTs.  Flop: TT3 rainbow.  He check/called 11k into 20k.  Turn 5 that puts up a flush draw.  He checked, I bet 24k, he raised 60k on top, I jammed for 100k more.  He had KT.  I think that turn is a fold against most random opponents in a deepstacked live tournament, but this guy had pretty consistently limped hands like AJ/AT and pocket pairs and I thought his range was weighted heavily towards overpairs and the occasional big suited aces that check/called and picked up a flush draw.  Folding trips is really, really hard normally and against this guy it just wasn’t happening. I hate when people complain about running bad in tournaments because eventually you’re going to lose and it’ll seem like you were unlucky to either have a cold-deck or get sucked out on or whatever.  But people always forget the bad beats they laid: I should have been crippled day 2 with JJ vs QQ.  The fact is these live tournaments require playing a ton of hands and getting lucky, and whenever somebody gets lucky they ignore it as if that’s something to be expected and then they only dwell on the hands that they lose.  It’s insane.

Anyway, sorry for that tl;dr but I figured I’d let you into some of my thought processes on hands, which I’m normally reluctant to do but since I’m quitting poker in a month I figure I can give you some good hands to learn from.  Hope you enjoyed.

Currently sitting on about 210K chips. I’ll be tweeting chip counts and hilarious anecdotes at twitter.com/FoxwoodsFiend.

With 3 of the 4 Day 1s completed in the WSOP, I’m sitting on about 147,000 chips.  I was chipleader for most of the day, but stagnated after the dinner break.  My table yesterday was awesome: until the later part of the day there weren’t any very tough opponents (and when the better players showed up they were on my left), everybody at the table was fun, and the table had the distinct vibe of a home game.  I won a couple all-ins and made a couple big hands, but I also ran a few good bluffs, made a couple tough folds, and just in general was playing my absolute A game.  I hate playing live tournaments as they’re boring and slow, but playing great and running great definitely make it enjoyable.

At this point, I should clarify that being chipleader or top 5 this early in a week-long tournament doesn’t mean too much.  It means that my EV is probably around 100k (I’m being conservative here), but my chances of final tabling are less than 5%, and I’m still not a lock to finish in the money.  These tournaments can mess with your head and get your hopes up: everything’s going great, you’re cruising, then one bad play (or one good play that happens to not work out), one suck-out, or a two-hour stretch where you never have that good a hand and lose a lot of marginal pots and the next thing you know you’re a shortstack again.  With that said, I think that, not knowing who the people ahead of me are in the chip count, that I’m probably the most likely person to win the main event right now.  Unfortunately, having the plurality in a 4,000 person race (I think that’s how many are left anyway) isn’t really grounds for too much hope.

Anyway, keep following on pokernews to see how I’m doing.  My day 2 starts on Wednesday.  Once I bust out I’ll post a ton of hands I played as there have been some really interesting ones.

As I posted on Deucescracked (ignore this post if you don’t play poker or have a DC subscription):

Hi all,

It’s about that time of year again. I’m going to be making some Dear FWF episodes and need hand histories to discuss. Here are the rules:
1) If you send a description of villain or reads and relevant history, your hand is more likely to get discussed
2)If you send a FULL RAW hand history (in other words, one that will convert and go into the replayer no problem), your hand is more likely to get discussed
3) Either PM me the hands here at DC or email them to foxwoodsfiend@gmail.com

NO POKERHANDS, NO LINKS TO CLICK ON, JUST THE TEXT OF THE HAND HISTORY AND YOUR READS/EXPLANATIONS.

Thanks a lot!