WSOP Trip Report

Just got back from a 3 week trip in Las Vegas and as a whole the trip was amazing! I'll try and hit on the highs and lows in here and try and give a glimpse into them.

I first arrived and immediately began texting my work-aholic dealer friend to see if he wanted to goto In-and-Out. After about 2 hours of getting checked into the luxurious Imperial Palace (more on this later) and getting all the rental car stuff done I ended up driving there alone and chubby nerded it up animal style!

After devouring my double double I made my way over to the Rio and got to meet up with Vers, Cardlo69, and Reasons14. I consider all these names a brag...but while I'm listing people I mind as well list all the others:

Whoopsy_Dazy
Draqq
Manhatonite
Milesaway
Eljay42
Curt23x
GrandPrixGT
Hartlin
PowellJam

I met some randomly and had maybe one conversation with them and had dinner etc with others. All in all it was great to meet everyone and fun humiliating myself bowling or just in conversation.

So I stayed at the Imperial Palace which in itself is an experience. I wouldn't recommend it really but it was absurdly cheap and in a good location so it has that. The joke that I told while I was staying there was that I'd set the line at 10 and take the over on the number of STDs in my room. The 3rd day I was there I was pulled aside by a guy who had irises the size of the moon who proceeded to offer me to by a myriad of drugs including coke. This is actually a dream of mine so that life goal was checked off. After convincing the guy that I was ok without and denying many free sample offers I got away unscathed.

As for poker I played ~50 sng sats ranging from 175s to 525s. I joked about having more receipts than hundred dollar bills by the end of it but I ended up making ~15k with about 9k in buyins spent so it was fun and profitable. The play was silly 3bbs had fold equity, around 50% of the field overbet pot on each street and people bet/folded leaving ~1.5 bbs behind in almost every sng. I want to take an aside here and rant a bit though...

I went out to Vegas with a deal made privately for backing. For this rant we'll say that the deal was to play at X buyins or less and would be Y/Z in my favor. I was excited about it and overextended a bit to make myself comfortable in Vegas because I knew I could rely on this for basically all my poker playing besides cash and I don't play much cash as it is. When I got in I said hi and got all the meet in irl things out of the way. My backer was short on cash and it didn't bother me too much as he insisted that in the next few days he would have cash and it would be fine. So I played a few sngs did well but was intimidated by buying in for so much. I ended up basically losing all my winning and in a couple days I asked my backer if he'd gotten the money he was waiting for. At this point he was 0 for whatever in sngs and stuck a bit in borrowed money...after getting money I asked him again...are you gonna put me in these or what? He then asks me X/2 Y-20/Z+20 ? In my opinion this is awful douchey and pretty much an angelshoot preying on my nittiness. I end up agreeing to X/2 Y-10/Z+10 which basically negated the majority of the fun I was gonna have the next couple days. I'm a pretty timid person and can be pretty nonconfrontational but I have way more punk rock in me than whats on the outside. This basically has turned me off of doing business with this person in the future. I think chasing %s among friends in anyway is douchey and I saw a lot of it happening when I was there. I'm sure it was driven by a function of him being stuck but I he just shit on his implied odds and I don't think that he accounted for that. It might just be a lack of respect for my game which I can deal with but I think he's wrong on that as well.
/End Rant

Outside of that I had a lot of fun in Vegas. I drank daqari out of a boot. I had orange glazed habenero crusted meats served off a sword(Rumjungle in Mandalay Bay). I went on a waterslide through a shark tank. I won 200$ playing Pai Gow drunk. I played with Bond18, Umberto Brenis, Eskimo Clark and Maria Ho. I bowled a 70. I went to a backyard BBQ. I lost with AA on a 77KA7 board. Kitty Glitter took 20$s from me. I had a Lamb Tandoori Burger. I had a spiked milkshake. I tipped a guy 40%. I drove a Yaris. like I said, all in all, it was a good time.

In Between Post

Just a quick in between post to fill me with some satisfaction about not neglecting this.

Accomplishments:
1. Not backed / chopping profits anymore
2. Interested in my own ideas about tournament equity

I was gonna talk a ton about these three subjects Lost Fold Equity, Slowed BvB Play and ATC Shoves(when accounting for future ranges needed) but I realized that I really didn't enjoy talking boastfully about something that could easily be based on false knowledge or a skewed outlook on things. And barring some miracle that my opponents read this I don't want to dictate my exact line of thinking for them.

Also I feel clunky just talking about my stats or complaining endlessly using the reader as a sad cry for help. Soooo, yeah.

I am, really excited about Vegas and think that I will hopefully be able to get to a point where I can point at something tangible and say this is what I've done with my brain. Highlights of that excitement are based on: 1) My 3 week stay at a harrah's hotel for 600$ 2) My baller Hyundai accent i'm renting and 3) potentially shooting a ~120 with some baller friends.

Outside of that I've been hooked on some enjoyable older movies mostly because of the speed you can get dvdrips of these movies and the recommendations of my friends. I first re-watched Naked Lunch and although I felt compelled to suck down some mind altering bug spray I just lol'd and posted vague references on my FB hoping that I would get some street cred.

After that I watched a documentary about the Dune movie that made me get a weird nerd boner for David Lynch. I immediately went to Eraserhead which if you haven't watched it I would recommend it. During this movie I laughed a lot at scenes that I don't think serious movie goers would. I loved the clunkiness of the conversations and felt at home in them. Again I went on FB hoping to lash out in a vague act of coolness posting my mind blown brain bits on there.

I got a reply from a friend of mine who has always enjoyed movies and happens to be a dealer in Vegas ( sick tie together adam). After him name dropping movie titles that were were cool I felt inadequate but excepted my fate, much like poker. From there I went to Barton Fink which in turn made me find Babe starring John Goodman terrifying. gg John Turtoro and the girl on the beach.

Side: I can't express how much I love the internet and the next level it is on vs. general society. The number of people that I've met there that can crush me with witty remarks and continually jab at things that are above my head in funniness is insane.

Good times all around I hope you all fade, unless it's against me.

Next Level Blues

Poker mindsets can lead to a skewed understanding of what your trying to do in terms of the hand your immediately playing or it's relevance to the game/tournament or an overall approach to poker in general. What I mean by this is expectations and perceptions delude thinking. I reached a point where I was all expectations for myself and only playing against perceived ranges instead of thinking through my decisions with all the information I was provided.

I listened to a podcast not too long ago that basically identified players with high expectations that believe they don't deserve to lose which was spot on for me. I continually was making moves in SNGs that were based on my opponents having X knowledge and if they don't have that information I run a gauntlet of variance that is getting it in with 7 high on the bubble for half my stack etc.

Anyways... the poker psychologist person basically said that a player that fits this mold just needs to buckle down and keep studying the game. To be honest regardless of being surrounded by good coaches I really needed to come to some conclusions on my own for a myriad of reasons.

So... Thats what I've set out to do. I've reformed my plan for SNGs slightly and it's mostly because I've slowed down my approach lately. So as an incentive for me to write more in the blog I'm going to try and post my opinions of these concepts and try and explain why I came to the conclusions I have now.

In my next posts I'm going to try and hit on my approach to Lost Fold Equity, Slowed BvB Play and ATC Shoves(when accounting for future ranges needed).

Good Times!

Month Update:


Just about 4k with RB but lol volume because I've moved to sets while I'm studying.

Focus!

I haven't updated the blog which is kind of a good thing because I felt like I was using it as a way to just complain about beats or the runbads. Speaking of run bads here is my January graph:



Yeh 2.5k games and -900$s. This all after having some of the most consistent results amongst students over at sngmentors. Coming right out of that I had my best week ever in the first week of February.

Qeloton7 402 $6 $10 55% $2,508 Hot N/A PokerStars 2/1/2010 2/7/2010 SNG Only x

Makes me bragging about a 5k month seems silly. Alot of the reasoning for the roi boost was me playing a fairly good amount of 45mans where I was getting way too many folds just for metagame reasons of me not being in the games for such a long time.

Other poker news I've been making it a goal to play more turbo mtts just because the play is very similar to sngs outside of the few random plateaus in the structure. I made the final table of a 40$ hyper which was fun and had a few deep runs in some of the daily turbos.

Outside of poker I'm really excited to sweat my friend Ryan who is playing on the magic pro tour this weekend.

My roomates are gonna hit up an indoor water park in Ohio soon as well and have been planning a few random road trips. I'm in the process of talking them into not immediately renewing our lease here and going on a tour de waterparks/casinos this summer. I think if I hit any kind of score over 10k i'd finance it :D

Other than that I'm just trying to stay humble and stick to the volume instead of just assuming I should be getting x $s a week. I need to find some way to extract value from my knowledge of sngs either through coaching or something else that way i can cash in the way many of my friends are.

Good times.

Just Put In My Submission

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! The WBCOOP is a free online Poker tournament open to all Bloggers, so register on WBCOOP to play.

Registration code: 722068

So my last post didn't have much to do with poker and there had been a pretty long stretch without any content so I figured I'd write up my New Year's resolutions as they pertain to my poker life and my personal life.

Poker:
1. Play 40000 18mans 16+
2. 400k vpps
3. 100k profit
4. 2k staked out for 6months of the year
5. Learn a new game HU cash/PLO/180s/mtts
6. Only play when my mind is at atleast 90%

Personal:
1. Lose 20 lbs by Vegas
2. Be proud of what I do for a living
3. Stay positive
4. Drink more beer

Those are copied and pasted from when I posted them on a private forum on new years eve. I was apparently psyching myself up for a night of drinking and put a blatant contradiction in there...but their are both goals I guess. I guess I can go through each goal explain my reasoning for the bar to be set there and my mindset going into it.

1. Play 40000 18man sngs 16+

This seems staggering to most people but it's calculated. If you haven't played 18mans seriously you might not know that you can average around 25 games per hour and that is only 20 tabling leaving a lot of room for thought so you could do this at any level in my opinion. Either way I intend on taking weekends off so thats 104 days of the year I won't be working so 261 days I will be working. Which works out to ~153 sngs a day which is by my hourly calculation 6 hours of work per day. So not even full time! I think this is clearly obtainable and leads me to some pretty gross delusions of grandeur because I instantly see my 2$ per game average being 80k for the year now which is pretty nice.

2. 400k VPPs

This one is a bit of a stretch and I've contemplating learning cash to play 1 day a week because I think the hourly vpps are a bit better. But, if I were to get to this purely on sngs I have to do some estimations on my rake paid per game. Normally this would be pretty easy it'd be 5.5 x 40k...but I'm playing a mix of 16-38s lately and that makes a mean rake of 2$s or 11 vpps. Which would put me right on the money for 400k vpps for the year just with my normal "work" week. This is pretty exciting too because this milestone is worth ~32k pending finishing deep in a 1 mil freeroll. So that is an exciting base pay.

3. 100k Profit

So my projected income from sngs should be 80k and my rakeback would in theory be 32k. That leaves us with 112k for the year which I think is room enough for huge swings not to hinder me from getting to this goal.

4. 2k staked out for 6 months of the year

This is just something that I would like to be doing with some of the extra capital I'll have "lying around." I feel like I understand the game enough and I'm a big enough nit where I could get a better return on investment that buying CDs from the bank or something. I may try and take on 2-3 students that would be using this entire roll mid year as well I just don't know if I would be attractive enough with my stats to people playing professionally.

5. Learn a new game HU cash/PLO/180s/mtts

This is just to kind of keep the spark alive as far as enjoying poker goes. I play HU cash for fun when I'm board and it actually gets my adrenaline going along with some of the MTTs that I cashed in last year got me excited. So, I feel like getting into these on the side profitably would be a good idea.

6. Only play when my mind is at atleast 90%

This has a lot to do with me giving my day to day structure. I don't want to roll out of bed and play x hours in my pajamas and then chug some red bull and do it again. I've been looking into tea, and just exercise in general to just raise my energy level that way I don't feel groggy while playing which will definitely effect my play.

Personal:

1. Lose 20 lbs by Vegas

This is just something I need to do. After getting laid off and finding poker I've really just let go of a lot of things in terms of exercise. So I figure this will help a lot of the other bullet points in my goals.

2. Be proud of what I do for a living

This is a big one for me. I don't get any pressure from my mom or other family members about what I do...but, I feel like at times I shy away from admitting to not having a legitimate job. I think with my projected income and my explanations of what I do really are gonna help this. I actually was introduced to a friends mother and she asked what I did for a living. I told her that I played poker...after the initial shock of it I explained my calculated decisions and basically told her that I do real time equity trading and/or played in chess tournaments with honkies. There is a NOFX lyric that talks about how he measures success by not having to work...and I think I'm right at the beginning of being successful.

3. Stay Positive

This is a big one for me because I generally want to be positive about things but the majority of my gut reactions are pessimistic. Which is weird considering all the bands I've ever played in deliberately delivered a posi punk rock message. Either way I want to stay focused on being positive. I'm a huge fan of Andrew WK and his stance on life. There is a pretty profound interview with him from a magazine put on by Juliard students that I can't find right now but he boils happiness down to every word he says in any given moment and it's pretty amazing. I also just watched this lecture by a professor at Carnegie Mellon that kind of stirred some ambition and made me want to attack life. Here's the link that I'm stealing from another poker player's blog: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

4. Drink more beer

I think this one is pretty self explanatory. No matter the hindrance to #1 I really just want to drink more beer...and I think this boils down to me wanting to maximize the amount of fun times with my close friends. I recently was at a German restaraunt drinking liters of draft German beers eating weiner schitzel. This was right before we played Whirly Ball. My friends = the nuts.

Kind of wordy but I hope you enjoy it.

My 2009 graph:

Science, Life, Selfishness

So...the combination of watching an interview with Richard Dawkins and a 40 minute long shower full of internal debate made me want to write and I figured I'd do it on the forum that I'd been neglecting...erhm, you blog.

So the question that I was asking myself was if I was so proud of humanity for it's progress in science why am I not spending any of the time I have and resources on progressing science.

I came to the conclusion that I was not smart enough.

Mostly because of a lack of education on the subjects that I'd want to influence (all of them). I figured that was a poor excuse because I'm not dumb and don't doubt that I could help scientists in some way. I assumed I could at least use my body for physical things they might need (wink). Manual labor, etc. I had delusions of grandeur of me walking 4 miles down the LHC in Cern with a box full of wires on my shoulder. It was either that or clap when they find something new. Be a science cheerleader or something.

Thinking through all this stuff I realized I have horrible time management and I can normally barely fit in enough time in the day to eat 3 times and get enough work done where I'm satisfied. So I would either need to force myself to a strict schedule and hopefully get bored enough in the extra time that I'd start doing something...or cut my current hobbies and just hobby in science(cheerleading).

One thing that I've realized about myself after I kind of let go of the thought of life after death and deities is that almost all of my decisions and emotions have lacked all communal value. I think selfishly about my immediate happiness in almost all my decisions. I'm not sure if that is a bad thing though I think it just may be a hindrance to my ambition to spend time doing things to contribute to the scientific community. I think what I need to do is be conscious of my own efforts and maybe report them to well me, which is basically writing them in this blog. Either that or I'm gonna become one bad ass remote control helicopter operator.

So goals:
1. Find a venue of science ( preferably one that I would feel proud to contributing to)
2. Somehow qualify myself in their eyes for at least being able to volunteer to carry their wires / cheer them on
3. PROFIT