I wrote this up right after my trip way back in mid December but lost the file and just refound it today and thought I’d post it finally. Better late than never right?
I had a blast during my New Jersey/Philadelphia trip this past week. The trip started off with a trip to Atlantic City and a stay at Tropicana. We gambled a bit and ended up going to the club Providence. It was alright, but nothing spectacular by any means. I was expecting to see loads of drunk guidos here but to my disappointment they are all pretty much from long island I learned (basically no one from the Jersey Shore MTV show is actually from NJ). I manage to see a few here and there, but definitely not the stereotypical 12 of them dressed identically in their double popped collars with their new haircuts ordering jager bombs and heinekans all night.
Gambling wise I won a bit, and my gf and college buddy lost a little bit. It was a bit disappointing for me as I’d much rather have it the other way around as losing a couple hundred bucks doesn’t really bother me, but other people will “real life” hourly jobs just aren’t accustomed to losing money gambling and it can really upset them. The Pai Gow and craps gods said otherwise and I benefited at their expense.
The next day we checked out the Borgata as I had read it was the nicest casino in AC. It was definitely up there, but certainly no Bellagio or Wynn in my opinion obviously. On Saturday around noon they had one $30/$60 stud game running which I was excited to play in but had to wait til our girlfriends were occupied later in the trip.
Next day was Philadelphia touristy stuff. Saw the liberty bell, Ben Franklin’s grave, their market, the rocky statue etc but the most exciting thing I did that day was eat a declicious philly cheese steak from Jim’s. It’s not one of the famous two rivals right across from each other, but my buddy said it was better than either of those. I got a “whiz wit” which means with cheese whiz and onions. The cheese whiz sounds gross, and I’ll be the first to tell you that, but it’s the local traditonal way of having a cheesesteak and besides my gf got provolone cheese instead which I got to try, and the whiz was definitely way better. I also had the exciting experience of having a gas attendant fill up my gas for me. Didn’t even have to get out of the car. It was awesome, definitely the second best highlight of the trip. Even kept my receipt.
Delicious Cheesesteak
Reading Terminal Market Sign
My gf and I with the Liberty Bell
My college bud and I chillin with the Rocky statue (ran up the stairs which are right behind him)
The next day I mostly just rested up as I was still tired from the redeye I took over from Seattle. Just played some video games and watched the Sunday Night Football game where the Eagles played a great game vs the Giants. Monday, I made it out to an amazing “rare game” restaurant Half Moon where I tried blackened alligator and a kangaroo burger for the first time. They have rotating game specials every day and I love trying new food. It was the first time I’d ever tried either of those animals and they each definitely have a distinct taste to them. The gator was a tough kind of almost chewy meat and the kangaroo was a hard to describe texture which I don’t have the vocab for because I’m no food critic. I did really like the place and would definitely go back though. After that it was off to Herrs chip factory where I got to see loads of assembly lines of potato chips being made with warehouses and warehouses stocked full of boxes of them and even ate fresh potato chips that were peeled just 6 minutes before. I think what made them taste so great was they were still warm.
After that it was off to Atlantic City again to finally get some poker in for the trip. I was hoping to play some live stud for the first time ever, but it was Monday night and nothing was running. I ended up playing a little $10/$20 limit hold’em, followed by about 5 hours of $20/$40 limit hold’em. It’s the first time I’ve ever played LHE seriously at a casino(as opposed for just fun) and I actually kind of liked it because:
The hands go fast – people make decisions very quickly, there’s no 5 minute tanking like there is in no limit and in general people make their decision in 20 sec or less I’d guess so you get in more hands
I can play more hands – I often get bored playing live, but limit hold’em kind of helps because I can defend my blinds much more, and in general just see more flops which is more fun. With a hand like QJs I’m almost always in the pot and am not getting squeezed out of the pot or have to fold preflop nearly ever after I commit some chips to the hand
Things I didn’t like were:
The hands go fast – there wasn’t really any time to pay attention to live reads or anything like that. I mostly just had to play like it was an internet game and make my decisions based on board texture and potsize.
We were playing with small denomination chips – even though the Borgata has $10 and $20 chips, which a few people used sporadically, greater than 90% of the chps in play at the $20/$40 game were $5 chips. I fumbled around a lot and had a hard time counting out 8 or 16 chips at a time and had to dedicate way too much of my time stacking 4 or 8 high chip stacks ready for betting as opposed to paying attention to the other players or hands.
It was Monday night and most of them were regulars – I’d say more than half the people at my table knew each other and were calling them by their first names. Now, I was playing the highest LHE game going on at the time, and it was a Monday night, but it’s never a great table when Tom is talking to Juno who’s talking to Steve and a couple other guys who clearly go there every night and know each other very well.
Having said that I ended up winning $268. Might have been enough to pay for my whole trip even minus flight of course. I started off hot winning a couple hundred, then had a big losing streak and was down about $600, but then starting running hot again, got up about $400 and finally quit up $268. I don’t think I played that great and made more than a few mistakes, but my opponents, even the regulars seemed to make a lot of mistakes too. I was surprised how often they would check back the river with the best hand or fold the river for one bet or how little they bluffraised in spots which are pretty standard online. Anyways, I learned a couple things and hope to be back at the live pokers soon.
Awesome british rap by Christian Van Vuuren who had to spend 7 weeks in quarantine cause he got TB
February ended up being a pretty epic month. I squeaked out something like $10k, but I’m going to go ahead and call this month a fail. I was on pace for my best month ever got up pretty quickly to $80k at my peak, but after that it was basically just straight down to finish up only $10k. I had one +$30k day and two -$30k days along with a bunch of plus or minus $5-$20k days thrown in. I think my game selection really fell off at the end of the month and when good 7 or 8 games stopped running I still really wanted to play and ended up sitting with some fairly tough regs which it’s pretty questionable about whether I had an edge against or not.
On the bright side, I think it improved my game immensely (though cost me a lot to find these leaks), improved my tolerance to big $$ swings and I did manage to end up with a pretty good profit I suppose. It’s just a bit frustrating I let the monster month get away from me but you know what they say, “Easy come, easy go” right?
For March I’ve officially sworn off pokerstars. I seem to continuously bust my account and have to redeposit there. I don’t know if it’s the software, the players, my bad luck, my psyche from having a large % of my stars roll at each table at any given time or what, but I’ve been losing there for months now. It took me awhile to accept it, but much like Dodgyken did I’ve just decided I’m going to stop playing there with the exception of the occasional Sunday donkaments as it’s just a big money pit for me which I’ve got to stop.
Here’s a breakdown of the various games for the month. I’m positive I’m missing some hands as there’s like a $7k difference between my recorded and actual results and obviously the 2-7 TD hands aren’t here, but this is what I’ve got.
NLHE
Not much to say here other than I played some big pots this month. I had both some run good hands and not so run good hands
LHE
I had another session with BigBadBar the other day which went great. He really hammered home some nice points and plugged a couple of leaks I was obviously having. Since then I’ve been playing some 5/10 to 15/30 headsup LHE and really improving in this game I feel. The only problem with headsup is the rake can be a real KILLER as pretty much every pot sees a flop and at least a cbet which is obviously raked and starts to add up pretty quickly.
PLO
Pretty clear I ran bad in plo this month as it’s one of my best games relative to everyone else and there’s just no way my expectation is breakeven here. These hands come to mine where I hit my nut anti-gin card and easily fold the river otherwise. Binking bottom set and Q high flush no good
O8
My run bad in plo is obviously made up for my run good in o8 here. I think I have a firm understanding of this game and play it pretty well now. Clearly my “tuition” aka huge losses I took almost six months ago when first learning this game are starting to pay off.
Stud Hi
I changed my style a bit this month and tried to play a bit more pots and fold less. It didn’t work out so well. I’ve gone back over my hand histories and tightened up considerably since, and hope to see my results go back to the green for this game next month.
Stud8
Pretty clear I still suck at this game. My goal for march is to play a lot of low stakes stud8, get some more coaching and finally crack this game and figure out what I am doing so wrong.
Razz
By far my best stud game right now. Some good 100/200 razz games were running for a couple days I had a nice win in. I’m definitely still learning and improving though. Here’s a monster razz hand I played. I played it bad, but Eli played it even worse. At the time I thought I had 35-40% equity on 4th, but was a bit surprised afterwards to learn I was only 32%. Definitely messed this one up and overcalling 4th is absolutely the right play. 7th is a bit interesting I think, in pro poker tools I’m 54% vs alexonmoon if he has two cards seven and below that are unpaired on 4th and got a random 7th street. I have Eli boardlocked and know he’s calling, still not sure I like the raise and this just shows the danger of not drawing smooth (76 is so much worse than 75).
Thats it for now, gl in March!
My pops e-mailed my this one and I got a good laugh out of it. Thought I’d pass it along…
The IRS
decides to audit Grandpa, and summons him to
the IRS office..
The IRS auditor was not
surprised when Grandpa showed up with his
attorney.
The auditor said, ‘Well, sir,
you have an extravagant lifestyle and no
full-time employment, Which you explain by
saying that you win money gambling. I’m
not sure the IRS finds that
believable.’
I’m a great gambler, and I
can prove it,’ says Grandpa. ‘How about a
demonstration?’
The auditor thinks for a
moment and said, ‘Okay. Go
ahead.’
Grandpa says, ‘I’ll bet you a
thousand dollars that I can bite my own
eye.’
The auditor thinks a moment and
says, ‘It’s a bet..’
Grandpa removes his
glass eye and bites it. The auditor’s jaw
drops.
Grandpa says, ‘Now, I’ll bet you
two thousand dollars that I can bite my
other eye.’
Now the auditor can tell Grandpa
isn’t blind, so he takes the
bet.
Grandpa
removes his dentures and bites his good
eye.
The stunned auditor now realizes
he has wagered and lost three grand, with
Grandpa’s attorney as a witness. He starts
to get nervous.
‘Want to go double or nothing?’
Grandpa asks ‘I’ll bet you six thousand
dollars that I can stand on one side of
your desk, and pee into that wastebasket
on the other side, and never get a drop
anywhere in between.’
The auditor, twice
burned, is cautious now, but he looks
carefully and decides there’s no way this
old guy could possibly manage that stunt,
so he agrees again.
Grandpa stands
beside the desk and unzips his pants, but
although he strains mightily, he can’t
make the stream reach the wastebasket on
the other side, so he pretty much urinates
all over the auditor’s desk.
The auditor
leaps with joy, realizing that he has just
turned a major loss into a huge
win.
But Grandpa’s own attorney moans
and puts his head in his
hands.
‘Are
you okay?’ the auditor
asks.
‘Not
really,’ says the attorney. ‘This morning,
when Grandpa told me he’d been summoned
for an audit, he bet me twenty-five
thousand dollars that he could come in
here and piss all over your desk and that
you’d be happy about it!’
US Reaction to 9-11 made simple. Ah, gets better with every viewing!
Got my own 7 game table over at ftp a couple weeks back and been meaning to blog about it. Come play with me! I just got done playing a session there in case you are wondering why I’m not sitting in the screenshot.
No video today, but I’ll leave you with a quick article Becoming a pro gamer which games pay the most? I used to play a lot of counterstrike back in the day. Glad I switched to poker as it pays about a million times better for being half as good as the best in the world. Can’t believe it’s not even mentioned here. I guess poker is less of a “game” and more just gambling in most peoples eyes.
Job Security. In a time when US unemployment is at it’s highest levels in decades one thing we as poker players ought to be thankful for is that we cannot lose our means of making a living due to anyone’s actions but our own. We cannot be fired, and if we lose money at work, well we have no one to blame but ourselves. Sure you can make excuses as most of us do for running bad and blame the poker gods all we want, but ultimately our luck will even out over our career and if we put in the proper amount of time, hours and dedication we will succeed and make money.
This is not necessarily true in other jobs and the fact that poker is for the most part (with the exception of a few tourney donk winners) a meritocracy where if you work hard and are good at your job you will succeed. Think about all the other people a typical 40 hour a week job employee has to depend on for his or her livelihood. First he has to impress someone enough for them to hire them. Then he has to work hard to keep his or her employer happy so that he won’t be fired. It’s not even enough that he is good at his job and gets his work done, he has to make sure he still looks like he’s busy even if he has no more work to do so he won’t appear lazy. He has to make sure he doesn’t say the wrong thing to his boss, or give some offhand comment that may offend him personally that may be detrimental to him getting a promotion. He may even work hard and do a good job with his work, but a coworker he is working with on a project slacks off and as a result makes him look bad in front of his boss. Even if he and his coworkers do a good job, this does not necessarily translate into being paid more. His boss may still fire him due to the recession hitting, or he may promote someone else that he enjoys working with better but doesn’t do quite as good of work as him or his hard work may just go completely unnoticed. In other words, the system is not setup fairly to reward the hardest and best workers with the highest pay. While poker is not perfect either in this regard, you have to agree that it is a much more fair system than the typical 40 hour a week career guy faces.
So next time you suffer a bad beat, or encounter a big losing streak think about this for a minute. Yeah sure you lost money, sure you got it in good, but as long as you practice half decent bankroll management at least you’ll still be able to go to work tomorrow and have the opportunity to make money working. A lot of others, about 10% of America to be exact, are not lucky enough to be able to say the same.
In case you missed them in the Superbowl.
In case you haven’t noticed I’ve been AWOL for the past six weeks. Blogging is kind of a vicious cycle where when I’m super busy I have all these things to blog about, but not much time to do it OR I have all the time in the world but nothing new is really going on in my life so I have nothing to blog about. I needed a little break from blogging anyways, but now I’m back and have all these fresh new things to talk about!
What have I been up to you say? Well, in mid-December I flew out to Philadelphia to visit an old college buddy of mine and spent a week hanging out with him seeing the sites and checking out Atlantic City for the first time. After that it was back to Seattle for a couple of days followed by a ten day trip back to the east coast to North Carolina to spend Christmas and New Years with my family. I came back to Seattle for about a week and then it was straight off to the other side of the world to Melbourne, Australia for the Aussie Millions with serbie for ten days. I just got back from that a week ago and am finally settling into a normal routine again which I haven’t had in what seems like ages now. I’ll probably write up a couple trip reports for those as a lot happened, but my hotel in Melbourne cost $27/day internet(excuse #3 for not blogging) and while they suckered me into it twice, I wasn’t about to pay for it every day just so I could give you all daily tourney updates like I do during the wsop.
2009 Results? 2010 goals? December 2009, January 2010 results? You wonder? I played a lot on both my laptop and desktop during these months due to traveling so I can’t really post a monthly graph or stats without either double posting from both databases or combining databases, neither of which I am prepared to do. December ended up being my 3rd losing month of 2009 with me losing around $29.5k. January I bounced back a bit and won something like $17k online, but lost about $3k playing live along with having another couple grand in travel expenses, accommodation, food, entertainment etc.
2009 was an okay year monetarily wise, I made more than most of my real life peers, but suspect I made much less than I lot of my poker peers. I’d rather not go into specific numbers for the year (yes, I pay my taxes btw I think I’ll owe something like 33 cents for every dollar I made in 2009) but I will say I ended up making <100k which is kinda meh for me. I played bigger than usual in December which I realize now may have been a mistake. I was reading in the wall street journal in December about how most traders tend to avoid placing risky or high volatility bets in December simply for the reason that they want to lock up their gains for the year and not destroy all their profit for the year in the last month of the year. While this is somewhat fish talk (lol locking up wins your poker career is all one big session, right?) I do see some merit to this and I may consider dropping down instead of shot taking next December for this very reason.
2010 goals. First I'd like to look back at my 2009 goals They were to
1. Not play any 10/20 until I make a post showing I have 100k online
2. Stick to my new schedule and focus on getting 25-30 hour tilt free poker playing in per week
3. Always maximize my hourly rate when playing. If this means 6 tabling 2/4 because that’s the best games running now so be it. If it means 2 tabling 5/10 so be it. The one exception I will add to this is learning a new game. So for example I’ve been playing some more PLO recently and obviously 1 or 2 tabling 1/2 HU PLO is not maximizing my hourly but hopefully this will improve my lifetime hourly rate as a poker player. This also means game selecting well, playing longer when winning, quitting if I am starting to tilt etc.
I’m pretty sure I failed miserably at #1. I’m a sucker for good games what can I say. I had some good sometimes month long spurts at #2 which would inevitably be interrupted by travel or visitors or staying up late one night and ruining it for the next three weeks. I’d really like to get better at keeping a schedule and sticking to it in 2010. If you want to make a lot of money at online poker, you really have to leatherass it up and grind 40 hours a week. I did okay at #3, though lately I’ve been playing some regulars in headsup 7 game and losing a bit to them overall which I’d like to stop. It’s really a waste of time and I’d be much better off grinding some lower 6max games. One thing I am proud of from 2009 is all the new games I learned. I think I paid a lot both in opportunity cost, and in “tuition” (losing a lot when first learning) but I think my newfound skills will really pay off for me in 2010 and beyond. I see a lot of the pure nlhe guys struggling these days and it’s nice to know I can table select a much wider range of games and limits than them and can usually find good games with fish instead of figuring out how to eek out that extra .02BB/1000 vs the 5/10 regs every day.
I’m still debating what I want my goals to be for 2010. Realistically if I wanted to make 1/4 a million I think I’d need to put in at least 500-600k hands or 40-50k hands per month. I’m not sure I’m prepared to do this so I have not committed to it yet, but it’s still weighing on my mind. The only goal I KNOW I have is I’d like to final table a wsop event. I plan on playing as many events as I can this summer and giving myself a real shot at a bracelet. That’s it for now, happy groundhog day everyone!
Add another $4k I lost playing some pretty good high stakes stud games for a total daily loss of $28k. Weee. Kinda frustrating that my biggest losing day is more than twice as big as my biggest loser now. Oh well. My time will come.
Here’s the big drop at the end. Pretty gut wrenching turn and river IMO. I think I played it standard but not totally sure. I could have taken a couple of different lines including just calling the 3 bet preflop but I think the money was getting in anyways. As played I’m a slight dog with 43% equity on the flop in case you are wondering.
On the bright side of things:
-I’m only down about $16k for the month which I think I MAY be able to push through, but it’s going to be hard esp cause I’ll drop down in limits for a few days now. In all likelihood I’ll be happy with a $8k loss or less for the month.
-I had a great time in New Jersey/Atlantic City/Philadelphia visiting my friend and wrote up a rough draft of my trip report. I’ll try to finish editing it and post it sometime in the next couple of days so be looking for that.
-I made some more progress getting some ATM leads today. You really have to be persistent at this and just go to as many places as possible before you find someone genuinely interested.
Be good and happy holidays!
I had to move up to where they respect my raises imo.
Yesterday I spent all day watching “Dr Razz’s”, “Razz made complex” eight video series on stoxpoker.com. It definitely opened my eyes to quite a few things and made me realize how poorly I was playing previously. Razz is a very difficult game to learn in my opinion because you can’t just pull up your equity on any given street, compare it to the pot odds, and make a decision that way. In fact that is a very poor way to learn the game and you will end up making loads of mistakes if you go about it that way. Dr Razz has compiled a series of graphs that are somewhat complicated to understand at first, but once you do they are immensely helpful in determining the correct play in any situation on any street.
If you are looking to learn razz, I suggest you start out by playing some low stakes for a couple 1000 hands and basically lose, but try to figure things out on your own at first. After you learn the trouble spots, rules, etc then I suggest you suck it up and watch the 7 hours of video he put up and do some analysis on your own afterwards. Your mind will be blown. My biggest mistake I found I was making was playing too loosely on 3rd and then folding too easily later in the hand (usually 4th or 5th) which is a pretty huge leak. I obviously have a ways to go before I consider myself anywhere close to an expert at this game, but for now, having watched all the videos I actually think I’m half decent.
That is the beauty of being able to play a lot of games and not just being a specialist in one. As you can see I was getting crushed at 10/20 razz, but there was a whale giving his money away at 100/200 razz today so I figured I was +EV in the lineup. While I may be leaking money to the other 100/200 razz regs there, I’m sure it was a profitable spot for me. At the same time, I got to play with other really good razz players and even learned a couple of things from them!
On Thursday I’ll be doing some traveling to the east coast to visit a college buddy of mine in Philadelphia. I’m super excited as I’m going to be going to Atlantic City for the first time. I’m not really sure what to expect, but people have said don’t expect Vegas, it’s gotta be better than 99% of all the other casinos I’ve been to though! I’ll be sure to report back. That’s all for now, if you find yourself getting bored at the tables this week go try some razzle dazzle! You might actually like it!
Like I said last post I ended up having a good month and cleared about $20k including a $4k stars bonus finally. I didn’t end up getting that many hours or hands in, but I did win some monies so that’s all that really matters, right? The thing I’m most proud of last month was that I was in the green for all three stud games (though it’s mostly due to just running good in the bigger games). I’m definitely improving, but obviously still have a ways to go, especially in my stud8 and razz games.
Laptop results were +$8600 over 1900 hands in HEM and +$1200 over 1000 stud hands. Lost a bit in donkaments.
Desktop HEM
Desktop Stud
Desktop HEM Graph
ATM
ATM machine wise I only made about $300 as opposed to $400 the previous months. This could be due to a number of thing such as natural variance, a shorter month, football season coming to an end and nobody want to see their 1-8 team play anymore, the weather getting colder and worse so not as many people not want to go out anymore. I’m not really sure. I just hope it doesn’t drop again in December. There’s not much more I can really do at this point except making sure the machines stay stocked at all times.
I have been working on acquiring some new spots recently. I’ve spoken to three prospective locations that sounded semi-interested which I’ve given my information to. I’m just waiting to hear back from upper management. I kind of forgot how difficult it is to actually speak to someone in charge at these places and convince them to work with me. Just gotta stay persistent and hope to get lucky again. Cross your fingers for me.
In case you haven’t heard it yet. Awkward Tiger Woods voicemail message to Jamie Grubbs.
Part one of my play was released yesterday. It’s hard to link directly, but if you go to Stoxpoker Videos and select coach “Eric Chipsahoya Rodawig” it is the “7 game mix: part 3″ video. This section is mostly Stud8 with a little Razz thrown in at $40/$80 and $100/$200 7 game on FTP. The pace is a bit on the slow side, but it’s very thorough and I definitely learned a few things. Part two should be out in late December early January.
Also, I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet, but I’m going to Melbourne, Australia for the Aussie Millions from Jan 14th-23rd with my boy Sarvesh/Serbie who I lived with this summer in Vegas. Drop me a line if you are going too and would like to hang out down under. Plane tickets were about $1700 roundtrip from Seattle and splitting a hotel ended up being about $100/person/night.