The Poker Nerd

Normally the message I got in my e-mail just now wouldn’t be cause for comment:

PokerStars Tournament #60481274, No Limit Hold’em
Buy-In: $10.00/$1.00
1077 players
Total Prize Pool: $10770.00
Tournament started - 2007/09/13 - 21:15:00 (ET)

Dear ThatJekke,

You finished the tournament in 72nd place.
A $21.54 award has been credited to your Real Money account.

You earned 77.77 tournament leader points in this tournament.

But, it’s been three weeks since I placed in a NLTHE tournament (roughly a run of 0-25.) At this point, I’ll happily take McDonald’s money.

1. The Poker Nerd and the COBB-Webb group spent four days over Labor Day weekend in Atlantic City including a trip to the Borgata. We liked the poker room. There was nothing special about the play. I was in the middle of a big dip, so it’s hard to judge whether it’s going to be a profitable room for us. Unfortunately, we’re probably not going to make it back there very often unless somebody builds up some reasonably priced hotels around the casino. The ability to take a nap between sessions is important, but not so important that we’re going to pay US$300 a night for the privilege.

I played badly the first two sessions and would have been down almost US$800 if I hadn’t made up half of it in the last session. Two and a half weeks in Vegas, I did fine (other than the front-loaded US$10,000 loss.) Four days in AC, I fall apart. I guess that’s poker.

2. I continue to have limited success with online NLTHE and remarkable success with all the other tournaments. I won two back to back on PokerStars, something I’ve never done. One was in HORSE, the other in Stud/8. My placement rate in mixed games, stud, and Omaha is absurdly high while still remaining awful in Texas Hold ‘Em.

3. My little sister is descending into moral degeneracy at a remarkable rate. We in the COBB-Webb group have great hope for her continued development.

I honestly never thought that the idiots I play with online could put me on tilt, but there’s an interesting correspondence here:

Record in online tournaments before turning off chat on PokerStars (since coming back from Vegas}: 0-21
Record in online tournaments since turning off chat on PokerStars: 5-2 (with 1 final table.)

There are a few other factors that may be contributing to the swing, but I definitely don’t miss the scintillating conversations of the PokerStars intelligentsia.

Wifezuki and I returned from Las Vegas early Sunday morning and have spent the day recovering from the travel, the vacation, and jet lag. Now that I’m settled in and rested, I’m looking forward to getting on with poker, programming, and building up this site to more than just a blog.

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If you’ve noticed the new freebie poker mag Rounder at your local poker room and thought that the “poker lifestyle magazine” looked completely useless, you weren’t far from wrong.

But, if you get past the nearly  content-free editorial material towards the back, this month’s issue (July 2007–with Vanessa Russo on the front) includes a listing of what looks like every significant regular weekly tournament in the United States.

It used to be hard to find poker tournaments. Hell, it used to be hard to find poker rooms. And, when you did find them, they ran one or two tournaments a week. Now, a lot of rooms run two tournaments a day. The thing is, they’re not really poker tournaments.

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I just got an e-mail from PokerStars announcing the sixth annual World Championship of Online Poker. While a bit ostentatiously named, the WCOOP has a special place in my heart as the first event where I took a run at being a serious multi-table tournament player.

I did abysmally two years ago and only a little better last year with zero cashes between them. After this year’s WSOP season, I feel like my tournament fu has improved a lot. The WCOOP will be an interesting gauge.

Yesterday’s game reminded me of a concept I have jokingly referred to as “toaster equity.”

I sat down at a 1/2 table around 1 pm and knew immediately I could make a lot of money there. Lots of multi-limper hands, big bets with lots of callers, an all-in every 3-5 hands. And, within two hours, my US$200 buy-in is already up to US$600.
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Since this seems to be the detail everyone asks me about, let me start at the end:

KhQh on the button, 100/200 blinds. Middle position raises to T600. I call and see a flop. The flop comes JhTh and a rag. Original raiser betsT800. I raise T2,000 to see where I am. He calls.

Turn come a king. Original raiser checks. I go all in for T10,700. After much agonizing, he calls and turns over pocket tens. The river doesn’t help me. I’m out of the WSOP after just four hours with a loss rate of US$2,500 an hour.

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I realized a hole in my tournament game this weekend based on blind progression.

A rule of thumb with tournaments is that, the faster the blinds progress, the more aggressive you have to be to survive (all other things being equal.) My mistake was thinking of blind progression velocity as a function of time when, in fact, it’s a function of hand-count.

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