40 Days of Pain!

My wife Jen, my son Peyton and I are off to southern California for a few days starting November 1st. That means between the end of the WCOOP and our little vacation I have 40 days to make some major headway on my year end point goals.

I thought the WCOOP would be good motivation to stay logged in and play for hours and hours thus generating tons of points. While I did spend an insane amount of time playing during the WCOOP, it was all multitable tournaments! I figured I'd be able to seamlessly mix in cash games, but in practice I had trouble playing lots of NL tournaments and limit cash games at the same time.

Now I'm way behind! My solution in to literally work for 40 days straight. I've had stretches where I've worked for 10 or 15 days in a row and not really noticed (my record is somewhere in the 20's) so it's not going to be like a normal person trying to pull off 40 work days in a row.

At the start of my 40 days I was at about 645,000 points for the year needing to make it to 1,000,000 by December 31st. My plan is to alternate days of 7,000 points which will take all the effort I can muster, and days of 3,000 points which I can either do at a leisurely pace or get up early and bang out before lunch.

My goal is to make it to 840,000 points by the end of my 40 days. That means I need to average 5,000 points a day (with one emergency day off built in) to make it. This IS NOT going to be easy. But since I'm taking a five day vacation and a seven day vacation in November and another seven day trip in December now is the time to make it happen!

I've got extra money in my pokerstars account from the WCOOP, my real world bank accounts are topped off and 840,000 points just so happens to be the point where I'll clear my $8,000 yearly milestone bonus so if I get rocked I'm OK with it. While I always plan on winning it's going to take playing more games than optimal, for longer hours and while I can't be specific about how my results might be affected, it might not be good.

When it comes down to it the difference between making it to 999,999 points vs 1,000,000 is worth about $50,000 so there's no way I'm not making it! I don't care what it takes!

Since I knocked out just under 7,000 points today and wrote this post you'll have to wait for WCOOP recap! Backer checks will be in the mail by the end of the week!

$1,050 HORSE Recap

This tournament was great fun, even though it was a tough field. Among the 32 players that entered were two time WSOP bracelet winner Bill Chen, Pokerstars Pro Chad Brown who won the $5,200 HORSE event at last years WCOOP and has 5 WSOP top 5 finishes, "Chino23" (I've forgotten his real name) who was the only poker pro to make the final table of the WSOP main event in 2007, and "Pearl Jammer" who is one of the best online tournament pros around and (according to his bio on fulltiltpoker) has 1.6 million in career tournament winnings.

We all started with 25,000 chips and while I dropped down to 15,000 at one point early on I came right back up to 25,000.

I did have one big hand early where I kind of got screwed. We were playing stud and I started with KK in the hole and a 6 up. Both of my opponents had an ace showing and after they'd capped it on 3rd street and again on 4th street it was about 99% sure they both had AA. On 5th street I hit the third king. At this point I was 99% sure I had the best hand. Since it got capped again I figured both of my opponents had two pair. On 6th street it was two bets an on the river it got capped again. Since I didn't do any of the raising on the end I was about 95% sure I was dead, but since the pot was an insane 25,000 chips I had to call. It turns out that they did both in fact have exactly what I thought, but one made a flush and the other a full house. In order to lose on the last card I had to miss my full house, and one of them had to hit one of his two outs and the other had six outs to hit. It sucked.

But things got better quick. By the time we were down to 25 players (a few hours in) I was in first place with about 100,000 chips. I kept steady at that number until we were down to the final 8 handed table.

Then I made a bunch of hands. I kept thinking "Man, I am running so good right now!" By the time we were down to 6 players I had about 40% of all the chips in play with over 300,000. And that's about where I stayed until we were heads up!

When we got to heads up we were close to even. Then my opponent kicked my ass in the hold'em which really surprised me. I feel like that must have been his best game and when we switched to Omaha he had me about 600,000 to 200,000. But I kicked his ass in the Omaha! I totally flipped it on him and was ahead 600,000 to 200,000. Sadly he took the advantage back in the Razz and wiped me out in the Stud. I feel like I played well heads up and there wasn't anything I could have done much differently so I feel great about this result!

2nd place paid $8,640! I've got to find some more HORSE tournaments to play! I might have to explore some new websites to see if they have any good HORSE action.

Now after playing all day and writing this blog, I'm tired! I'll have the final total and some final thoughts on the 2008 WCOOP tomorrow.

More Good WCOOP News!

We're in the money in the $1,050 HORSE! I was in first going into the money so it never really felt in doubt. I've slipped a little since then, but things are still going well. I'll let you know what happened when it's over. Giddy up!

WCOOP Update

Well after all my talk about how great I was going to do in the 6 handed limit events I got my doors blown off! I was out about as fast as I could have expected to be eliminated in both the main tournament and the second chance.


But there is good news! I won the second $320 satellite to the Main event! I thought I was going to have to play but instead I've unregistered and gotten $5,200 in what they call "W" dollars. $W can only be used to buy into "special events." While every tournament associated in any way with the WCOOP is considered a special event, I can't say I know too much about what else counts. My impression is that it's very few tournaments. At worst I'll be sitting on $5,200 that's locked up for a year until the next WCOOP. At best I'll find some tournaments that pay cash in which I can use them. I'm not sure yet what this means for my backers. I still need to give it some thought.

In other news I'm still in the $1,050 second chance HORSE. We started with 32 and are down to 12. It pays 5 spots and I'm in 3rd.

WCOOP Complaining!

I'm getting screwed in the limit tournament! I've had AK five times, AQ once, and KQ 4 times. While I snuck out a few small pots with bets I haven't made a pair with any of these hands! What the hell is that all about! I'm down from 7,500 to 3,200. I like my table. I'd smoke these jokers if I could make a pair!

I blanked in the first $320 main event satellite and two $44 satellites as well.

Before today my $10,000 starting bankroll was at $16,002. I'd really like to get it to $20,000 by days end. If I get blanked for the rest of the day I'll end the WCOOP with a $2,644 profit. It makes me a little sad to see it drop so low, but the day's not over yet!

Last Day of WCOOP!

Event #31 is underway! This is the one that caught my eye the first time I looked at the schedule. $1,050 Limit Hold'em 6 handed is what were playing today. More than anything else these days this is my specialty. We started with 580 players with 84 spots paying. The edge of the money is $1,566 and 1st place is $107,300. So far it's not going well. We've played 100 hands and I've only won 8 pots. That's less than half as many as I would expect. Luckily the stakes are still low so I have 80% of my starting stack left.

Also on tap today I have the $530 6-max limit hold'em second chance. This should be another chance to play my best game for solid stakes.

But wait there's more! I also have two $320 qualifiers to the $5,200 main event (one is actually 20,000 FPPs which are worth $320). I have a baby shower to go to tomorrow for some of our best friends so if I win a seat I'm going to in the words of Ricky Ricardo "have some splainin' to do." But these are just too good to pass up. The first one is for supernova's only and pokerstars put up 12 seats no matter how many players signed up. I basically got into a $450 tournament for $320. In the other it's the super duper big satellite to the main event that they have been running smaller satellite to for 2 months. They've guaranteed at least 100 seats given away and I expect this tournament to be loaded with some total buffoons who have won their way in via $4 with rebuys satellites to the satellite!

But wait! There's even more! The last thing I have today is the $1,050 HORSE second chance tournament. While the competition in this one is going to be light years ahead of the people who play the $109 HORSE tournament that I win 1/3 of the time, there just aren't very many chances to play HORSE for this kind of money.

Hopefully I can close out the 2008 WCOOP with a bang!

2008 WCOOP Event #28 ($530 6-max with rebuys) Recap

This one all came down to one hand. Sometime in the second hour of play I got moved to a new table and saw that I was up against not one, but two team pokerstars pros. Right behind me was Gavin Griffin who for a little while was the youngest player to ever win a WSOP event and is still the only player to win a title in a WSOP event, the WPT (World Poker Tour) and the EPT (European Poker Tour). Needless to say he's a great player.

So with blinds of 25/50 the first player to act raised to 150 and got called by the next player to act. Then it was up to me and I had KK! I made it 600 to go and Griffen just called out of the small blind. My first thought was "Shit, that looks like AA." The other two players called as well and the flop came down J 9 7 with two spades. Griffen checked and then the original raiser went all in for 7,500 into the 2,500 chip pot. Right away I knew that was a draw. My only decision was how sure was I that Griffen had AA. Could I really lay down KK here?

After a short moment I decided my hand was too good to fold and I went all in for 25,000. Griffen called and turned over AA! AHHHHHH! The other player had T9 and after no help I was down to 5,000 chips.

If that weasel with T9 hadn't just blown all in like a fool I might have been able to make it to the river only putting a few thousand chips in the pot.

A little while later I got the rest of my chips all in with 66 vs JJ and that was it.

I've decided to skip the second chance tournament and instead play a bunch of $33 with rebuys satellites to the $1,050 limit 6-max (there's one going off every hour). I played $150 in satellites in an attempt to make it into the $1,050 Omaha cheap, but no luck there either.