Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Upcoming Poker Schedule and a Big McCain Bet

A few months ago, I posted a schedule of the poker tournaments I was going to play into the forseeable future.

The trips on that schedule were:

Vegas WSOP Circuit at Caesars (wound up cashing in a $1k prelim)
Party Poker Million Cruise (3rd for $160k)
New Orleans WSOP Circuit (15th in the Main Event)
WSOP (18th in a $2,500 prelim and 159th in the Main Event)

The only other three poker related trips I've taken this year were:

Oklahoma State Championships of Poker (5th for $22k)
Venetian Deep Stack in February (4th in a $300 for $11k)

and

Irish Poker Open (washout)

So 7 trips and cashed in a tournament on 6 of them. Classical conditioning says go to more tournaments.

With that in mind, here's the trips I plan on taking into the forseeable future:

August 17th-23rd: The River Poker Tournament in Thackersville, Oklahoma

Five hour drive from Houston with a $2,000 buy-in. A tournament in Oklahoma with a sizable buy-in that will attract virtually zero professionals? Yum, yum!!

September 4th-6th: Gulf Coast Poker Championship in Biloxi, Mississippi

Six hour drive from Houston with a buy-in of $5,000. Plus, hanging out in po-dunk towns in the deep South is always an adventure in and of itself.

September 27th - October 5th: WSOP Europe and EPT London in London, England

This is a trip I'm really looking forward to. The European Poker Tour officials were savvy enough to schedule their EPT London event literally right after WSOP Europe concludes. Flying all the way to Europe and getting to play two big events rather than just one is definitely nice. (Note: The buy-ins for these events are £10,000 and £5,000 (roughly $20,000 and $10,000). Good chance I'll be interested in selling off a little of myself for these events, so get in touch if that interests you).

October 12th-14th: WSOP Circuit Indiana in Elizabeth, Indiana

$5,000 buy-in.

November 15th-18th: Scotty Nguyen Poker Challenge in Tulsa, Oklahoma

$5,000 buy-in.

Beyond that, it's hard to plan anything out. One trip that I think sounds fun is the Aussie Millions in the early part of next year. Whether or not Australia is in the picture depends on how well I run in the aforementioned events and whether or not John McCain wins the election.

I'm building what will hopefully be a pretty large position on McCain through online sportsbooks. So far, I've wagered about $5k to win $12k on a Repubican to win the Presidency. The odds these idiots are laying on Matchbook and InTrade is unreal. It's absurd to think that Barack Obama has a 70% chance to win the election. It's like... he's trailing in the polls to McCain amongst likely voters. At the end of the day, nobody likes arrogant liberal elitists who tell people that they need to learn Spanish and complain about the prices of arugula at Whole Foods. Especially when that person has a middle name Hussein and donated $27,000 to a church whose pastor says things like, "God damn America!"

Monday, July 28, 2008

Huge Online Score

I woke up this morning about 45 minutes before the Sunday Warm-Up so I could take my dog for a walk. At one point during the walk, I just kinda thought to myself, "I have a good feeling about today. Maybe I'll win something big." (Humor me and pretend for a second that I don't think that nearly every single Sunday!)

For a while, it was looking like the Sunday Warm-Up might pan out to something big. It started with over 4,000 players and I had a nice stack with about 300 left. Unfortunately, I made a bonehead shove in a spot where I would have folded if I had seen that someone had already entered the pot. A couple people Michael knows were at the apartment, and I kinda lost focus making small talk with them. You can't exactly say, "LEAVE ME ALONE DAMNIT I'VE GOT SIX TABLES GOING!" to someone who knows nothing about online poker.

As the day progressed, it looked like nothing was going to materialize for me. With about 200 players left in the monthly Stars $530 buy-in $250k guaranteed, I made a pretty marginal shove with pocket Jacks and got decimated by Aces. I was literally left with about 5 big blinds. Since 180 spots were paying, I decided to nit it up and drain my timebank so I could at least cash. Bottom cash was like $800, so hey... might as well try to cash, right?

By the time we were in the money (180 players left), I had no timebank and only 3 big blinds.

By the time 110 players were left, I was the chipleader.

From that point until the end of the tournament, I was never worse than 4th in chips on the leaderboard. I just kept cruising right along thanks to people spewing off in extremely light spots against me when I had big pocket pairs.

Yada yada yada (I'm tired, so I won't bore you with tiny details)... next thing I know, I'm heads-up with half the chips in play.

The heads-up match didn't last too long. The other guy, "Benba", was unknown to me and had generally seemed a little spewy. I got him all-in with my Ace-Nine suited against his Ace-Ten offsuit. I flopped a flush draw and was really begging for a suckout to ship the $105k my way. No dice. To his credit, he deserved to win the hand and the tournament. Later, I got 2.3M and KTdd all-in against his 9.5M and A2o. No dice there, either. I don't think I made any glaring mistakes heads-up or anything, but I sure as hell didn't outplay him either.

I'm glad Stars fixed their payout structures so that first isn't like twice the size of second in their big tournaments. I came up short on the win, but took a staggering $76k for second! Not bad for sitting on a couch and clicking some buttons! :)

To put that into perspective a little:

* My previous record for largest online cash was $14,000.
* In over 1,300 previous MTTs on Stars, my combined gross winnings were a mere $50,000
* After toiling with a lowly -30% ROI on Stars for years and years, my lifetime ROI on Stars is now 67%!!

Tournaments are so crazy!

WEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

NFL's Worst Owners

Yahoo sports columnist, Michael Silver, wrote a pretty interesting article ranking NFL owners from worst to best. Here's what he had to say about some of the worst NFL owners:

32. Jacksonville Jaguars - Wayne Weaver

“He’s a sick puppy,” one owner says of Weaver. “He’s totally and completely out for his bottom line, and the league’s best interest is not in his mind at all.”

31. Oakland Raiders - Al Davis

The Raiders, since their Super Bowl XXXVII defeat to the Bucs, are 19-61 over the past five seasons, the NFL’s worst record during that span. But in Davis’s distorted world, it’s always somebody else’s fault.

30. Cincinnati Bengals - Mike Brown

Recalls one owner: “Mike said, ‘We should each be able to manage our own organization without the league getting involved. If we can’t manage it ourselves, we shouldn’t be running our businesses.’ And we were all laughing to ourselves, because Mike is the one whose organization had more players getting in trouble than anyone else’s.

28. Arizona Cardinals - Bill Bidwill

Two years after opening University of Phoenix Stadium, five months after hosting Super Bowl XLII, the Cardinals are having trouble selling out the joint. That’s tough to do, but when you’re so cheap as an organization that you refuse to fly in draft prospects for visits.

27. Buffalo Bills - Ralph Wilson

Back when he co-founded the AFL, Wilson was considered an innovator. Now he comes off as selfish and stodgy and looking for handouts.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

2008 WSOP Trip #3

I just arrived back in Vegas for my third and final stay during the WSOP. I'm staying at Treasure Island for the first few nights. Staying at this hotel is really good value. I'm paying a rate of $100/night, which is like significantly less than half the cost of the more "high end" hotels in the city. Yet, comparitively, this hotel really doesn't lack that much compared to places like the Venetian or Bellagio. Sure, the room might be a little smaller, but it's not like I'm looking to run laps around the bed or anything! I think the douchebag-factor is the only way those other places can get away with charging what they do.

Anyway... for the remainder of this trip, I'll be keeping a blog through PokerTips.org's Live from the WSOP section.