The Bottom

I just had about the longest five minute walk back to a hotel room in my life.

Played the Venetian $2.5k Main Event today. The five levels leading up to dinner break went pretty great. We'll get back to those in a minute.

After dinner, I was in the tournament for 2.5 hours without winning a single hand. I went from 80 big blinds down to zero while never losing more than 20 on one hand. By "never won a hand" I don't mean that I never won a showdown or never won a hand after seeing a flop. I mean that I never won one single hand whatsoever.

I trust this will seem as inconsequential to me one day as it does to you right now, but when you're in the middle of it, it's hard to keep focus on the bigger picture. And on that note, my bigger picture isn't looking too hot as it pertains to poker. I am in a serious poker recession right now. I'm too broke at the moment to put myself in these events that I know I can be competitive in, and my backer, while not exactly broke, is probably running low on desire to use his limited liquid assets to put me in tournaments. I can't say I blame him. The results haven't been there for me since last year's WSOP Main Event. From an outsider's perspective, it would be easy to think that I "just don't have it anymore".

What makes this situation of the utmost frustration for me is that I feel like I've never "had it" more so than now! I am playing and thinking as well as I ever have. I'm loosening up my game more to disguise ranges better so people have a much tougher time putting me on hands. This adjustment is growing to be imperative in the poker world since the "average player" is always improving. I couldn't be more satisfied at the progress I've made on staying ahead of the curve. Despite how much better everyone is getting, I don't feel like I've sacrificed any relative advantage since last year when I was enjoying a lot of success. If anything, I've increased the advantage. The results just haven't been there.

Certainly everything I've said in this post is much less applicable to online poker where the stacks are small and the hands mostly play themselves. But this Venetian event has a structure that rivals the WSOP Main Event. It essentially played like a high stakes cash game (I say high stakes because the field was pretty loaded with great players) for most of the first handful of levels because of how deep the stacks are. Despite having little experience in that arena of poker, I felt pretty comfortable with assigning ranges to anyone at the table.

I'm in too much of a pensive mood and feeling too bummed out from a general standpoint to dive into all the intricacies of a few interesting hands I played today. Since this post has been a huge Debbie Downer so far, I might as well conclude it in that spirit: this blog could be light on poker-related content, or content altogether for that matter, for the next few months. I can sense I'm pretty much off the shelf for the time being. My hope is that circumstances will have turned around in time for the WSOP; it will be super painful if my upcoming limited participation in the poker world extends through the summer.

Signing out for now.

Tulsa Busto and America Busto

Michael and I flew up to Tulsa this morning for the $3k Oklahoma State Championships of Poker. I love this tournament. It is so beautifully soft. The only other "good" player I knew of in the tournament was Jordan Morgan. Even the younger unknown guys with headphones who you would label as probably being decent still make horrible plays from my observation (ie: call a raise for effectively 60% of an opponent's stack and then fold when they stick the rest in on the flop OR four-bet all-in with pocket Eights against a tight player). Such a sick tournament. Entries held strong with 100 too. For reasons I cannot figure out, poker is somehow still super juicy despite the economic situation.

Anyway, I couldn't get anything materialized. I felt like I was playing really good though, so I'm happy about that. One thing I've noticed is that poker is starting to "play itself" a little more than it used to. To put it another way, even the "bad" players have gotten to the point where they don't really make thaaaat awful of mistakes. They just kind of play their hands very straightforward and that's that. Basically, I think you have to work a little harder to exploit people now since they don't really exploit themselves for you as much as they used to. One example of how I think you can do this is to 3-bet more preflop with air, especially when you have a tight image. People give you so much credit for this since everyone's ranges are becoming more obvious and standard.

Despite not really making any glaring errors, I found my 10k starting stack to be about 4.5k when 200/400/50 rolled around. I got Ace-Queen in against pocket Jacks and didn't have to wait around much for the final verdict when the flop came Jack-Three-Three.

I tracked down Michael (who had already busted out in level three) and found him in a state of serious tilt. I guess he lost a couple thousand playing blackjack at an average of $100/hand after playing for 90 minutes. Following this, he asked a host if he could get a room and they basically told him that he hadn't played enough. I don't want to turn this blog into story after story of casino incompetence and mismanagement, but long story short, Michael made it clear to Cherokee Casino personnel he's never gambling at their establishment again.

I can see how that might sound kind of like spoiled behavior, but you have to realize these places are just being decimated right now. There is like no room for them to be refusing accommodation (that probably costs them $10 or less to give out) for a player putting that kind of money into play. Hopefully they catch on to this before their assets have more value being sold for scrap metal than used in a gaming operation.

The problem is likely that their automated comp systems have not been updated to reflect the relevancy of the day. Three years ago, it might not have made sense for them to give Michael a room based on that play, but today it most certainly does.

On the plane ride this morning, we had quite a lengthy discussion about how horribly people and businesses are responding to this recession. I'll spare tons of anecdotal examples and just say that the sense of entitlement people are still displaying is really concerning. I have a derivatives-trader friend in London who has been saying "America is f**ked!" for quite a while. Up until recently I kind of thought he was overreacting a little, but now I'm starting to think he might be on to something.

If this topic interests anyone at all, I'd recommend reading up on the lessons we could be learning from Japan's "Lost Decade". The parallels between their 10+ year economic slump and our current situation are alarming.

I think the way to play this is to keep your ear to the grindstone and make the sensible, value-based decisions. This is why Buffet is loaded from investing in brands like Coca-Cola and avoiding these unintelligible financial products put together by some 22 year old trying to win a hedge fund lottery. When the dust settles on this, all the people out there who were "too cheap" to spend their money on bottle service and marque-brand discretionary purchases will be the big winners. The "$30k Millionaire" is all smoke and mirrors; that will only become more and more painfully evident in the coming years once their employers wise-up and start firing them.

Buy McDonalds, buy China, and short steakhouses, Ed Hardy, strip joints, law schools, Vegas, art, high-end retailers, golf, "ultra-lounges", timeshares, Grey Goose, auto manufacturers, sushi, travel agencies, wine bars, high-rise condos, American women, and anything else your neighbor with the popped collar thinks he needs or deserves.

There's still plenty of pork left in the system.

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Visiting my sister in Phoenix on Friday and then off to Vegas for the Deep Stack Extravaganza Main Event next Monday ($2.5k). "One time" yada yada yada...

When the Yanks Go Marching In

I just returned from a fun little trip with a few poker players. On Monday, I flew into Philly and was picked up by Ray "Exitonly" Coburn and his friend Cris who live in Jersey. We made the five hour drive to Pittsburgh to spend the night at Luke "IWEARGOGGLES" Staudenmaier's townhouse where Matt "mlagoo" LaGarde was staying for the FTOPS series.

When we arrived, Matt had a laptop full of online poker tables going and Luke was playing a couple of tables himself. Each of these guys have enjoyed quite a lot of success in the poker world. Matt won the Sunday Million once when it was a $1,000 buy-in and Luke finished 3rd in a WPT event last year for nearly half a million.

Ray fired up a bunch of tables himself while Cris showed his truly sick prowess for Jeopardy. You would have almost thought we were watching a re-run listening to him answer probably two-thirds of the questions correctly.

We all got to witness Matt pull off a once-in-a-lifetime online poker accomplishment. He won not one, not two, but three online MTTs that night. First was a PLO rebuy event with 110 players, so not a huge deal. Next was a NLHE freezeout on Full Tilt with 450 players. When he won that, he was pretty much cemented as a god for the night despite being down to the last few tables in a huge $50 freezeout on Stars (1,150 players).

Sure enough, a couple hours later Matt was heads-up in that event. He had to survive a flush draw at one point, but I don't think any of us doubted that the river card would be a diamond given how he was running. In all, he won about $21k on the night, a score we all agreed came nowhere close to providing a feeling of accomplishment that winning three tournaments did.

Due to being really tired and low on funds, I only played one event, a $216 turbo FTOPS event that had over 2,000 players. It was going really awesome until I lost a 40 big-blind all-in preflop pot with Jacks versus some guy's Ace-Five when an Ace hit the river with about 200 players left. That relegated me to the same sour mood Ray was in from washing out of every tournament he played.

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The next day, Ray, Cris, and I left Luke's in Pittsburgh for the three hour drive to Columbus to attend the US vs. Mexico World Cup qualifying match. I've developed a casual interest in soccer after becoming addicted to Fifa '09 on PS3. Cris is a huge soccer fanatic. The long car rides gave me a chance to learn a ton about the sport from picking his brain.

At the game, we sat in the Sam's Army section behind goal. Sam's Army is a huge group of US soccer supporters that dress in red, stand for the entire game, and shout/sing chants non-stop (including during halftime while in line to use the restroom). It was without a doubt the most fun I've had at a sporting event. When the US scored its first goal (they went on to win 2-0 in a game where Mexico never looked like they stood a chance) the elation in the Sam's Army section could have been cut with a knife.

At some point, I found myself in possession of a colonial-style American flag with '76 written in the middle of the stars. I'm not really big on nationalism, but it was pretty fun waving that thing in the air as we marched out of the stadium high on beer and pride.




Badass double-rainbow following downpour in parking lot before game

Sam's Army greets the US Team

Sam's Army after victory

The Harrah's Treatment: You Can Check Out Anytime You Like, But You Can Never Leave

Before going to Tunica, I called some transportation places to arrange a ride from the Memphis airport. The prices I was quoted were in the $110-$130 range roundtrip (for a 30 minute drive), which is actually more than what it would have cost to rent a car. I was sharing the absurdity of this to a friend who lives in the area. He told me, "dude, just call a casino host, I'm sure they'll hook you up."

Good idea, Tim!

So I called Harrah's and spoke with a host. Ride from the airport? No problem. It was free and the driver was waiting for me on time when my flight landed. Gotta love a good recession.

Anyway, since I've been a little light on bankroll lately, I only brought $5,500 with me. After washing out of the $5,150 WSOP Circuit event, I was more or less busto for the trip. I had also recently lost my ATM card, so getting more cash with which to gamble was out of the question.

The day before my flight home, I requested a host so I could arrange a ride back to the airport. A tall, blonde woman in her early 40s named Deborah greeted me. She told me she would need to see my Total Rewards card to check how active I had been at the casino. Knowing from previous experience that they don't really take good care of their WSOP participants, I warned her that the only thing I had done since being at the casino was play the $5k event.

Still, I figured they'd probably take care of me anyway. After all, I was just asking for a ride to the airport. Not exactly demanding food and hotel along with it, since I was fully aware that my presence on this trip wasn't exactly a big money maker for them.

"Sorry, the play is just not there, we can't do transportation," Deborah told me. I politely explained to her that, needless to say, I thought it was a little shitty that they'd be willing to pick me up and then just strand me there after "all" I had done was play a $5,000 buy-in tournament. I mean, you'd think they'd be willing to take some basic steps to keep a person walking into a casino with that kind of money satisfied.

But I'm no stranger to the gaming industry. Harrah's has some notoriety for treating their high-value customers as disposable. I wasn't exactly shocked that something like this would happen, so I mostly kept my cool and didn't make a big deal about it.

Since Deborah had at least been cordial and I was bored anyway waiting for the aforementioned friend to meet me, I decided to sit down with what little money I had and start playing some $25/hand blackjack. High risk of ruin, sure, but I maintain a "no red chips" policy so as not to be confused for some nitty college kid.

Between my friend running extremely late and me running half-decent at blackjack for a while, before I knew it I had been playing $25/hand for three hours. I'll bet they'll give me a ride now, right? I mean, after all, it is a Tuesday in the middle-of-nowhere Mississippi during a recession. The play I just put in made me a relative whale considering the circumstances. So I can have a ride, right?

Wrong.

I talked to a new host this time, a guy named Jim. After looking at my play, he told me they couldn't do transportation for me. Furthermore, he had the audacity to tell me that I was up $100 despite the fact that I had actually dropped $300 to them.

What seems to have happened is that one of the floor managers forgot to enter me into the system at some point, so they didn't properly track my play. At this point, I was just fed up with the incompetence, so I just let loose.

I'm still shocked that someone walked into their casino with $5,500 on hand, which probably is somewhere in the 97-99 percentile of their customers, lost it all, and couldn't get a simple ride back to the airport. This is all aggravated by the fact that they gave me a ride there in the first place! You just don't do that to a customer. It's bad business.

I let loose on Jim for a while more because it felt good than anything else. The issue wasn't about the $60 I wound up having to pay for a ride the next day, the issue is about Harrah's jaw-dropping incompetence as an organization. Their hosts are like robots programmed to read whatever they see on a computer screen. Jim and Deborah made no effort to add a human element to the proceedings or attempt to understand why, perhaps, it made sense to bend the rules just this once.

These places are just getting killed right now (check stock prices of MGM and LVS). We can't know exactly how bad Harrah's is doing because they're a private company now, but it can't be good.

A crippling recession comes along that wipes out 90% of the value of the casino industry, and these guys can't give a ride to the airport to a young man who comes through their doors with $5,500? Shit, the van and the driver were probably just sitting in the parking lot anyway! It would have cost them like $5 in gas money to keep me happy in this situation, but they chose not to, and now that savings is going to be wiped out a hundred times over.

I'm done with Harrah's completely except for the WSOP. I'll give them credit for doing a decent job operating the WSOP, and it's simply too much a part of my life for me to boycott that too, but as far as hotel, restaurants, blackjack, craps, shopping, etc... screw 'em. I'm done with that organization barring satisfactory compensation from this incident.

I'll try passing this blog post along to their management, but I'm guessing they're probably so incompetent that you can't even get in touch with them to tell them how incompetent they are.

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These are the Harrah's properties in Las Vegas you won't find me at:

Bally's
Caesars
Paris
Flamingo
Imperial Palace
Harrah's
O'Sheas
Bill's Gambling Hall

Drawing Dead in Deep Fried Tunica

The only guys I recognized at my starting table in Tunica were Justin Truesdell and a guy a few people have probably heard of, Chris Moneymaker. My inner-fanboy has a pretty hard time getting excited about any fellow poker players, but I admit it's pretty cool to play with Moneymaker. As he sat there with a nonchalant demeanor, I couldn't help but think to myself that he was a primary reason I started playing this game nearly six years ago. Certainly the course of direction my life has taken since then is remarkably different than it would have been had ESPN's WSOP telecasts in the summer of 2003 not been so captivating in part thanks to Moneymaker's "normal guy" charm and hyper-marketable last name.

In level six, I flat-called a raise from vinnyb9 of Bodog fame with pocket Kings. I raised his bet of 1.7k on a rainbow flop of Jack-Nine-Three to 4k. When he checked the Eight on the turn to me, I went ahead and "sped up the process" as Timex would say and moved all-in for 11k. It would have taken a photo-finish camera to see whose chips got into the pot faster: mine or vinnyb9 and his Queen-Ten.

After that, I went to the casino buffet. A pretty unremarkable point of pride for me is all of the Harrah's buffets I've been to. Let's just say I've been around. The Tunica version by far wins the Most Fried award. Any food that has ever gotten notoriety for its tastiness after being fried was in this buffet: pickles, green tomatoes, steak, you name it, they have it here. Perfect way to start off my Eat Less Food and Don't Shave resolution for the month of February.

Lastly, I got an idea today that I thought was a pretty good one. Let's just say it involved getting a tad bit political in the poker world. However, I'm not as optimistic about its chances anymore. After farming the opinions of some guys like Shaniac, Bill Edler, Allen "Chainsaw" Kessler, and Nat Arem, I'm not sure the time and energy required to do it in the way I had envisioned is such a good idea. Certainly there are less flamboyant approaches and more influential channels than myself who could attempt to get a four color deck instituted at the WSOP.

Time for Tunica

The $5k in Tunica is about to start here in a few minutes. I got in last night just in time to watch the Super Bowl in which I lost all four bets I had. There's something very funny about the poker world, from my perspective. You travel around to all these places and see so many of the same faces, but everyone seems so distant from each other. When I was in skydiving, this was not the case. All the familiar faces you'd bump into at conventions on the road seemed like lifelong friends even if you had only met them once or twice. In poker, it's as if everyone is afraid to make eye contact with you. Like as if you're going to check-raise them in the hallway if they glance at you with a smile. There's something awfully sad and lonely about that, I think. But hey, I guess we are all out here after each other's money in the end. Right?

To be sure, it's not like this everywhere with everyone. There are plenty of really nice people out here too. On that note, time to head across the street and see if I remember how to play this game.