Res Ipsa Poker: January 2011

Monday, January 31, 2011

Prepared to SCOOP

Another World Blogger Championship of Online Poker is in the books. Some people won giant prizes. Some won medium size prizes. They're all good. Thank you PokerStars!

Playing poker on Sundays has always been a problem for me. I have obligations that conflict with tournament scheduling. Always have. I do periodically wonder if I would have become a MTT donk if I had ever been able to play Sundays, but it's just pointless speculation. Sundays are not poker days for me.

At least it's winter and the 15:00 ET start meant that I had a little time to play in the Main Event.

I had drizz at my starting table. About three hands in I picked up QQ. Some unfortunate soul had JJ and decided to put all his chips in on a 9 high flop. He didn't get there.

Still in the first half hour I found another willing donor, a donk who decided to shove with AQ on an ace high board. Alas for him my AK held and I had 9,000 chips and was up to 3rd overall.

And then nothing much else happened. I floated up and down between 9,000 and 12,000 chips through the second break, when I had to leave. I had about 9,000 left when I shut it down and didn't think I'd make the money with ~450 runners left. I was wrong. I blinded off in 192nd place, good for another $11 SCOOP ticket.

I got nothing in Saturday's qualifier, so the final count for the series is 2 x $11 and 1 x $16.50 SCOOP tickets. Not stellar but not bad. I'll definitely be looking forward to the release of the SCOOP schedule.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Nothing Additional

No more WBCOOP scores to report so far. I played the PLO8 event on Wednesday and busted in the 240s. I donated thousands of chips to the tard on my direct left who ran hotter than the sun. No success in Thursday's NLHE event either - I busted very early when AK < AQ all in preflop.

And then I just plain forgot about yesterday's 8 game mix. I certainly could have played, but I'm not sad that I missed it. Rough day yesterday.

Today is the final NLHE "qualifier" and tomorrow is the main event. I will probably play both like a complete tard, since as usual I have no time to play, especially on a Sunday.

Good luck to all who are playing, get those SCOOOOOP tickets

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Twickets

Many years ago my parents took my siblings and I to the Great America amusement park outside of Chicago. It was a pretty big deal to us and we had a great time, but curiously enough one of the random memories that sticks from that trip was an advertising promotion. Great America had an offer of some sort - I don't remember the details, this was a long time ago - where if you brought in your full price ticket for the day you could get a ticket for the next day for some absurdly low price. It might have even been a dollar. Obviously they just wanted your body in their park spending money.

The promotion was called "twickets". For twin tickets? Two tickets? I don't know. Twickets.

For whatever reason it stuck and we've been referring to twickets for years.

And now, for the SCOOP, I HAS TWICKETS.

Yeah, yeah, crummy build up, cool story bro, I know. I was just trying to come up with a way to embellish slightly the "oh hai I finished 51st in WBCOOP event #2 for another baby SCOOP ticket last night" post.

Sigh. FAIL.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Fair Compensation

After the fact "live blog" of WBCOOP Event #1 on PokerStars:

14:00 - Play begins. Pot limit omaha, full ring. 540 entrants, lots of eurotards. T3000 to start. 200 people get tickets to the WBCOOP Main Event, the top 153 get various SCOOP ticket prizes too.

14:01 to 14:20 - I play about two hands past a limp. I pick up some chips with top set versus second set on a straighty flushy fugly board. I pick up some more when I push out five limpers with a pot bet after I flop top two and a gutshot on a 9 high board.

14:20 - I have to leave. I sit out with about 4500 chips.

14:20 to 16:40 - attend pretrial conference and conduct other business away from the office. It takes longer than it could have/should have.

16:45 - return to office, check tournament status. Discover that I just blinded off in 148th place, winning my main event ticket plus an $11 SCOOP ticket. Boom!

16:46 - Tiger Woods style fist pump

16:47 - much LOLing

Yeah, that was pretty unexpected. My goal was to get to 10,000 chips (or busto) before I left, but my horrible weak/tight nature prevents me from tarding it up with hands like Q663 unsuited. As it turns out the delay in getting back probably helped, since I would have shoved any four cards pretty much long before I blinded off.

I still can't believe that my dead stack survived TWO bubbles. That's just crazy.

Event #2 tomorrow evening, I think it's at 17:00. A friendlier time to Eastern US donkeys.

Lighting An E-Ticket On Fire

Under the weather this weekend. Really didn't feel like doing anything. What do you do when you don't feel like moving? Play online poker of course.

I had a 109 ticket in my Stars account courtesy of a prior WBCOOP (reminder: WBCOOP starts TODAY) so I played the 40k guaranteed 6 max on Saturday.

I didn't play well but I played decently enough I guess. I got a timely double late in hour 2 with KK but was still below par. I saw a guy go out when he had KK and AA cracked on back-to-back hands (by pocket 7s and KJs), all in pre-flop.

The next hand, I fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book. UTG limped. I found AKs in MP and was in shove-monkey mode. What does UTG have when UTG limps as things are getting close to the bubble? 99% of the time it's AA.

Duh.

Maybe if I hadn't been shoving every half-decent hand for the previous 30 minutes I could have gotten away from it.

Oh well, it was just an e-ticket.

Monday, January 10, 2011

So 2011

Many years ago, someone -- I want to say ftrain -- eviscerated the medium in a mere three words: "Blogs are gay".

Now that it's 2011, you get people like this, some random 2+2 NVG tard:

A blog doesn't get viewed and i'm not interested in being a part of one anyway. I love this website because it discusses all aspects of poker and has useful contribution from people of all facuets of life. blogs are just useless and never taken seriously whereas here there will at least be an open discussion of ideas and they will be thrown out for valid reasons not just because no one looked at or considered them.

Headline: It's 2011, blogs downgraded to just useless.

Oh Poker

Here we are ten days into 2011 and I haven't done anything pokery. Odd. I think that might change tonight as I "watch" the BCS national championship game. (I say "watch" because I don't care in the slightest who wins). It should be the perfect time to poker it up.

What I should do but won't do is play some tournaments to sharpen up my weak/tight tourney game. Our friends at PokerStars have announced the 2011 World Blogger Championship of Online Poker (WBCOOP) and it's coming up FAST:

Game	Date	Time
Pot Limit Omaha	Jan-24	14:00 ET
No Limit Hold’em	Jan-25	19:00 ET
Pot Limit Omaha HI/Lo	Jan-26	22:00 ET
No Limit Hold’em	Jan-27	14:00 ET
8-Game Mix	Jan-28	17:00 ET
No Limit Hold’em	Jan-29	19:00 ET

The 2010 WBCOOP Main Event takes place January 30 at 15:00 ET.

Assuming that Stars can get my registration issues resolved in time, I plan to play as many as possible. There are a ton of goodies on the line, namely $58,000 in SCOOP tickets and a $5,000 in live events package.

Thank you PokerStars!

Monday, January 03, 2011

Happy New Year

It's hard to believe another year has come and gone. Personally, I thought 2010 sucked. It was right up there with 2009 as a contender for worst. year. ever. But that's just me and whatever, it's history. It's never too early to start writing a different story and a change in the calendar just makes it cleaner when you write the story later on.

I don't know about you but I'm still waiting for an earthquake to reshape the poker landscape. There was a lot of chatter at the end of the year about the Reid bill. I can't say that I'm sad that it failed. I would like online poker to be explicitly legal as much as anyone, but not at the cost of giving away the store to Caesars Entertainment and other brick and mortar gambling entities.

***

I haven't been playing much and when I do it's been down in the bargain basement of Rush NL. I even got in an hour of Rush on the phone the other day while waiting for a service call. I didn't quite win enough to pay for my bill for the month, but at least I got a couple days paid.

Poker will continue to be a pleasant diversion as long as it's available.

The social aspects are probably more enjoyable than the game itself. It felt like 2005 for a while yesterday while a bunch of people popped in to rail Drizz as he earned a nice payday. As a bonus I got to extol the virtues of Brett Favre to the lone Russian player at the final table (thank you Google Translate!).

I have no goals for 2011 other than to have fun and to continue to not risk anything I can't afford to lose. I like my chances. Oh, and yeah, add fix my blog template to the list.

***

It may be that I need to find an outlet for all my random personal observations. I shouldn't clutter up this space and not everything can be crammed into 140 characters. Could it be ... time for another blog?