Monday, November 30, 2015

Basic words and pictures

In Malta, they don't make false claims. They don't do bombast. They're pretty relaxed, in fact.

Example 1: in most airports these days, when you clear security, there are signs exhorting you to rush to your gate. 20 minutes away. Take the monorail. Hurry hurry.

The equivalent sign in Malta airport says simply "Relax. Your gate is only a few minutes away"

Example 2: near Portomaso casino there exists the finest convenience store I've ever seen. Once you are inside, there's an excellent selection of alcoholic beverages and fine wines, culinary delicacies and even some DVDs. Anywhere else, this oasis of fine taste and wide selection would have some high faluting delicatessen name and facade. In Malta however, here's what it looks like from the outside:



Already something of an egaming hub, Malta is becoming something of a refuge for online expats, driven from their native lands by regulations and restrictions. Ike Haxton lives there, and currently two thirds of the Chip Race are there. Daragh Davey moved there a while back (with ex Firmy Jaymo), and David Lappin is wintering there currently. It's possible we'll all end up in there in a few years in the end times of online poker as more and more Governments seek to tax, regulate and restrict us out of existence, and apart from the mosquitoes, there are definitely worse places to end up.

I spent much of the trip struggling with a cold that surfaced just after I got there. This is a recurring theme for me recently. One of the dealers told me the dealers nearly all get sick on these trips too, and she blamed the unhealthy Petrie dish conditions of poker rooms and the stark contrast between their air conditioned atmosphere and the warmth outside. I'm also wondering if my policy of doing a 25 to 30 mile long run the day before I fly out is wise (my old running coach was always quick to point out that as great as these long runs are, they do lower your immune system for about 24 hours).

I still managed to get in a few pleasant runs round the island, and a few deepish runs in the poker. The most noteworthy of these came in the EPT main event, where once again (as in Barcelona) I found myself on the feature table near the bubble, the easy butt of Stapes "He's got a girl's name" jokes (blame the ancient Gaels for that one and their more gender neutral culture that saw no reason to have different names for boys and girls: every old Irish name is simultaneously both and neither, even if in modern more sexist and less enlightened Anglocentric times people have moved towards clearer gender badging). This time, I had to get lucky early on (when I proved Scott Gray's oft repeated assertion that king Jack always beats ace queen to be true), and avoid getting unlucky on the exact bubble when I reshoved aces and was quickly called by Allen Bilic with queens. It being the bubble, we weren't allowed to table our hands immediately, but the convention in these spots is to tell each other what you have with the verbal equivalent of a nod and a wink that just about stays within the letter of the "you can't declare your exact hand" law but strays well outside the spirit of that law. So when Bilic asked if I had it, I assured him I had, much to the amusement of my stacked table mates. With one guy on another table down to his last three antes and two other sub one big blind stacks out there, my immediate neighbour to the left Paul Berende chuckled "Of course he's got it", his immediate neighbour Dan Smith concurred, and Faraz Jaka pointed at me and said "My money's on that guy to have the better hand". When it was announced I was all in, Max Silver shouted good luck to me from a nearby table, and Berende joked "He's not going to need it".

Which was true, but there's always a sweat. After my lovely dealer friend Sonia delivered a safe enough looking flop where nobody hit a set, she turned over a third heart to give Bilic a flush draw going to the river. After what seemed like an eternity while she waited for the TV director to tell her to proceed through her earpiece, she dealt a right colour wrong shape diamond river and I was able to breathe again.



Afterwards a lot of people asked me how tense I was. The answer is not as tense as most people imagine. Once I have made my decision and the outcome is in the lap of the poker gods, I become pretty stoical. I know in that spot that I can't fold aces, but I also accept that that means I'm destined to bubble almost a fifth of the time. If it happens, it happens. The ICM of those spots is what really interests me. It's very difficult to assess (exact solutions are trivial with 9 left, but too complex to solve with 90), and good players often diverge quite significantly in their intuition. Watching the livestream in another Maltese expat's place, Kevin Killeen turned to his host and said "Doke has either aces or kings here". His host pooh poohed the notion that my range was so tight. In reality, Kev nailed it. And I would have had to think about kings and not loved it (Ax being a big part of the calling range, and aces being out there almost 5% of the time you have Kings). Daragh Davey thinks kings is very close and might even be a fold.

In Barca, I bust shortly after being moved off the feature table after the bubble. I managed to avoid such a fate this time, but never really mustered any further momentum at a super tough table. Late into day 3, I found myself in shove or fold mode with a hand I'm supposed to shove. My nines ran into the big blind's queens and that was that. Apart from one hand I wished I'd turned into a bluff on the turn rather than a meek check fold, I had no regrets.

On livestream commentary I was reportedly referred to as a serial casher. This is a slightly less insulting version of the accusation often thrown at me that I'm a min cash specialist. While I understand why people taking a cursory look at my Hendon mob and seeing a forest of relatively small cashes as I close in on a century of scores, when I'm feeling contrary I sometimes raise objections to this view. A more careful look at my record reveals that when I cash, the position I finish more often than any other is......first (the same is true over a much more significant sample size online of almost 1000 final tables, where I also finish first more often than any other position). With 8 wins on my record meaning I win almost once every dozen times I cash live, I think this underlines the fact that I'm not just about min cashes.

Add in my eight second places and seven 3rds  (so when I cash I have finished top three a quarter of the time) and 31 other final tables (so when I cash I make the final table over half the time) and I don't think the view that I just min cash a lot stands up to scrutiny. There are actually very few pure min cashes on my rap sheet, and hopefully the fact that in recent months I have compiled a second and a ninth in two WSOP bracelet events, a third in a UKIPT High Roller (and another in a side event), and two non min cashes in back to back EPT main events will make it more obvious I don't just go around min cashing and getting my buyin back :)

Other highlights of the trip included the good fortune of sitting beside the guy who cashed the main event with one ante (lovely guy, lovely chat, lovely story), and flipping so bad in the six flipout events it actually was funny. And I went for dinner with Tony Baitson, one of the few guys who has been around the upper echelons of Irish poker since I started. Back in 2008 when we both final tabled the European Deepstack for our first big live scores, much of the press coverage afterwards was of the "Joe Beevers and eight unknown Irish donks made the final table" variety, so it tickles my fancy that not just myself and Tony are still around but also current Irish GPI number 1 Marc McDonnell and Gary Clarke were there too. Looking back, that final table looks a lot stronger than it did at the time.

My main goals for the rest of the year are to grind out a decent online final score for the year (at present my online year while decently profitable is lacklustre by my previous standards), secure Supernova status again (2016 will probably be my last year as a supernova as one of my New Year's resolutions is to move most of my volume back to other sites), and hopefully complete my century of lifetime cashes live in either Edinburgh or Prague.

Update: That last paragraph was written before my Supersonic chop (this blog got bumped for one about that) and my Edinburgh trip (where I secured the century of live cashes: more on that in the next blog on Edinburgh)

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Hyper hype is real

This week's blog was supposed to be a reaction to the changes Stars recently announced changes to their loyalty program. The gist of it was that while the dismay of high volume Starscentric grinders for whom rakeback represented a large portion of their income is understandable, Amaya's only real responsibilities are to their shareholders, and in fact the grinders who chose to play only on Stars for years are a big part of the reason Stars are now in such a powerful position dangerously close to monopoly. If any good comes of this, it will be to persuade poker players as a group that giving any one site so much dominance is not good, and that competition in the marketplace is vital. I was going to go on and give advice on the other sites and what's worth playing where, but that will have to wait until another blog since of course no sooner do I decide to write a blog about playing less on Stars than I go and chop the Supersonic.

It had been a frustrating Sunday to that point. I had built a lot of stacks but not converted anything and even my bread and butter satellites had gone bad. I took a really annoying beat in a Microgaming satellite when I was 2/5 with three times as many chips as 3/5, I flopped the nut straight against the chipleader who had slightly more than me. He didn't seem to realise we should be avoiding confrontation on ICM grounds with two packages up for grabs, and decided one pair was enough to call it off with. To my horror, I saw his one pair turned into runner runner house. Now I really wasn't feeling great, and was thinking of skipping the later stuff. Thankfully I've been doing a lot of work of my mental game recently, specifically rereading Jared Tendler and Tommy Angelo, and listening to Jared's podcast, as well as that of Eliot Roe and Dr. Tricia Cardner. The mental game is one area I haven't put a ton of work into down the years, primarily because I genuinely think it's naturally one of my strong points. But even if that's true and even if (say) I'm in the top 10% of players as far as mental toughness goes, there's always room for improvement.

So my initial "Screw this, I'm running crap today, everyone's getting it in horrible against me and getting there, I should just quit for the day" feeling lasted but a few seconds before I used the Tendler technique of injecting logic along the lines of "You're a professional, you should welcome the willingness of other players to get it in bad. It's going to happen on Sunday more than any other day with all the weekend warriors, which is why Sunday will always be your most profitable day, so forget about how you are running in this infinitesimally small part of your overall sample and just focus on playing as well as possible".

I don't really remember too much about the early stages but I had a stack pretty quickly and ran well all the way to the final table, which was 100% reg with some real beasts. When I saw the final table, I decided I'd happily chop at any point so I had the Deal option clicked throughout. Generally my policy is I will chop with other regs but I rarely if ever actively ask for one. When we got headsup I OPRed my opponent quickly and saw he had similar lifetime record to mine so I didn't think either of us had much edge. And in that game in particular, it being so shallow, I think it makes sense to chop. He had a big chiplead though so I guess he went for the quick kill first. When that didn't happen he must have checked Deal. Pretty much the easiest chop ever, neither of us insulted the other by haggling for more. Very similar script to my WSOP final table in Vegas now that I think about it. Laddering to headsup with a massive deficit but hanging on long enough to chop, then snap losing after the chop seems to be my specialty.

This was my second biggest online score ever, after my Super Tuesday chop described here. On that occasion, my beloved wife brought me crashing back down to earth when I told her about my result when she woke up:

"I cashed in that tournament. It just finished"
"How much?"
"85....."
She looks at me a bit confused as to why I seem pretty pleased with myself.
"85 bucks?"
"No. 85......"
"85 hundred. Wow! Great!"
"No. 85 grand"
"85 thousand?"
Good enough for a squeal it seems. After said squeal though, her face suddenly looks slightly disppointed, and she says
"But it's only dollars, right?"

On this occasion, the conversation went thus:

Me: Good morning my love. I chopped a tourney on Stars for over 36K
Beloved: Stars? Is that a dollar or Euro site?

Supersonic is one of the final tables Stars makes available on the replayer so if you want to watch an old nit ladder to headsup then hang on for a chop, have a look in the next day or two before it disappears. Be warned though: the entire final table took less time than the average time it took Zvi Stern to fold preflop on the WSOP main event final table. I'm toying with the idea of making a series of videos on ICM and making it as definitive as I can and this would probably be good material for the series (on a side note: if you think you'd be interested, let me know. The more people I know are interested the more likely I moved this from my Want To Do But Never Get Around To Acually Doing list to my Actually Gets Done list).

Besides that result I've been doing very well online since I got home from Malta, and turned what was looking like another lacklustre year online by my previous standards into a good one (assuming I don't do my proverbials between now and year end). I have two more live trips planned. First up, a few days in Edinburgh next week for UKIPT (where I will be selling action for the High Roller: watch my Twitter for more on that if you're interested). After a week back home I then head to Prague for a couple of weeks to take in the WPT, Eureka and EPT.

I watched the WSOP main event final table in its entirety, something I've done every year since the November 9 was introduced. I love it: for poker players it's almost our Christmas, complete with loud obnoxious relatives (in the form of all the elite players who take to Twitter to berate the players and ESPN commentators). While I thought McKeehan was an extremely worthy winner (he played by far the best), and respect to Blumenfield who gave a great account of himself, I thought it was overall the most disappointing and lowest standard final table of recent years. Most recreational players I know who watched found it pretty dull fare, but as I said on Twitter, if you think that was dull, wait for the one where they spin the wheel at the start and find they're all playing for 2 dollars.

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Donkey shots in Berlin, and the second most famous person from Dumfries

My original plan for WSOPE was to get there early and play almost all the Holdem bracelet events up to and including the main event. I was forced to change that when I realised that the main event ran into IPT Malta, which I had already qualified for. While this would only be an issue if I made day 4 of the main event (something I have failed to do in 7 attempts) and it could be argued that at that point I wouldn't be too upset to know I had a stack blinding out in a 1k event in Malta, that's not how I look at things. I don't like to go into an event where I have a good reason to be somewhere else before the end of it: I tend to think that on some sub conscious level there's a strong possibility for self sabotage, or at least not taking it as seriously as you should. Furthermore, the thought of going straight from Berlin to Malta spending three weeks away from home a few days after I'd just got back from the Isle of Man wasn't too appealing, and might make my wife feeling a little grumpy and abandoned. So I changed the plan to a week in Berlin that would allow me three to six shots at a coveted bracelet, and then a few days back home recharging my batteries and placating my wife before Malta.

First up was the six max event. In theory with around 200 runners this seems like one of the best bracelet shots for us Holdem specialists (since most bracelet Holdem events attract over a thousand runners) but it's fair to say it's a pretty stacked field. Six max tends to turn off recreational players not used to playing anything other than full ring, and attract the strongest online 6 max specialists who rightly see it as their best bracelet shot. My first table included Anthony Zinno (then third eventually winner in the WSOP leaderboard) to my immediate right and Manig Loser to his right. The tables did not get any easier either. When that table broke my new table included Ollie Price, Martin Jacobsen and Faraz Jaka. My final day one table saw Steve O'Dwyer to my immediate right, Simon Deadman next to him (replaced by Ollie Price when Simon bust), and Kevin Macphee next to him.

In such a tough field, I flipped my usual strategy of lowering variance and avoiding marginal spots to ramping up the variance and pushing even the most marginal of edges. This seemed to work out pretty well. At one point I was 3/17 but by the time we were down to nine, prolonged card death and a few minor losses saw me sub 20 big blinds and 7/9. The plan was still to keep the boot on the gas and take any promising spot rather than focus on laddering. Apart from this seeming like good strategy in a tough 6 max, I also felt with the high calibre of player remaining I was less likely to benefit from the ICM suicides that allowed me to ladder all the way from ninth to headsup short stacked in my first WSOP final table in Vegas this summer. It also should be said that the 100k up top was a lot less significant to me than the 300k I got for coming second in Vegas, which relieved any financial pressure I might have felt to lock up a five figure payday. So when I found ace ten in the small blind, it seemed like a pretty trivial shove over a button raise. The speed and exuberance with which he called made me think I needed to hit a three outer. I wasn't wrong: he had queens and hit a set on the flop. I wasn't dead though: in fact my three outs had become four as I flopped a gutshot, but I didn't fill it.

After my second place finish in Vegas this year, I was surprised at how little disappointment I felt at having got so close to the bracelet only to fall at the last hurdle. I think there were a number of reasons for this: I was genuinely thrilled with my own performance so had no regrets on how I played, and the fact that we were basically only playing for the bracelet at that point and I had locked up almost 300k and was a heavily outchipped underdog meant I knew I was going to lose in most universes.

By contrast, this time I was surprised at how disappointed I was not to have gone further. My entire focus was on maximising my chances of winning the bracelet (one of the reasons I didn't sell for this event was I didn't want to have to compromise on this as I would feel obliged to maximise investors equity), and while I would have been thrilled by the prospect of even one shot at a bracelet at the start of the year, the realization is starting to dawn on me that there are only so many chances an old donkey like me can expect to get in his life.

I regged the so called Oktoberfest and then went  for some food with my Anglo Chinese friend Chi. I gave him the choice of a Chinese or a fish and chip place: his Chinese heritage overcame his Englishness and I found myself in the rather bizarre position of interpreter between Chi (who speaks no German) and the Chinese waitress (who did, but spoke no English).

The Oktoberfest was a rather novel event. The low buyin (550 euro) and four starting flights have been done before (in Vegas this summer): the novel part is that they played well past the money in each of the four flights. Anyone who bust a flight was free to enter later flights. Anyone meant almost everyone in this case with just over 5% of the field advancing. This meant that in theory you could cash the same event up to four times. While this might horrify the purists I personally think it's a great idea. It overcomes one of the most annoying features of multi flight reentry tournaments where you can find yourself short stacked near the end of one flight still a distance away from the money wondering if you should gamble it up so you can reenter a later flight.

In this format, with the min cash already locked up, you should definitely be looking to gamble it up short stacked near the end of a flight, knowing that any equity you lose doing this is compensated for by being able to reenter.

My run in the six max meant I missed the first flight, and came in to the second one late. The table had one bracelet winner (Michael Wang) but lots of spots and I built a stack pretty effortlessly. I ran my starting stack up from 5k to over 40k, before running kings into Wang's aces for over half of it. I rebuilt again to over 40k, but ran horrendously in all ins to find myself sub 20 bbs at around 40k near the bubble. The final straw was when I reshoved tens over nines and lost.

My second bullet the following day saw me again effortlessly build a stack again only for most of it to disappear when I lost with Ak v a9 a bit short of the bubble. I managed to tread water between three and ten big blinds until we got within ten of the bubble, and I was pot committed on my big blind with sevens, and got rivered by king jack.

My third bullet in the final flight saw me lose most of my stack early on at the toughest table I'd been on all event that included Mike Leah, and never really recover. Still, even if I ended up bubbling the same tournament twice rather than cashing it four times, I do think the idea is a winner.

My final event was a 2k six max. I found myself seated to the immediate right of 2012 main event champion Greg Merson, which was prime position to eavesdrop on an interesting conversation between Greg and 2014 champ Martin Jacobsen on what it's like to win the main event, how neither of them were approached by a single online site after their wins (I guess sites are only interested in footballers and models these days), their views on Daniel Negreanu, and coyness about revealing who they were coaching in this year's November 9 (but admitting they both were coaching someone).

I advanced a little on my starting stack by reverting to my more normal low variance style, but was pretty card dead the entire tournament. After a few hours of folding down to what was now a sub 20 big blind reshove stack, AJs seemed like a fine candidate to do that over an open from a guy playing over 50% of hands. When my neighbour who had only played 2 hands all tournament snap called, I found myself hoping I had three outs. As it turned out I had against his kings, at least until he hit a house on the turn.

That freed me up to do a bit of socialising for my last two days in Berlin, and to play a bit online. Within a few hours I found myself headsup in an online satellite for Malta against one of the guys I had loosely arranged to meet the following day, 19 year old Indian pro Arsh Grove. Arsh is a young charismatic guy with boundless energy and bonhomie, so I would be very surprised if some site eyeing the potentially massive Indian market doesn't snap him up soon. On this occasion I was victorious, which made for some good banter when we met up the following evening. Also in attendance at various points in what became quite a messy alcohol fuelled gathering that moved from casino to restaurant to beer house to Irish pub were Niall "Firaldo" Farrell (who told us at one point that he's the second most famous person from his small town in Scotland: Calvin Harris being the first), current Irish GPI top ranked Marc McDonnell, PokerStars mind sports ambassador Jen Shahade and poker/chess champion Kenny. Firaldo's near legendary prowess at the poker table is topped by his legendary drinking ability. He was a little off his game tonight though. I am renowned for being really bad at drinking, so it was a shock of David versus Goliath proportions when I beat him in a Jägermeister race. I guess it was the injured pride from this setback that caused him to go sober for the entire Malta EPT (which he of course won), which meant the rest of the field were drawing dead. Whatever hope we might have against a drink addled Firaldo, we have no hope against a clean and sober one.

The night started rather well with a great Phil Hellmuth story from Canadian beast Shak from the 6 max, but you'll have to read my forthcoming Bluff piece for that one :)

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