Congratulations to my backers – you’re sort of in profit!
I made 18th place in tonights (by which of course I actually mean last night’s – Thursday 26th – because of the time difference) $540 tournament in the Orleans Open, scooping a whopping $945 prize. After a $25 tip (a little tight, but with 4% already withheld from the prize pool for dealers, I wasn’t going to go overboard) that’s $9.20 coming back to you for each 1% share.
Plus, as I’ve only paid $870 in buy-ins so far, that’s an overall profit from the two events I’ve played so far. $50 in total, so fifty cents for each share! Ship it!
It could have been so much sweeter had just one of three potentially huge hands won for me. After a massive pot just before the dinner break I was up to over $27k in chips, with the average at about $12k. I then lost 3 big pots; with a nut flush and gutshot straight draw that didn’t get there against two players all-in, and with AK losing twice against shorter stacks all in pre-flop – AQ and T3 if you must know. Any one of those pots would have put me in much better shape than the $6k I ended up when we were 3 off the money.
I don’t really know how, but I pulled off a survival miracle with blinds at $600/$1200 with a $200 ante, after deciding that it was probably better to try to creep into money (as 10th to 18th place all paid the same) than gamble it up and go broke on or near the bubble. After nobody was eliminated for what seemed like a week, I would have been all in on the big blind the very next hand when two players went broke at the same time – including one from my table. I thank them very much for paying no attention whatsoever to my stack size.
So it’s not a spectacular result, but it’s a start. Bring on the limit tournament!
So I have no chance now. Thirteenth player to enter. Not sure whether to expect an early exit, or a long hard slog followed by a cruel elimination on the bubble. Out of my hands really.
Live updates will appear here:
EDIT: The bust out was in 45th place, 27 were getting paid.
A very quick update, written the night before but post-dated to look like I scribbed it just before we leave for the airport, to introduce the world to my sponsors for the Orleans Open. My first tournament begins Tuesday!
In alphabetical order: AMG, Colm, David, Darren, Geoff, Jill, Matt & Paul.
Eight wise men, if we pretend that Jill is a man.
So that’s eight sponsors sharing 21% of my action across four tournaments. Umm, yeah, I accidentally oversold myself ever so slightly, after I relisted the eBay auction while I had my wires crossed with one of the winning bidders.
No harm done. Except that I know next time to take all the bloody fees into account. Even with the $2.00/£1 exchange rate I’m nearly $20 light from the auction sales…
Jerry Yang (a new poker millionaire, not the Yahoo! billionaire) took it, with pocket eights against Tuan Lam‘s ace queen with all the money in pre-flop. After getting outflopped, he runner-runnered a two-gap gutshot straight for $8.25m. A true champion.
A novelty side bet, that is. A bracelet… nah, he still hasn’t got one.
Thanks to some dodgy geezer streaming the ESPN pay-per-view coverage on a dodgy web site, I’ve been able to watch some of the Main Event final table live. Although, I didn’t exactly sit and watch it intently because it’s just a little bit on the dull side.
Of particular dullness are the incomprehensibly long delays where the dealer dutifully freezes (I think he’s also required to not breath) between dealing each round of cards when a player is all-in. They must have to take a moment to drag in a few more cameras, as it’s very important to make sure they can catch the reactions of all two players in the hand, get a fresh look at the prize money, and also see all five board cards as they sprint across almost half a yard of felt. How on earth does the ESPN crew cope with NFL games?
When everyone’s ready the announcer says, "Here comes the turn card". Thanks for that. These guys have been playing this tournament for eight out of the past 12 days. Right now it’s level 32 ($150,000/$300,000 blinds with a $40,000 ante) so that’s about 64 hours, not counting breaks, in total so far. They all know what comes after the flop by now, even if they didn’t when they paid $10,000 to enter.
The live audience may not have been paying such close attention as the players the past fortnight, but they turned up to watch the World’s Slowest Poker Game – it’s not like there’s nothing else to do in Vegas today – so they must have at least a passing interest in the game. I’m pretty sure they know that the last card dealt is called the river.
The folks watching at home (some of them at least) paid $19.95 to have 16 hours of their life drained away, so they probably know a bit of the lingo too. Even if they didn’t, there’s still Phil Gordon and A. N. Sidekick saying pretty much the same thing as the announcer at pretty much the same time. And when it’s shown to the masses on ESPN proper in August, there’ll still be Norman Chad. (I can’t possibly even start to go there).
So back to the victory. Phil Hellmuth was making his way to the commentary booth – which is actually a desk – and Gordon made a bet with Sidekick: how long before Hellmuth mentions his eleven bracelets? The line was set at 45 seconds, and Gordon took the under.
Hellmuth was given a flattering introduction… and then…
I’ve said it before so I’ll say it again: everyone loves a graph.
Just you try to deny it.
So I’ve been fiddling around with an idea I had for posting real time poker tournament updates to my blog, and it’s evolved into something rather more fancy than I first anticipated. The updates will look something like this.
This is not my result. It comes courtesy of mrmacacan on the UK Poker Life forum, where I’ve been making a nuisence of myself looking for testers for the new system. This tournament is all over now and mrmacacan won, which is why he gets the dubious honour of being immortalised right here. You never know, someday someone might even notice.
When I’m in Vegas (T-8, it’s so close now!) the graphs I post here will be live updates with my chip stack progress in real time. For anyone with a passing interest in how I’m doing – and particularly those who have a piece of my action – you can now get that information at-a-glance from a chart, saving you valuable seconds. Stakes in me for the Orleans Open are now sold out, thanks to eBay. Two of the three winning bidders have even paid me already, and I’m delighted that I actually managed to meet my bankroll fundraising goal on the very first try!
It’s a fiendishly simple system, but really quite funky – even if I do say so myself. At any time while you’re playing, you can send your chip counts in a text message and the graph will update itself automatically. So far it only have one UK-based incoming number, but there’s no reason that numbers in other countries can’t be added, so that world domination can ensue.
If only I’d come up with the idea a few weeks ago, gazillions of players at the WSOP could have been whipping out their cellphones to create their very own graph for the benefit of friends back at home. While there’s plenty of live reporting going on at the Rio, your chances of being covered are very slim indeed: first you have to be drawn to sit at a table with a known professional, and then you have to get involved in an interesting hand with them. Self-inflicted live updates are the wave of the future.
I’m still adding features to the software and I’m not prepared yet to say that it’s completely stable, but if you want to have a peek and get your own graph, mosey on down to chipgraph.com.
Of course, it’s extremely important that you understand the house rules regarding cellphones at the poker table, in case you happen to come up against an angle-shooting prick like David Singer. Singer was eliminated from this year’s Main Event on Day 1 after moving all-in with the worst hand, but is still adamant that his opponent’s hand should have been killed when his phone rang. The WSOP rules (rule 82) prohibit players from talking or texting when a hand is in progress, so Singer immediately jumped at the opportunity to try to get something for nothing.
Did his opponent answer the call? No. However, rather than subjecting the table to thirty seconds of whatever dreadful polyphonic soundalike ringtone identified that phone as his own while two players contested a significant pot, he pressed a button to reject the call. I guess if you know you’re about to lose ten grand, courtesy means nothing.
Fortunately, depsite Singer playing the quintessential sore loser and threatening to take the matter to the Gaming Commission, common sense has prevailed.
In just three weeks time I’ll be playing the first of four tournaments I plan to enter in the Orleans Open. Three no-limit Hold’em poker tournaments, and one fixed limit folly. My backers may be wondering what I’ve been doing in order to prepare for the fixed limit event.
Fixed limit tournaments are quite rare – The Orleans has two $40 limit tournaments in their normal weekly schedule, but they’re the only ones in town that I know of. I’ve never played one live before. I’ve played a few online, but mostly by accident on Party Poker, where they still insist on labelling fixed limit as simply "Hold’em" and you’re meant to remember that the default format for a poker tournament is fixed limit. The infinitely more popular no-limit tournaments are labelled "NL Hold’em" and pot limit is marked "PL Hold’em", so I guess the distinction is there. But given that even the times I’ve intended to enter a limit tournament, I’ve ended up at a table with at least half the players not wanting to be there, they might consider making a simple change for the benefit of many of their players. Oh, never mind, I just remembered who we’re talking about…
From what I remember, the first few hands always go like this:
Raise raise cap call call call call call. Bet raise raise cap call call call call call. Bet raise raise cap call call call call call. Bet raise raise cap call call call call call.
The sound of half a dozen players trying to bust out so they can start again in a different tournament that they actually want to play. But even after all that action, the losers still have 80% of their starting stack left. And so the pattern begins again.
You never know, it might be just the same as this in a $540 festival tournament, but I doubt it.
I’ve not really found anything lately, but I’m still on the lookout for some limit tournaments I could try online. I want to find a tournament with a decent sized field (I remember playing in a field of just seven on Empire a while back) and one where the players do actually want to be there, so I can get a feel for how the dynamics of the game change as the limits increase.
In case I don’t find anything suitable in time though, I can always keep in mind the strategy employed by the youngest ever World Series of Poker bracelet winner, Steve Billirakis. He won Event #1, $5000 World Championship Mixed Hold’em event – which alternated between no-limit and fixed limit every 30 minutes – aged 21 years and 10 days.
In this interview with Phil Gordon from the Expert Insight WSOP Podcast, Billirakis revealed (obviously I’m paraphrasing) that he is an arrogant rich kid who was desparate to get onto TV playing poker as soon as possible after his 21st birthday, without having – or thinking he might need to have – any idea how to actually play a game that made up 50% of this tournament. Sadly, he got very lucky.
LOL dickaments.
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"I don’t have much experience playing limit Hold’em, so I pretty much avoided playing limit Hold’em"
Oh, if you still want a piece of my action, I only have 5% left for sale, and it’s going on eBay very shortly if I don’t shift it!
Tony G does a brilliant job of demonstrating the blandness and complete lack of character at the Rio, by filming his video blog in a lovely taupe room where the World Series of Poker payouts are processed.
At 4.10am the pop up banner announced a ten minute break. I never had a ten minute break on Poker Stars before. Well, I guess that’s something to be pleased about if I don’t make it now.
Morning has broken, it’s getting light outside. I need to be up early in the morning to take Claire to school and her car to the garage. I wouldn’t mind being fit to drive, but that looks like a long shot. 373 players remain. 231 get paid, of which 220 walk away with an $11k package. Which really is an $11,000 cash prize, as Stars cannot register players into the WSOP.
The chip leader is at my table, and he could easily fold to victory, yet he’s still playing, calling big bets, and knocking players out. I’d quite like to move tables. I’d also quite like to see a big hand and have it hold up. I’m below average now, but it feels like I’m one coinflip away from standing a damn good chance.
That’d be a $5500 coinflip then. Where did my comfort zone go?
EDIT: Nearly 6am. The four figure coinflop was 66 vs AJ. I raised, and the flop looked good. An ace on the river and it was all but over. 256th. 8 hours, no cigar.
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