My pops e-mailed my this one and I got a good laugh out of it. Thought I’d pass it along…
The IRS
decides to audit Grandpa, and summons him to
the IRS office..
The IRS auditor was not
surprised when Grandpa showed up with his
attorney.
The auditor said, ‘Well, sir,
you have an extravagant lifestyle and no
full-time employment, Which you explain by
saying that you win money gambling. I’m
not sure the IRS finds that
believable.’
I’m a great gambler, and I
can prove it,’ says Grandpa. ‘How about a
demonstration?’
The auditor thinks for a
moment and said, ‘Okay. Go
ahead.’
Grandpa says, ‘I’ll bet you a
thousand dollars that I can bite my own
eye.’
The auditor thinks a moment and
says, ‘It’s a bet..’
Grandpa removes his
glass eye and bites it. The auditor’s jaw
drops.
Grandpa says, ‘Now, I’ll bet you
two thousand dollars that I can bite my
other eye.’
Now the auditor can tell Grandpa
isn’t blind, so he takes the
bet.
Grandpa
removes his dentures and bites his good
eye.
The stunned auditor now realizes
he has wagered and lost three grand, with
Grandpa’s attorney as a witness. He starts
to get nervous.
‘Want to go double or nothing?’
Grandpa asks ‘I’ll bet you six thousand
dollars that I can stand on one side of
your desk, and pee into that wastebasket
on the other side, and never get a drop
anywhere in between.’
The auditor, twice
burned, is cautious now, but he looks
carefully and decides there’s no way this
old guy could possibly manage that stunt,
so he agrees again.
Grandpa stands
beside the desk and unzips his pants, but
although he strains mightily, he can’t
make the stream reach the wastebasket on
the other side, so he pretty much urinates
all over the auditor’s desk.
The auditor
leaps with joy, realizing that he has just
turned a major loss into a huge
win.
But Grandpa’s own attorney moans
and puts his head in his
hands.
‘Are
you okay?’ the auditor
asks.
‘Not
really,’ says the attorney. ‘This morning,
when Grandpa told me he’d been summoned
for an audit, he bet me twenty-five
thousand dollars that he could come in
here and piss all over your desk and that
you’d be happy about it!’
US Reaction to 9-11 made simple. Ah, gets better with every viewing!
Got my own 7 game table over at ftp a couple weeks back and been meaning to blog about it. Come play with me! I just got done playing a session there in case you are wondering why I’m not sitting in the screenshot.
No video today, but I’ll leave you with a quick article Becoming a pro gamer which games pay the most? I used to play a lot of counterstrike back in the day. Glad I switched to poker as it pays about a million times better for being half as good as the best in the world. Can’t believe it’s not even mentioned here. I guess poker is less of a “game” and more just gambling in most peoples eyes.
Job Security. In a time when US unemployment is at it’s highest levels in decades one thing we as poker players ought to be thankful for is that we cannot lose our means of making a living due to anyone’s actions but our own. We cannot be fired, and if we lose money at work, well we have no one to blame but ourselves. Sure you can make excuses as most of us do for running bad and blame the poker gods all we want, but ultimately our luck will even out over our career and if we put in the proper amount of time, hours and dedication we will succeed and make money.
This is not necessarily true in other jobs and the fact that poker is for the most part (with the exception of a few tourney donk winners) a meritocracy where if you work hard and are good at your job you will succeed. Think about all the other people a typical 40 hour a week job employee has to depend on for his or her livelihood. First he has to impress someone enough for them to hire them. Then he has to work hard to keep his or her employer happy so that he won’t be fired. It’s not even enough that he is good at his job and gets his work done, he has to make sure he still looks like he’s busy even if he has no more work to do so he won’t appear lazy. He has to make sure he doesn’t say the wrong thing to his boss, or give some offhand comment that may offend him personally that may be detrimental to him getting a promotion. He may even work hard and do a good job with his work, but a coworker he is working with on a project slacks off and as a result makes him look bad in front of his boss. Even if he and his coworkers do a good job, this does not necessarily translate into being paid more. His boss may still fire him due to the recession hitting, or he may promote someone else that he enjoys working with better but doesn’t do quite as good of work as him or his hard work may just go completely unnoticed. In other words, the system is not setup fairly to reward the hardest and best workers with the highest pay. While poker is not perfect either in this regard, you have to agree that it is a much more fair system than the typical 40 hour a week career guy faces.
So next time you suffer a bad beat, or encounter a big losing streak think about this for a minute. Yeah sure you lost money, sure you got it in good, but as long as you practice half decent bankroll management at least you’ll still be able to go to work tomorrow and have the opportunity to make money working. A lot of others, about 10% of America to be exact, are not lucky enough to be able to say the same.
In case you missed them in the Superbowl.
In case you haven’t noticed I’ve been AWOL for the past six weeks. Blogging is kind of a vicious cycle where when I’m super busy I have all these things to blog about, but not much time to do it OR I have all the time in the world but nothing new is really going on in my life so I have nothing to blog about. I needed a little break from blogging anyways, but now I’m back and have all these fresh new things to talk about!
What have I been up to you say? Well, in mid-December I flew out to Philadelphia to visit an old college buddy of mine and spent a week hanging out with him seeing the sites and checking out Atlantic City for the first time. After that it was back to Seattle for a couple of days followed by a ten day trip back to the east coast to North Carolina to spend Christmas and New Years with my family. I came back to Seattle for about a week and then it was straight off to the other side of the world to Melbourne, Australia for the Aussie Millions with serbie for ten days. I just got back from that a week ago and am finally settling into a normal routine again which I haven’t had in what seems like ages now. I’ll probably write up a couple trip reports for those as a lot happened, but my hotel in Melbourne cost $27/day internet(excuse #3 for not blogging) and while they suckered me into it twice, I wasn’t about to pay for it every day just so I could give you all daily tourney updates like I do during the wsop.
2009 Results? 2010 goals? December 2009, January 2010 results? You wonder? I played a lot on both my laptop and desktop during these months due to traveling so I can’t really post a monthly graph or stats without either double posting from both databases or combining databases, neither of which I am prepared to do. December ended up being my 3rd losing month of 2009 with me losing around $29.5k. January I bounced back a bit and won something like $17k online, but lost about $3k playing live along with having another couple grand in travel expenses, accommodation, food, entertainment etc.
2009 was an okay year monetarily wise, I made more than most of my real life peers, but suspect I made much less than I lot of my poker peers. I’d rather not go into specific numbers for the year (yes, I pay my taxes btw I think I’ll owe something like 33 cents for every dollar I made in 2009) but I will say I ended up making <100k which is kinda meh for me. I played bigger than usual in December which I realize now may have been a mistake. I was reading in the wall street journal in December about how most traders tend to avoid placing risky or high volatility bets in December simply for the reason that they want to lock up their gains for the year and not destroy all their profit for the year in the last month of the year. While this is somewhat fish talk (lol locking up wins your poker career is all one big session, right?) I do see some merit to this and I may consider dropping down instead of shot taking next December for this very reason.
2010 goals. First I'd like to look back at my 2009 goals They were to
1. Not play any 10/20 until I make a post showing I have 100k online
2. Stick to my new schedule and focus on getting 25-30 hour tilt free poker playing in per week
3. Always maximize my hourly rate when playing. If this means 6 tabling 2/4 because that’s the best games running now so be it. If it means 2 tabling 5/10 so be it. The one exception I will add to this is learning a new game. So for example I’ve been playing some more PLO recently and obviously 1 or 2 tabling 1/2 HU PLO is not maximizing my hourly but hopefully this will improve my lifetime hourly rate as a poker player. This also means game selecting well, playing longer when winning, quitting if I am starting to tilt etc.
I’m pretty sure I failed miserably at #1. I’m a sucker for good games what can I say. I had some good sometimes month long spurts at #2 which would inevitably be interrupted by travel or visitors or staying up late one night and ruining it for the next three weeks. I’d really like to get better at keeping a schedule and sticking to it in 2010. If you want to make a lot of money at online poker, you really have to leatherass it up and grind 40 hours a week. I did okay at #3, though lately I’ve been playing some regulars in headsup 7 game and losing a bit to them overall which I’d like to stop. It’s really a waste of time and I’d be much better off grinding some lower 6max games. One thing I am proud of from 2009 is all the new games I learned. I think I paid a lot both in opportunity cost, and in “tuition” (losing a lot when first learning) but I think my newfound skills will really pay off for me in 2010 and beyond. I see a lot of the pure nlhe guys struggling these days and it’s nice to know I can table select a much wider range of games and limits than them and can usually find good games with fish instead of figuring out how to eek out that extra .02BB/1000 vs the 5/10 regs every day.
I’m still debating what I want my goals to be for 2010. Realistically if I wanted to make 1/4 a million I think I’d need to put in at least 500-600k hands or 40-50k hands per month. I’m not sure I’m prepared to do this so I have not committed to it yet, but it’s still weighing on my mind. The only goal I KNOW I have is I’d like to final table a wsop event. I plan on playing as many events as I can this summer and giving myself a real shot at a bracelet. That’s it for now, happy groundhog day everyone!
Add another $4k I lost playing some pretty good high stakes stud games for a total daily loss of $28k. Weee. Kinda frustrating that my biggest losing day is more than twice as big as my biggest loser now. Oh well. My time will come.
Here’s the big drop at the end. Pretty gut wrenching turn and river IMO. I think I played it standard but not totally sure. I could have taken a couple of different lines including just calling the 3 bet preflop but I think the money was getting in anyways. As played I’m a slight dog with 43% equity on the flop in case you are wondering.
On the bright side of things:
-I’m only down about $16k for the month which I think I MAY be able to push through, but it’s going to be hard esp cause I’ll drop down in limits for a few days now. In all likelihood I’ll be happy with a $8k loss or less for the month.
-I had a great time in New Jersey/Atlantic City/Philadelphia visiting my friend and wrote up a rough draft of my trip report. I’ll try to finish editing it and post it sometime in the next couple of days so be looking for that.
-I made some more progress getting some ATM leads today. You really have to be persistent at this and just go to as many places as possible before you find someone genuinely interested.
Be good and happy holidays!
I had to move up to where they respect my raises imo.
Yesterday I spent all day watching “Dr Razz’s”, “Razz made complex” eight video series on stoxpoker.com. It definitely opened my eyes to quite a few things and made me realize how poorly I was playing previously. Razz is a very difficult game to learn in my opinion because you can’t just pull up your equity on any given street, compare it to the pot odds, and make a decision that way. In fact that is a very poor way to learn the game and you will end up making loads of mistakes if you go about it that way. Dr Razz has compiled a series of graphs that are somewhat complicated to understand at first, but once you do they are immensely helpful in determining the correct play in any situation on any street.
If you are looking to learn razz, I suggest you start out by playing some low stakes for a couple 1000 hands and basically lose, but try to figure things out on your own at first. After you learn the trouble spots, rules, etc then I suggest you suck it up and watch the 7 hours of video he put up and do some analysis on your own afterwards. Your mind will be blown. My biggest mistake I found I was making was playing too loosely on 3rd and then folding too easily later in the hand (usually 4th or 5th) which is a pretty huge leak. I obviously have a ways to go before I consider myself anywhere close to an expert at this game, but for now, having watched all the videos I actually think I’m half decent.
That is the beauty of being able to play a lot of games and not just being a specialist in one. As you can see I was getting crushed at 10/20 razz, but there was a whale giving his money away at 100/200 razz today so I figured I was +EV in the lineup. While I may be leaking money to the other 100/200 razz regs there, I’m sure it was a profitable spot for me. At the same time, I got to play with other really good razz players and even learned a couple of things from them!
On Thursday I’ll be doing some traveling to the east coast to visit a college buddy of mine in Philadelphia. I’m super excited as I’m going to be going to Atlantic City for the first time. I’m not really sure what to expect, but people have said don’t expect Vegas, it’s gotta be better than 99% of all the other casinos I’ve been to though! I’ll be sure to report back. That’s all for now, if you find yourself getting bored at the tables this week go try some razzle dazzle! You might actually like it!
Like I said last post I ended up having a good month and cleared about $20k including a $4k stars bonus finally. I didn’t end up getting that many hours or hands in, but I did win some monies so that’s all that really matters, right? The thing I’m most proud of last month was that I was in the green for all three stud games (though it’s mostly due to just running good in the bigger games). I’m definitely improving, but obviously still have a ways to go, especially in my stud8 and razz games.
Laptop results were +$8600 over 1900 hands in HEM and +$1200 over 1000 stud hands. Lost a bit in donkaments.
Desktop HEM
Desktop Stud
Desktop HEM Graph
ATM
ATM machine wise I only made about $300 as opposed to $400 the previous months. This could be due to a number of thing such as natural variance, a shorter month, football season coming to an end and nobody want to see their 1-8 team play anymore, the weather getting colder and worse so not as many people not want to go out anymore. I’m not really sure. I just hope it doesn’t drop again in December. There’s not much more I can really do at this point except making sure the machines stay stocked at all times.
I have been working on acquiring some new spots recently. I’ve spoken to three prospective locations that sounded semi-interested which I’ve given my information to. I’m just waiting to hear back from upper management. I kind of forgot how difficult it is to actually speak to someone in charge at these places and convince them to work with me. Just gotta stay persistent and hope to get lucky again. Cross your fingers for me.
In case you haven’t heard it yet. Awkward Tiger Woods voicemail message to Jamie Grubbs.
Part one of my play was released yesterday. It’s hard to link directly, but if you go to Stoxpoker Videos and select coach “Eric Chipsahoya Rodawig” it is the “7 game mix: part 3” video. This section is mostly Stud8 with a little Razz thrown in at $40/$80 and $100/$200 7 game on FTP. The pace is a bit on the slow side, but it’s very thorough and I definitely learned a few things. Part two should be out in late December early January.
Also, I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet, but I’m going to Melbourne, Australia for the Aussie Millions from Jan 14th-23rd with my boy Sarvesh/Serbie who I lived with this summer in Vegas. Drop me a line if you are going too and would like to hang out down under. Plane tickets were about $1700 roundtrip from Seattle and splitting a hotel ended up being about $100/person/night.
So I guess you’re probably wondering why I’ve been AWOL the past month and where the hell your monthly strategy post is. Well the truth is I actually wrote two strategy posts in November but decided not to publish them for now. I’ve done my best to monetize this site without completely selling out and paying someone else to write my entries for me obviously, but I’m making way less than $50/month at this and for the amount of effort I have to put in to those posts I think there are much better (and more profitable) ways to publish my content. So for now I’ve decided I’m going to write two articles a month and save them up for a book/e-book. So ya, be looking for that to come out in like 2013 when I finally get enough content, haha!
A whole lot has happened in the past month I’m not sure where to start. Pokerwise I ended up having a good month, I’ll post detailed results next post, but it started off really poorly with me digging an $8k hole or so and busting my stars account. Big thanks to Btimm for loaning me some stars money for a bit so I could grind out a $4k bonus there 8 tabling $1/$2 which coincidentally took quite a bit of the month. I started off 8 tabling NLH, but switched to PLO after a couple days after I realized how bad the NLH games have gotten even at the $1/$2 level. Here are my thoughts on both the games at the $1/$2 level.
$1/$2 NLH
The typical regular plays like the following: Relatively tight opening standards (but once they open they are not folding to a raise) and on a lot of tables. I’d say 22/18 or something and has a completely unpolarized 3 betting range. So instead of 3 betting JJ+,AQs and trash suited hands, they 3 bet 77+, KJo+. They love to flat 3 bets with pairs and set mine or peel a cbet on the flop. They love to flat 4 bets with 88 or KQ or even JTs from time to time. They also cbet too much.
To combat this I eventually adjusted by:
4-betting larger and for value – If they want to call my 4 bet with JTs or 99, fine, but it’s going to cost them 1/3 of their stack. No more 25-27bb 4 bets like I’d make at 5/10 or 10/20 where people usually shove or fold. Gotta get that extra 8bb where you can.
Betting bigger for value on the flop and turn – This is sort of an extension of the first adjustment because the $1/$2 regs love to call and peel on the early streets to try and hit their hand, but when the big bets come out on the river they are pretty passive and actually folded quite bit. So you need to punish them early in the hand for the maximum.
3-betting a wider range for value and less polarized – If they want to call my 3 bets with 33 100% of the time to try to spike a set, fine but that just means I don’t really want to be in there with the J7s as much as I’d like to have 88.
What this all adds up to is me putting in a lot money in the early streets of a hand. This does not play to my strengths as a poker player in my opinion. I used to say and think playing postflop and especially turns and rivers was where my edge came from but before I started playing a lot of PLO I’m not sure that was the case. Now I know for a fact I play better on those streets than the vast majority of players, but playing 100bb deep against $1/$2 regs I just don’t get a chance to use this skill very much and my edge diminishes drastically.
Another area where I believe I have a big edge is adjusting to my opponents. 90% of regs don’t adjust their game at all to who their playing and just play “their game” the vast majority of the time. Well I found that when I was 8 tabling I had a hard enough time keeping with all the action let alone adjusting to my opponents, so I found myself very much auto piloting and there goes another one of what I believe to be my edges out the window.
The reason I think PLO is such a great game is there isn’t much edge to be had preflop so it’s much harder to play a cookie cutter game given to you on a preflop hand chart by cbetting 90% and win. I think a great game would be ante hold’em where everyone antes, is dealt two cards, a flop is dealt and THEN the betting action begins. But such a game doesn’t exist so to PLO I go.
$1/$2 PLO
The typical $1/$2 PLO reg is extremely loose passive. He plays 40% of hands or more preflop and never folds anything postflop. I would strongly advise against bluffing, like ever. I can’t tell you how many times I would fire 3 barrels with nut blockers only to be called down by the 12th nuts. If you follow this advice you will do well. I could go into more specifics, but it really does just boil down to bet your good hands and check/fold or check down your weak hands.
Okay well enough poker strategy what else did I do this month? I made it out to Tulalip Casino about 30 mins outside of Seattle for the first time. I went with a couple of my non poker friends so we just gambled it up with some low stakes $10 Blackjack, Pai Gow and craps but I checked out their poker room and I’m not really interested in playing there anyways. Washington state law forbids you from betting more than $500 per hand link, so the highest NL stakes they had was $5/$10 which is basically cap NL with 50bb which I’m not really interested in playing and the highest limit game they had was $4/$8 which I’m definitely not playing unless there’s plenty of booze involved. Overall I ended up breaking even, but got a good two hours of gambling entertainment in. I was a bit disappointed that the drinks were still $5 a pop even when you’re gambling but I guess this is standard everywhere but Vegas from my experience.
I bought the New Super Mario Bros
I discovered a new, ultrasecret, completely natural way of increasing my stamina and attention span: yawning
This video got me thinking of all the different ways you could unlock a lock (voice activated, whistling, fingerprint, your iphone, possibilties are endless). Are keys sooo 20th century?
Completely mindblowing. We are in store for a bizarre 21st century IMO.
I was playing headsup to determine the winner of the first table in today’s $322 4x shootout FTOPS #13 today when the following hand occurred.
Full Tilt Poker Game #15928294408: FTOPS Event #13 (109222915), Table 114 – 60/120 – No Limit Hold’em – 15:09:43 ET – 2009/11/10
Seat 3: andr3w321 (4,654)
Seat 4: Slutaments (7,346)
Slutaments posts the small blind of 60
andr3w321 posts the big blind of 120
The button is in seat #4
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to andr3w321 [Ks Th]
Slutaments has reconnected
Slutaments raises to 360
andr3w321 calls 240
*** FLOP *** [4h 9d Jh]
andr3w321 checks
Slutaments has 15 seconds left to act
Slutaments bets 500
andr3w321 has 15 seconds left to act
andr3w321 calls 500
*** TURN *** [4h 9d Jh] [Js]
andr3w321 has 15 seconds left to act
andr3w321 has requested TIME
andr3w321 bets 1,050
Slutaments has 15 seconds left to act
Slutaments calls 1,050
*** RIVER *** [4h 9d Jh Js] [Qc]
andr3w321 has 15 seconds left to act
andr3w321 bets 2,744, and is all in
Slutaments has 15 seconds left to act
Slutaments has requested TIME
Slutaments calls 2,744
*** SHOW DOWN ***
andr3w321 shows [Ks Th] a straight, King high
Slutaments shows [Qd Qh] a full house, Queens full of Jacks
Slutaments wins the pot (9,308) with a full house, Queens full of Jacks
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 9,308 | Rake 0
Board: [4h 9d Jh Js Qc]
Seat 3: andr3w321 (big blind) showed [Ks Th] and lost with a straight, King high
Seat 4: Slutaments (small blind) showed [Qd Qh] and won (9,308) with a full house, Queens full of Jacks
Never been so badly slowrolled in my life. I’m sitting there all gitty I rivered a straight rooting for a call only to finally be shown the nut full house after a minute of him tanking. I have a newfound hatred for all Danish poker players. Check out Jeff Lisandro’s life story. Australian poker players are way cooler than Denmark’s.
Part 1
http://pokertube.com/Movies.aspx?movie=11777&title=Jeff_Lisandro_s_Life_Story_1_3&player=1
Part 2
http://pokertube.com/Movies.aspx?movie=11778&title=Jeff_Lisandro_s_Life_Story_2_3&player=1
Part 3
http://pokertube.com/Movies.aspx?movie=11779&title=Jeff_Lisandro_s_Life_Story_3_3&player=1