150 Seat Guarantee

Well, I said it:

"Meanwhile, WSOP satellites have started. I'm not going to make a real push at it this year since I'm pretty sure it would be a bad idea to try and actually go play it -- I still have my theory qual on August 26th. But, Full Tilt is as usual running their massive 150 seat guarantee satellite, this year on June 21st for a $535 buy-in. I intend to win a seat into THIS tournament, and it'll be my one shot at the WSOP this year."

and I just did it:



Unfortunately, I don't think I can play in this, because it starts at 3pm tomorrow and I'm playing at church this week, and have to be at practice at 4:30pm.

However, there's another $535 tournament, also a Main Event Qualifier, that starts at 1:30pm and should be much smaller. I might just do that instead... or I might just unregister and keep the tournament credits for later use. We'll see...

my gchat buddy list...

...now contains a WSOP bracelet winner!

Congratulations to Leo Wolpert who won the $10k Heads Up NL Hold'em Event which ended on Tuesday night.

Leo was involved in the Michigan-Ohio State last-longer bet that I organized for the Main Event back in 2006 (which I talk about back in
this post). I can't remember if I actually met him then, but we e-mailed back and forth a bit, and hence he's been on my gchat list since then.

I thought about shooting him a "congrats" on gchat but it would've been totally random to him and I didn't want to seem stalker-ish. Of course, you might say I abandonded that by making this post, but whatever.

The Main Event starts on July 3rd. Doesn't look like I'm playing this year... sigh...

Hello from Michigan

The spring quarter has come to an end, and you know what that means... more time for poker!!

Maybe. I still have to study for the big qualifying exam on August 26th. But I barely played ANY poker at all during the spring quarter, so almost anything would be "more" at this point.

Lish and I are at the tail end of our vacation in Michigan, centered around Emily's wedding on Mackinac Island, and followed by time in Ann Arbor and Detroit. We're not gonna hit the Detroit casinos though since Lish wants to save that for when we actually go to Vegas, but I did get to introduce her to a little Chinese Poker while we were out for breakfast the other morning :)

Tonight I crossed the $300 mark on PokerStars, woooo! No idea how DN is doing there since I can't find any updates, but under his scheme I'd be at $50NL now (actually, I would have been since crossing $250). But I'm at about 2200 hands of $25NL right now, so still chugging along to 10k on that. It's gonna be kind of funny if/when my Stars account surpasses my Full Tilt account, which may happen since I've been taking my Stars account so seriously, but just been monkeying around on my Full Tilt account. hah.

Oops, I did it again

On Saturday evening, we had a Memorial Day Weekend BBQ/Party. There was beer involved. Well, before going to bed, I decided that it would be a good idea to sit at 5/10 (limit) heads-up. Long story short, my Full Tilt account now sits at about $705, a good drop down from about $1000.

On the other front, I played enough hands to clear my bonus at PokerStars! So that account now sits at about $260. I've played 1,632 hands at $25NL (I'm gonna start calling it that now instead of 10c/25c; they're the same thing), so I still have a ways to go before reaching my target of 10,000 hands and then doing some analyses.

I've barely been playing at all this quarter because school has been pretty rough... I think I've played MAYBE once every two weeks or so, and only for like an hour at most.

school woes

Haven't been playing as much lately due to school kicking my ass. However, I did cross the $200 mark today on Stars (now at $226.46). woo. :) My immediate goal now is to just play 10,000 hands at the 10c/25c level, because *NERD ALERT* I want to build up a sufficient sample size to do some statistical analyses of my play. I'm just curious to see what I might find if I take a close look at it.

Meanwhile, WSOP satellites have started. I'm not going to make a real push at it this year since I'm pretty sure it would be a bad idea to try and actually go play it -- I still have my theory qual on August 26th. But, Full Tilt is as usual running their massive 150 seat guarantee satellite, this year on June 21st for a $535 buy-in. I intend to win a seat into THIS tournament, and it'll be my one shot at the WSOP this year.

Lish and I opened the discussion for me taking her on her first Vegas trip, in early September after my qual. We're both excited about that :)

PLO: such a sick, sick, sick, sick...

...sick, sick game. I'm just playing 5c/10c and 10c/25c right now to learn this damn game, but man it's crazy tilting. That's all I'm gonna say, because anyone who has played much PLO is probably laughing and saying no duh.

In other news, I crossed $100 at PokerStars. This means I'm within grasping range of DN, because based on his last update he must still be somewhere below $125 as he has yet to reach the 10c/25c level under his 500BB rule.

Postponing the move up

I hit $50 last night on PokerStars, which is when I would move up to 5c/10c under the rules of Daniel Negreanu's challenge. However, 500 big blinds is a bit on the small side as far as conventional bankroll management wisdom goes.

Therefore, I've decided to delay the jump up to 5c/10c until I hit $100 so that I start it with 1000 big blinds. I may take the occasional shot at it before then though just depending on how I feel on any given night.

It took me about 1400 hands to get from $25 to $50, and it took DN only 252 hands which is just sick. However, it looks like his next step is taking him quite a bit longer because he's been at 5c/10c since then, and in a recent update that I just found he says that he has crossed the $100 mark but has yet to move up to the next level, 10c/25c. So now is my chance to catch up!!

On a slight side-note, there's been some comments from various writers online about this that are just flat out wrong and sometimes stupid. Let me point a couple of them out now.

Exhibit A: Here the author states, "At a certain point he will reach a level he can no longer beat. Judging by his inability to laydown top pair on High Stakes Poker, it is likely that level will be about $1/$2 or $2/$4 in todays games." There's so many reasons why this is a stupid comment. The guy is making this assessment based on a bunch of hands he saw on TV. He has little if any idea about the context of those hands, and I can guarantee you that Daniel was thinking about so many things in each of those hands that this guy would never have thought of nor perhaps even understand.

ok. next one.

Exhibit B: This one basically has the opposite problem, with the idea that Daniel's road will get easier as he moves up in stakes because of the "ridiculous" play at micro stakes, where players "are almost always going to call you down to the river, and pushing opponents out of pots is practically impossible." yeah, you sir just described the easiest games in the world to beat, and you're also speaking as if Daniel would not know how to adapt to these conditions even if he is too used to playing at high stakes where his full arsenal of weapons should be used.

Let me finish this off by saying that I don't want to glorify DN as some sort of poker deity or anything like that at all. I do think he is one of the best in the world today, and this is based on his record and some of his thoughts that I have read or listened too. Even his record is a dangerous metric to judge him on because anything can happen in the short run, but he has put up great numbers year after year that it would be hard to argue against this. But the way that he thinks about the game (as evident in his writings) is what impresses me more.

All that being said... Negreanu, I'm gonna whup your butt to $10,000. After that is unknown territory for me and I'll make no claims about that, but we will see.

Peter Chi vs. Daniel Negreanu

Ok Negreanu, you don't know this, but I'm racing you in your challenge.

I just reached the 2c/5c level yesterday, I'm at $25.03 now. It took me just under 2,200 hands, which is about 3 times the amount it took you (786 hands). So this means that you're 3 times the player that I am. haha.

Just kidding (at least, in the sense that you could make any judgment of that based on this). But according to his latest update, he's now at 5c/10c. I should point out, though, that he has had a 2-month head-start on me, plus I started with almost 3 bucks less haha. But on the other hand, I have a $25 bonus coming from PokerStars once I play enough hands... so between all these things I think I'll just call it even :)

I think I'm going to do things a little bit differently from him though, in that at some point I'd like to get off of cash games and switch over to SNGs and MTTs. I'm not set on that for sure though; we'll see how I feel down the road. But right now I'm thinking that at $100 I'll switch to the $5 tournaments and go from there.

The funny thing is how much I'm getting into this though. I was worried when I started that I wouldn't be able to take these micro-stakes games seriously, but... that's not true at all. Twice within these 2,200 hands I had come within $1 of the $25 mark, only to have it come crashing down. And I got just as excited and then subsequently demoralized as I would when I was playing for hundreds of dollars. That kind of makes me feel good though -- it's testimony that I play this game because I love it, and the stakes don't even matter per se. I mean they do matter in the sense that I'm eager to move up because each step up represents accomplishment. but. I dunno, I've always told myself that the day when playing poker becomes all about the money for me is the day I'll quit, if that ever happens.

Meanwhile I'm still hovering around $1k on Full Tilt... been up and down around it for the past month and can't break much higher than that yet. I'm staying at the $10s even though when I first started rebuilding that roll I was moving up at 50 buy-ins for each level, but the $20s just seem too high psychologically for me right now; if I whiff on just 5 in a row that's minus $100 right there, and that's far from unlikely on any given session.

Atlantic City in two days!!

shaniac vs. Shannon Shorr

There's been some drama between two semi-name players in the past couple of days.

First, who are these guys? The first thing that might not be too obvious is that these are both dudes. When I first started reading shaniac's posts on 2+2, I thought his screenname stood for Shania C. But it's actually Shane Schleger, a very active 2+2 poster and blogger with a ton of readers.

On the other side, Shannon Shorr is actually the reason this feud caught my eye -- he's a guy I played with for the 2nd half of Day 1 at the WSOP back in 2006. At that point, he was coming off of his first big score of his career: a 4th place finish at the Aussie Millions for about $200k. He has since become a very accomplished tournament pro, periodically being near the top of CardPlayer's Player of the Year standings and was as high as #2 this year.

Now, what happened? Well, NBC's National Heads-Up Championship is coming up. It's an invite-only tournament with a $20k buy-in. The criteria for selection is not clear-cut, and that is exactly the reason for this fiasco... the stink of it is that Shannon feels snubbed for not having been invited.

But here, let me just lead you to the post: Snubbed.

And here is shaniac's: Delusional.

And just for good measure, here is the list of people who WERE invited.

Soo... who is right? The thing is, I think shaniac makes really good points, but I don't think it was right for him to call out Shannon like that. Shannon was just ranting on his own blog, which, yes, is out in the open for people to see and therefore is open game for people to rip on and whatever. But... I mean, he really takes a number of shots at Shannon that I think are quite unnecessary and not only are hurtful, but detract from his point as well.

Discussion/debate/flaming continues here in this 2+2 thread.

February Graph

Well, here's the latest graph with February play included:



The line represents the beginning of February. So yeah, it's been up and down as usual, but according to this graph I'm up a couple hundred in the past month. Also this doesn't include that $200 bounty that I won in FTOPS.

Last night I decided to play limit cash games for some reason though. I have no idea why I thought that would be a good idea. And yeah it was not fun at all, and I dropped $160. I actually still feel pretty bummed about it. What's funny is that back in the old days I wouldn't even blink at a loss this size... but now that I've been rebuilding from almost nothing, it hurts to see so much hard work go away in one bad session. oh well, whatever.

One more thing -- at the beginning of the year I deposited $100 into PokerStars. Well, by March 1st I ran that all the way down to $7.59. Sweet. And unfortunately, I tried to re-deposit but for some reason it wouldn't let me. Sooo... being stubborn, instead of just letting it go, I've decided to drop all the way down to 1c/2c NL games to try and work it back up. So yeah money-wise it's totally a waste of time, but I'm looking at this as a project. In fact, Daniel Negreanu is in the middle of doing the same thing -- from $10 to $100,000. Race to the finish imo... haha.

and also it'll make a good story once I win the WSOP.

Another 2nd place

I seem to be pretty decent at getting 2nd place in these medium-field tournaments (this time was 90 players). And when the jump in prize money from 2nd to 1st is by more than 60% (here, from roughly $160 to $260), that's sort of an unfortunate thing to be good at. Could be bad luck, or maybe I need to practice my heads-up game and learn how to close...

Although in all honesty, I can't complain. I went into the final table like 4th in chips, and was doing fine but not awesome... figured I'd likely get like 3rd-6th or so... and then when we got down to 3-way, I was the short stack by like 20k to like 100k and 100k. Getting JJ paid off helped the come-back a bit, and I did actually gain the chiplead for a few hands, but it didn't last.

When we got to heads-up, it was against a guy whose screenname is "sleep w fishes." Now I didn't know who he was, but I looked up his stats... and they're pretty impressive. He's got a few big cashes in these $10-$20 tournaments, including two that are in the $4k-$5k range, and several 1st places in the 45-player $26 tournaments (for $410 each). I actually find it sort of incredible that with all these wins, he's still playing at the $20 level.

Anyways, my reaction while playing him was that he was making some mistakes -- I thought he was a bit TOO aggro, and also calling things a little light. But in retrospect, he may have been playing pretty solid... I may have to go back and look at the hands again to see what I can learn. With how much that he's winning, he must be doing something right...

528th for $363.95 + $200 bounty

Well I just busted out. My last hand I had 99 in CO, opened to 3x, the BB shoved (had me covered), and I actually thought about folding because I figured it was probably a race at best, even if he was screwing around and re-stealing. But I figured I'd go with it, gotta win races to win the tournament. So I called and yeah he had AK, and flopped the A.

But at least I didn't go away empty-handed, got $363.95 for the 528th place finish, out of a final total of 6275 (they were still doing late registration for a bit). ALSO, they had bounties on all the FTP pros, so you got $200 if you knocked one out. I knocked out Gabriela Hill on this hand. And... for the little bit that I was sitting with her, she really looked like she was playing rather poorly, so I was hoping to get the chance to bust her. And yeah this call by her in her final hand is definitely questionable (although, in all honesty so is my shove, but we won't talk about that, lol).

Come to think of it, I actually don't even really know who she is. So I'm not sure how she got to become an FTP pro. But hey, thanks for the extra $200, Full Tilt :)

(edit: I looked up who Gabriela Hill is. Makes sense now since she's really an announcer, not a professional player).

And now back to my regularly scheduled $10 tournaments... actually, I think I might be ready to move up to the $20s with this $563.95 score, haha. And of course I will have my constant eye on satellites into more of these big events.

FTOPS 2nd break

Well I'm still alive. I'm sitting at 7460 chips, and the average is 8159.

In the first few levels I was pretty active, putting in a lot of bluffs and getting called, so my table might think I'm a total monkey. I had one bluff that I DID get away with though: this REALLY shouldn't have worked.

I think my turn check-raise was fine... but after he calls that, he's saying he doesn't buy what I'm selling. So he's almost certainly calling the river, too. Well, I got really lucky on this one.

On the other hand, here's one I'm really proud of: you don't have an ace.

I was surprised that his pre-flop raise got us heads up. But then again, I think it was pretty apparent from his raise that he was really strong. Now, once that Ace came down on the flop, I felt that it wasn't too likely that he had an Ace. And so I decided to take this pot from him, but to wait until the turn to do so. And yeah, success!

Oh, in another hand, I raised to 4510 by accident... I meant to raise to 450 :-P The keys are too close together on my number pad. Fortunately no one called, haha. Although, I had AQ so I might not have been in too bad of shape if someone did, but still.

okay, back to it.

FTOPS XI here we goooo

Event #1 of FTOPS XI has begun! We've got a total of 6,108 players and a 1st prize of $210,750.43.

Things have just begun and I'm already in a bit of a hole. Ran into aces, had some other things go wrong, and I'm already down almost 1,000 chips after 7 hands (we started with 5,000).

Projections on 2+2 have been saying that this thing is gonna go until 10:30am EST. Time to get comfortable... hopefully...

SharkScope, Vegas Summary, FTOPS, etc.

Tonight I found a website that is basically a public online database of everyone's tournament results at pretty much all of the poker sites. Pretty sick, huh? You can search for anyone based on their screenname. So of course, I searched for myself! So it returned a bunch of data on me, including this graph of my results:



Pretty cool, huh? I'm not entirely sure how far back it goes, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of this graph is within the last two months or so because I didn't play that many tournaments on Full Tilt before that. Notice the bit of a downswing I'm having right now, though. yeah, it's been pretty sucky. But, I think what I might do is check this website periodically, and post a new graph each month to see how I'm doing.

Anyways, I've been meaning to write a recap of Vegas, which I still plan to. But for now, I'll just give a brief summary of the gambling results: I played in a couple of tournaments, didn't cash in either (3rd in one that paid top 2, 13th in another that paid top 6). Lost a bunch on craps and blackjack, too. But managed to come out ahead in non-tournament poker. The totals were something like:

Blackjack: -$155
Craps: -$100
Poker Tournaments: -$140
Poker cash games: +$220

total: -$175


The FTOPS tournament that I won a seat into is in less than a week, on Wednesday at 6pm. First place is still listed at $172,960... gonna have to have a lot of things go right to even get anywhere close to that. But here we goooo...

Heading to Vegas tomorrow

Going to Las Vegas for MLK weekend. Can't wait... Michael Sachs is already there, and has been for like 3 hours now. Rahul and I are the next ones to arrive, and we don't get in until like 7pm tomorrow. I'm eager to see what Mike can do in the 34 hours that he is there alone.

The others coming are Wendy, Brownpa, Steve, and Jon (first Vegas endeavour with him but I'm looking forward to great things).

I've been looking up the current tournament schedules to try and figure out which ones I want to play in. I think my cap for tournament buy-ins on this trip is going to be like $100 per tournament, although I also might want to try and satellite into bigger ones if those opportunities are there.

Trip report to follow.

FTOPS Seat

Tonight I won a seat into FTOPS Event #1, which
is a $200 buy-in tournament with a guaranteed prize pool of $1,000,000. 1st place prize money is currently listed at $172,960 although this could go up as more entrants register.

I had to mount a massive comeback to win this seat, because I was in a winner-take-all satellite, and when we were down to 3 players, I was out-chipped like 8-1 by the chip leader. But somehow I battled back to take it down... in one hand he made a huge overbet for all my chips and I made the call with top pair, which held against his flush draw, and in the final hand he called off all his chips on another flush draw after I check-shoved with middle pair. Fortunately for me, this one didn't hit either and I won the seat.

In another tournament tonight, I had a shot at 1st place prize money of about $1,200 but sadly, I busted in 13th.

Lish and I had a good conversation tonight about the role of poker in my life and the world. My thoughts on that are all kind of whirling around right now though so I'll save that for another post.

Another final table -- almost

Played in one of the PokerStars 180s last night (their 180-person tournaments that they run), and came in 10th; final table was 9. boo.

On the way there, this hand came up:
AA over QQ

Basically, his pocket queens ran into my pocket aces. Then, see the chatbox in the image of the table, below:



Now that's just rude.

Anyways, I was definitely running pretty hot in the first half of this tournament -- this hand put me up to about 13k in chips, which was good for at least top 5 at this point. I basically hovered between 1st - 5th for a while, but then after a while I just couldn't make anything happen, and eventually busted one shy of the final table. oh well.

I was just realizing, too, that I've not yet come in 1st in one of these big tournaments... in anything bigger than like 5 tables. I mean, I haven't played all that many yet, so it's not surprising or anything. But like, these prize pools are very top-heavy; 1st place is where a large chunk of the money is. So... it's time to make it happen!

16th of 301

Last night I played in another medium-field tournament, still of a small buy-in ($5, with 1 rebuy and 1 add-on; I didn't have to rebuy, but I did the add-on), but with 301 players, 1st place got up to about $750 so that's certainly a nice prize for a $10 investment.

Things were going pretty well, and I got all the way down to the final two tables without much mishap. Then comes one hand, when I'm sitting at about 50,000 chips (just below average at this point): a short-stack moves all-in for about 12,000, one of the bigger stacks re-raises to 20,000 and I'm sitting in the small-blind with pocket kings. I move all-in, everyone else folds and the big stack calls. He's holding AQ, spikes an A on the flop and I'm out in 16th.

Bummer because if I win this pot, I'm up to like 120,000 chips (which would have been about 2nd in chip standings) and would have an excellent chance of making it to the final table and a shot at the 1st place prize.

Did I play it wrong? No way -- I did worry for a split second about the big stack having pocket aces, but that's such a small part of his range; he could be isolating the short stack with anything down to like a medium pocket pair. So I'm definitely not folding. But... could I just call and re-evaluate on the flop? Not with our stack sizes, I don't think. If I just call, there's now 36,000 in the main pot and 16,000 in the side-pot. Then with about 30,000 left in my stack, basically my only move on the flop is an all-in (or a fold). So... I could shove any flop that doesn't have an ace, but what good does that do? If he had a smaller pocket pair than kings, he's probably gonna fold unless he hit a set. And I wouldn't even know if an ace on the flop was a problem for me or not, so this just puts me in all sorts of trouble.

As played, I got called by an inferior hand which is exactly what you want, so definitely by that standard I did the right thing. Unfortunately, it just didn't go my way here.

For 16th place, I won a relatively meaningless prize of $22.73. However, it IS encouraging to continue to go deep in these medium-sized tournaments, so I'm happy about it from that standpoint.

Two final tables and the Holiday $100K

Last night I played a few tournaments, including two in which I made it to the final table, each with roughly 100 players to start. Of course, I'm playing tournaments with tiny buy-ins right now ($5-$10), so the prize money wasn't all that much -- about $40 for 5th place in one, and $150 for 2nd place in the other. The 2nd place finish was actually kind of bitter-sweet, because in one hand during heads-up I had my opponent all-in on the turn with only 5 outs (I had top pair, he had middle pair), and he spiked his trips on the river. And 1st place was $250, so I missed out on an extra $100 there once he won it in the end. But hey, my bankroll IS getting re-built, little by little...

Additionally, I won a seat into the Holiday $100K. So this is a tournament with a total prize pool of $100,000, with 1st place prize money of $10,500. That takes place on Sunday, 12/28 so that's still pretty far away. But it'll be my first tournament of that magnitude in a while.

Matt and I were unsuccessful in our endeavour to play free poker at Goldie's; it turns out that the information on the website was incorrect, and they only have poker on Monday nights (the website said Monday and Wednesday, and we went on a Wednesday). Bummer. Maybe I'll just have to get myself to a real casino again soon...