CARDRUNNERS

In reply to an email, one of the members of the stars support team asked me if anyone from pokerstars has confirmed my attendance at the WPT championship, cause I guess they are the ones buying me into the event since PCA is a pokerstars sponsored tourney. I sent back no and told them I was indeed going to the event. I got this as a response back.

That's awesome. Jeanne rules.



so anyway, I just got back from the movies, I went to see grindhouse. it's these 2 full length horror movies with sweet trailers in between them to comebine for over 3 hours of pure awesomeness.

Pretty much the greatest movie of all time. There were zombie type creatures, gogo dancers, explosions, a girl with a machine gun for a leg, and that was just the first movie. I actually just registered for imdb for the sole purpose of giving this movie a 10. It's obvious that Robert Rodriguez has a machine gun for a dick because only a man made out of that could make a movie this awesome.

If sin city and kill bill had a baby, and raised it like a spartan warrior, it would become this movie.




I highly recommend that all of you see it asap.

I've recently been involved in a few staking deals and one teaching deal. I have a couple live tourney deals, had one online sng deal, loaned a friend who plays donkaments a little money to get him started on cash games and i'm teaching someone PLO.

My two live tourney stakes are in Ari "bodogari" engel and Corwin "mig.com" Mackey.


Ari has played 10 tournaments so far and already made a 63k score as well as a cash in the LAPC.




Mig just started playing in his first live tournaments for me. In his very first one, the $2500 event at the bellagio, he has made the final table and is currently in 6th out of 10. 1st place is 220k.

So sick.


Earlier this year I was staking rainkhan in sngs. We had a buyout option and he did so well in the first week that he bought out. Since then he has won a few online mtts and has won 5 (yes thats correct) main event seats.





Finally, I'm teaching my buddy Corwin (tecknowledgy on stars) PLO. He's really bright and he picked it up really quick and now hes beating the game at like 19ptbb at 1/2 plo. What a sicko.





As for me, I've been playing well in NL lately. Things turned to shit in PLO though. I lost most of my 60/40s 40/60s and intermittently played like shit and lost all my 20/80s and 10/90s. It really sucks when your gutshots get cracked by sets and AAxx overpair all in on the flop doesnt hold up against the nut straight.

I'm still very confident in my PLO game but im going to take a break from it for a while and maybe play some 3/6 5/10 and 10/20 plo instead of 25/50 until i start playing well again. Maybe I'll ask my student for some lessons cause hes murdering children at 1/2.

This semester I'm "taking" 3 classes. Abstract Algebra 2, Complex/Functional Analysis and Advanced Mathematical Logic 2. I have taking in quotations because I haven't exactly been the model student for attendance.

So I didnt go to abstract algebra for a little while. On the friday after spring break, I decided to make an appearance only to find out that there was a midterm coming up on the following monday. This posed a major problem. Basically, even if I wanted to buckle down and study for it, i had no idea what was even on the test because it had been so long since I had went to class. I figured id just show up to the test and as the title says, empty the clip and let the looooord decide.

I asked the good people in the BBV forum at twoplustwo what I should do, and their response was invariably "DROP OUT!"

Then my buddy Jonny Cosmo drew this graph to describe my situation:



I knew what I had to do. I just didnt go to the test. That's what real poker players do, they fold the hand when they know theyre beat.

So I talked things over with my parents and told them I dont really think grad school is for me. If i'm not motivated enough to go to class and dont want to learn this stuff then I really shouldnt be here. So I'm going to hang out for the rest of the semester and withdraw from my classes.


Ok, so anyway, on to the point of this post. Since then I havent been going to class, i've just been playing poker, working out, watching movies, etc. So I've basically been going down imdb's top 250 list and checking out the movies ive always wanted to but never did, and pretty much have been watching one a day. In the past week I've seen apocalypse now, reservoir dogs, kill bill 1 and 2, and raging bull for the first time ever. but I cant seem to find the one movie i really want to see...

For the past 2 weeks ive been trying to find the seven samurai. Not in best buy, not in circuit city, not in blockbuster, not in the little movie racks at walmart or target. Nowhere. I was beginning to believe this movie didnt really exist. And then I remembered a little movie place down the street called mike's movies. I was sure this dude would have it, i mean he specializes in movies, hes got to.

As I pulled up and saw the front of the store I became really skeptical. I mean on the front window the only movie poster he had was Charlotte's Web.



Imagine walking up to the window of a promising movie store and seeing a 24 x 32 in. shot of that fat little blob's mug. I totally lost faith. i decided to enter anyway.

First I hit up the classics section. No seven samurai.
then I went to the drama section. No seven samurai.
Next I hit up adventure. No seven samurai.

With a disgusted scowl on my face I started to walk out when I just saw it sitting there in the middle of this unnamed rack. WOOHOOO.



It was pretty damn expensive, the movie cost over 40 fucking dollars, but that ain't nothin to a boss.

Time to watch it. Will post results later.

When I first saw this hand I immediately thought it was the worst call I had ever seen. However, the more I think about it the more interesting the hand gets. For those of you who havent seen or heard about this hand, it came up in the monte carlo tournament a few days ago. Here was the spot:

So as I said it came off as a bad call at first. I did a quick analysis on how adam does against a sample hand range of patrik's.

We are getting roughly 1.5:1 odds but a little bit better, so lets say we need 39% equity.

If we assume that patrik has air here 20%, a draw (clubs, gutshot, oesd etc) 30% and a monster (set/AA/KK) 50% then we get the following.

(note that im assuming patrik would not do this with random pairs. he very well may, but if he has a queen like AQ that can be grouped in the monster category, if he has an underpair, that can sort of be grouped in the draw category because Adam will have 30% equity against a hand like 88 and i think he doesnt have these type of hands very often so it wont effect the overall EV of the "draw" category very much, especially when some of the gutshots like A3 and A5 also have about 30% equity for patrik, so they pretty much even out)

Suppose against air that Junglen has on average 75% equity. This fair because if patrik has 2 live cards hes about 25% and sometimes he has adam dominated (AK), sometimes adam has patrik dominated. but I have trouble beliving that patrik will often just shove hands like 68o where he missed completely, so i think 20% of the time is a generous estimate here.

Now, against a draw, lets say that adam has 50% equity on average. This is also fair because some big draws are more than 50% vs adam(like 56cc) and some gutshots are a bit under.

And against a monster, lets say adam has on average 8% equity. sometimes he will have a little more if patrik has KK, sometimes he will be murdered against a set, sometimes patrik will have AQ, whatever, 7% is fairly accurate.

ok, now his ev given these assumptions is .2*.75+.3*.5+.5*.08=.15+.15+.04=.34
34% equity. This is not good, in fact its quite -EV. If we adjust the hand range a bit to include more air and less monsters perhaps we can convince ourselves that adam has CLOSE to enough quity against patrik's range. (this would require a very very very good read because adam is getting very bad odds and patrik will often show a good hand here)

Now, let's backstep a bit before i continue.


I think the call preflop is terrible. Here is adam's quote on the situation, right after it happened:




how exactly do you trap with AJo? you dont hit flops often enough and when you dont you arent even certain of where you stand. It's a total reverse implied odds situation. I think that the call preflop is atrocious, and if he really thought his range was that wide, he should shove. he would be risking roughly 41k to win 14k, and he gets folds more than enough to make this a very good play (much much much more EV than calling here even though he has position). I wont bother running the EV calculations but I assure you this is very +EV if patrik is calling with say AA KK QQ JJ AK and is putting in a 3rd raise about 10% of the time (which would mean he is calling 1/3 the time and folding 2/3 the time). Ok, just for you guys ill run the damn EV calculation :)

Let's say that patrik calls the all in 33% and folds 67%. when he calls, AJo has 25% equity against that range.

.67*14=9.38 (when he folds we win 14k)
.33*(.75*-41+.25*48)=.33*(-30.75+12)=.33*-18.75=-6.25

so our EV of shoving here is over 3k. very very good.

I'll also add in that folding to this 4bet is just fine as well. Nothing wrong with it, havent risked a lot, AJo isnt all that strong. And it's also ok toflat cal with AJo in position here.


ok, back to where i was. now, suppose that we can convince ourselves that Adam almost has enough equity against patrik's range but it is still -EV to call. I think if we have a good enough read to convince ourselves of this it becomes a call postflop for the following 3 reasons.

1. we have a chance to knockout the best player in the world
2. we will have a big chip stack which we will be able to take advantage of because....
3. Everyone at the table will utterly fear us.

Imagine how scared the average poker player would be of a guy who just bitched the best player in the world and now has a stack. If he could have a 100k stack after this move, its at a point in the tournament where nobody will fuck with him and he can just run everyone over and build a monster stack in the next few hours. It would have such profitable aftereffects that I think having a slight -EV situation is overcome with ease.

The question becomes how -EV are we willing to go in order to still take this gamble? Unfortunately that isnt quantifiable, but I would guess that its around 35% equity, a little bit higher than I came up with in my EV calculation.

Now, note that I said i was giving patrik a generous range, and I still think that. I just dont see how we can assume he has air or a draw here much more than that, I would usually assume much less, but for the sake of argument i gave adam the benefit of the doubt in his read. perhaps adam was a little more sure of this and could push it into the 35%+ range. Then although it's still a -EV call, i say great move.


Kid's sure got balls to pull something like this. I still think the preflop call is atrocious, but after a lot of thought I have come to appreciate this postflop call. he gets my gold star award for the week, mainly because its the manliest call of all time, he obviously has some Bryan Van Dautsend blood in him to make patrik say matte.