CARDRUNNERS

What's Your Edge

Brian Hastings : Poker Blog

October 19, 2008

Hey guys, sorry I didn't get to this sooner, but now I'm going to recap the 2 trips I took recently. I went to Aruba to play the Aruba Poker Classic tourney and hang out with my poker friends (Taylor, Andrew, Joe (LL2), Brian (used2bgood), Mike (shipitthisway), and Rogo (Denny Lemieux). Bruce (cornellxc) also made the trip with me from Cornell. I always enjoy hanging out with this group, they're all great guys and lots of fun to hang out with. If not for school I'd love to take more trips with them, but I can't really afford to miss any more time. An average day in Aruba consisted of waking up around noon, going to the beach or pool around 1 and starting to drink delicious girly beach drinks and/or Bud Light, going back for a nap then to dinner around 8 or so, then watching baseball or football games at the bar and then doing some late night gambling. I also hit the strip of clubs one night and had lots of fun, commencing with taking a swim in the ocean at 5am with a group of people I had met about 2 hours prior (and it was still warm!). I can't stress enough how beautiful the weather was in Aruba, mid 80s and sunny during the day and 70s at night, just perfect. Bruce also has a great story to tell about someone we met in the casino, but I'll let him do that in his upcoming blog. (btw, his blog will definitely be an entertaining read, I recommend everyone check it out when he publishes it)

I also played the tournament, although honestly I'm not sure how great of a decision that was. My head just wasn't really into playing live poker all day indoors when it was so beautiful out. I also drank at the table some and just didn't take it as seriously as I should have. I splashed around a lot and had a roller coaster of a day. We started with 15k chips and my stack first dwindled to 4k, I won a race and doubled, then won a huge pot and ran my stack up to 30k or so, then lost a big one and was down to 15 again, then chipped up to about 20k when the following hand occured. About an hour before the hand, a new player moved to my table 3 seats to my left. I had a tough table featuring plenty of good TAGgy internet tourney players so a new addition was welcome. I then realized that the guy moved there was none other than the infamous stevesbets. If you've ever wondered what he's like in real life, it's eerily similar to what you'd think from his online persona. He's an interesting guy for sure. We had some fun table banter in which he basically called every big winner in the high stakes online games 'terrible', it was quite humorous. Anyway, on to the hand, Steve (covers my ~20k) raises utg+1 to 600, I call in SB with QJdd, everyone else folds. Flop comes Kd7x2d, I check, he bets 1k, I think about raising but decide its kind of hard to believe and just call. Turn is an offsuit ace, I check, Steve bets 2k. At this point I thought he had a lot of thin value betting hands in his range, and I didn't expect him to put me on a bluff on this board, so I decided to raise to 6k. Steve snapcalled. River was a Q and I thought for about 15 seconds and shoved for about a pot-sized bet. Steve quickly says "so sick if you have A7" and calls in about 2 seconds, tabling K2s. I'm not sure if he even put any thought into what my range is there, as I have very few hands I'm ever taking that line as a bluff with (although not too many for value either), but he owned me I guess. I was pretty upset with my play afterwards just because I had a bit of a gambly image, was drinking too, and because it was stevesbets and he never folds, and I know this. Honestly part of my reasoning was that it would be funny to bluff him in a live tournament and see him go on live monkeytilt, and another part was that if I lost I could just go to the beach. Obviously this stuff should not be entering my thought process and I'm pretty upset that it did, but if I go back to Aruba next year I'm going to either pledge to myself to take the tourney super seriously or just not play. I think my bluff was still okay vs anyone but Steve pretty much but against him it's a major mistake. Oh well, live and learn.

I brought my camera to Aruba fully intending to take a bunch of pics of the beautiful island, but unfortunately that didn't happen. I guess most guys are like me, too bad we didn't come with girls who could have taken some that I could have posted here. Overall I had a great trip though, and I think those who didn't go just because they don't want to support UB are missing out, although I understand their point-of-view.

I was going to do a Vegas trip report too but this got kind of long, I'll do that in the next few days. Take care.

Brian

Entry Tags:

Oct 20, 08 19:21:47

I think it is a little naive to say that the players that didn't go to Aruba because they don't want to support UB are missing out. It is admirable that people are passing on a +EV trip because they are taking a stand against UB. I played there for 3 years and will not support them in anything they do. It is the only way to punish online poker rooms that cheat their players out of money.

cuervo