CARDRUNNERS

S I had quite the uneventful trip at vegas… it started out with a poker session that I can seriously say I donked up based on my “deep” reads on players that I really don’t have many reads on..I started on a wonderful start (sarcastically) being stuck 750 playing at the Venetian hitting myself on the head repeatly on this rock garden of a table ( for those who don’t know what a rock garden is, it’s one that’s filled with a bunch of tight players that only peddle the nuts)  the game was 2/5, 200-1000 buy in, and I bought in for what I usually buy in for hustler which is 500.  The game was filled with very competent elderly players (I wouldn’t be surprised of most of them were regulars) so yea, my first mistake was even playing in the game in the first place!  When I’m the one being categorized as the one of the loosest players at the table, you know that something is wrong!  Anyways, I try to play standard positional poker by trying to isolate and make late position raises, but my strategy didn’t work out so well, as players who I assume wake up with big hands decide to play back at me with reraises or limp call with semi strong hands and hit flops on me.  Who knows, I may have been outplayed those hands, but my ego tells me otherwise.

Anyways, my donkey play of the day was against this younger guy that was making a couple of late position raises as well. My initial read from playing with him for about 20 minutes was that he was the only guy that I would be able to exploit with three bets, since his raising range is wider than most of the players at the table.  I’m starting to realize that 3 bets aren’t the way to go out of position with the game being 9 handed, as I’ve lost soo much doing it! Blehh!) 

This is how the hand plays out:

There’s 2 limpers from under the gun (utg) and utg+1 (the next player) and the young guy makes a standard raise to 25.. I look down the small blind at 99, which I think is definitely a favorite compared to his hand..I didn’t want to just smooth call as I wanted to both isolate his inferior hand and discourage the other limpers from calling, so I pump it up to 70..the early position limpers fold and the young guy quickly calls, automatically putting my read on him as having overcards..

Flop: Qs  rag rag (two clubs)

I lead out as a continuation bet for 80 and he quickly calls.  I put him on ace queen at this point with his quick call, and I’m seriously contemplating firing a second barrel representing aces or kings.

Turn: a spade blank, putting out two spades and two clubs

After thinking long and hard about repping aces or kings, I decide to wuss out and check, shutting down and just hoping that I can go to showdown with my nines.  I also want to gauge how he reacts to my check..But surprisingly enough, he puts in two black 100 chips and $15 worth of chips more, essentially putting me all in since I had approx 240 left!  So instead of shutting down, my read changes as I now put him on some sort of draw instead of AQ and is making a semi bluff, precisely on AK clubs but possibly on AJ clubs as well..I don’t think that he would make this bold of a bet without a draw, and if he did have AQ which was my initial flop read then he would check behind for pot control and would not be willing to risk all his chips on it.. So my donkey ass decides to follow my “excellent” read and call off the rest of my chips.. a red King hits the river and I ask him if he has a queen.. at first he asked what I had since I called, but then decides to table his AQ of spades for the queen plus a flush draw on the turn!  Ironically, both my flop and turn reads were correct, in that he had a queen on the flop and a draw on the turn, but it just sucks that I discounted his queen in favor of just the draw!!  Another factor in me putting him on AKc was that he wouldn’t have the queen much of the time after calling the reraise..blehh!!

One of the biggest leaks I confess to having is that I make too many assumptions about players without having an extensive read on their play.. I just assume that when they make raises that they are much more aggressive then they actually are which gives me the excuse to take the much more aggressive line when I play them..so after donking off my chips to a guy the first 30 minutes of my session and realizing the next two hours that he plays one hand an hour, I feel like a complete idiot for paying him off!!  The guy with AQ that I paid off was a case in point, as he hardly played any hands afterwards..some people naturally do that after winning a huge pot, but I knew that he was a solid player that knows how to extract value from their hands..If I knew in that pot with him what I came to know about his play 2 hours later, I would’ve most likely flat called the 99 and would have check called his first bet and would have most likely check folded if he double barreled.  My tendency to want to take control of the pot is getting me into a lot of trouble especially in the deeper games of 100 big blind stacks or more, so that’s something I definitely need to work on..So yea, since most of the 1000 bankroll was depleted, I then lose about 60 more sucking up my pride and playing the 1-2 for a grand total of -840 approx..  I’m probably gonna go on hiatus from live for a little bit to recover from my recent beatings and concentrate on playing online.  I think my constant transitioning from playing Heads Up online and 9-10 handed online is screwing up my ability to put people on accurate hand ranges so I need to watch out for that.

The rest of the trip was OK..on Friday, my cousins and I got bottle service at Rum Jungle at Mandalay Bay! (any club with the word “rum” in it sounds super sketchy to me) and it was arrite, despite the fact that they played old school  hip hop music and not much of the newer hits (was so glad that they at least played one of my fav songs A Milli by lil wayne!)  the crowd wasn’t too great either, as it was filled with alotta middle aged people that were definitely out of our age range ( didn’t stop my bro reggie from dancing with a bunch of 35 year olds at their bachellorete party! Haha)

Saturday was kind of a buzzkill tho at Tao @ the Venetian.. Since we didn’t wanna wait in line forever, we decide to get dinner reservations at the place (it’s also a fancy restaurant) so that we could get line passes and “supposedly” get in for free!  So we get there and are seated in this very fancy smanshy private table with a wonderful view of the restaurant and are told to either pay for a single entrée each ($30) or the family deal where we would all share food. I dunno why but we ended up doing the family deal which ended up being much more ($50) for hardly any food!! What frustrated me as well was the fact that we already ate dinner and just wanted to order something small to get in the club for free!!  It sucked that I got ripped off on that end but I figured were only in vegas once and at least we’d have our cover taken care of, but the big kicker was when they told us that the dinner only allowed us to have line passes but we still had to pay a cover!! (another $30 shipped to Tao!)  At this point it was already 1am and I was seriously contemplating leaving, but I was pot commited at that point so I had to do it! (only way to express my situation was in poker terms)  Although the venue was extraordinary (with sexy gogo dancers and close to nude girls on display in rose petaled bathtubs) as well as the red chandeliers, Buddhas surrounding the room, and bubbles that occasionally sprayed out into the main dance floor, place was wayyyyy toooo packed to have any fun!! There was absolutely no breathing room to move around and even dance comfortably, and it was basically a sardine can full of people just bumping into each other..$80 down the drain, but what do u expect from a high end night club on a Saturday night! (felt like my experience at Pure in Caesars Palace! Blehh)  I would’ve much rather had fun getting drinks at Margaritaville with no cover and playing beer pong at O’Sheas but ohh well..)

I also wanna talk about starting back up at school, so ill try to keep you updated soon!

I also wanna talk about my first week of school, so I’ll try to keep u updated soon!

Dear Blog,

First of all, I want to apologize to anyone who still reads my blog. My absence was uncalled for but I needed to step back and reevaluate why I play this game I claim to love. Septemeber and October chose to be two of the most varient months in my career. I lost more money then the Dow Jones (about 85% of it to be exact) and I became overwhelmingly depressed as to the status of my career and if I was truly able to win in this game.

I broke all bankroll management rules for a pro. I played above my head. I chased losses and in the end, I was almost busto. Hanging on the ropes like a once prestige prize fighter, in the late rounds, I choose to go down swinging because this was my livlihood at stake. After being your own boss, it's hard to asimulate back into a normal society and play by their constrictive rules.

With my last $2k, I decided to do what I always did when my bankroll got on life support. I began grinding sng's again. SNG's have been my 6th man for so long, that I realized this month, she should've been starting all along. 3 weeks, I turned 2k into $9k and I still chose to deny her. I love CR but it has currupted my thoughts. For so long, I wanted to rise the poker lines to become one the great cash game players when poker is never about the glitz and glamour. Poker, at the end of the day is simple: To make the most money as you can playing a game you love. If fame and success is given with it, so be it but it's a secondary mission and not a primary objective. I had lost that wisdom and as I settle in for the month of November, I feel that burning inside of me again. Winning is a just another day at the office.

November Goals:
SNG's: 2,000
Levels: $60-$236 turbo's
ROI: 5%+
Top 5 on FTP High SNG Leaderboards

-Locks

I played Peter Eastgate today HU on Stars.  There was a hand that I forgot to save where I 4bet him w/ AKhh and he called OOP, flop came Q84.  It went check/check and turn was a 7 bringing 2 spades and he overbet shoved AI.  Well, I had previously seen him do this with draws and made the call w/ AK high, binking a K on the turn and winning against A8o.  2 things went through my mind when this happened:
1. Wow I ran good!  Sucked out!
2. Wow he called a 4bet OOP with A8o!  I need to keep playing!

He leaves but soon after calls me back to play, this time at $100/200, where he proceeds to run really good vs me (he played quite well too) and take the rest of my stars roll with some retarded coolers that played themselves:
http://www.liquidpoker.net/h/600638 --I was cheering here!  Crap.
http://www.liquidpoker.net/h/600642 --I was cheering here too!
The rest of the hands were just me making good thin valuebets and him rivering me or me making good thin calls and him rivering me.  It was really irritating, and I lost about $100k total

Then I decide to take pieces of MezmerizePLZ at $200/400 who ran QQ into durrrr's AA (didn't save the hand b/c it was too standard) and Boosted J who ran into this:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?3666675

So, I'm pretty broke online now losing about $140k total today with about...well nearly nothing left!  Gonna grind $5/10 for a few months, worry free and variance free.  SEE YOU GUYS AT THE TABLESSSSSSSSSS