GL me

I'm now 50% backed for the $1.5k WSOP event tomorrow. It kicks off midday Vegas time, that's 8pm UK time. Thankyou to everyone who bought a piece of me, I'll be playing my very best. We're looking at a likely 2,700 player field with over $600,000 to first place... so u can do the maths on your percentage ;)

You'll be able to get updates by clicking the following link and going to Event #52 once it's put up there. http://www.pokernews.com/live-reporting/

I think pokernews will be trying to keep track of the big name pros rather myself so unless I bust Doyle Brunson you might not hear much from me. I'll do some sort of write-up after the event anyways.

Here are a couple of pics I took from the $50k buy-in HORSE final table tonight. It was 3-handed Erick "E-Dog" Lindgren vs Scotty "It's all over baby" Winnn vs some 2p2er with a girls sounding name. All of the big names were out railing it and messing around drinking on the sidelines. Obv Phil Hellmuth tried to get in on the cameras as much as possible too...

WSOP Event #52

As much as I dislike the variance in tourneys I can't come to Vegas and not play a WSOP event! I've decided to play the last $1,500 entry WSOP tourney. It's a 3-day event and should have around 2,000 entrants, with the top 10% of the field getting paid. First place will pay around half a million dollars.

Rather than put up all of the $1.5k from my roll I'd like to even my variance by getting up to 50% of it backed by any people who'd like the action. You can buy any %'age you like in me from 1% ($15) upwards. I'm giving the action straight up, so you take 10% for example and you'd take 10% of whatever I win. If I bust you bust also.

I'd expect my equity in the tourney to be around $2,000-2,500 (meaning if the tourney was ran a million times that'd be what I'd expect to get back each time on average) but the variance is huge as it's the only big WSOP tourney I'm playing. One shot basically. Due to the top heavy payout structure around 80-90% of the time I will bust the buy-in. So although I'm certain I'm profitable to back it certainly is a gamble, but a positive expectation one!

The event is on Monday at midday Vegas time, if you'd like to buy a piece of me drop an email to bazclef@gmail.com and tell me how much you'd like to buy. I can take payment by transfer on Stars/FTP, bank transfer, in person, etc.

Vegas #6

Booked some small wins day before yesterday and put in a decent sized online session, getting like 800 hands in on the laptop.

Noticed $100 had been shipped to my Stars account this morning, Amatay lost the bet on whether he could make $10k this month playing SNGs on Full Tilt. He kind of underestimated the difficulty of the task, I'm pretty sure he took off the first day of the challenge and went out drinking lol. I think he would have needed to play about 1,000 SNGs AND run well to win the bet. Unlucky you lazy fishay.

Headed in to Caesars Palace yesterday to play cash games and did well despite only getting a few hours sleep the night before. Seeing as drinks are basically free while playing I decided to start working my way through their drinks menu. I recommend the Chocolate Julius, tastes like the fakest chocolate ever but is very delicous.

So yea, booked like $420 there, shippp. Then went across to Venetian to meet up with Pete/Dan and had some noodles. All 3 of us ended up getting in a $1-2nl cash game and drinking coronas and shots throughout, was pretty much carnage and a lot of fun. We didn't leave 'til after 5am I think and I was reeeally tired and pretty frustrated after losing most of the money I'd spent that day making! Lesson learned, don't drink and play or play tired. if I'm going to drink play $2 blackjack or something instead. Although I did run pretty bad that session, but whatever. Was really frustrating worked hard at Caesars booking a good win then jizzing it away. Grrr!

Took a bunch of pictures around the Venetian and some of the strip...

Venetian shops
Guy on a Segway outside the Venetian"Las Vegas and the fuckin' Mirage"
Scotty Nguyen's car (probably) outside Rio
Today was pretty lazy, slept 'til like 2 then lay in bed watching the Mask of Zorro :P Got up at like 5 and headed into the Rio, played a short cash session and ran pretty poorly, the table wasn't great either. So I quit and left after a few hours. The $50k horse event was on which was pretty cool to rail for a bit, and the $5k 6-max too. Awesome fields. Isabelle Mercier is sooooo hot in real life. Had a burger from In n Out which was sweet.

Gonna get my grind on at the Rio or Caesars tomorrow. My aim is to get back to breakeven for the trip by the end of the weekend and play the last $1,500 WSOP event which is on Monday. If I'm playing it I'll be selling half of my action at face value, will post about that over the weekend.

Kind of concerned that almost half of the trip has gone and I've not done a lot of the touristy shit I was aiming to do. Really need to hook up some of the following...

• Shooting guns
• Spearmint Rhino
• Rollercoaster at NY NY
• Stratosphere
• Shopping at outlet mall
  
• Cirque de Solie show
• Penn and Teller
• UFC 86
• Rancid gig at the House of Blues
• Play at Bellagio and Wynn
• Euro 2008 final
  

No idea when I'm gonna get the chance to half of this stuff but if I get the chance to do some of it that'd be cool. Will probably try to do most of it on the last week while the main event is on. Next few days are gonna be griiiiinding to try to get in a better position to play this WSOP event... might take Saturday off though, watch the football then go drinking or something.

Damn I've played 76 hours of poker since arriving here just 11 days ago, pretty sick. :)

Vegas #5

Dan and I headed out to Rio late last night and pulled a big session getting in at 7am. I booked a $1,040 win in the $2-5 game. Building a huge pyramid stack throughout the night and cashing in 3 racks of chips FTW. Booooooom. It's GO TIME.

Got up at 5pm today played some pool and had a delicous breakfast(?) of blueberry waffles and Mountain Dew, best drink ever. Now chilling in the pool playing some cash on Full Tilt with Matt, weather is pretty much a perfect 100 at this time in the evening (7:30pm).

Spent a bunch of time on study yesterday, read a lot of The Poker Mindset, posted some comments on weaktight, railed a coaching session Brian was doing with Dice and picked Dan's brain a ton about live poker. Made a lot of adjustments to my game, a lot that Adam mentioned in his comments on the last post. Basically playing a lot more passively preflop and not inflating pots without a big hands, playing draws more passively, keeping a tighter image, etc.

Really not too much tourism or whatever going on, although that being said there are lots of big poker players at the Rio. On nearby tables to me yesterday were Devilfish, Raymer, Violette, Mortensen, David Williams which was cool. Anyway, we're all pretty much still in the mood for playing poker so continuing to play a lot and expecting to get burned out soon. Will take a couple of days off and do some tourism and drinking. But until then it's allll poker, planning on heading to the strip in an hour or two.

Suspiciously 3 cases of All-in Energy Drink have been delivered to our house, I think from a tourney Dan entered.

Some thoughts on running bad live

Just re-read a lot of The Poker Mindset and kind of cleared things up a bit after that depressing last post lol. There are 2 errors in my thinking that are causing me to be frustrated with poker at the moment.

Bankroll
My bankroll seems shallower when I'm across here. I brought across $6k poker monies, and have $1k online at FTP out of my total $13k bankroll. I remember railing a session with Brian and Dice a few weeks back where Brian pointed out that he classed your bankroll as the amount of money you have instantly available (in that case he was talking about online on FTP) rather than your entire poker bankroll.

I disagreed at the time but now I think my current situation illustrated why he's right. At the moment I have $6k in Vegas, of which I've lost $2.5k. That sort of variance is completely normal at the games I'm playing and is fine within my $13k bankroll. However in Vegas I'm looking at that loss as a factor of the $6k cash bankroll I have here, so I feel frustrated. Not only that but I feel anxious about losing another $2.5k and busto'ing my Vegas roll. It's the same case at the moment on FTP where I only have $1k online due to the lame $1.5k per week deposit restrictions.

So there are a couple of solutions to this... the most obvious one is to move down and play within my Vegas roll requirements. This would mean playing from a $3.5k bankroll, so basically playing $200nl and $300nl. I really don't want to do this as I feel comfortable enough skill wise to kill the $1000nl games let alone $500nl which I'm currently playing and obviously want to profit as much as possible while I'm across here.

So the best solution for me is to find a way to make the remainder of my bankroll available to me in Vegas. I'll figure out the best solution for this today.

Short Term Results
I've lost count how many times I've blogged about short term results now. It's the main thing that continually tilts and frustrates me, however not running well live is definately a lot different than not running will online.

Firstly you don't get nearly as many hands in live as you do online, when you only play 200-300 hands in a 5-6 hour session (you could play 2k hands online in that time) variance is huge. So the results of a 200 hand session have a high luck element, it'd take weeks or months of live play for variance to even out and get a rough idea of how you're doing. One unlucky hand or suckout in a live session will likely kill your entire session.

When you spend 6-7 hours playing live at a table where the players are mostly awful it doesn't feel good to book a losing session, let alone booking a string of 3-4 losing days. It certainly has affected my confidence and put me on a bit of a downer. So it's important to accept that in the short term (which can mean a week, or even a month live) poker is largely a game of luck. It would certainly take months of play live for the skill element to show.

Most important thing for me to do is to prevent tilt and keep myself sane is to accept that the day to day results do not matter, and focus on constantly improving my play. I'll probably remove the day to day results thing I put at the left hand side too.


So with the mindset sorted out... lets gooooooooo. Crushing time.

Also, thanks for all of the comments so far! :)

Vegas #4

Kind of a really frustrating last few days poker wise. I really want to book some decent wins here but can't run well.

Running 0/6 in the wsop sats killed $2.25k of my $$$ roll here in Vegas, and seeing as I'd be really annoyed if I continued to run bad then I've got to sit out of them for a while. This really frustrates me as they're so soft and I know I can crush them. I'm sure my expectation in at least $150 per STT.

So I've moved to playing $2-5 for a bit, really aiming to grind out a lot of hands and recoup a couple of k before moving back to tourneys and STTs. Unfortunately I just can't seem to get things going, I feel like I'm playing well and the games are great but I'm just not running well. I understand I need to be patient but I'm getting frustrated at being across here and not being able to beat up these soft games.

Played an online session tonight and booked a 2 buy-in loss, just continued run-bad. I bet it's because I didn't play from the pool... damn. Wish I could get stuff going right now as it's kind of depressing me from a poker point of view. Really my outlook on the situation is just a bit messed up. I'm simply running bad at the moment but I guess I'm not used to running bad live, it sits with you more. Gonna read over The Poker Mindset a bit tomorrow.

As for other stuff going on umm...

Been eating out with ppl quite a lot, the food here is just SO DAMN GOOD. Ate at Noodles at the Bellagio which was easily the best chinese/asian food I've ever sampled. The noodles/dumplings were on another level, if you're in town... make sure to go there! Also been at The Cheesecake Factory at Caesars Palace which was good although we ended up having to get most of the food bagged as the appetizers were so big and we were filled up on cocktails. Flying Gorilla FTW. Sushi buffet restaurant tonight, huuuuuuge selection so tried a lot of different things, supremely delicious. The food here really is just top class.

Went to see The Incredible Hulk tonight too which was good, although nowhere near as good as Iron Man. Kind of a solid 5/10 Marvel film.

Will probably take the day off tomorrow, do a bit of study and get down to some drinking.

Vegas #3

Started playing WSOP single table sats today as they're real soft. Buy-in is $325, with $3000 being awarded to 1st place in wsop tourney chips, but it's almost always chopped 2 or 3 way. Unfortunately I've not chopped one of the damn things yet despite always feeling like the best player at my table. I dropped $2k today, variance imo.

Anyways, here's some tourism from the Rio today... the sharp eyed will spot Doyle, Hellmuth, Ivey, Harman, Boatman, and more. There were some STACKED tables at the $10k Omaha Hi/Low where I took the pics. One table had Tony G, James Mackey, Howard Lederer, Annie Duke, Dario Minieri, Andy Bloch and John Juanda!

Other news... I ate a Baconator for dinner, how do you beat that? A fucking BACONATOR. Matt arrived today too so gonna go hang out for a bit. I've bust my cash roll now, so I'll be cashing in some travellers cheques tomorrow.

EDIT: Made $380 on full tilt while chilling drinking in the pool with the guys. I run so damn hot from the pool. Shipppp it.

Vegas #2

Some of my family/friends and folks are after updates on what's up, so I'll post some more lifey stuff here too and they can check it out. Saves me relaying the same stuff to lots of people.

Caesars Palace
Didn't bother playing the $330 tourney at Caesars Palace yesterday, instead headed out there after lunch and played cash as Pete was playing the PLO tourney there. Awesome casino, couple of quick pics...

The cardroom is reeeally comfortable and the play at $2-5 is absolutely terrible. Kept raising a couple of old guys on my table to the point where 2 of them left lol. Lots of fun/interesting players there too. A couple of guys at the table blatantly had escorts, one guy had a really hot asian chick turn up, he then bought her in for $500. She promptly blew him off a $300 pot and showed air, then jizzed her chips off on a huge bluff the next hand... he didn't buy her in again. :) I finished the session up around $100.

40/40 Club
Headed out for food to the 40/40 club with Graham and Pete. The place was pretty damn baller, we think it's owned by Jay-Z? Got some sweet seats outside just off the strip, but seperated by fountains and stuff... ate a ton of great food and watched the Lakers-Celtics playoff final. Couches and TVs outside is where it's at. Played a bunch of pool and I freerolled the $150 beer+food bill, pool skillzzz. They have some pics of pretty much exactly where we were at on their site...


Venetian
Was gonna head home after this as I'd had quite a few beers but ended up heading to the Venetian with Pete and playing poker 'til late. The Venetian is absolutely stunning, the scale of it is just huge. It's a really beautiful place both inside and out, will need to take some pics. $2-5 games were pretty poor but I made about $50 running a bunch of bluffs as my image was real tight. Most players were decent though so I dropped down to $1-2 for a bit where the play was a complete trainwreck. Was up around $150 there, then lost 2 $500ish pots... one AA vs flopped set and one where my 60/40 didn't hold.

Walked back up to Caesars, the strip is awesome at night, still really buzzing with nightlife, and the temperature is really nice, around 85c at around 2-3am. Lost a $10 sidebet on what level Pete parked at in the carpark. Beat.

Rio wsop sats
This morning I got up pretty late and headed into the Rio to play some WSOP sats. Played the $330 and bust 18/100 after running QQ into KK when I was about average stacked. Top 3 prizes were $10,000 main event seats. Won a $50 last longer with Dan though, wheeeee. There were a ton of big pros in the same tourney room as our satellite as it was the 2nd day of the $5k stud event.

Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson were sweating my table for a bit while they were on break which was cool, don't think I quite did enough to gather their interest to make me a FTP Pro. Also saw Hellmuth bust out and the almost knock some old boy off of his seat while storming out of the room lol.

There are some pretty interesting people playing in these things, was sat next to a real nice woman today from Texas who had lost $23k in slots over the last week, and hummed Johnny Cash songs throughout hands! Also I can agree with Ryan's observation that the women in Vegas do have the fakest breasts ever, however to balance that out there are a lot of suuuuperhot girls... which is nice.

The Palm
Went out for steaks at the Palm in Ceasers Palance with the guys from our house and the guys from Martin/Steven's house. Good times and awesome shrimp and steak. We played credit card roulette for the (just under $1k) bill. For those who don't know what that is, we basically give our 9 credit cards to the waiter and he draws them 1 by 1 and the final one out pays the bill. Naturally this leads to a lot of rowdyness while we sweat the waiter - who did a great job of slowly picking out the cards. The guys at the nearby table unpolitely requested that we shut the fuck up lol. Martin ended up losing after putting his card back in when it got to 4-way to ensure that noone could chop it, crazzyy.

Shipppp the 2nd beer+dinner freeroll. Pics of me regretting sharing a desert with Dan, Martin paying, and a group photo...

Also, they have a place called the Cheesecake Factory in Caesars. I must go there. I love the cheesecake.

Just been chilling at the house since, hung out in a pool for a while, drunk some more beers, listened to music and played some poker until the laptop battery died. Finished up around $140. Managed to blog half of this post from in the pool. :) Will have to post some house pics, this place is pretty sick.

Life is good, poker is good, now if I could just start winning plz?

Trip so far: -$550

Vegas #1

Here, alive, etc.

I'm in super-chilled holiday mode right now, getting settled in, getting to know folk a bit and stuff. Dan/Pete are cool, the house is awesome, and Vegas fkin rules... so it's all good here. :)

Random things done so far:

• Got held up almost an hour at customs due to bringing a bag of money into the country
  
• Got ripped off by a taxi driver
• Lost heads up to Dan for the master-suite, how degenerate
• Bought a cellphone, essential
  
• Ate a delicious cheese steak sandwich
  
• Played cash at the Rio, and mississipi straddled
• Got sunburned in the 40+ heat
• Bought some sweet Oakley shades
• Seen the strip lit up at night, awesome
  

Tomorrow I'm up for some griiiinding, as I've really not played enough poker since getting here. Think I've been a bit more in tourist mode that poker mode. Gonna play a $330 tourney at Caesars Palace then probably some cash there. The idea is to play at each of the big casinos.

Almost falling asleep writing this so I'm done. Will maybe post some pics or something soon, and trip reports or something, who knows.

Trip so far (poker): -$125

Fly out tomorrow night

Finished up at work today for the next 4 and a half weeks. Ridiculously excited... wish I could fly out tonight instead of tomorrow!

Have to get up at 3am Sunday morning and fly from Edinburgh to London, then flying from London to Vegas at about 10am, arriving 2pm Sunday Vegas-time. No idea what I'm going to do about sleep lol, prob just gonna try to sleep in 'til real late tomorrow as I doubt I'll be able to sleep before getting up at 3.

The climate change might take a bit of getting used to... when I get the flight it'll probably be around 12 degrees, and when I get off it'll be like 40.

Edinburgh
Las Vegas
I'm dead. :)


Pretty much good to go. I hate long flights so I've got my iPod loaded with pokerroad/2p2 podcasts, will be taking the Nintendo DS too. Flying with Virgin so can hopefully catch some decent films on the way.

Next post will be from the US. LETS GOOOO!

Erica Schoenberg

is awesome

Planning Vegas

Not played any poker at all in June so far. Been back at work too and had a bunch of stuff to sort out for Vegas. Unfortunately Roman had to drop out of the WSOP house so we interviewed a bunch of folk over the last few days and settled on Matt, a professional player from Florida, I think we've got a great mix of guys now.

Not long 'til I leave now... Saturday night!!! :) I cashed out all money I have in poker sites to organise my roll for the trip. Gonna stick $5k on Full Tilt and take $6-7k to Vegas. Seeing as I'd like to get staked for a bunch of tourneys I really need to come up with a schedule...

Rough poker schedule

Week 1/2 - settling in. Get acclimatized... used to the heat, housemates, etc over the first few days. I'll prob be gagging to play... Will grind a bunch of $1/2 and $2/5 live and play a few $200-300 range tourneys at the Venetian/Golden Nugget/Caesars Palace deepstack series.

Week 3 - up the stakes. Should be super confident live by this point, will play $2/5 exclusively, most likely at the Wynn and Venetian. Probably play in a $550 Venetian deepstack, and a $1.5k WSOP event.

Week 4 - finale. If I've been running well at $2/5 cash games and my roll is in good shape then I'll take shots at the $5/10 games. Depending how I feel about tourneys I'll consider playing more sats for to the WSOP ME, or maybe play the Caesars/Golden Nugget $1k Main Events instead.

Online
Throughout the trip I'll grind a bunch of $1/2 on FTP. Dropping down stakes to lower the variance and hopefully help provide some stability over the rocky variance of live poker. Also, I'm expecting to have to adjust a bit from iPoker so I think dropping to $1/2 is wise.

Staking
I'll be taking backing across a series of events I decide to play. It'll likely be around $4-5k worth of events, and I'll be looking for around 50% backing. I'll decide on the schedule over the next few days and post it up along with instructions on how to buy stakes. I'll be specifically targetting MTTs with large soft fields where there's the most value. I'd expect myself to be hugely +EV over the field in all of the events I play and I'll be selling stakes for face value so I think it'll be a great deal for anyone looking to invest.


Getting ridiculously excited about the trip now... :D

Also, this thread on 2p2 is GOLD.

And lol check out Amatay's crazy prop bet to try to make $10k this month from $33 SNGays on FTP, I've got $100 against but am secretly rooting for him.