Been a little while and i’m beginning to write this on my 9 hour flight back to the UK so this could be a lengthy witter!
After my last blog post i headed across the border for Tough Mudder in Seattle. I very much enjoy a lengthy endurance challenge for the sake of it so this was exactly my kind of thing and i’d never timed it right to do it in England, so when a couple of friends told me they were doing it, i snap-called. I bought a GoPro a few days before to capture my pain in the process…
There’s no individual obstacle or task that would stop people completing the course(at least as a team) but the culmination of the 12 mile run and multiple obstacles make it worthy of its name. The arctic enema was probably my least favourite, gave me some idea of how well your body can act in survival mode, as i wasn’t consciously moving any part of my body but my muscles moved damn fast to get me out of there! I managed to rip a callous in the middle of my palm on the monkey bars which made for an uncomfortable couple of obstacles but i made it across the finish line and the beer + 3 protein bars they handed out barely touched the sides at the finish line. Speaking of protein bars, Quest bars have pretty much been the main part of my diet the last month. Choc brownie, 25 seconds in the microwave, amazing guilt free dessert.
Enghien-Les-Bains was the setting for WSOPE, a very beautiful lake and quiet town. I wasn’t looking for much to do around the place on this poker trip because with me attempting to hunt down WSOPPOY points i was playing poker all day every day. That said i think the location was a poor choice, the accommodation nearby was far too limited which almost certainly affected field sizes, rooms fairly mediocre for the price and transport for others from the city centre awkward and inconsistent. The tournaments were well run with extended late registration and schedule of events was ok, the mixed max tournaments are cool structures and NLH events are important for the masses. Having some form of mixed tournament would have been nice but in France i think its a no go with the likely field size. The buffet breakfast was very good though and Jason Mercier very accurately pointed out on twitter how hard it was not to overeat when you know its going to be your best meal of the day and my glutinous side came out raging, averaging a solid 4 plates a day and i gained a solid padding over my abs once again.
Coming into the final 8 events i had a pretty solid lead for POY(Player of the year) Daniel Negreanu was pretty much the only one who could catch me with one score in the smaller buyin events, all the November niners had a shot if they won a bracelet and then the main. The Main and the High Roller were bigger concerns because of the multipliers that come with them, Negreanu would only need a top 9 in those events as opposed to top 5 in the others. I think i was probably around a 2-1 favourite to win coming in and I min-cashed the first event to extend my lead a little. I’d ran good to build up a big stack entering the money but bluffed off my chips in a spot i certainly didn’t need to. I’m not too unhappy with my bustout, my opponent made a very good river call but certainly better spots could have been found. In terms of POY the points it meant very little, it was only final table points that would increase my chances of winning by any significance which is a reason to gamble more once i’ve cashed. I came 9th/180 in the mix max PLO event too but again only increased my lead very slightly and with Negreanu not picking up any points prior to the main event i was in good shape.
After 6 long straight days of playing a break was welcome and i took the Eurostar back to London for my friends birthday. Not so surprisingly being a poker player, my overly lax attitude to being punctual for journeys made me miss my train, i was treating it like hopping on a train on the Merseyrail as opposed to an airport to leave the country and apparently turning up 2mins before the train’s supposed to go isn’t ok. Thankfully i could get on the next one, got a little carried away with the complimentary leffes and happy hour cocktails and blacked out around 9pm, a poor performance even by my standards. I headed back to play Day 1B and out of my regging options i decided to reg. after dinner perhaps 80% recovered. This turned out to be the worst timing of the trip as after waiting 15mins for it to come around to my big blind, i busted 10mins and 6 hands later. I managed to run into a set twice, once with QJ vs 55 on JJ5 and also 77 vs 99 on J975J. Punished by the poker gods for my punctuality with 2 swift blows. 10k euros well invested!
Negreanu went deep in the main but not enough to get significant points and going into the high roller i was probably more like a 7-1 fav. to win. I enjoyed the event and playing with some of the tougher tournament players around. The field got a lot more than expected with ~80 players which did help my POY chances. Negreanu needed 8th or better to overtake me. My starting table seemed pretty good with Devilfish being the only person i knew and a couple of self professed amateurs. There was a lot of seat changing during the event which is probably a good thing to balance things out but it didn’t work out so well in my favour, one by one the weakest player at the table got moved and that set off Devilfishs bluntness.. ‘What you taking him for?’ ‘You can’t be taking that fish away as well’ ‘Him!?! You’ve got to be fucking kidding me’ I think his muffled Hull accent was only translatable to me but i couldn’t hold back the laughter. I busted with 20-30 left in a hand with Phil Ivey. I had 14BBs from the BB, he took a good look at my stack and instead of making his usual 2-2.5xBB open he 4xBB it pre, the SB folded and i had KJo in the BB. I would have been jamming over his standard open very happily but this raise screamed of a small pair or perhaps A rag that wanted to dissuade me from taking a flop with. I’m normally pretty good at taking a step back considering all my options in a poker hand but i didn’t think hard enough here. Taking a flop for 30% of your stack is generally a large mistake in NLH but if i’m confident enough his range is that polarised its a much better play to call. Against that range its pretty easy to call a wide range and just lead 2-3BB at any kind of middle semi-connected flops without him being able to do much about it and get away from certain flops too. I jammed he had 44, i lost. Results oriented.. flop was J98 could have worked out different!
Negreanu folded his way into the top 8 and then even managed to take it down. He does a hell of a lot of good for poker and absolutely deserved to win the title and everything else he gets out of it on whatever personal and professional level. Some people complained about the POY points system, i think its very reasonable and big buy-in events definitely need a good multiplier because they are so much tougher than the 1000+ player fields and i believe playing in a variety of games deserved some credit towards POY which also relates to those smaller fields. I would penalise the especially small events that get less than 100 players. The high roller final table placings getting a 2.75x multiplier for 80 players is steep, equivalent to something like a 2000 player $1500 event or 500 player $5K event. Maybe make less than 100 player fields something like a 0.5x multiplier based on the current system. Like i’ve said previously, i’ve got a long way to go before i can have any real disappointment with tournaments, coming 2nd in the player of the year race sure means you had a pretty lucky year!!
After busting the high roller i immediately booked a flight 12 hours later back to Vancouver, and as always the case after playing the long slow live tournament grind was looking forward to playing online again. I came into November pretty intent on making it the hardest working month i’ve ever put into poker. It started off positively but as soon as my mind drifted towards what to do with myself in December after leaving Vancouver my progress slowed, my daydreaming rose back up to the usual 15hours a day and i didn’t reach a position where i wanted to battle at any nosebleed stakes. I had good results at high stakes and putting in hours to grind out some money is important but it just isn’t giving me anywhere near the same satisfaction as when i’m taking on tougher players or doing some off-the-table work on my game. That said i do feel like my poker theory is as strong across all the games as its ever been and if i can put in some more HU volume my game will improve and get strong quickly.
One of the best tweets i read in the last couple of months was stating that time is your most valuable resource in life. That hit home for me and i’ve become a little obsessive about being as productive with my time as i can be, online poker is getting harder all the time and is only going to be a profitable skill for so long, could well be a lot sooner than most high stake players realise.
However… I still have the conflicting desires of wanting to travel and put in serious hours into poker, the urge to travel has the greater pull for me this month and i decided to return to Asia and enjoy the nature of Borneo probably followed with some beaches and nightlife in Indonesia. A lot of the time once i start thinking about the what i’m doing the next month i lose focus on the present and it decreases my productivity significantly, which i think is somewhat inevitable and some level of planning trips well does make them a lot better but its still something i’d like to improve on and November ended a little slowly and unhealthily after starting the month well.
So the backpack will be back on for 2-3 weeks leading up to Christmas having an explore and getting away from Cities for a little while. This will then be followed by a move to Melbourne! I do like the people there and the feel of the place in my previous two visits and am super excited to head back there. I’ve got a strong feeling there is going to be a lot more fun things going on that distract me compared to Vancouver but hopefully my appetite will be built up after taking most of December off and i’ll have some good battles in the new year.
The first episode of the sky poker cash game recently got released on pokertube..
One hand a couple of people have asked me about is the fairly epic fail of a hero call i made with Queen high. I raised preflop on the button with Q3 of spades and Rupert Elder called from the big blind. The flop came Kc8s4s, Rupert checked i bet 25 into 35 and he called. The turn came the 2c. Rupert checked, i bet 180 into 85 and he raised to 380. The river made the board Kc8s4s2c7d. He shoved all-in for ~ 600 into 845. I called.
Despite the commentary, Rupert hadn’t actually been playing quite that snug and i believe he had already check-raised me on 1 of 2 flops we’d seen. I thought it was more likely he would opt to check-raise the flop with his best value hands than check/call. I expect Rupert to read my overbet on the turn as very polarised between a strong hand or a draw.
You could make some theoretical based arguments for him virtually never raising the turn here as doing so with his value hands leaves his check-calling range very exposed on rivers with this drawy board and allows me to overbet jam for a large bet size and increase my bluffing frequency with me having a lot more AK+ hands in my range on the K842 board than his range. His range of bluffcatchers would be struggling to ever win the pot on virtually every river.
I don’t know to what if any degree Rupert would be considering this in the moment, even if he was thinking less theoretically i think people’s intuition can often come to similar conclusions. The ideas behind this made me believe he would also just call the turn a high % of the time with his value hands.
After Rupert raises my overbet his range is extremely polarised, i think the value hands could be as little as 44 and 88 maybe as far to also include K2s,K4s,K8s,84s. This is 6 or 15 combos of value hands that may choose to take this line. I thought it was much more likely he’d raise with a draw that decided they couldn’t call a bet that large but didn’t want to fold so decided to bluff. 56,57,67 with a flush draw all seemed like likely candidates, other small spade draws seemed like reasonable possibilities, this is up to 18 combinations of hands. Of course this line isn’t one i expect him to take that often with these hands but then i didn’t think he would play a set this way that often either.
I was ready to snap call a board pairing river but the 7d was a particularly bad one, i now only beat 7 combinations of the hands i mentioned. His shove size meant i needed to beat 3 bluff combos for every 7 value ones. I felt like if he paired the 7 he would likely check but it is certainly possible he decides to bluff with it. He may also bluff with A high, or just a random pair he didn’t want to call the turn with.
I think the fact i lose to that many hands that he may opt to bluff with makes it a pretty bad call, but in the moment i did think there was a good chance he would just flat call his value hands on the turn especially after the propensity of my overbetting on the later streets earlier on and i expected him to not turn a showdown value hand like A-high flush draw into a bluff very often.
I also really REALLY wanted to be right 🙂 Sometimes your just not meant to be a hero!
I like how the show’s been screened so far, from a poker perspective there’s a good volume of hands being shown and interesting ones imo to poker players, perhaps less so to the masses with less all-ins but i think the game playing as deep as it does made it a lot more interesting and fun to play and watch. Also helps that all my other questionable plays seem to have been correct against their actual hand so far!
Hope everyone enjoys the Christmas build-up and festivities!
Matt.
Matthew Ashton's blog 