Been getting killed in poker since moving into this new place. I swear our internet is cursed. Haven't been playing very well thou so need to fix that. That wasn't the point of this blog thou, I wanted to update and tell everyone that I just beat ElkY in SC2 3 times in a row. I has replays to prove it too!
Ok Ok, and now for epic hands that was played at Palomar a few weeks ago. The game is 20/40 mixed with 5/10 big bet and the rotation of games was Badugi, Triple Draw Deuce to Seven, PLO, and NL Hold'em. Villan in this hand we will refer to from now on as "Pizza Tom". He owns a local pizza shop in San Diego, and has recently picked up poker as a hobby. Note: He has played less than a week of poker before coming in on this particular day.
Hand #1: ($20/$40 Badugi)
First orbit of Badugi and Pizza Tom has never played the game in his life, so we tell him the rules are pretty simple: "You draw 3 times, You want low cards, you want 1 card of every suit, ace is low, and bam you have a badugi!" Pot is 5 way to the first draw, and everyone is drawing atleast 1 card to some that are drawing 3. Oh Badugi is so fun! With one draw left there is about 16 big bets ($640 ish) in the pot with 3 players still left, one being Pizza Tom. Two players draw and Pizza Tom stands pat. First player leads river for $40. Pizza Tom raises to $80, both players fold. Pizza Tom rolls over the and is like "Badugi!" as he scoops massive pot. LOL
Hand #2: ($5/$10 Pot Limit Omaha)
Gordo16 (whos played an extensive amount of PLO / Mixed games, prolly one of the best mixed players in SD) has been the most active on the PLO rounds since he got himself a little stuck. Finally he gets in a heads-up pot with Pizza Tom who once again is still learning the ins and outs of PLO. They get into this one hand on the river the board reads Q-J-7-4-2 with no possible flushes. Pizza Tom has 77XX hand, and Gordo16 has QQXX. Pizza Tom checks river and Gordo pots for $3k. Pizza Tom makes the most ridiculous soul read of a fold after like 10 seconds of thinking!?! Gordo shows him the top set to let him know he was right. This hand sets up the final most epic hand....
Hand #OMG EPIC LOL: ($5/$10 Pot Limit Omaha)
I'll write this hand from Ryan's point of view (Palomar regular who was sitting next to Pizza Tom, and was helping him with the rules to each game. Pizza Tom was showing Ryan is hand each time) Pizza Tom raises UTG to $40, Gordo16 3bets to $150 to try and isolate him. Someone flat calls, and action gets back around to Pizza Tom who repots to like $560. Gordo is sitting deep with him and is already thinking "Oh baby, time to crack aces" as he flats the 4bet. Cold caller folds. When the flop came down , Pizza Tom now leans over and shows Ryan his hand: and asks "Wait so I can only use two cards?" Ryan is like "Yes you can use only 2 of those cards". Pizza Tom proceeds to be like "Oh shit" (as he realizes now that he doesn't have three of a kind 8's) then checks to Gordo. Gordo fires $700 and Pizza Tom doesn't waste too much time before calling. Turn comes so board reads , Pizza Tom checks and Gordo pots it all-in for $2500. Pizza Tom looks back at his hand and again doesn't waste much time before saying "I call, I have a straight" Gordo says "Ug, you must have the AA4X" Pizza Tom then rolls over his 8884 thinking that his lone 4 was making him a straight. Gordo just stares in horror as he rolls over the to see that Pizza Tom had just a pair of 8's which were good at that point (not to mention the 3 blockers to Gordo's straight draw, and 84 to take away the 7 as a 2pair out lol). River bricks and Pizza Tom ships massive PLO pot with pair of 8's. "That would happen to me" say Gordo after the hand as he proceeds to play every hand in the badugi orbit before tilt leaving.
Moral of the story, don't bluff people who don't know the rules to the game
First off, note that I haven't had internet for the past week. I wrote this on my offline time so it's a couple days out dated:
Not even going to get into trying to update my blog more. When playing mostly live pokers, your time spent on the computer drops dramatically. Add that in with the release of Starcraft 2 (which is clearly a mandatory 2-3 hours of wasted time per day), and a little bit of the online poker grind here and there, I basically don't find myself with the time I use to have to update this thing.
Just came off of an awful WSOP. Played the $10/$25 at the Rio for cash games, and ended up getting creamed for ~$30kish over the week I played. Got the chance to play one of the craziest cash games ever with RaSZi where a $10/$25 turned into a $10/25/50/100. Weeeeeeeee! Although I ended up being pretty card dead during that particular session. On another day, I had probably my worst single orbit of live poker ever where I flopped a set 3 times and lost all 3 pots. Lucky for me, none of those pots where over 200bbs. I also played 3 tournaments, one of those $1k shit shows where I lasted about 2 hours then got 2 outted. The $2.5k 6-max where I lasted til 11:30pm before getting knocked out by Jeff Shulman in a sick hand where I river a set and he binks a straight . Finally the Main Event, I played on Day 3 and drew Table 1 Seat 2. Was it a sign? Table 1 Seat 1 happened to be Theo Tran, and our table didn't break all day. We had a pretty soft table for the most part and I ended the 1st day with 77k. Day 2a did not go as smoothly as I wanted, as I was working off of one hour of sleep from the night before for god knows what reason (maybe I was too excited to play or something?). My stack went on the monkey coaster for the majority of the day, swinging between 40k and 180k. Ironically, if I played my good solid tight game I probably would have ended with a pretty variance free 100k. Instead I ended the day with 125k after several hands where I just went bat shit insane and ran good. Going into Day 3 I was pretty well rested and took an adderol to make sure I would stay focused. I drew Annie Duke's table and we had the cameras around the table for the majority of the day. I played just about as good as I wanted to play and built up to 210k in chips at the 1k/2k level. Then I ran TT into JJ for a 70bb pot. The very next hand I flopped the world with AcQx on a Jc-Tc-3c board and bricked vs JT in a 80bb pot. Finally I reshipped my last 18bb's with A9s from the bb vs btn open and btn woke up with JJ so I was out 2 orbits after having a massive stack. That was pretty heart breaking, but the good news is that I might get my 15 seconds of fame as I played some weird hand with Annie Duke and the ESPN cameras were there and took down my name so... crossing my fingers!
In other news, just finished with a year of living in La Jolla (northern San Diego) less than a block away from the beach, and it definitely was an awesome experience. Going into the year, I thought winning money in the online pokers was a myth but I learned (or basically relearned) what it takes to be an online grinder and so hopefully in these upcoming months I will have a winning PTR on atleast one site :-P
I just moved to a condo in the south side of the Hillcrest area of San Diego (between Pacific Beach and Downtown). Yes, it is the "gay-friendly" area. It just so happens that everyone that I've met in our condo building so far has been gay. Make fun of it all you want! We got the biggest condo in the building with a baller ass 270 degree view of San Diego for about half the price as it normally would be just because it's the "gay" area of town. New roommates: GoGators86, A2Steaksauce, Clayton_27. Only downside = when walking around the building or outside in the Hillcrest area with one of my roommates we are probably mistaken as a gay couple. The upsides = We are closer to a lot of the other poker players down here who mostly live downtown. Great location to pretty much everything (10 minutes to the beach, 5 minutes to downtown, 10 minutes to Petco Park, 10 minutes to Qualcomm Stadium, 10 minutes to PB bars, 5 minutes to golf course / driving range). And this...
This post is a 100% shameless brag, so if you don't like reading my brags gtfo and move on to the next thread. Hand happened earlier today at Commerce. Villan is a certain older gentleman wearing a certain unnamed MMA logo on his hat and t-shirt (I will keep it unnamed, but for those who are here and playing the games you will know exactly who I'm talking about). Villan has a massive case of hero syndrome (and apparently did not realize I have a bigger case of it) where he wants to make the big call downs, the big bluffs, and basically the most heroic play possible then show his cards and be like LOOK AT ME, I AM GOD OF THIS GAME, SUP?
Game is short handed 10/20 where Villan limps in the CO, SB is young kid who raises to $80, I am in BB with and call. Villan also calls. 3way to flop.
Flop: ($240)
SB checks, I bet $200, Villan calls pretty quickly, SB folds.
Turn: ($640)
I bet $620, Villan immediately asks "You have a set?" then proceeds to tank for 2 or so minutes. Finally he makes the call.
River: ($1880)
I check pretty quickly assuming my hand is good here >%50 of the time with the way the action went. Villan doesn't waste anytime and shoves all-in for $4900. So I stood up and called over a few people I knew that were walking around the table to come and watch what I was going to do to this poor man.
Then I called. He shakes his head with disgust and mucks. Table the A9 high ftw of the $11k+ pot. Dealer calls me "Young man" (reference to Peter Tran here at Commerce for those who know who I'm talking about). I <3 this place.
Letting everyone know I'm in LA for LAPC right now. Just wondering who from LP is here and playing. If anyone wants to meet up, I'll be playing cash games (10/20 NL in the smaller room) all day starting at 1:00pm PST tomorrow til like 9:00pm. I'll be wearing a blue hoodie and possibly a beanie. Don't be afraid to say hi if you see me! I don't bite! I'm here with GoGators86, A2SteakSause, TradeByDay, Hardcory, Webzilla, and BMW_Golf_Pro2 so I'll introduce ya to the gang if you find me. Ok GL!
So I realized that updating my blog on a weekly basis is just too much work. I really wanted to get some pics of the beach house I live in now (moved in at the end of August) but I lost my camera which sucks. Anyways, Evan and I moved up stakes in life and now we live in the WindanSea area in La Jolla with TeeJayOrTJ. Other than that life has been chill past few months. There are a ton of online poker players (Like 20-25 players that I know of) living here in San Diego and a bunch of us have taken up golf, so recently I've been golfing atleast 1-2 times a week which is a blast except for the fact that I'm averaging losing ~$500 in prop bets everytime I go out with the boys. I'm a sick betting fish apparently, but atleast my golf game is improving. First round of golf I shot a 180 (I'm sure most people would just give up counting strokes, but I wanted to see how bad I really was) but now I'm averaging around 125 strokes from the middle tees which is nice. I've even shot my first legit birdie already!
Been playing mostly live the past 2 months and been crushing until the last week of October where I pretty much ran like dog shit and probably didn't play my best while running that bad. I had a set goal on what I thought I could maintain monthly at Palomar (the cardroom I mostly play at in San Diego) and I was on track until my very tragic last week of October. Sucks to run bad on one of the very few times the No Limit game runs with $10/$20/$40 blinds. Lucky for me, my next door neighbor is | Scubba | the cap NL wizard, and watching him play & crush Ivey at $500/$1000 cap NL got me motivated to play online once again. Actually ended up learning a lot about playing vs short stacks from watching one of his sessions and listening to how he thinks about the game. So far thou, my own online en devours have been slow, as I feel like playing live vs mostly fish has set me back on the learning curve. Been watching a bunch of videos and studying up so hopefully I can return strong! Other than that, I got myself into a relationship and it's cool caz my girlfriend is basically awesome in everyway. For some reason, my mind set is on such an even keel no matter how bad or good I run and I feel it's mainly caz of her.
Left to right: Girlfriend's roommate, Girlfriend, Me
Here is most of our poker group down here at dinner for Clayton's (Leggopoker Clayton) birthday:
Oh and Halloween @ Hardrock in downtown San Diego -->
Before I go off on my very long and very rage-filled rant about how Pot Limit Omaha is the most rigged game ever, I'd just like to say that the drama between Evan and I (which really wasn't all that serious since it was just over 5k) has been cleared up, just a big misunderstanding that kind of went the wrong way. To recap a little bit since my last blog post, WSOP was a blast. Basically ran really good in almost everything I did. Got pretty lazy about playing the tournaments halfway through the series since I was destroying cash games pretty hard for a long stretch, so I only ended up playing 10 tournaments total all summer when I was planned on going on the super grind and play 22. The only thing that bugged me was that I thought I played a less-than stellar main event. My starting table was filled with nits with the exception of Faraz Jaka who sat two to my left. Had no clue who he was until he busted out at the end of day 1, but he made sure to make my life pretty miserable. Was pretty disappointed to how I adjusted to the situation overall. Made day 2 but was real short, and only lasted 2 hours before my KK got cracked by a flopped set of 9's
WSOP Event #11 $2,000 Final Table - Yes I has the happiness
WSOP Event #11 $2,000 Final Table - Wat?
WSOP Roommates, Auspicious and Jakelantic
Other WSOP roommates, GoGators86 and RetiredAt30
Ever since then I've been back in San Diego chilling. I have played less than 5 hours of online poker in the last month. It's been super relaxing actually. Went back to Palomar and my god run continued for a +15k first week back at mostly 5/10 and a little 10/20. My boy Clayton (The donkament player who makes vids for Leggopoker) has been living with us since Vegas, and so I've been learning PLO from him since he's been playing PLO for the majority of the past year and has been recently taking shots at 25/50 online. Most of my learning has just come from watching his sessions, and not really trying it out for myself.
So last night I decide to give PLO a little spin. I 4 tabled $.50/$1.00 for a good 4 hours, and ended up down like 6 buy-ins wtf... Not a good start. Woke up this morning and dropped another 2 buy-ins over an hour. That ain't good, but Clayton said it's just standard PLO variance. So I head to Palomar this afternoon and see that the wait for $5/10 is going to be a while. That's when the $25/50 PLO that was running caught my eye. Obv I take a shot, since the game looked pretty good to me considering I have smashed half the table in NL Hold'em. The game got a little bigger when two fish took a seat an hour or so after I sat, as they straddled every pot. I kept trying to get the game half PLO half NL Hold'em but there were some wet vaginas that kept refusing. My final hand went as follows:
Aggro fish straddles $100, weak/passive fish calls $100 in middle position. I am dealt in the CO. I pot it to $500 (they round up for pot amounts). Super mega fish who had not folded a hand in the past hour calls in the big blind. Straddler calls, and limper calls. Flop comes . All 3 players check to me, and I pot it for $2k. Mega fish in the big blind calls. And everyone else folds. Turn comes . Fish checks, and calls my last $3k shove, then rolls over for the epic wtf are you doing preflop / holy shit u are a moron / how the fuck did you pick up more outs / please god hold one time / don't let this retard fish ruin my first full day of PLO.
This update is going to be short since I gotta bounce to Rio for the $2000 today. Just got into Vegas a couple days ago, played my first event yesterday which was the $1500 6-max and lasted about 6 hours. Value cut myself pretty hard in the first level and had to claw my way back to starting stack, then got my brains coolered out by a "live pro" which name I will leave out of this. Whatever, tournaments are stupid. Rio has had the most bomb ass cash games ever! They are running 5-10-20 with the 20 being the straddle on the button, action starting in the SB. Makes the game super juicy.
Pretty much the funniest thing I've witnessed so far was at a 5-10 game with Myth and PoorUser, where PoorUser is completely smashed and absolutely crapping all over this younger guy. Finally, On a board PoorUser like double pot shoved the river after betting all 3 streets. The kid turns over and obviously I'm thinking there is no way he's going to fold. Kid tanks forever as PoorUser keeps telling him "When you fold I'm going to show you JUST the Qd" and after like 3 minutes of thinking THE KID MUCKS THE 3RD NUTS. PoorUser insta shows the and we had a good ROFL for the next ten minutes.
Anyways, if you guys are keeping up with the updates on pokernews or the WSOP site, keep your eye on my boy Jake Kalb.
He has mountains and mountains of chips going into day 3 of the $1500. He's 2nd out of 36, so hopefully he can bring a bracelet back to Palooooomar cardroom. Weee!!!
Basically listed out everything that I plan on playing over the summer today. I'm heading to Vegas Friday morning so I'll prolly get in around 3-4pm. Obviously I'm not going to be playing all of them, since Day 2 will overlap into a lot of those tourneys and I plan on making a lot of Day 2s. Anyways here it is:
On the off time I'm probably going to be around the Rio or Bellagio playing cash games. Planning on coming home (San Diego) for one or two of the weekends. Other than that, I will be in Vegas til July 18th in a house 10mins west of the Rio on Spring Mt with GoGators86(UB/AP) aka plzlemmewin (FTP) , RetiredAt30 (UB/AP), and UnderAAged (PS). My house WILL bring home a bracelet this summer. I'm calling it now!
PS: If you see me in Vegas, don't be shy! Say hi! I swear I don't bite. This is me:
SPOILER: Blog post contains epic pictures of VITAL FUCKING MYTH below.
Yea, so my New Years Resolution about keeping my blog updated is not going so well as you can see. The playing 2500 hands each day minimum was going well for about 3 weeks, then I realized I'm lazy. I started going to the gym, then stopped, then started again, then stopped again, and now I'm just too busy to get my ass back up to go again. I'm pretty bad with time management and organization in general so that definitely is probably contributing to my so-called laziness. Other than that, this year has been a successful one already for one simple reasons: THE LIVE POKERS!
There is a card room in San Diego called Palomar where they run a 5/10 game with a $2k cap buy-in, with the occasional 10/20 w no cap buy-in. I knew about the place when I first came down here to San Diego, and visited it once or twice at the beginning of last year, when I didn't really have the motivation or discipline to play live poker yet so I never really went back. After a year of practice on the live tournament circuit, and losta time spent in the Vegas live cash games I came back to San Diego with more of both motivation and discipline. So starting last November, I started to dedicate atleast one day a week to the Palomar grind. At the beginning of this year, I was going 2-3 times a week. Starting March I upped it to 4-5 times a week. Basically it would be spewing money not to go, the games are THAT juicy. It really is the sweetest mix of loose/passive random middle aged guys, super old super nits, and gambling loose aggrotards. Very comparable to the Commerce games during LAPC (Really, nothing on earth will surpass the goodness of the live games are Commerce during LAPC). From Jan 1st to the present I'm up ~$65k playing live 5/10 and 10/20 (which breaks down to 21k at Commerce 10/20, and 44k at Palomar 5/10). Pretty funny since most of my time is still spent playing online NL 6-max / HU, and I'm up but not close to those numbers so far this year.
All the practice has really made my live poker reads really sharp, mainly because I get pretty good insight into how different people think about how to play hands. Before I'd always think "Shit this guy is so stupid, none of his logic makes any sense" but now I realize that most people actually attempt some sort of reason to their play and even thou it is incorrect the majority of the time, now it makes a lot more sense to me on why they think these ways in certain spots. Can't think of a better way to put it, here is kind of a basic example of what I'm trying to say: Player A never realizes the pot size in any hand. Therefore, when he faces a $50 bet to him and has the decision between calling or folding he only sees the size of the bet. He reasons that his opponents hand is probably weak because he only bet $50. If his opponent bet $250, he reads the hand strength as strong. So he ends up calling looser in single raised / limped pots, and folding big (seeing ghosts in the closet) in 3bet pots, assuming that his opponent is adjusting his betting sizes to the size of the pot (surprisingly some people don't adjust their betting sizes either because most of them think like Player A). Just one of a dozen things that run through the head of your average live player. Live poker so ez lol...
So far this year, went to LAPC which was a bust tournament wise (Direct yourself two blog posts down to my 10k Commerce event recap), followed by a trip to Rincon which is an hour north of San Diego (even thou they call it WSOP Circuit in San Diego, but in reality that shit hole is nowhere close to SD). Only played the main event there and ended up getting 8th for $24.5k which made up for all the LAPC buy-ins I dropped which was nice. Last hand was a coinflip to the ever so aggressive shaundeeb prodigy, Esther Tayor (E-Tay) for a top 2 stack. Decided to skip the Bellagio series because I got lazy and decided to do real life fun stuff with my friends, here is a short recap with pics:
On Oahu with a couple high school buds of mine, this is the backside of Poli
On top of Diamond Head over looking Honolulu & Wakiki
Going snowboarding for the first time @ Big Bear
On the lift... before I bruised my tail bone on a rock
My boy Noah and I on Valentines Day with the girls in LA @ Geisha House
Some girl smiling at the camera before I smashed her skull open with my pool stick. GTFO bitch it's my picture day imo.
That's VITAL FUCKING MYTH!
That's VITAL FUCKING MYTH ONE MORE TIME!
Oh yeah so last Friday was my 24th birthday. Fuck I'm old. We've discussed that if you're 21, you are the average age for an online poker player. At 24, you reach your mid-life crisis. At 28+ your like grandpa (or grandma) to all these young-ins. We ended up having a chill dinner in Mission Beach at this bomb place called Mizu's where they are like "FUCK YEAH!" if you sake bomb. So we sake bombed all night, then headed to Bar West in PB which is also pretty ill. PBDrunks round-house kicked one of our grey goose bottles to the floor. Smooth.
For the weekend me and my "kinda" girlfriend Anna, went to Vegas to see Dave Matthews Band two nights in a row at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. Let me mini-rant first: Wynn's ticket service people can suck my fucking left nut. Other than that is was an awesome weekend. Boyd Tinsley on the violin is the illest. Dave Matthews Band absolutely rocked the entire house. I'm def a big fan of all the new stuff they have coming out too. Can't wait til the new CD comes out in June.
Here is some random youtube clip of my favorite song 'Dancing Nancies' played on the second night (Note-> Boyd Tinsley rocks socks):
And a pic from weekend:
Fixing my laziness! Maybe post something more enjoyable to read soon...
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and is like "Badugi!" as he scoops massive pot. LOL
, Pizza Tom now leans over and shows Ryan his hand: 
and asks "Wait so I can only use two cards?" Ryan is like "Yes you can use only 2 of those cards". Pizza Tom proceeds to be like "Oh shit" (as he realizes now that he doesn't have three of a kind 8's) then checks to Gordo. Gordo fires $700 and Pizza Tom doesn't waste too much time before calling. Turn comes 
so board reads 
to see that Pizza Tom had just a pair of 8's which were good at that point (not to mention the 3 blockers to Gordo's straight draw, and 84 to take away the 7 as a 2pair out lol). River bricks and Pizza Tom ships massive PLO pot with pair of 8's. "That would happen to me" say Gordo after the hand as he proceeds to play every hand in the badugi orbit before tilt leaving.
. Finally the Main Event, I played on Day 3 and drew Table 1 Seat 2. Was it a sign? Table 1 Seat 1 happened to be Theo Tran, and our table didn't break all day. We had a pretty soft table for the most part and I ended the 1st day with 77k. Day 2a did not go as smoothly as I wanted, as I was working off of one hour of sleep from the night before for god knows what reason (maybe I was too excited to play or something?). My stack went on the monkey coaster for the majority of the day, swinging between 40k and 180k. Ironically, if I played my good solid tight game I probably would have ended with a pretty variance free 100k. Instead I ended the day with 125k after several hands where I just went bat shit insane and ran good. Going into Day 3 I was pretty well rested and took an adderol to make sure I would stay focused. I drew Annie Duke's table and we had the cameras around the table for the majority of the day. I played just about as good as I wanted to play and built up to 210k in chips at the 1k/2k level. Then I ran TT into JJ for a 70bb pot. The very next hand I flopped the world with AcQx on a Jc-Tc-3c board and bricked vs JT in a 80bb pot. Finally I reshipped my last 18bb's with A9s from the bb vs btn open and btn woke up with JJ so I was out 2 orbits after having a massive stack. That was pretty heart breaking, but the good news is that I might get my 15 seconds of fame as I played some weird hand with Annie Duke and the ESPN cameras were there and took down my name so... crossing my fingers! 
($240)
($640)
($1880)
. Fish checks, and calls my last $3k shove, then rolls over 
.... 
and obviously I'm thinking there is no way he's going to fold. Kid tanks forever as PoorUser keeps telling him "When you fold I'm going to show you JUST the Qd" and after like 3 minutes of thinking THE KID MUCKS THE 3RD NUTS. PoorUser insta shows the 
