Goin' Retro: My big win at the Rock

Three years ago, in May of 2008, I got a free media pass into a super-satellite tournament for the Coast to Coast Poker Championship at the River Rock Casino. This was the first event of the "WPT Canada" tour, and I'm fairly certain it was the last. I alluded to this tournament in a post a couple months back, and I managed to dig up the column that I wrote for the paper afterward. Since I originally wrote it for a non-poker audience, I've added some more technical information for your consumption. Enjoy!
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Have you heard the one about the journalist who wins his entry into a major poker tournament, improbably earns a huge payday and writes an award-winning story about it?
If you've read Positively Fifth Street, it's a familiar plot line. In 2000, author James McManus was assigned to cover the World Series of Poker for Harper's magazine, and elected to sink his entire advance fee into qualifying for the $10,000 buy-in main event. He ended up making the final table against all odds, earning $247,760 for his fifth-place finish, and the resulting volume is widely considered one of the best sports books of the past decade.
Recently, my status as a media celebrity (such as it is) afforded me a shot at my own mini-McManus moment. Jody Trainer, an Abbotsford poker pro whom I wrote a feature about in 2006, sent an e-mail offering me a free seat in a super-satellite tournament at the inaugural World Poker Tour Canada event at Richmond's River Rock Casino.
Being a bit of a poker aficionado, I jumped at the chance, selling it to my bosses as an opportunity to take the pulse of poker in Canada. I've been playing the game since 2000, when my buddy Matt and I looked up the rules for Texas hold 'em on the Internet after watching the Matt Damon-Ed Norton flick Rounders. Being that we were poor college students at the time, we'd go down to the corner store and buy boxes of Smarties to use as chips. Then we'd play late into the night, with the winner taking home a bucket of well-handled sweets. 
In recent years, we've graduated to playing for vast sums of cash – 10 bucks per tournament, to be precise. Suffice it to say, I'm no high roller.
When I arrived at the River Rock Casino and found my seat, I glanced around to take stock of my opponents. To my left was Joy, a gregarious 77-year-old whose fashion sense echoed that of Johnny Cash, at least when it came to colour choice – black pants, black sweater, black faux-fur vest, black sunglasses, accented by a splashy silver necklace and matching earrings. She brightly informed me that she intended to become the oldest winner of the World Series of Poker women's championship. 
Joy took up the game four years ago, and she lost 30 pounds when she started playing online because it cut down on her trips to the fridge. Joy said that poker is a profitable venture for her, and she needs it to be – her winnings supplement a modest pension. 
"Find a good mutual fund, and put $100 in it every month," she advised me, using eye contact to emphasize her point. "You'll still be able to pay your rent."
To my immediate right was a young buck sporting a grey Billabong hoodie and a sparse chin-strap beard. He had just arrived at the River Rock after a 13-hour drive from Terrace. Like me, he'd never played in a big tournament before, but he said he'd had some success at $125 buy-in events at his local golf course. Unlike me, he liked to move all his chips into the middle with weak hands like J-10 and K-7. The poker gods must have been smiling on him, because he managed to build a huge stack in the first hour of play.
For the uninitiated, a super-satellite differs from a regular poker tourney in that everyone who finishes in the money wins the same prize. In this case, one out of every 20 players in the event would win a $4,000 prize package, representing buy-ins to a pair of no-limit hold'em tournaments.
In the early stages, I seemed to have a horseshoe embedded in my DNA. On the fifth hand of the event, I was dealt pocket tens in the big blind. The button opened the pot to 250 (blinds 25-50), and I re-raised to 750. The button called, and the flop made me do a double-take – a jack, a ten and another ten. The odds of flopping quads, I found out later, are approximately 407-to-1. I slow-played it effectively, and took about three-quarters of my opponent's stack without a showdown.
Unfortunately, I lost the next couple of hands I played, and I found myself on the razor's edge of elimination, barely treading water as the blinds rose. A couple hours in, I was down to about nine big blinds, and moved all in on the button with A8. I was gutted when the big blind called with AQ, but a miraculous eight materialized on the turn to keep me alive.
That doubled me up, but I was still mentally planning my drive back to Abbotsford when I picked up some massive hands. Twice in quick succession, I was dealt pocket aces and dragged huge pots to boost my chip stack. 
Meanwhile, I saw Joy make her exit with under 100 players remaining. And with 55 players left, my buddy from Terrace joined her on the sidelines. There had been 598 entries (including rebuys), meaning that 30 of us would finish in the money.
At that point, the increasingly realistic possibility of winning $4,000 stripped me of any semblance of composure. My table demeanor became less James Bond and more Steve Urkel, and I was literally trembling at times. 
Will, a young jet-setting pro from Toronto who was fresh off the plane from jaunts to Monte Carlo and Las Vegas, was seated to my left as the field shrank inside of 40 players. Taking into account my near-constant fidgeting, he started chatting with me in much the same tone that a suicide hotline operator might use to talk someone in off a ledge. 
"Hey, you're definitely in the top 15 in chips," he told me, eying my stack. "All you've got to do is avoid confrontations and cruise to the money."
It was sound advice. I locked it down for the most part, but I did raise a couple of pots with legitimate hands and actually ended up busting a short-stacked player in 33rd place when he ran KQ into my AQ.
After eight-and-a-half hours of nerve-wracking play, the money bubble finally burst with the elimination of the 31st player. As I high-fived the other 29 survivors, part of me felt sorry for the guy who'd just been knocked out, but the other (more dominant) part of me was pretty stoked that I'd just won four grand. 
I was headed to a wedding in Edmonton that weekend, and thus was unable to make use of the two tournament tickets (for events with $1,000 and $3,000 buy-ins). The casino, though, was nice enough to pay me out in cash instead.
Jody said he was pretty impressed with my performance, calling it "a nice little win." I guess that's a fair assessment – to put it in perspective, Jody boasts upwards of $800,000 in tournament winnings since 2006. 
Indeed, I'm not the equal of James McManus as a poker player or a writer. But I've got a pretty cool story to tell my friends.
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To this day, this tournament represents the largest score of my modest poker career. It was quite a windfall for me at the time – I was just two months away from my wedding, and I used the cash to pay off the remainder of my car loan and to cover the costs of our honeymoon. It definitely put my wife and I in a much stronger financial position heading into married life, and the tourney itself is simply a great memory.

Stuff I Like: Breaking Bad

Allow me to introduce what I hope will become a regular feature on this blog – the only obstacle being my short attention span. "Stuff I Like" will feature, ummm . . . how to explain this . . . stuff I like. Media – movies, TV, music – will be the primary subject matter.
I wouldn't call myself an expert in terms of movies and TV, and though I am a classically trained musician, I'm not necessarily a music nut who has all the latest and greatest albums. My conceit, though, is that I believe I have very good taste. I know what I like. And I like cool stuff.
For my first foray into this realm, I can think of no better piece of media to recommend than "Breaking Bad". Now I'm as big a fan of "Mad Men" as anybody, but for my money, its AMC cousin "Breaking Bad" is the best show on TV.
I believe we live in a golden age of television drama, and "Breaking Bad" represents all the best elements of the medium at the moment. The production values are more in line with what you'd see in a movie, but when you give a talented writer/producer like Vince Gilligan the freedom to tell a story over multiple 13-episode seasons, the end result is delicious. Movies tend to be like fast food; great TV shows like "Breaking Bad" are slow-cooked to perfection.
I was late hopping on the "Breaking Bad" bandwagon, to be perfectly honest. Based on the promo commercials, the premise didn't grab me right away. High school chemistry teacher Walter White, played by Bryan Cranston – best known at the time for his role as the dad on Malcolm in the Middle – has been diagnosed with lung cancer, so he decides to cook crystal meth as a means for providing for his family. It just didn't seem like a barrel of laughs.
I happened to stumble across a couple episodes midway through Season 2, and the show gradually started to burrow its way into my cranium. I watched Season 3 in its entirety, then went back and bought the first two seasons on DVD and caught up on all the episodes I've missed.
Season 4 is set to debut on AMC on Sunday, July 17, and I'm positively giddy. "Breaking Bad" is what I imagine it would be like if the Coen brothers made a TV show, with a little dash of Tarantino in the mix.
The show is dark, no doubt about it, and it isn't for everyone. But it is undeniably brilliant. Cranston has been full value for his three Emmy awards as outstanding lead actor in a drama series, and his wingman Aaron Paul (playing Jesse Pinkman, Walter White's junkie-with-a-heart-of-gold partner in crime) really came into his own in Season 3. He won he Emmy for best supporting actor last year. Their complex father/son-type relationship is the heart of the show.
White's unlikely journey from bland family man to drug kingpin is a fascinating one, and it's written and presented in logical way, as much as such an unlikely scenario could be.
The show is darkly hilarious at times, and the supporting characters are well-conceived. My favourites are Hank Schrader, White's macho brother-in-law who happens to be a DEA agent, and Walter Jr., White's son who suffers from cerebral palsy.
If you're not sold on "Breaking Bad" just yet, there was an excellent feature in Newsweek analyzing the success of the show, and previewing the upcoming fourth season. You can check it out by clicking right here.

Grinding out a cash in Vegas

I've had two laptops bite the dust over the last five months, but at long last, I own a legit computer.
So you can expect to see a few more regular updates at this site, including the recap of my Vegas tournament that I promised earlier. That's what this is. Included with this post will be the outcome of my "Hand of the week" that I posted a while back.
FINDING THE RIGHT GAME
Before we headed to Vegas, my buddy Jayeson and I did a bit of research on where the best single-day poker tournaments were held. The site allvegaspoker.com was a tremendous resource.
The general consensus online – backed up by a look at the structure sheets – is that the Venetian is the place to be. We also considered Caesar's Palace and the World Series of Poker at the Rio.
The structures at Caesar's daily tournaments are quite comparable to the Venetian, but the rake at the Venetian was markedly lower in the buy-in range we were looking at ($100-$200). The Venetian's daily $150 noon tournament returns 86 per cent of the buy-in to the prize pool, while Caesar's $85 nooner returned only 76 per cent.
The tourneys at all three places had half-hour-long levels, but the WSOP daily (non-bracelet) tourneys had smaller starting stacks, a couple of missing levels, and the antes started earlier. Not as good a structure and not as much value, and the lure of the WSOP brand wasn't enough to overcome that.
When we got to Vegas, we discovered that the schedules at the casinos were slightly different than we'd expected. Dovetailing with the WSOP, the Venetian was holding its Deep Stack series, and Caesar's was hosting its Mega Stacks series. The Venetian tourneys were out of our ideal price range – upwards of $300 – so we showed up at Caesar's for their $130 buy-in event on Monday.

HOT START
Enough foreplay. Let's talk poker.
At Caesar's, players begin with 15,000 chips and 50-100 blinds. The stacks are deep enough that you can play fairly solid poker, and that's what I did. Over the first two-and-a-half levels, I played just eight hands where I voluntarily put chips into the pot. But I won six of them, chipping up to 32,000 in the process. I wish I could remember some of these hands, but they're escaping me at the moment.
The event drew 371 players, paying 36 spots, including about $7,500 for first. I played with guys from Russia, France, Italy, England, and a few gents from other provinces in Canada. I imagine tournaments in Vegas generally have a fairly high tourist factor, but the fact the WSOP was in town made it a particularly interesting time to be there. Everybody who played poker on the planet seemed to be in town. At least, that was the illusion.
DONKEY BOMBED
There was this guy seated directly to my right who fancied himself the table captain. I might have been annoyed with him, but instead I chose just to be amused.
The dude was in his early 50s, with a greying goatee and leathery sun-burned skin. He took it upon himself to make sure everyone had their antes in, and got into arguments about etiquette a couple times. Classic. Mr. Leather Skin felt it was his God-given right to play every single pot, and he took FOREVER to make a decision pre-flop. Every pair of napkins that landed in front of him required a full-fledged production number as he moaned about how to play this monster, how he just had to call that raise and reraise. The vast majority of the time, he'd call. The man was loose-passive, and a crazy calling station.
He actually played the style reasonably well, but his chip stack obviously did a crazy roller-coaster routine. I steered clear of him for about an hour and 15 minutes, then we finally locked horns.
I hadn't played a hand in a while, so I felt the need to raise with AJ under the gun (a bit loose, maybe). I got a caller in middle position, and of course, Mr. Leather Skin just had to call in the big blind.
The flop was a beauty – AJ3, two diamonds. I decided to slow-play, and we checked it around. The turn was a club, somewhere around an 8. Mr. Leather Skin bet 1,500, and I put in a big raise to 5,000. To my utter shock, the other player in the hand flat-called, and Mr. Leather Face called as well.
The river was gross – the 9 of diamonds. Leather checked, I wasn't putting another chip in the pot, and the other player checked as well. Loud-mouth rolled over T4 of diamonds to take it down. The other player claimed to have 52 of clubs – gutshot straight draw on the flop, flush draw on the turn.
That pot would have had me nearing 45,000 chips, but instead I was knocked down to 23,000. Gaaaaaaah.
RUNNING REALLY GOOD
I felt I had the best seat at the table – to the left of the uber-loose heehaw. But for the next hour and a half, I couldn't find a reasonable hand to play with him. I was utterly card-dead. I ended up blinding down to my starting stack of 15,000 . . . and with the blinds at 500-1,000, that was rather short.
I finally found AJ in middle/late position, and pumped it up to 2500. It folded around to an affable Englishman in the small blind, and he shipped all in with a covering stack. This was not a good spot, so I mucked.
Two hands later, I found AJ again. Once again, I raised to 2500. Once again, the same player – now in the cutoff – shipped all in with a shrug. I had around 10,000 behind, and I was a little suspicious that the same player made the exact same move on me. Was he bullying me? At any rate, if I folded, I'd only have 10 big blinds left. I figured I could well be trailing, but I had to make a stand sometime, so I called.
He flipped over AK, and I was in terrible shape. The flop came down ATx, the turn was a king, and the river was a glorious queen to give me a very fortunate broadway straight. He told me he'd had AK the previous hand he'd shoved on me, as well. Better to be lucky than good sometimes, I guess.
A couple hands later, I finally found a good spot to go to war with Mr. Leather Skin. He raised in early position, and I made a beefy re-raise with KK. He called – of course – and we saw a flop of 642, two diamonds. He checked, and I made a healthy value bet – about 40 per cent of my remaining stack. He check-raised enough to put me all in, and I called.
He rolled over J5 of diamonds, and I just about barfed. He had a gutshot straight flush draw – 12 outs in all. But I managed to fade both the turn and the river, and chipped up to more than 50,000. Phew.
CHIPPING UP
In possession of an above-average stack after that double-up, I began to chip up steadily. My table broke just before the dinner break, and I joined a new table with a bunch of big-stacked players.
On the last hand before dinner, an Eastern European player raised in middle position to 15,000 (blinds were 3,000-6,000, ante 500). I found AK in the big blind, and decided a shove was in order. I pushed about 78,000 into the middle, and after a few moments' thought, my opponent open-mucked JJ. He didn't want to race there, and neither did I. That pot took me over the 100,000 mark, and I had an above-average stack as the money bubble approached.
THE HAND I DIDN'T PLAY, AND THE HAND I DID
If there's one hand where I look back and second-guess myself, it's this one.
We were down to about 40 players – with 36 getting paid – with the blinds at 5,000-10,000, ante 1,000. The player under the gun pushed all in, and I looked down to find JJ in middle position. I asked for a count, and he had about 65,000. At this point, I had just a smidge over 120,000. I felt quite strongly that he probably had AK or AQ, and ultimately, I didn't want to race for half my stack so close to the bubble. So I folded.
In retrospect, I was almost certainly ahead, so calling wasn't a terrible idea. There's no way he had AA or KK, and I highly doubt he had QQ. Given that he was under the gun, it may have been a desperate attempt to steal the blinds. But I was quite convinced of my read, and I went with it, hoping I'd find a better spot.
Two hands later, I found one. The player to my right shipped all in for about 50,000, and I woke up with KK. I re-shoved to isolate, and he had 88. My hand held up to take me to 193,000. The chip average was about 135,000. I was going to make a deeeeeeep run, I figured.
TRENDING DOWNWARD
Regrettably, that represented my high water mark. I didn't find a good spot to play a hand for a lap and a half, and with the blinds at a predatory level, I was soon back down to chip average.
The bubble thankfully burst – a player got it all in with KK, but was run down by AJ on the river. Rough. But I was happy. Not going to lie.
I didn't necessarily just sit idly by and blind away. The table was playing very standard and tight, so I got a little frisky in the cutoff and raised to 25,000 with 93o. The small blind – the biggest stack at the table – shoved all in, and I had to release.
A while later, I tangled with the same player in a blind-vs-blind battle (the player between us busted, leaving an empty seat). I had given him a walk the previous lap, and this time I limped with QJ. The flop came AT8, giving me a double-gutshot straight draw. I fired 25,000, and he called, to my mild chagrin. I put him on a 10 – there's no way he would let me see a cheap flop if he had an ace. The turn was a Q, which if my read was correct, put me in the lead. So I fired 30,000 (leaving maybe 50,000 behind), and after hemming and hawing, he folded.
The very next hand, I had QQ on the button, min-raised, got action in the big blind, and then shoved on a rag flop.
That left me at 144,500 . . . and brings us back to the hand of the week from my June 10 post. To avoid redundancy, I'll let you go back to that post to get up to speed on the action if necessary.
(Waiting . . .)
(Waiting . . .)
Okay, that's enough.
THE END
So I got to the flop holding QcTc, and saw the board roll out Q73. With one player already all in, my only live opponent bet out 25,000. I thought about it for a moment, but with only 96,500 left, I decided a shove was in order. He snap-called with 77, and I was out the door in 34th for a $250 min-cash. (The big blind shover, incidentally, preceded me out the door. He had A8o).
I was very proud to cash at a live tourney in Vegas, but I was also fairly upset with myself afterward because I had an inkling my opponent was very strong in that spot. The proverbial alarm bells were definitely going off when he bet the flop. But when you see a flop with QT, with the stack sizes being what they were, it's hard not to get married to top pair. Credit to the dude who busted me – his bet on the flop was sized perfectly. It gave me the illusion that I had some fold equity.
In some ways, the hand played itself. But I'd like to learn from it. Next time, I'll take more time to ponder the question: Why on earth would he bet the flop?
The tournament was a blast, and my buddy Jayeson also made a nice run. He finished 65th, within shouting distance of the money.
I've got tentative plans to make another Vegas run next year. This time, it'll be more of a poker trip as opposed to a tourist thing. VEGAS BABY!

VEGAS, BABY! VEGAAAASSSSS!

I was in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago, and what a time to be there.
The trip – with my wife and another couple – wasn’t necessarily a poker jaunt, but it just so happened that the World Series of Poker was going on at the same time. At this time of year more than any other, Vegas is the Mecca of poker. Sweet.
We landed in Vegas on Sunday afternoon (June 5), and spent the rest of the day checking out the sights at the casinos (the wives had never been before).
We really wore ourselves out, hiking from our home base at the Monte Carlo up to the Venetian, stopping at every casino along the way. By the time we got back to our rooms at 11 p.m., everyone was pretty much ready to crash. I had some work to do, filing a story for Tuesday’s paper, so I stayed up later. After I was finished, I decided to jog over to the Rio to stick my head in at the WSOP. I didn’t think the women would be necessarily thrilled about that activity, so heading over late at night on my own seemed like a decent idea.

It turned out to be a good call, even though the Rio turned out to be a lot further away than it looked on the map. I arrived at around midnight, and on my way to the Amazon room, I spotted my first quasi-celebrity – former NAPT final tablist Chris DeMaci, discussing the details of a bust-out hand with a couple buddies.
Stepping into the room itself was trippy. It’s a massive space, rows of poker tables as far as the eye can see – a familiar sight from the WSOP main event broadcasts. Just inside the door, the final two tables of Event 9 ($1,500 2-7 draw lowball) were being played. Seated at the end of one of the tables was superstar Jason Mercier, sitting behind a towering chip stack he could hardly see over. So cool. I also recognized ESPN.com columnist Bernard Lee and Pittsburgh pro Josh Brikis. Watching from the other side of the ropes was Sam Chauhan, the noted mindset coach who has worked with the likes of Antonio Esfandiari, David Williams and Chris Moneymaker. Between hands, Lee would come over and confer with him.
I watched the Mercier-Lee table for a while, then wandered over to the feature table area, where they were down to heads-up in Event 7 ($10,000 pot-limit hold’em championship). The two players remaining – Amir Lehavot and Jarred Solomon – weren't particularly famous, but it was exceedingly cool watching them battle it out for the bracelet. Lehavot had the chip lead, and after giving Solomon a double-up (A9 > A7), he wrapped it up when his AQ held up against Solomon’s AJ. (The photo at the top of this post was taken on my iPhone at the moment the river card came off to clinch Lehavot’s bracelet.)
Maybe five feet away from me, apparently there in support of Solomon, was online superstar Daniel Cates. The 21-year-old was the top online cash-game earner last year, turning a profit of about $5.5 million. So sick.
I took a cab back to the Monte Carlo and rolled into bed at around 1:30 a.m., my mind thoroughly blown by the whole WSOP scene. The next day, I had the opportunity to play some poker myself. I’ll detail that in my next post.

Hand of the week: QT suited in late position

My so-called poker blog has been collecting cyber-space dust for a while now. I simply haven’t been playing much these days, for all the same issues discussed in previous posts.
But last week, I scratched my poker itch in a huge way. My wife and I joined my buddy Jayeson and his wife Ashley for four days/three nights in Vegas, and the gents managed to shake loose to play a tournament at Caesar’s Palace on Monday.
I’ll recap how I fared in a later post, but at this point, I’d like to unveil a new blog feature – the hand of the week. Hopefully, I’ll play an interesting hand every seven days or so, and trot it out for you people to chew over.
THE SITUATION
We’re just inside the money bubble. My chip stack is 144,500 after winning a nice pot holding QQ on the button. Average stack is 159,000. The blinds are 5,000-10,000 with a 1,000 ante, so most stacks are rather shallow. There are nine players at the table.
MY HOLDING
I’ve got QcTc in the cutoff.
PREFLOP ACTION
A solid middle-position player limps into the pot. (Decision point: Fold, call, or raise?)
I elect to call. The button folds, the small blind completes, and then the short-stacked big blind ships all in for 48,000 total. The original limper flat-calls. (Decision point: Fold, call or raise?)
I elect to flat-call as well. The small blind folds.
ON THE FLOP
The flop comes down Q74, rainbow. The middle-position limper leads out with a bet of 25,000. I have 96,500 left. (Decision point: Fold, call or raise?)
HOW WOULD YOU PLAY IT?
In this “hand of the week” format, I think I’ll usually be offering my analysis and breakdown of the hand at this point. But in this case, I’ll keep you in suspense and save my analysis for the next post, as I recap my entire tournament.
I’d be curious to hear how the rest of you might have played this hand. That’s what the comments section is for, folks.

Taking a shot

It’s been a while since I posted to this blog, and that negligence reflects a sharp downturn in the amount of poker I’ve been playing. When writing a poker blog, it generally helps to play a bit of poker, you see.
The reason for my absence from the online tables is, my aging six-year-old laptop kicked the bucket. This was about a month ago. So I pulled out an even more ancient laptop, a 10-year-old Dell that was collecting dust in my garage, and wouldn’t you know it, the machine works. One problem – the only application it can’t seem to run is PokerStars. For whatever reason, it won’t connect to the server.
It’s been a somewhat annoying turn of events, but at the same time, I’ve been busy at work and felt I needed a break from the game anyway.

But last Sunday, I felt a burning desire to play the PokerStars’ Sunday Million. Now, I’ve never played the Sunday Million before (its $215 entry fee is generally too rich for my blood), but last week’s event was different. In celebration of the tournament’s fifth anniversary, PokerStars boosted the prize pool guarantee from $1 million to $5 million, with a minimum of $1 million and a Lamborghini Gallardo (pictured right) to first place.
Now, if those sums don’t get your juices flowing, I don’t know what would. So I borrowed a buddy’s laptop and entered the event.
The final numbers associated with the tourney were mind-blowing: 59,128 entries generated an $11.8 million prize pool, with both first place ($1.6m) and second ($1.1m) earning seven-figure payouts.
In the end, the players at the final table settled on a nine-handed chop that saw payouts ranging from $263k to $844k. Regrettably, I was not at that final table, though I did make a decent run and managed to finish in the money.
I had an excellent start. After chipping up steadily over the first hour, I won a huge pot against an aggressive big-stacked player seated two to my right. He’d been raising my big blind from the button every single lap, so when I found AQ in the big blind, I re-popped his opening raise of 450 to 1100. He called, and we saw a QQ9 flop. I bet out, he raised, I reraised all in, and he called with KQ. I held up, and took nearly his entire stack. At that point, I had over 40,000 chips after starting with 10,000.
I continued to build my stack, peaking at 108,000. Along the way, I won another huge pot when my QQ held up against AJ after we got it all in on a jack-high flop.
Two bad beats crippled my chances of making a truly deep run. After moving tables, I found a very aggressive player to my left. On one occasion, it was folded around to me in the small blind, and he shipped all-in after I limped. The very next lap it was folded around to me again, and this time I raised to 3,000 (blinds 500-1,000). It definitely looked suspicious, given the action in that same spot the previous lap. He apparently felt it was a good time for a re-steal, and shipped all-in once again. I had trapped him with AK, but he sucked out with his raggedy Q3 offsuit. That chopped my stack in half.
Later on, just before the money bubble (at 7,450 players), I had 99 in the small blind and called a middle-position raise. The big blind came along for the ride, and we saw a 764 flop. I elected to bet 12,000 (about half the pot) to see where I stood, and the short-stacked big blind shipped it for about 30k. The initial raiser folded, and the pot odds were far to compelling for me to fold. My opponent showed 73o for top pair and a gutshot straight draw, which he filled when a 5 hit the turn. Gross. Losing that pot knocked me down to about 34k, and I was resigned to limping my way into the money.
Once the money bubble burst, I grinded my short stack for another 20 minutes, before shoving in late position with A6 and running into the big blind’s AK. Oh well. I finished in around 5,000th place for $354, which was a min-cash. Obviously it would have been pretty sweet to make a deep run, but I was proud to have cashed in one of the biggest tournaments in history. Good times.
Playing at all was a novelty in itself – I hadn’t played for the three weeks previous, and I haven’t played since. One of these days, I’ll get that big score. As soon as I get a laptop.
Oh, and my bankroll? $6,300 at the moment.

Bankroll management: Keeping score

The approach to building my bankroll that I described in my previous post is somewhat similar to the from-the-ground-up gameplan that top pro Chris Ferguson (pictured above) used in his epic bankroll experiment of 2006-07.
While I started with $5, Ferguson’s degree of difficulty was considerably higher. The World Series of Poker main event champion in 2000, Ferguson decided to see whether he could build a $10,000 bankroll from zero on Full Tilt Poker.
Ferguson began with freerolls – free-to-enter tournaments with massive fields that pay pocket change to the winners. It took him a month to win $2, and a further eight months to crack the $100 plateau. But after 16 months of working at the project for about 10 hours a week, he had his $10,000.
Impressive stuff, no doubt. But as much as Ferguson’s playing skill had plenty to do with succeeding in this feat, his bankroll management strategy was perhaps more crucial. I’ll sprinkle in Ferguson’s wisdom liberally as I move forward with this discussion.
KEEP THE POKER MONEY SEPARATE
I’ve mentioned it before, and I’ll say it again: I firmly believe the first step on the path to bankroll success for a recreational player is keeping the poker funds separate from the regular household income and expenses.
This boundary is beneficial in several ways. It allows your bankroll to serve as an accurate scoreboard, so to speak, of your poker successes/failures. It also prevents poker expenditures from becoming a point of contention with the family, because you’re not gambling with the grocery money. I can’t recommend this course of action strongly enough.
DON’T PLAY ABOVE YOUR MEANS
Ferguson’s rules of bankroll management are reflective of universal poker wisdom. He states that no more than five per cent of a player’s bankroll should be spent on a cash game buy-in or a sit-n-go; and that no more than two per cent should be spent on a tournament.
The principal is, a player must have enough of a bankroll to weather the inevitable downswings that accompany the variance of poker. Think of your bankroll as capital. Knowing you’ve got a comfortable reserve of funds prevents you from playing scared, and also helps to slow the onset of tilt during a losing streak.
I haven’t always been faithful to this strategy. In my previous post, I mentioned my massive spew-fest in the Mansion Poker cash game. That was a classic case of playing above my means. The max buy-in for the $2-$4 no-limit game was $400; when I began playing at that level, I had enough money on that site for just one of those buy-ins. Even after running up my account to $2,000, that only represented five buy-ins, and a few losing sessions quickly wiped me out.
Another classic mistake players tend to make is, when they’re on a losing streak, they play higher to recoup their losses. This is a somewhat natural reflex that I am prone to from time to time, but it’s counter-productive. After losing a string of sit-n-gos in the $20 to $50 range, I’ve sometimes succumbed to the lure of the $100 buy-in game. That’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Most of the time, it doesn’t stop the avalanche; it just speeds the descent.
To recap: If your bankroll is expanding, move up in stakes as you feel comfortable. If your bankroll is shrinking, swallow your pride and move down.
BE A STUDENT OF THE GAME
In an earlier post, I posed the question: “If I can’t have a regular expectation of winning, why on earth am I playing?”
You should be asking yourself the same thing. This next sentence probably isn’t in my best financial interest, but here it is: If you suck relentlessly at poker, you should either quit or get better. Read Dan Harrington’s books. Discuss hands with your friends. Figure it out, for goodness sakes.
That, to me, it the major goal of bankroll management – to figure out whether you’re good or whether you suck. If you don’t like the answer, do something about it. Take responsibility.
It’s probably easier for a recreational player like myself to manage a bankroll. Since the game is not my livelihood, I can take a break for a couple weeks when I go on tilt. I can move down to micro-stakes to satisfy my poker jones before moving back up when I’m feeling more confident. But even for me, it’s a pride-swallowing act to move down a buy-in level. It’s an area for growth.
I think that’s all I have to say on this subject. Bottom line: If poker is to be a presence in your life, make it a healthy presence. It can so easily be the opposite, and the right path begins with solid bankroll management.