The AP Points Race

It's been two weeks since my last post and not much of significance has happened since then. I played a total of 5 FTOPS tournaments: $216 6-max NLH, $216 7-game mixed games, $109 NLH with rebuys, $535 HORSE, and $216 6 max limit hold'em. It was brick city in all of them (I came closest to the money in the HORSE).

I spent a fair amount of time playing on Absolute Poker (AP). Each month the website through which I get rakeback runs a promotion called a "rake race" where they give prizes to the customers who earn the most rake on various poker sites. Last month with a part time effort I finished 2nd which was worth $775.

After my streak of 11 straight winning days I had a significant run of losing days. I've been really conflicted lately because if I make it to 600,000 base FPPs on pokerstars by the end of they year I earn a $6,000 bonus. Right now I'm 67,000 points away which is not a ton (I averaged 83,000 points a month last year), but I have been getting killed on pokerstars! On the other hand I have been killing on absolute poker doing fine in limited action on cake poker.

I haven't really run the numbers to see what I should do, but I'm going to do it right now!

$6,000 is a lot of money to leave hanging out there and in making it to that point I'd pick up about $3,000 in FPPs so really I'm looking at $9,000 for breaking even over about 50,000 hands on 10/20. That's 18 cents an hand which amounts to about 65% rakeback!

Now I'm going to look at what those 50,000 hands will make me on AP. I think I get about 9 cents a hand in rake back so that's $4,500. I'd earn 187,500 absolute points (the AP version of FPPs) which are worth about $1,300. I'd get two prizes in the rakeback nation monthly rake race (One for November and one for December). Conservatively I could get 3rd place this month and 2nd next month which would be $1,400. So really I'm looking at $7,200 in bonus money on AP and $9,000 on pokerstars. That's closer than I thought. When I factor in that I'm going to be playing in cupcake games instead of ball busting ones, it seems like a clear decision.

But there's more! For the rest of this month AP is offering a daily points race. The top 10 players who earn the most points each day get a cash prize. Here is the list of prizes:

1st $500
2nd $400
3rd $300
4th-6th $150
7th-8th $100
9th-10th $75

I found out half way through the first day which was the 17th so I didn't make the top 10. But I put in a major effort yesterday and came in third. I took today off, but my effort from yesterday would have put me in a solid second.

The points they use to determine the race are "status points." I'm not sure what the rules are for other stakes, but at the levels I play I get two points every time I play hand that A) I put money into the pot by, raising, calling or posting a blind and B) they rake the pot. It turns out I make about .75 status points per had on average.

Yesterday I played about 3,300 hands and made 2,500 or so points. The second place finisher had around 3,000, 1st had 4,500 or so and the fellow in 4th had about 50 less than I did. In fact I played some at the 11th hour to move past him and since it was much later in other parts of the world I'm sure he was long done with his day.

Today 1st place was won by the same guy (who also plays 6 max limit hold 'em, but plays more games at a time and longer hours than I do) who again was over 4,000 points. But 2nd was 2,100 and 3rd was only 1,900.

I'm not sure what's going to happen to the numbers over the weekend and if they guy who has been winning keeps it up I'm not going to get 1st. But I should be able to pile up a few seconds and thirds and should have a fairly easy time getting into the top 6 without really busting my ass. I'm going to give it my best over these next three days and hopefulle pick up and extra grand.

So with that in mind I'm going to be totally AP focused for the rest of the month. And given that, I'm probably going to bail on pokerstars altogether. I'm not 100% on that, but it seems like it's headed that way. It makes me a little sad. :(

FTOPS XIV Event #1

FTOPS XIV Event #1 was $216 6-max NL hold'em. This tournament started with 4,694 players which meant we had a few hundred fewer players than would be needed to meet the $1,000,000 guarantee paying full juice. Instead of $200 a player going to the prize pool and $16 going to the house, $213 from every player went to the pool and $3 to the house.

I registered about 20 minutes after the tournament started and was faced with a tough decision right away. We all started with 5,000 chips and during the hand in question the blinds were 15/30. The under the gun player made it 60 to go and got called by the button. I was in the big blind with TT and raised to 240. The under the gun player called and then the button made it 900 to go. What?

It's very unusual for a player to call a raise (especially a minimum raise) initially and then rereraise later on the same round. When it happens it's almost always AA, but sometimes it's a player acting on a total whim and pushing a hand like QJ. In this case I decided it was probably AA and just bailed out.

If I was playing a $1,000 tournament folding would have been an easy decision, but in a $200 tournament I really wanted to just drop the all in bomb and see what happened. Of course that's not a good mindset to have and it's important to always play your best regardless of stakes.

The hand that really derailed me came about an hour later. Again the under the gun player came in for a raise when I was in the big blind. But this time I had AA. He raised, I reraised, he called and the flop came down king high. I bet about half the pot and my opponent raised me. "Ah ha!" I thought. "He has a king and now I will get his entire stack!" I was right about the first part.

I just called his flop raise and after a blank came on the turn I check raised him all in. At this point there was something like 6,000 in the pot and he only had 900 or so left, but probably knowing he was beat he still took a long time calling with KQ. 39 of the 44 cards left in the deck would make me a winner, but the river was a queen and I was down to 2,000 chips.

A little while later I'd climbed back close to 3,000 chips. I was in the small blind with K6 suited and raised the big blind who just called. The flop was 8 high with two hearts, I bet three quarters of the pot and my opponent called. I had a strong sense that I was against a draw or maybe just overcards taking one off. Feeling bold I moved all in for about 2,000 into the 1,500 chip pot. My opponent thought for a moment and then called with A2 of hearts which was nothing but a flush draw...and the best hand since I was on a total bluff. The river was a blank and the ace high held up. This was a situation where if I knew exactly what my opponent had I would have played it the same way on the turn.

Today I have Event #2 which is 7-game mixed. It's all the HORSE games, plus NL hold'em and PLO (the same as the pokerstars 8-game mixed format except there's no triple draw lowball). An hour in I'm up to 7,000 chips from a starting stack of 4,000.

The Highs, The Lows and FTOPS XIV

My streak of winning days came to an end on Sunday, but not before I'd won 11 days that I'd played in a row - my best run ever in terms of winning days in a row! I lost $700, which after being down $2,500 at one point, was an adequate result.

Amazingly I was still a little (just a little) upset about losing. A few days before I'd won $1,500 during the day in a few hours and then later on my laptop I scooped up another $800 during one episode of survivor. In the midst of the streak that $800 felt like an extra sprinkle on a very large cupcake. I was feeling very "whatever" about it at the time. Which leads me to a question: why in the world would I be upset about losing $700 when I barely cared about winning that extra $800?

I'm constantly battling my emotions, trying to stay as cold and logical about everything as possible. Sometimes it's easy. After all I know that losing sessions, days, weeks and even months are part of the deal. Even the best players lose some of the time. I've had hundreds of losing days and scores of losing weeks and everything is still fine.

During the stretches where my emotional control is at it's highest I brush off losses and bad beats like they are nothing. I almost feel amused when my aces go down, and my straights get flushed time after time. I some how manage to think "Oh, well. I'm sure this will turn around. Just stick with the plan and the cards will even out soon enough." That is how I'd like to be all the time and it is how I am the vast majority of the time.

In other instances I get upset about nothing. I curse out loud. I slap my hand against my forehead or bang my mouse on the arm of my chair. I feel tension throughout my entire body, just because I've lost a few hands or I'm down a few hundred dollars. This is not how a professional should act! I look back on my reactions and wonder why I was being such a buffoon. Swearing out loud? Really? What good is that doing?

Of course the problem is, simply that losing sucks! If you watch Tiger Woods play golf, you'll see him get pissed all the time. He'll get upset that he missed a 20 foot put on the second day of some random tournament. What sort of significance could that put have in the scheme of his life? ZERO! He's got hundred of millions of dollars, an amazimg wife and family, and a world of people who think he's awesome. He could never swing a club again and he'd still be a legend. But he wants and expects to win every tournament and make every shot. And that's how I feel too. I want those aces to hold up every time. I want every bluff to work. And damn it, I want to win every f-ing day that I get dealt a hand! And I get upset (just a little) when I don't.

I also find it more than a little annoying that I get upset. I know, by the next day or the next week I'm not going to care at all unless it was a major back breaking loss. I couldn't tell you anything about any of the losses I had in September. They are all far in the past, but I'm sure some if not all of them bothered me at the time.

Another thing I find annoying is I wish I could get more excited about winning. When I first started playing even though the money wasn't very significant in the big picture, the highs were much higher. I would have to win at least $100,000 to feel the way I did the first time I won $1,000 in a day (my biggest win leading up to that point was $350).

When I have a good win I try to think about it as much as possible and squeeze every ounce of joy I can out of it. But these days is really feels more like satisfaction that the elation that I felt when I was 21.

Anyway, I'm going to take a shot at some elation in the Full Tilt Online Poker Series XIV (FTOPS) starting tomorrow. Here is the full schedule if anyone would like to see it, but it's pretty much the same old same old FTOPS schedule.

I think I'm going to take $3,000 and play as many tournaments as I can with it (I probably won't take on any backers this time around with one or two exceptions), making sure I hit the $535 HORSE event and the $216 6-max limit event, but otherwise taking it one day at a time.

I'm not really as pumped about these FTOPS tournaments as I used to be since they have an FTOPS every 3 months, but it could still be big if I knock one out of the park.

We're Going Streaking!

I am on a great run! Today I won $1,500 in a few short hours of play on Cake and Absolute poker.

There is this movie Knockaround Guys (which is an OK movie) starting Vin Diesel, Seth Green, and a few other people you might have heard of that I think about sometimes when I'm playing on these other sites.

In the movie the main characters who are a bunch of New York (I think) gangsters, and sons of mafia types who are major king pins, lose a bag of money with hundreds of thousands of dollars in it. They know what town it ended up in, but don't know who has it. So their plan is to go to the toughest bar then can find in the town, find the toughest guy in that bar, and beat the shit out of him. That way everyone in the town will be interested in helping them find their money.

In the online poker world, pokerstars is New York and if you're a tough guy there than you're a tough guy anywhere. While I'm not the mafia boss, I'm certainly a wise guy and sometimes I feel like I'm beating the shit out of the toughest guys in the suburbs.

I'm on one of my best streaks ever. I've won 10 days in a row with no win of less than $500!

Cruisin' for a Bruisin!

After a week of vacation I'm back home and I have a post laden with F-Bombs for you! In general my vacation was great, but I have a few choice words (or more than a few...paragraphs) for a certain operation.

The main purpose of this vacation was to go on a 4 night cruise to Mexico with my wife and two of our closest friends (our son stayed with is grandparents and got 4 days of rule bending grandparent love).

I got a little sea sick (think 2 out of 10 with 0 being no seasickness and 10 being puking over the rail the whole time) once we pulled out into the open ocean even though we were sailing through calm waters. The food was better than I expected, and since we were paying for drinks they were very good as well. We drank a lot, sang karaoke (poorly, but with lots of energy) 3 of the 4 nights, and took part in a few of the organized cruise activities.

The highlight of the trip was a one hour Kayak tour of "The Bufadora" which literally means "blowhole". It's a geologic formation that is essentially a long, thin tunnel that fills up with a mixture or air and water as waves come in and then shoots the water between 30 and 100 feet in the air based on the intensity of the wave. We also spent some time paddling around the surrounding bay looking at star fish, rock formations and whatnot.

It was pretty amazing and was only over shadowed by the tacos we had afterwards. We had to take a bus ride from the boat to the Bufadora and on the way back our tour guide (who was a local) took us to a hole in the wall taco stand that was packed. The were making the tortillas and grilling the meat right in front of us. When a taco got to your mouth, 60 seconds earlier the meat was on the grill and the tortilla didn't exist yet. It was awesome.

But this blog is about poker and gambling so now I'm going to talk about the casino on the ship! Here is what I have to say about the Carnival Cruise Line casino (and this is in no way based on my results which were slightly negative, but not unreasonable)...FUCK YOU CARNIVAL CRUISE LINE CASINO!

I'm not sure how many casinos I've been to, but it's at least 50 and probably closer to 100. This was without a doubt the worst one. Allow me to explain why starting with the less significant and moving to the down right ridiculous.

There was a $5 craps game that had 2 times odds as the maximum odds you could take on a passline or come bet. I've never seen that before. But more annoying was how quickly they moved the dice. On a few occasions the stickman was pushed the dice to the shooter before the other dealers were done getting the odds bets from the previous roll set!

Another indication of the rushed atmosphere was that I didn't get at pass line bet down before the come out roll two times in a row. I don't think that's ever happened to me before and I've been drunk at a lot of craps tables for hours and hours. Over the course of 30 minutes there were a half dozen occasions where I thought "Holy Shit! There are the dice! I can't believe the rolled already!" To make things worse, the dealers were making mistakes here and there, so I didn't have confidence that I was being paid correctly (which meant I had to really pay attention) and most of the other players didn't know what they were doing so I had to make sure no one was going to scoop up my money thinking it was theirs.

But that's not really that bad. Worse was that they adjusted the payouts on some of the games! For example they paid 3 to 1 on a flush in 3 card poker instead of 4 to 1. That might not seem like a big deal, but in a normal Vegas casino 3 card poker has a house edge of 2.3% meaning for every $100 you bet in the long run you can expect to get back $97.70. Not too bad. With the table they were using the house edge was 7.3%! ACK! For a comparison roulette (which is one of the worst games) has a house edge of 5.25%. They'd also made similar draconian adjustments to the payout scales on Let it Ride and Caribbean stud which were the only other games that they offered using payout tables.

To sum up they made regular casino games HARDER to beat! The system that Vegas has used to build all those billion dollar hotels was too soft for them! I don't even want to know what they did to the slot machines.

As a brief aside we at dinner at a very large round table and one fellow kindly informed us, as if he was sharing a real gem that we should most certainly take to heart, that "craps and roulette are the best games in the casino." Why thank you kind gent for sharing your expert opinion and giving us lay folk the vital information we need to win in the casino. I'll get right to the roulette wheel. In your opinion what numbers are best to bet?

Some other douchebag (and it's a kindness to leave it at just that) was talking about his "system" for beating slot machines. Shortly after he had to think about hitting 7 in blackjack. You've got a 5 and a 2 pal! Even though they're trying to screw you at every opportunity, there didn't put any 15's in the deck!

Now is where I get extra worked up. On the website they go on and on about how it's a cashless boat and you can bet everything with this magic card. When you get on they give you a card that's liked to your credit card and you can use it to buy anything on the ship. It's also your room key and what you need to show to get off and on the boat at the various ports. In the casino you can buy chips with this card, but they charge you a 3% fee! You bastards are going to gouge me on every game in the house and before you do it, you want to take 3% off the top! FUCK YOU CARNIVAL CRUISE LINE CASINO!

But wait! There's more! You can go to old downtown in Vegas, play $1 roulette and drink for free all night, but the drinks were normal price in the casino! $4.95 plus an included mandatory 15% tip for a Budweiser!

Which leads me to another point. They had a group of $9 drinks on the menu all over the ship. They were good drinks and I was fine paying $9 for them. If you brought a receipt for one of those drinks to the casino cashier they'd give you a "$5 match play" card. Sounds like five bucks off a drink right?" WRONG! If you get promotional chips in a normal casino you play them like normal chips. You bet $5 and if you win you get a normal $5 chip while your promotional chip stays there. If you lose they take it. With these $5 match cards, first of all you had to put $5 of your own money into play as well to use it, and second of all they take the card if you lose AND if you win AND IF YOU PUSH! What's that all about?

I was with my wife and we went up to a black jack table, put down our card with a $5 chip on it, got a 20, the dealer busted and when he went to pay us he put down two $5 chips and took our card. My wife asked what was going on. The dealer and the pit boss then went on a rambling 60 second explanation of how the cards worked using the phrase "just like money."

Just like money? It's not anything like money you dicks! Did I mention that they were dicks? Because if I didn't allow me to now mention that these guys were total dicks! They treated us like we were trying to pull something and like we were idiots, instead of just explaining how it works. Try this you dicks "If you win we pay you an extra $5, but the card is only good for ONE hand and we have to take it every time, win, lose or push (slight understanding frown)."

I'm sure it's not great fun to work in a cruise ship casino, but everyone in there looked and acted like they were in the last 10 minutes of a 16 hour shift.

We haven't even gotten to the worst part yet, but before we get to that let me talk about the poker they had. There was an electronic table with a touch screen at every seat and a large sceen in the middle of the table. I've read a few articles about these tables, but I'd never seen one in person. My review of the table is about the only thing positive I can say about the casino. Actually it's not entirely positive, because I think they should have had a real table, with a real dealer and chips, because that's much more fun and that's what cruise ships are supposed to be about!

But the table itself worked perfectly. The game was $1/$2 blinds no limit hold'em and you could buy in for a maximum of $200 with your magic card. Actually now that I think about it there was one major flaw in the table, which I'm sure was just the cruise people choosing the options. There was nothing about posting blinds to get your first hand. When you bought in, they just dealt you in. If you sat out and missed the blinds when you sat back in they'd just post them for you without asking no matter what position you were in. I guess they thought that would be too complicated for some reason.

When you got dealt in your touch screen would have a picture of cards face down and if you touched them the top corners would peal up so you could see what you had. When you action got to you, you've have a set of options just like in online poker (you couldn't declare what you were going to do before the action got to you like you can in online poker). You'd select an option like check or fold or whatever and then you have to touch the top right corner of the screen to confirm that's really what you wanted to do. If you wanted to bet or raise there were pictures of $1, $5, $25 and $100 chips which you could touch to create a bet amount. So if you wanted to bet $39 you'd touch the $25, the $5 twice and the $1 four times, then touch the "bet $39" button, followed by the "Confirm Bet $39" button. It sounds like kind of a mess, but it was actually pretty easy to use and the action moved along smoothly.

The biggest problem with the poker was the rake. In the games I play they take $1 for every pot over $20 that goes to the flop, $2 for a pot over $40 and $3 for a pot over $60 with $3 being the max (and I get a bunch of it back in bonuses, FPPs and rakaback). In this game they took 10% of the pot up to $40 and some piece beyond that. I didn't play for too long, there weren't a ton of big pots, and I wasn't really focused on working out the precise rake system, but I saw $8 come out of a $150 or so pot. Since most pots were less than $40 they were taking 10% out of most pots. On average the players were in for about $100 each. That means if you took ALL of the money on the table it was enough to pay the rake for 5 or 6 hours (Maybe 200-250 hands).

I lost a few big hands and decided to call it quits with $37 left in front of me. Foolishly I thought this would be credited back to the account that it came from. What was I thinking? They'd have no chance to screw me over if they did things that way! I found out on the last night of the cruise at 11 pm as I was cashing in a few chips that I had to give them my card and they'd give me $37 in cash. Otherwise that money was gone into la la land. It didn't say that anywhere. The only reason I found out was I was in the casino when they made an announcement. I'd been in there for 5 or 6 hours over the course of the cruise and didn't hear a whisper before the 11th hour. FUCK YOU CARNIVAL CRUISE LINE CASINO!

I know this has been a long post, but I have yet to get to THE WORSE GOUGING OF ALL TIME! Yes folks I placed not one, but THE TWO WORST WAGERS OF MY ENTIRE LIFE on this cruise.

The first was bingo. They had a large theater for shows and such and on the first night we were there they had bingo (they had it there other nights, but we didn't go). For $10 you could get one bingo card, and for $20 you could get 3 cards. There was some other reason for this gathering other than the bingo, but I can't quite remember what it was. Maybe 200 people were in the room and it looked like half of them were playing bingo. Without a doubt they'd collected a few grand $40 of which came from our group. Guess what the prizes were? ONE $500 prize. Are you fucking kidding me? They played one game which took five minutes and paid out one $500 prize regardless of the money collected.

But wait! It gets worse! There was also a "black jack tournament." Notice the quotes. Calling this a black jack tournament is like calling goat a finely tuned thoroughbred. They told us that the tournament would last from 7:30 to 10:30 and I was surprised that they would run something that would take so long. It sounded like fun. I figured everyone would start with x number of chips and the minimum bet would gradually be raised or we'd play a bunch of hands and whoever had above a certain chip count, say in the top 25% or whatever would move on and then we'd do the same thing again.

Here is the way it actually worked. For $20 you got ten $100 tournament chips. You had 7 hands to turn those chips into as much as possible. We started at 7:30 and at 11:15 the 7 players with the highest chip total would come back and play 7 more hands at "the final table." By the time the action was underway there were 30 or so people signed up to play. The first set of 7 players played their 7 hands, and the best of them ended up with $1,800 in chips. Everyone in my group played in the second round and the best of us ended up with $1,500 in chips.

Here is where things get fishy. The action started at 7:30 and went until 10:30 and they allowed people to enter more than once. While I wasn't there the whole time as far as I can tell they ran this set up at one table constantly from 7:30 until 11:00. Each round lasted something like 6 or 7 minutes and at most 10 minutes. Every time 7 new players sat down that should have been $140 into the prize pool to be payed out to the players at the final table. Right? Isn't that how this should work? Isn't this just something fun to do on the ship or at worst a way to get people into the casino? After all there was plenty of fun stuff to do on the ship that was free. Karaoke was free, mini golf was free, the water slide was free. Hell even the food was free, with 24 hour room service!

So after three and a half hours of collecting $140 from set after set of players every 7 minutes guess what the prizes were? ONE $500 PRIZE! That's right. One prize. $500 regardless of the amount of money collected.

Even if the rounds all took 10 minutes that would be 21 rounds which is $2,940. That's the conservative estimate of what they took in, and they paid out one $500 prize. What a bunch of dicks! Don't do that to your customers Carnival! What the hell is wrong with you! Take 10% off the top or even 20%, but paying out one $500 prize when you've taking in thousands is just wrong. Even the lottery pays out 60% of the money they take in.

I knew ahead of time that there was only one $500 prize on the line, but when we got there at 7:25 and signed up there were only 10 people registered. I thought it was going to be whoever signs up before or at about 7:30 is in the mix. But letting people play as many entries as they want and continuing to take entries for over 3 hours is nuts! The top chip counts were all over $16,000! Guess what? It ain't easy to turn 1,000 chips into 16,000 in 7 hands and that was the worst of the top 7! How many entries do you think that took?

One more time say it with me: FUCK YOU CARNIVAL CRUISE LINE CASINO! YOU'RE A BUNCH OF DICKS!

Everyone else who worked on the cruise was great or at least fine. The entertainment staff, the dining staff and certainly the bartenders, waiters and waitresses were all friendly and competent if not wonderful.

In other news, after my PANIC! post I have been doing amazingly well. In my last post I mentioned the tournament success. At my in law's house I played maybe 2 hours on Monday and won $700, and hour or two on Tuesday and won $550 and, and hour Wednesday and won $650. That makes 8 straight winning days with the worst of them being $500 to the good. Things have gone from about as bad as they could be, to great. I hope I can keep it up these last few days of the month and into November.

Two Final Tables

The only tournaments I've played since the WCOOP have been a handful of freerolls. But today with the plan of taking it easy I jumped into two multitables: a $109 no limit hold'em and a $5 with rebuys with one $25 add on no limit Omaha-8 (yes that is a wacky format).

The Omaha had 179 players and a first place prize of $800 and change. The only thing worth mentioning about this tournament was with 13 players left I was down to 129 chips. Though an insane series of double ups, triple ups and quadruple ups I got my stack all the say back up to 27,000 which still had me in last place! I increased my stack by a factor of 209 and was still in dead last! But while I was winning all of those pots other people were going broke and I went from 13th to 9th which made me a whopping extra $33. There was still a little satisfaction in making the final table and the monster turnaround. I'll try to remember it the next time I'm somewhat short chipped.

The final table of the $109 NLH was much more significant. I got off to a good start early with a double up holding AJ vs QQ. I have to think about that hand when I get pissed about the hand that I lost in the end. I also beat JJ with AKs with all of my chips at risk early.

Much, much later when the blinds were 2,000/4,000 (we each started the tournament with 3,000 chips and blinds of 10/20) I made two strong plays, but still got a little lucky.

On the first occasion, I was in the big blind with 130,000 chips or so and the player in the cutoff who had about 160,000 raised to 9,000. Every time without exception that the action had been folded to him on my big blind he'd raised (at least 10 times) and he always made it between 2X and 2.5X the big blind. I'm not sure why he kept doing it since I called at least half time time and every time I called I took the pot away from him.

The second to last time he made this play (there's a little hint about what he has coming to him) I had 97 of hearts and decided to call the extra 5,000 and see the flop. It came down T 8 5 with one heart giving me an open ended straight draw. I checked my opponent bet 10,000 and I check raised him to 30,000.

He thought for 30 seconds or so and I was trying to decide if I should go for it if he moved all in. Instead of going all in he made it 60,000 and I opted to call and see the next card before committing all of my chips. The turn was the 8 of hearts which meant I now had a flush draw to go along with my hand. It also looked like kind of a scary card for my opponent since I could easily have an 8. I figured I had enough to go for it since there was 140,000 in the pot and I only had 60,000 left so I bet out. After some thought my opponent folded and I was up to 200,000. In retrospect I think he thought that I was check raise bluffing the flop and he put in one more raise to try and resteal.

On the next round we got into it again. This time I had K5 of clubs and decided to take a flop after the villain min raised to 8,000. The flop came down 8 6 4 with one club. I checked and my opponent bet out 12,000. I decided to get aggressive. We were down to 20 players and the prize jumps were starting to get significant so I was hoping he'd be careful and bail out if I pushed him. Since his range was VERY broad, I figured I could blow him off his hand with a big raise. Also working for me was the fact that I had him covered by a lot, and a 7 or a king would likely make me the best hand even if I got called. I moved all in and he instantly called me with 89. Happily the turn was a 7, I made a straight and took down a huge pot. I had 280,000 chips and was in first place.

By the time we made the final table I was in 4th place and liking my chances. 9th place was only $900 or so and first place was $12,500 so it was nice that a few players dropped out quickly and I moved up the money ranks a bet before I got involved in any big hands.

When we got down to 5 handed, four of us had 300,000 or more and one player had 80,000 or so. I was guessing that if we could drop that one guy we could make a deal and split the remaining prize money. While 90% of the time playing it out is going to be in my favor in a tournament of this size and significance, given my recent struggles locking up some big bucks was my first priority. But the stupid Q6 of hearts got in the way of this glorious plan!

Playing 5 handed the blinds were 4K/8K with an ante, Mr. 80K folded and the next player made it 19K to go. The other two players called and it was on me with Q6 of hearts in the big blind. I had 400,000 chips and part of me said "what's the point of playing a hand here? Just wait until Mr. 80K is gone before you do anything fancy."

The other part of me said "You only have to put in another 11K to see a flop, there's already 68K in the pot and if you hit it hard you could bust someone." I decided the pot odds were too good to pass up. The flop came down Q 5 3 with two hearts.

"What the hell do I do now?" I thought. That was a strong flop for my hand, but I could easily be behind (this is why it's not good to get in there with Q6). I decided it would be best to check, see what everyone else did and go from there. To my great surprise everyone checked and the turn came out a non heart jack. Based on the flop action it looked like I had way the best hand.

The small blind bet out 28K which I knew was bullshit. That looked like a jack at best or more likely a total bluff. I thought about popping it, but I decided I'd try to get to showdown as cheaply and risk free as possible. Then the God damned button moved all in for 325K!

The small blind folded and it was back to me. My first thought was "this guys is full of shit too." I knew this was not a monster hand. First of all he checked last to act on the flop vs 3 opponents on a somewhat dangerous board and second of all it was a massive overbet. If he had a set he would have made it 100K or so, not 325K.

But, there was still Mr. 80K waiting to go broke and upon his or anyone else's exit I'd instantly pick up another $1,500. Did I really want to take this chance? There were close to 2,000,000 chips in play and if I called and won I'd have 40% of them and be in total command. If I lost I'd have 50K and one foot out the door.

After 15 seconds I trusted my read, put my balls on the chopping block, and called. My opponent had KJ and I made my flush on the river. Unfortunately it was KJ of hearts and he made a flush too! Bastard! For the record I was a 73% favorite when all of the money went in.

My remaining chips went out the window a few hands later when I lost KQ to AJ and that was it. 5th place paid $3,531! Less that I'd have had with one more break, but I caught my share of breaks already and $3,500 is still some nice bucks!

I'm on a nice little roll here. I've had five winning days in a row and picked up a little over $10,000 during that stretch. I have to admit that the me of 6 days ago would barely have believed that I could go on a run like this at such an opportune time. It's been well into the top 1% of my expectations. All of a sudden everything is back to good.

Now it's cruise time bitches!

Briefly

I got a call from my sister today. After reading my last post she was wondering if I was OK. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm fine, if not good. I won $800 today in limited action, and after several very strong winning days in a row I feel like I'm back in command of my own destiny.

Moving forward I need to make sure that I always bail out from games that have become unfavorable and if there are no good games going on Pokerstars or AP, I need to just not play! If I stick to that I'm confident I can do what I need to do to make enough to get by. The big bucks might need to be put on hold for a while, but supporting my family is always goal #1 and I'm back to feeling like I can do that.