Chris Halverson’s Blog

Another in the series of 30ish Grublog Classic writeups…

The Good: I didn’t go out first

The Bad: I didn’t make it to the final table

The Ugly: Choice Poker’s interface and blind acceleration

First off, a big THANK YOU to Grubby for setting all this up. It was a blast! I was dead money going in, but I still had a great time.

I ended up 20th, which is better than I thought I would do, but not as well as I wanted to do. I outlasted Pauly, Liquid Swords, , and , among others (and only two in front of ). This, of course, in no way means that I played better then them. Tourneys are a large part luck. I haven’t heard the story, but LS went out quickly, so I’m guessing he made a banzai move early. The chat was great. Lots of smack. Word of rockets being cracked by the HAMMER (I didn’t see it, but I’m sure we’ll hear about it). In my opinion, it was $22 well spent.

So how did I go out? No bad beat, I promise. Instead, I blame it on my wife (/me looks around hoping she doesn’t read this… ). I was chugging along, not in great chip position by any means, and the blinds were going up quickly. I had enough for two more orbits. I’m in MP and then my wife came upstairs. I had told her I had this planned and such and she was all good with it and said she’d leave me along. Next thing I know I have a Vince Van Patten-esqe running commentary about what I should do and how everybody else is playing. Oh no…(The rest of this is semi-fuzzy pending my hand history which is taking forever and a day to get, so bear with me) I then get 99 UTG. I call, everybody but Anistropy, who is in the SB (I think), folds. Flop comes Axx I think (sorry, I’ll update this later!) and I go all in hoping to buy the pot (we, technically I went all in except for T5 as I mistyped and didn’t see if there was an all in button, crazy interface), he raises me my last T5 and I call (duh!). I end up losing to AA. It was a gutsy (read: dumb) bet, especially that early, but such is life I guess, plus I was distracted. I explained to her that I even had the TV off and didn’t even have a web browser open. I was concentrating (well, more or less, I had to be involved in chat on two tables, so that was kinda tough). Of course, once I was out my wife only hung around for about 10 more mins before leaving. FYI, she was cheering for Henry, Iggy and Scott too.

Honey, I love you, I’m just kidding about blaming you, it’s all part of the game, OK. (Just in case…)

To nobody’s surprise, Scott made it to the final two against . Lots of back and forth until finally Gene, in a Nixon like move to help fund his run for the presidency, took it all. Look out Ralph Nader, Gene’s got the same amount of funding as you do! Evidently TFG’s recent play at the NL tables really helped him.

Choice Poker was not the easiest interface to use. I normally play at Party/Empire. In fact, I only deposited the requisite $22 to play at Choice. I probably won’t be going back. The chat window sucked. The general interface sucked. It’s been 60 mins and I still haven’t received my tournament summary. The blinds also seemed to move up very quickly, every 8 minutes. Of course, that meant that it got a 32 person tourney done in a touch over 2 hours, which was kinda nice (especially since I was already out) The flip side is that they actually let us play there. Hopefully the next one at True Poker will be better in terms in interface and usability.

Here’s a screenshot of the final results:

Pauly hasn’t put up any new odds for the WBT tourney tonight. So what are the going odds? I notice quite a few people have been quiet lately, no doubt they’ll say they’ve been “busy with work”, or have had “family matters” to attend to. Bah! We all know that they’ve been taking time off to study up while playing SNGs all week.

It’s too bad nobody thought of this earlier, but there could be some nice side action on prop bets. Who will be the first out? Who will finish on the bubble? Payoff on a royal flush? How many bottles of Guinness will Iggy drink? How much scotch will I drink? Odds that Iggy and Felicia are HU at the end? Royal and Felicia? Hdouble and Iggy? Me and Iggy (don’t bet on this one)? There’s a ton of other ones.

Somebody needs to do this quickly. Pauly, get on the J-O-B and setup book!

Eleven hours until The Grublog Classic. I decided that Pauly’s training regiment was not to my liking, after all running and $900 extra-peat (now with more bog!) scotch do not really mix. Therefore I have spent the last couple of days training by not playing. I watched a movie last night and started reading my newly acquired copy of Big Deal (if hdouble says it’s the best, then I have to get it). I’m training by getting my mental game into it. After all, tourneys are a big crap shoot anyway.

Hdouble has a point about being the only sober one there, although Felicia is on the West Coast too. Hmmm…The Midwest will be heavily represented though, especially if you extend it to the Central time zone to include TFG. It’ll be great!

You know, I guess I’m going to have to start a home game with those new chips I’m gong to win…

Normally I’d leave the news reporting to Iggy, but I thought I’d post this since you need a free login to get it and therefore he may not see it. I subscribe to Forbes and in the latest issue they have an article about the popularity of poker on TV. Looks like ESPN is adding 7 card Razz to their WSOP coverage this year (I have no idea what that is ). To give full credit, the article is here. Here is the text:

Poker TV gets some high stakes.
Poker has never been a big moneymaker at casinos–or as TV content. Televised poker tournaments used to be “as exciting as watching paint dry,” admits World Poker Tour producer Steven Lipscomb. So last year Lipscomb added a little reality-TV pizzazz to a Vegas poker match, wiring the tournament with 17 cameras and flashing on-screen personal factoids about players. With million-dollar jackpots, the souped-up card game gave the Travel Channel its best ratings ever for a series and clinched a $40 million contract for Lipscomb to produce the show for six more seasons.

Bingo. Now a half-dozen TV networks are throwing their own chips behind casino card games. It’s a dicey bet. Poker programming turns out to be a bit costlier than just filming a bunch of folks playing cards. World Poker Tour costs Lipscomb, who has 50 staffers, $400,000 an episode. Given the competition, the cost of buying licensing rights from tournament organizers is climbing, too.

Poker producers point to the 51 million people who visit casinos each year as proof of a market. But will they watch? Investment banker Robert Carlsson thinks so. He and partners are raising the poker-TV ante with plans for a $75 million launch this fall of a new casino-and-gaming channel. So far no cable carriers have shown their cards.

Full House
Poker shows running on TV this season:

Bravo Celebrity Poker Showdown. Celebs like Martin Sheen and rapper Coolio face each other down at Las Vegas’ Palms casino.

Travel Channel World Poker Tour. Arena-style poker features masters of the game competing in 13 tournaments around the world.

ESPN World Series of Poker. Last year’s prize money totaled $20 million. On this year’s schedule: seven-card Razz and No Limit Hold ‘Em.

Fox Sports Net Late Night Poker. Under-the-table cameras reveal the real bluffers in this American version of the British series.

No tourneys tonight, I wanted to get back to working on my ring game. Glad I did. First table, down 4BB in about 20 minutes when it started going short. I jumped to a new table and won two of the first three hands that dealt. Yes, I got good hands, I wasn’t playing loose. Played like a rock for quite a while after that. Moving up 10BB, and then hovering around +5BB. After a healthy dose of Oban scotch (one of those “end of the bottle” things, it never looks like much until you pour it into a glass) and some more rockish play, I get QcQd on the button. Check, check, check, raise, call. I call, EP raises and we only loose one person (I called). Flop come 8cQh3c. Bet, raise, call, call and I raise. Fold, call, call, call. Turn is 3h. Checked around to me and I bet and all call! River is 8h and I like seeing the flush possibility hoping that somebody was drawing to the flush. Check, check, bet. I raise. Fold, fold, call. Oh yeah.

I pull in a $22.25 pot (22.25BB, a net of 16.25BB for me) and beat an ace high flush. That may be the biggest net pot I’ve won. I left before my next BB and didn’t play any other hands (the Oban was hitting me, although it was appreciated after some family issues earlier in the night). For the night I was up 21BB (for about 90 mins). Nice.

Doing a quick Poker Tracker look I see I was playing pretty well, as in doing the right thing. I was up about 3.5BB in 75 minutes before my monster pot. I think I’m playing much better now. I’m paying more attention to what’s going on and reading up on some of the drawing hands has helped a lot. Still have a way to go to win back my most recent buyin, but at least it’s going in the right direction.