Chris Halverson’s Blog

Ouch

I was back at Party on Monday night looking to take advantage of some free time in order to grind out some of the rest of my Party bonus. By the end of the night I played an additional 400 hands.

I’d give up every last one of them if I could and consider the time spent as pennance.

Wow, what a run. Let’s rephrase that: What a bad run.

I started by playing 2 Party tables and one InterPoker table in order to hopefully hit pocket Aces. The first thing I tried was to use GameTime+ on a Crypto skin. It works beautifully and I feel dumb now for not using it earlier. The fact that GT+ works with any site supported by PokerTracker will cause me to use that over PlayerView, even if PV may be “better”. I play at a ton of Crypto sites, and I want to be able to use it there too, so that eliminates PV.

I played an hour on InterPoker, get zero aces and logged off up 1BB. I then pull up another Party 1/2 table to get some more hands in. During this time I’m down 2BB on one table and, hold on, down 17BB on the other. I proceed to hold even on the third for a while before Mrs. H comes up to watch a little TV. I log off and decide that I can appease the poker gods by spending some quality time with her. We watch a little TV and then she heads to bed.

I jump back to the laptop hoping that my karma is is back in check and pull up a couple more tables. I’m holding about even on both (averaged, I was a bit down on one, a bit up on the other) when I notice a couple shady characters who popped onto the table.

It was all downhill from there.

Pauly, Maudie and I chit chat a bit (in general terms, didn’t really let on that we knew each other) and I experienced what I call “The Pauly Effect”. Every time I’ve played with him, Pauly is able to loosen up the table. Maybe it’s because he’s slumming at my lower level, but whatever the case, he gets the table loosened up a bit and bets are flying. No need to worry if a hand will be raked or not now.

After a bit I get the hand that put me over the edge for the night. It’s not even a bad beat, I was behind the whole time, so I’m not complaining, but it just capped off a bad night.

First off, I admit I was suffering a little bit of tilt. Nothing crazy, but I was frustrated with myself. I had totally misplayed a number of hands that night, some of them ended up winners, but for about half as much as I should have got from people. Some of them were big hands that I didn’t play hard and let people stay in cheaply and I ended up getting rivered. While some of those were “bad beats”, it was because I played them horribly and let people stay in. Totally my fault, I just wasn’t playing well. I was playing very, very weak earlier and I resolved to correct that on this hand.

Talk about bad timing.

I won’t bore you with the details, just suffice it to say that I flopped the baby set from the SB and filled up on the turn. The only problem was that the Villan just happened to make his larger set on the flop and of course filled up on the turn also. We capped the turn and the river and a nice 24BB pot slides across the table and I’m left stunned.

Maybe I played too aggressively. I sure wasn’t going to lay down a full house, but I could have just check/called or bet/called and saved quite a bit. On the other hand, if he had two pair (which is what I put him on, maybe 3 tens), I was leaving a lot of money on the table. I think I should have slowed down a bit when he capped the turn and I definitely shouldn’t have gone crazy on the river.

Shortly after that, I bid Pauly and Maudie farewell (thanks for stopping by, it was fun while it lasted!) and went and poured myself a nice big pour of 14 year old Oban Scotch. I sat in front of the TV and pulled up an episode of MacGyver from the TiVO to dull my pain (it was an episode with Mitzi Kapture from what was one of my other favorite shows, Silk Stalkings, so it was all good). The Scotch was smooth and so was Mac, mullet and all. Plus, after the beating I took I couldn’t bear to watch the “Best of 2003 WSOP” or any poker for that matter.

I’ve now got 300 hands left to clear by the 26th. If I break even on those I’ll still come out ahead, but man, I could use a good night.

Canterbury On Wednesday

I’ll be at Canterbury on Wednesday the 22nd from sometime mid-afternoon and into the evening. There’s going to be a 2+2 get together at 7pm at the end of the bar. I’m taking the afternoon off of work to finish up some shopping and to get there a bit early. The heavy hitters from the 15/30 and 30/60 game are planning on some drunken 3/6 play that night. Their plan is to go after the people who try to be “pros” at 3/6 and destroy them. For that reason, I’ll be playing 4/8 unless I’m getting destroyed there and then I’ll go home and drink. Heavily. So far there are about 20 2+2′ers who have confirmed, so it should be a good meet and greet. Since I couldn’t make it to Vegas this is as close as I can get to meeting others and it should be fun.

See the thread at 2+2 for more info if you’re interested. Look for me, I’ll be wearing black Ferrari cap and will be surrounded by pyramids of blue chips.

Back at Party

Wow, there are bonuses all over the place. I cleared the InterPoker additional deposit bonus early last week (I think they cut the required hands to 300 due to the problems, I got it much sooner than expected). I played there on Friday hoping to hit poket Kings to no avail. On Saturday I didn’t really play much, but did so at InterPoker again in hopes of clearing the 200 hands needed to get an extra $20. I came up short in order to spend some time with Mrs. H and watched The Stepford Wives which was pretty entertaining, so it was worth the missed $20

Sunday brought me back to Party. Me and 56,000 of my closest friends. 56,000. Oh my.

After all, how could a bonus chasing whore like myself pass up a $200 bonus? I think I’d loose my Bonus Whore Membership if I passed this up, especially because it was at Party. The only thing that almost prevented me doing it was the 7 day deadline. Ug, I hate that about Party. What I do like is that it’s very easy to monitor your progress on their “My Account” page. I don’t have to rely on PokerTracker and hope things are correct. 1400 hands (of course I was going to max it out) in one week is quite a bit for me, so I had to figure out if I would have time to do it or not. I then realized I would have virtually all Sunday to work on it, so I threw a grand to Party and got ready to grind away.

I pull up a chair to Party for the first time in 6 weeks and at a Party ring game for the first time in probably two months. The last time I played at Party I played SNGs and I’ll return to those after clearing all of these holiday bonuses as I think I’m actually better at those than the ring games. My sample size is still too small to determine that, but I’m more consistent there than at the ring games, at least so far.

Due to the fact that this was my first Party ring game in a long time this was also the first time I could try out GameTime+ (although the “docs” imply that it works with any site that supports PT, but I haven’t tried it on Crypto yet, has anybody?). Wow!!! This was awesome and helped me make a few decisions at certain times such as when facing a pre-flop raise, etc. I haven’t tried out PlayerView yet, so if anybody has any preferences for one or the other, let me know.

I first pulled up a couple 50/1 tables figuring that this would be a low variance way of clearing the bonus. Oy. First off, I notice that not enough pots were being raked, which was pissing me off. Secondly, I was facing the suckouts of 50/1 that were pissing me off even more. I dropped about $30 floundering around at 50/1 before I dropped that and pulled up 2 tables of 1/2. Ahh…back to a little normalcy.

Grinding away during the football games I was down a little, but was feeling pretty good. After dinner I pulled up another two tables and proceeded to go on a little rush and won back everything and finished the night playing 711 raked hands and was down $0.53. *whew* I know 700 hands in one day is nothing for some of you, but it was tiring for me, even playing as distracted as I play (watching football, reading 2+2, other general surfing). I figure breaking even for me is pretty good and I was happy with it. I’m halfway done with the bonus and now I should be able to finish it pretty easily now despite the holidays.

Maybe 3 tables would keep me a bit more focused. I did it the other night playing two Interpoker tables and one TGC table (their mini-view is great) and it was fine. I would have played more at TGC in order to work off their bonus, but they’re having some issues getting their bonus stuff figured out and while I’m sure they’ll get it sorted out, I figure I can wait until after the Party bonus (the TGC bonus expires after 30 days instead of the ridiculous 7 days at Party).

I stopped by the blogger NL table to say “Hi” for a bit. Looks like good times. I’m also thinking that maybe the $25NL tables are a good way to clear bonuses because virtually every hand is raked. The 1/2 tables are pretty good though too, I’m getting about 80% raked there so it’s not too bad.

I’m probably going to throw some money to Stars to at least get their reload bonus since they don’t expire. May as well get them stacked up and have them ready to go. Play poker without a bonus? No way!

Lord Admiral Radio

I was mentioned on Card Club’s podcast this week. You should check it out, not for my mention, but to hear the PokerProf give a nice long interview. It’s kind of nice to put a voice with the blog. Thanks to the Prof and others, being about to put a face with a name has been one of the highlights of the WPBT reports. Thanks to everybody who’s posted pics, I appreciate it.

Bonuses Galore

Geez, what a time to be a bonus whore. I’ve already cleared over $300 in Crypto bonuses this month and still have the rest of InterPoker’s 12 days one ($50) to work off (not to mention TotalBet and UKBetting, although I may not get to them this month). Now Party comes out with a 20% bonus up to $200 with a 7x WR. The problem here is that it must be cleared in 7 days. Ouch. For somebody like me 1400 raked hands in 1 weeks is an awful lot. The Gaming Club also has a new bonus available ($300 on top of the existing $140 I still have to clear there) that I signed up for (no deposit necessary) and with their new concept of a “raked hand” being that the hand just has to be raked (ie. you don’t have to contribute) this will clear fairly quickly, but once again, it expires after 30 days. Then it’s January and the Cryptos start all over again.

Damn, that’s another $700 or so to clear within the next 30 days, not including the new Cryptos at the beginning of the month. Wow. I wish I knew Omaha at all, I’m not even sure what a good starting hand is

Poker Podcast

There is a weekly poker discussion podcast available at Lord Admiral Radio. You can also download the MP3s normally from their site. They mentioned the WPBT event on their last episode, so that’s pretty cool. It’s kind of interesting and good to see some people doing something innovative like this.

Barry Greenstein

Barry Greenstein has some info regarding his thoughts and analysis on various pros. Some of the analysis is very intersting. Check it out at barrygreenstein.com.

Misc (ie. Real Life)

Considering that my final project for my grad school class (in “Project Management for Techology”) is due by the 20th (if I want the extra 5 points), I decided to look over the requirements to figure out what I had to write about. I re-read them about 10 times before firing off an email to the instructor to make sure that I hadn’t accidently smoked some crack during the day and was misunderstanding them. Nope, My final paper? I just have to take all the smaller papers and assignments (Project and Excel docs) and combine them into one big Word doc. That’s it. Woo hoo! Here’s what I don’t understand: How can I not get an A on this paper when I’ve got all the points possible for each individual assignment? Not that I care, because I’ll take the A (and continue my 4.0), but it just seems kinda funny.

The upside is that this means more time for poker, which is good based on the amount of bonuses I need to work off.

Bah humbug! I two tabled InterPoker for about 2.5 hours last night in hopes of getting the Hilton Sisters. They were worth $10 a pop (claim it with the bonus code “TURTLEDOVES”) no matter the outcome of the hand, and I could have used it. I hardly got any cards all night. Due the fact that I wasn’t playing anything, the two times I got the rockets and raised, everybody folded back to me and I’d pick up $1.50 for my troubles. Nice. I did clear my December bonus and am now into Monday’s bonus, so at least I’ve got that going for me.

As soon as I sat down at table #1 I noticed I was directly to the right of 2+2′er and fellow poker blogger IggyWH. OK, maybe two of us at a table is ok. Next thing I know the person to the right of him asks (in the special secret 2+2 code words) if I was the chrisdhal from there. Oh joy. We’ve got the left side of the table taken up by other 2+2′ers. While this is not always bad, especially because the general concensus is that 2+2′ers tend to be fairly weak/tight, the problem is that in general they’re better than average. Oh well, I’ve got bonus to clear and there’s the hope of the Hiltons to keep me going.

Right…

I got them exactly zero times. To top it all off I was down 5BB on one table and 7BB on the other. Woo hoo. What a night.

I’m not going to be playing tonight or tomorrow. The promos aren’t ones that interest me and more importantly I have a major paper to write for class. I think I can hammer out most of it over the next couple of days and then I’ll have a couple of weeks to concentrate on poker.

Sunday

Instead of being hungover, dead tired and potentially broke while sitting on a plane from Las Vegas to MSP, I spent 8 hours driving through 60 MPH winds in rural Iowa and Minnesota. I know, all you bloggers that went to Vegas are jealous, but sorry, only I was lucky enough to participate in this activity. Anyway, the Christmas get together with my family went well. We had some good food, watched some of the Vikes game on my Uncle’s new 50″ TV (don’t get me started about the Vikes) and then headed back through the wind storm.

I got home and fired up a little Interpoker (foregoing watching the end of Survivor since it sucked this time). I no sooner sat down at a 1/2 table when I saw, “Uh oh, another 2+2′er, hi chris”. Yikes. First off, I would have thought that I would have been outted earlier for my blog. I never thought I’d be outted due to my postings on 2+2. I guess I’ve posted enough there (mainly in the Zoo, but in a bunch of other ones too, don’t look for strategy posts from me though), and in particular about some of the Crypto issues, that I’m becoming more recognizable. Not sure that’s a good thing

It was a night of cold cards and I left after an hour of getting virtually nothing. I got pocket aces twice, raised both pre-flop, and had everybody (including blinds) fold around both times. Unreal. I was down on both tables, but not much because I never got any cards to get involved in a hand. It was mostly an hour of paying blinds. The upside was that things were moving fast and I got almost another 100 raked hands done.

Monday

Monday brought us InterPoker’s first bonus. Funny thing was that nobody could claim it. It was a 20% bonus to $50 ($250 deposit, play 500 raked hands). The bonus code did not work in the InterPoker software. Nice. Evidently a few people could get it, but most couldn’t. For the first time in my poker history, I called tech support. They laughed and knew exactly what I was talking about. Evidently this promo is bringing them a lot of deposits because they had it down rote. Basically they said that it will be credited automatically after I clear the hands. They had to put something into the “system” by hand due to the problems.

After the call, I played a while at InterPoker to work off the December bonus. At my first table in the first 5 hands I got KK, JJ, AA, AK. I got some action because I was new to the table. I basically doubled up and then got nothing for the next 90 minutes. On my other table I was down a little bit during the same time.

I then watched the SciFi channel movie “EarthSea” (damnit, it’s a miniseries and I’ll have to watch it tonight too) with Mrs. H, and then she went to bed and I fired up InterPoker again. I got noticed by another 2+2′er right away (ironically he’s from MN and I sent him a Gmail invite a while back when he asked on 2+2, BTW, I’ve still got a couple if you want one). Table 1 had me down 2BB at the end of the 90 minute session. The second table was going to hell quickly. I was down to about half my buyin (-9BB) and decided to play out my orbit and pack it in.

I’m in MP and look to see pocket Jacks. Great, let’s just blow the rest of my buyin with 2 hands left. I raise and SB is the only one who comes along. I’m just waiting for the ace to come on the flop when instead it comes down Jh9c4d. Score! SB checks, I bet out and he raises. That threw me a bit, but decided to succumb to a little FPS and just call hoping to get more on the bigger rounds to follow. Turn is the Ah and I like it even more hoping it hit him, maybe making him two pair. He checks, I bet, raise, raise, raise and then I start thinking something is weird so I just call. Not sure what I was thinking that could beat me other than a set of aces. Two raises (including a check raise) is a little more than betting for value, so I didn’t put him on the flush. The river brings the 2c and he leads out. I raise, he raises, I raise again and he finally just calls. My set of jacks win and I pull down a 20BB pot and rescue the session (he mucked and Crypto doesn’t record mucked hands even if they go to showdown).

I’m virtually done with my December bonus hands, then it’s time to work off the PEARTREE bonus and to play during the pocket queens promo tonight. I’ve also got to start on my final paper for my class. If I get it turned in by the 20th I get extra credit (gotta love getting extra credit in grad school). Wedensday is a lame (IMHO) promo (10x prop payments), so maybe I’ll play tonight and jam on the paper on Wednesday and Thursday (tourney fees refunded promo) and get ready for pocket kings on Friday.