Steve's Poker Blog: The Next Generation

Well, with some sadness I must say farewell to this particular poker blog. I have been absent from it for such a long time that I've forgotten the credentials to log in and update it. It's easy enough for me to hack in, but I find having to do so for each new post is unacceptably frustrating. So I'm migrating my efforts (and the last three posts) to a new blog.

Please follow me to "www.StevesSecondPokerBlog.blogspot.com", and continue to enjoy the finest poker blog on the interwebz! (At least the finest one I contribute to.)

The old content (and blog address) will continue to exist here until doomsday, most likely, so you can continue to pop back from time to time and relive the best moments of those posts.

Adieu!

Peru Poker Trip

In the summer of 2012, we took a two-week vacation in Peru. We have friends who are Peruvian, and they invited us to come back with them. We did all of the touristy things while we were there -- went all over Lima, and then on to Cusco (the Incan capital), but the (literal) high point was Machu Picchu. I blogged about it thoroughly as "Notes" on my Facebook page and posted dozens of pics ("Mucho Machu"), so you can go read it there if you want. And if you're not my Facebook friend, why not? I've been told I sometimes post some funny things.

Lima has a handful of casinos around the city, and a few of them have poker rooms. I of course could not resist checking them out, and so even though I was somewhat hampered by the language barrier I made sure to sit down in a game or two and see what it was like.

First of all, you can forget finding a game that starts any sooner than midnight. The Peruvian currency is called the sol (plural soles, pronounced using two syllables). Each sol was worth, at the time, around 35-40 cents, so we're not talking high stakes.

The players are terrible; there is a good reason why Peru has never produced a championship player. The game plays much more slowly than in Vegas, sometimes as long as five minutes per hand. If you want to check, you say “Paso”. I found this is a bit confusing, because in England if you say “I pass” that means “I fold”. So I was afraid to actually say “paso”; I just tapped the table to check.  “All in” is how you push all-in, although it’s pronounced more like “all een.” “Llamo” is call, which makes sense. A Flush is “Colór”; a Full House is “Full”, pronounced “fool”; and they call Four of a Kind “Pokér”.

There were almost no female poker players to be found. Then again, the conversation around the poker table is of the locker room variety. Very useful for learning Spanish slang, if nothing else.

One of the more notable things about the game there had to do with the rake. In the states, the poker rake is 5% up to a cap of $4-$5 (sometimes more, sometimes less). This, by the way, is probably the single biggest reason why low-limit games are so difficult to beat. The competition at higher limits might be tougher, and you may not win as many big blinds, but the amount of dollars might end up being more because the juice hits a ceiling. In Peru, however, there is no cap on the rake! So even if the pot gets to a thousand soles or more (and it sometimes did), the dealer will pull in a rake of nearly a hundred soles before he pushes the pot.

All in all, I think I'd rather play in Vegas. But the game was very good and definitely lucrative, and I would go again if I had the opportunity. And by the way, one of the Latin America Poker Tour stops takes place in the casino I visited, the "Atlantic City" casino.

Resurrecting the Blog

I had literally forgotten all about this blog. I was (virtually) cleaning out an old laptop, and found some old entries, and well … I guess we’re back in business.

I never really stopped playing poker, although it lightened up significantly after “Black Friday”. Like the death of JFK or the attack of 9/11, if you were a poker player you’ll always remember where you were when you heard about it … I was in Pendleton, playing their Spring Round-up, and in the hallway I overheard some poker luminaries discussing the shut-down (Linda Johnson, Jan Fisher, Susie Isaacs). I wasn’t sure what they were referring to … a temporary outage of some kind? Anyhow, I finally learned the whole tragic story.

So there’s not much online poker anymore, and of course none at all in Washington State since it’s a felony. But as I travel a lot for my day job, and since there are plenty of card rooms across the country, it’s easy to find a game to sit down in. I’ve been playing a lot in L.A. lately, as well as Foxwoods and A.C. on the East Coast. I even checked out Mohegan Sun once, but the games there are very hard and I don’t know that I want to go back.

I’m pretty happy with where my cash game is nowadays. Lately I’ve been trying to sharpen up my tournament game. I played a WPT main event at Borgata last year (made it to Day Two but didn’t cash); a WSOP bracelet event (made it to Day Two but didn’t cash), and of course Pendleton’s Round-Ups (in the last one I cashed in two out of four tournaments, which is an extraordinary accomplishment).

I met a couple of guys at the last Round-Up, Grant and Jonathan, who are poker coaches. Their operation is called the Portland Poker University (pdxpkr.com). I went ahead and hired Grant – the tournament expert – and my tourney game has gotten a lot better just in the few weeks since then. I knew that my successful cash-game style was too tight to work in tournaments, but I wasn’t sure how to loosen up. Grant has shown me how and where to do that, and we’ve also worked on overall hand-reading (which is very helpful). He’s a terrific instructor and the investment is already paying off.

Portland does have poker rooms, which I never realized before. Actually, they’re more like private clubs. You buy a membership ($5/day or so) and play all the tournament poker you can stand. During my on-site visits with Grant, we’ve been playing some of them. Last weekend, cousin Dave and I played a tourney at a club called “Aces”. I finished in the money (sixth out of 80 or so players), and there’s no doubt at all that my results have improved because of the coaching. For example, here’s one hand that tells the story:

It was very early in the tournament, before antes kicked in. Blinds were something like 200/400, and we all had deep stacks of over 50,000. I was in the big blind. Action folded all the way to the button, who limped. The small blind completed. I looked down at QQ and decided to pop it … made it 1300 to call. The button called, and the SB folded.

The flop came nine-high with two diamonds, and so I continuation-bet around 1600. The button put in a giant re-raise to 5000. This was such an odd move, that I had to stop and think about it for a while.

I gave some serious thought to just folding. There wasn’t much in the pot, and I didn’t want to risk losing a lot of chips so early in the tourney. But I tried to figure out what hands could be ahead of me right now.

First of all, my opponent was a really good player. I could tell that just from watching the action at our table. He’d seen me continuation-bet a lot of flops and clearly knew that I’d stolen a lot of pots holding nothing. He probably thought I was doing it again … he can’t have known just how strong my hand was. It was a good move, if that’s what he was doing.

But what could he have that beats me? AA or KK would probably have raised pre-flop, rather than just called the button. A flopped set or two pair probably would have raised less on the flop, or even just called, to keep me in. I couldn’t put him on a flush draw either. Frankly, his raise showed me that he didn’t want me to stick around. The best hand I could put him on was something like A9 – top pair, top kicker. But even that might be an overestimation. (This is the kind of thinking that Grant has been encouraging in my game.)

I called that flop bet, and he was visibly displeased. Since the pot was big enough to satisfy me, the turn and river went check/check, and when I showed my unimproved Queens he mucked disgustedly.

I won another big pot from this same player later in the game, which ended up tilting him beyond any possibility of repair. Again, he was the button and I was the big blind. He raised preflop with AA, and I called with KQ offsuit. The flop was King-high, so I check/called his bet. Turn was a rag, so I check/called again. I actually thought I might have the best hand. The river was another King, which pretty much took away any doubt. I put out a very big value bet, he made a crying call, and when I showed my hand he literally bolted from the table and ran out the back exit. He lost over half of his stack to me on that hand. He did come back to the table – walking through the front door, so he’d literally stomped all the way around the building – but he didn’t last much longer, given his dark mood.

I have some poker trips coming up, and some tournament play planned, so we’ll see if I can keep this blog updated a bit more regularly.