Unfortunately, I only had time to play one event in the last two days, FTOPS4 (the 200 PLHE event), which went nowhere after a promising start. Who knew that the triple shootout would sell out 40 minutes ahead of time? I'd have tried the Stud 8 tourney tonight, as well, but some allergy or other that's making my nose itch like crazy also made me cut the day's session short after 5 PM or so (and just as importantly, I'm not nearly as good at S8 as at razz).

Tomorrow's tourneys are a 535 PLO (no way) and a 100r (maybe, if I feel better and find enough other stuff to fill up a screen with.) Sunday is a 530 HU (probably not; I think I'm +EV in a field like that, but not by a huge amount, and its too early for my other tourneys) and a 300 freezeout (definitely); Monday has a 200 PLO8 tourney (maybe, since I don't horribly suck in those) and a 1K (meh, pass.)

While I'm at it, those of you that want to take a close look at variance should check out this MTTC thread, a 'best of FTOPS' competition. The fun part of this is to take everyone's overall results and just look at the # of cashes/entries (keep in mind that in a contest like this everyone plays 80%+ of all events.) Odds are only 2-3 people of those who didn't book a final table will finish with an overall profit, but nevertheless, the ratio of cashes to plays and the overall finish of all of these players will almost certainly be much higher than random.

It's not a great one because I always hate finishing in this area for a little while after I bust, but 40/4100-odd runners for ~2K isn't bad. (Add up another few hundred in CR fees because this has at least 1 vid in it and probably 2...if FT emails me the HH's. Who knew this laptop didn't save those by default?)

I'm incompetent at PLO and will pass on it, but the shootout tonight looks cool.

Last night, I finalized my WSOP living arrangements - all I need to do now is finally buy flight tickets and I'm set. As some people can tell you, the last time I took a flight to attend a tournament, I managed to sleep through a gate change, so as insurance, I promise to blog about anything similar happening this time in the most embarrassing way possible.

In online news, after a week...well, not really 'off' (playing 1-2 tourneys a night for fun > not playing anything, but not actually work, either), it's once again time to spend a few K and a bunch of time on FTOPS events. The bad news is that 1)for whatever reason, I run so awfully at FTOPS that my best finish was in an LO8 event of all things, and 2)since I have little cash online, I'm gonna have to actually do well if I don't want to shift money around. The good news is that...well, it's FTOPS. It's not quite the UBOC or the Bodog series for terrible play, but it's close enough for awesomeness :)

Since I haven't been blogging as much and I want to try and go back to daily or near daily updates again for the WSOP, what I'll do now is to at least quickly recap the FTOPS events I'll actually play. I'm not sure about tonight's since I'm headed out to my parents' house and might not have time to play it, but other than that, I usually play about half the events in a series and I see no reason to stop now. So, expect an update tomorrow or the day after at the latest.

Since my last entry, I've played 2 full tournament days (by "full", I mean "very little", because I suck at volume) and a half day on Sunday. The Sunday was a complete bust, but last Wednesday included an FT bubble on UB and tonight had a 9'th place finish in the Cake 30r. That's the good news; the bad is that I think I played the UB tourney mediocre and probably did something wrong in the Cake tourney, too - I had a 270K (1st) to 110K (2nd) CL with 15 left, lost it on a pretty mediocre PF call, got most of it back with 12 left and then proceeded to bluff a good chunk of it off/not win another pot for half an hour. It doesn't help when people decide to defend their blind with 92s and get there, but that wasn't the entire story; once I got that lead, I just should have done more with it than I did.

It's been a long time since I've been final tabling this consistently, but now that I'm doing it, I need to top 3 and/or win these things, and that's just not happening so far. It feels like a combination of being rusty shorthanded and (still) just running bad in critical spots late, but I can't really complain about that tonight. Regardless, losing money ($100, but still) when you FT something is yucky. Ah well - with the low volume I play, 3 FT's and a bubble over a week is a big deal regardless/being up five figures is nice.

I should also say that I've partly dropped down in stakes. I always enjoyed playing well overrolled for almost everything I've ever decided to try and that still holds - theoretically, I have well over what I need - but with an investment I have going and this summer's likely WSOP spending extravaganza, a lot of my money has been transferred offline. Between that and the Intrade account, I don't really have enough online on every site to play $1K a day worth of buyins (BTW, the fact that I say "1K" should tip you off as to how little I actually play, sigh), and the variance in the larger tourney fields also works against that BR requirement. One of the reasons I was getting really sick of tournaments prior to recent events was simply not going deep enough often enough, which is entirely normal when everything you play has 1K people in it. Because of that, rather than spend a bunch of time on tilt from playing $150's I'm kinda shortrolled for (again, I could afford it, but it's hard enough to transfer money between the usual 4-6 sites these days that it's a pain in the ass for a tourney regular), my weekday schedule now has a bunch of $20-30 rebuys and $50-100 FO's with 200-400 people. The BR requirement is theoretically only slightly lower, but with 5-10K for 1'st, the field is much worse and has a lot more really terrible fish instead of mediocre regs. That, in turn, makes it easier to go deep and harder to get frustrated with poker, so except for Sundays, I think I'm gonna be playing that kind of sched a lot from now until at least the end of the summer.

I'll be leaving for Vegas again in about 4 weeks. It's hard to say whether I'm looking forward to it or not; I like the poker boot camp environment, but leaving my wife and comfortable apartment behind every year is hard. With that said, I think I can use the boot camp thing right now, so at worst, it'll be good to be around a bunch of people and thinking about the game again.

Also, I'm rooming with Bond...so the blog updates ought to be interesting :)

After a really frustrating month and a half, I finally have a major FT to show for it, the UB 200K. That tournament's been very good to me over the years, and today was no exception. Unfortunately, I ran just like I've run since March once I actually made the final table and took 6'th for 9K after two back to back unavoidable coolers, but I did play really good poker to get there (answer to how long it takes for enough bad beats to make me a little sloppy: right around a month and a half. In fact, I was starting to worry at how long it was taking to get a tournament worth making a video about this month...)

Now to keep doing that and build on the nice after tax season bounce.

Also, bonus hand for those of you who think I'm nitty (nobody post this on 2+2 for a day or two please):

MaximusBets is at seat 0 with 3010.
lowhanginset is at seat 1 with 7250.
PocketOwnage is at seat 2 with 1810.
-BENTLEY- is at seat 3 with 2660.
jas0042 is at seat 4 with 2600.
Vezina_08 is at seat 5 with 1450.
Adanthar1 is at seat 6 with 3900.
BiggDaddyBink is at seat 7 with 3420.
TheLynx is at seat 8 with 7100.
elveee is at seat 9 with 875.
The button is at seat 9.

MaximusBets posts the small blind of 20.
lowhanginset posts the big blind of 40.

MaximusBets: -- --
lowhanginset: -- --
PocketOwnage: -- --
-BENTLEY-: -- --
jas0042: -- --
Vezina_08: -- --
Adanthar1: 9d Ad
BiggDaddyBink: -- --
TheLynx: -- --
elveee: -- --

Pre-flop:

PocketOwnage folds. -BENTLEY- folds. jas0042 folds.
Vezina_08 folds. Adanthar1 raises to 120.
BiggDaddyBink folds. TheLynx folds. elveee folds.
MaximusBets folds. lowhanginset calls.

Flop (board: 9c Qc 2s):

lowhanginset checks. Adanthar1 bets 160.
lowhanginset calls.

Turn (board: 9c Qc 2s 7h):

lowhanginset checks. Adanthar1 checks.

River (board: 9c Qc 2s 7h 2h):

lowhanginset checks. Adanthar1 bets 350.
lowhanginset raises to 900. Adanthar1 calls.



Showdown:

lowhanginset shows As Jc.
lowhanginset has As Jc Qc 2s 2h: a pair of deuces.
Adanthar1 shows 9d Ad.
Adanthar1 has 9d Ad 9c 2s 2h: two pair, nines and deuces.