Over my trip to Washington I managed to have a day where I play 60 SNGs. Because this was basically all high stakes action, I made around 15,000 VPPs. With some rudimentry math, I calculated that these amount of VPPs equated to about $1500 in rakeback. Playing 364 days a year, thats over $500,000 in rakeback alone. Not too shabby considering I only played about 4 hours.

Max has been playing exclusively SNGs recently so we’ve been bouncing a lot of idea off each other. It’s been surprising how much I have learned that past 2 months regarding optimal play in them. There are a lot of major changes I made in my game that I think are going to pay big dividends. I don’t want to say what they are, but I will say the changes regard how playing with different stack sizes causes optimal play to vary radically.

I got back from DC today after packing up everything I left at my old house into my car and driving 16 hours over the past 2 days. For once in the past 3 months, I will be in the same city for more than a month at a time.

Time to put in a lot of volume.

As I sat in the airport waiting for my flight to stop being so god damn delayed, I wanted to play some poker. However, I couldn’t play many tables because I forgot my mouse, but I wanted to possibly two table sit and goes. Since the airport connection was really bad, I wanted to use my phones connection through tethering. The problem was that I needed to right click on the easy tether icon in my shortcuts bar to connect. The problem with that is my right click doesn’t work on my touch pad because of a freak pepsi spilling accident (okay, maybe not freak).

What I did next was the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life.

I went to touch pad settings and set my left click button to perform the right click function. It seemed like a good idea. I would simply right click on the tethering short cut to connect to the internet, and set the setting back to normal when I needed left click. But when I tried to execute my plan I was met with one complication: I couldn’t set my left click back to the left click function without using left click. It was the best real life catch-22 I have ever come across. In order to restore the functioning of the left click, I needed to left click.

I called Dell Support actually excited to present them with this quandary because of the seeming impossibility of solving this issue without an external mouse. But apparently since my warranty is expired, customer service will cost me $40. I didn’t accept the fee out of principle, and because I felt there was a chance they wouldn’t be able to solve the problem in a reasonable amount of time. So I called my most computer savvy friend I knew. After about 20 minutes of talking, we decided there were 3 possible ways to fix the problem.

1. Attach an external mouse. Since I only changed the setting for the touch pad, this of course would work. But in a small airport there was no place to buy a mouse, nor people with mice in site.
2. Use a left click hot key. He did not know one and could not find one on the internet. Simply tabbing to the appropriate button and pressing enter or + did not work in this case.
3. Open a program that allows someone to take over my desktop and change it from his computer. I had such a program, but was unable to open it, and was unable to download a different one, because I couldn’t left click.

I told this story because I found it to be funny but it almost seems like a computer experts riddle. Is there anyway I could have fixed my computer without an external mouse?

This has nothing to do with poker. I was randomly looking at optical illusions when my brother said something to me about logical paradoxes. We browsed a bit and came to this wikipedia page that has a list of a bunch of paradoxes, many of them I had never heard of before but really interesting.

The Decision paradoxes are especially cool. One of my favorites is Abilene’s paradox. Abiliene’s paradox, in short, is that if people make decisions based on what they think everyone wants them to do, and everyone makes decisions this way, then everyone will make a decision based on what no one wants to do.

So I busted out in about 400th place in the WSOP ME for about 32k. Going deep in the ME is the most exciting thing I have been a part of in my life. I tried not to, but the day dreaming of final table and victory is just too strong to fight. The hand I ended up busting on I felt like I totally butchered. I ended up getting it in on a J74 two club flop with 55 vs Christian Harder, a good tournament pro. He had J9 and I was sent to the rail.

After the hand I realized that there were factors I failed to consider which would have swayed my decision for the better. This was obviously depressing for me. At the same time, my failure to consider factors wasn’t random, I felt like it was the result of subtle tilt. I had a session with Jared Tendler today to work out the issue and I feel confident that I will solve this problem over time. I unfortunately had some proof of my progress today, as I lost a lot of money and felt that I still maintained a high level thought process and did not feel depressed afterwards.

I’m back in my hometown in Iowa in the immediate future. I’m trying to decide what to do in the future, currently I’m leaning towards going back to school for engineering. But for now I’m going to be putting a lot of hours in playing poker. Max and I are also going to start investing in real estate in the bay area and midwest. I’m excited to get that going as well.

I’m going to DC on Friday to move my stuff from my old place. I’ll drive my car and likley a U-haul attached to the back. Probably going to download some Klosterman audio books to kill the time. 16 hour drive, here I come.

So yesterday I busted out of the WSOP getting really damn unlucky. Here’s the hand:
Read the rest of this entry

Without many updates you may have thought that we were both already out of the main event, and too depressed and gloomy to post. Guess again! Danny and I are both in the Main Event going into day 4, there are 1240 people left, Danny has 364k chips (he started yesterday with 20k! He still can’t explain how he accumulated so many chips so fast) and I have 164k chips.

If you want to follow throughout the day, we’ve created a twitter that will be updated frequently Twitter

June was kind to me, even though I didn’t get lucky and win any tournaments. This month is starting off well too, mostly a good amount of winnings in cash, But I feel very confident in my HU SNG game too. I think my winnings in HU SNGs are going to come on strong by the end of the year.

I’m playied day 1b of the WSOP ME, I finished the day with 34,650 chips, slightly below average. Max is doing better, with 55,500 chips. I try to keep the perspective of not worrying about winning and losing and just trying to play well, but it’s hard to keep the fantasies out of my head. Lets face it: Anyone who final tables or wins the main event is going to have their life change tremendously. Me and my roommate joked that being 1 on 1 for 1st probably feels like the last two soldiers in a war, all of their comrades dead, each of them their country’s only hope to win the war… Okay well its probably not that intense, but I can imagine it is pretty damn intense.

The strength of the main event fantasy manifested itself after I took a bad beat that would have given me 75,000 chips but instead left me with 10,000. I got it all in with KJ on an AQT board vs TT, turn was an Ace, game over. I don’t think I have felt so devastated over a poker hand in my entire life. It took me an hour just to gain my composure again.

Thankfully, after clawing my way back I got it all in with top set and doubled up at the end of the day. But even though I have a better chance of winning now, the bad beat experience helped me regain the right perspective: I’m making money when I sit down at the poker table, regardless if I win the Main Event or bust out the first hand tomorrow.