So I finished in 6th place at the WSOPE ME. First final table ever of a live tournament and it was a lot of fun. I’m not going to share every detail of the tournament, but I will share the most interesting bits.

I felt like I played great throughout the tournament, but there were certain hands that really stood out to me as fantastic.

1. The first was against Ludovic Lacay, a great tournament player who was crazy aggressive. He 3bets insane amounts preflop. We each had about 100,000 chips and the blinds were 600-1200. I raise to 3000 preflop with KT0. Lacay who takes less than 10 seconds on every decision 3bets to 7200. I fail to pick up anything from his mannerisms. I decide to flat call. Flop comes K74 rainbow. I check and he bets 10,000, which is a standard size for him but a more optimal bet size here would be something like 6-7k. I c/r to 27,000 trying to induce a spazz. He takes 10 seconds and shoves all in. I think just to make sure I don’t change my logic. I call and he shows Q4, I hold up.

2. and 3. The Blom hands. After sitting at the same table with Viktor Blom on Day 4 I came away incredibly impressed by his game. However, two hands likely to be shown on ESPN I will be seen having the best of him. The first hand comes right after I 3bet him and he folds and I show 64o. The very next hand he opens again, and I 3bet with A2o in the SB. I expect that his thought process would be to fold a lot because it would be an incredibly odd thought process for me to decide to 3bet him light after 3betting and showing such a bad hand. Unfortunately, he calls. The flop comes AK9 rainbow. This is a tough decision. If my preflop assesment is correct, check folding could be good. This is a terrible board for him to triple barrel, if I were to check, as a bluff, so I wouldn’t expect him to do so. At the same time, I felt like he would not think my bet flop, check turn range was weak so he wouldn’t try to bluff me there either,  not to mention there are so little draws he could call a flop cbet with. I expect I would get value from one pair hands as well that were worse than mine. I decide to cbet and he calls. Turn is a 6. I check, he bets, and I fold after little deliberation. Later he told me he had top two pair.

Another hand later on I had stopped 3betting him but we were both 100bbs deep. I get AJ in the BB and he opens the CO. I figure Blom’s 3bet calling range is wide enough where AJ is an easy 3bet. He calls again, but very quickly. Flop comes K64 two diamonds. I cbet and Blom visably looks frustrated. Not sure what I thought about that, on one hand I knew he wasn’t acting, but at the same time it seemed kind of strong. A decision with KJ is more frustrating than one with A6. Turn was a 7 of diamonds. It’s a great card for me because I expect Blom to raise the flop with flush draws but my line is still congruent with a flush. Also, very little 7′s in his range besides 77, K7s or 76, which would hit the turn. I bet out 2/3rds pot, about half my stack. He thinks for awhile and folds. I tell him later I had AJ no diamond, he says he’s embarassed to say what he folded. I’m excited to see this one on ESPN if it makes it there.

4. This hand was at the final table. 6 or 7 people left, I have about 2.3 million and Ronald Lee has me covered. 20k/40k blinds. I raise T6o to 100k  in what is essentially the CO because James Bord looks at his hand before the action comes to him and it’s clear he’s folding. Lee OTB, who had been very loose preflop all day, flat calls. Everyone else folds. Flop comes QsTs6x. I cbet to 125k. Lee looks straight at me, which I was inclined to think this is weak. When Lee had a nut hand he tended to stay within himself. He calls. Turn was a 9x. Terrible card. I look at Lee and something has changed: He seems no longer interested in what I am going to do. I’m not sure of it but I was inclined to think he hit the turn. I considered c/fing, but I figured I didn’t want to give too much weight to the live tell. I bet 250k into a 500k. Lee doesn’t think for long and raises…. to 420k.

I laugh because he raised less than 2 times my bet, which is not allowed, and I thought it would be ruled a call and I’d have a chance at boating up. Instead, they make him change the raise to 500k. It doesn’t take me that long before saying “This sucks but it’s an easy fold” and I muck T6o face up. Lee puts his hand on his head, almost saying with his mannerisms “Why can’t I get the best of this guy?” Later I found out not surprisingly he had KJo, turned straight.

…………………………………

Lee got his revenge though. I had about 1.3 million at this point and Lee had me covered. Lee opened preflop in MP, and I had a tell on him that helped me realize he was weak here. Given he was opening 50-60% of hands when folded to, my decision to 3bet AJs from the BB when it was folded to me was an easy one. He had raises my 50kbb to 110k, and I 3bet to 285k. Lee shoves it all in after a short time of deliberation. It was a pretty trivial call at this point but I took my time just to make sure I didn’t pick up anything. I finally decided to call. Lee showed 44. It held up on all streets.

After I lost, the experience was a little surreal. I felt like I had played really well so whether I won or lost the all in became totally irrelevant to me. Everyday I use the logic that I can’t control the results so I should just be happy when I play well, but it rarely manifests itself completely. It didn’t in the KK hand. But when I got it all in with AJs, it did, and I think everyone saw that in me. I was happy because I played exceptionally, the result truly didn’t matter. Nicolas Levi, a very good french pro to my right, told me the nicest thing I think anyone has ever said to me. “I told Roland that I knew it would be the best for us if you lost the all in, but I didn’t want you to.” I turned to James Bord, the coolest guy I’ve ever met at a poker table, and shook his hand. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that expression he had on his face on anyone ever before. His smile and head nod seemed to say he was honored that he got to play with me at the poker table. After I exited the table the ESPN reporter, who was about to interview me, started tearing. I asked her with a big smile “Why are you crying? Don’t be sad there is no reason to be sad .” She replied. “I don’t know… I mean some people come over here all upset but you seem genuinely happy.” I know this whole paragraph may come off as incredibly self centered but I don’t mean it to be, it’s just honestly what happened.

Anyways, I had a great time and felt like I learned a ton from my experience. I have the EPT London ME left to play, and then I go back home. And you never know. Luck is independent, maybe the result can be even better there.

Danny had a great run today which involved a lot of great aggressive play and some very good luck. Again, the twitter account and pokernews will be updating all day starting at 7 ET. If you want to watch the stream, tune in to espn3.com at 12 ET. Good luck to Danny! I’ll badger him into doing a tournament summary as soon as this is all over.

You may have heard already, the other twin is doing very well in the WSOPE. He has about 760,000 chips, and is at a table with the infamous viktor blom (who btw, after seeing him interact with howard lederer and greenstein as if they knew eachother, i’m almost certain isildur1).

There’s a great interview with Danny on cardplayer here:

http://www.cardplayer.com/cptv/channels/13-poker-news/poker-videos/4366-world-series-of-poker-europe-steinberg-on-the-rise-on-day-3

If you want to follow you can do in a couple ways. There’s a stream on espn3.com starting at 12:00 et tomorrow, however it will not be live, there’s a 5hour delay. There will be commentary and exposed hole cards though, it should be fun to watch. Otherwise you can follow twitter, SuitedAAces or pokernews.com.

ONE TIME BABY!

I have a riddle for you. You wake up at 7:00 AM on Sunday, fall asleep at 10:00 PM the same day, and wake up at 7:00 AM again on Monday. However, 24 hours have not passed. How could this be?

You fly to London, which is precisely what I did today.

I woke up at 7 this morning planning on a hellish next 24 hours. Thankfully, it got off to a good start with a nice McDonalds breakfast with my girlfriend, who didn’t seem to mind getting out of bed to hang with me for 15 minutes before I left for the airport. Egg and cheese bagel and hashbrowns got me off to a powerful start.

My flight from Moline airport was leaving at 10:00. Because this is Iowa, you need to get to the airport about 30 minutes before departure and you’ll still have time to pick up some magazines. I played it safe though. I got there 45 minutes before departure. Definite wuss move by me. I would fly Moline to Atlanta and from there fly to DC, arriving around 3:00, where I would board my plane to London at 6:00. There were a lot of places I could have stopped over on my way to London, New York being the most practical place. But it needed to be DC. Why? Because the Redskins game was at 4:00 and I needed the local channels. After rechecking in to my Virgin Atlantic flight on my arrival in DC, I went to an airport bar and started watching. 6-0 Redskins. I was happy.

I found myself sitting next to two marines who had just gotten back, strangely enough, from the Congo and happened to be hard core Philly fans. Surprisingly, they are nice despite me being open about being a Skins fan. Unfortunately, I can’t stay the whole game because my flight departs at 6:45. At the last time I am able to check the score, it is 27-20 Redskins with two minutes left. I figure next time I check, which will be in London, I will see they probably won.

When I arrive in London I go through customs and the customs guy actually gives me a hard time. I didn’t know the address I was staying at and he went on this couple-minute-long-steaming-mad-tyraid about how US customs are much stricter and they would never let him into the country without an address. I tried to stay nice and he calmed down and let me through. “I’ll give you a break since it’s your first time in London.” He said, gesturing me away. After that I really had no idea where to go, I was meeting Max at a diner called Raffles but I didn’t know how to get there. But I remembered Max mentioning something about going to Paddington Station so I boarded the express train. After signing on to the free wi fi on the train, I saw that the place I needed to go was actually right outside Paddington Station. I check the score of the Skins game… 30-27 Texans win in OT. F!#%ing A.Thankfully, I found a Krispy Kreme donut shop. A few donuts eased the pain. But I have 3 hours to kill before Max gets here, hence the blog post.

Max and I are getting and apartment in London for two weeks to play in both the WSOPE HU Event and Main Event and the EPT HU Event and Main Event. First up is the WSOPE HU Event. No idea what the prize pools are going to be like but I assume a final table in any of these events is going to be a lot of money.

Anyways, the Laptop is running out of batteries, I have to find a place to plug it in. We’ll keep you updated on our tournament results.

Not talking about the song.

This year I have had a higher fish to regular ratio at HU SNG’s, but I have not had nearly the kind of success. And I feel like the reason why is because I am getting killed by loose stationy fish. I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t a winner against them. But why is this the case?

My instincts and adjustment tool set seem to bode much better vs a fish who can fold well or a tight, aggressive or passive regular. For people who have played me, this is fairly obvious. I’m a bluffing machine. I wouldn’t be surprised if I bluff fish more than any other non fish in the world. But this isn’t an honor I’m proud of having.

However, while bluffing vs fish is a problem, I don’t think it’s my biggest problem vs maniac fish. My biggest problem is not postflop, it is preflop. It seems if I do not stop and think for a few seconds, I can’t help but raise every hand on the button and call all those pretty cards out of position. The problem with playing loose out of and in position is it gives me more air and weak hands postflop. And versus someone who doesn’t fold and plays very aggressively, this is the worst possible strategy.

So my second goal for this month: Play a more optimal strategy against loose, aggressive, stationy fish.

In other news, the play a lot of tables experiment is going decently. Sometimes its difficult to focus that hard. I want to just go into robot mode and relax. But I’m trying to catch myself dozing off as much as possible and reaffirm my goal.

Every time you sit down to play poker you have a goal. You may not realize this or you may just vehemently deny it, but you do. Some people say it’s good to have a goal, but when you aren’t clear about the goal it becomes a problem. When that goal is one of the usual, default poker playing goals, it becomes the source of anger, tilt, and leads to terrible play. But if you can set a clear goal that is beneficial to your poker game, and become aware of when you stray from that goal, you’ll find yourself a calm, focused, poker playing, chip-taking, money-making machine.

One of the most common goals that poker players subconsciously set is “I want to win.” There are many ways to satisfy this goal. You can 1) Win a pot by making a good play 2) Win a pot by sucking out 3) Win by making a fortunately successful, terrible play. There are also ways that you will fail at this goal. You can 1) Lose a pot by getting sucked out on 2) Lose a pot but making a bad play 3) Lose a pot by making a good play but running into the top of your opponents range. Since in a 3 hours long session a good player will probably only win 55-60% of the time and in any moment a you can lose 100% of the time, this goal of wanting to win will leave you angry and upset about every other time you play.

But we don’t have to use this default goal, we can create our own. We can create goals that aren’t at the hands of something we can’t control. When I sit down to begin a poker session, I open up a word document and write down my goal for the day. Yesterday it was “Go to time bank as much as you can.” So throughout my session, I would look back at that word document and check in with myself. Am I taking my time enough to go to time bank consistently? No? Ok let’s try to take a little more time. By taking myself back to this goal, especially in times that I’m getting unlucky, I begin to focus on what is going to make me play my best instead of what I can’t control.

Here’s how you can come to your own goals. Think about how you are and what you do when you are playing your best. Here’s 3 of mine:

1) I’m consistently going to time bank on post flop decisions.
2) I’m thinking of alternate ways to play my hand instead of my initial reaction.
3) I feel calm

All these are clear, pointed ways for me to play my best. And most importantly, when I accomplish them it I’m able to recognize it. This means during a session, when things aren’t going well monetarily, I can feel a sense of calm knowing I’m accomplishing what an objective Max wanted to accomplish. Really, the goal doesn’t even have to have anything to do with making money, “I want to have fun.” It could not have to do with the way you play but what you play, “I want to play my most profitable stakes.” Or it could be statistical, “I want to play 3bet over 15% of hands.” Regardless of what it is, your poker session is only going to be as good as your goal. So set a great one.

Last month I decided to take a shot at playing only two tables at a time playing HU SNGs. I played 710 SNGs and went 344 – 366. I clearly ran badly, but my results make it less likely that two tables actually improves my winrate enough to warrant playing only two tables at a time. I would continue this experiment but I’ve gotten inspiration to do the opposite. Instead of playing less tables than usual, playing way more tables than usual.

This inspiration started a week or so ago when Max mentioned to me that if he took more time on his decisions, aka played a lot slower, that he felt like he could play a lot better. I tried the same thing. While the sample size of results were too small to determine whether or not my play improved or declined, I felt as if I was playing a lot better. Then, last night I saw in a high stakes thread on 2p2 that a player named grolongo, believed to be Isildur, was playing as many as 7 different opponents HU, and seemingly was still capable of playing extremely well. Then I remember when I would watch durr play multiple tables HU of both PLO and NLH vs multiple players, he seemed to still be able to play very well. Same theme with jungleman when I sweated him in LV.

I may not have the capabilities to be this epic, but I want to try. I’m going to play the most tables I possibly can at once, which is basically going to be the amount of tables that only get me to time out once or twice during a session. I suspect this is going to be 6 or 7 tables. I’m going to evaluate every decision I make throughly, and see how I do. I think I can do really well, and if I do, it could mean a lot more rakeback and a lot more total winnings for me.

So if you’ve been watching the Stars lobby recently you may have seen me playing some 5k sngs. Recently, a new player name NU Gatsby came onto the sng scene out of seemingly nowhere, and started sitting at the 5k non-turbos playing basically anybody. I decided to take a shot at him with Danny taking half my action.

It turned out that even though his play was unorthodox and he seemed like a big fish initially, after about 5 or so games I started to realize he wasn’t really all that bad. He was weak late-game but because of the structure of the non turbo a lot of times we never got there I actually learned a lot from playing him and have incorporated a little of what he does into my own game. I ended up getting rocked for 8 buyins in the first 15 games or so, and although he was an ok player I still felt like i was getting the best of him.

By the tenth game I had a great feel for him, and at this point I think we’ve played 20 games and I’m down 4 buyins. Hopefully he’ll sit more because if he does I think I have a really great edge.

Another player sitting at the 5k’s recently was Joe Cada. I played him for about 15 sngs and was up a buyin. He actually played much better than I expected, and honestly he got the best of me in those 15 games. I was in an impatient mood which plays into his strengths and he actually made a couple good big calls. Besides that he just ran hot, and when someone runs hot against you what ends up happening is 1) you never seen what they have 2) they have a sense of what you had because you folded and because of this 3) they have a huge advantage. I’m sure he’ll sit again and hopefully I can take what I learned against him the other night and beat him down.

Now let’s talk about SNE, when I first started this blog, I wanted Danny and I to be the first twins ever to be SNE. However, since I’ve been behind one SNE ever since I started in April, I would have to play exclusively on Pokerstars to achieve it. The fact of the matter is getting SNE as opposed to playing normally, I would only get the equivalent of about a 1% roi increase in sngs. But playing on ftp and being able to game select better, would give me a 3-5% increase in roi. And furthermore, the new superturbos on ftp are so fishy that it would be dumb to pass up playing them.

But I haven’t exactly given up on SNE. There are a couple of factors that may inspire me to make a run at SNE. Pokerstars will have dealt it’s 50 billionth hand in a few weeks and it’s possible that they have a double vpp week during this time. If this happens I could knock down 200k vpp or even more in that week, putting me close to pace. Or, if Joe Cada, NU Gatsby, or another player I think I have an edge on decides to sit at 5k’s for a while, I may be able to make a big vpp run. If both these happen, then it’s probable that I get SNE.

For now, I’m grinding pretty hard on both Stars and FTP, and I’ll continue to do so.