Atlantic City

I haven't told you guys that I went to Atlantic City recently. This is just an exert from a blog entry on my other blog about the whole trip. This post will only hold the part about poker. We stayed at the Taj Mahal.


(...)After a great dinner, me and Hugo went to the ATM to get some cash and then signed up at the poker room. On the way there we had to walk through the whole casino and it was just huge! According to the website, there are over 3,000 slot machines and more than 210 table games (roulette, blackjack etc.) and 70 poker tables - can't wait to go to Vegas where the casinos are even bigger!

By the way, this is what two (wannabe) high stakes poker players look like :) 

Poker

The lowest stakes was $1/$2 with a minimum buy in of $60 and a max of 300$. Beforehand, I had decided that I wouldn't lose more than 3 buy ins of what I normally play online = 600$ total. So, I found a table and sat down with 300$. Unfortunately, I didn't get the same table as Hugo but at least we could see each other and sometimes we would walk over and ask how the other was doing. 

I started out folding a lot because I wanted to see how the table dynamic was and I didn't get any good cards anyways, so I really couldn't do anything else. However, the bad cards continued so I figured I would try to steal some blinds. The first time, this guy, lets call him Mr. Aggressive, re-raises me and I had to fold. A couple of hands later he just calls my raise and check-raises me on the flop where I have to fold. He shows me a total bluff. 15 mins later he does the same and later he does it again. Still, I wasn't getting any cards whatsoever, so I really couldn't do nothing. 

Actually, I can sum up all my good hands from the +4 hours of play right here: 2xKK, 1xAQo, 1xKQo and 1x88 - that was it! I had no other pocket pairs all night, no good aces, no suited connectors - NOTHING!

Back to the story... After losing with some bad hands and bad bluffs, I was down to about 150$. Finally, I got my first real hand - a pair of kings. The short story is that I get my last 150$ all-in against another guy with QQ and doubles up to 300$.

Later I get  KQo in the BB. Mr. Aggressive now tries to steal my blind again and I just call. Flop comes Qxx and I check-call his bet. Turn and river are blank and I decided to call him down after he had been bluffing all night long. Unfortunately he woke up with AQ this time and he won my stack of 300$ from me on that hand. Maybe I should have folded since he hadn't bluffed that big before. I think we had played about 3 hours at that time.

Anyway, I buy in for another 100$ and after literally folding all hands except a couple of blinds for a whole hour, I get kings in early position. I raise it big but somehow I get no respect and five people call me. Flop comes 235 rainbow. Since I'm first to act, I just check because I want to trap Mr. A somehow. As I predicted he takes a stab at the pot and I just call. I don't raise because he will only call me with something that has me beat already. The turn opens up for a flush draw but is otherwise blank and I check to him again. He puts me all-in. I really had a tough decision but I was short stacked. Preflop, he could have called with 22, 33, 55, 66-TT, suited aces and suited connectors. So either he had a hand or either he was bluffing or semi-bluffing. I ended up calling after a minute or so and he showed me A4, which means he had flopped a straight on me :(

I decided to call it a night at the poker tables because the deck was so cold. I really should have quit earlier but what can you do when it's the first time at a casino.

You Can't Win Them All...

As I wrote in an earlier post, the former world champion, Peter Eastgate, played a good tournament. However, he experienced a bit of a cooler when he flopped a set (3 of a kind) and his opponent made a straight on the turn to knock Eastgate out of the tournament in 23rd place. He won 80.000DKR (about $15,000). The first prize of 3.6M DKR was won by a Swedish guy called Anton Wigg.

I have to say that Peter Eastgate keeps on impressing me. A lot of world champions we never hear from again but Eastgate's results speaks for themselves! In January 2010 he came in 9th at the EPT Deauville ($100k), France. In October 09 he came in second at the EPT London ($843k) and in January 09 he won the Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure worth $343k. But of course the WSOP Main Event victory where he won $9.1M remains his biggest win!

You can check out his impressive record here

Isildur1 On Another Rollercoaster Ride

This is the fantastic story about a poker player who plays on Full Tilt Poker. Full Tilt is known for its nosebleed cash games. Before the financial crisis, there was a lot of action on the $500/$1000 tables. This meant that a couple of times a day, someone would win a hand worth more than $500k. However, the action slowly died out on the higher levels.

All of a sudden, in November 2009, this kid shows up under the nickname Isildur1. In less than two weeks he wins close to 5 million dollars - 4 of them he won off Tom 'durr' Dwan. The funny thing is that no-one really knows who he is. There are rumors about him being 18 year old Viktor Blom from Sweden but it has never been confirmed. 

After winning 5 million dollars, everybody in the poker community was really amazed by this new player. Unluckily for him, he also tasted what it feels like to be on a loosing streak! In less than 24 hours, one day in December, he lost 4 million dollars to another young gun, Brian Hastings. Throughout December, Isildur1 lost all of his winnings plus another two million dollars! One day he just disappeared. He wasn't seen at the tables in all of January, so everybody thought he would never come back. Below you can see a graph of his results.

Isildur1's Career Timeline

Before Isildur1, the biggest online pot had been $700k for more than a year. During November and December that record got beaten more than ten times! Today, the record for the biggest online pot is 1,3 million dollars, in which Isildur1 was the loser.

So it was a bit of a surprise, when he went back to the tables a few days ago! He started out like in November - he won $900k the first day. But yesterday and today he has lost approx. the same amount. So, I think he is break-even for the year.

But it is going to be very interesting to follow this mystery kid!

Eastgate Doing Good At The EPT Copenhagen

The 2008 World Champion, Peter Eastgate, is trying to make another deep run in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The tournament is part of the European Poker Tour and is by many considered to have the toughest field on the circuit except from the season finale in Monaco. This is because there are a lot of Scandinavian players and they are usually known to be very aggressive in their style of play.

Last years winner, however, came out of the US but this year it seems that the financial situation has made most people stay on the other side of the Atlantic.

The tournament is still only at day 2, so the money has not been reached yet. The prize pool is about $3M and with a first place prize of about $700k, I sure would not mind if we had a little Danish success! :D

High Stakes Poker

Finally, this year's season of the televised cash game poker show, High Stakes Poker, aired last Sunday on GSN. This year's first episode featured one of the most impressive line-ups ever seen in televised poker.

Line-up:

- Phil Ivey (Photo), US
- Gus Hansen, DK
- Dario Minieri, IT
- Antonio Esfandiari, US
- Andreas Høivold, NO
- Phil Hellmuth, US
- Tom 'durrrr' Dwan, US
- Daniel Negreanu, CA

This season, the minimum buy-in is $200k but Ivey and Dwan both elected to buy-in for a cool half a million. Already in the first episode, one of the players loses his buy-in and quits the game - this is highly unusual as poker players most often carry around huge ego's. However, you will have to watch the show (see below) to find out who has a blow-up!

If you don't know what the difference between cash game poker and tournament poker is, here's a quick intro; first of all, in a tournament there is a fixed buy-in - you pay e.g. $100 and you get 10,000 tournament chips (= so the maximum amount you can lose is those $100). In cash game, on the other hand, you buy-in with your own money and you can quit or bring more money to the table anytime you want.   

Cash game poker's biggest advantage is that the format makes the game more interesting to watch because the players have more room to play good poker. When you see the final table of a tournament, the players usually only have 6-20 big blinds (BB) left because the blinds increase over time. This way, the most common phrase you will here is "I'm all in!" - it sounds cool but it really takes out the skill element of poker.
In cash games, the blinds stays the same all the time. On HSP the blinds are $400/$800 so all the players start out with at least 250 BB's. The deep stacks are way better for televised poker since the decisions become much harder and the bluffing element becomes more important.

PokerStars' Sunday Million Guarantees $4,000,000

During the month of February, PokerStars will reach a huge milestone - 40 billion played hands. Of course they want to celebrate this, so they are launching several different promotions in their 'PokerStars 40 Billion Hand Celebration'.

One of these promotions is an upgraded version of their weekly Sunday Million tournament, which normally 'only' guarantees 1,5 million dollars. However,  at 16:30 ET on February 21st, it will have a guaranteed prize pool of 4 million dollars and a guaranteed first place prize of at least 1 million dollars. This makes it the largest online tournament ever considering the size of the prize pool.

The buy-in will be $215. Cheaper satellites will be available for those people who does not want to pay up with that kind of money.

Another possibility is their 'Micro Millions' with a guaranteed prize pool of 1 million dollars which takes place on February 14th at 14:40 ET. The buy-in for this tournament is only $40.

For more information go to PokerStars 40 Billion Hand Celebration