Weekend Update
Dec 07, 2009 – 20:12PMI didn't really blog about it, but the Tulsa trip was pretty much a disaster in the sense that I drove down for the $2k, but even after late registration we only ended up with 21 players. For those of you that followed on Twitter I have already said most of this, but it was a glorified sit n go. So I skipped the main event since it was on a Sunday and they told me they were 'hoping for 40-50 entrants' at the main event. Just didn't seem worth the time really.
I am going to Las Vegas this week for the WPT event and a couple of the preliminary events. It should be a good time, I'm looking forward to it, also looking forward to getting out of the COLD weather here in Kansas to something appreciably warmer in Las Vegas although I've been hearing it's chilly down there too.
Had a great weekend. My daughter's birthday party was on Saturday. She's turning 3 soon but we wanted to have the party before I left town because if we waited til after it would be Christmas weekend. We had a rowdy house full of kids but everyone had a lot of fun. We did an ice cream bar and pretty much just let the kids run around and have fun.
Then Saturday night I watched The Ultimate Fighter finale with an old friend. It was nice to catch up, and the fights were decent. A lot of the fights didn't go the way I expected them to. I really thought Houston Alexander would beat Kimbo and I was REALLY tempted to put money on the Marcus Jones vs Matt Mitrione fight but the line just didn't look good, but I really thought Jones was going to win that one easily. Very few of the fights went to a decision which always makes for an exciting night. There are some REALLY good fights on the card this weekend too and although I'm going to be in Vegas, unless I'm in a tournament I'm going to try and find some way to watch them.
I had a couple of beers while watching the fights, tried to play some PLO afterwards, but honestly I'm such a lightweight since I hardly ever drink anything that after about 5 minutes while I was feeling fine it was fairly obvious to me my head wasn't completely clear so I only played about 20 minutes. I did win about a buy in, but I didn't want to spend a lot of time playing if my head wasn't clear.
I did grind a lot of PLO on Sunday. I haven't been playing the Sunday tournaments too much lately mainly for lifestyle reasons. I'll probably play them while I'm in Las Vegas if I have time, but while I'm at home it just is REALLY draining to begin the day around noon and not finish it until midnight (or later) with no breaks. I've gotten spoiled by being able to take a break every couple of hours playing cash games and hang out with my kids or whatever I want to do and the idea of voluntarily seating myself in front of the computer for 12+ hours just isn't that appealing right now. If I'm at a hotel room in Vegas though I'll probably be sitting there anyways so I'll probably play the tournaments, if that makes sense at all.
I've tried playing MTTs on Sundays on my laptop and just being out in the living room with the family and all, but my kids are too young to understand they can't climb all over me and quite honestly I know in 10 years or so they won't want much to do with me so I don't really want to tell them not to. I still love MTTs (hence the traveling for live ones) and once my kids get old enough for school I could see myself playing them more often during the week.
Lately my cash games have been a mix of 1/2-2/4 PLO and 2/4-5/10 full ring NLHE. I usually play PLO for most of my afternoon/early evening sessions, but lately the 2/4+ full ring games on Lock have been SUPER soft later at night, and a fair amount of them are running too. I had a pretty good November and December is off to a fast start.
This is already getting pretty long, but I'd feel like I glossed over something major if I didn't briefly touch on the Isildur thing. I think it's mostly blown over now, but for those of you that don't know Isildur is someone who suddenly started playing a lot of nosebleed cash games out of no where and was just crushing everyone up there. I've had lots of people ask me what I think of him as well as what I think of the recent swings Durrrr has had. Honestly, I don't feel I'm super qualified to comment considering I don't play in those games. I know the nosebleed heads up games are SUPER swingy and aggressive. I mean I look at some of these sessions and the guys are dropping and winning 7 figure somes in ~1000 or sometimes less hands. That's some obscene variance if you think about it. I easily play 1500-2000 hands per day, and it's at 6 max, and I rarely see swings of more than a couple of buy ins on any given day. To play 1000 hands of heads up we're probably only talking about a few hours of play across multiple tables and even at 500/1000 those are 10+ buy in swings.
I just wouldn't ever have the stomach for it in the first place, although quite honestly even if I *DID* have the stomach for it I'm not nearly naive enough to think I'm skilled enough to play with those particular guys at their best games. I feel I'm a good enough tournament player to play with anyone at the world, but my HU cash game is not world class and I'd be a huge dog playing any of those guys HU at PLO or NLHE.
I guess the bottom line is Isildur has been good for the high stakes community in that he's generated some more interest around games that didn't seem to be running all that frequently anymore. Durrrr is a smart guy and I'm going to assume he's smart enough to have managed his bankroll well enough to withstand the swings, but I have no idea and wouldn't even want to begin to speculate.
-Rizen