Dec 07, 2009 – 20:12PM
I 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
Nov 17, 2009 – 18:11PM
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Nov 13, 2009 – 15:11PM
Not a long update, but just letting everyone know I'm in Tulsa and playing in the $2k today. I'll be twittering updates on breaks. From the looks of things they haven't had a huge turnout this year so I wouldn't be shocked if we only get 50 entrants or so, but hoping to get around 100 for a solid prize pool.
Got a good night's sleep and am in a pretty good frame of mind so I feel pretty good about things. My first time at the Hard Rock here in Tulsa. The room was reasonable, although the walls are thin enough I was woken up a little earlier than I would have liked by the sounds of someone above me walking around in heels. I can't be too picky though I suppose as there really isn't much else out here!
-Rizen
Nov 11, 2009 – 15:11PM
Sorry I've been off schedule with the updates. Without going into great detail, I'm dealing with some ongoing issues related to the hacking of my accounts a few weeks ago. It's really been a pain, and having a background in technology it's really something I never thought would happen to me. I'm VERY careful about things and take a lot of extra steps to make sure things like this don't happen. At some point in the future I'll go into much more detail about it in the hopes that it might help anyone reading avoid going through a similar situation, but while there are still some open issues surrounding it I'd feel better not talking about it a ton other than to say it sucks, and I truly hope that no one else has to ever deal with anything like it.
Poker wise things have been relatively good. I'm still playing mostly PLO at 1/2 and 2/4. I've been focusing more on 1/2 as I'm making some adjustments to my game. At first with PLO I worked very hard on fundamentals, hand selection, position, etc. What I'm finding now is that playing a very solid, by the book sort of game can beat up to 1/2, but to beat much higher than that you have to start to make adjustments or thinking players will eat you alive.
Honestly it was the same in my hold em development. When I first started I literally used a starting hands chart and pretty solid fundamental strategy. That will allow you to beat a lot of weaker opposition. Over time though, eventually you reach a point where players are good enough at hand reading to stop paying you off when you're playing super straight forward, so you have to start to mix things up to keep them guessing. That's what I'm working on right now, as even though I've started to beat 2/4 now it's still not by enough that it makes sense to play instead of 1/2. At 1/2 my win rate is better than twice what it is at 2/4 with a lot less variance. So I've dropped back down to primarily 1/2 for a bit while I try out some adjustments to my game and once I get more comfortable with them I'll hop back up to 2/4 and see if it helps.
That kind of brings up a pet peeve of mine, which is that people often play the highest levels they can beat in poker without at all thinking about win rate. If a player can beat 3/6, they play 3/6 even if it might be more profitable for them to play 2/4 since their overall win rate would be higher. Same with MTTs, I find people often get fixated on playing certain buy in levels rather than looking for what tournaments will be the most profitable regardless of buy in. I know I used to get asked 'what are you doing here?' a lot when I played the $10 rebuy on Stars at 10pm. I don't view it as a $10 buy in though, I view it as a tournament that pays over $10k for first, has lots of soft opposition, and because of the rebuys plays pretty deep stacked.
I've also been playing the 'pro' tables on Lock at 7pm ET every night. Those are 5/10 and 10/20 full ring no limit hold em tables where pros from across the Cake network (myself, Doyle Brunson, Mike Caro, Kenna James, etc) play at 5/10 and 10/20 every night. The games bring in some good and not so good players and are a lot of fun. So far I've been fortunate enough to take quite a bit out of those games most nights, but I've run exceptionally well at times. I even recorded a video of it last night so hopefully that will be up on PokerXFactor soon.
As far as live events go I'm going to be hitting the Hard Rock Poker Open at the Hard Rock in Tulsa a little later this month. I'll be playing the $2k this Friday then the main event the 15th. Will be fun to get in some live poker action again and I'll be twittering updates from both events provided my phone cooperates.
-Rizen
Oct 30, 2009 – 19:10PM
Ask Rizen will be back next week. I haven't been able to update lately because I've been super busy in life away from the poker table. I'm going to make it a somewhat quick summary, but basically we had a scare where we thought our son had H1N1 after being exposed to it at the day care at the gym where we go. It turned out luckily that it was just a regularly virus/flu bug but it hit our entire family (except me luckily) so we had a lot of sick people around the house for a while.
This month was also my birthday and my anniversary both. We celebrated those which was fun. Around that same time unfortunately I had my Full Tilt and Bodog accounts hacked and subsequently drained. That really sucked and kind of soured me on online poker for a bit, also hampered my ability to play any tournaments as all I had left was Lock and Stars. I took a few days off since my head wasn't in the right place and have since started to play some again, but it was one of those things I never really thought would ever happen to me.
I do a whole piece with a lengthy explanation as well as security precautions to take for your own accounts in this week's PokerXFactor podcast. I don't think it's up yet but once it is I'll try and link you guys to it if you want a more detailed explanation as well as what you can do to make sure it doesn't happen to you.
I'll return to regular updates now that all that is sorted out, and Ask Rizen will return next week on Fridays again. Oddly enough even though it was a bad month for both disease and having money stolen it was a really good month for me poker wise. I'm finally beating 2/4 PLO with a solid, consistent win rate now, and have been playing the 3/6 and 5/10 full ring games on Lock in the evenings as part of a 'play with the pros' on the Cake Network promotion and have had a lot of success in those games.
-Rizen
