Two of my San Diego poker buddies and I had a  great night up at the Bicycle Casino in LA this week.  My friend, Jake (who goes by chilidog on 2+2), finished 5th in the Legends of Poker plo tournament while Chris and I ran over the cash games.   We were playing 1/3 NL Omaha High only with a $80 buy in, which went up by $40 every time you rebought.  This is a very strange game to find in a casino, which meant that few of the people at the table knew how to play it well.   I invested that initial $80 in the game and left with $1480.

Chris and I won all our chips from the seat 1, who has his hand on his head in the photo.   Seat 1 won all the chips that he later gave to us from the guy with his hands covering his face.   Those two got it all in at least six times. Seat 1 was the best kind of maniac, and most of the time he got all his money in dark.  Not surprisingly seat 1 was behind in all of these face offs, but he somehow managed to suck out and win every single one against hands-covering-face guy.  This made Chris and me very happy because the more money Seat 1 had, the more money we would eventually be getting.  In one of these blind face offs, they had all their money in and Seat 1 revealed 2227 in his hand.   Then, we all cringed in disbelief as the dealer flashed a deuce in the window!  In another hand, Seat 1 got it all in with 3489 rainbow (after looking, lol) and the flop came 343.   Of course the guy with his hands on his face had big aces that time. Chris took the photo of them right after that hand happened.   Isn’t body language fascinating?

The table was so crazy that people were standing around watching our game, we had to call the floor over to get more all-in buttons, and there was constantly a chip runner exchanging racks of 1s that started taking over the table for 100s.  Dealers were talking to other tables about how insane our game was, which made the action junkies at other tables fill the empty seats in our game, even though most of them had never played Omaha before.  Some people just love action, I guess.   It was really a perfect storm sent from the Omaha Gods.  I just kept wishing I cold somehow triple the stakes of the game.  My husband and I have been trying to start a family for over a year now, and at one point I thought to myself, “That pot was huge!  I can buy like 4 viles of follistim with that!”  I bet I am the only poker player in the world who calculates pots in terms of fertility med costs.

I had a fan club of old Asian men standing behind me saying things like, “She super conservative, but she good!”   One guy asked me, “Want to be my daughter?”  Another didn’t understand him because of his thick accent and because he didn’t speak English all that well himself, and he said, “Ha!  He wants you to be his doctor!  I need doctor too!” Then he urgently shook my shoulders and said, “Doctor, I have empty pockets, please help!”

Jake came over to play after busting out of the tournament and quadrupled up in the first twenty minutes he was at the table.   We had such a great time.   It was one of the craziest/most fun nights of poker I have ever had in my life.  I left at 5 a.m. so that I would miss LA rush hour traffic on my drive back to San Diego, and I am still wondering how much I could have won if I stayed longer. Before this week, games that good only existed in my fantasies.

Now, more about affiliates than you probably ever wanted to know…

A poker affiliate is a company or person that receives a commission for sending new players to the poker sites that they work for.  For the most part, affiliates attract new players through online marketing efforts.  Their commission can either come as a one-time up-front payment or a percentage of the action the player gives the site for as long as they have an account.

Many markets have affiliate programs, but according to pokeraffiliate.com, “Online poker is without a doubt one of the most lucrative affiliate markets available. What started simply as a ‘refer a friend’ program escalated into what is now providing a full time income for thousands of people with multiple revenue streams.”

Affiliates bring in new players, which is good for the poker community.  They deserve to be compensated for the work they do to get players to sign up. The only problem with the poker affiliate system, in my opinion, is that at some sites, the host site and it’s affiliates leave the player out of the initial contract negotiating process.  This causes new players to be unknowingly forced into unbreakable contracts that are not in their best interest.

At Full Tilt, new players that sign up for a poker site with a bonus code from an affiliate enter an unbreakable contract with a third party.  Some players have even been linked with an affiliate just by  visiting a site which attaches a cookie. Once a player is linked to an affiliate on Full Tilt, she can never terminate her relationship with the affiliate or switch to another affiliate.   Theoretically, a player could negotiate new terms with their affiliate, but that is only if the player can contact her affiliate, which is very difficult to do in most cases. And even then, the affiliate has little, if any, incentive to offer the player a better deal.

So that means, if you signed up for Full Tilt long before you’d even heard of online rakeback, forget about getting it now.   If you’re frustrated that Full Tilt won’t tell you the name of the third party making money off of you, tough.   Want to sign up with an affiliate that will offer you free use of a training site? Too late.  This may seem like a non-issue for most players, but if someone plays a good amount of hours or at high enough stakes, the rake they miss out on is substantial enough to force them to extreme measures.  Many honest players that have held accounts on Full Tilt for years are forced  to choose between continuing to feed the affiliate black hole, breaking the rules by creating a new account, or leaving Full Tilt all together.  Many, many players are trying to negotiate this frustrating situation, and if you don’t believe me, just visit this thread on 2+2 on this topic.  As of now, it’s had over 64,000 views.

It doesn’t make sense for Full Tilt to prioritize relationships with affiliates over players.  Many of the posters on the thread mentioned above told Full Tilt that they would leave unless the terms of their affiliate deal were changed, and Full Tilt let those players walk out the door. The lack of options frustrate me as a player, and it would make me mad if I was an affiliate, since affiliates lose money when players stop playing.  No one wins when players are forced to leave a site, and I wish Full Tilt would correct the situation.

In the next post, I’ll talk about what players can do to protect themselves from an unsatisfactory affiliate deal.

This past weekend, I played twelve hours to cash for a whopping $150 profit in the Venetian PLO event, but it was worth it because I managed to figure a few things out.

1.  If the tournament is structured like a typical hold’em tourney or stacks aren’t deep enough (you should get substantially more starting chips in a PLO tournament than in a hold’em event) then you pretty much have to win your first pot to have a decent chance at going deep.

2. If you’ve got chips, calling raises from tight players is very profitable.  Any time during the early and middle stages of a tournament when you’ve got good position and you think someone is raising with a big pair, call them with a very wide range of hands, because they will inevitably overplay their hand.  You can knock them out with as little as two pair or float them on the flop and steal after they fire a second bullet on the turn.  People over play aces much more often in tournaments than they do in cash games.

If someone else has already called the raise, you should narrow your calling range substantially unless you have low cards, like 7654.  If there are one or more callers and you have a hand like this, go ahead and play the hand because you know a lot of the high cards are out already and are therefore less likely to flop.

3.  It’s okay to bet big wraps with position, but better to play them slow out of position.  I unfortunately built a couple of really big pots by leading out with 12-16 card draws from early position, only to have them not come in.  You can, and often should, weather this in a cash game, but in a tournament, where chip retention is just as important as stack building, it can be disastrous.

4.  Changing your style of play based on your table is even more important  than it is in hold’em tournaments.  The guys at my first table liked to see cheap flops, so I potted preflop any time there were three limpers ahead of me, and I won several hands without ever being contested.  Later, I had a much more aggressive table, so I waited for good hands and limp-reraised preflop (Rolf Slotboom style) more often instead. People seem to be less suspicious of late position raises in PLO tourneys than they are in hold’em events, so depending on your table, you might be able to take advantage of this as well.

I know none of this is earth shattering, but hopefully it will inspire someone out there who does know a thing or two about PLO tourneys to do some writing on the subject.

There is some hope for consistent action though.  Online, I found a few 2+2ers that are trying to get a smaller PLO game going at Oceans 11 on Friday nights.  This past week, they weren’t having luck filling a $2/$5 table, so they lowered the blinds to $2/$2, and we got a table going around 8:30.  It looks like we have enough regulars to get this game going every Friday, so if you’re jonesin’ for some PLO and find yourself in San Diego on a Friday night, come play!

Watch the 60 Minutes story Online

I thought they did a good job explaining what happened. It was interesting though to see the buildings where the servers are held and to here some of the players talk about what happened.The only thing I didn’t like was that they over simplified the legality of playing online

The first thing I noticed about the early coverage was that ESPN showed a disproportionate number of bad beats. Seeing so many people hit four-outers on the river and watching quad aces get beat by a royal flush (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kycdQnKPz0) was disheartening for me, even though I statistically understand how unlikely those things are to happen. The ESPN coverage of the WSOP is one of the only interactions the non-poker playing world has with our sport, and loading episodes with these types of hands could be a problem when we try to convince law makers to legalize poker, when we advocate for poker winnings to be taxed liked income instead of lottery winnings, and when we try to attract new players to the game. If people don’t believe that they can win more by reading and studying, there is less incentive for them keep playing.

A few thoughts about a few players…I am so tired of watching Phil Hellmuth. It is not fun or entertaining. I fast forward through almost every hand he’s in because almost all of them turn out the same way. He raises, then someone either reraises him, he folds, and whines, or someone calls him with a worse hand, out flops him, and he gripes. It’s boring and annoying to watch. One player I have enjoyed watching more than ever before was Mike Matasow. In life, I appreciate anyone that is sincere and willing to make themselves vulnerable. Any of us who plays seriously could empathize with the way he felt after getting knocked out. Watching his new grounded and comfortable style of play has helped me be more patient in my own game. Any Finally, did it bother anyone else Tiffany Michelle jumped for joy every time another woman got knocked out? Every time there’s just one or two women left in a tournament I’m playing in, I instinctually root for them because I want people to see what strong players women can be. I’ve made many friends this way, and I think most women, unless there has been a contentious hand or negative interaction, generally find kinship with one another. Plus, I think it’s in poor taste to single out any player and publicly root for them to lose, even if you’re privately wishing for that. You would think that someone who has been in front of the camera would understand this, but I guess not.

And a little about the play…It seems like smooth calling with a monster is extremely popular play this year. One of the main differences I notice between amateurs and professionals is the ability to properly size bets. As I’m getting towards the end, I notice mediocre players getting into huge pots with marginal hands and professionals picking off pots without risking their whole stack. I really like Dennis Phillip’s game. He’s unpredictable and stays under the radar, but I think my pick to win it all is Chino Rheem. Who do you like? What have you noticed during the coverage?

I haven’t gotten to play any cards here, but I have seen lots of gambling.  Some old guys in Malaysia were playing good ol’ three card Monte, a cool Indian guy I met plays gin in a private club on the beach in Varkala, and in other rural areas I have seen something that looks like craps, but that is played with rocks instead of dice. 

Anyway, I will be back to the USA at the end of September.  I have been playing cards and making art full time for the past two years, but as my husband is taking a new job that pays much less, I will be looking for more steady work.  Hopefully I will be able to make time to go up to Commerce everyonce in a while, get to know the card rooms in San Diego, and find a new home game.  I had such a  great home game in Chicago.  It is one of the things I am going to miss most.

I am a good-hearted person who plays poker, and I naively assume that people are the same way–generally good intentioned. For the most part, the individuals in the poker world that I have befriended are great, especially those I know from the Dallas and Chicago, the towns I’ve lived in, but it’s easy to forget that the poker world can be seedy.

The day I left Vegas, a friend of mine from Dallas pulled me aside and said, “You know that older lady who’s been playing a lot? Well, when you and I were at the same table last night she walked over to our table and started talking in Farsi to one of the other guys. I guess she assumed no one else could understand, but I could. She looked at you and said, ‘I hate that f$#*ing Bitch, she’s taken all my money, but I have to hand it to her, she’s a pretty good little Omaha player.”

Coming from this kind, motherly woman, who I had helped and talked with so much, and even began to play straightforwardly against, this really hurt. It made me regret that I let my guard down to the people I play cards with. I clearly liked this woman much more than she liked me, and in fact she did not like me at all. I felt duped, out played, and then I wondered if I should trust this other friend who just told me this story. After all, I met him on the circuit as well. I don’t need people at the table to like me, but it’s also always a little disconcerting when you realize that your sense of reality is not the actual reality.

Grocery stores make money by doing a similar thing.  They earn the majority of their profits by investing, not by simply selling goods for a higher price than they bought them for.   Here’s an example. A store gets an invoice for a flat of toilet paper on the day they received the shipment.  That invoice isn’t due for sixty days, but you or I buy a package of rolls when on the shelf, one or two days after the shipment arrived. The grocery store then invests the money they got from you and me for the 58 or so days between when they get our money and when they have to pay their bill. After 60 days, they pay their bill, and the profits they made in the interim just keep growing and growing.

The moral of this story is that there is a lot of money to be made off of other people’s money.  This makes me wonder who is making money off of the final table proceeds while it is just sitting there until November. At a very reasonable daily interest rate of 3%, the $23,626,746 that is waiting to be handed out, should reap a profit of $200,000 between July 15 and November 10.  That’s a lot of money, and if I was sitting at that final table, I’d want my interest.  By pushing the table back several months, Harrahs is costing the final table, as a group, all the interest they could be earning on the their money. And with some savvy investing, it could potentially costing them a lot more than $200,000.

And here’s another crazy idea…it seems like players should start pushing internet poker sites to keep our online funds in interest bearing accounts.  After all, our online accounts are little more than checking accounts that we make rapid withdrawals and deposits from.  I’m no genius, but I’m guessing that if every industry out there has figured out how to turn profits using idle customer money, that the poker sites have as well, and we should ask for our cut.

Here are some things I’ve noticed at the WSOP this year, mostly related to Omaha, since that’s the game I’ve been focusing on this year.

#1 Many hold’em players aren’t just bad Omaha players, they possess a magical ability to tilt good Omaha players during tournaments

In each Omaha tourney I’ve played, you could immediately tell the no limit players. They start trying to steal right off the bat, which is so stupid early in PLO tourneys for a couple of reasons. First, since it’s pot limit, you can rarely raise enough to make people fold, especially the blinds, since one hand is rarely less than a 2:1 dog against another preflop. Second, the pots are so big in PLO that you just need to win one or two every now and then to stay ahead of the blinds.

And before long, even the players who were clearly Omaha players start pushing preflop too. It’s peer pressure in action. I rarely make the first raise preflop for a few reasons, but even I was pushin’ my aces. It’s tough to constantly defend against hold’em blind stealers and to then switch gears, chill out, and play slow style Omaha.

The second tell-tell sign of a hold’em player is that they’ll play two pair all the way to the river like it was the stone cold nuts.  When you have a player like this at your table, you think you should call them down every time. But eventually they’ll pick up a monster, and you’ll be the one short stacked because you were just sure that your bottom set had to be good against this donkey.  Then, he’ll give all your chips away to tougher players at the table.

#2 The WSOP needs to have a lap-top friendly room where we can play online, check our email, etc.

I’m thinking rows of folding tables with power outlets and chairs.  Nothing too fancy.  All of us non-vips just need a place to chill out…and write poker blogs. I certainly wouldn’t have gone so long without writing if I had a comfy place to use my lap top at the Rio. And all the internet players need a place to play while waiting for their buddies without having to walk two miles back to the room.  This seems so obvious; maybe there is a place besides the hotel business center that I don’t know about.

#3 Vanessa Selbst is a pretty incredible player

I’ve had Men Nguyen and Greg Raymer on my left in two events this year. I played with Vanessa Rousso, Humberto, and so on, and none of them affected my play all that much. But Vanessa Selbst has been at my table twice, and she is intimidating. Period. She never lets up, and what makes her so freakin’ incredible is that she is highly skilled at making you do what she wants you to. Plus she is LUCKY. Put me up against a lucky nit any day, but a LAG that hits every 10 5 offsuit? Man, how do you beat that? She is a great, great player, and she is dominating the WSOP. I saw on deucescracked that she charges an exorbitant fee for coaching, but after playing with her and watching her PLO final table and her run in the heads up hold’em event, I’d venture to say that if she coaches as well as she plays she is worth every penny.