The Bat Cave

Play 3-5 WSOP events – Cash a WSOP event (continued)

Here is an excerpt from this section of my 2016 Goals post: “I feel like I’m on the brink of a life-changing cash and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if that happens in 2016.”

This is what can happen when you work hard and believe in yourself. You keep putting yourself in a position to succeed and things will go your way eventually. I truly believed that and I finally saw it come to fruition in 2016. While final tabling a WSOP event was kind of a surreal experience and I thought I would break out in smaller way first, I do feel like that kind of success was a long time coming. Granted, I got lucky a bunch to get to that spot, but that’s what you need to happen sometimes. I’ve been deep in plenty of big tournaments and found myself in a great position to chip up late – only to lose in brutal fashion and hit the rail instead, so it was a nice change of pace.

That brings me to the $235 Daily Deep Stack at The Rio. I didn’t even plan to play this tournament. It’s not an official WSOP event, but a tournament that runs daily at the Rio during the WSOP and attracts some massive fields. I was going to play cash games all day, but my buddy was playing this and I decided to tag along with him.

I can say quite honestly that I dominated this tournament from start to finish. There were obviously some stretches of time where I had to build back up or I had to get lucky, but all in all, I really felt like I was playing some of the best poker of my life.  And the biggest change that I felt I made was that I didn’t care at all. There were a number of spots where I trusted my gut and put all my chips at risk with what most people would consider a very marginal holding but I felt the situation warranted it – and I was always right. All my moves worked. I know there was a key hand late in the event where I won a big pot with AJ where I did not have the best hand, but other than that, I can’t remember getting super lucky any other time.

I was fresh off two WSOP cashes, including my best all time score, and I was feeling zero pressure, so when I got to the final table and people started talking about deals, I stayed quiet, hoping we could just play it out. Fortunately, one lady spoke up and said she never makes a deal and she made it to heads up with me, so I never actually had to state my own opinion on the matter. Obviously this woman played pretty well to make it that far, but I bulldozed her heads up and her only chance of beating me was to win multiple coolers – and I knew it. There was just no way I was going to lose. She let me minraise every hand, folded to all my c-bets when she missed, never fought back unless she had something, and never adjusted. It was a total layup. I had to do zero guessing. And she just let me bleed her stack all the way down to the point where an all in confrontation was inconsequential. And then I won it. Eleven days after my life-changing, all-time best score in WSOP Event #1, I topped it by outlasting 1156 entrants and winning the Rio Daily Deep Stack outright for over $36,000. This tournament started at 2 PM and ended at 5:30 AM and I have to say there was no better feeling than having my wife go to sleep knowing I was making a decent run and then waking up to news of me winning it. It was such a sick run and I really can’t describe how good it felt not only to win the whole thing,  but to know how much of an impact my success was going to have on our family. The heater was real… and I wasn’t even supposed to play this one!

My next WSOP event was also relatively unplanned. I had initially planned two separate trips to the WSOP, but I cancelled my flight home after my first big cash and decided to just stay in Vegas. The $1500 Limit Hold Em tournament was an event I added during my extended stay. I felt really good about this tournament because I spend all year playing limit hold em and I felt like my edge was probably at it’s biggest here. Even when I had famous pros at my table, it wasn’t the least bit intimidating because all they can do is bet and raise the fixed amounts. They can’t apply the kind of pressure they can in a no limit situation. Not only that, but I’m sure I have more (recent) experience at this variant than pretty much all the big names. Among the notables I butted heads with in this tournament were Chris Moorman, David Chiu, 2015 Card Player Player Of The Year Anthony Zinno, eventual bracelet winner of this event Danny Le, 2015 Main Event runner up Josh Beckley, and 2015 Main Event Champion Joe McKeehen.

I also had the pleasure of playing at the same table as Alex Keating, the dude with the mountain man beard that got a decent amount of exposure in the 2016 Main Event coverage. I hated him. He was way more playful in front of the ESPN cameras than he was at my table in this event, but even during that coverage you could get a glimpse of someone that was being confrontational and acting like it’s all one big joke. It was way less subdued at my table. I thought he was clearly mean-spirited and harsh, trying to get under everyone’s skin, all while breaking plenty of rules that no one cared to enforce. I’m sure it’s all part of his game and maybe he’s a decent guy in real life, but I show no love to anyone whose whole persona is built around being a dickhead at the poker table.

With that said, I thought Anthony Zinno was an incredibly genuine, humble and funny guy, all the more impressive for someone coming off such a massive year. He seemed like someone I would become quick friends with if we crossed paths on a regular basis. Same goes for 2012 Main Event runner up Jesse Sylvia, whom I played a bunch with in the $1500 H.O.R.S.E. event. He was clearly new to the limit mix games and it was pretty funny watching how geniune and forthcoming his confusion was – or he was going for the ultimate level… but I don’t think so. Joe McKeehan was actually pretty pleasant too. I didn’t even recognize him for the first several orbits I played with him (he had abandoned the shaggy look of his 2015 title run and was more clean shaven) and then I got in a hand with him and saw ‘The Stare’ and I was like “Oh shit! I’m playing with the champ!”

I made another day 2 in this one and this time it was Josh Beckley that decimated me with a hand that I had crushed. I opened TT under the gun and Beckley three bet me in late position. I just called and we went heads up to a jack high flop. I ended up calling him down when no further scare cards showed up, but he showed me a set of 7s that he made on the river. I could definitely play this hand faster and take control of the pot by being the aggressor, but in a tournament situation, especially out of position, I felt the need to conserve chips if I was behind; and honestly, on a jack high board, he wasn’t the kind of player that was going to fold to pressure anyway.  This hand basically crippled me and I soon found myself all in with 55 and outdrawn by Zinno’s AQ on another river. I did cash this event though, albeit for another small profit, but I was now three for four in WSOP events and my lone bust out was just shy of the money. I was feeling it.

My final WSOP event ended up being the $1500 Omaha 8 or Better tournament and this is the only event I played where I really never had any momentum. Interestingly enough, it was also the only event my wife played and she was sitting right behind me. Like literally in the chair across from me at the table behind me – in a tournament that probably had over 900 entrants. Kind of crazy. Nothing too notable about this one except that I played the duration with Connor Drinan, who has over $10M in lifetime cashes and is currently ranked #12 in the world on the GPI. He was… interesting. He spent the whole tournament wearing sunglasses, which is kind of weird for someone of his status in a limit tournament, and pounding beers two at a time. And he lost with far less grace than I was expecting. He didn’t strike me as an asshole like Alex Keating did, but… he definitely had an odd vibe about him. My wife outlasted me in this one, but also failed to cash and watching her bust out actually broke my heart a little as I thought it would have been incredible for her to make a deep run in her first WSOP event.

My WSOP was unofficially over (I ended up skipping the last event I had planned), but I did have an event I wanted to play at the Golden Nugget: their $240 8-Game Mix Tournament. This is an event that features a mix of limit hold em, limit omaha 8 or better, razz, stud hi, stud 8 or better, 2-7 triple draw, no limit hold em, and pot limit omaha. It attracted 119 entrants and, again, I relatively cruised to the final table of six.

My key hand at the final table came against a player I would later identify as Michael Trivett, a guy that has a live tournament resume that resembles my own, but I thought acted like a total asshat after this pot. We were in stud hi and I had buried aces with an 8 up first to act after the bring in. With a couple of higher door cards behind me I decided to limp in and disguise the strength of my hand, but everyone ended up folding anyway and I was heads up against Michael. I took the betting lead on fourth street and continued to fire unimproved on 5th street when Michael check-raised me showing three wheel cards. He could definitely have a straight here, but my hand was way too underrepped to considering folding, plus I had a three flush working. On 6th street I caught another flush card and he caught a high card to take the board lead and bet out again. I decided that raising 6th street was a reasonable play since he was unlikely to reraise a straight when I was repping a flush and I thought I had at least 7-9 outs to a flush (can’t remember if any flush cards were dead) and possibly up to 14 more outs to trips or better – and if I missed, I could just take the free showdown. 6th street went as planned and I caught two pair on 7th and decided to go for value. He paid me off and my hand was good – and he really kind of lost it. I mean it wasn’t a total meltdown, but he was cussing at me and saying things like “that’s what happens when you get too cute,” which is a bizarre thing to say to someone after losing a pot. I kept his weak range in the pot, took an aggressive line on 6th street, and then realized my perceived equity by getting there on 7th and took him to value town… and he cried about it like a baby. He started the table with the chip lead and had a really cocky holier-than-thou vibe going on, so I was pretty happy to see him fizzle out in 6th place after this pot. Obviously this hand helped catapult me to the final two and I really thought I was going to pull off another outright win, but after my opponent pulled even with me for a second time and offered a chop, I relented and split the remaining prize pool with him.

The Golden Nugget insisted on giving a coin to and taking a photo of “the winner,” so I ended up taking first place in the record books. It was a $5700 cash in a $240 buy in, which kind of pales in comparison to my other two big wins, but would have been my career best score a mere 17 days earlier.

Obviously, it was an incredible trip for me – nothing short of magical really. It seriously changed our lives. I paid off a student loan, we bought a house, and I quit my job in October to pursue a full-time career in poker, which has always been my end goal.

While I’m still talking about tournaments it’s worth noting how these things go in streaks. I followed up my amazing WSOP run by going 0 for 13 in major tournaments for the rest of the year, including an absolutely horrifying showing during Jason Somerville’s Run It Up Reno series. I was going to blog about that experience, but I’ll just sum up by saying it was my all-time worst poker trip, financially, and while I obviously wasn’t running well, I can’t honestly say that I felt like I was playing my best either.

I have never had a losing year of tournament poker, but 2016 was my true breakout. I played 34 events with an average buy in of $494, I cashed 10 times (29% in the money), final tabled four times (including a WSOP event and a WSOPc event) taking 5th, 3rd, 1st, and 1st – and finished the year with a ridiculous and totally unsustainable 463% ROI.

Online, during my training sessions, I have played 130 tournaments, cashed 24 times (18%), final tables 14 times (10.7%) and took first 4 times for an ROI of 45%.

Read through Jared Tendler’s The Mental Game Of Poker vols. 1 & 2 and do ALL the work

This was the goal I did the worst at. While I still believe that the mental game is one of my biggest edges, I did very little to improve that muscle in 2016. It’s easy to get complacent when things are going really well, but I felt that lack of improvement when I was in Reno getting crushed and again in December when I had another rough patch. I can’t deny that it took me by surprise and I wasn’t proud of how it handled it mentally. With poker being my job now, there is no excuse for not making this a priority in 2017 to help better prepare for the inevitable bad stretches.

Maintain a 1.25 BB/HR win rate at the $8-$16 level

I spent most of 2015 hovering over 2 BB/HR, but finished at 1.12 after a terrible last three months, so I thought it was likely I could improve on that number in 2016 and I did, finishing at 1.8 BB/HR for the year over nearly 900 hours in what has been my main game the last two years. Between 2015 and 2016, I have now posted a 1.43 BB/HR win rate over 1653 hours.

After playing 0 hours of $20/$40 in 2015, I did play a decent amount in 2016 thanks to Fortune opening in Renton and the bankroll boost I got during the WSOP. In the past, I have found that I struggle in new places as I adjust to new players and learn how they play, but I still managed to post a 0.52 BB/HR win rate over 158 hours of $20/$40 against mostly new faces, which I’m not too unhappy about. I had two horrible sessions in Reno in what I felt was the softest $20/$40 game I’ve ever played in and I have a long history of winning at limit hold em, so I suspect my current win rate is a product of less than ideal run good in a short sample size.

Top 5 $8/$16 Sessions:
1. +$2377 on MY BIRTHDAY @ Palace – includes $130 for HH, $220 for straight flush, $1042 for another straight flush – CRAZY
2. +$1754 @ Palace – $250 for quads
3. +$1722 @ Palace – no bonuses
4. +$1563 @ Palace – no bonuses
5. +$1451 @ Palace – no bonuses
6. +$1250 @ Palace – no bonuses

Worst 5 $8/$16 Sessions:
1. -$1259 @ Palace
2. -$992 @ Palace
3. -$915 @ Palace
4. -$866 @ Palace
5. -$856 @ Palace

Top 5 non-$8/$16 Sessions:
1. +$4245 in $30/$60 with a $50/$100 kill @ Ameristar in Colorado
2. +$3275 in $20/$40 @ Fortune
3. +$3067 in $20/$40 @ Fortune
4. +$1525 in $20/$40 @ Fortune
5. +$1500 in $10/$20 O8 @ Clearwater

Worst 5 non-$8/$16 Sessions:
1. -$2300 in $20/$40 @ Fortune
2. -$2123 in $20/$40 @ Peppermill in Reno
3. -$1157 in $20/$40 @ Fortune
4. -$1027 in $15/$30 O8 @ Fortune
5. -$946 in $10/$20 O8 @ Clearwater

Reach a $30,000 bankroll

Even after buying a house and clearing some debt, I have quite easily annihilated this goal.

All in all, 2016 was nothing short of an amazing year. The run I went on from June 1st to August 7th is truly mind-blowing. Obviously June was the massive game-changer, but I followed that up with the best cash game month of my career in July, which was capped by the mammoth session on my birthday, and then my first session in August at Ameristar was my biggest net win in a cash game of all-time. So for those two months it really felt like I was on Cloud 9. My only losing months were in April and again in October (thanks to the Reno disaster).

That wraps up my 2016 and all the goals I set for myself. I will be thinking about what I want to accomplish this year over the next few days and I will have a post up with my goals for 2017 within the next week.

Thanks for all your love and support – I really felt it when I was down in Vegas and it was greatly appreciated!

I just read my 2015 Wrap Up again and there were a lot of positives in there. Notably, how beneficial our move to Tacoma was, how I felt about my new job, our new car, and just how it was the best year of my life in general. Well, somehow, my 2016 topped my 2015. By a lot. I have talked about my WSOP final table already in this blog post and that was one of the massive life-changing events that happened this year, but it was just the first of many huge positives last year.

In that 2015 post, I mentioned that the only negative still hanging over my head from my past mistakes was a $20,000+ medical debt for an appendectomy I had done in 2008 and have been running away from ever since. For years, I haven’t been able to use a bank account because the collection company had a lien on my account and were allowed to take whatever balance I had in my bank whenever a judge approved it, which seemed to be every few months or so. They got me pretty decent the first time, but I learned quick, and never kept any of my money in the bank. I would just deposit cash when I needed to pay a bill and then pay it online while I was still standing in front of the ATM. So they’d get like $3-$5 every few months, but every time they got a judgement on me they would add hundreds of dollars to my balance in administrative and lawyer fees.

It was just a huge, dark cloud hanging over my head that I had no idea how I was going to get rid of – but I certainly didn’t plan on paying it. I spoke to a bankruptcy lawyer about this debt, but I was informed that I could not file a Chapter 7 (that would wipe it out entirely for a small fee) but that I would have to file Chapter 13, which basically still required me to pay the amount in full over time via garnishments from my paychecks. Uh… no thanks.

I had made the decision that I was going to have to quit my job so that I could qualify for a Chapter 7 when my wife spoke to one of the local poker players who was a retired lawyer and he offered to help us with the situation. He advised me to go to the court where my case file was and have a look. He wanted me to find something specific, but as I was looking through the file I found approval for garnishments for my income at Silver City Restaurant and All Star Lanes – my two previous jobs. I had no idea they were after my wages. I had quit both those jobs just a few months before they were about to start garnishing me. They had been after my wages since late 2011 and as of spring 2016 they still hadn’t caught up to me. But it was only a matter of time.

However, I found the document the laywer/player told me to look at (I forget the official title) but I discovered exactly what I needed to. They tried to serve me papers at my parents’ house, but never actually handed the documents to me. My dad refused to take them, so they just dropped them in the driveway. After doing some research, and with the help of a previous landlord, it was discovered that the date they served me the papers I had already established residency somewhere else… and just like that, I had a case – and someone to present it for me.

It was really that easy. My lawyer contacted the collection agency, sent over documents my former landlord provided and BOOM! Case dismissed. Not only did I get that entire debt erased, but I was refunded all the money they took from me over the years too. I’ll get to all the awesome poker stuff in a minute, but in a lot of ways, this was the best thing that happened to me in 2016. I mean, what a relief. I didn’t have to quit my job. I didn’t have to file bankruptcy. I didn’t have to pay back over $20,000. It was totally unbelievable. I can’t thank the lawyer who helped me enough. He probably has no idea how much pressure he has taken off our shoulders. Even though I didn’t feel the affect of this debt on a day-to-day basis, it still loomed over me like a dark cloud and it was eventually going to affect my life in a very bad way if something didn’t happen. Much like driving a car without a breathalyzer for the first time in five years in 2015, it was strange to have full use of a bank account again in 2016 with no worries that the money in it might be snatched up at any time.

I don’t want to give off the impression that I was in the right here. I originally had this medical bill cut in half and I was on a payment plan that allowed me to pay $30 a month, interest free, for basically eternity. It was a pretty fair and awesome arrangement, all things considered. I could have followed that process and paid it off in a few decades and everything would have been fine and it would have been at little cost to me financially in the short term. But I was stubborn and I just thought it was wildly unfair that I had to pay such an enormous fee for a medical procedure that I had to get or I would probably die. Pay $20k or die. Whatever happened to saving people’s lives without raping them at the same time? Anyways, my rebellion against The System was immature and not very well thought out. It made my life inconvenient for years and was very close to being devastating. I ended up getting the best of it in the end, but only because I got lucky – and I’m not really proud of it. Certainly it would have been plenty easy to just pay the $30 a month.

Still, I’m not sad about it either!

Now on to the poker. Let’s take a look at the goals I set for 2016 and how well I did at achieving them.

play 1250 hours

I knew this was a pretty soft goal when I set it, so it’s not too surprising that I smashed it with 1591.5 total hours in live games this year. Interestingly, my volume from January to April – when I was still working my day job – was 142 hours per month and my volume from October to December – when I’ve been playing full time – has dropped to 132 hours per month. I do think there is a reasonable explanation for this, but I’ll get to that next. I played my most hours (185) in June when I was at the WSOP and I played my least amount of hours (101) in August when I went on a road trip with my wife that only included one poker day.

Do the Advanced Poker Training weekly challenge every week and spend at least an hour a week playing hands on APT

Unfortunately, I have been a bit disappointed with this training site. I bought a lifelong membership because the price seemed too good to pass up, but I have found the AI on the site to be unbelievably bad at times. I don’t want to get into all the details of what feels wrong about it, but I’ll just say I don’t feel like the site does a great job of simulating actual poker games. I still find use for the site though and the weekly hand challenges are still on my to do list every week, although I probably played less than half of them all year. On the bright side APT has forever to improve things – my membership never expires! I can’t help but feel any number of training sites would have been a better investment. Any site that offers a plethora of video instruction is more constructive by default.

I feel good about my lack of participation here for one reason only. I have decided to treat Ignition Poker like an online poker training site. I feel like if CardPlayer can advertise for them in their magazine then I can talk freely about playing on the site. I mean, it’s just for play money anyway, right? Right?! Well, after having a sizable amount of money locked up on Full Tilt for years following the Black Friday fiasco, I don’t trust the procedure enough to try to make real money at my normal stakes, so the goal is to sharpen my skills playing micro stakes at things I don’t get to play as often; like tournaments, pot limit Omaha, no limit hold em, etc. So the reason I feel okay about my slight volume dip in the last three months of 2016 is because I’ve put in over 300 “training” hours online during that time. That number isn’t as massive as it sounds though, as I almost always play at least two tables at a time and when I’m playing tournaments, I frequently register for as many as six at a time. So I would guess that the actual number of hours I’ve played online is significantly less than half of 300.

Obviously I have found playing against real people for “real” money to be far more rewarding than the simulated stuff on APT and it has really helped keep my tournament game sharp, in particular. Normally, I only play tournaments when a series comes up, which averages out to about two a month for the year, but online I’ve had numerous nights where I’ve played 15-20 tournaments in one sitting.

Play 150 hours of Omaha 8 or better and maintain a 1 BB/HR win rate

I came up short here, on both portions of the goal. I only played 110 hours and I ran at -0.61 BB/HR overall. Obviously, I’m not going to draw any conclusions from a 110 hour sample size, as it means very little in the grand scheme of things. I did fine in $15/$30 and $10/$20 games but I got crushed at $8/$16. I lost almost $1500 in 35 hours in the $8/$16 O8 @ The Orleans in Vegas which is kind of absurd. For whatever reason, I was not allowed to turn over a winner at showdown in that casino. I also played in the $1500 O8 event at the WSOP and whiffed it, so Omaha was definitely not a profitable venture for me in 2016.

In addition to the previous stats, I also played 35.5 hours of O8 online and ran at -0.49 BB/HR while turning a profit – which means I did well in the big games and bad in the small ones. I played three O8 tourneys online, cashing one of them, which actually happened to be a first place finish.

Between tournaments and cash games online, I played about 25 hours of PLO or PLO8 and lost a little bit of money, even though I finished with a positive win rate in the cash games.

There is obviously plenty of room for improvement in my Omaha game. I can play a fine ABC game, which should actually make money in the long run, but my hand-reading skills and ability to figure out how to exploit opponents seem minimal.

Play 100 hours of no limit cash games

I played seven hours in live no limit cash games over four separate sessions, which means I went to the casino for the sole reason of playing NLHE exactly zero times in 2016. I managed to win about $1000 over these four sessions, which is pretty remarkable considering I only played in $1/$2 games last year – the final win rate comes out to over 138 big blinds an hour! I stopped in Harrahs during the wee hours of the morning on my way back from my real session to donk around a bit before going to bed a couple of times and I was playing a hyper-aggressive game and decided that I couldn’t fold the AQ suited preflop considering my image and wound up getting 150 big blinds in against pocket aces. I did not lose that hand. These are the kinds of things that can happen in the short run that can skew a player’s interpretation of their results. I did not crush the NLHE games in my incredibly small sample size… I got stupid lucky in one big pot and it made up a significant portion of my NLHE profit for the year.

I’m not upset about missing out on my goal here. At the end of the day, becoming an expert NLHE cash game player just doesn’t make a ton of sense for me. With 20/40 limit hold em regularly available every day of the week relatively nearby there’s just no need for me to make the transition in Washington state and even when I’m in Vegas I can find big games that are better tailored to my expertise. I might go back to playing at Muckleshoot on Super Sundays, but other than that, I don’t feel compelled to start playing more live NLHE.

With that said, this is one of the skills I don’t mind developing slowly at micro stakes online. I played roughly 18.5 hours the last few months and lost about 44 big blinds an hour. Obviously, both the samples I just presented are incredibly small, but I don’t doubt that my NLHE cash game ability needs a lot of work.

Play 3-5 WSOP events – Cash a WSOP event

I actually ended up playing in five total events. I have already written a long blog post about my final table run and third place finish in WSOP Event #1 – and you can watch the whole final table on YouTube by starting here: WSOP Event #1 (Part 1). So obviously a great start to my WSOP that helped me achieve a ton of my goals for the year.

Next up was the Colossus, which I managed to hang around in until the money. I think they had four different day 1 flights and each flight paid 15% of the field. I don’t remember too much about this event now except that my initial table draw was far more favorable than it was in 2015, which had multiple notable pros at it. I also remember moving tables after cashing and being incredibly impressed with everything about Taylor Paur’s game. This guy is one of the best tournament players in the world right now. He currently ranks #63 on the Global Poker Index and has over $4 million in lifetime cashes. He’s in the top 30 on California’s all-time money list, which is pretty impressive considering almost all of his volume has come since 2011. Anyways, his whole demeanor at the table was on point. He played a ton of hands and was plenty intimidating, but he was also quite friendly when people made conversation with him. He was basically a total beast.

As is usually the case when I play with a high level pro, I lost a very big, key pot to Taylor… when I had him crushed. I was relatively short when I first moved tables, but found myself doubled up back into a playable stack pretty quickly. Taylor opened in front of me and I decided to flat call with AQ because I realized that if Taylor four bet me I was just never going to fold the hand and I felt I was too deep to put all my chips in preflop. The flop came down A9x with two clubs on board and Taylor made a standard continuation bet. I just called because that’s a huge flop for me – it’s super dry and I’m in position against someone I view to be overly aggressive. I wanted him to keep putting chips in the pot. The turn card brought the 9 of clubs and he bet again. I had the Q of clubs in my hand and called again. The river bricked off and he fired a bet that was probably in the 60-75% pot range. I thought for about zero seconds and called and he showed me Q9 for trips. I was back to a short stack after that and I didn’t last much longer. I have to say I’m not super happy about that hand. I like my postflop plan: I flopped huge and let my opponent barrel into me on all three streets and I was never planning to fold. Obviously I got super unlucky; first that he caught his two outer on the turn, and second that I missed my 11 out redraw on the river. What I don’t like about the hand is my preflop thinking. I knew Taylor was opening way too many hands and AQ should be punishing that range. It’s too good to flat with in this situation. I was too deep to want to get stacks in preflop – which very well might have happened if he four bet – but that’s no excuse for not making the right play and if he did four bet me, well, time to gamble. Still, I locked up my second consecutive WSOP cash in this event, albeit a pretty small one.

My next event was the $1500 H.O.R.S.E. and my starting table featured the likes of Karina Jett ($500k in tournament cashes), Carol Fuchs ($316k), Ryan Tepen ($943k), and Shannon Shorr ($6.13M). I can’t really remember any interesting hands as it has been nearly half a year since I played this event, but I spent a good portion of the latter part of day 1 playing at Norman Chad’s table and I have to say the experience wasn’t as fun as you might think it would be. This is a guy that clearly turns it “on” for the cameras. He was friendly enough, but I saw basically zero of the personality he has during his ESPN commentaries. Amy Schumer mentions in her recent book The Girl With The Lower Back Tattoo that she is an introvert, which is surprising given her chosen profession as a stand up comedian, and my take was that Norman Chad is the same way – a dude that seems like a total extrovert but that would probably just rather be left alone when he’s in public. No judgement here: I’m the same way. On the other hand, Carol Fuchs and Karina Jett were both super nice.

I finished day 1 with a sizable stack, thinking that I was almost certain to cash and that I was in a great position to make another final table run. Carol Fuchs even went out of her way to tell me how well she thought I played, which was a pretty cool compliment. I can’t recall exactly, but I believe I started day 2 in the top 20-30% of all chip stacks. I met Ian Johns, a pro from Washington state that specializes in limit hold em, at my new table and he started the day with less than 2000 in chips, which was one or two big bets at the time, I think – he was in what poker people like to call “the dead zone.” Well, he won the first pot he played, more than doubling up, and eventually built up a stack that would take him to the final table and ultimately win him the bracelet in this event. It was a super impressive run and yet another story of why you should never give up in a tournament, no matter how grim things look at the moment. Ian would also go on to win the $10k limit hold em bracelet to cap off a huge summer. Meeting Ian Johns actually changed my whole perspective on what I want my career to look like. He has proven that you can succeed on an every day basis and at the WSOP even if you primarily focus only on games that have a fixed structure, which is definitely my specialty.

Unlike Ian, things didn’t go my way on day 2 and I never picked up any momentum. Still, I had a decent stack when this very key pot came up with around 125 players left. We were less than ten spots off the money when a player with a 7 up in stud high completed the bet in front of me. I started with a T up and AK in the hole, so I was very happy to reraise and get heads up against someone that likely had split 7s. I caught a Q, an 8, and a blank to complete my open board and continued to fire as my opponent’s board also bricked out. On 7th street, I caught bad again and finished with Ace high but since my opponent had played his hand like he hadn’t improved, I just had to fire one last bullet and hope he would lay down his pair. He did not. He called me all the way down unimproved and I was left decimated. I busted shortly after that, 7 spots shy of my third consecutive WSOP cash. I was pretty mad at myself for punting my whole stack so close to the money bubble, but in retrospect, I think I played the hand fine. I had five overs to my opponent’s pair, plus a gutshot to Broadway, on 5th street and I really feel keeping the pressure on was the correct play. On 7th street, my bluff doesn’t have to succeed very often to be profitable and I obviously found myself in a position where I had to bet to win. Still, it was quite the eye opener coming off multiple days of having things really go my way. I never even considered the possibility that I wouldn’t cash this event until I lost this pot. It was a good reminder to stay grounded and not get ahead of myself.

I feel like this post is getting really long winded and I’m not even close to being done, so I’m going to go ahead and publish this as part one and I will have part two up tonight or Thursday.