borgata recap (bloody aftermath)

i arrived back in new york wednesday after 16 straight nights in atlantic city staying at the borgata. i wasn't particularly diligent in staying current with the blog during my trip, so i'm going to try to provide a recap of the second half of the trip based on my own shoddy memory.

lets just say the tournament series did not go exactly as i had envisioned. i think the last event i wrote about was on the 350 on monday 1/19. well that night ronNasty and i went to borgata's finest nightclub, mur mur. our friend kyle b. had final tabled the 1k the night before and got bottle service at some tables right on the dancefloor to celebrate. bottle service is essentially the kiss of death for muggins here. all of my roughest drinking nights take place when hard alcohol is prominently involved, and most of the sloppiest nights in recent memory have taken place at the club when we get bottle service. its a combination of pouring myself stronger drinks than a barkeep would, and the fact that drinking slowly might result in other member's of the party killing the bottle before i've had my fill. it turns into a sort of race in my twisted alcohol addled brain. well on this night, we ended up getting 5+ bottles so I was a puddle of a human being by 1 or 2am. i ripped the sleeve of one of my top cowboy shirts clear as a result of some furious dance moves. i ended up waking up the next morning back in my room, still wearing said ripped shirt but without pants. that may be my new look... sparkly cowboy shirt with one sleeve paired with boxer briefs and argyle socks.

Needless to say I wasn't in tip-top shape the next day, so i elected not to play day 1a of the 560 deepstack. i mostly laid around and tried to comfort my ailing organs. years of reckless booze guzzling are finally starting to manifest themselves in the form of some kidney issues, and this was never more clear than on this particular day. that night i dragged myself to tournament room where i played a 280 sng with RonNasty and some of the boys, and ronnie and i ended up chopping it so i turned a little profit on the day.

that night i was still so hungover that i slept very little and arrived the next day for the 560 deepstack in the 4th level. for several levels i hovered around the 30k starting stack, but then when i got back from dinner i ended up check raising half my stack with a6c on a j33cc board in a limped pot as a semibluff of sorts. i was trying to represent the 3 in a hand i was going with regardless. that didn't work out terribly well as charlie marchese, who had been playing virgin tight all day, decided to limp the button with the k3dd. i missed, and that tourney was a wrap.

the next day was the 2k event. i think there were about 230 players in this tourney and you started with 15k stacks. this was the first tourney of the series where there was a noticeably higher concentration of pros in the field. many top players traveled to ac to play only this event and the 3k main event. my table was kinda tough, as there were about 4 solid internet pros who 3-bet pretty liberally. the kid to my direct right won a 50k pot right at the beginning of level 2 in pretty absurd fashion. 6 people saw A85 rainbow flop in limped pot. the 2nd limper bet about 400 into 600 and was called in 4 spots, including both blinds. turn was 2s putting two spades on board. it was checked to flop better who bet approx 1600, was flatted by button, and then sb to my right check raised to about 5500. first better shoved, button called all in, and sb called. all three players had 34 suited, but the sb had 34ss and hit the freeroll spade on the river to scoop it. he was a solid aggressive player and i was pretty handcuffed with him remaining active on my right with a monster barrell of biscuits.

i hit one huge hand but was unable to extract max value. i limped 88 at 75-150, and one of the internet ninjas raised to 650. kyle burnside flatted from the blinds and i called as well. the flop was decent: 855 with 2 hearts. kyle checked. i considered leading at this flop but knew i would feel pretty stupid if i got no action with my monster, so i elected to check. the pf raiser bet 1500, and kyle quickly checked raised to 4200. i thought there was a pretty decent chance that kyle had a 5 in his hand, but again raising here would look so strong that i might kill any further action. i only would have about 7500 behind after i called the 4200. if the opponents in the hand were graduates of clown college, i am flatting all day long and trying to give them rope to go all the way with the hand. however, i had two sophisticated players to deal with. if i shove, i am getting kyle to stack off if he holds A5. However, if neither player has a 5 i think the hand ends there. so i ended up flatting although the play is pretty transparent and still stinks of strength. the preflop raiser folded. the turn came a 9 and went chk chk. the river came an offsuit 10 and kyle checked, and i sloppily shoved. he showed me 52 and said "i can't beat anything" as his cards floated into the muck. if the player wasn't kyle (who was pretty generous picking up the entire bill at mur mur just nights earlier), i might have tossed out a little value bet of 3 or 4k. stupid conscience! not sure it would have made much difference one way or the other. in retrospect leading the flop gives me best chance of scooping stacks, but i say fuck you hindsight.

i got my stack as high as 23k, but was sitting on about 17k when the fateful hand occurred. during the last hand of the 200-400 50ante level, i raised 22 in the hijack to 1100. a good young internet player flatted on the button, and al riccobono called out of the big blind. the flop came j92 with the 92 of diamonds. al checked, i bet 2400, the button folded and al check raised to 6k. i tanked for about 30 seconds and then shoved for about 10k more. al called with the j8dd for top pair and a flush draw. the turn came the queen of diamonds, i failed to resuck, and that was all she wrote. its pretty frustrating when you haven't flopped a set in weeks, and then you finally flop one, get action, have the best hand, and still lose. not that al did anything wrong- i get my biscotti in with his hand too. congrats to al... he cashed in that event and also had a deep cash in the main event. he's a good guy and is putting up some consistent results.

that night i played a $300 +40 survivor tournament, which is structured like a mega satellite, but 1 in 10 players wins $3000 cash rather than a tournament seat. i hung around for the early levels and then had excellent timing in getting my money in the middle in 2 really bad spots and still managing to win. in the first hand, i had approximately 10 big blinds and was in the big blind. my good friend steve ryan open-shoved the button and i decided to call off with kq offsuit even though steve is an uber-nit. steve had aq, but i flopped a buckaroo no problem. a few hours later, when we were probably 20 spots from the money, i had blinded myself all the way down to about 5bbs. this guy open shoved his 10-15 bb stack and i again had kq offsuit in the bb and called off my little baby stack. this time the guy had kk so i wasn't in particularly good shape. the flop was j45 and i was headed for the exit. the queen turn , and queen river kept me in my chair however. i went on a sick rush a little later and was able to coast to the end and ship the 3k. it sucks that i can't run like god himself in a bigger event, but it was nice to run hot for a change and get off the schneid somewhat.

over the next few days, i airballed a few $700 1 in 5 sattelites to the main event, but made some money playing sngs. i was planning on playing Day 1A of the main event, but ended up out at the Bbar for "one drink" the night before. one drink clearly turned into a bunch, especially when Brady and John Racener rolled in at 3 or 4am and started buying bottles of Dom and rounds of shots. in a rare moment of clarity i went back up to the registration desk and switched from 1A to 1B. so i slept in on sunday and was bright eyed, bushy tailed, and felt like i had a little extra lead in my pencil for the main event on monday. i had a weird feeling this would be a big tournament for me. that feeling was not even remotely accurate.

you started the event with 50k chips and the structure was nice and slow with 75 minute levels. i figured with all those biscuits and my patient playing style, i would be a lock to make day 2. ummm... yeah. not so much. i experienced one of the most frustrating, torturous days in my poker career. i had a bunch of premium starting hands, but got outflopped left and right. every time i tried to make a play at a pot, i was unsuccessful. i played pretty poorly overall, and was definitely way too passive in some crucial pots. i bled all the way down to 20k in the 4th level of the day. but then i doubled back up to 42k and it seemed like i had stopped the bleeding and might be able to make a run in the tourney. but by the end of level 5 i was back to 20k and hating life. i busted at the beginning of level 8. i won't bore anyone with hand details as they aren't really that interesting. just trust me when i say that it was a rough day. mcgruff the crimedog rough. its kind of sad, but i was almost a little relieved when i finally busted because i was getting abused so badly. you can only get taken behind the woodshed so many times before it starts to get a little old.

i was hoping to split town the next day. i was going to take a quick stroll through the tournament room to say some goodbye and then hit the bricks. however, the final event, a $350+50 one-day event was starting right at the minute i entered the room. for some stupid reason i decided to play it. even though i had been a resident of the borgata for 15 nights and had been ritually sodimized by the poker gods for the duration of the trip, i was somehow not all pokered out. i played most of the day and then busted a few levels short of the money. my bust-out hand put a fitting exclamation point on a miserable trip. i reshipped about 15bbs over a cagey little russian guys open raise. i had 1010 and he had aq. k10x flop. jack turn. goodbye borgatcha. good fucking riddance.

the next morning i was back on the bus to the big apple. the weather was some of the shittiest in recent memory-- wet, cold, sloppy bullshit. as i got resettled in my cave like apartment, i tried to reflect on what, if anything, i had learned on my trip. i guess three things stand out in my mind.

1) its not too often in live tournaments that you can accumulate massive biscuits in the early going. in the first $560 event, i did just that but was drinking throughout the day and eventually just could not hold it together. I made some mistakes on the way to busting out short of the money. i am an absolute idiot for drinking during an event, and realize that i really have to try to play my absolute A game the next time i pick up a huge stack, because the opportunity to play big stack poker doesn't come along every day. i never had lots of chips again
during this series, and i deeply regret blowing the opportunity in that event.

2) the feelings of apathy and isolation that come along with living in casinos were never more clear than on this trip. when the commercial airliner made the emergency landing in the hudson river a few weeks ago, it seemed so surreal and distant watching the live coverage on the big screen in the tournament room. this was a major event that happened in the very city that i live in, but it seemed more like a fictional event in some fantasy parallel universe. barrack obama was also inaugarated during this trip. i am a huge supporter and was pretty pumped to watch the festivities and his inaugaration speech but instead got blackout drunk the night before and slept through the speech. USA! USA! USA!

3) i can not continue to drink the way i have the last several years. it is finally catching up with me and manifesting itself in the form of various health problems. living in a casino is basically equivalent to living in a 24-hour bar, and i have definitely been drinking as if last-call is right arond the corner.

headed to foxwoods tomorrow for 2K megastack event. i will be in CT for a week or so for this event and the mohegan sun winter series. hopefully muggo can emerge victorious this trip.

whoregata: first tiny taste of success, lots more failure

today is day 7 of the borgata winter open. so far i've put together a tasty pile of biscuits in two tournaments, but managed to hold a free biscuit giveaway and finish outside the money. i've played pretty well in the other events but had very little go my way.

joe slutler and i met a few heads at the bbar for some sodas around 11 last nite. i was a handful of drinks deep when the amazing RonNasty arrived in AC and met us at the bar. after having a few more cocktails, we decided to go play at $250+30 sit-n-go up in the tourney room. ronnie, steve karp, alex and a few other clowns that play decently were all in the same sng. we had an 8-way hundo last-longer going as well. it probably was pretty poor game selection considering the majority of players in the 250 sngs are major-league monkeys. however, i played and ran well and was able to ship the 1500 for first place and the 8 last longer with no chop. its not much, but it gets me slightly less stuck for the trip. not to mention that winning for the first time in a while is a serious boost to the psyche.

i got to the tourney room about 20 minutes late in today's 350+50. i sat down in the big blind as the cards were being dealt, and looked down at dem birds (AA). a circus clown managed to generously double me up by shoving over my flop check raise with 99 on a 1065 board. so things started well, and i had a good feeling that i was going to make a run. alas, it twas not to be. i lost the majority of my chips in the following hand:

i had about 8500 chips halfway thru the 150-300 level. i limped utg+1 with 910c. another player limped behind me and then a terrible, overaggressive middleaged guy raised to 900 from the bb. both of us called and we saw the flop. the flop game 1075 all spades. the flop was checked through. the turn came an offsuit 8, so i had top pair and was open ended. the first guy checked, and the second guy shoved his stack of 5400 before i acted. when i alerted the dealer that i had yet to act, i watched the shovers reaction and he clearly didn't love his hand. so i checked and let the shove stand. the pf raiser folded, and i decided to go with my read and call of the majority of my stack. my read was spot-on, as he he showed 67 of hearts for a smaller pair and open-ended. the dealer flipped another 7 on the river and pushed the pot to clownshoes.

i doubled up twice after that dirrrty hand but eventually when i had 14 bbs, shoved 77 over a monkey's pf open and was shown 1010 and then shown the door. oh well. i think i am playing the 5hundo deep stack tomorrow, although i may just grind sngs and cash the next several days and then play the 2k on thursday. we shall see.

one other thing. i just made the most marvelous new friend. his name is werewolf and he is just delightful. his picture is up at the top of post. currently, werewolf and i are in negotiations to have live-lookins at the werewolf webcam on this very blog. muggins is stoked!

blorgata, cuse on the loose

so i hopped in the benzo and cruised down to AC for the start of the borgata winter open. and by benzo, i mean greyhound bus. the bus was thug and pungent body odor-free for a nice change of pace, and i slept most of the ride down. i've been battling a cold for the last 4 or 5 days and i retired to my room shortly after checking in. i was in bed by 130 am, but i lay restless until about 5 or 6 from the nervous energy i usually feel at the start of a tournament series. i was playing the best live tournament poker of my life before the holidays and was anxious to get back into action.

event #1 started today. it was a $350+50 buyin deepstack event with 2 Day 1's to choose from. i played day 1A today, but because I had such trouble falling asleep last night i slept in an extra hour or so and didn't make it to the tourney room until the start of the third level. no worries though-- they gave you 25k starting stacks and i still had over 24k when i arrived. the first two levels i played (3+4) were pretty uneventful and i hovered around 30k biscuits. the next 6 levels went well and i chipped up to 84k at the dinner break. my key hand came when i flopped a set 0f 7s on a j72 rainbow board in a 4way limped pot at 500-1k blinds. the turn came a 4 completing the rainbow, and the sb led 3k, the bb raised to 7500, and i was sitting on 39k. i didn't see any good reason to raise at this point, so i just flatted. the other limper and sb folded, and the river came another j-igolo. homeboy led 7500 (verbalizing "same bet", which is almost always weakness). i tanked for a mintue and made it 20k, and he shipped on me with the old j8, so i got effectively a full double thanks to the passive line i took in the hand.

my biscuits got as high as 135k... but then dwindled in the last few levels of the night. i was sitting on 94k stack when the i decided to cut the little fellas loose. i was in the sb at 1500-3k. massive table chip leader limped utg, utg+1 limped, 2 limped from mid position and i completed from the sb with J2hh. bb knuckled, and the flop rolled off 822 with two diamonds. it was checked to the first mid position limper, who led 11k into 21k pot. next guy in, who i have some history with and is generally a pretty poor, predicitable player, minraises to 22k. i certainly didn't love my spot. flat-calling was clearly not an option with a 50k plus pot and a flush draw present. the minraiser could certainly have had a2... but something was telling me 8's full. whatever... i'm not a good enough player to lay this hand down in a $350 tourney with a lot of play before we even reached the bubble. so i shipped the biscotti. the flop better folded and the raiser called and showed me the dreaded 8's full. oh well... got coolered somewhat but was very happy with my play throughout the day.

no tourney tomorrow... i'll just play a satellite for the 3k main event as well as some sngs and/or cash. i'm hungry as a hippo for action and still have a good feeling that i'm gonna pop something big this trip.


anyway...

this past saturday, my pop (thos-dog) and i went to the syracuse-rutgers bball game at the RAC in new brunswick. i went to undergrad at cuse and am a huge cuse bball fan. cuse struggled a bit in the first half and went to halftime down 1, but then put it together in the 2nd half and slapped rutgers around like a red-headed stepchild. jonny flynn, cuse's pg, threw down the sickest dunk i've ever seen live over one of rutgers swingmen. (the play ended up as #1 on sportcenter's top ten plays of the night, on the same day as a ton of big college and nba games, not to mention 2 nfl playoff games.)

my pop is a really cool dude, and i was psyched to hang with him for the day-- i rarely spend time with him away from the rest of the family these days. thos-dog is really into photography and just hooked up this sick zoom lens for his digital rebel. neither of us were particularly adept at catching the boys in action, but we got some decent pics. at the top of this post you can see one particularly good one-- my dawg, eric "thug-life" devendorf launching a silky-smooth jumper. i am going to post more on my facebook page as soon as i get the chance. check em out there if you are interested.

tonight was super fun. i can't even put my finger on why. i was with hines and his lady, seymore, who is the shit and way wise beyond her years. we went to the release party for working class magazine which is our friend megan's publication and a damn good one at that. anyway... to make a short story long... the party was kinda lame and we ended up at iona... which has fast become my favorite bar in williamsburg. the dj on this particular evening had his fastball and was slinging tons and tons of sweet tracks. not only did he play my favorite police track (truth hits everybody) but he also played my favorite blue oyster cult song (I'm burning for you). in all fairness... i guess i only know three boc songs and godzilla blows. regardless awesome song. we danced and basked in each others' company. tonight was just one of those nights where the stars aligned and i was with good people and we had an awesome time.

this entry is probably terribly boring to all dem peeps that weren't there. but trust me when i say that i'm still warm from the glow.

HULK SMASH!

i hadn't made the final table of an online tourney in months. today i played three tourneys, and managed to accumulate and maintain a decent stack in one of the $26 shit-shows on full tilt. there were over 1000 players in the field and first was $4800. i made the final table as one of the smaller biscuit bearers, but clearly had a huge skill edge on the field. with 8 players left and the blinds 5K-10K, i sit in the bb with A10o. i have about 150k in my stack. its folded to chip leader in sb who open jams. i snap him and he shows the q7. clean flop, clean turn, and then SPLAPPA. a miserable fucking queen on the river. i was slightly angered by this. lets just say if i had a pet cat i would have punted it across the room.

$450 for 8th is a complete kick to the balls when playing for $4800. $4800 would have made me slightly less broke. so i'm going out on the town for cocktails tonight with homicide on the mind. its gonna be really fun.

Eskimo Clark currently ranked #7 in the Card Player Player of the Year Race!

i bet he ends up scooping player of the year in 2009. that's my DAWG!

sunday tourney misfires, sweating leah at 750K FT

i wanted to put some serious hours in today playing online, playing 5-10 online events. well... i played 5-10 events but did not put in serious hours by any stretch of the imagination. my wireless internet has been a bastard all week so i took the choo-choo into the city and headed to my boy Tim "BegsCrutch" Begley's apartment to rub elbows with he and his roomate Mez, who would also be grinding the sunday online schedule.

i arrived at their place as the eagles-vikings game was starting, and had entered and busted from 6 mtts before the game was over. I played the sunday majors on both stars and tilt, and a few other midsize buyin events. It was a pretty poor showing all around, as i made definite mistakes in at least two of the events. i won't bore anyone with hand details, but trust me when i say i didn't have my fastball on this particular day. my bustout hand in the ftp 750k was particularly gross. i managed to blow a 6500 basket of biscuits in a limped pot at 50-100 blinds with about the 134th-nut hand.

several hours later i was hating life back at casa de muggins, cleaning my bedroom as punishment for my miserable performance. i glanced online on a whim to see if anyone notable was making noise in the online majors. my good friend mike "goleafsgoeh" leah was still alive slinging below average chips in the ftp 750k guarantee with about 110 runners left. anyway, goleafsgoeh stayed patient and executed some perfectly timed suckouts for his tournament life, and low and behold he is was top 3 in chips with 2 tables left. he made the final table with middle of the road biscuits. unfortunately, he seemed to go pretty card dead, and watched the shortstacks double up a few times before running 1010 into kk and busting ninth. regardless, it was a nice run and a fun sweat for my pathetic ass. congrats to mike... i know he wasn't playing for 9th place, but it was an impressive run nonetheless. this guy has been beasting it on the live tourney scene the last several months, and although he has not hit that elusive monster score yet he is right on the cusp and i'm confident he'll break through in 2009.

anyway, watching him inspired me to play better online and not give up so easily. i was so focused and such a survivor playing live in q4 in 2008, but unfortunately did not experience much success online in the same timeframe. hopefully i turn things around in the very near future-- cuz my azz is stone broke.

friday night grindin, back-door beauty?

so i played 9 tourneys this evening- 8 on full tilt and the 1am turbo hundo on stars. it was a pretty frustrating night, although i've certainly had worse.

early on i won a seat in a sng to an event ftp was having called the January 2nd Chance. it started at 9, had a $535 buyin and allowed you to rebuy for free if you lost all your biscuits in the first two hours. you only started with 2,222 biscotti rather than the standard-issue 3k on stars. not sure how i feel about this set up. i would certainly prefer a deeper starting stack than a free rebuy and baby biscuits.

anyway, i started playing about an hour after i got out of bed at the early hour of 430pm. i made the 3rd hour of a couple events but crapped out before i made the money. i was thinking of calling it an evening, cashing out my seat for that 5hundo and hitting the town for some adult beverages. but i kept doubling up a baby stack in the 8:30 33 rebuy until i had chips that i could no longer dust off willy-nilly in good conscience. therefore i went ahead and played that 5hundo. i never had even an average stack in either tourney but i managed to min-cash in both of them.
i lost a race just inside the money in the 5hundo, which might have given me a shot at the 40k first prize. i ended up making less than 100 dollars for the evening. 12 yr old sweatshop workers in micronesia would be displeased with this wage.

i played one kind of goofy hand in the 30rebuy. at 1-2k blinds, i got pretty lucky to double up to just over 40k when my AQ outdrew AK. just a few hands later, the massive chipleader of the tourney (approx 120k) limped utg. i had AQ clubs on the cutoff and decided to just limp behind and play a little carefully in position. the blinds completed and the flop came Qs5d2d. it was checked to me and i bet 6600 into about 10k. the blinds folded and the bigstack minraised me. i ended up tanking and then shoving with tptk and was shown 555. i think in retrospect, i should have found the fold button here, regardless of the outcome. even though i had no info on the player cuz he had just arrived at the table, he limped utg and check minraised a pretty clean board. his most likely hands are aa, kk, 55, 22, kq or some sort of combo draw. i am in good shape against exactly one of those hands. its possible that he has a pair btwn the 5 and q but that is not going to be the case very often, and when it is, most players fold to my reshove on flop. not to mention the fact that i had newlyfound biscuits and could have folded, left about 34k behind and found a much better spot. anyway, live and learn.

an uneventful day overall. watched fear and loathing on hbo for about the eleventh time. it really never gets old for me. the napkin scene at the diner with Ellen Barkin sticks in my mind tonight for some reason. "The question mark was emphasized!" remarkable.

two thousand niner bitches

i'm not too big on making new year's resolutions. actually... that's not true. i'm great at making them, but absolutely terrible at keeping them.

so i've set my sights pretty low this year. i'm not pledging any drastic lifestyle changes or resolving to be a better person. i'm pretty content staying a terrible person for the time being. however, i tried to start writing a blog back in july and it never came to fruition. i had a few partial tournament reports and never completed or published any of them. hopefully i am able to publish this shit regularly this year. so here it is... episode one of a hopefully long running comedy of errors.

poker is certainly going to be a running theme... so this might not be for that interesting for many/most people. there will be other tasty nuggets of interest i'm sure... as anyone who knows me knows well that i have a knack for getting into some serious shenanigans. way too much funny shit happens in my life to not document some of it.

so it begins... every minute is a movie. unfortunately i spent a sloppy, slovenly day recovering from NYE on my couch today. maybe not EVERY minute's a movie. gonna play some online tourneys this weekend and then i'll be at borgata for the duration of the winter open starting 1/13. the goal is to have at least a couple more posts up by then.

one last thing... i want to give a shoutout to my boy Jeffrey V Korn. his Gamblero blog on this site is in large part my inspiration for writing this one. check it out here http://jeffreyvkorn.blogspot.com/.