Monday, July 14, 2008

WCOOP, WSOPE and being bad at poker

After grinding out the cash games last week during the Stars promo I'm back to tournies this week. I have sucked sooo badly all week, repeatedly running up huge stacks and donking them off in a variety of super fun ways. I went deep in a couple but lost key flips/got sucked out on, and had a couple of light shoves called and way behind when short. Didn't really get much going in the Sunday Million or any of the other Sunday tournies last night, so a dissapointing week overall.

Unfortunately all of the guys I backed are out of the WSOP. One guy made the money but busted in the first level. It was fun railing the guys and it was cool being at work in the morning here in the UK and getting the odd update e-mail.

There isn't much on the poker horizon for me a the moment, but two things I'm looking forward to are the WSOPE and the WCOOP, both of which aren't until September.

Since they have added a £1500 (roughly $3k) event to the WSOPE, I initially looked at trying to sat into that, but it appears nobody is running sats to that event, so I may try to buy-in direct. I don't really have the patience or the bankroll to try to win a $25k ME package, so I doubt I'll be bothering with that.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Stars Promo and WSOP

I've played quite a lot of cash games on Stars over the last few days as they were running a double VPP promotion which was just about worth me moving from my usual games at Party. I dropped down a level to $200 NL and ran 10-12 tables of FR. I have to admit after doing so much 3-4 tabling and improving my concentration I struggled a bit to start with but overall I finished up $1,200 which was not too bad, and managed to clear 12,000 VPP's.

I would have liked to do more, but I only really got the chance to play on the final two days of the promotion. It looks like they might be doing a similar one next week so maybe I'll get more time to play then.

It was part of a 4 week '2x' promotion by Stars during the first week of which they had the VPP promo above in addition to a bunch of double chance tournies at $2, $22 and $222. This week they are doubling the guarantees of all of their regular tournaments. I initially thought they might squeeze a small overlay on some of them, but that thought was quickly dismissed when the $50 gtd had an astonishing 2500 runners compared to it's usual 1200, and a $125k prizepool.

I posted on the forum that this was great and all, but only really means I'll be busting out of tournies with bigger prizepools. I didn't disappoint last night, busting from the 100k with KK < A9, from the 90k with AK < QQ, from the 80k with 55 < 85 (he shoved to resteal and I called, river 8 obv) and last but not least the 50k with KK < AA.

Good times.

I have been watching the WSOP ME updates all week too, and a couple of the guys I backed made it to day 2. One has just over 70k in chips, the other is short on 15k. Still plenty of room to play though and they are on separate days (2a and 2b) so at least I get to rail a little tonight and tomorrow. My favourite non poker story from the WSOP so far is of the guy who, when the cards were first in the air at the start of the day, stood up from his chair and crashed two symbols together. He was promptly informed about the excessive behaviour rule or whatever it's called, and told not to do it again. Something tells me he already knew about the rule.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Staking

I have been doing a lot of staking recently, so I thought since it's more interesting than me talking about bubbling final tables or bitching about losing huge pots in cash games as a massive favorite I may as well write about it here.

There are two types of staking deal I engage in. The first is purely for fun, sometimes they make a little profit, sometimes they don't. I still seek to back + EV players but it's usually for small amounts, a typical deal will be someone playing 50,000 hands of $50 NL and me picking up 10% of a $1k seed fund and taking 60-80% of the profits on my share. I often rail these people, try to give them advice and just enjoy being a part of something they are trying to achieve. I have done a few smaller MTT ones too, backing people 100% for a set number of tournies and taking a cut of any profits.

The second type is more about making money. I have backed people for everything from $50 NL to 30/60 FL sometimes picking up all of their action. On the whole these deals have gone very, very well for me. One person I backed made me just over $4.5k in two separate deals (including makeup from the first) over just two months, and my biggest loss to date has been about $500 which I'm more than happy to write off given how well my other deals have gone.

Last week however I encountered my first real issue. I backed a player $2,000 to play $100 NL 6-max with a 20 buy-in BR over a set number of hands. This player was hugely +EV and after running badly at the start and dropping to $50 NL for a while, he eventually clawed it back and went on a nice run towards the end to finish up at $3800 total. We had a 70/30 split in my favour, so I was due to pick up a tidy $1200 profit and he was going to pick up $600 for his efforts.

Unfortunately after the deal had ended he supposedly decided he wouldn't want to play low stakes after being at $100 NL with his newly earned, but ultimately smaller $600 BR, so he proceeded to try to work up a bit more money using the money I staked him while he still had it.

The story is that he was taking shots and first lost the $600, then lost a bunch while tilting, eventually stopping at $2k. This was over a period of about 2 weeks while I didn't hear from him at all (before this we spoke 3-4 times a week, so initially I thought he had done a runner with the whole lot). I managed to get my $2k back which I was happy about after being frozen out and thinking I might end up with nothing, so at least I didn't actually lose anything on the deal.

Obviously I have no way of knowing if his story is true. He has no way to pay the money back, hence the original staking deal, and the only way he could raise more funds was to get another backer, which I would obviously move to block. So I think I have to write that money off, which is annoying, but I think it would be too much effort and stress to try to get it back when I consider my chances to be pretty low from the outset. Ironically I knew he wanted a larger BR, and if he didn't go silent for 2 weeks I was going to alter the deal slightly in his favour to give him a chance to build a half decent BR and start playing for himself.

All this leads to a few deals I have been arranging recently for the WSOP. I had a couple of stakes for people in prelims but I pretty much broke even on those with one early exit and one small cash. However, I have backed no fewer that 7 people for the WSOP Main Event this year, all on different deals. Some of them are buying straight up percentages, which isn't that good of a deal for the backer, but it's just a bit of gamboool with a potentially huge payouts.

So I'll be watching the ME with interest next week and hopefully one or two of my guys will go deep and make me some serious money...