Dublin Bellybuster and Badbeatspoker.net forumer, Dave Walasinski aka Otbdave spent the last three days grinding his way through a field of almost 2800 players in the WSOP Event #51. Last night, it was lights, camera, action as he took his seat at the final table. He was the short-stack with 700,000 chips but a double-up would put him right in the mix.
Over the course of the next few hours, Dave went into overdrive, raising and re-raising, bashing his way into the top6. An audacious bluff saw him climb higher and by the time it was 3-handed, he was sitting pretty in 2nd spot with 4 million chips. First place was worth over 660K but Dave took a bad beat and bowed out in 3rd for just shy of $275K.
Congratulations to Dave on his incredible achievement!
Congratulations to Dublin Bellybuster's very own Michael Craig who, in the small hours of last night, took 2nd place in Event 44 of the World Series of Poker. The event was won by all-round Stud maestro Jeff Lisandro who bulldozed the Final Table and took home his third bracelet of the Series, not to mention the $180K+ first prize. Michael won $116K.
In his own words, "I played the best poker I could play today. Good cards helped, of course, but I knew the right situations to push marginal cards and the right situations to bet for value. I did a very good job sizing up my opponents and how to play (or not play) against them. Despite the structure making us short-stacked, and having just half the chip average at the beginning of the day, I don’t think I was ever in danger of busting until I was heads-up with Jeff Lisandro."*
Lawyer, author and friend of Full Tilt, Michael can now add another moniker: Razz-Machine.
Ok, so fresh from being schooled by the flesh 'n' blood Dutch masters ("Do I not like orange!"), I returned this week to the cyber-felt. Having put in minimal hours for over a fortnight, I was keen to get back to winning ways asap. Friday night was a feast as I won two $24 and one $69 45-man SNGs. Saturday was a famine as I made numerous final tables but only cashed twice for a pittance. Today, I woke up and pledged to put in a big session. Four hours in and I was down a grand with just one or two games brewing. I decided to be brave and entered a pair of live tourney satellites - the $300 Late Night Poker Satellite and the $200 Full Tilt Series Espana Satellite. I normally wouldn't buy in to tournies this big but both of the fields looked super-soft (I already won one of the Spanish Satellite thingies a few weeks ago in what I can only describe as dismally poor company).
An hour into both tournies and I was dicking around with slightly less than starting chips. A gear change was the order of the day as was a double-up on both tables. The Eurodonks obliged and I was back in business. Two hours in and I was 11 of 16 and 13 of 22 - lots to do but definitely in the mix! I lost a flip in the Late Night Poker Satellite but won one in the Spanish one. 10 of 10 in the former, I re-shoved 910 suited BvB and was unlucky to find him with A10. He had been aggressive for the previous half-hour so I think the play was fine. I flopped a flush draw but missed turn and river to be sent packing.
The crucial hand in the Spanish Satellite came when I smooth called a button raise with the A9 of clubs in the SB. I had 13K and was 2nd in chips. He had 16K and was 1st. The flop came AAQ, I checked and he bet 1500 into a pot of 3500. Feeling at this point that I was either miles ahead or miles behind, I decided to smooth call. The turn came the 9 of diamonds, putting 2 diamonds on board. I donk-lead for 2300 into the 6500 pot, hoping to represent a queen. The Button called. The river came the 4 of diamonds. I lead for 3500 into 11K and he re-shoved. A moment of panic followed as my internet connection vanished before I could snap-call. Luckily it returned in time and with teeth grit, I hit the CALL button. Please no AQ, please no AQ! BOOOOM as he flipped up the A7 of diamonds and the mammoth pot was shipped my way.
From there, I had more than double the player in 2nd place and it was easy to play positional poker, stabbing small pots away from scared oponents. The satellite format has its own set of game theory principles and I love to pressurise the donks. Playing the big-stack aggressively, I coasted to the final table with half the chips in play. It was a brief affair as the short-stacks departed quickly. The 5-handed bubble was also brief as, after two hands, the short-stack shoved with JQ suited UTG, I called with Aces and they held!
HOLLAND: 5
LAPPIN: 0
SPAIN: 0
LAPPIN: 2
Viva Espana, once again!
Case Study: Holland Casino, Amsterdam
I arrived back to the Holland Casino, having indulged myself with a crybaby blog (see my last entry for details of how I dropped a grand on the tables and fed another hundo into a racist roulette machine), to find Michelle mid-decision for the majority of her stack. Having raised to 1000 from the button, an old dude went all-in from the Big Blind, insisting to his table-mates that the 'little girl' couldn't call. It was a further 3800 chips to call and from Michelle's body-language, I put her on a medium ace or small pocket pair. I figured she wasn't putting him on much but I also figured that she wouldn't want to call off a big portion of her stack with a marginal hand.
After a minute of contemplation, she made the call. The old guy grimaced and tabled K9. Michelle flipped up A8. "Great Call Honey", I hollered from the rail, "Now Hold!" Neither of them hit the flop, making Michelle over 75% to win. Boom comes a 9 on the turn and suddenly she is 14-1. No justice on the river and Michelle was left with 1500 chips. She got them in two hands later with A9 but found KK in the small blind. The Kings held and she was eliminated in 28th place.
As we walked back to our hotel, we bemoaned out luck and bitched about the dealers. The Dutch poker fraternity are a chauvinistic bunch, taking every opportunity to belittle female players. Michelle was the only woman in the room and in three short hours, she was talked down to on several occasions. Bizarrely, the worst offender was the female dealer, who twice joined in with the players at the table. Her snide remarks got Michelle so ruffled that, at one point, I thought she was going to summon her Super-Obama-Ninja-Fly-swatting powers and slap the bitch from across the table.
Crossing the Leidseplein, we agreed that we were done with poker for the trip. I also pledged to never again put money into a gambling machine. In the words of George W, "Fool me once, Shame on...Shame on you... Fool me, you can't get fooled again." However, like the book says: "You may be through with the bad beats, but the bad beats aren't through with you." Two days later, I completely miscalculated the time and we missed our flight. We arrived to the airport 40 minutes before take-off but we had a bag and they said it was too late to check it.
We were re-directed to the Aerlingus Help Desk where I booked the flight for the following morning. We went downstairs and booked a hotel for the night. We went to the pharmacy and bought Michelle some cold-medicine. We got coffees in Starbucks. We went out to the bus-stop where we waited for 15 minutes until our complementary shuttle bus arrived. 10 minutes later, we pulled up to the Novotel. Stepping off the bus, Michelle directed my attention to a plane flying overhead. Before looking upwards, I looked at Michelle and sighed - "Seriously?" Her expression was enough. I no longer needed to look up... but I did.
Fuck me, I'm running bad this week...
Tuesday Night: Go to bed with a pain in my side.
Wednesday Morning: The pain moves to my groin.
Wednesday Afternoon: Pass a stone from one vital organ into another.
Wednesday Night: Pain moves to my lower back.
Thursday Morning: Michelle convinces me not to take my painkillers.
Thursday Morning (an hour later): While eating the most disgusting and disgustingly over-priced breakfast at the airport, the pain in my side returns. I thank Michelle for her marvelous wisdom and chew down my tablets.
Thursday Afternoon: Can't find my hotel in Amsterdam. Michelle begins to doubt it exists.
Thursday Night: Lose $500 in less than an hour of live cash game poker in the Holland Casino (two coolers when I ran Ace-8 of hearts into 99 on a 873 board with two hearts and a set with the nut flush draw into a boat on a AK9K board).
Thursday Night: Bank charges me a $22 fee to release another $500 of my own money from my account - the transaction was completed before I realised that I had been royally fisted!
Thursday Night (an hour later): Michelle flops the nuts and I flop a flush draw with an over card. Needless to say I was in no mood to slow-play my draw. Her 'nuts' rightly holds and I am felted yet again.
Friday Evening: I buy into the $200 NLHE Tourney in the Holland Casino and having played good poker for two hours, I donked my chips off to the fucktard who was raising any two cards preflop. I flopped top pair and turned two pair. Obviously he had flopped the nuts! Next hand, he raises from the Cut-Off and with A9 and a stack of only 10 BBs, I shoved. Obviously he had woke up with two queens and flopped a third to send me packing.
Friday Night: I wish Michelle well as she sits pretty with a top10 stack of 60 BBs and make my way to the Roulette machines. I decide to set fire to $100, figuring that if I just put $20 on black, I might get an hour or two of mindless entertainment out of it. I'm wrong as the first five spins all land on red.
Friday Night (10 minutes later) aka NOW: I take Michelle's computer to the bar across the road from the casino to bitch and moan about my woes in a blog.
I haven't gotten round to any scribbling for the last few weeks. Why? Well, you see, we are currently in the midst of some unusual tropospheric phenomena here in Dublin. Every morning for the past 10 or so, I have opened my curtains to find blue stuff where the clouds are supposed to be. Day after day, the Sun has beaten down, with the result that every self-respecting man, woman and child has participated in that well-known Irish game 'Pass the baby oil - I bet I can get skin cancer before you!'
Lying in bed tonight, however, I was compelled to start writing. Poker has been plodding along nicely as I am fast becoming a decent cash-game player but it is not poker I'm going to discuss. This morning I woke up with a bad pain in my right flank. I grit my teeth and went back to bed but a few hours later, the pain had moved to my groin and it was more than I could tolerate. I got up and began writhing around in pain in different positions in different rooms of the apartment. Unsurprisingly, neither my posture nor physical location had any bearing on the intensity of my pain. Twenty minutes of swearing and moaning later, the pain started to subside a little. I rang my doctor's office and told them that the big day had finally arrived... I was about to give birth to my very first kidney stone.
"I can fit you in at 4pm", uttered the voice at the other end of the line. "4pm!", I answered, "I'll be dead by 4pm!" I hung up the phone and told Michelle that, being the hard-man that I am, I was going to tough it out at home. Five minutes later, the pain was back with a vengeance and I was squirming around a taxi on the way to St James Hospital.
On arrival, I was taken in immediately by the nurse and administered with a double dose of morphine and a single dose of difene. I immediately became queasy and lost the feeling in my right arm. On the upside, however, the pain became almost tolerable and it seemed that the worst hour of my life was over. As Michelle lovingly petted my forehead, the doctor asked me how I was feeling. With an earnest stare, I told her that I needed more morphine. She obliged and courtesy of my third 2.5mg hit in fifteen minutes, I dozed off in a opium haze.
Blood tests, urine tests, an MRI and an X-Ray later, I was informed that I had successfully passed the 4mm in diameter boulder from my kidney into its new home in my bladder. From there, it will do one of two things:
1 Dissolve harmlessly and be absorbed back into my body (Relatively painless)
2 Travel out of the bladder into the urethra where it will tunnel its way out of my body through my penis (Excruciatingly painful)
Needless to say, I am 'one time' hollering for the former as the latter sounds like giving birth to a pineapple. The doctor let me leave in the late afternoon with a bag of pills and the promise of a follow-up consultation with a urologist. The pain has moved from my groin to my back but it is only a shadow of what it was this morning.
I've decided not to cancel my trip to Amsterdam tomorrow where I hope to experience a more pleasant type of stonage. Michelle and I have been looking forward to this holiday for months and it would be a shame to miss out. A bastion of culture and sub-culture, Amsterdam shall offer a pleasant dichotomy of attractions - the museums and the coffee-houses, the Vondelpark and the red-light district. The Holland Casino will, no doubt, also see some action so I hope to report on some profitable sessions there in the days to come.
So get this. I'm in this orphanage in Dublin. It's 1969 and today is my 10th birthday. I'm not really an orphan but my mother gave birth to me out of wedlock so I was taken off her as a newborn and sent here. The priests who run the orphanage are friendly most of the time - "Make your 60 rosaries a day without messing and you won't get a beating". It's a fair deal and they keep their end most of the time.
So this morning, I'm finished serving mass. I'm in the Sacristy, taking off my cassock when the priest comes in. He tells me that because it's my birthday, I can have some altar wine. I take a big gulp and immediately feel a bit funny. Next thing I know, the priest is touching me in a strange way. I'm thinking: "What the fuck are you doing?" I try to leave but he grabs me. He fucks me in the ass. I start to cry. He fucks me in the mouth. I'm so upset after that I go back to my room and start punching myself in the face.
Luckily my face heals. Later that day, another priest comes into my bedroom. I tell him what happened and he tells me that I deserved whatever I got. He tells me that I am a bastard child and I should be grateful to have a home at all. I go outside and squish as many ants as I can find.
The next day, I tell my best friend about what happened. I ask him if I should write a letter to the police. He tells me that there's no point. He says that the last kid who did that was beaten so badly that he never came back from the hospital. "That's bullshit", I say. He looks at me: "I'm sorry dude", he says, "but it's just something you have to get used to. It happens to everyone here from time to time."
"No fuck you!", I say, "This can't be something we have to just put up with. Where do these priests get off behaving this way". So I write my letter and a policeman comes. He brings me to the police station and asks me about what happened. I tell him and he tells me that I am lying. I swear to him that it is the truth and tell him that it has also happened to lots of my friends. He tells me that I am a trouble-maker. He says that if I don't stop making up these stories, he'll put me in prison.
That night, I am beaten and raped by two of the priests at the same time. When they are finished, they spit on me and tell me that I am going to Hell. They tell me that I better get used to it and do you know what the weird thing is? I did.
Forty years on and I am celebrating my fiftieth birthday. Opening the newspaper, I read how the members of the clergy involved in child sex abuse are being publicly commended by the Archbishop of Westminster, Rev Vincent Nichols. According to him, it takes great 'courage' for them to confront their actions. "I think of those in religious orders", he says, "who have to face these facts from their past which instinctively and quite naturally they'd rather not look at".
Quite right. I am thinking of them too. I am thinking how dreadful it must be for them. As I know only too well, nobody likes listening to a bad beat story and I can only imagine it garners even less sympathy coming from the perspective of the ones who inflicted the beats.
A few moments ago, I won a $200 Satellite to The Full Tilt Poker - Espana Series. The tournament had 61 entrants and as such, gave away 4 $3K prize packages with 5th getting his money back. I couldn't resist taking a punt for two reasons:
I excel in tournaments of this size.
The field was full of Spanish players and had not a single recognised player.
As was my hope, the tournament played super-soft and I easily negotiated my way to a chip-lead come final table time. From there, it was a case of boxing clever. With 6 left, I surrendered my chip-lead but I was never in danger with the short-stacks going at each other in a battle for survival. Oddly, the tournament continued after the 5th place finisher hit the rail. We all had our packages in the bag but played it out for the glory. I finished in 1st place after my Q9 beat my opponent's K4 all-in preflop.
The package includes flights to Madrid, hotel accommodation, a €1500 seat in Event I and a little spending money. The tournament is a 3-day affair but has a guarantee of just $150K, implying there won't be a big turnout. Here's hoping for the 2nd installment of the 'I Don't Hate Live Poker' saga!
Last night, I played a handful of MTTs. My 45ers went terribly and I was down about 1K with just two games left. One of them was a 69er and one was the $25K Guarantee. I took 3rd in the 69er and had the chip-lead with 200 left in the 25K. Two hours later, there were 35 remaining and I was 5th. Nick 'Rounder63' Carrillo was railing me and I sold 10% of my action to him. I had pieces of Nick for two of his last four big scores so I was determined to repay the complement. I was also desperate to take down a big score as a bacon-less 8 weeks had resulted in an 8K MTT downswing.
A couple of bad-beats and one lost flip dented my chances as I plummeted out of the top5 and back to an average stack. I rebuilt well for the next hour and won a crucial race with AJ vs 1010 to be top5 again with 12 left. My friend and fellow Bellybuster Thang 'thang911' Nguyen was sitting to my immediate left and we pumped each other up for a 1-2 finish. He was, at this stage, however, nursing a short stack but a double-up would put him back in the hunt for the final table. It came when his QQ beat AJ and we were final table bound.
The standard on the final table was poor. With one exception, our opponents were weak tight, rarely defending and almost never 3-betting. I took the initiative and began raising every pot that got to me unopened. The tactic worked as I doubled my stack and took the chip-lead without much confrontation. Thang was busy enough, keeping himself above water but my loose style reduced his opportunities to late-position steal. From 6-handed on, I relentlessly pillaged the blinds. When resistance came, I was happy to fold because it was profitable to raise every pot pre-flop given how tight the table played. Thang moved into 2nd place, winning a big pot by knocking out the 6th place finisher. He had 1.4 million chips to my 2.5 million. The other 3 players had less than 700K.
5-Handed didn't last long as two of the short-stacks went at it. 4-handed was a different story as we battled for the best part of half an hour. I lost a big pot to Thang. Thang lost a big pot to one of the others. I took a shot at the short stack with 8-7 suited from the SB but his 10-4 held up. Unfazed, I continued to make my pre-flop raises. Thang seemed to target my blinds which was actually a really smart tactic as they were the only pots where I couldn't get a raise in before him. I defended on two occasions but check-folded when I failed to connect. The one thing I didn't want to do was get out of line versus the only decent player left.
Finally, the short-stack died when he ran into my AQ. I had 3 million while Thang and the other guy had 1.5 million each. 10 minutes later, they went at it preflop, getting it all-in with A10 and AJ. Thang had the AJ and they held when he flopped trips. We had almost identical stacks and agreed to chop, winning $7800 each. Playing on for the honour and the title, I got the better of my friend, winning a big pot when I flopped a straight and finishing him off when my 1010 held versus his Q7.
It was a fantastic achievement as we outlasted almost 2000 players in what was one of the biggest $24 fields of all time. It was my biggest score to date and I followed it up this afternoon with a 2nd place in the $30 Turbo Event. This poker is a streaky business. Bring on the streaky bacon!
Bump for the following animated movie.
My good friend Stinky Budz sent me the link and I cried with laughter when I first watched it. It is destined to be quoted ad nauseum in poker circles.
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