According to Josh

Sunday, Bloody Sunday.

Highlights:

100/200 Level in Poker Stars Sunday Million. KK vs K7o vs QQ all in preflop.

No Limit Holdem Tournament
$200+$15
7 players
Converted at weaktight.com

Stacks:

Blinds: 100/200

Pre-flop: (300, 7 players) Hero is BB

1 fold, BruceWizayne raises to 600, nipe1955 calls 600, 1 fold, 3tomake5 goes all-in 7,100, 1 fold, Hero goes all-in 8,100, BruceWizayne folds, nipe1955 goes all-in 6,775

Flop: (23,275, 3 players)

Turn: (23,275, 3 players)

River: (23,275, 3 players)

Final Pot: 22,550
3tomake5 shows:
Hero shows:
nipe1955 shows:

3tomake5 wins 22,000 ( won +14,900 )
Hero wins 1,275 ( lost -6,825 )
BruceWizayne lost -600
nipe1955 lost -7,375

Also played the Poker Stars $650 World Series of Poker satellite. The tournament had over 1000 players and was set to pay out 57 or 58 $12,000 Packages. Sadly, I managed to draw an incredibly tough table with 7 of 9 players having close to $100,000 Profit according to Official Poker Rankings.

This was a frustrating tournament as I was dealt an insane rush of starting hands and either won blinds or lost. I doubled up with KK vs QQ in the first level, and then proceeded to lose 3/4 of my stack the very next hand with AA vs KK. I think in the first 2 hours I picked up AA & KK 4 times each and never managed to accumulate chips. I finally busted with about 500 players remaining after raising with Ace King Suited and getting it all in on the turn on an Ace X X X board vs an opponent who was slow playing pocket aces. When I busted there was still 6 of the original 9 players at our table. Hopefully I can run better next time I play this tournament.

Plans for this week:

Grind out a ton of 180 player Sit & Goes and World Series of Poker Qualifiers including the Poker Stars Step Tournaments after work each night. I’m planning on playing in the Sunday $650 Qualifier again.

I’m playing in a live World Series of Poker qualifier saturday which should be fairly soft. It is a $100 buyin with 1 Rebuy & 1 Add On and will pay out 1 “package” for every $2300 in the prize pool to pay for people’s flight & accomodations to Las Vegas and entrance in a $1500 event.

Josh Poker Poker

Here is an updated link to a tournament schedule calendar. Included on this calendar are events from:

World Series of Poker
Caesars Mega Stack
Venetian Deep Stack
Bellagio Cup
Binions Poker Classic
Golden Nugget Tournament Series

http://tournamentcalendar.blogspot.com/

I currently have my eye on the following events:

Saturday, May 30: $1000 WSOP NLH
Sunday, May 31: $550 Venetian
Monday, June 1st: $550 Venetian or $540 Caesars
Wednesday, June 3rd: $1500 WSOP 6 max NLH
Thursday, June 4th: $2000 WSOP NLH
Sunday, June 7th: $1070 Venetian NLH

Hopefully I will have to skip a few of these ones that take place on back to back days for final tables.

Josh Poker, Trip Report Las Vegas, Poker, Trip Report

Like many poker players I am planning on spending a large amount of time in Las Vegas this summer. While trying to decide on my tournament schedule I found this very useful image on 2+2 which is a calendar that shows all of the larger tournaments from May 28th - July 14th.

It includes events from the World Series of Poker, Venetian Deep Stacks, Caesars Mega Stacks, and the Bellagio Cup. I will update this post if a new version is posted that includes the Binions Poker Classic events.

Josh Poker, Trip Report Las Vegas, Poker, Trip Report

* This is my first trip in 5 years where I didn’t play a single hand of poker. It was strange, but fun.

- 2 Double Vodka & Redbulls on the flight to get me in the Vegas Spirit and begin my buzz.

- Got checked in at the Hard Rock without any hassle. The room was really nice and over looked the pool.

- Nothing too crazy our first night, lots of drinking, degen-gambling in clearly -EV situations.

- Breakfast/Lunch at Pink Taco.

- Spent an hour or so lounging around the pool admiring the scenery and recovering from our first night. The pool at the hard rock is amazing, the only downside of our trip was that we arrived 1 week too early and “Rehab Sundays” began the following week. Attached is a picture to show you what we missed out on by 1 week.

Hard Rock Rehab Sundays Pool Party Vegas

- Did a bit of degen-gambling and I managed to make a small step towards recovering from the previous night’s losses playing Let it Ride & Black Jack.

- Met up with some friends and had a delicious dinner at PF Changs and then out to Nine Fine Irishmen in New York, New York for some drinks.

- After dinner & drinks we joined the girls for a night out. We decided to head over to the palms and began our night in the Playboy club and eventually moved over to Moon night club. Much socializing and dancing occured and a great deal of alcoholic beverages were consumed. After leaving the club sometime between 4am & 6am I managed to make a quick stop over at craps table before passing out and did my best to donate to the casino.

- Saturday afternoon was filled with a great run of short term positive variance while playing blackjack.

- Saturday night was spent getting bottle service at Body English. Bottle service is by far the best way to do clubs in Vegas.

- Skip waiting in line for hours (or forever if you’re a group of guys)
- No paying cover. ( At most clubs $30-$50 per person )
- Your own private table in the VIP Area.
- Personal waitress mixing your drinks for you.
- Your own bouncer keeping an eye on your table, personal items, or out in the club inviting beautiful women to your table.

The club was packed. It was by far the most fun I have ever had at a night club in my life. Managed to keep the party going all the way through the night until my 9am flight home.

Will possibly expand on this trip report in the next while and upload some pics but it all depends how motivated I am.

Josh Trip Report Body English, Bottle Service, Las Vegas, Trip Report

It looks like my pokerstars doomswitch has been turned on ever since I made my most recent cash out to pay for my new computer. The site is obviously rigged against me… either that or I am just encountering some standard variance combined with a few sessions where I wasn’t playing my A game.

March didn’t turn out nearly as well as January & Februrary but was still a winning month. I took a few shots in some cash games that looked good but ran horribly and dropped a few buyins that ate up a lot of profit. I’m planning on avoiding online cash games for all of april.

I’m headed to Vegas this weekend for a quick getaway. Hopefully I’ve earned enough run good & sklanksy bucks over the past couple weeks to make it a profitable trip. I’ll do my best to post a short trip report once I get back.

Don’t Stop Believing

Josh Poker Las Vegas, Poker

I finally got around to picking up a new computer last night. So far I’m pretty happy with it. Its using the Intel Core i7 920 2.66Ghz processor, an ATI Radeon HD4870 video card and 9GB of DDR3 Ram. My old system was pretty sluggish when running Holdem Manager and more than 12 tables so this should be a big improvement.

My only complaint so far has been with my auto hot key scripts not working properly. The exact same scripts worked perfectly on my old system running windows xp sp2 and my laptop running a 32bit Vista but won’t run on my new system which is Vista 64bit. I spent some time playing around with wickks scripts which allow you to control poker stars with a joystick or gamepad but eventually settled on using a program called table ninja which seems pretty sick so far.

Now that I’ve got a new system I’m planning on picking up a few PC games in the next bit for much needed breaks from poker. I’ll probably get WarCraft 3 + expansion as I played it quite a bit when it was originally released. I’m mostly looking forward to Starcraft 2 but who knows when that will come out.

I wish there were more techno songs about playing video games and talking to friends over ventrilo. Bass Hunter - Dota

Josh Misc. Thoughts, Poker Poker, Video Games

Poker Content:

Poker has been going ok for the first half of month. I haven’t been putting in nearly enough volume but have continued to run fairly hot. The 2+2 Team Tournament Leaderboard Challenge #6 is starting in a week. Hopefully this will be just what I need to get motivated to put in more volume.

Small Brag: I’m currently in the top 10 of the sharkscope leaderboard for average profit over last 500 games for my usual stakes which is kind of cool. I guess I’m not nearly as bad as my opponents think

Despite just making a small brag about my irrelevent results over a small sample size, I highly recommend this article about not tracking your results.

Random Content:

Mike Doughty has announced another west coast tour this spring and will be playing in Vancouver, BC May 14th. I’ve never had the chance to see him perform live so I’m definately going to attend. If you’ve never heard of him I’d highly recommend downloading/purchasing his albums “Haughy Melodic” and “Golden Delicious”.

Here are Youtube Links to 2 of his songs off of Golden Delicious:

Fort Hood
27 Jennifers

Josh Misc. Thoughts, Poker Music, Poker

I wasn’t able to put in as much volume in february as I did in january but still managed to find time for 360 sit and goes and another 68 regular tournaments. I never really managed any deep runs in regular tournaments but ran very well in sit and goes. Mixing in $27s, $38s and $60 45 man sit and goes has worked out well so far, I only wish that they would fill up faster so I could fit more of them in.

My regular set would generally be:

4x $12 / 45 Man
4x $12 / 180 Man
1x $27 / 45 Man
1x $38 / 45 Man
1x $60 / 45 Man

Here is a screen shot of my results.

I once again finished in the top 1000 players on pokerstars for the monthly tournament leaderboard which earned me another shot at a $20,000 free roll next Sunday.

March Goals:
1) Continue grinding Sit & Goes (300 minimum)
2) Play online sattelites to both SCOOP (Spring Championship of Online Poker) and The World Series of Poker (once they begin).
3) Profit??

Josh Poker Poker

The Tournament Leaderboard Challenge completed Friday at midnight and really came down to the wire. Unfortunately, a strong push and some impressive late results by our opposition led to us finishing in second place for 30% of the prize pool.

The new season of High Stakes Poker starts Sunday March 1st on GSN. I’m normally not a huge fan of this show but the online preview has got me interested again. If you are interested in watching high stakes cash games on tv I would recommend checking out the latest episodes of Poker after dark on Pokertube.com. This season of Poker after dark has some of the best online plaers including Taylor “Green Plastic” Caby, Cole “CTS” South, and David “Raptor” Benefield.

Josh Poker Poker, TV Shows

My team in the 2+2 Tournament Leaderboard Challenge is doing well but really needs 1 or 2 more decent finishes to push us to the top. The contest ends tonight at midnight so hopefully one of my teammates can make something happen. I’ve ran horribly for the 2 weeks this contest has been going on and despite cashing in many tournaments, I never managed any real deep runs or final tables. The most I was able to contribute was a few wins in 180 player sit and go tournaments on pokerstars.

In other news, the player I have been staking and coaching is really starting to come in to his own and is doing quite well. He doesn’t have a very large sample size yet but I am confident he will continue to be profitable while moving up limits. I’ve attached a sharkscope graph of his results since I took him under my wing.

Josh Poker Poker