Whoa… crazy coincidence

I kind of randomly decided to eat dinner again at the Thai place I found last night, and the place was a little crowded so an older American woman ended up sitting with me. She’s lived in Tokyo for the past twenty years, so it was awesome getting to talk to someone fairly fluent in both Japanese and English. Anyways, we got to talking and she mentioned she had a son about my age… who studies physics (like me)… and was born on June 15th (like me).

We were both like “get the fuck out! that’s insaaane” and ended up having a really enjoyable conversation 🙂

Oh yeah and I should get to play a little live poker tomorrow – a friend of a friend lives in Tokyo and invited to a game with some of her friends, should be pretty funny.

This is insane

So… Japan may have actually worsened my luck. Down another three and a half buyins in about 600 hands. I really hate that this blog has gotten so emo but for fuck’s sake, the past month and a half is without a doubt the worst I’ve ever run. Some highlights from today: I double up a 2/3 stack retard when I get it in w QQ on a 556hh flop and he has trips, and then the very next hand I get KK and lose a big pot to a different retard when he flops trips on a TTx board. Thankfully he was terrible and I escaped with some of my stack. I also had KK < 88 aipf against a half stack, and ran AKdd into KK against a TAG (who I’m beginning to think is just a giant nit, but I didn’t know that at the time).

I also played a little HU, which was probably unwise, and what do you know, every bluff I made got snapped off and virtually every value bet got a fold. One bluff was genuinely pretty bad (and cost me a stack) but I think you’re allowed to make a couple mistakes here and there.

I may have to quite playing for a bit since this is starting to ruin my time in Japan, which is lame. But yeah, it’s pretty silly that May was so terrible, and now I’m down eight buyins in 3.5k hands so far in June.

Honestly

I may never win at poker again.

Full Tilt Poker, $1/$2 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 6 Players
LeggoPoker.com – Hand History Converter

CO: $200
BTN: $273.15
SB: $300.35
BB: $197.30
UTG: $207.95
Hero (MP): $498.10

Pre-Flop: 6 6 dealt to Hero (MP)
UTG folds, Hero raises to $7, CO calls $7, 3 folds

Flop: ($17) 2 3 6 (2 Players)
Hero bets $13, CO calls $13

Turn: ($43) A (2 Players)
Hero bets $36, CO raises to $72, Hero calls $36

River: ($187) 2 (2 Players)
Hero checks, CO bets $108 and is All-In, Hero calls $108

Results: $403 Pot ($3 Rake)
CO showed 2 2 (four of a kind, Twos) and WON $400 (+$200 NET)
Hero mucked 6 6 (a full house, Sixes full of Twos) and LOST (-$200 NET)

Villain is a fish, not really sure why I didn’t just shove the turn, but it doesn’t really matter either way.

Ugh this is so frustrating. I played for a while today and finished down about half a buyin. I think I played okay, I sucked out pretty badly with JJ>AA aipf (Am I crazy to keep getting it in w jacks preflop? I thought this was standard but I pretty much only run into KK/AA, even against fairly laggy players – I don’t know if I’m running badly or totally underestimating people’s ranges) and got it in with a flush draw vs. TP2K in a 3bet pot, other than that I pretty much just ran into flopped sets all day.

Bleh I’m not really sure what to do about this. As far as I can tell I’m playing fine – probably not the best poker of my life but certainly good enough to crush 1/2. But I don’t know… my confidence is a little low at the moment 😦

Japan not helping my luck

I just finished playing my first poker session on Japanese soil and finished down a couple buyins. Some of the highlights were QQ<KK and JJ<KK vs. the same TAG aipf (the JJ hand was probably avoidable although it was close) and losing top set to a rivered higher set vs. the table fish. My big suckout for the day was turning an open ender. Wohoo.

I think I did an okay job focusing on “practicing” poker rather than playing, although I have to admit I feel pretty tilted right now. But I stopped playing before I got too frustrated, so that’s good.

But bleh, it would be really nice if poker could turn around sometime soon… I guess I deserve this considering how lazy I’ve been this year.

Anyways, otherwise today was pretty fun – I went to bed around 8:30 last night since I was exhausted from the flight, so I got a nice early start this morning. Got breakfast in the hotel, wandered around Takadanobaba for a bit, and had some coffee at Ben’s Cafe, which was mentioned in the John Rain books. I recommend it. I also had some of the best Indian (well, Pakistani) food of my life for lunch. All you could eat buffet for about $10, it was awesome.

Tokyo subway system 1, me 0

I’m way too tired to do a full trip report, but here’s an executive summary. Flight was fine, I didn’t get much sleep but did a bunch of reading. I finished another Barry Eisler book and got started on Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness. It’s hilarious and a lot of fun.

Customs etc. was fine, no problems getting my bags. Getting from Narita to my hotel was a ridiculous bitch though. First I had to take a 1.5 hour train to Shinjuku station. Conveniently I got there around 5:45pm, just about at the height of rush hour. Dragging around two huge bags during Tokyo rush hour is a terrible, terrible idea. I mean everyone knows that Tokyo subways are really crowded but this was insane – I’ll take some pictures eventually, it’s hard to appreciate the sheer crush of people unless you can see it. Anyways I eventually managed to squeeze onto the JR Yamanote line, and then it was just a couple stops to Takadanobaba station. Which was basically a slightly more crowded version of Shinjuku, except it only had like three signs in English.

It took me about fifteen minutes to figure out how to get out of the station, but then it was just a couple minute walk to the Hotel Sunroute Takadanobaba. It’s a pretty cool little place – the reception people were all really nice and my room is comfy (although it’s about the size of a large closet).

Anyways, I need to get a shower and some food.

Couple more hours…

Had a pretty fun day today lounging around in New York – my dad and I went out for an awesome anticipatory Japanese dinner, saw the new Indiana Jones movie (review: kind of entertaining, outrageously retarded), and tried to take shelter from the ridiculous heat.

Some random comments: CTS is such a sicko. He’s put up a flurry of blog posts lately and jesus, I honestly get an adrenaline rush reading them. I don’t even know what to say, he’s just a stupefying human being.

Next, I was walking down 5th avenue today on my way to the bookstore and passed by a big storefront ad campaign thing featuring Alessandra Ambrosio. I came pretty close to walking into a fire hydrant, it was kind of embarrassing.

And finally, Grace Park/Boomer from Battlestar Galactica explaining how Asian people look like Lego people. Man, I would marry her right now. I remember when I first started watching BG and found out that she was a Cylon – I was like, OK, I see what’s really happening here. This is clearly a giant misunderstanding – the Cylons evidently just decided they needed a “perfect Asian woman” in their linup, not knowing that she already existed and was a pilot on the Galactica. At any rate, I’m really happy Grace Park has a bigger role in this season – she kind of disappeared for a while in the third season and that made me sad.

Okay, that’s about it. Hopefully the flight tomorrow won’t suck balls.

June!

More importantly, Japan!

Sorry about the complete lack of blogging lately (and that my occasional posts all suck). It’s been kind of a “low” couple months. But I’m working on my poker comeback and the next few months should be really really fun.

I’m gonna head down to New York tomorrow night and then fly out to Tokyo on Monday around noon. No joke, I arrive the next day at 3pm local time (about a 14 hour flight)… ugh. Shouldn’t be too bad though since I’ve got a lot of good books to read – it’s funny, every once in a while I go through what I guess you could call a “very hypo” manic episode, where my mind kind of races a bit and I have trouble sleeping. My brain is usually too frazzled for sensible poker playing but I get a ton of reading done. The downside is that all the relentless mental energy tends to burn me out for a while. In college I’d get pretty depressed after these episodes – I’m still learning how to soften the fall to normalcy (or below), but at least I’ve made progress since Harvard.

Anyways, I think I’m towards the tail end of one of these things at the moment (not great timing). But I’m handling it pretty well, so I think I’ll be able to keep plugging through all the books I’m reading. First, I’m now on the fourth of Barry Eisler‘s John Rain books, after having blitzed through the first three this past week. My dad showed them to me – they’re about a half-Japanese, half-American assassin based in Tokyo. I usually make fun of my dad for reading so many goofy airplane paper backs, but I have to admit, Eisler is really really good. If you ever have plans to go to Tokyo definitely take a look at the Rain series, since there’s a ton of incredible information on the city. I’ve got several obscure jazz clubs and several more obscure coffee places to check out, so even if the books were boring they would have been worth reading. Eisler’s website is also pretty interesting, and he has a blog.

Next up, I read a pretty good popular science book on probability about a week ago, called The Drunkard’s Walk. I’d give it a B – the sections on pure probability are very good and a lot of fun to read, but the more discursive stuff on statistical biases in everyday life wasn’t as insightful as I’d hoped it’d be. Oh well. Regardless, reading it got me thinking about mathematical finance again, so I’ve been doign a lot of reading about risk in the past week. One of the books, Plight of the Fortune Tellers by Rebonato, is fantastic. It’s about some of the flaws of modern (i.e. hyper-quantitative) financial risk management. Interestingly, Rebonato is a quant himself, and has published a couple very interesting looking books on mathematical finance. Anyways, I’m about two-thirds of the way done and it’s very insightful so far – if you want a relatively gentle introduction to how finance/risk works, it’s a good place to start.

I could keep going with the books but I should probably get to bed. Next entry will probably be from Tokyo – I’ll try to include some fun pictures.

Relaxing in NY

So I’ve decided to take a little break from poker – this month has just been too crazy. Wilt couldn’t do anything about me being doomswitched and we dropped another couple buyins in our lesson, so I’m now down almost exactly $3k on the month in 10k hands. That’s 19 buyins at 6max in about 7k hands, and then I’m up a bit at HU. So pretty sick. But poker is tough when you can’t win your 95/5s:

Full Tilt Poker, $1/$2 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 5 Players
LeggoPoker.com – Hand History Converter

AWhaleIsNotAFis (BTN): $601.25
bonovox83 (SB): $200
raisy-daisy08 (BB): $215.80
Poelle6 (UTG): $290.90
Hero (CO): $235.75

Pre-Flop: A A dealt to Hero (CO)
Poelle6 calls $2, Hero raises to $9, 3 folds, Poelle6 calls $7

Flop: ($21) 3 7 3 (2 Players)
Poelle6 checks, Hero bets $16, Poelle6 raises to $36, Hero calls $20

Turn: ($93) 4 (2 Players)
Poelle6 bets $76, Hero raises to $190.75 and is All-In, Poelle6 calls $114.75

River: ($474.50) 2 (2 Players – 1 is All-In)

Results: $474.50 Pot ($3 Rake)
Poelle6 showed 2 2 (a full house, Twos full of Threes) and WON $471.50 (+$235.75 NET)
Hero showed A A (two pair, Aces and Threes) and LOST (-$235.75 NET)

Wilt and I were like lol @ you, you clearly have nothing with your terrified turn bet, so ship ship – oh what the F:Lkha;slkgjha;d fuck you you retarded piece of shit. He was a super nice guy though and apologized profusely (“I thought you had AK”) before he instaleft. Ugh, go choke on a donut you degenerate loser.

I’m trying to think what sorts of lessons I should be learning from this experience. First of all, worrying about your winrate is almost entirely counterproductive. Short-term variance is apparently significantly more insane that I thought it was, so just don’t even think about your winrate. Chances are it’s meaningless. This is something I’m very very guilty of and it makes me kind of sick to think how much this attitude has held me back. So this whole 100k hand challenge thing I’m doing is probably a bad idea (maybe, I’m not totally sure about that yet).

Second, if you’re playing for a living, be very careful with your bankroll, and make sure you have at least six months worth of living expenses locked away in the bank. I knew this a year ago but never really let it sink in. It sucks to have a big downswing sink it in the hard way. I’ll be fine $wise, but I can’t really afford to withdraw much more from FTP. I’ve still got $2k waiting to be withdrawn from Bodog, but who knows how long that’ll take.

Anyways I can’t think of any particularly cogent third take-away lesson, so that’s it for now. I’m gonna be hanging out in NY for the next few days, and then I’ll probably head home to Virginia for a bit to see my brother. He finishes up his junior year at UPenn on Tuesday. He’s gotten in sick shape for his USMC summer OCS thing, so it ought to be pretty fun working out with him.

Disappointed

So I’m pretty bummed at the moment. I played a marathon, sloppy session tonight at 1/2nl and finished down a little under a buyin. So I’ve now played about 10k hands this month and I’m stuck $2.5k.

I’d like to say I just ran badly again (I lost some gross coolers towards the end of the session) but I mostly just played horribly. I made so many fundamental errors tonight it was kind of disgusting. I’m honestly embarrassed that people saw me do so many idiotic things 😦

I’ve got a lesson with Wilt tomorrow so hopefully he can help me get back on track. Cause this really really sucks and it’s starting drag down other aspects of my life…

Bleh.

On this cloudy May day…

Well, May is off to an unbelievably crappy start.

So far at 6max I’m down a whopping 15 buyins in 3.5k hands, which is one of the biggest downswings of my career. Thankfully it’s only at 1/2 (my biggest was about 20 total buyins, but it was a mix of 2/4 and 3/6 and came out to about -$10k or so) but I have to admit, this is getting pretty sick. I’m maybe not playing superbly but the vast majority of these losses have been completely unavoidable. Just today I ran KK into AA 150bbs deep, lost a 150bb flip w AKo vs 99 at HU, got aipf w AA against KJo at HU and lost, got it in preflop w TT vs A9o CO vs BTN and lost, and got set over setted in a 3bet pot at 6max. Whew. Poker is both very frustrating and very hard when you run this badly 😦

I think I’m still playing pretty well though, so I guess I just need to ride this out. I’ve got a lesson with Wilt on Thursday so hopefully we can make a little progress towards getting back in the green.

The really bleh thing though is that May isn’t off to a great start for non-poker stuff either… I’m pretty banged up from my last crossfit workout (my left wrist is messed up and I seem to have a mild case of tennis elbow from all the pullups), haven’t been studying Japanese all that diligently, and still haven’t received any of my bank transfers from Full Tilt. I’m not quite life busto yet but I’m getting close, so that’s a pretty lame source of additional stress.

This all reminds me of a line from a poem by James Moore I once read in the New Yorker: On this cloudy May day, I keep thinking maybe June is what I need to make me happy…

Hope your month is going better than mine, Alan