by john | Nov 30, 2011 | Poker, Real Life, Travel, Vegas
If you know where this picture comes from, then you’re either a degenerate gambler or you’ve done waaaayyyyy too many drugs. Or both. In any case, you might recognize the Chihuly sculpture that lives in the lobby of the Bellagio. Or maybe not. But if you’re looking for me for most of the next week, I’ll be closer to that sculpture than I will to any of my normal haunts. I’m heading to Vegas for my annual pilgrimage to the city of sin to hang with some of my best friends that I don’t see nearly often enough.
I started making this trek in December of 2005, and haven’t missed a year. Next year looks a little cloudy because of my impending self-employed status, but something tells me all the poop will miraculously form into a group at the right time and I’ll be there anyway. In those six years we’ve all laughed, cried, drank, overindulged, gambled and won, gambled and lost, married, divorced, lost and found loved ones and generally lived life, gotten older, not a damn bit wiser, and richer for the friendships we’ve made. This is a special group of people I’m privileged to be part of, and this weekend is just like Merlefest for me, only completely different. It’s going home. Only a different home.
Where Merlefest is a chill weekend punctuated by great music and great friends, this blogger gathering in Las Vegas is a frenetic maelstrom of drunken hijinks, crazy prop bets, gambling on anything that moves (or doesn’t) and great meals punctuated by the magical quiet moments among the storm where you connect with someone you don’t really know, but know you should. It’s less about the poker for me nowadays, and a lot more about hanging with my friends. And I can’t wait.
If you’re anywhere near Vegas, this would be the weekend to come out and hang. I’ll be at the Sherwood Forest Bar in the Excalibur tomorrow night starting around 8-9PM. Friday I’ll be at The Pub at Monte Carlo in the late afternoon/early evening drinking and munching with buds. Then Friday night we move to the Aria poker room for mixed game goodness. Saturday we have a private tournament at noon, then I’m wide open after that. Hopefully I’ll run a little better than I did last year, but I’m not holding my breath :). My poker is teh rusty. No real plans so far for Sunday, but I’ll be betting on some football and watching some games. Sunday night I have a bunch of friends running a half marathon, so I’ll be at the finish line cheering them on. Then Monday we come home, and Tuesday I detox. So you kids behave while I’m gone, and maybe I’ll even hook you up with a scheduled post or two.
by john | Jun 28, 2011 | Poker
Some players prefer to avoid thinking about the mathematics behind poker but learning some basic skills in this area could help improve your game.
Poker, like many card games, is a game of chance – but if you can calculate statistical odds, you are more likely to place bets that have a higher percentage of winning and at the same time avoid those hands that are likely to cost you money.
Among the mathematics you can learn to help your online poker game is how to calculate estimated value, which enables you to work out approximately how much each individual play will make – or lose.
Figuring out the pot odds is another way in which you may be able to avoid big losses, by calculating your chances of winning each round and also an estimate of how much money you can make if your odds play out the way you expect them to.
This has been a sponsored post
by john | Apr 17, 2011 | Poker, Real Life, Writing
Not for me so much, but certainly for a bunch of my friends in the poker industry. For those of you new around here, I spent several years doing tournament coverage for major poker news and play sites. Before and during that time I made a little money, and made a lot of good friends. Due to a change in leadership at my major employer, a disagreement with an editor and a shift in focus in my life, I left all that pretty much behind me a couple years ago. Last summer was the first in several that I didn’t cover the World Series of Poker, and I haven’t stayed up late to watch an internet poker tournament in at least a year.
Turns out to be good timing on my part, since Friday the US Dept. of Justice laid out indictments against key figured in the operation of Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and UltimateBet. What does this mean for yours truly? About $700 of my money is trapped in online poker accounts that I won’t be able to get to for the immediate future. I’m sure I’ll be able to get it eventually, and I’m not really sweating it.
What does it mean for some of my friends and acquaintances? Unemployment, major chunks of their life savings locked away in the poker sites’ accounts, uncertainty in their income stream for the foreseeable future, and a lot of other ugliness. I have the utmost faith that most of my friends will eventually come out okay, because they are very bright and talented people, and they also were pretty aware that they were riding a volatile vehicle and it could go KABOOM at any moment. So, with the exception of some denial that may have led some folks to leave more money in online poker accounts than they should have, they’ll be okay in the long term.
But for me, the events of the weekend did make me sit back and look around for a minute. Two years ago, I was counting on about a quarter of my income coming from writing about poker. When that went away, I tightened the belt a little (but not much, because it’s still a significant girth to go around), but I’ve never really replaced that revenue. Now I’m beginning to be in a place where that revenue is starting to trickle back in via book sales. This month will be my best month ever for sales (by a LONG shot), with over 500 e-books sold already. That’s more than triple the number of books I sold last month, and if I’m lucky, I’ll break 900 for the month. That’s a big help with the monthly finances, and with at least two more books to come this year, hopefully we can keep things on an upward trend.
But what happens in the future? Do I quit my job and try to write for a living? I could certainly be more prolific if all I had to do each day was write and promote. But will the money ever be there? I dunno. I honestly have no idea. I have hopes, and I have examples from other indie authors that I’m trying to follow, but who knows if I’ll ever get to David Dalglish numbers, or Michael Sullivan numbers, much less Joe Konrath or Amanda Hocking numbers. I’m not looking for James Patterson money, just enough to pay my bills and live comfortably (and I could be very comfortable in a yacht, BTW). Right now I have a good job and my book sales are finally approaching enough money to be considered a nice side income. For now, I’ll live with that and keep writing. Book 3 of Black Knight Chronicles will drop this summer, with another book coming in the fall. I’m not sure if it will be book 1 of Return to Eden or this odd horror novel that’s been bugging me the past few days. But my point is, I have plenty of ideas, so I can keep writing for a while. And as long as people are buying books, I’ve got something going for me.
by john | Apr 7, 2011 | Poker, Real Life, Vegas, Writing
Ok, not as young as I once was, but as the song goes, I’m as good once as I ever was. I leave tomorrow night for Vegas. I’m going out to attend the National Association of Broadcasters show for the day job, but since the show starts Monday I thought I’d take the weekend and play a bit. Then I found out that the Venetian is having their Deep Stacks Extravaganza poker tournament series this month, so I’ll definitely be playing that on Saturday. My friend Hoyazo went deep in one of those last year for a very nice score, and since I’ve cashed in the Venetian daily tournament several times I thought I’d give it a shot. I get in around 8PM Vegas time Friday, and hopefully I’ll catch a couple hours sleep on the plane so I can stay up for a while when I get there. I don’t really care if I do anything tomorrow night, but I want to be able to go to bed and sleep until at least 8AM Saturday, so my sleep schedule will get right quickly. It’s usually not an issue for me in Vegas.
So if you’re in Vegas, and want to get together, email me. I’ll be at the Venetian Saturday, and hopefully Sunday, and at the Convention Center during the day Monday thru Wednesday. I fly home on the redeye Wednesday night and am participating in a writer’s panel Thursday afternoon. That should be entertaining for everyone!
Book sales are soaring, for some reason I’ve jumped from averaging 3 books a day in February to 20 or so per day in April. Hard Day’s Knight keeps creeping up and up in the Amazon rankings, finally breaking through the 3,000 mark today. Lower is better on those rankings, and all three books had been living in the 20-30,000 level. Now HDK and Back in Black are pretty much living under 10,000, and The Chosen is hanging out around 20,000. I’m thrilled with the progress, and with some recent reviews. Obviously I hope it keeps up, I’ve got truck payments to make :).
Volume 3 of The Black Knight Chronicles is coming right along, I’m probably about 10% finished with the first draft. I hope I’ll be able to get some work done on it while in Vegas, but I’m not holding my breath. NAB is a tough show, with long hours and a huge attendance, so I’ll be working pretty much non-stop the whole time I’m there. That’s okay, I’ve got this weekend to play!
by john | Apr 6, 2011 | Poker
Best Books About Poker
Lots of poker fans love to read about the game but of the thousands of poker books on the market, 95% of them deal solely with things like poker strategy and the mechanics of the game. While everyone would love to know the optimal way to play pocket jacks from early position, it doesn’t exactly make for gripping reading, especially if you’re a more casual fan of the game (or buying a present for a poker playing friend or family member). Below you’ll find some of the best books about poker that take a broader, more writerly approach to the game and include a lot of the fascinating history that makes poker such an interesting game.
“The Biggest Game in Town” by Al Alvarez is one of the most compelling books about poker, coming from a writer that’s well-known in literary circles. Alvarez deals with poker before the online boom of the early 2000s, weaving together a variety of amazing stories, anecdotes, and interviews with poker players in the early 1980s as they made their way to Las Vegas to take on the world’s biggest poker games. Be forewarned, though, that Alvarez deals with an older generation of poker players (such as Doyle Brunson, Stu Ungar, Johnny Moss, and Nick the Greek), so you’re not going to find any ink spilled on players that weren’t even born in 1983 such as Tom Dwan or Viktor Blom.
Anthony Holden’s “Big Deal’ is another amazing poker book, which chronicles Holden’s attempt to make a go of it on the professional poker circuit for a year from 1988-1989. His book deals much more with the psychological and emotional toll that poker can exact, with players chasing a big score that often remains just out of reach. While it’s very much about poker it also appeals in a broader sense to anyone who’s found themselves chasing a dream that takes them farther and farther away from the people they care the most about in their lives — a plight that many poker players face each and every day.
Jim McManus has contributed two excellent poker books to the canon: “Posititively Fifth Street” and “Cowboys Full: the Story of Poker”. “Positively Fifth Street” includes personal poker action from McManus’ deep run in the in the 2000 WSOP Main Event, with the backdrop of the murder trial of Ted Binion (which is the story he was originally sent to Vegas to cover). “Cowboys Full” is a more historical piece on the evolution of the game of poker over the years, from its humble beginnings to the poker boom fueled by online poker rooms that has seen it grow into a multi-billion dollar global industry.
This has been a sponsored post.
by john | Jan 29, 2011 | Poker
Last week I joined my buddy Jim at a local underground poker room for a Pot Limit Omaha tourney. Now I loves me some Omaha, but I’ve played very little tournament Omaha, or Omadraw as we like to call it. This was a cheap-o rebuy tournament, where your initial buy-in was only $25, with $20 rebuys. Yeah, that always works well for me. I should never, ever play in a cheap rebuy tournament. I should stick to tournaments with one buy-in or $100 or better, because then I care a little more. Or can at least fake it.
I bought in, and did the immediate rebuy to give myself a double stack. Then I shoved it in with bottom set against a made straight and a flush draw, got my full house when the flush hit, and was off to the races. That sounds like the recipe for a big stack, right? Yeah, not so much. I played like complete crap in the rebuy period and fished out a total of $145 out of my pocket before all was said and done. After the rebuy period, people were dropping like flies. The play in this even was pretty spectacularly bad, I’m pretty sure a moderately bright orangutan could have made the final table. And since Jim and I both made the final table, you can judge that for yourself!
I tightened up considerably once we got close to the money, but there was one guy who never shifted gears. He might have been the second-worst player in the whole event, so of course he built a massive stack. There aren’t many things that I consider to be unforgivable poker sins, but being a calling station is high on the list. This guy not only flat-called with flush draws, he would call with ANY flush draw, no matter how puny and no matter how big the bet. He took half my stack early when I led out with two pair and he was my only caller with a flush draw. He picked up bottom pair on the turn and called me again. The river paired his ace, and I checked behind him. He turned over his runner-runner two pair and started to pseudo-apologize for his play, saying he was on the flush draw. Of course he was on the 10-high flush draw, so not even close to the nuts, but regardless. I looked at him and said “Don’t apologize, you gave me the action I wanted. You called when you were behind, and checked when you pulled ahead. I couldn’t have asked for you to play it any better for me.”
Of course half an hour later he calls my all-in with the nine-high flush draw and bottom pair against my Kings and gets there on the river to send me packing two out of the money. I’ll definitely be back the next time they run that tourney, because there’s a lot of money to be made. I didn’t make enough adjustments once we got to the final table, but with a little tweaking, I feel fairly certain that I can pull down a pile of money out of that tourney.
Omaha is a great game, if you’re not familiar with it, you should check out Full Tilt Poker where you can play poker online for free.
