FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#375 – Hit the Ground Running (& Writing)

Posted by Editor | Filed under Me in live tourneys, Me in online tourneys, Wynn Classic

I took a week away from the blog after the Heads-Up Championship, as you undoubtedly noticed. I was playing the Wynn Classic, playing online, blundering my way through some family issues, putting together the CardRunners post (#374), and giving Full Tilt the time to switch the blogging program and redesign The Full Tilt Poker Blog.
Let me say this at the outset: the CardRunners guys operate a lot quicker than me and Full Tilt. Within minutes of the announcement of the Full Tilt/CardRunners alliance this morning, I noticed that Andrew Wiggins was playing 6 games of $5-$10 PLO. The page you are now reading is supposed to go through a redesign. I have no idea what that involves but I’ve passed along the following ideas, and I hope they will be implemented:

(1) Category/indexes for each blog – This way, if you want to see all the poker strategy blogs, or all the Phil Gordon blogs, or all the FTOPS blogs, you can do so.

(2) Comment and response – I’ll try to get it set up so you can comment on the blogs and I can respond. I wanted to do something like that in the forum but it just wasn’t feasible for me to work on blogs and separately monitor what readers were writing and responds. Perhaps this will work better.

(3) Andy Beal v. the pros, 2006 – I wrote a series of lengthy articles about Beal’s games with the high-stakes pros at the Wynn in Feb. 2006. I own the internet-rights to the pieces and I want to post them, with new graphics and illustrations.

(4) Favorite posts – Each post, as I write it, seems like a gem to me. But there are certain posts I look back at and particularly enjoy, or that I keep encouraging people to read.

(5) New bio – I’ll update my bio, photos, and produce an FAQ.

During my week away, I played three events at the Wynn Classic. Great tournament, terrible players. (You already know, don’t you, that I didn’t cash if I’m running down the competition? Which is ironic because you’d think I’d want you to believe it was Allen Cunningham and Phil Ivey beating me rather than Helen Keller and Wrong-Way Riegels.) I lasted until late at night in both Limit Hold ‘Em and Omaha Eight-or-Better but failed to cash. I lasted just 90 minutes in No-Limit Hold ‘Em but lost all my chips with J-7 on a flop of J-7-3 rainbow. It happens. But I love the Wynn and poker director Deborah Giardina and tournament director David Eglseder have very quickly put together a great series of tournaments. In particular, they’ve managed to bring in dealers and floor personnel without significantly reduce the quality of the people you hope to find in those positions. It’s not fair to compare what Harrah’s does at the Series because they need hundreds, probably thousands, of new people for seven weeks, but it still impresses me whenever a service business (like a poker room) can accommodate a bunch of extra business in a short time. And let’s face it: poker players can be rotten, demanding customers. I’m going back there later this week to play some more.

Thursday is $2,080 NLHE and Friday is $3,100 NLHE. Saturday is satellite day and Sunday is the start of the Main Event, $10,000 + $200 NLHE. Initially, I was going to play the Main only if I satellite in. Then I decided to put up the $10k. Now I’m unsure, trying to gauge if I’m comfortable with my no-limit game. There’s also the matter of skipping the Full Tilt Sunday events. I know it sounds goofy to build myself into a tournament player and then potentially skip a big-money tournament because of online poker, but the Sunday events on Full Tilt are looking pretty sweet. I want to start playing the Brawl every Sunday and try to climb the leaderboard on “career” knockouts.

In the Sunday HORSE, I finished 10th yesterday, to go with my two wins this year. And the big event this Sunday is the $1 Million Guarantee. I’m still thinking it over. I’m still trying – and still failing – to get Full Tilt to rechristen a tournament as “Michael Craig’s Candyland.” I haven’t done anything in the Turbo Hundo lately and I heard someone else has won it four times. The HORSE is probably too big a deal for me to get my name on, plus I dropped all the way to 10th last Sunday, after a couple recent wins. There is, however, a new candidate. Full Tilt is running, at 20:45 ET, a $69 + $6 $5,000 Guarantee double-stack limit event every night. I first discovered it last Friday, when it was HOSE. I won it. (That makes this the third brand-new tournament I won the first time I learned of it.) The next time, it was HORSE and I finished 2nd. On Sunday, it was LHE, and I finished 4th. Unfortunately, I busted out long before the money tonight, when it was Omaha OEB. But I’ll keep trying.

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