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#376 – A Story? Or Just a Bunch of Stuff that Happened?
I’m playing the Sunday $150 + $13 $40,000 Guarantee NLHE as I write this. I got home from Las Vegas about 9 hours ago, at 2:30 AM, to my 16 year-old daughter Ellie standing outside in our driveway, wearing an old black suit. I’ve since blown $175 at the grocery store without getting anything for breakfast and $256 in the Sunday Brawl.
I just finished up a pair of trips to Las Vegas for the Wynn Classic. To say the results weren’t satisfying would be stating the obvious. If the results had been satisfying, it would have been one trip instead of two. If the results had been satisfying, I would have been telling you every money-accumulating detail in this space. If the results had been satisfying, I would be playing in the Main Event, which started 24 minutes ago, instead of figuring out how I let some doofus bluff me out of a big pot in the Brawl shortly before my elimination.
But I’ve said these two things in the past and I’ll repeat them:
(1) Good play is related to good results, but only generally.
(2) Tournament poker is about failure.
Let me start adding a third lesson to my live-tournament mantra: I am constantly amazed by how much I learn every time I play a live poker tournament.
So I didn’t have successful results. That doesn’t mean a lot of interesting and entertaining things didn’t happen. I want to share those with you, like the tournament table I played where the game, for two hours, resembled a poker game you’d imagine between employees at a meth lab.
I also have some lessons to share. Maybe “lessons” sounds improperly authoritative. But I came back from the 8 events I played – 5 Wynn Classic events, 2 supersatellites, 1 second-chance events – with some very solid ideas about how to use my abilities developed in online tournament play into live tournaments.
I can’t say I right about all these ideas but they feel like good ways to adapt my objectively successful online style to live play. I feel confident a lot of tournament players are getting it wrong. In addition, I think a lot of readers of this blog are, like me, tournament players on Full Tilt who, as students of the game, want to use what we know to play live tournaments. Finally, some of the things I have learned, I think, will improve my online tournament play.
So my goal is to play a couple thousand dollars of tournaments on Full Tilt today and start sketching out what I want to write. Right now, all I have are a few pages of notes, a partly-written blog, and about 30 scraps of paper – Wynn note pads, narrow multi-colored cards a carry when I play, torn-up tournament structure cards, even the back of a cocktail napkin – to document my 10 days in Las Vegas since the end of the Heads-Up Championship.
But it cost me ten grand and damned if I’m not going to learn something from the experience and maybe get a couple laughs. I’ll try to post a bunch of stuff about what happened over the next several days.
