The Worst Winner

Yes, that's right, the biggest online poker event of the year is here, the World Championship Of Online Badugi (WCOOB)! Pokerstars have announced the schedule for this year's greatest tournament series and it looks like this: My intention, or rather hope, is to play all the events. The $22 low is a given, b uying directly into the $109 medium event is just throwing bankroll management out the window, however, as it's such a special event I will make an exception if I can't satellite in. And, given that most of my poker playing currently revolves around playing $4.40 or less badugi tournaments, I should be able to carry on should it all go horribly wrong. The trouble lies with the two bigger events, the $530 high and the $1050k championship event. I'm not begrudging the existence of these two events but looking at the guarantees and buy-ins, isn't it just going to be the same 40 players in both?  Anyways, I have been trying in vain to win a Power Pass package of ...

My foray into Badugi continues.  For a long time I thought I was going to have to satisfy myself with being the fourth best badugi player after finishing fourth or thereabouts time after time in 80-100 fields.  Yet, I persisted.  Then it was runnerup again and again.  On my first attempt at headsup badugi, I was crushed. With little idea of what adjustments to make my opponent pummelled me with aggression and by the time I decided to make a stand, it was too late. My second heads-up battle was also short-lived but while I didn't win, I think I was just unlucky to be outdrawn a few times, so I left more hopeful. My third heads-up experience was a 40 minute epic back and forth battle, alas, I came up short again. But I persevered and at long last won the nightly badugi tournament outright! I have discovered another couple of badugi tournaments on Pokerstars but they are still maxing out at a $4.40 buyin. Until...  Pokerstars announced a WCOOP warm up series called...

For the best part of the last ten years, poker legend Daniel Negreanu has been documenting his annual WSOP grind through a series of daily vlogs. I have watched bits and pieces over the years but never really followed it fully. But this year, one of my friends was buying a piece of Dnegs world series action through the 'Pokerstake' site. A few of our poker grouped chipped in £50 each, having initially been sold the idea (by my friend) that a big win would equate to a five figure return for us. Alas, after a second look at the numbers, the decimal point moved a couple of places and actually it was highly unlikely we could win more the a couple of hundred pounds, realistically.  Unperturbed, I was invested and decided to follow along with Negreanu's world series vlogs for the summer. It's kind of amazing that not only does Daniel churn out these videos giving an real insight into the world of a top poker pro on a daily basis but also that he's been doing it for so lon...

I had a new favourite game: Badugi.  I discovered the game last year, and after playing just three tournaments, I came up with the following sticky note guide to Badugi to keep myself on the straight and narrow: You get dealt 4 cards, a 'badugi' is when you have one of each suit. The lower the cards the better. Pairs count against you. You get three rounds of drawing and betting. Got a badugi? BET BIG! Drawing to a good badugi? Try get there cheap. Someone else betting big? They have a badugi already. Don't waste chips chasing a poor draw. Obviously there's more to it than that but that was my initial strategic observations and seemed to be enough to make the money about half the time on the nightly pot limit badugi tournament on Pokerstars. It is almost the perfect tournament for me, since becoming a parent I'm very much time restricted in what poker I can play, but this tournament; begins around 9pm which is ideal, it gets 80-100 players meaning it finishes around...

~ probably some Scottish guy It's the final week of SCOOP! And despite the uninspiring run of results thus far, I had high hopes for this week, with tickets for both the hold'em and omaha (low) main events! I'd won an $11 ticket on Twitter, been holding onto a $109 power pass ticket from before SCOOP and won the $215 ticket from just 50 cents as part of the SCOOP League Team Spraggy qualification. That's $335 in buy-ins for this week at a cost of pretty much nothing, with over $250,000 up top to win!  Before the grand finale, I used my $11 ticket for a hold'em tournament but don't have much to say about that, nothing particular noteworthy.  #80-L NLHE   -$11   2571/11603 Outside the big Sunday events, there wasn't too much on the schedule this week that excited me, a lot of turbo PKOs in the later evenings, which I'm not really interested in. But that was fine, before SCOOP began I had planned to play a lot more power path tournaments to see if I could r...

As I looked back on my second week of SCOOP, I often found myself expressing the thought that a lot of the people I played against were fools who didn't know what they're doing, and if you listen to any group of poker players freshly busted from tournaments, you'll probably hear a similar sentiment. And yet, this perspective typically comes from the players who are out, the players that have not won.  A few weeks ago I was playing a live tournament and a friend, 'Brentos', was sat to my immediate right. In one hand he gratuitously doubled me up, blind vs blind, by misplaying absolutely every spot in the hand. In fact, apart from folding pre, I don't think he could have made a single worse decision on any street throughout. Afterwards, I was winding him up but he stuck to his guns and justified why he played the way he did based on how he expected me to play, despite me not doing any of the things he imagined I would do. Our cognitive bias makes us unreliable nar...