As I mentioned earlier, I’m co-teaching a course in applied game theory at Harvard with my friend Andrew Woods. We have two sections of ten students each. We’re splitting up the teaching (12 classes each). I had my first class yesterday. It’s a solid group this year. I’m looking forward to it.

Things are a bit chaotic in my apartment at the moment. There’s no hot water, so I’ve been experimenting with cold showers. This has to be better than coffee.

I played an hour and a half of tennis yesterday. I’m worried that Patrik could actually beat me on the golf. He’s seems incredibly focused there.

We are at $1.53 to the Euro now. We’re all going broke and we don’t even know it. In Martin Amis’ book, London Fields, he has a line something like, “What happens when everyone’s a thief? We hadn’t though of that.” In financial markets these days, it’s more like, What happens when everyone’s broke? Scary world.. things that are supposed to go up go down and everything else goes down as well. You can see I’m not running good.

Not too much poker lined up in next two months…. six days of big live cash, no tournaments.

Brandon

That is my conclusion.

At Commerce, 34/hour rake is slowly busting everyone. Feb was a disasterous month for the poker economy… Commerce Casino and Phil Ivey got all the money and, as far we know, they already had a lot.

In the real world, $103 oil and record lows on the dollar means everyone is already poorer than they think. Everyone I know spent too much in the good times and is now losing money rapidly.

I’ve been training hard for the bet with Patrik. I’m constantly fighting minor injuries (first rotator cuff, now shin issues). I can buyout of golf for 50k if I’m injured and he can buyout of tennis for 50k, but other than that there is no injury allowance. This bet has made me realize that my body fat is quite high and I’m basically slow and out of shape. I’ve improved pretty dramatically in the past two weeks, but conditioning and speed are going to be the two main factors for the match.

Illya Trincher was telling me that he was a top ten ITF junior at one point. Benyamine was as well. The two of them have a match set for the summer and Benyamine has already lost forty pounds.

BA

Not sure where my last entry left off, but last weekend my mom was in San Diego and I went down to visit her.

I signed up awhile ago to take the Series 7 exam in LA on Feb 22. It’s a six-hour securities licensing exam and I needed to pass it to trade with Bob Bright’s firm, Bright Trading. I gave myself four days to study for this exam. I stayed in San Diego for most of this time. I thought I would fail b/c one of my best Harvard students took the exam recently and he barely passed after much more study. Then to make matters worse I was perhaps the most undisciplined I’ve ever been during a study period. It’s tedious stuff and not particualy easy to focus on, but I did a horrendous job. I might have studied 9 hours total over four days. I mean, I can’t even recount the various proscratinations. At one point, I spent four hours reading Rolling Stones magazine, including a 10000-word article on Britney Spears.

I stayed in downtown LA on Thurs night and I somehow wrote down the directions wrong to the test site in Pasadena, CA. I ended up in Encino, CA (not close), ten minutes before exam time. It was rush hour, so I got to the exam an hour and twenty minutes late. They let me take the exam but they deducted an hour and twenty minutes from my test time. I thought for sure I’d fail but halfway through I realized that I would be OK. I scored 82% correct; 70% is a pass.

Friday night I went to Madeo with Kenny and a few others, then I went to Goa with some LA friends and ran into D Williams and JR Ballende. I played the 10k LA event on Sat. I mostly played well until there were about thrity minutes remaining. At that point, I made the general comment to the table, “Is it stuffy in here?” It was of course hot and disgusting, with five hundred people crammed into a relatively small room upstairs at commerce. And I was not at my physical peak, having gone out the night before, and having consumed absurd amounts of caffeine in my mostly failed study attempt the week before. So I proceeded to come up with various justifcations for giving away my chips. On my bustout hand, I reraised a habitual raiser with 46s from the button with the intention of giving up if called. He called and the flop came 3-5-10 with one spade. I shipped it in for 1.3X the pot and he called with jacks.

Brandon

I played at Commerce on Tues night. No poker since then.

I’m going to be in LA until the end of February, at which point I’m flying to Cambridge, MA.

I’ve been playing a huge amount of tennis for my bet with Patrik but sadly I overdid it; I’m having some rotator cuff sensitivity that will sideline me for two or three weeks in tennis and probably one week in golf.

I just finished Nassim Taleb’s new book The Black Swan. I participated in a forum about topics from this book for Garp Risk Review Magazine back in April. I don’t think the book came out until early summer, so oddly most of the forum participants hadn’t read the book.

This is a fabulous book, one of the best popular econ/finance books of the last few years (another, The Misbehavior of Markets, covers similar territory and is written by a friend of Taleb’s, the legendary Benoit Mandelbrot). I was quite surprised that I liked this book becuase, for me, Taleb’s first book, Fooled by Randomness, covered overly familiar territory and used trite examples. Also I found the author’s tone a bit annoying. I was shocked that it was seen as an innovative, insightful book on the Street. If someone recommended the book to me, my opinion of them instantly went down.

How can an author improve so much on the second try? Taleb is now someone I desperately want to meet. My theory is this….
If you write a book, you do so (if you are not deluded) under the expectation that very few people will read it.
Thus at a certain point, you say, “OK, additional progress is hard fought at this point. My book is almost as good as it’s going to get. I could read this and read that and edit this and edit that. But I’m ready to finish up.”
Now possibly your 80% effort is, in the case of Fooled by Randomness, OK, and for one reason or another a lot of people happen to buy it.
You then get a big advance and a guaranteed readership (in the case of Taleb, he knows that at least 100,000 people will read his book, a staggering number is this genre).
With this guaranteed readership, the marginal investments of time now become worthwhile for you to undertake and you produce a second book that is dramatically better than the first.

I just replied to a popular post on twoplustwo about “online poker millionaires”. My post…
most people who make it don’t hold on to it.

i was reading bluff last week. there was an article about the WPT and lipscomb made some comment about the fact that wpt tournaments had made 90 poker millionaires (can’t remember exact number). it would be fun to go through and see how many of the ones who were made millionaires (meaning they didn’t have a mill before and they didn’t have a staker who took most and they didn’t have substantial debts going in), and look at how many are STILL millionaires. let me state the obvious: most poker players are sick. they’re not the best at holding onto money. the ones who aren’t gamblers spend too much when times are good. if you did the above calculation and excluded FullTilt stakes/infusions, the number would be low. below five would be my guess offhand and i haven’t look at the list of winners.

wait they actually have a link for this stuff

http://www.worldpokertour.com/Players/WPT_Poker_Made_Millionaires.aspx

maybe five is low, maybe not. not a fair test for wpt since those who tend to hold onto money are usually somewhat rational re:bankroll management and so tend not to play 10k tournaments without selling pieces or taking backers.

Brandon

I’ve been in Palo Alto for the last week.

Can’t remember where the last blog left off, but basically I was tilted by a huge bluff that Guy Laliberte put on me in PLO, and I immediately booked a flight out of Vegas.

I’ve mostly been hanging around my apartment. Watched the Super Bowl last Sunday. I once played neighborhood football with Eli and Peyton when I lived in New Orleans… this is my claim to fame in major athletics, as I never played organized football, scored 0 goals in my soccer career, and was a mediocre baseball player before I failed to prevent a baseball from getting past my glove and breaking my skull (left orbit bone).

I was at one point a half decent tennis player. At my best I was ranked around 150 in FLorida in the under-14s (which surprisingly is pretty good. These days I would imagine it’s even more competitive). I quit at 15 or so, and my closest friend (Will Brown, who was ranked about the same as me in the 14s) went to Nick Bolleteri Tennis Academy and ended up playing at the University of Florida after being ranked top 20 nationally in the 18s.

Now this bet with Patrik has me fired up on the tennis front.
The bet is 100k in tennis in July, 2 of 3 sets straight up, on clay, and 100k in golf, 18 hole stroke play on a fairly difficult course. Right now he’s way behind in golf (like 20 shots behind) and I’m way behind in tennis (prob 6-1, 6-2 if we played now) and he’s an infinitely better athlete. Plus he’s in shape and I’m not. I think I’m the favorite b/c if I play a lot of golf I’ll have him drawing dead there and there’s no way that I’ll be dead in the tennis if I work. Plus from what I can tell he has more money than me, so on the margin my incentives are better.

I read a short little book this week that’s hugely popular in Silicon Valley… it’s called The 4-Hour Workweek. This thing is hilarious, you have to get it. I want to meet the author. Among his views….Email and texting are the biggest waste of time in modern life. You should check your email twice a day and not in the morning, as that tends to derail you for the rest of the day. You should have a ‘to do’ list every day, but on that ‘to do’ list you should highlight two critical tasks and make sure you get those done…. this will put you ahead of the game since most people have a long list and accomplish nothing.

By the way, I haven’t mentioned it anywhere yet, but I’m co-teaching a course at Harvard this semester in applied game theory (with Andrew Woods). I designed the course and frankly I think it will be the coolest undergrad game theory course in the world. We have a few classes that hit cover stylized card games of the type found in the Mathematics of Poker (Matt Hawrilenko will be a guest in those three classes).

Brandon

So Guy Laliberte bluffed me in a big pot and it put me on such tilt that I had to book a flight immediately.

1k-1k PLO. Ivey limps for 1k. I get froggy and raise to 5k on the button with Kc3c4s5s. By the way, I don’t know if froggy is a word, but Viffer has taken to using it and I like it a lot.

SB calls, Guy calls from BB, Ivey calls. Flop 4c6cJc. Check, check, check. I decide to check. Turn is Qc. Check, check, check. I bet 20k. SB folds. Guy wants to fold but has chips in his hand. I really want him to call. He calls. Ivey folds.

River is a 9c. Guy bets 30k into 60k pot. I decide that I can’t let him out for 30k.

In retrospect my line should be min-raise, call a push. Why? He can only legitimately push one hand: 8c10c. If he has this hand, he’s going to bet the turn or check and autocall when I bet. Instead he waited forever and acted like he really wanted to fold. This could have been an acting job for Ivey’s benefit with AcXc but he’s not going to 3-bet push the river with that hand. Plus my line (bet after everyone checks the turn, min-raise river after Guy min bets) really makes it look like I’m f’ing around.

If I’m going to fold to a push, I should raise to 70k (instead of a min-raise to 60k) b/c it makes it less likely that he’ll move on me.

The reason I can raise for value is that I can easily have a straight flush with my line. Plus, he can’t bluff me with a naked ten unless he calls the turn with a ten-high flush (like Tc7c) and then decides to turn that hand from a calling hand to a bluffing hand after I raise the river.

At any rate, I did the worst possible thing– I min-raised and then folded when he pushed. He had an Ac and three diamonds in his hand. In other words, he has a billion and change and just decided it was time to push. We were thinking about things a little differently.

I have a bet with Patrik…. around July 10, we are going to play golf for 100k straight up and tennis for 100k straight up. Beating Patrik in tennis might be my biggest goal in life at this point. Patrik is a first class athlete and I am very average. Right now, he beats me about 6-1 in tennis and I beat him in golf by 18 shots.

Brandon

I don’t think I’ll miss the Australia tournament again. It’s a blast. I love being around the tennis and there’s a huge amount of gambling going on.

Australia is an amazing country. I only saw Sydney and Melbourne, but I’m looking forward to checking out more. The country seems to be exceptionally well run. There’s a bit more of a community feel than in the US. While I was in Sydney, they had an amazing two-week program of events called the Sydney Festival, with every major venue including the Opera House participating. On the first night of the festival, they shut down a good portion of the city and had a huge number of free concerts taking place over ten hours across five stages.

There was a great Full Tilt party on the last night. At one point, I noticed Tony G and Niki (Kaibuxxe) abruptly leave and I knew it must be game on. Tony G has won so much lately that he’ll only play super huge and he seems to only play in good games.

So Aussie was not a great trip $-wise up to this point…. I busted from the tourney, finished marginally up in golf, down 25k in tennis prop bets (spectating) vs antonius and robert alexander and kenny, and down in the Aussie Millions TV cash game. Not sure if I wrote about the TV game in last blog but I played a bunch of crazy hands and I thought I played good to lose only 60k. AFter the game, Gus and I played HU 400-800 half plo-half NL for three or four hours and finished roughly even.

The cash game was 500-1000 plhe/plo. It was a very crazy, very very good game. Durrrr was in. And Antonius. I lost 138000. The story of the night was a monster 400,000+ pot that I lost to Niki. Niki limped. I raised with 789T, ten high dlamonds. Durrr calls. Phil Laak calls. Tony G calls. Niki reraises with weak aces. I call, Phil calls all-in with weak aces, Durrr folds, Tony G calls. Flop is 2d 5d Tc. Niki bets the pot, I raise all-in, Tony folds. It wasn’t much for Niki to call, he has aces with no draws and it holds up. Phil Laak splits the side pot.

Durrrr won big. He was supposed to go with me to Hong Kong but he missed the flight. Hong Kong is amazing. I can’t wait to go back with friends. On Wed night, I went to the Hong Kong Jockey Club races at Happey Valley b/c I heard it was a must see. It is crazy! I’ve heard the Sunday races at Sha Tin are even better. Hong Kong takes their horse racing seriously. It’s all coffee and pen and paper and race forms. I bet like $100 total but there was a huge spectator value for me.

Brandon

We’re definitely doing some gambling down here. I have to get back to normal life soon.

A fit of gambling insanity took place after the 100k Fox Sports Cash Game that took place two days ago. The Cash Game was pretty eventful for me. I lost 54,000 despite being dealt QQ, AK twice, AA twice, TT, JJ, 99 twice, AQs once. I laid down AA vs Durrrr’s set of fours to save 90k. In general I think I lost the min, though I feel like Eli Elezra might have bluff four-bet me preflop when I had queens. I felt like he was bluffing but didn’t put my remaining 85k in.

Gus and I played 400-800 heads up (half plo, half nlhe) for three hours after the cameras left and finished about even. The ring game was 600-1200 200 ante for the last three hours.

So the two days after the Cash Game I played golf with Antonius, KobyTapOut, and Robert Alexander. We played at Capitol Golf Club, the site of the Ivey matches last year. I think the club is owned by the casino, so almost no one is out there at any given time. I finished up small over the two days. It was for sure the most insane golf gambling I’ve ever seen… on the last hole of day two, KobyTapOut (Jani) lost 180k in one hole when he got a par vs Robert’s birdie. And I think he might have finished close to even on the two days. Anyway, there was just a huge amount of gambling in two days, everything from Chinese at dinner to tossing quarters to betting on the Australian (Patrik won $105,000 bettting props at tennis matches last night).

Brandon

First of all, I got some great responses from my last post. I’m still in the process of going throught the emails, but I found someone who I think is a perfect fit.

Melbourne is not nearly as cool as Sydney, but the Crown Casino is a nice place, and it’s fun to have all the poker players in one spot. A lot of tennis players are staying here. One night Federer came to sit literally five feet away from me at Nobu. I should have just introduced myself but instead I stared in awe. Yesterday I had a tennis lesson and Carlos Moya was hitting on the court next to me.

The first day here I played golf at Capital Golf Club with the Full Tilt outing. It was a great day of golf but it was extremely hot and afterwards I realized I was probably pretty close to heat exhaustion. The next day at the gym I ran into Ivey and he talked me into going out again. We never came even remotely close to agreeing on a bet. Golf betting is not something I recommend to anyone. There are two scenarios you can get yourself into: 1) You can get into a bet where you have the worst of it, or 2) You can into a fair bet or a bet where you have the best of it, but if you win you won’t be paid or you’ll be paid far down the road. It’s not too far off to say that this applies to prop bets of all kinds.

Poker has been uneventful. I’m even including yesterday’s early bustout from the tournament. It’s a hell of a tournament. The field is very weak. The cash games here are sporadically amazing. The problem is that to get them you kind of have to hang around the poker room and the poker room is not that pleasant (plus it’s a half mile from the hotel rooms).

I’m going to hang around until early Monday. Hopefully some good cash games will go. I’m playing in the 100k buyin TV cash game tomorrow.

Brandon

OK, I’m going to try to fire up the blog again.

I have some problems with blogging, namely I don’t like to talk about life outside poker that much, yet most of my life is outside poker, and then when I talk poker I don’t like to talk results. The quick 07 summary is that I had huge year live and a terrible year online. The live action was a lot bigger than the online. My gambling in 07 was insane… I had daily swings in live play of a half million or close to fairly often.

Beanie and I are starting up a new site at some point in 08 called Poker and Finance. www.pokerandfinance.com. I think this site is going to be pretty amazing. We’re going to bring in some very accomplished guys to write for the site.

Though I haven’t made the crossover from poker to other stuff, to some extent I’m always trying to. This year I’m going to start trading actively at my friend Bob Bright’s firm, Bright Trading (www.stocktrading.com). I’m also working hard to finish up a co-authored book on behavioral finance.

Poker has made me fairly sick with regard to taking monster bets relative to my bankroll when I think the edge is big. In 2005, the first year I ran big in poker, I lost 230k in one day in one stock at a time when my bankroll was 520k (nov 05). This year I made a million in one day in one stock in July. That was especially insane b/c my bankroll wasn’t that big in march 07; I just ran huge subsequent to that. I followed the July score with huge losses and then huge gains.

I’ll be playing a lot of big online in 08, especially the latter half of the year. I have a sweet online setup in my new apartment, and I’m ready to put in the time again to be a top player online. My online play in 07 suffered from the usual problems of overconfidence. My game selection was terrible. Also, I now believe pretty strongly that you need a dedicated online set-up to play poker seriously.

I’m in Sydney right now. This city is unbelievable; one of the three coolest cities I’ve seen. I mean it just piles strength on strength on strength. It’s like you go to the beach and you think, omg this is beautiful, then you take a look around and and the girls are amazing, like a -2 point curve on Boston or NorCal, then you stop in for lunch and have nice people introduce themselves and buy you beer.

I think www.aussiemillions.com is going to be pretty incredible. I can tell the Aussies take their gambling seriously.

One thing I’m halfway looking for is someone to work with me on trading and other stuff (writing, pokerandfinance.com, analyzing online poker games, etc.). My ex-Harvard students are ideal but they don’t want to take the career risk associated with doing random stuff for a guy who does random stuff. Shoot me an email at badams2525@gmail.com if interested. I imagine there are some twoplustwo frequenters who’d be ideal. I could conceivably partner with someone rather than hire someone. I don’t really have time to mentor so the person I’m thinking of would have to have a very heavy background in poker, finance, and econ.

Brandon

I’ve been travelling around a lot. I’ve been in LA and Vegas a lot in the past month, playing a lot of poker. It turns out that I’m a bad blogger…. the more interesting my experiences, the more I think, “Am I really going to put that in a blog?” So the whole thing just doesn’t work out. But I’ll keep at it.

I played this pot on Saturday….
Full Tilt Poker Game #3991315183: Table Pantheon (6 max) - $200/$400 - Pot Limit Omaha Hi - 5:29:00 ET - 2007/10/28
Seat 1: Luck123 ($8,000)
Seat 3: Gus Hansen ($62,587)
Seat 4: David Benyamine ($135,351.50)
Seat 5: Brandon Adams ($48,437)
Seat 6: pokerinvestcouk ($32,996)
Gus Hansen has 5 seconds left to act
Gus Hansen posts the small blind of $200
David Benyamine posts the big blind of $400
The button is in seat #6
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Brandon Adams raises to $1,400
pokerinvestcouk has 15 seconds left to act
pokerinvestcouk calls $1,400
Gus Hansen calls $1,200
David Benyamine calls $1,000
*** FLOP *** [2s 5c 4c]
Gus Hansen has 15 seconds left to act
Gus Hansen bets $5,600
David Benyamine calls $5,600
Brandon Adams has 15 seconds left to act
Brandon Adams raises to $28,000
pokerinvestcouk folds
Gus Hansen has 15 seconds left to act
Gus Hansen calls $22,400
David Benyamine raises to $88,800
Brandon Adams calls $19,037, and is all in
Gus Hansen: ups
Gus Hansen has 15 seconds left to act
Luck123: i dont know him, who do you think he is ?
Gus Hansen calls $33,187, and is all in
David Benyamine shows [Kd 4s Kc 4d]
Brandon Adams shows [5h 7s 3s 6s]
Gus Hansen shows [6h Tc 3h 7d]
Uncalled bet of $27,613 returned to David Benyamine
*** TURN *** [2s 5c 4c] [5d]
*** RIVER *** [2s 5c 4c 5d] [8s]
David Benyamine shows a full house, Fours full of Fives
Gus Hansen shows a straight, Eight high
David Benyamine wins the side pot ($28,300) with a full house, Fours full of Fives
Brandon Adams shows a straight, Eight high
David Benyamine wins the main pot ($146,709) with a full house, Fours full of Fives
Gus Hansen is sitting out
Brandon Adams is sitting out
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $175,011 Main pot $146,711. Side pot $28,300. | Rake $2
Board: [2s 5c 4c 5d 8s]
Seat 1: Luck123 is sitting out
Seat 3: Gus Hansen (small blind) showed [6h Tc 3h 7d] and lost with a straight, Eight high
Seat 4: David Benyamine (big blind) showed [Kd 4s Kc 4d] and won ($175,009) with a full house, Fours full of Fives
Seat 5: Brandon Adams showed [5h 7s 3s 6s] and lost with a straight, Eight high
Seat 6: pokerinvestcouk (button) folded on the Flop

In other news, Viffer (Dave Peat) played for 77 hours straight (in the same seat, no significant breaks) at Commerce recently. By the way, for those who don’t know, he’s one hell of a live poker player when he’s on. I think he even managed to book a win on that marathon session. One of the overlooked arguments for booking a win and going to sleep after, say, 16 hours, is that if you keep going, you will often find yourself in the situation of, “Shit, i’ve been playing for thirty hours, but this game is too good to quit. No way I can leave.” And next thing you know you’re 77 hours deep.

I think Gus has been winning a decent bit on FT lately. One thing that (sometimes) seems to work out for him is, if his hand has any value at all, he’s going to see it through. I mean he’s not folding away much of his equity.

BA

I’ve been running pretty terrible lately. Whenever I run bad, one thing I think is…. “Shit, when things were going really well, why didn’t i just say, ‘hold up, thing are going really well right now. why not just consolidate these gains?’” People never do that, they just push and push.

Here’s a major psychological difference b/w running good and running bad….
When you’re running good, you’re generally very in the moment. You’re entirely focused on the present and the future and you take very little time to reflect on your good fortune. This is a good thing to the extent that it makes it more likely that you will continue your run.
When you’re running bad, you’re focused on the past. You’re focused on your mistakes and your bad luck. You tend to look back at your path and note that changes in any number of initial conditions would have led to a more favorable outcome. All of this makes it more likely that you will make further mistakes and worsen your run.

Here’s one trade that blew up recently…
LKTJE.O CALL NETLOGIC MICROSYS $25 EXP 10/20/07 CALL NETLOGIC MICROSYS $25 EXP 10/20/07 -350 $9.701 +0.50 -$339,500.00 -$17,500.00
summary… when you write calls, you don’t want the stock to go up. i wrote a lot of calls and the stock went up huge, and these calls consitute just over half of my NETL position.

Looking at this past year, here’s the summary….
Jan/Feb/Mar. At one point, I lost 8 consec all-ins for more than 40k when I was an 80-20 fav or better when the money went in. Sometimes I’d be like 92-8. I played in very good games during this time and ran v v bad.
Apr. Good poker month.
May. Will go down as the best month in my poker life. Just silly.
June/July. Very good. Some big wins and only one huge loss. Did a bit better than breakeven in tournaments. Had a couple of big scores in the market as well.
Aug15-now. Ran terrible in both markets and poker.

Now in $ I’m right around where I was at the start of the main event.

BA

I’m flying out tomorrow at around noon. The trip’s been a failure on the poker front. I played two short sessions online and lost both times, and I didn’t cash in any of the tournaments. In the big tournament, I got all-in on day two with AsQc vs KhQd on a Qs9s4c flop (30k pot) and lost to a river Kc.

On the plus side, it’s been a lot of fun to be back in London. I’m staying in a hotel that I lived in for four months when I was a student in 1999. Some of my close friends are living here now and I’ve had time to hang with them.

London has become insanely expensive. This tournament is going to have a tough time making it. It’s just too costly for players to come here.

I ate at four nice restaurants while I was here, all of them Chinese. The best of these by far was Mr Chow. I drank too much last night for the first time in a long while (at China White with Craig Abrahams and Kenny Tran). Drinking just isn’t worth it. It really is stupid.

I’m headed to New York tomorrow and then Cambridge soon after.

Brandon

It’s fun to be back in London. I was a student at the London School of Economics in 99-2000. The city looks pretty much the same. It’s definitely much more expensive. Some of the players are staying in the Sanderson Hotel (or something like that)… the cost is min $1000/night. ERik123 says his room is $1500/night. I have the cheapest room of any poker player, forty pounds per night. I’m staying in a hotel that I lived in for four months in 1999. I booked Kenny Tran in the hotel and he left me a message….’what the f8ck, man, is this some kind of joke?’ No, man, it’s London, get used to it. So he moved to St Martins Lane, five hundo a night.

The poker has been OK. I finsihed close to the bubble in both the HORSE and PLO events. That was too much poker in four days. I’m still in the Main Event with 15000 chips. There was some horrendous play in the tournament. One guy at my table laid down a big full house in a spot where there was simply no way it was not good. Farzad Bonyadi said. “If you put a gun to my head in that spot and said, ‘if you are wrong, i’m going to shoot you’, i still would have called”.

Brandon

Brandon Adams at World Series of Poker Europe

Brandon Adams, Poker, WSOPE, World Series of Poker Europe

LA beat me up a bit. I’m in NY now, watching the US Open until tomorrow with friends and family.

On Thurs night, I played in a game at Commerce with Kenny Tran, Jeff Katzenberg, Michael Chow, Bruce Parker, Dave Peat (Viffer), and a few others.

I lost one huge pot against Bruce Parker….
I flopped a set of queens on a queen three four flop w/ two hearts. There was about 4000 in pre. I bet the pot, Bruce calls. Turn is a four. Bruce checks, I bet 9000, Bruce calls. River is a five. Bruce checks, I bet about 20000, bruce goes all-in for about 20k more. I call. Quad fours.

How does Kenny make this call?
One can never be sure, but I think I’m tough to read. Kenny just comes up with it somehow, I’ll never know.
Here we go….
the game is playing super loose-passive, so i’m raising a wide variety of hands in position. this is bad for kenny as he’s one to my left. i know he will respond at some point and i’m inclined to defend if his reraise is coming from the blinds. limp limp limp, i raise to 800 with AcJc from the button. Kenny makes it 3000 from the small blind. I decide to call.
The flop is Qh6d8h. Kenny bets 3500, I call. This call will shut Kenny down for a lot of his range here given that we’re deep stack on deep stack and I have position. It’s a metagame play; I have to control the table from the last two seat positions. The turn comes a black queen. This is a better card for me than for Kenny in this spot. He checks, I bet 7000. He thinks and calls. I was messing around with my chips with my left hand and I called the flop too fast…. these were kenny’s tells in retrospect. The river is a black two. Kenny checks. I decide that he will call me so I check. He has black AK. If I bet the river, he’s going to call me and I’m going to be absolutely sick. I mean, I might have to quit poker if I get called for 20k on the end.

Brandon

Leaving LA

Brandon Adams, Kenny Tran, Viffer, Poker, High Stakes Poker