Been a cool couple of weeks since I last posted. The coolest thing that probably happened that I'll share is my Tufts University visit. I went out to Boston last weekend for their first Tufts Poker Championship. Woke up at 4am to get on the early morning flight... almost slept through the boarding while I was taking a little nap at the gate. Touched down into Boston at around 6pm.
Two of the Tufts Poker Society members, Slava and Craig, picked me up at the airport in this sweet cherry Hummer that Slava drives around. So we cruised to my Amerisuites room in style. I freshened up a bit and then it was off to the tournament.
The president of the society, a cat named Jake Resnicow, spent the last few months putting this event together. He got all sorts of sponsors for it, including Dominos which threw in about a hundred free pizzas, PokerRoom.com, which gave the tournament a prize pool, and Bluff magazine, which donated about a thousand magazines. Speaking of Bluff, if you've never checked it out is definitely worth the subscription... one of the better poker mags out there.
So there we are in this big auditorium all setup with a tournament table, a local band called "The Juice" playing some pretty good covers, and some pretty big televisions all ready to show the one-table tournament. It would be me playing against 8 finalists who all went through a few weeks of qualifiers to make it this far. Jake had managed to get a jewlery company to donate a few kick-ass trophies for 1st through 4th place. And the top five places all paid money, with a cool grand going to first.
The auditorium filled up with college students. They threw t-shirts and playing cards out into the audience and at 8:30pm the tournament started. We each had a thousand chips. The blinds started pretty small with the limits going up every fifteen minutes. At every blind increase, they'd give out prizes to the crowd. Everybody at the table played pretty solid and nobody wanted to be the first one out. We didn't lose anybody until an hour and half in.
I didn't play many hands at all... just a few are of note. About an hour into it, after getting blinded down to about 750, I picked up rockets in the SB. I think the blinds at this point were 50-100 with 10 antes. The button decides to raise to like 400 and I push the rest of my stack in. He's got A2 and calls... I double up.
The next time I was in the BB I had 55. The smallest stack at the table only had about 300 in front of him. He pushed all-in with something like Q7 and I called. The board came out clean... something like 962. Turn was another 6. River was a 9. Half the table thought I'd won the hand, but I saw right away that the second pair on board counterfeited me and his Q played. Sick.
Now it's about twenty minutes later with the blinds up to 100-200 and antes at 30. By this time we had only lost one player. I'm at about 1300 and pick up tens. The same guy who pushed with Q7 pushes his meager stack in again for about 600. A really small stack calls 400 of it. I'm in the cutoff and decide to play for it... I push the rest of my stack in to dissuade the last three players to call... but one of them picks up Kings. The other two guys each had something like A2 and AQ. The Cowboys hold up, two players are knocked out, and now I'm down to a little less than 400.
So here's a little tourney strategy... I'm now at a point where I've got less than 2x the BB. So basically if I push it's pretty close to 100% that I'm going to get called. This situation comes up all the time in tournaments, and I think it's a pretty big mistake to wait for a hand like KTo and push. I think it's far better to just wait for the BB and hope for the best. The thing to remember is that in spots like this, even if you double up, you're probably going to still be in a must-call situation when that BB hits you. Unless I get a pair over 88s or AK or AQ, I'm usually just going to wait for the BB and take a random hand against hopefully overcards.
Anyway, that's basically what happens... I wait until the BB and get dealt J5. The button raises with AK and I call. The flop comes out happy with a Jack... turn is a Queen... river is a Ten. Good game guys.
So after that the weekend really begins and I basically spend until Sunday chilling out with Jake and Slava and the rest of their crew. On Friday I got to be on this show on the college station called "Jumbo Love Match" which was basically a Chuck Berry ripoff. I was behind a screen and asked three female students questions to weed out the best pick. "First question... contestant one. I'm a degenerate poker player which means I'm quite often broke as a joke. What would you think about a romantic dinner at Taco Bell?"
The decision was pretty easy... for one thing, two out of the three students were freshmen, which is way too young for me. I generally gravitate towards older women. For another thing, one of the freshman students never gave an answer more than two words. And the other one, when I asked "if you were a smoothie, what flavor would you be?" replied after not too much thought... "Mango." Yuck. That's the worst fruit smoothie flavor of all time.
So I pick the graduating senior, a pretty student named Jackie, and we go out for a bite to eat with the two co-hosts (who were slightly drunk from passing around a brown bag while doing the show), Jake, Slava, and a few others. It was a pretty good time.
The rest of the weekend was pretty filled. A reception where me and about twenty other students tossed around some chips for fun and ate some more of the donated pizza, a few chillout sessions with Jake and his friends, a few Boston bars, an interview with XYTV, a homegame with Slava. I think the highlight though was doing a student tv spot with two students named Tara and Heather (more friends of Jake), and hanging out with them a little later arguing about reduced-fat cheese-its. Good stuff.
I kept it pretty low-key for the weekend... Bill W. would be proud. Tufts has a good 'n rowdy crowd and pretty much everywhere we went there was a lot of binge drinking. But I'm 24 and don't even pretend anymore that I can hold my own against these younger frat boys. I kept the drinking to a minimum and managed to go the weekend without a hangover. So it's Sunday morning and I'm back on the plane to Fresno (thanks, Noah, for taking me in so early).
When I got back into Fresno I checked into a little motel in Kerman... I've been hanging out with Gianna a good bit this week which has really gotten my spirits up. We've been on pretty rough terms for too long and I've felt so shitty about it. I really didn't want to leave Fresno on bad terms with that woman.
Gianna had been such a big part of my life for so long... I'd pretty much built a vision of the future and she was it. When she broke it off, I felt like half of me was cut away... and for the last few weeks I've been lamenting. I'd call her a few times a week and it always ended pretty bad. This week, though, has been great. We've been able to just chill and talk again, and it almost feels like old times. I'm not holding on to any false-hopes that we'll get back together and things will be like they were... she's moving back to LA and it's looking like I'm going to be setting up in Vegas. But I do feel like I'm going to be able to keep a friend that I was pretty close to losing for good.
One last thing that is cool as hell... I worked out a deal with a fellow player named Danny. He agreed to buy two iPods and give me one if I filled them both up with songs. I've got about three days worth of pretty smooth tunes. So between the Tufts trip, the iPods, and Gianna... things are looking pretty good.
