http://www.pokernews.com/wsop/2009/event-57/payouts/

Sigh… why won’t PokerNews take any pictures of him? 

Today I went Garden City Casino to get a little bit of live practice in before I arrive in Australia. They’re running a series for the new year that seemed decent enough and didn’t require multiple $100 rebuys like the ones put on at Bay 101.  The structure however was completely ridiculous. Although the first hour was reasonable, the blinds basically started doubling every 20 minutes and the whole thing was a crap shoot within about 3 hours.

There weren’t really any difficult hands or anything while I was there but I was just further reminded of how completely and hilariously bad the average live players is.  Some choice hands:

1)  UTG is a degenerate Asian gambler and limps, someone in MP limps behind.  I have

Ah

and raise to 1k  on the button assuming that UTG will shove or do something retarded.  For some reason SB cold calls leaving behind just 1k, and then UTG quickly does the same, with only MP having the sense to fold.  The flop comes

Th

UTG shoves, and SB and I both call.   UTG shows Ac Jc and SB shows Ad wtf. We manage to fade the diamonds and I chop with UTG.

2) A youngish super nitty dude with a ridiculous lisp has 10BB and raises to 3x UTG.  Awesome play.  UTG+2 shoves over him, and it’s folded back around to him.  He proceeds to tank for 5 minutes trying to decide if he should call getting like 3:1.  He finally talks himself into it and shows…… QQ.  More awesome play.  To make the hand even more ridiculous the shover actually had AA, and the flop ended up being Q high.

3) While I’m in the BB a super short stack with 5k at 1.5k/3k is UTG.  He shoves all in for less than a minraise.  It’s folded around to the lispy dude from hand #2 and he once again tanks for five minutes trying to decide what to do. He’s got like 8BB at this point and finally folds.  I have KK in the BB and call but obviously it’s just no match for UTG’s Q7o.  After the hand lispy dude informs the table that he hero folded AJ there and it would have won.

Overall there wasn’t a single player I ran into that wasn’t completely horrible.  It’s actually pretty remarkable – you’d expect that over the course of the day one of the 30 or so people to sit at the table wouldn’t be embarrassing themselves.

I ended up pretty much bubbling when I shoved 8BB with 94s into the BB and he had AK.  Oh well.  At least I got some of the kinks worked out and hopefully don’t do stupid shit like fold out of turn, accidentally call or think a 3 is a J or something retarded once I get to Melbourne.

I had my first winning Sunday today (excluding the Aussie Millions sat) in months.  I managed to make two final tables on cake, and then proceeded to go out in 10th and 7th in them.  So even though I managed to finish the day up it really wasn’t by a whole lot.

I definitely feel like I’ve been playing my A game lately and that it’s only a matter of time before I finally bink something big, but until then I’m stuck grinding it out.  I hope to record the run from one of my tournaments today for a spicebox video.  At the very least talking through hands will probably help shame me out of making the mistakes I made, or at least realize why they’re mistakes.