Shabbir's Diary

World Series Of Poker schedule for 2007

The WSOP schedule is out, or it's been out for a while and I just noticed it.  Either way, it's pretty interesting.  Since I am not, as many of you might suspect, a wildly rich man, for me to play in a $1,500 event I have to save for a few months to get the buyin together.

This year there's several $1,500 NL no-rebuy events again, but I'm particularly entranced by a couple of non-traditional games.  One is the June 9th $2,500 HORSE event.  HORSE is a mix of games, played one per round.  It's pretty fun, and impossible to win unless you're a decent player or wildly lucky at 5 different games.

The other is a $1,000 SHOE event, on July 1.  It's an amazingly small buyin, but I think that's because they're worried about the turnout given the mix of non-Hold'em games.  SHOE is 7-Card Stud, Hold 'em, Omaha Hi/Lo, and Stud Hi/Lo played one game per round.  It doesn't say, but presumably that's a Limit tournament.  I think that would be a ton of fun to play and not too wildly expensive.

World Series Of Poker Champion doesn't want the attention

"I just thought about what would happen if I won,'' Gold said. "Out of the goodness of their heart, a lot of people would feel like they needed to talk to me, they'd want to know what I was doing, cameras would follow me around. I don't want my life on display. I don't have anything to hide. I'm just not that person. I've always been behind other people. I like making other people famous. I'm not comfortable being in the spotlight. I like my private life.

 

"I also don't want to be responsible for being the ambassador of poker or anything like that. What Greg Raymer does is amazing. Good for him. I'm not looking to quit my job. I like the job I do. I don't need the money. I'm not doing this for the money. I love the competition.''

This interview was done before the start of Day 6, before Gold had won the championship.

World Series Final Table main event

I had a handful of folks over last night to watch the final table of the main event on pay per view.   I thought sitting at home watching it alone would be kind of pathetic, so we had steaks and played a small $5 tournament while we watched Jamie Gold bully the table with his 30 million dollar chip stack.

The smartest thing I heard said on the broadcast was when Doyle Brunson observed that Gold could only lose if he stopped playing.   Given Gold's stack size disparity, he had the ability to put many of the other chip-deprived players to life and death tests without putting himself at all at risk.  He did that over and over again.  When the other players got lucky, they doubled up.  When Gold got lucky, he put them out.

Not a fair fight at all.

Adventures in the desert: My trip to the World Series

So I'm back and finally recuperated from my trip to the World Series Of Poker.  Many important things were learned about my poker.  My preparation was good, but I honestly found computer players in Poker Academy to be softer than the real ones at the World Series.  I have to figure out how to make them harder in the tournament configuration screen.  Always have to have good competition if you want to improve.

That being said, I found loads of poor players at the Paris casino, and reveled in my trouncing of them and cash-making adventures.  It's a real tug though, on one hand they suck, and I make lots of money playing the worse players in the tourneys there.  On the other hand because they suck, my tournament style gets a little too loose which is a problem when I play stronger players.  Since I'm so used to playing bad players I find that, as Chad pointed out on my blog, "I call too much".  He's exactly right, of course, and it took a few days of distance to really see it.

Ultimately I need to master varying my play based upon my opponents, and so perhaps I have the "weak opponent" style down well, and now I need to work on the "strong opponent" style.

My adventures playing 'crazy' $2/$4 limit hold 'em were also a hoot.  I found within myself a maniac style that is fun to play and if used in a session where I'm changing gears a lot, a very useful tactic in a larger toolbox.  I intend to continue honing that style at low limit games in the future.

And of course there was the dinner.  It was incredibly touching that two of my friends made their way out to Vegas to be my cheering section, and I was more than happy to take us out as a thank you.  Our trip to the Vodka freezer was a hoot that I'll never repeat, but never forget.

(Of course we're drinking the vodka tonight at my house as we watch the final table)

I'll definately go out to the WSOP again, as well as Vegas.  I'll probably try a little harder to win my entry next year, but it will still be worth the trip, and the weather's pretty darn nice.

Team Safdar: Live from the WSOP

Welcome to Team Safdar, Live from the Rio at the World Series of Poker 2006. We are Shabbir's local support staff, and will be updating you throughout the day on Shabbir's progress in Event #40, $1000 buyin NL Hold'em. For those of you who have somehow managed to secure secret video of the event, he is at table 51, seat 7. It is not too far from the rail, which makes him easier to spot.

Thus far he has played brilliantly. It's hard for us to see much, primarily because we are trying to avoid alarming him. Our strategy is to sneak in every thirty minutes or so, and peer through the hordes of people who are watching the event with breathless excitement. We have snapped a few photos with a special World Series of Poker camera, designed not to get us "taken into a back room" for using flash photography.

We will try to update every 30 to 45 minutes, and the future champ himself may live blog from his cell phone. 

Vegas baby, yeah!

I've spent the last 5-6 months honing my tournament game.  This wasn't because I'm going to play in a baby $1,000 event this week.  I'm always studying poker, and I treat tournament skill like a muscle, you've got to use it and exercise it to improve it. 

At the same time I didn't want to waste my time and money.  The time is the important part.  I'm going to be away from Sarah and Moishe for 6 days since neither Sarah nor I could think of a way to bring them to Vegas and not make them miserable.  So I'd really like to feel like I played my best game.

My preparation has included:

1. playing lots and lots of 180-person Sit 'n Go tournaments on Pokerstars;
2. scouring Dan Harrington's tournament poker series; and
3. simulating my World Series event through the Poker Academy software tournament simulator.

If you're not familiar with Poker Academy, it's an excellent trainer and the tool I've spent the most time with.  You can configure a wide variety of extremely savvy and crafty players.  You can also completely configure a tournament template to be exactly like any tournament you might play live.  Months ago I downloaded the tournament configuration from the World Series website for my event and set up the hardest set of computer players I could find. 

Then in every spare moment I played the tournament over and over again.  When I'd played it dozens of times and never even made it to the money, I knew it was finally hard enough to be a good trainer.   I even spent one weekend getting up at 10am when my real live tournament starts and playing as if I was in the real tournament. 

What's the point of that?  Live poker is kind of slow, and you get impatient sitting there for hours on end.  Eventually you make a mistake.  I wanted to train myself to get used to that tedium in real time and not have it affect my judgement.

I'm also intentionally playing a tournament where the buyin is low enough that if I get knocked out in the first hour I'm not going to be bothered by the money.  While $1,000 is a lot of money, I'm at the point in my life where I can take $1,000 out of my disposable income and not miss a mortgage payment.  Why all this emphasis on not being bothered by the money?   

Because the key to winning no limit hold'em tournaments is chip accumulation through naked aggression.  Every successful player talks about getting a big stack by playing aggressively.  This is an entirely different style than my cash game style, which is to only put my money in with the best hand.  In a tournament you've got play aggressively, without worrying about the cards.  Does the player already in the pot look weak?  Are his action weak given the cards he could be holding?  Then you're going to raise him out.  Oh, you don't have cards?  It's ok, you don't have to have good cards every time you bet into a pot in a tournament.

This is a tournament style that should either a) knock you out in the first hour or two or get you a big stack to take you deep into the tournament.  But you can only play that game if you can make the money not matter to you.  The money doesn't matter (so much) to me, so I think I've picked the right one.

 

So off I go.  Katie said she'd come along and liveblog my tournament on Thursday, so if I last more than an hour or two, look for updates here.  Either way I'm taking her and whatever's left of my posse out to Red Square on a thank you dinner on Friday.

See you when I get back.