Poker and gambling
Safdar Tournament Poker Bootcamp: Results
[I love this photo of Vegas I took on the strip outside Planet Hollywood. Rampant overbuilding, sex blatantly for sale, and Salvation Army, all in the same shot. It's the epitome of the city to me. -Shabbir] Though I played a lot of poker, and met a new poker colleague who lives in the Bay…
Read MorePoker coaching
So my coach and I have settled into a new routine. I play all week, pick a session at random, and then run it through a processor and add my notes and send it off. A day later he sends back notes on my notes and we get on the phone and talk for an…
Read MoreCongrats, you beat 51 people to win an entry into a poker tournament you can’t compete for!
Any denials that "I am not a degenerate gambler" just went out the window. I play sometimes on sportsbook.com, one of the Cake network poker sites that's really a sportsbetting website. I don't sports bet (if you know me at all, you know my aversion to anything else in a casino except poker) but I've…
Read MoreRight now, I phone bank.
But as soon as the election is over I’m playing and analyzing 500 hands a week, minimum. We’re gonna step this up a notch.
Read MoreBuilding your mathematical poker game (preflop)
One of the first things my poker coach did, after looking at a sample of my hands, was to send me to hit the books and tell me not to play poker until I was done with probability homework. He wanted me to work the math out for my game to understand the values of…
Read MoreO’Shea’s Casino and the Vegas Carnival
When I say Vegas is like a carnival, it was never more obvious to me than at O’Shea’s casino. I was sitting at a $1/$2 no limit table, waiting for the poker tournament to start. I had just cracked a guy’s Aces with 76o and two pair when I saw a "little person" walk by…
Read MoreVegas recap
I’ll post the third day wrapup later, but the upshot on Vegas is that I made a total net of $544 on tournament wins, and I lost net $158 on the cash games I played waiting for tournaments to start, or waiting for Tim or Katie to finish a tourney they were in. Those are…
Read MoreSafdar Poker Tournament Boot Camp, Day Two
Today was also a lot of fun though less lucrative. 9am: Rio $35+rebuys tournament, came in 2nd out of 10 for prize of $304After an attempt to hit the 8am Stratosphere tournament, we discovered it didn’t exist and went to Rio for the 9am $35 NL. After I buy rebuys and addons repeatedly, I was…
Read MoreSafdar Poker Tournament Boot Camp, Day One
(Some of the terms in this post refer to the concept of "M" from Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie’s seminal 3 volume set on poker tournament strategy. When sitting in a tournament, "M" is the cost to sit at the table for one orbit, and includes both blinds and the antes. Depending on your M,…
Read MoreRatholing chips: surreptitiously removing chips from your stack while still at the table
One of the basic tenets of fairness in a poker game is that you can’t remove money from the table until you get up. You can (and should) count it all you want, but it’s got to stay on the table. This gives the other players a chance to win it back from you. So…
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