Travel Report: EPT10 Deauville Main Event, Day 1b: One More Step

Yesterday I titled the post “Déjà Vu,” then went and helped report on the second Day 1 flight of the EPT10 Deauville Main Event for the PokerStars blog. And it goes without saying that multiple Day 1 flights always carry with them that inexorable sense of covering the same ground again, so there was a little bit more of that “haven’t we gone through these steps already?”

Speaking of, I managed to find a way in the blog to share a funny story from the last trip here, the one involving myself, my friend Yorkshire Pud, and some wet cement. Click here for the full account from a year ago, then you can read “Following in our footsteps” to read the sequel.

Another highlight yesterday was getting to chat with Jan Heitmann, the German pro, who besides being a great player is also another one of those great reps for poker (in my opinion). He hosts poker shows in Germany and does a great deal, I think, to help bring the game to larger audiences, something in which I’m becoming more and more interested.

The weather thus far has been essentially as it was a year ago, and the same, too, as what I experienced many years back when living in Lille -- cold, windy, gray, and wet. Might be a little warmer than last year, but still not the kind of stuff you want to be caught outside in for long.

Meanwhile, we’ve eaten especially well so far, including enjoying a fairly lavish meal of coquilles Saint Jacques meunière (scallops in fried butter) on Sunday, followed by steak last night. Enjoying a better-than-average breakfast buffet spread each morning, too, all of which is adding up to my starting to feel the need to find some légumes or just switch to salads here if I want to avoid any food-related comas before the week is out.

Am fairly written out and so will be keeping these posts brief this week. Follow the PokerStars blog for more on how the tourney is going and other features along the way from Deauville.

2013 WSOP, Day 21: Min Cash, Max Fun

It was a day of poker playing yesterday for your humble scribbler, not necessarily what I’d expected to do during my one-day respite before joining the PokerNews live reporting team later today. But after arriving Monday night, Rich told me that several guys happened to be off yesterday and were planning a trip downtown to play in a cheap tourney at the Golden Nugget, and I snap-called, glad to have the excuse both to play as well as to hang out with some of the fellas.

Six of us made the trip -- Rich, Chad, Josh, the two Matts (Whitefield and Yorky Pud), and myself. Was a $125 buy-in no-limit hold’em tourney, part of the Golden Nugget’s month-long Grand Poker Series 2013 that features a ton of different games, including mixed games, a Chinese poker event, a Badugi/BadAcey/BadDeucey event, and other off-the-beaten-path fare.

Someone suggested a last longer between us at $20 per, and I agreed while insisting I was dead money among the group. I hadn’t played a live tourney in many months, while all of these guys play regularly. Hell, one of them had even won a WSOP bracelet this summer. (No shinola.)

I had played at the Golden Nugget once before, back in 2009 in a charity tourney hosted by Howard and Suzie Lederer that also involved their old “World Series of BBQ.” (Talk about a blast from the past.) That was the tournament in which I found myself in the embarrassing situation of having Dan Harrington come to my table while I sat with an “M” of 2.

We joked at one point about the sign advertising the Grand series and the non-specific “Big Chip Stacks” item listed as one of the tourneys’ selling points. The list also included “Great Structures,” and even though we were having some fun inserting those phrases into various absurd declarations (“Me? I only play events with Big Chip Stacks”), the tourney did in fact have a lot of play. Levels were 40 minutes, and with the $10 bonus buy -- “optional,” though everyone took it -- we started with 12,000 chips and blinds of 25/50.

After not playing for so long, I enjoyed getting reacquainted with the rhythms of tourney play. Was sort of like getting back in front of a class to teach after taking off for the summer. I knew what to do, but at the very start there was that tiny bit of anxiousness about it all that often characterizes such situations.

I settled in quickly, though, and enjoyed having Josh at my table a couple of seats to my left to chat with here and there. I chipped up a bit during the first three levels to get over 15,000 by the first two-hour break. Then in the fifth level I earned a boost when I came along from the button with a few others following a middle-position player’s raise after being dealt . The flop came , giving me Broadway and a nut-flush draw to boot. The original raiser -- an aggressive player against whom I’d already won a couple of small pots -- continued with a bet and only I called, then I called another bet from him after an offsuit four fell on the turn.

The river brought another king to pair the board, and my opponent shoved for 6,700 (about two-thirds the pot, I think). I thought a while before calling, he showed , and I had just about doubled my starting stack.

I continued to win a few small pots while mostly sitting tight, the next highlight coming in a hand in which I opened with from late position and got a caller from the blinds from another aggressive, more skillful, hoodie-wearing player. Three overcards and two hearts came on the flop, which we both checked, then I turned my flush and ultimately got two streets’ worth of value from him and a surprised look when he saw my hand at showdown.

Meanwhile Rich busted early, re-entered, then busted again before heading off to play cash. Chad went out as well, with the two Matts also hitting the rail to leave just myself and Josh. I mostly just treaded water during the latter part of the afternoon, making it to dinner break with just over 27,000 which at the time was only around 16 big blinds. Out of the 166 entries about 55 other players made it that far, too, with the top 18 scheduled to get paid.

Josh was still in, too, with an above average stack, and the two of us met up with others for a dinner at the Hash House a Go Go located across the street at the Plaza. I had a reasonably sized (and tasty) portabello mushroom sandwich and fries, watching in wonder at the other mountainous dishes around the table including multiple orders of Andy’s Sage Fried Chicken and Bacon Waffle Tower. The meal resembled the tourney, with me short-stacked relative to others’ intimidating “towers.”

After dinner I managed to add chips without putting myself at risk, and with 30 players or so left was sitting at around 40,000 (by then only 12-14 BBs or so). Across the room the Spurs-Heat game was on and it was just about the time Ray Allen hit that game-tying three that I was four-bet jamming, watching the original raiser tank and then fold, then getting a call from the reraiser.

We both had ace-king and would chop the pot, kind of mirroring the game being tied and heading to overtime, and afterwards the original raiser noted he’d folded a pair and would have won the hand. Not long after we were down to about 25 players when I was all in again with A-K and this time was up against A-9. The board ran out a weird 4-4-4-K-K, and suddenly I was up over 80,000 and well out of the danger zone with an average stack.

Somewhere in there a highly unfortunate situation arose for one of my opponents. I was in the big blind, and the player to my left open-shoved all in from UTG for about 17,000. It folded around to an elderly gentleman in Seat 5 (the cutoff) with about 12,000 or so, and he declared he was calling.

He pushed his small stack of chips forward, his small, circular metal card protector sitting on top. It appeared he might have set his cards forward slightly, too, and unfortunately the dealer reached out and slid them into the muck. The player quickly noted what had happened, but it was already too late. The floor was called, and after some discussion it was determined the man’s hand was dead.

That inspired a torrent of what I imagine to be uncharacteristic language from the senior citizen before he departed, then lots of predictable table talk afterwards especially once the chagrined dealer had left. A few noted they’d seen such occur involving players in the 1 or 10 seats before, but never the 5. All agreed it was a crummy way to bust, but several also pointed out that if he’d used the card protector to protect his cards rather than as a chip stack ornament, it wouldn’t have happened.

A total of 23 of us made the next break. I had 82,300 while Josh had just taken a hit to fall to around 77,000. Then he had the bad fortune of running A-K into A-A following an ace-high flop to bust in 22nd, earning me the last longer in a fashion not unlike what Josh had endured in the Casino Employee’s Event when he’d finished 12th and Chad won.

It took a while, but the super-shorties finally ran out of chips and we hit the money around 10 p.m. I had about 15 BBs then, but lost a chunk after doubling up a short-stacked player. He’d pushed with and I called from the big blind with pocket fives, and the flop came 8-2-2. Another player said he’d folded eight-deuce.

I endured a bit longer, then down to around 8 BBs I watched the table fold to a player in the small blind who limped, the same hoodie-wearing one from my first table, in fact. I then jammed from the big blind with A-J, he instacalled, flipping over A-K, and five cards later I was out in 16th for a $258 min-cash, my profit padded a little more by the hundy I’d won for the last longer.

I came away pleased and with a renewed appreciation for those who do this stuff more than just once in a while. I’d made a few small mistakes, and of course left with the inevitable second thoughts about my exit hand. But I was glad to have played reasonably well and most of all to have kept focused throughout, which is a lot easier said than done.

I cabbed it back to the home-away-from-home, the others having all long gone. I thought about how tourneys gradually evolve into these elaborate, fascinating puzzles to solve, with players’ approaches toward the task perhaps overlapping in several ways, but all ultimately being unique.

I probably only had two or three genuinely difficult decisions to make during the entire day and night. In the end, I was only all in and at risk those couple of times with Big Slick on the money bubble prior to my final hand. Of course, my ability to avoid too many crises along the way spoke more to my willingness to fold and patiently await less troubling situations than anything else.

Like a decent percentage of the field yesterday -- perhaps a third or so -- I have gray hair. And I’ll admit I play like gray-haired guys play a lot of the time. Ultimately it didn’t add up to a winning strategy, although I’d like to think I’d have been able to adapt had I gotten any further along.

Best of all, though, was I had a lot of fun playing a great game. Had been awhile.

Now I get to watch others try to figure out these things. I’ll be on the second day of Event No. 32, the $5,000 NLHE 6-max. with lots of big names among the 128 returning. Check over on the PN live blog today to read how the pros do it.

The Pushing Strategy (Pushing Strategy Away)

Was reading a post this morning written for Betfair Poker by my buddy and colleague over there, Matthew “Yorkshire Pud” Pitt, regarding what he found to be a curious conclusion to Event No. 18 of the 2013 World Series of Poker, the second of the several $1,000 no-limit hold’em tourney on this summer’s calendar.

There the Pudster describes how the event which started with 2,071 players had gotten down to heads-up on Wednesday night between Taylor Paur and Roy Weiss. After playing for a while the pair went to dinner break with Paur enjoying a commanding lead with nearly 5.5 million to Weiss’s 715,000.

Looking at the PokerNews live blog (where Matthew was reporting), Paur apparently didn’t want to take the full hour for dinner, but Weiss said he wanted to and so they did.

Upon their return, Weiss shoved all in the first few hands in an effort to try to get back into contention. On the fourth hand he did manage to double up, meaning Paur had about a 2-to-1 chip lead. Then Weiss continued to shove all in hand after hand -- i.e., every single time.

Weiss eventually scored another double to take the chip lead, and then continued to open-shove every chance he could after that. Paur eventually was dealt A-9 and called to see Weiss had 6-3-offsuit. Paur won that hand to get the lead back, then on the next hand Weiss pushed with and Paur called with .

Both an ace and king flopped, then another ace came on the turn to give Paur trips. Paur then managed to fade a club flush draw on the river and won the event.

Kind of interesting to look back at the reporting of that endgame on the PN blog. This year PokerNews is providing hand-for-hand coverage from all final tables, and this is an instance where having the full blow-by-blow of what happened is especially interesting, I think. There you can see how out of 24 post-dinner hands, Weiss pushed all in before the flop 21 times, getting a walk twice and only one time checking his option after Paur limped from the button.

Weiss had not employed his shoving strategy during the 60-plus hands he and Paur had played against one another prior to the dinner break. They’d begun heads-up play with Paur well ahead, and during those pre-dinner hands Paur had whittled Weiss down further. Matthew speculates in his Betfair post that Weiss might have looked up Paur online, discovered his impressive tourney résumé, and thus adopted the new tactic with the thought that perhaps it was his best chance of beating Paur.

The story made me think immediately of that memorable 2008 WSOP event I covered in which Vanessa Selbst won her first bracelet, a $1,500 pot-limit Omaha tourney that ended with Selbst’s opponent, Jamie Pickering, adopting a similar strategy of raising or reraising the pot before the flop every hand, sometimes without even looking at his cards. (Read this post from long ago for details on that crazy finish.)

Paur in fact asked Weiss at one point if he was looking at his cards during his sequence of all-in pushes. That picture above (courtesy PokerNews) shows Paur’s frustration at having to deal with the fact that Weiss had effectively reduced the strategic element considerably, making their endgame much more chance-based because of his one-dimensional line of attack.

Again, Paur’s look reminds me a lot of how Selbst appeared when Pickering was playing similarly at the end of that 2008 tournament. Selbst had dominated the event all three days, leading nearly start-to-finish (including at the end of both Days 1 and 2) with a performance that provided a hard-to-refute argument for her skill at PLO. But that skill suddenly didn’t matter as much in the face of an opponent shoving (or raising/reraising pot, anyway) before the flop every single hand.

Matthew asks at the end of his Betfair post for readers to respond to Weiss’s strategy, evoking the question of whether or not it makes a “mockery” of the game or perhaps even raises ethical issues. To that I’d have to respond that while such play is clearly going to frustrate one’s opponent, it has to be regarded as acceptable, and even smart in certain contexts such as when the difference in skill level between the two players is unmistakably wide.

In other words, any problems with the strategy would have to be directed toward the tournament format and rules of play, not the player.

The situation calls to mind how Daniel Negreanu was raising the issue on Twitter yesterday of there being an unfortunate (to him) preponderance of no-limit hold’em events and not enough fixed-limit or non-HE tourneys on the WSOP schedule. I think the issues aren’t entirely unrelated.

An ending such as the one Weiss caused to happen in Event No. 18 is always going to be a possible consequence of NLHE tourneys, as the format allows for it. Such is a factor that can help make no-limit hold’em especially exciting, but also can frustrate those who seek to ensure poker (and the tourneys of the WSOP) remain primarily skill-based competitions.

Looking Back (Deauville Footprints)

Had some decent travel run good on Sunday with my shuttle to Paris and both flights sticking to schedule. Was great reuniting with Vera at the airport and getting home for a full night’s sleep. Slept a little late, in fact, and after taking care of various post-trip business I’ve now let most of the day get away from me. But I did want to share one last thought about the end of the EPT Deauville Main Event and the experience of spending the week in France.

Now that I’m home, I’m catching up a little with the commentary regarding Super Bowl XLVII. I mentioned last week I was able to watch most of the game in my hotel room, but I didn’t really have time in the following days to see what people were saying about the game.

Been thinking further about the whole crazy shift in momentum that happened pre- and post-blackout in the game. Remember how Baltimore was up 28-6 early in the third quarter when the power went out, then from that point forward the 49ers outscored the Ravens 25-6 to make the final score 34-31 with the Ravens prevailing.

Indeed, if not for some clock mismanagement and weird play calls at the end of that late-game drive by San Francisco, the Niners really should have won the game, which would have led to years and years of talk about the power outage having unfairly stemmed the Ravens’ momentum and thus affected the outcome. But Baltimore won, so that angle will not be pursued.

I was thinking today how the final table went in the PokerStars.fr EPT Deauville Main Event and how the end of the tournament kind of resembled the Super Bowl in some respects.

During the next-to-last day of play, the Frenchman Remi Castaignon built an enormous lead by knocking out several players on the way to the final table. He began the last day with 9.9 million chips when the next-closest player (Walid Bou Habib of Lebanon) had but 3.835 million. Thus did play begin on Saturday with an assumption that Castaignon would very likely at least remain ahead for most of the day, and perhaps might just gobble up all the short stacks and cruise to the win.

It was a little like the feeling after the Ravens returned the second-half kickoff to go ahead 28-6 insofar as the imbalance was now so great that it would take something very, very strange for the leader (i.e., Baltimore or Castaignon) not to remain in an advantageous position for much if not all of the remainder of the contest.

In the Super Bowl, the lights went out, interrupting the game for 34 minutes, and when play resumed it was as though the Ravens and 49ers had switched uniforms. For anyone looking for proof that momentum matters in team sports, that game has provided some hard-to-refute evidence.

The lights didn’t go out Deauville, but something strange did happen at the start of that final table. During the first orbit, Castaignon showed he wanted to get involved right away and use his big stack to pressure others, but got himself into a big mess early in a hand versus the young German, Enrico Rudelitz. Heck he probably felt like someone had pulled the plug on him, the way that hand went.

After calling a raise from late position, Castaignon watched Rudelitz reraise from the blinds and called again. Then he called c-bets by Rudelitz on the flop and turn before the German pushed all in on the river with the board showing .

The pot had bloated to 6 million chips by then, and after tanking for more than five minutes Castaignon called and saw his opponent flip over Q-Q for top set. We were all then fairly amazed to see Castaignon’s hand -- 5-5. He’d made a “hero call” (as they say), and while one could kinda-sorta see how he’d talked himself into it (after the fact, anyway), it still seemed like a major, momentum-shifting misstep.

Suddenly Castaignon was no longer in the lead, but like Baltimore he’d recover and ultimately played a solid endgame to win anyway. Thus, as with the Super Bowl, the story of the 2013 EPT Deauville Main Event won’t really linger over one surprising moment, in this case a first-orbit hand at the final table in which Castaignon surprisingly lost nearly half of his dominating stack.

As I was saying in those brief bursts throughout the week, it was a great experience going back to France and getting to experience a little bit of the culture again, plus a lot of fun, rewarding collaboration with all of the other media folks who were there. As has been the case at the WSOP and these other tournies over the years, I’m grateful to have been part of the effort to share with the poker world what happened at Deauville over the last week, and to have contributed to the chronicling of it all.

Speaking of leaving one’s mark, I’ll share one last funny nouvelle from the week.

I mentioned how a highlight was finally getting to meet in person my longtime friend and colleague Matthew Pitt, a.k.a. “@YorkyPuds” or “Yorkshire Pud.” One morning the Pudster and I were making the short walk from the hotel to the casino, engaged and distracted by whatever conversation we were having.

Suddenly we both looked up and realized the last couple of steps on the sidewalk had been qualitatively different from the previous ones. “Seemed kind of soft,” said Matt, and we looked back to see one newly paved square of sidewalk interrupting the usual pattern. There had been no signs or cones or anything warning pedestrians to avoid treading through, and so we’d plodded right over it, our prints amusingly gleaming there in the still-drying pavement to show what we’d done.

We looked back, looked at each other, and then instinctively (and hilariously) put our heads down and kept walking, perhaps a tiny bit faster than before.

As we walked the same path again and again the remainder of the week, we had to laugh each time to see our handiwork still there. Or footwork, I guess you’d say.

“Look... I was here once,” they say. Kind of like these travel reports....

2013 EPT Deauville Main Event, Day 1a
2013 EPT Deauville Main Event, Day 1b
2013 EPT Deauville Main Event, Day 2
2013 EPT Deauville Main Event, Day 3
2013 EPT Deauville Main Event, Day 4
2013 EPT Deauville Main Event, Day 5
2013 EPT Deauville Main Event, Day 6

Travel Report: 2013 EPT Deauville Main Event, Day 1a

Bonjour, mes amis. Since we’ve last talked I’ve been on a couple of planes, traveling to about 500 miles over to Detroit, then nearly 4,000 more to Paris. Then it was another 120 miles or so by van up to the northwestern edge of France and Deauville.

Again I find myself in a coastal resort city during the offseason, much like the couple of trips down to Uruguay I’ve made during summer months. Was feeling plenty of flashbacks to my time living in Lille years ago as well when reunited with the gray skies and cold temps here in Deauville upon my initial arrival.

I landed at Charles de Gaulle airport late morning on Saturday, then after an hour-and-a-half or so of uncertainty finally was able to get in touch with my scheduled ride to Deauville. It was just above freezing, and when I first climbed into the van that would be taking me to Deauville a brief hail storm erupted, peppering the vehicle with small white spheres. That turned to a light rain during the first hour of the ride, then came blue skies and sunshine for the latter part of the journey.

Got checked in by around four in the afternoon, and eventually hooked up with my PokerNews blogging mates for the week The Conv (Marc), Homer (Chris), and Yorkshire Pud (Matt). Was great reuniting with Marc and Chris, both of whom I have worked with before several times, and finally meeting Matt with whom I’ve collaborated for quite a while now over on the Betfair poker blog.

In fact, me and Yorkie Pud go way, way back. If you look back at the earliest posts here (from 2006), you’ll see him having come around to comment a few times, much as I did at the blog he kept long ago. Looked it up and saw his first comment here coming on a post I wrote in September 2006. Pre-UIGEA, even!

Needless to say, after having communicated online in various ways for so many years, it was like I was reuniting with Matt, too, when we first discovered we’d been positioned just a few doors away from one another on the same floor of a quaint hotel here in Deauville. Kind of like meeting a pen pal, I guess, but more than that, really, given our shared experiences going from recreational players/bloggers to full-time poker writers.

Saturday night saw me, Chris, and Matt walking a few hundred meters up the road to dine at a pizza place recommended to us by Benjo (Santa Lucia), then meeting up with Marc, Sarah, Kristy, Mantys, and Adam later for the Stars welcome party. Made a relatively early night of it, slept reasonably well, then got up and walked just a few blocks north to the Casino Barrière de Deauville to start covering the PokerStars.fr EPT Deauville Main Event.

Yesterday saw the first of two Day 1a flights play out, with just over 300 players taking part. Will most certainly be a bigger group for today’s second (and final) Day 1 flight, although it’s appearing the overall turnout will probably be down from the 889 who played last year.

The tourney went well, with the always efficient running of the show by PokerStars on display. Had to get a casino card, a press pass, and a bracelet to go where I needed, and even then found myself at the end of the day suddenly refused entry back into the tourney area when a guard decided he wasn’t letting me pass after all of his colleagues had for the previous 11 hours.

That reminded me a little of living in Lille, too, I have to admit, and encountering what sometimes seemed whimisical displays of authority. All worked out, though, and to be honest I wasn’t even bothered by it, perhaps having been conditioned to expect something similar from living here before.

I’m sure I’ll write more about the actual tourney and experience of covering throughout the week, but this morning my thoughts are mostly occupied by that crazy Super Bowl XLVII which I was up until five a.m. watching.

Caught a bit of it on a stream at the casino once Day 1a ended, then decided against joining Chris at a nearby bar to watch the game and came back to the hotel instead. Much to my surprise the game was on one of the channels in my room (I’d been told it would only be available on a pay-per-view basis), and so I settled in and watched the second quarter, Beyoncé’s halftime show, the start of the third quarter, the power outage (and a Beyoncé replay), then the rest of the game.

Was a nutty game, and kind of a treat to watch it while following all my friends and others having that cacophonous conversation on Twitter throughout. During the power outage I made a tweet referring to an old Airplane! gag that was retweeted a couple dozen times and rapidly appeared on one of those tweet-collecting reports you sometimes see, “The Super Bowl Power outage in Social Media.”

Was amazed like most at the Ravens’ dominance and 49ers’ lack of readiness early on, although I did think the teams were evenly matched and wasn’t expecting an S.F. blowout. Incredible, though, to see it play out as it did -- yet another stirring playoff game this year, and another crazy, nail-biter finish to an NFL season.

Gonna sign off here as it’s already late morning and I need to get cleaned up and back over to the casino in just a few. Salut à bientôt!