Pissing Away Ten Thousand Dollars

There are a lot of ways you can blow ten thousand bucks. You could buy a used car with some unforeseen problems. You could make some poor investment choices. You could rent that new suite at the Palms that has a basketball court in it. You could do what Jonas was urging me to do at the end of the World Series, blow it all on one drug and hooker fueled limousine binge.

Or you could do what I did today - play a poker tournament and toss away your shot at fame and fortune. This event was loaded with all-stars. My first table had Men the Master and none other than the mythical Johnny Chan. The sick thing is there may have been TWO players even better than them - young hotshots JC Tran and Amnon Filippi. But I was able to get up to 13k playing at this table, mainly by making one enormous bluff against Lars Bonding. I had 99 and there were three overcards and a straight draw and I kept the heat on all three streets. That table broke, thank god, and I went to a new one. I made a flush against a tool and got to 17k.

After that things got rough. Kido Pham was at my table and he had two things I did not - position and a huge stack. He put the hurt on everyone, including me. Todd Brunson was there as well but he was clearly not on his game. After Kido got moved Hoyt Corkins, who was sitting on my right, slowly took over the table. His game is not to steal blinds or even outplay people after the flop, but reraise and pick up dead money whenever he thinks he can get away from it. This strategy, combined with a lot of big hands, was pretty devastating.

Soon enough John Phan sat down directly on my left. Sitting with a tough, aggressive player to my left is nothing new for this trip - I've already had Hasan Habib, Mark Seif, Alex Prendes, and Alex Jacob manning that post. Phan lived up to his reputation throughout the day. At one point a couple guys at the table made a sidebet on the number of hands he would play in one round, with the over/under set at 8.

After playing for several hours, I felt I got to know Phan's strategy pretty well. His game is really about finesse, not brute force. He gets himself into what seems like every pot, but what he is really trying to do is put himself in position to get lucky and outplay people. He makes a lot of bets but they are usually small bets - small raises before the flop and almost always bets of less than half the pot afterwards. He is not afraid to make hard decisions and playing with him is an exercise in patience - others must often wait for several minutes while he thinks about what to do. At the same time you must be patient with him and concede small pots without losing your mind. And when he gets shortstacked, he tightens up considerably (though that didn't stop me from doubling him up).

My stack was down to 4500 at dinner after two ill-advised confrontations against Phan and the underrated unknown recreational player John Smith. Right after the dinner break I hit a little rush and cruised up to 14k. After that things did not go so well and, down to 7k, I made a mistake. I would have been at around 4k if I had not made the mistake, in deep trouble, but still in. It was an embarassing moment, though the most embarassing moment would actually come half an hour later in the crowded Gold Coast elevator. I had left my ipod playing, and everyone could hear the Collective Soul blaring from the headphones when I took them off in the elevator.

Getting knocked out of these things is so painful, all I can think about is the next chance. Don't take my word for it - just ask this guy, whose third place finish YESTERDAY at Foxwoods didn't stop him from hopping a morning flight in time for this tournament.