Hugo's Blogspotting: 29 November

Lucky Jim in his Element

Gambling has always been a seedy and cynical business which leads me nicely to Lucky Jim’s latest entry on his blog. Jim has finally moved out of his parents’ house and now seems to spend his time (when he’s not too busy with hookers) playing poker in a 24 hour internet café.

Now I’m sure, like me, you have played poker in some rather shady places, but this gaff sounds like the mother of all spielers.

“When I walked in, the poker player I'd talked to the day before was asleep in the corner. When I spoke to him later, he told me he'd been there two days. He was waiting, he said, for a tournament. And for Godot, I suppose.

I sat at the back, and noticed the man sitting in the corner next to me was watching porn films. Another man was looking at escort websites; someone else was on Gaydar.”

A nice place to take your mother for a cup of coffee and check your emails then, eh? Jim goes on to describe a fracas between two customers (a Pole and an Englishman) which is dealt with by a burly Turkish gentleman:

“Suddenly the English man was curled up on the floor and the Turkish man, no doubt being from the fighting class himself, had lifted a large metal stool above his head and was about to bring it down onto the thug's thick head. I felt my heart race and desperately wanted him to do it, but his colleague held him back.”

Wow, and somehow Jim managed to find a way to win at online PLO amidst this highly charged atmosphere. Mind you, having said all that I’ve just realized that all the quotes above sound like an average night at the Vic….

Take This Job and Shove It

Many bloggers often threaten to quit poker or go on about how sick they are of the game, but how many follow through? I guess we can assume the many dormant blogs that have been left un-updated are by players that may have stopped, but more likely got fed up having to publish their losses on the world wide web.

Matt Maroon has no such qualms and his latest blog entry is Why I Quit Playing Poker For A Living, Pt 1. The fact that this is Part 1 is significant; I guess one needs serious justification as to why you would give up poker, especially to a readership that I would assume is made up of poker players.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I have been through total poker burnout and horrible runs where it feels like I’ll never win a pot again, but I have to say it never crossed my mind to actually quit playing. Sacrilege! Treachery! To abandon the holy game is like giving up on life itself. So why has Maroon, presumably a player who won a good amount of money from poker, giving up?

Ok, he’s not actually giving up for good, he’s just not going to be a pro anymore and to be fair he hasn’t ended up in a flophouse either. So why is poker a tough way to make an easy living?

“….in poker you can't fake it, or at least you shouldn’t. If you're a writer, or an accountant, or a lawyer, or have just about any other occupation I can think of, you can phone it in when you need to and nothing too bad will happen. You can go to work, fly under the radar for a day, not be your fully productive self, and you'll still get paid.”

Exactly. What other occupation is there where you are in charge of your own pay cuts and rises? Plus those elements are unpredictable and fluctuate greatly. Maroon puts it best when he describes a losing streak like this:

“Imagine you go to work every day and do your absolute best. You work as hard as you can, do everything perfectly, or at least as close to it as humanly possible, and throughout the day, every 15 minutes, your boss comes over and tells you that you are an idiot. Each time he tells you that everything you do is wrong, even if you know it's not. Then instead of paying you, he forces you to write a check to the company.”

Perhaps the best part of a long well written post is at the end where Maroon talks about someone he knew that quit his job as an air traffic controller so that he could become a professional poker player. Presumably this guy must have done well. The pressure of literally having people’s lives in your hands must have translated into to being able to think clearly, quickly and decisively at the table – playing cards must be a doddle compared to air traffic control.

“He did it for a year and claimed to have made about 25% more than he would have at his job, but went back to his old career because, as he said, it was "far less stressful".”

Simply the Best

One player who would probably make a great air traffic controller is Patrik Antonius. Have you all seen the most recent episode of High Stakes Poker where he sticks in about half a million with top pair, weak kicker? When Sammy Farha snap-called it was maybe the only time one has seen Antonius lose his cool. And even then it’s only momentary.

So where does this Finnish poker God get his nerves of steel from? It’s all in the preparation.

“My daily routine lately has been almost perfect. I have been waking up early and our wonderful nanny/chef continues to impress with wonderful new dishes on a daily basis. After fueling my body I head down to the 24 hour fitness for a workout and warm up. I am happy with my workouts lately, my body feels good again.”

As has been reported elsewhere Antonius is a great believer in keeping fit in order to keep one’s poker game sharp. Well, he would think that wouldn’t he? After all he was on his way to being a professional tennis player. Most poker players’ ideas of workouts that I know would be plenty of elbow bending at the bar. Also, let’s not forget the ordering-biscuits-and-tea exercises that many of them excel at.

Antonius is probably one of the few players on the planet who doesn’t have to worry about game selection seeing as he is usually one of the best players in whatever game he’s playing.

“Phil Ivey called me while back and told me there was going to be a "Big Game" on Friday night. It has been a long time since I played live cash games and I was excited to sit back down at the tables and at real people in the eyes. It was the usual line up, I had Jennifer on my right and Minh on my left. Bobby Baldwin, Doyle, Guy (Noatima,) Eli, Lyle, and David B. were all in the game.”

Sounds like a good game huh? Alas no:

“I am sure that I am not the only one who finds live poker so boring after playing online. I was also a little upset that we were only playing $2k-4k instead of $3k-6k or $4k-8k.”

Oh well, never mind Patrik, I’m sure the games will get better when the Five Diamond Classic starts.

“The Bellagio was getting pretty busy while I was playing the other night. This is a great sign, hopefully when the tournament rolls around, the stakes are bigger are more players are in town. I have talked a few times with Brian Townsend, Guy, and Bobby Baldwin about getting the $1k-2k NL and PLO game going again during December.”

With any luck we’ll have some good blogging about these games. It shouldn’t be too long before they’re all playing $10k-20k or something.

Finally, I mentioned High Stakes Poker which without doubt is the best poker on TV around. Somebody has a done a vaguely amusing photo-shop job which can be seen here.

Hugo 'Chimney Sweep' Martin

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