Tecmo vs The World

At the end of 2010, I began playing Triple Draw online. I was tiring of NL Hold’em and quickly learned how much I enjoyed its polar opposite, 2-7 Triple Draw Lowball. For whatever reason, I instantly loved the game and began studying it. The freshness of a new game allowed my enthusiasm to flow as it had back in the early 2000s, when I was buying & reading every poker book I could get my hands on. Poker was less of a grind when playing Triple Draw and it reminded me that it was in fact still a game.

Games are supposed to be fun. I’m not a pro poker player and don’t rely on my poker income to pay the bills. It’s important to remember that when you are playing this game. Sure, my goal has always been to use my poker winnings to start my own charity, but in the words of Van Wilder, “You shouldn’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out alive.” The same goes for poker.

So as I continued to play and learn Triple Draw, I began eyeing the Triple Draw event at the World Series of Poker. Every year for the past 3 years I’ve gone out to the WSOP to play some poker, hang out with friends from all over the world, and just have a great time. Last year I played my first ever WSOP event in a $1,000 NLHE tournament. That ended relatively quickly when KK lost to 56o on a 55x board. I quickly realized that the $1k events simply weren’t a great value. Sure, the players are horrible, but you start with so few chips that it’s hard to build a stack without running hot early. Twas a disappointing beginning to my WSOP career and I decided that my next foray would need to be in a higher buy-in event where you received more chips.

Enter the $2500 Triple Draw Event. Now, this was still a large amount of money for us “normal folk” so even though I wanted to play in it, I had to find some people to stake me in order to help cover the costs. I eventually was able to sell roughly 2/3 of my action, which allowed me to pay for the rest with a portion of my poker bankroll. In preparation, I continued to play Triple Draw cash games online, and even entered several Triple Draw tournaments, with fairly decent results. I was excited to play in a few bigger buy-in online TD tournaments in April and May to help me gain experience and also hopefully pay for the trip! Things were moving along nicely and I was learning more and more. That is…..until Black Friday.

April 15, 2011. Dubbed “Black Friday” by the poker community (not to be confused with the day of wonderous shopping deals), this was a day that will live in infamy in the poker world. The 3 major online poker sites were essentially shut down for Americans on this day by the Department of Justice as a result of bank fraud and money laundering charges, among other things. I won’t go into detail about it here, but suffice it to say that Black Friday threw a large wrench in my WSOP plans. No longer would I be able to continue improving, practicing, and studying TD online. Instead, I was forced to either cancel my plans to play the WSOP event or do the best I could with the work I had already put in. After mulling it over, I realized that even without further practice, I was still going to be one of the better TD players to sign up. Not many people have the fundamentals of TD down and the game is far less evolved than NLHE.  With that realization, I stayed the course and continued to do what I could to study the game away from the table.

Fast forward to June 27th. I fly out to Vegas and start mentally preparing myself for the next day. June 28th was the day I had been awaiting. I was both excited and a bit nervous as I slept that night. Excited for obvious reasons, knowing that I worked hard and was ready. Nervous because this was still only my 2nd WSOP event ever, and my first live TD tournament. Regardless, I actually slept pretty well and awoke early, still pretty much on east coast time. I worried that I woke up too early as the event didn’t start until 5pm and we’d be playing into the morning of the next day, but I was pretty sure adrenaline would take care of any onsetting drowsiness. I opted for room service that morning and selected one of my favorites, waffles with peanut butter! It probably sounds weird, but if you love peanut butter like me, you should definitely try it.

Breakfast of Champions

After a delicious meal that included strawberries and whipped cream, I called a few people to inform them the event would be starting soon, then headed over to the Rio. Soon enough, the time had come. I took my seat and didn’t know a single person at my table. I suspected this was a good thing, but you never know with Triple Draw. Many big name pros are pretty poor at this game so it would have been cool to at least play with someone famous (and subsequently take their chips). Meh, not a big deal. I whipped out the Deuces Cracked Duck in hopes that it would provide some luck and prepared to play to the best of my ability. My goal for the day – make it to day 2.

The Mighty Duck

As the day went on, I was running pretty well, playing well, and spotting many, many mistakes in my opponents’ games. It was pretty clear that 4 out of the other 5 people at my table had no formal training in the game and I was obviously thrilled. The one other guy who seemed competent was directly to my right. I couldn’t have asked for a better table and was able to stay away from mistakes for the most part, make several great hands, and chip up throughout the day. At one point, I started to get low in chips, but luckily I got a rush of cards and built a big stack toward the end of the day.

Rockin' Out to Some Sinatra

An interesting side-story that developed during the latter half of the day was a back-and-forth I had with Doyle Brunson via Twitter. In order to avoid boredom during slow times and keep those interested in my progress up to date, I was constantly tweeting updates and reading the tweets of others. While reading, I saw that Doyle posted the following tweet:

To which I responded, “Don’t you mean the poker sites who broke the law?”

Turns out he wasn’t a fan of that response as he proceeded to tweet the following two messages:

I thought that blocking me for voicing an opinion was a bit of an overreaction, and it turns out many others did as well. Soon thereafter, many more people started following me on Twitter Doyle responded by tweeting the following:

So all in all, just a funny little side story to spice up my day. A few days later, I actually saw him playing in the 50k Player’s Championship Event and he was near the rail. My friend Bryce convinced me that not introducing myself would have been a mistake and I agreed eventually. When the opportunity arose, I introduced myself as TecmoSuperBowl from Twitter and he surprisingly remembered my name. He laughed, shook my hand, and just said that he was in a bad mood that day. Doyle is a living legend in the poker world, and he also seems like a cool dude.

Getting back to my Triple Draw tournament, with less than an hour of play left for the day, my table broke and I was moved to a new one. A Deuces Cracked Triple Draw coach and buddy of mine, Vincent aka soepgroente, was seated at this new table. I obviously wasn’t happy about having to play against another good player, but I had position on him, he didn’t have many chips, and the day was ending soon anyway. I managed to win a hand against him and before I knew it, we were bagging up our chips for the night! I made it to day 2!

310 people entered the tournament, 105 survived to make it to day 2. I finished the day with 39,400 chips, which was good enough to put me in 12th place. Not bad for my first TD tournament and 2nd WSOP event ever!

Chip Counts at the End of Day 1

Shortly after day 1 ended, they posted the new table draws for day 2. The good news was that I was the clear chip leader at my table. The bad news was that I had Jason Mercier, one of the hottest players on the circuit, on my left. Jared Bleznik, a high stakes online player, was also at my table, but I was happy to see him directly on my right.

Table Draw for Day 2

I accomplished my goal of making it to day 2. Now it was go time.