Ray Allen

The NL 5000 6 Max started off great. I built my initial 10,000 chip stack to 40,000 with relative ease and I really was looking like I had a shot at the first prize of 900,000 dollars+. Unfortunately things did not work out how I imagined. A combination of 1 or 2 poorly played hands, a lack of any cards for a couple levels, and a lack of any imagination from me when I was card dead led to my stack moving from 40K to 26K.

I then ended up in a coinflip with KJo vs TT when my resteal of the cut-off was interefered with by the Big Blind. No K or J and instead of having 55K with 110 people left I am off to the rail. I came home and broke my no internet poker rule and ended up booking a small loss after being up 2000.

Add to all this that the Celtics ended up with a 32 year old shooting guard who has been through multiple knee surgies as there draft pick this year and yesterday could have been better.

Today I woke up at 11:15 and hustled over to the rio by noon. This violates the "Jeffery Lisandro Rule" of waking up exactly 90 minutes before a poker tournament, but I needed the extra sleep. I arrived at my table feeling good, and soon had 7500 chips. I felt as tho I was playing slightly too loose before the antes in previous big field events, and my new plan of lock down poker was working like a charm.

I don't feel like going through the details...but I lost all my chips in the next 3 hours. A slowplayed KK hand was the biggest dent. I was and still am pretty dissapointed in my last 2 tournaments. I am playing ok, but I am not giving myself the absolute best chance to win.

I think the biggest thing I need to work on is learning about my opponents more. I find myself paying off too many river bets lately, I need to be more confident in my reads so that I don't err on the side of caution so often and pay these no names off.

Part of the obstacle with this is that with my ADD tendencies I find it hard to pay attention to the hands I am not involved in sometimes. I know many people have this same problem, but when playing live against no names we are giving up too much value by missing hands our opponents play. The best players are paying much better attention than I am. Although the series is almost over, I am going to do my best to learn as much as I can about the players at my tables over the next 2 weeks.

When I got back to Bellagio today I was itching to play a live game. The 10-20 NL games are pretty boring so I was hoping a 25-50 NL was going with a decent line up, or a 200-400 limit. a 25-50 NL was going, but the catch was there was a $25 ante. This makes the game super big.

I decided to jump in, and try to play super expert. I made some hands and at one point was up $9000. Unfortunately I started to slip down to 6000 and then ran a bluff for another 5K that didnt work out. There is obv much more to the story, but in the end I ended up +2700 or so.

I definitely only played my B game at best, but I did think I understood the changes in strategy when playing a game with such a big ante better than most of my opponents and that probably gave me an edge. I really need to improve my overall NL game, especially my river play, it is far from sharp enough.

The downswing in my session lingered with me and now that I already broke the seal of my "no internet poker"rule last night, I decided to try to win a couple thousand back online. I found some good games and booked a decent win, my recent live game upswing has definitely come at a good time.

As for the Celtics, Ray Allen-Paul Pierce-Al Jefferson and 9 scrubs isnt the worst, but they arent going to win a championship either and it seems like Danny Ainge is now just managing the team to try to save his job more than anything else. It's really a mess, and very sad. Who would have thought 15 years ago that the Patriots would be the class of the NFL, everyone would love the Red Sox owners, yet the Celtics were the laughingstock of the NBA.

For you NBA and/or Bill Simmons fans, this column is a must read if u havent got to it yet.