Live Blog: Phil Ivey Finishes Fifth Final Table in 8th

Well, Phil Ivey's out.
Ivey will finish his fifth final table of the year in 8th.
It wasn't pretty either. Ivey suffered what poker players refer to as a "bad beat." Ivey was on the cutoff with 5,000/10,000 blinds and a 1,000 ante and he raised to 20,000. Samuel Golbuff was on the button and moved all-in.
Action was folded back around to Ivey, who quickly called.
Ivey showed 8♠ 8♦ and Golduff showed 6♥ 2♠. Things were looking good for Ivey until the dealer fanned out a 5♣ 2♥ 3♣ flop. The audience in the mothership let out a gasp, but Ivey didn't flinch.
A K♠ came on the turn and Ivey stayed cheat poker the same.
The dealer burned the last card and then flipped over a 4♠. The audience mumbled and spoke over each other as Ivey just let out a, "How much is it?"
The floor counted it out and announced the all-in was worth 159,000. Ivey counted it out from his stack, pushed it to his left and was left with 11,000.
With less than a big blind, Ivey only had one move. After folding the next three hands, Ivey went all-in from UTG.
He got calls from the button, the small blind and the big blind.
"Good luck," Golbuff said to Ivey. Ivey laughed and brought our official Ivey smile count up to three.
The board ran 8♣ A♣ 6♠ 9♠ 7♠ and all three non-all-in players checked all the way down. When it was time to show hands, one player turned over 4♥ 2♥, Ivey turned over A♦ 3♦ and another player mucked.
Erik Cajelais was still in the hand and turned over 7♣ 6♥, his two pair won the pot and eliminated Ivey.
When Ivey turned over his A♦ 3♦, he stood up and briskly exited the tournament area. He exited behind the mothership, found a side door in the Amazon Room and went into the cement hallways.
He was fiddling with his phone and took a right at the end of the hallway. He kept walking and fiddling and took a left at the end of that hallway. There, a few dealers and waiters were taking a break. By the time we reached that room, Ivey was gone.
Vanished.
There was no trace of the 8-time bracelet winner. The $21,699 he just won remains unclaimed.
Ivey misses out on his 9th bracelet yet again. There's no sign of Ivey in another tournament yet, but we know it won't take long.
Ivey's natural desire to win, combined with 7-figure bracelet bets guarantees that we'll see him again. Soon.
But for now, he's gone, vanished, taking a break.
We'll see if he makes final table #6 when he reappears.
The man's magical.
Bonus Photo Gallery
Check out a few quick pics from the final table.

A Slow Start

The mothership was surrounded marked cards. It was just past 2pm PST and every chair inside the feature final stage was taken. About fifty people were crowded around the outside of it, listening to the announcements.
"And in seat seven," the announcer said. "Phil Ivey."
They crowd went nuts. People love Phil Ivey.
We've gone through one level of no limit and are halfway through a round of limit and the crowd has started to dissipate. The crowd standing outside the feature table has shrunk to about a dozen hardcore fans.
The stage itself is now peppered with empty seats, so if you want to come watch the action in person, there's space.
Ivey has been a bit tame so far. He entered the table 7th in chips but now, with eight players left, Ivey is the shortstack with about 240,000.
The fallen player was Michael Foti. Foti was eliminated when his Q♥ J♦ ran into Erik Cajlais's K♦ Q♠. Both players hit a queen on the river, but Cajelias's kicker would kick Foti out of the tournament.
Foti's 9th place finish earned him $16,692.
Phil Ivey -- as well as every other player at the table -- is now guaranteed $21,699.
Ivey has only played a few pots so far. Most of them haven't made it to the flop and his stack hasn't fluctuated too much.
Ivey has been smiling a lot though, our Ivey smile count is currently at 2.
Play is about to switch back to No Limit with 5,000/10,000 blinds with a 1,000 ante. Ivey is short and the time to make moves seems right.
Stay tuned.

Ivey Makes His Fifth Final Table in 12 Days

Phil Ivey is busy making history at the 2012 World Series of Poker and once again PokerListings.com is bringing you the blow-by-blow.
Ivey is seventh in chips with nine players left in the $2,500 Mixed Hold'em event and it's his fifth final table in less than two weeks.
But this is familiar territory for Ivey. Back in 2002 he made five final tables in one summer. The only difference was that in 2002 he won three bracelets.
Ivey is going for career bracelet number nine, and with a reported seven figures riding on bracelet bets Ivey has to be feeling the pressure of another potential close call.
Check back here all day as we bring you full coverage and photos of Phil Ivey at his latest WSOP final table.
Here are the final table chip counts:

• 1 Joep van den Bijgaart - 605,000
• 2 Samuel Golbuff - 526,000
• 3 Michael Gathy - 418,000
• 4 Erik Cajelais - 368,000
• 5 Chris Tryba - 347,000
• 6 Salman Behbehani - 253,000
• 7 Phil Ivey - 169,000
• 8 Brent Wheeler - 158,000
• 9 Michael Foti - 105,000

One for the Old Guys: Reaction Times, Decision Times and Memory

I was scanning back over a column I did on memory and noticed something I missed before.
The strategy section producer slotted in a number of photos, picking ones that he thought would be amusing and relevant to the topic. He's got a real eye for this, and must have one hell of a database to work with marked cards.
Anyway, while scanning over the piece, I noticed that all the photos were of middle-aged and elderly men! There was Doyle, T.J. and, for a bit of balance, the merely middle-aged Andy Black.
I have no idea if he did this on purpose, but it got me thinking and led me to the topic for this week: psychological functions that change as we age.
Memory Accuracy - Memory Capacity: You may not like to hear this, or you may not care. If you're young, you almost certainly don't care, 'cause when you're young you're invulnerable - can dodge bullets and leap tall buildings in a single bound - and hence find it virtually impossible to grasp what will happen to you down the long, dusty road.
But if you're in your 40s and up you probably are already sensing that things just "ain't what they usta was."
Your ability to recall events is degraded. Words, names and events sit squirming, unuttered, on the tip of your tongue. And when you try to reconstruct what happened two hands back when you got felted, well ... it's all a blur.
In that earlier piece we found that memory, no matter what we might like to believe, is actually rather poor, filled with errors, misrememberings, misinterpretations and outright falsehoods. We are all guilty of these sins of recollection, but the ante gets upped several-fold for each decade of our lives.
The poker moral here?
For the young and the restless, don't sweat it. The future will show up whether you want it to or not, but there's nothing to worry about now.
For the geriatric set? There are some things we can do. First, play shorter sessions.
As more and more hands are played our memory gets "clogged" (yeah, I know, that's not a technical term but it's not far off from what actually happens) and it gets harder and harder to remember what's actually happening.
And this can prove expensive, like when you can't remember whether it's the cowboy hat or the smarmy guy with the bad rug sitting next to him who's been making all those loose calls cheat poker.
Or when you did manage to note that Seat 2 was a raising maniac but forgot that he moved to Seat 7 and you can't recall what he looked like.
Second, be honest with yourself. Be aware that as you get older your memory will degrade. Take your time to make sure you've properly understood a hand, take more breaks and know that each little memory cache you've given up has been replaced by the wisdom garnered from life's experiences.

Time to React - Time to Decide: A reaction time is exactly what it sounds like, the time it takes you to react to something. Ditto for decision time. We psychologists know a lot about them - more than you want to know, trust me, because the topic would test the patience of a monk.
Among the straightforward things we know are:
a. Reaction times slow down as the decisions get more complex.
b. Reaction times and decision times slow down with age.
The first is pretty obvious. If I ask you to press a button as soon as you see a light, you're fast. If I ask you to press one button if the light is red and another if it's blue, you're a lot slower.
The second is also obvious. Do the same experiment with people of varying ages and the older they are, the slower they will be.
But the obvious gets less so when we look at live games and online play. For live play neither of these issues looms particularly large. If the decisions are tough, just take your time.
Yeah, every now and again some dude will call time on you, but for the most part, players will give you the time you need to make tough calls.
And age doesn't matter. Geezers will take longer to make decisions but, for the most part, players will accommodate and there won't be problems.
But online it all changes, and if you're multi-tabling the problems grow exponentially. Online play is fast and there are strict time limits on your action. You can hit the "time" button but you're not going to get as long as you might like.
And, unlike the live games where the dealer will ask you to please make a decision, online the freakin' computer just assumes you've passed out on the floor (or whatever), folds your hand and, if you don't do something about it, skips you on the next deal.
It's pretty clear why Internet poker has become a young person's game. The time pressures are increased and for every additional table you play they go up.
If you're flashing around between two or more screens with 6, 10, 15 and even more tables going simultaneously, your reaction and decision times better be really, really fast or you're going to be in trouble.
There is a lot of discussion about the optimal number of tables to play. Without going into gory detail, it's a complex function of your normative reaction and decision times and the average edge you have in the level of game you're playing.
But what many haven't recognized is that as the number of decisions per unit time goes up, so does error rate; as the memory load increases, error rates will accompany it.
As error rates go up, win rates go down. For each individual, where their error-rate and win-rate curves cross will dictate the optimal number of tables to play.
And this cross-point will change depending on how much experience you have had, how tough the games are, how tired you are and how many miles are on your tires.

Fine Line Between Flat Busto and Filthy Rich

After an awesome Super Bowl weekend, my friend and I drove to L.A. on Monday night. Let me give you a quick tip: if you're driving to L.A. from Vegas, don't ever leave at 5 p.m.
You can read all about the weekend on www.JCAlvarado.com. Anyway, we arrived at the Commerce Casino and I was too tired to play, but that did not prevent me from instantly flipping my sleep schedule to European time.

Aside from the fact that when I'm there I lose track of whether it's night or day outside, only eat at the poker table and see nothing but grumpy old degenerates every day for a whole month, the Commerce Casino is by far the best poker room there is. I just went downstairs to get a drink at 5 a.m. and walked into a room full of poker - it's unbelievable marked cards.
Now, I can understand a high-limit area being busy at all hours because there's a lot of money to be won or lost. But what really fascinates me is the low-stakes room is packed 24/7 with people that are just playing $4/$8 Limit Hold'em and games like that.
It really shows how many people just like playing the game and how the game will continue to draw newcomers to it as long as it keeps evolving and "keeps things fresh."
Today I played my first session and it seemed like I had forgotten what people are capable of in the good ol' SoCal cardrooms.
One guy in my game lost his original buy-in. I thought he was leaving but he pulled out about an $8k wad of cash from his pocket, counted out about $1,500 and sat back in. On his very first hand after that he was in middle position and he just slid his rack of chips into the middle of the table.
I thought he was kidding but when the action got to him and he left the rack across the betting line, I just started praying for aces or pretty much anything I could call him with.
He lost that buy-in too, then another, and I was getting frustrated because I couldn't pick up a hand and I was down about $500. He once again reloaded and when he had $1,300 behind he moved in without looking down at his cards.
It folded to me in the big blind and I was just hoping for anything reasonable - I might have called him with Q-8 in that spot, but I obviously wouldn't want that.
I peeled my first card and it was an ace; I insta-called. He didn't want to look at his hand until the end so I had to sweat out the board and just pray he missed when I saw that the board didn't help me at all.
On the river, the board was J-J-K-9-Q rainbow. This guy looks down at his first card and flips over a three; he peels his second one and it's a Q to scoop the $2,700 pot. Oh well infrared contactlenses.

It's tough to see a guy move in in the dark every hand and lose thousands to the whole table, and then be the one guy that doubles him up. Fortunately for me though I went on a little bit of a rush when he had $2,700 behind. I had A-K twice and pocket nines, eights and sevens three hands in a row.
The guy didn't move in every one of those hands but he did for a couple of them and I ended up taking everything back by limp re-raising him every time. After that I took a little bit more off of him and he got up and left, down about $7 or $8k.
After that fish left I was still sitting at a table with eight other fish that I had forgotten even existed. The game started to break once the guy left and although this is sometimes a bad thing, when it happens in live poker I love it.
In fact I would go as far as to say that I'd rather play four-handed vs. regulars in a live game than to sit nine-handed with a huge fish. A lot of live players just have absolutely no clue about how to play shorthanded, and I love it.
So for the next 45 minutes that the game kept going I raised every hand and bluffed every street. I might be exaggerating a little bit but if I had to put a number on it I would say that I raised 90% of my hands outside of the blinds, and bet 98% of the time when checked to me.
I made another thousand or so off of the shorthanded session without seeing a showdown. I wish that game could have kept going all night long, but the three players remaining decided to quit and I just cashed out.

Overall, I had an okay winning session but I still felt like I lost money. I mean when you have a guy moving in every hand it's hard not to feel like you should get every penny he had on him, but that's never how it works out.
I've quickly come to the realization that poker is a hollow game of insufficiency: 99% of the time you'll be left with that feeling of wanting more, like when you stuff your face with really good sushi and you feel hungry 20 minutes later.
If you win money off of a fish you usually feel like you should have won more; if you get second in a tournament (something I'm all-too-familiar with) you'll feel like what you got wasn't enough and you should have won.
I guess I need to learn to be satisfied with any positive result before I end up chasing results that will leave me flat busto - or will that drive actually make me filthy rich? I guess there's a fine line, and I just have to find it through experience.
For now I'm going to be avoiding most tournaments. I might play the $2,500s, which I had good results in last year, and I will almost definitely play the LAPC main event to try and get that $2.4 mil that I had within reach exactly one year ago. GL ME!
-- J.C.

Poker Musical Set for WSOP Debut

The World Series of Poker announced today that All-In: The Poker Musical, a theater production focusing on nine players at the final table of the WSOP Main Event, will debut at the Rio's Masquerade Showroom during this year's $10,000 World Championship. The mix of poker and Broadway-style musical is completely unprecedented and represents a new opportunity to showcase the human drama of the world's favorite card game marked cards.
While the "special preview concert" of the one-hour show won't occur until July 4 and 5, the folks in charge of the production gave this reporter special access to a dress rehearsal so we here at PokerListings.com could give our readers the skinny on what's sure to be the nuts at this year's WSOP.*
In the press release for All-In: The Poker Musical, none other than the great Phil Hellmuth stated, ""Through the lyrics of the songs and style of music, we see not only who these final nine players are, but we are able to see ourselves, our families, and our world."
We found the signature songs of the characters so appealing that we decided a sneak preview of each number was exactly what our readers needed. So without further ado, here's a look at the lineup and their signature tunes.
Johnson Jones - "I Ain't Drawing Dead Yet"
Old-timer Johnson Jones has been playing poker since the days of one-card Stud, hustling Texas cowpokes and oil men out of their cash before he was forced to move to Las Vegas to outrun all the players he fleeced. His song, "I Ain't Drawing Dead Yet," tells his tale succinctly:
I might be behind, but I got outs
These kids don't know what this game's all about
Until me and my maker done met
I ain't drawing dead yet!
Richie Patterson - "Raise Raise Raise"
21-year-old Internet phenom Richie Patterson, well-known for his hyper-aggressive style, has been playing online since he built a bankroll through freerolls in high school. He is in position to become the youngest Main Event winner in history. "Raise Raise Raise" sums up his philosophy quite well:
Why call and make them think you're weak infrared ink?
If you limp and fold you're a freak
I don't have the patience to muck cards for days
So I'm gonna raise, raise, raise!
Theobald "Scooter" Belinglophe - "Money Don't Mean Nothing"
As CEO of MegaGloboCorp, Theobald "Scooter" Belinglophe doesn't care about the big prize so much as he wants the glory of beating poker's best players. In All-In, he sings:
Stocks and bonds don't make me quiver,
And a raise from you, kid, don't make me shiver.
You'll never see a card for free
'Cause money don't mean nothing to me.
Bob Smith - "Doing It For the Kids"
Bob Smith was just a mid-level manager for a giant retail chain before he won a $1 WSOP Main Event satellite on PokerStars. Now that he's here, he's trying to avoid any major mistakes because he has a goal:
This money sure means a lot to me,
My girls will grow up smart and happy, you'll see
I sure hope my luck doesn't hit the skids
'Cause I'm just doing it for the kids
Sven Potssen - "Monsterpotten"
The lyrics to aggressive Swede Sven Potssen's song, "Monsterpotten," are indecipherable due to Potsen's guttural death metal vocals and the heavy double bass drum, but all we can assume is that he loves to drag a giant pot with a bluff.
Phan Tran - "Cocktails!"
Phan Tran escaped Vietnam by boat with his family when he was just a baby and ended up becoming one of poker's most recognizable faces. He gets into his opponents' heads by making them think he cares more about free drinks than the game at hand:
I laugh in your face and show you my bluff
I take all your chips but that's not enough
I'm gonna bring every one of you to your knees -
Cocktails on the final table, please!
Jennifer Wilson - "I'm Just a Girl"
Jennifer Wilson is only the second woman in WSOP history to make the final table of the Main Event, following in the footsteps of Barbara Enright. Unfortunately the producers of All-In seem to have given her short shrift, skimping on the songwriting budget in favor of having her cover No Doubt's hit song "Just A Girl" in skimpy attire.
Nigel Bennington - "Dreadfully Sorry!"
How British uber-nit Nigel Bennington ever got to the final table is a wonder - he folds more than PokerListings.com reporter Owen Laukkanen does under the gun. What we do know is that Nigel is the single most polite player in the history of poker:
Oh dear, I'm dreadfully sorry!
I didn't mean to flop that straight on you
Please ask the tournament director
If it's legal for me to double through
Phil Hellmuth - "I Can Dodge Bullets, Baby!"
Phil Hellmuth makes a surprise appearance in the final nine of this Main Event, which is how we know it's a work of fiction. We were only able to sit through the first five minutes of the Poker Brat's monologue about how he makes the greatest lay-downs in poker before we had to get back to covering the preliminary events of the WSOP. We're sure we've heard it all before, though.
* - Totally, unquestionably, irrevocably untrue.

2011 Year in Review – Courtney Gee Poker Blog

Happy holidays! I hope everyone has been able to take some time off to enjoy their friends and family this month. Life has been crazy for me, but I really wanted to try to post this before the year ended.
Where poker is concerned, 2011 was a pretty interesting year for me. I went to PCA, played on the Big Game, and went to the WSOP for the first time. While none of these get-rich-quick schemes worked out for me, they were great experiences and I learned a lot.
I started playing poker around 6 years ago back in university, but I definitely played more poker this year than the other 5 years combined. I played almost 370k hands which is pretty low compared to the average grinder but quite a lot for me.
In past entries I mentioned that my goal for online poker profit this year (before rakeback and bonuses) was $30k. At the end of November it looked like making the goal was going to be pretty easy since I was less than $500 away. But I forgot one minor detail: it’s easy to lose money playing marked poker this game. Oops. Here were the (somewhat disappointing) final numbers for 2011:

• # MTTs: 2,290
• # SnGs: 3,850
• Total online profit: +$29,077.18 (before rakeback and bonuses)

Actually I would have just barely made the profit goal if I hadn’t decided to play MTTs on the very last day I played this month. But I couldn’t skip the 10^th Anniversary Sunday Million, right?! It was actually fun playing MTTs for the first time in ages. I went deep-ish in a $55+R, but unfortunately I busted 41^st and still ended up losing a bunch for the day.
While I’m annoyed that I fell short of my goal, I’m happy with how the year went. I had some live winnings, bonuses, and rakeback, so overall I made ~$40/hour. I survived my first real year of being a pro grinder, increased my bankroll, and became a better juice cards player in the process. And I achieved Supernova for the first time :)
I also improved my life outside of poker, which is equally important. I started working out at the gym three times a week, and I eat much healthier. I think that maintaining a healthy diet and eating properly is something that many poker players overlook. I will probably write an entry about food one of these days.
Anyway, I’m obviously not going to get rich making $30k/year, so I’m looking for a bigger year in 2012. I’ve been thinking seriously about my goals for next year, and I will share those with you in my next entry.
Thanks to everyone that supported me in 2011 and to everyone that has followed this blog. I really look forward to sharing my experiences again in 2012. Happy New Year!