My somewhat different poker story (extremely tl;dr)
08-24-2011
, 08:42 AM
Quote:
Can everyone just calm the **** down!
@Chuckster
Please continue your writing. I think most people accept there will be some minor errors as part of anyones degen story. Maybe you should be a little careful with naming people, but this is a Forum thread. It's not pretending to be a major piece of journalism.
Also, you need to accept that following a number of recent issues in 2+2, people are perhaps a little wary of trusting everything that gets written. So there will be some doubters. Respond to the reasonably framed questions, but don't fall into the trap of trying to reason with everyone.
Just keep writing, I think it's going pretty well so far, I think this latest hiccup is actually a good thing to provide a little perspective here.
@Chuckster
Please continue your writing. I think most people accept there will be some minor errors as part of anyones degen story. Maybe you should be a little careful with naming people, but this is a Forum thread. It's not pretending to be a major piece of journalism.
Also, you need to accept that following a number of recent issues in 2+2, people are perhaps a little wary of trusting everything that gets written. So there will be some doubters. Respond to the reasonably framed questions, but don't fall into the trap of trying to reason with everyone.
Just keep writing, I think it's going pretty well so far, I think this latest hiccup is actually a good thing to provide a little perspective here.
Yeah I don't have any issues with people questioning some stuff. When the story is finished, most people are going to be like WTF all that stuff just can't happen within a timespan of two years and questioning everything
In my old blog I got into this a lot. People were questioning a lot of stuff which I don't blame them for, and I got massively defensive. Looking back at it it was just real dumb and me tilting about that was just horrible.
In my old blog there also was some stuff that wasn't true, such as the aforementioned Main Event story, and a couple of other things we'll get to later in the story. So people actually even were partially right, and back then when I was worried about my cover blowing off I was telling people off and was really bad about answering questions.
But since the whole point here is to be as blatantly honest about my past as possible and make sure to not exaggerate anything, I'm extremely happy to answer any questions and do my best proving myself, and won't go ballistic over it. It's only natural to doubt a story like this.
There are also a few bits that I've already left off, because I just *know* people won't believe them, and I have no one to witness them. So you can actually consider this the slightly put-down version of my story.
I used to have a slightly questionable reputation in Finland for a while back in 2009 after the TowerGaming scandal etc (we'll get there), and I *know* that basically anything I post in this thread that isn't 100% true will get snap called out by Finnish people. So I really am trying to be careful and I just had bad judgement regarding the Vegas episode and not getting my facts straight beforehands. Fiiiiish also said that he was on his cell at the airport and he had only just been linked to the story, so his choice of words probably came off a bit too angry because of that.
But yeah just to be clear fiiiiiish is 100% right, maybe he doesn't remember some stuff I do and vice versa, but the stuff he does remember is definitely the way it actually happened.
08-24-2011
, 08:52 AM
08-24-2011
, 09:18 AM
08-24-2011
, 09:20 AM
Edited version of the Vegas story. People can feel free to compare it to the original and let me know if my version was too different. If a mod could replace post #54 with this (it has fiiiish's name removed and the story straight) I'd be extremely happy.
Vol.6: My First Vegas Trip
After the Pokerisivut party and making my first poker friends I made an impromptu decision to go to Vegas. I don't think I had it planned before the party, but some people I met there said they were going, and that Vegas was awesome. When I blogged about it, many people said they'd be in Vegas at the same time and that they'd show me around and so on.
By this time I had also become slighty cocky, like I said in one of the previous parts. After getting so much attention and back-patting, I wanted it to continue. I kind of wanted to create a snowball effect, getting bigger and bigger. Again, I'm not quite sure if I realised this on a conscious level, but looking back at it this was certainly the case.
Around the same time I also got my first true haters. At first I had basically no haters at all, after all I was a guy with a gambling problem who didn't think too much of himself and had funny stories. But when I started winning, I also started to act like I owned the world, and the tone of my blog entries slowly changed. Sure, 95 per cent of my readers were still devoted fans, and the rest were chronic non-believers who doubted everything I said. But I had a few guys (who, in retrospect, were absolutely right), who constantly told me that I had got too much way too fast, that I was actually pretty bad, and so on. Some of them may even have been just trying to protect me, as what I really would've needed was someone telling me to take it easy and grind lower stakes. Either way, I took every negative comment I got really hard, and whenever someone doubted my poker skills I got incredibly mad and wanted to show them all how good I was.
So, after receiving a couple of comments saying $20k wasn't much of a roll and that I wasn't much of a player, I decided to announce that I'd play the Main Event. Back then only a handful of Finnish people played it. I think that the previous year there had been 4 or 5 Finns playing it. This would surely be considered a huge thing.
A funny side note is that back then I hadn't heard of selling shares. It didn't even cross my mind. It was clear to me from the beginning that I'd keep my entire action to myself. Despite having very little MTT experience, and even less live MTT experience, I thought I'd easily crush some $10k donkament. I didn't think it would be a big deal to wager half my roll on it. After all it had a deep structure, and I had read somewhere that the best players only get better when the play is deep, and I considered myself to be one of those players.
On one of the last days before going to Vegas I randomly decided to do a $1k online roulette flip. I had already got slightly addicted to the internet casinos, and they ate a portion of my winnings, but I hadn't blown more than a few thousand. Yet. Of course I ended up losing my entire Whitebet roll because I couldn't stop after just one flip, which was like $5k. The rest I had withdrawn earlier for the Vegas trip. I remember trying to furiously cancel my $15k withdrawal to play more online roulette. They didn't allow me to do that, and I was happy that they didn't.
I landed in Vegas on a beautiful night. I had $15k in my pocket, and I had a room from Sahara booked for two weeks. I'd always stayed in cheap hotels on my travels, and I got a room from Sahara for $20 per night and it was a decent 3-star hotel, so it felt like a bargain.
I remember the feeling when I took my first steps outside the McCarran International Airport, after wondering how on earth they even had slot machines inside the airport. It was so hot. It was as if I was in a sauna, except that the air was dry. It was about 40c outside at 10PM. I'd never encountered such a temperature. Actually, I had been to some rain forests where it was equally warm but also extremely humid. No place had actually felt so hot before.
Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age is famous for loving deserts. His recording studio is in the middle of a desert. When Arctic Monkeys made their record "Humbug", he forced them to move into the desert with him. I feel the same way about deserts with Homme. I love how everything is so dry and silent, and especially what the air feels like. It's so different from the air back in Finland. Here it's really cold for most of the year, and every time you go out the air feels like someone's pointing small needles at you. During our short summer it's not cold, but it's somehow too... fresh. It's always windy, and it sort of feels like the air is going somewhere, as if it was in a rush. It's really hard for me to enjoy any silent moments in Finland, because the air just won't settle down. Whenever I'm close to a desert, my mind is at rest just because of what the air feels like.
Despite finding the kind of weather that would offer me peace, I was everything but peaceful in Vegas. In Finland we only have one casino, and they only have roulette, blackjack and a couple of other games. It gets boring after a while. In Vegas they have everything. All kinds of Fortune wheel games, Three card poker, Four card poker, Five card poker, Casino war, Baccarat, and all kinds of slots. Even in the low-key Sahara the entire lobby was full of flashing lights and the sound of someone winning money. Bills on the table, coins flying out from the slots, someone winning a jackpot somewhere. Keno, Bingo, Horse races.
I checked in to the hotel, dropped my stuff in my room, and despite it being midnight and having traveled for 24 hours, I went straight to the casino floor. I wanted to try every game possible. I played some roulette, I learned the rules of Baccarat and played it a bit, I lost at least $1k in Casino War until I decided it was a stupid game and quit. Finally I played a Fortune Wheel game, hit the 47:1 jackpot and broke even for the night. I went to sleep at 3AM, still $15k in my pocket.
I started to regret my promise to play the Main Event from the beginning. It hit me in Vegas almost immediately; there was simply too much I wanted to do. I had left $1k at home in case I'd go busto on the trip, and I was comfortable I could grind it up from there if that happened. I didn't feel much pressure about losing everything I had with me. I just wanted to experience it all, I wanted to play every single table game in every single casino, and of course I wanted to play a ton of live cash games. I was worried that a measly $5k wouldn't be enough for all that. So I decided, as the Main Event was still almost a week away, that I'd do whatever I felt like doing with the money and that I'd only play the ME if I had enough left at the time. (I didn't know that Rio ran satellites, if I had known that I would've spent a lot of time playing those for sure.)
I kept losing money on the casino games at a stable rate. I believe I broke quite even at cash games or possibly even won a little, and lost about $1k per day on everything else, every day. I didn't stress too much about it. A few days into my Vegas trip I decided to go drinking with one of the guys who had written in my blog. He later became a very good friend of mine, but I'm not sure how he feels about naming him, so I'm just going to refer to him as fiiiish (his 2+2 alias).
We met in front of Treasure Island and instantly hit it off. We went to play the lowest stakes cash game we could find, I think it was 1/3, and ordered drinks. The drinks in Vegas are free, and the waitresses are incredibly fast, and if you tip a lot you can order multiple drinks at a time. We ordered 5 drinks at a time and drowned them with one sip. Then we tipped $10 to get new drinks as fast as possible, repeated the procedure a few times, and as a result got very drunk in just a couple of hours. At some stage when the place got more crowded and the waitresses didn't have as much time to serve us, we went to the gift shop to buy a bottle of vodka. We then placed it on the table and started drinking straight from the bottle. At some stage the floorman told us that it wasn't allowed, and we bribed him with $20 to let us keep drinking straight from the bottle, which he did.
"I'd like to bet all of my chips... and this bottle of Vodka!" I actually used that line, but the dealer didn't allow me to use the bottle as a wager.
Oh, I almost forgot. The next day was the day I was supposed to play the Main Event. I already knew I wouldn't be able to play it. I had almost exactly $10k left, and I couldn't use it all on the buy-in. At the same time there was more and more flaming going on in my blog, and I was incredibly furious to the people who doubted me playing. "He's not going to play, he's going to lose his money on roulette", people were saying. They were pretty spot on, but I hated people thinking I had failed. So I decided to "change" my starting date from 1B (that I had told people I'd play on) to 1D. This would give me a couple of days to grind some money, so I could buy in and still have some cash left.
I had also told fiiiish that I'd play the next day, so I solved the problem by getting incredibly drunk, passing out on his hotel room floor, and saying I'd go to the Rio to switch starting days.
Of course I failed miserably at my attempts to collect money for the Main. I played some live poker but ran bad, and some more roulette and obviously lost. I had no idea what I should do, so I decided to come up with a story that I'd played the Main and busted on the first level on some crazy bluff. This would make my image even cooler, I thought. By now everyone must think that I'm the coolest person alive, punting his roll on a single tournament, going drinking the night before, and busting on a crazy bluff. I made it public that we were going drinking the night before, and I made an incredibly ******ed post that went something like this: "The Main Event starts in 15 hours. I'm gonna get incredibly drunk now. Hollllla."
When I look at my 20-year old self now, I see an idiot, and I'm only 24. I wonder how I'm going view him when I'm 40?
It was so dumb. I could've just swallowed my pride and written about what had happened, and I'm sure my blog would still have been number one. It wouldn't have been a big deal at all. I couldn't do that, because I was way, way too proud. I didn't want people to think I was a failure. During the following two years my pride would only get worse, and my actions would only get worse, until I would finally hit the rock bottom in December 2009, just before my 22nd birthday. We'll get there.
On the night before my supposed Main Event we went drinking again with fiiiiish. I can't remember where we went at first, quite possibly it was Treasure Island again. At around 1AM we got the idea of going to a strip club. I hadn't been to more than a couple of bad European strip clubs before, and I really wanted to experience a cool Vegas one. I have no idea why, but we didn't end up going to Rhino or Crazy Horse or Palominos (which is my favourite these days). We ended up going to a place called Seamless that was somewhere off the strip.
We paid $30 to get inside, got a table in the corner, and ordered a tray full of Mojitos and other drinks. Pretty soon after we sat down were joined by some young pimp. He just sat in our table, and told us to get the **** out as it was "his" table. He acted like he owned the place. He indeed did know all the strippers, and the minute he sat down he had girls around him.
I, being a bit drunk and overly confident about my fighting skills, wanted to play tough and told him we weren't going anywhere. He was really short, like 170cm, and I didn't think he'd be much of a physical threat. I had started working out heavily six months earlier and I was in pretty good shape, and I had been to a few bar fights in Helsinki. I was drunk and thought I could easily knock him down, so I told him to **** off. He gave me a stare that I'll never forget, lifted his shirt a little bit, and flashed a handgun. This guy was no joke. He was (probably) a drug dealer carrying a gun in a strip club, and I had just told him to **** off. I didn't even realize how bad the situation was, but luckily fiiiish was a bit more sober and he apologized for me. He told the guy he could drink as many drinks he'd like, and, we moved to a new table at the other side of the club.
A couple of drinks later, when I was already so drunk I could barely walk, I went to take a leak. The toilet was empty, and just when I was closing my zipper the guy came in. I don't remember what he said, but once again he seemed to be threatening me. He didn't attack me, but he flashed his gun once more, and said something about messing with the wrong people. I remember thinking that I need to handle this calmly, so I just apologized to him once more, and said we were just drunk tourists.
(For the record: He never took the gun out of his pocket, and for all I know it could be that he was just showing off. It'd take me 9 more months to learn what it feels like to get actually pointed with a gun.)
When I was washing my hands, I'm not sure what he was trying to do but he grabbed me from behind (it could basically have been anything between a hug and a some kind of wrestling move). As a panic reaction I hit him in the face with my elbow, and he - also being drunk and on drugs - misstepped and fell on the floor, and I ran away. I yelled to my friend in Finnish that we have to get out here now, I just hit the guy with a gun. We left our drinks at the table and ran for our lives.
I remember running to the parking lot, stopping there for a while to breathe, and then running some more. We saw the lights of some random Casino. This place was off the strip so it was pretty dark everywhere, and the only neon lights nearby came from that one, small casino. We ran there, and soon it became clear he hadn't followed us, so we stayed there and ordered drinks. We talked about our relationships and pretty much everything for many hours, until it was 6 or 7 in the morning. I can't remember why, but we decided to take a taxi to Bellagio.
As soon as we got there, I had to take a leak once again. I went to the toilet, and (no racism intended) the only other person inside was a Jamaican-looking guy who was the walking epitome of a pot head. I had done pot only a couple of times, and I had never got any kind of kicks from it, but for some reason it felt like a good idea to buy some at seven in the morning in a toilet in Bellagio. I have no idea why I wanted to do this, I had been drinking for at least 10 hours and it showed. So I just walked to the guy, did my best to sound as gangsta as possible, and said "Yo bro, got some pot?". This must've sounded hilarious coming from a pale young scandinavian.
It turned out he actually was a drug dealer, and he indeed sold me some pot. He asked me how much I'd like, and I had no idea how much that stuff weighs, so I said (again in my gangsta tone): "How much you got bro?".
I ended up buying a fairly large bag of it, but as I'm still not into pot I can't measure how much it was in grams. All I remember was holding that bag and not putting it in my pocket, but instead carrying it in my hand. I was so drunk I didn't think it would be necessary to hide it. The Bellagio lobby was crowded. Just as I was showing fiiiish my purchase (he looked at me like I was crazy, I had told him to wait as I'd take a quick leak, and came back with a bag of weed), the chief editor of the magazine I was now writing for walked by with a photographer. They were in Vegas interviewing some pros. I shouted his name from a distance, waving my bag of weed, asking him to come smoke with us. Everybody in the lobby was looking at me. It was full of old people going to get some breakfast. It's a small miracle no security guard stopped me. The editor just laughed at me, and instructed me to hide the bag.
We never ended up smoking any of it, and although we briefly discussed leaving it in fiiiish's hotel room as a tip for the cleaners, he ended up giving it to a skateboarder friend of his who was in town.
After my drunken nights out with fiiiiish I had another week left in Vegas. I kept losing money on my gambles, put $5k on black at one point and obviously lost. I also met another Finnish guy and went drinking with him, who was a high stakes Fixed Limit player at Betfair. I'm sure many Betfair (before it became an Ongame skin) regulars remember him: He played the highest FL games as "El Pato".
He was dating a blonde, as was I, and they shared the same first name. He lived half a mile from my place, but I had never met him before. We were born in the same year. We hit it off pretty well. We went to Bellagio to play 30/60 FL drunk on one night, and we played the game with a shared bankroll (as far as I remember, we didn't softplay). I ended up playing a huge pot with AA, where the betting was capped 5- or 6-way pre-flop. I flopped top set on a rainbow, non-straight board and it was capped 4-way. I still had the nuts on the turn and that was capped as well. On the river the board paired to give me the second nuts. I can't remember the river action anymore, but I think it was still 4- or at least 3-way, and I raise-folded getting like 60:1 or something absurd. I think it went like bet-raise-cold 3bet before it got back to me. The guy had quads, and I thought I had made a great laydown, which it was based on results. These days I'd still call given the ridiculous odds I was getting. I ended up losing a lot of money, but El Pato won much more than I lost, so I ended up in the green for the night. Me playing in that game was probably a pretty bad deal for him. We also saw Daniel Negreanu there that night, and he was incredibly drunk. I think he fell off his chair at one point, and got into a heated drunken argument with Huck Seed about something. And to answer the obvious question: No, I didn't spot Phil Laak playing 10/20.
On some other night, a really weird incident happened in Mirage. I was there with fiiiiish at six in the morning after a night of playing cash. I decided to play some roulette. Every time I hit, I tipped the croupier $5. After a few rounds I was slightly down, and I decided to tell him that I'd tip him $50 if I'd hit in the middle of my "mat".
A mat is a roulette term I first learned from Ziigmund's blog, who in turn had learned that from Ville Wahlbeck, who's a known degenerate, but also a great poker player. It means that you choose a number you're betting on in roulette, and then put chips on both the number and in the numbers around it. For example if you wanted to bet on the number 5, a mat would mean you'd put half of your chips on 5 and the rest you'd spread around between 1 and 9.
So I told the croupier that if I'd hit number 17, which was in the middle of my mat, I'd tip him $50. There was no one else around. The number that came was either 14 or 20, I can't remember, but either way it hit only the edge of my mat. What happened next was something that I still can't believe. The croupier calmly lifted the white thing that marks where the ball had landed, and moved it to number 17. Then he paid me the full amount, as if I had hit number 17. For $50! In the middle of Mirage, where the table was full of cameras. Me and fiiiish looked at each other with a Phil Ivey "wtf" face and left. I wasn't stopped on my way out, and I don't know if anything happened to the croupier.
I played a few tournaments in Vegas. Actually, I'm pretty sure I played less than five, but I managed to win two. The first was a $60 buy-in tourney in Stratosphere that I won for $900. The second was the Caesar's Palace nightly $150 that I chopped 3-way for $3500. Had I played only poker on that trip I would've easily covered all the costs and ended up in the green. But of course I wasted all of that on slots and roulette.
I also could've noticed that MTTs was something I should focus on. I remember thinking that the players in those tournaments were much worse than the players in cash games. If I had discovered MTTs back then, I'm sure my life would've been very different, and I would've avoided getting into a lot of **** I ended up getting into. And I'm pretty sure I'd have a fortune of at least $500k by now. In the other hand, sometimes you really have to hit the rock bottom to become a better person. It's entirely possible that if I had become an MTT superstar thanks to the soft games still available in 2008, I would still be a terrible person now.
I went to L.A. for a few days after I was done with Vegas. I didn't have much money anymore, so I stayed in a ****ty motel near the Airport. The reason I'm calling the place ****ty is that there was someone else's pubic hair on my sheets and that I had to listen to some couple having sex for 8 hours every single night. Must be nice to have stamina like that. Maybe there were shooting a porn movie.
On my last day in L.A. I took a taxi to some outlet and bought a nice watch with the rest of my money. I'm not sure why, once again it was a heat-of-the-moment decision. I hadn't ever even used a watch.
When I landed in Helsinki, I was again so broke that I couldn't afford a taxi back home. It was starting to become a habit, but at least it was summer, so I didn't mind having to again take the bus wearing flip-flops and shorts. I had the $1k waiting for me, and I was sure I'd turn that into tens of thousands of dollars with no troubles.
And I did.
Vol.6: My First Vegas Trip
After the Pokerisivut party and making my first poker friends I made an impromptu decision to go to Vegas. I don't think I had it planned before the party, but some people I met there said they were going, and that Vegas was awesome. When I blogged about it, many people said they'd be in Vegas at the same time and that they'd show me around and so on.
By this time I had also become slighty cocky, like I said in one of the previous parts. After getting so much attention and back-patting, I wanted it to continue. I kind of wanted to create a snowball effect, getting bigger and bigger. Again, I'm not quite sure if I realised this on a conscious level, but looking back at it this was certainly the case.
Around the same time I also got my first true haters. At first I had basically no haters at all, after all I was a guy with a gambling problem who didn't think too much of himself and had funny stories. But when I started winning, I also started to act like I owned the world, and the tone of my blog entries slowly changed. Sure, 95 per cent of my readers were still devoted fans, and the rest were chronic non-believers who doubted everything I said. But I had a few guys (who, in retrospect, were absolutely right), who constantly told me that I had got too much way too fast, that I was actually pretty bad, and so on. Some of them may even have been just trying to protect me, as what I really would've needed was someone telling me to take it easy and grind lower stakes. Either way, I took every negative comment I got really hard, and whenever someone doubted my poker skills I got incredibly mad and wanted to show them all how good I was.
So, after receiving a couple of comments saying $20k wasn't much of a roll and that I wasn't much of a player, I decided to announce that I'd play the Main Event. Back then only a handful of Finnish people played it. I think that the previous year there had been 4 or 5 Finns playing it. This would surely be considered a huge thing.
A funny side note is that back then I hadn't heard of selling shares. It didn't even cross my mind. It was clear to me from the beginning that I'd keep my entire action to myself. Despite having very little MTT experience, and even less live MTT experience, I thought I'd easily crush some $10k donkament. I didn't think it would be a big deal to wager half my roll on it. After all it had a deep structure, and I had read somewhere that the best players only get better when the play is deep, and I considered myself to be one of those players.
On one of the last days before going to Vegas I randomly decided to do a $1k online roulette flip. I had already got slightly addicted to the internet casinos, and they ate a portion of my winnings, but I hadn't blown more than a few thousand. Yet. Of course I ended up losing my entire Whitebet roll because I couldn't stop after just one flip, which was like $5k. The rest I had withdrawn earlier for the Vegas trip. I remember trying to furiously cancel my $15k withdrawal to play more online roulette. They didn't allow me to do that, and I was happy that they didn't.
I landed in Vegas on a beautiful night. I had $15k in my pocket, and I had a room from Sahara booked for two weeks. I'd always stayed in cheap hotels on my travels, and I got a room from Sahara for $20 per night and it was a decent 3-star hotel, so it felt like a bargain.
I remember the feeling when I took my first steps outside the McCarran International Airport, after wondering how on earth they even had slot machines inside the airport. It was so hot. It was as if I was in a sauna, except that the air was dry. It was about 40c outside at 10PM. I'd never encountered such a temperature. Actually, I had been to some rain forests where it was equally warm but also extremely humid. No place had actually felt so hot before.
Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age is famous for loving deserts. His recording studio is in the middle of a desert. When Arctic Monkeys made their record "Humbug", he forced them to move into the desert with him. I feel the same way about deserts with Homme. I love how everything is so dry and silent, and especially what the air feels like. It's so different from the air back in Finland. Here it's really cold for most of the year, and every time you go out the air feels like someone's pointing small needles at you. During our short summer it's not cold, but it's somehow too... fresh. It's always windy, and it sort of feels like the air is going somewhere, as if it was in a rush. It's really hard for me to enjoy any silent moments in Finland, because the air just won't settle down. Whenever I'm close to a desert, my mind is at rest just because of what the air feels like.
Despite finding the kind of weather that would offer me peace, I was everything but peaceful in Vegas. In Finland we only have one casino, and they only have roulette, blackjack and a couple of other games. It gets boring after a while. In Vegas they have everything. All kinds of Fortune wheel games, Three card poker, Four card poker, Five card poker, Casino war, Baccarat, and all kinds of slots. Even in the low-key Sahara the entire lobby was full of flashing lights and the sound of someone winning money. Bills on the table, coins flying out from the slots, someone winning a jackpot somewhere. Keno, Bingo, Horse races.
I checked in to the hotel, dropped my stuff in my room, and despite it being midnight and having traveled for 24 hours, I went straight to the casino floor. I wanted to try every game possible. I played some roulette, I learned the rules of Baccarat and played it a bit, I lost at least $1k in Casino War until I decided it was a stupid game and quit. Finally I played a Fortune Wheel game, hit the 47:1 jackpot and broke even for the night. I went to sleep at 3AM, still $15k in my pocket.
I started to regret my promise to play the Main Event from the beginning. It hit me in Vegas almost immediately; there was simply too much I wanted to do. I had left $1k at home in case I'd go busto on the trip, and I was comfortable I could grind it up from there if that happened. I didn't feel much pressure about losing everything I had with me. I just wanted to experience it all, I wanted to play every single table game in every single casino, and of course I wanted to play a ton of live cash games. I was worried that a measly $5k wouldn't be enough for all that. So I decided, as the Main Event was still almost a week away, that I'd do whatever I felt like doing with the money and that I'd only play the ME if I had enough left at the time. (I didn't know that Rio ran satellites, if I had known that I would've spent a lot of time playing those for sure.)
I kept losing money on the casino games at a stable rate. I believe I broke quite even at cash games or possibly even won a little, and lost about $1k per day on everything else, every day. I didn't stress too much about it. A few days into my Vegas trip I decided to go drinking with one of the guys who had written in my blog. He later became a very good friend of mine, but I'm not sure how he feels about naming him, so I'm just going to refer to him as fiiiish (his 2+2 alias).
We met in front of Treasure Island and instantly hit it off. We went to play the lowest stakes cash game we could find, I think it was 1/3, and ordered drinks. The drinks in Vegas are free, and the waitresses are incredibly fast, and if you tip a lot you can order multiple drinks at a time. We ordered 5 drinks at a time and drowned them with one sip. Then we tipped $10 to get new drinks as fast as possible, repeated the procedure a few times, and as a result got very drunk in just a couple of hours. At some stage when the place got more crowded and the waitresses didn't have as much time to serve us, we went to the gift shop to buy a bottle of vodka. We then placed it on the table and started drinking straight from the bottle. At some stage the floorman told us that it wasn't allowed, and we bribed him with $20 to let us keep drinking straight from the bottle, which he did.
"I'd like to bet all of my chips... and this bottle of Vodka!" I actually used that line, but the dealer didn't allow me to use the bottle as a wager.
Oh, I almost forgot. The next day was the day I was supposed to play the Main Event. I already knew I wouldn't be able to play it. I had almost exactly $10k left, and I couldn't use it all on the buy-in. At the same time there was more and more flaming going on in my blog, and I was incredibly furious to the people who doubted me playing. "He's not going to play, he's going to lose his money on roulette", people were saying. They were pretty spot on, but I hated people thinking I had failed. So I decided to "change" my starting date from 1B (that I had told people I'd play on) to 1D. This would give me a couple of days to grind some money, so I could buy in and still have some cash left.
I had also told fiiiish that I'd play the next day, so I solved the problem by getting incredibly drunk, passing out on his hotel room floor, and saying I'd go to the Rio to switch starting days.
Of course I failed miserably at my attempts to collect money for the Main. I played some live poker but ran bad, and some more roulette and obviously lost. I had no idea what I should do, so I decided to come up with a story that I'd played the Main and busted on the first level on some crazy bluff. This would make my image even cooler, I thought. By now everyone must think that I'm the coolest person alive, punting his roll on a single tournament, going drinking the night before, and busting on a crazy bluff. I made it public that we were going drinking the night before, and I made an incredibly ******ed post that went something like this: "The Main Event starts in 15 hours. I'm gonna get incredibly drunk now. Hollllla."
When I look at my 20-year old self now, I see an idiot, and I'm only 24. I wonder how I'm going view him when I'm 40?
It was so dumb. I could've just swallowed my pride and written about what had happened, and I'm sure my blog would still have been number one. It wouldn't have been a big deal at all. I couldn't do that, because I was way, way too proud. I didn't want people to think I was a failure. During the following two years my pride would only get worse, and my actions would only get worse, until I would finally hit the rock bottom in December 2009, just before my 22nd birthday. We'll get there.
On the night before my supposed Main Event we went drinking again with fiiiiish. I can't remember where we went at first, quite possibly it was Treasure Island again. At around 1AM we got the idea of going to a strip club. I hadn't been to more than a couple of bad European strip clubs before, and I really wanted to experience a cool Vegas one. I have no idea why, but we didn't end up going to Rhino or Crazy Horse or Palominos (which is my favourite these days). We ended up going to a place called Seamless that was somewhere off the strip.
We paid $30 to get inside, got a table in the corner, and ordered a tray full of Mojitos and other drinks. Pretty soon after we sat down were joined by some young pimp. He just sat in our table, and told us to get the **** out as it was "his" table. He acted like he owned the place. He indeed did know all the strippers, and the minute he sat down he had girls around him.
I, being a bit drunk and overly confident about my fighting skills, wanted to play tough and told him we weren't going anywhere. He was really short, like 170cm, and I didn't think he'd be much of a physical threat. I had started working out heavily six months earlier and I was in pretty good shape, and I had been to a few bar fights in Helsinki. I was drunk and thought I could easily knock him down, so I told him to **** off. He gave me a stare that I'll never forget, lifted his shirt a little bit, and flashed a handgun. This guy was no joke. He was (probably) a drug dealer carrying a gun in a strip club, and I had just told him to **** off. I didn't even realize how bad the situation was, but luckily fiiiish was a bit more sober and he apologized for me. He told the guy he could drink as many drinks he'd like, and, we moved to a new table at the other side of the club.
A couple of drinks later, when I was already so drunk I could barely walk, I went to take a leak. The toilet was empty, and just when I was closing my zipper the guy came in. I don't remember what he said, but once again he seemed to be threatening me. He didn't attack me, but he flashed his gun once more, and said something about messing with the wrong people. I remember thinking that I need to handle this calmly, so I just apologized to him once more, and said we were just drunk tourists.
(For the record: He never took the gun out of his pocket, and for all I know it could be that he was just showing off. It'd take me 9 more months to learn what it feels like to get actually pointed with a gun.)
When I was washing my hands, I'm not sure what he was trying to do but he grabbed me from behind (it could basically have been anything between a hug and a some kind of wrestling move). As a panic reaction I hit him in the face with my elbow, and he - also being drunk and on drugs - misstepped and fell on the floor, and I ran away. I yelled to my friend in Finnish that we have to get out here now, I just hit the guy with a gun. We left our drinks at the table and ran for our lives.
I remember running to the parking lot, stopping there for a while to breathe, and then running some more. We saw the lights of some random Casino. This place was off the strip so it was pretty dark everywhere, and the only neon lights nearby came from that one, small casino. We ran there, and soon it became clear he hadn't followed us, so we stayed there and ordered drinks. We talked about our relationships and pretty much everything for many hours, until it was 6 or 7 in the morning. I can't remember why, but we decided to take a taxi to Bellagio.
As soon as we got there, I had to take a leak once again. I went to the toilet, and (no racism intended) the only other person inside was a Jamaican-looking guy who was the walking epitome of a pot head. I had done pot only a couple of times, and I had never got any kind of kicks from it, but for some reason it felt like a good idea to buy some at seven in the morning in a toilet in Bellagio. I have no idea why I wanted to do this, I had been drinking for at least 10 hours and it showed. So I just walked to the guy, did my best to sound as gangsta as possible, and said "Yo bro, got some pot?". This must've sounded hilarious coming from a pale young scandinavian.
It turned out he actually was a drug dealer, and he indeed sold me some pot. He asked me how much I'd like, and I had no idea how much that stuff weighs, so I said (again in my gangsta tone): "How much you got bro?".
I ended up buying a fairly large bag of it, but as I'm still not into pot I can't measure how much it was in grams. All I remember was holding that bag and not putting it in my pocket, but instead carrying it in my hand. I was so drunk I didn't think it would be necessary to hide it. The Bellagio lobby was crowded. Just as I was showing fiiiish my purchase (he looked at me like I was crazy, I had told him to wait as I'd take a quick leak, and came back with a bag of weed), the chief editor of the magazine I was now writing for walked by with a photographer. They were in Vegas interviewing some pros. I shouted his name from a distance, waving my bag of weed, asking him to come smoke with us. Everybody in the lobby was looking at me. It was full of old people going to get some breakfast. It's a small miracle no security guard stopped me. The editor just laughed at me, and instructed me to hide the bag.
We never ended up smoking any of it, and although we briefly discussed leaving it in fiiiish's hotel room as a tip for the cleaners, he ended up giving it to a skateboarder friend of his who was in town.
After my drunken nights out with fiiiiish I had another week left in Vegas. I kept losing money on my gambles, put $5k on black at one point and obviously lost. I also met another Finnish guy and went drinking with him, who was a high stakes Fixed Limit player at Betfair. I'm sure many Betfair (before it became an Ongame skin) regulars remember him: He played the highest FL games as "El Pato".
He was dating a blonde, as was I, and they shared the same first name. He lived half a mile from my place, but I had never met him before. We were born in the same year. We hit it off pretty well. We went to Bellagio to play 30/60 FL drunk on one night, and we played the game with a shared bankroll (as far as I remember, we didn't softplay). I ended up playing a huge pot with AA, where the betting was capped 5- or 6-way pre-flop. I flopped top set on a rainbow, non-straight board and it was capped 4-way. I still had the nuts on the turn and that was capped as well. On the river the board paired to give me the second nuts. I can't remember the river action anymore, but I think it was still 4- or at least 3-way, and I raise-folded getting like 60:1 or something absurd. I think it went like bet-raise-cold 3bet before it got back to me. The guy had quads, and I thought I had made a great laydown, which it was based on results. These days I'd still call given the ridiculous odds I was getting. I ended up losing a lot of money, but El Pato won much more than I lost, so I ended up in the green for the night. Me playing in that game was probably a pretty bad deal for him. We also saw Daniel Negreanu there that night, and he was incredibly drunk. I think he fell off his chair at one point, and got into a heated drunken argument with Huck Seed about something. And to answer the obvious question: No, I didn't spot Phil Laak playing 10/20.
On some other night, a really weird incident happened in Mirage. I was there with fiiiiish at six in the morning after a night of playing cash. I decided to play some roulette. Every time I hit, I tipped the croupier $5. After a few rounds I was slightly down, and I decided to tell him that I'd tip him $50 if I'd hit in the middle of my "mat".
A mat is a roulette term I first learned from Ziigmund's blog, who in turn had learned that from Ville Wahlbeck, who's a known degenerate, but also a great poker player. It means that you choose a number you're betting on in roulette, and then put chips on both the number and in the numbers around it. For example if you wanted to bet on the number 5, a mat would mean you'd put half of your chips on 5 and the rest you'd spread around between 1 and 9.
So I told the croupier that if I'd hit number 17, which was in the middle of my mat, I'd tip him $50. There was no one else around. The number that came was either 14 or 20, I can't remember, but either way it hit only the edge of my mat. What happened next was something that I still can't believe. The croupier calmly lifted the white thing that marks where the ball had landed, and moved it to number 17. Then he paid me the full amount, as if I had hit number 17. For $50! In the middle of Mirage, where the table was full of cameras. Me and fiiiish looked at each other with a Phil Ivey "wtf" face and left. I wasn't stopped on my way out, and I don't know if anything happened to the croupier.
I played a few tournaments in Vegas. Actually, I'm pretty sure I played less than five, but I managed to win two. The first was a $60 buy-in tourney in Stratosphere that I won for $900. The second was the Caesar's Palace nightly $150 that I chopped 3-way for $3500. Had I played only poker on that trip I would've easily covered all the costs and ended up in the green. But of course I wasted all of that on slots and roulette.
I also could've noticed that MTTs was something I should focus on. I remember thinking that the players in those tournaments were much worse than the players in cash games. If I had discovered MTTs back then, I'm sure my life would've been very different, and I would've avoided getting into a lot of **** I ended up getting into. And I'm pretty sure I'd have a fortune of at least $500k by now. In the other hand, sometimes you really have to hit the rock bottom to become a better person. It's entirely possible that if I had become an MTT superstar thanks to the soft games still available in 2008, I would still be a terrible person now.
I went to L.A. for a few days after I was done with Vegas. I didn't have much money anymore, so I stayed in a ****ty motel near the Airport. The reason I'm calling the place ****ty is that there was someone else's pubic hair on my sheets and that I had to listen to some couple having sex for 8 hours every single night. Must be nice to have stamina like that. Maybe there were shooting a porn movie.
On my last day in L.A. I took a taxi to some outlet and bought a nice watch with the rest of my money. I'm not sure why, once again it was a heat-of-the-moment decision. I hadn't ever even used a watch.
When I landed in Helsinki, I was again so broke that I couldn't afford a taxi back home. It was starting to become a habit, but at least it was summer, so I didn't mind having to again take the bus wearing flip-flops and shorts. I had the $1k waiting for me, and I was sure I'd turn that into tens of thousands of dollars with no troubles.
And I did.
08-24-2011
, 09:45 AM
08-24-2011
, 12:11 PM
08-24-2011
, 01:45 PM
My PLO adventures start in the next part. Holy crap I was bad back then (still am).
08-24-2011
, 02:09 PM
08-24-2011
, 03:37 PM
Quote:
Vegas story seems more legit now. As I told you on the phone, these stories are great even when you are not elaborating anything. I don't even care, but when my friends call me with 2+2 links and ask that "Is this really how everything happened?" I have to correct some of the stuff, thats all.
Moar, pls.
Edit: BTW the roulette croupier bit is one of the most f***ed up things I have ever seen in a live casino. Still can't believe it, but I saw it and was kind of sober.
Edit2: The TI photo is from my POV, my stack and that's taken just after I hit the gift shop after losing a bet. I'm on vodka+coke already, but you're still consuming your super manly strawberry daquiris out of position. It is true that when we drowned most of it, you went all in proper with the bottle and all.
Moar, pls.
Edit: BTW the roulette croupier bit is one of the most f***ed up things I have ever seen in a live casino. Still can't believe it, but I saw it and was kind of sober.
Edit2: The TI photo is from my POV, my stack and that's taken just after I hit the gift shop after losing a bet. I'm on vodka+coke already, but you're still consuming your super manly strawberry daquiris out of position. It is true that when we drowned most of it, you went all in proper with the bottle and all.
Haha I actually did wager it? I didn't even remember. Vegas strawberry daiquiris are the nuts, that's all I still drink when I go there.
But yeah thanks for the correction, and if you or anyone else who was with me on any of these trips see something you think I got wrong, you can feel free to correct me - I'm not intentionally posting anything that isn't true. There are a few other hazy episodes coming up that I can't fully remember but I'm going to ask people beforehands this time
Klasuu - nope I don't play on iPoker, the software makes me sit out. It's the worst software I know. The only site where I have the sn Chuck Bass or anything like that is Entraction.