Pattern Matching

Babar and I had a long heart to heart over skype this morning, something we do from time to time when he's more worried about me than usual. A lot of the talk was fairly private, and he suggested a lot of ways for me to improve and proved once again that is a grade A compassionate and caring friend. We discussed some parallels between my software and poker careers (there are many) and eventually I had what could possibly be construed as the beginnings of an epiphany.

I learned to play poker by pattern matching.

And there you have it. Often times when you enjoy something or get good at something you don't really ever take a step back to decide why you're good at it or how you've managed to build your skill. You just kind of keep going until all of a sudden it doesn't work or isn't fun anymore. But I got to thinking about things I've been really good at in my life this morning, and invariably most of my successes have been built around some form of pattern matching. Some concrete examples are doing very well on standardized tests, getting very good grades, serving as a reasonable software developer who often cringed at learning about new technologies (which admittedly could be mostly the fault of Oracle, since at that company the word "new" really just means "doesn't work yet"), and perhaps even becoming a pretty high level swimmer despite boasting at best modest physical talents.

The theme throughout those endeavors is that after a few years I got bored, and was unable to rise past the level of "good". Obviously at this point I'm stretching a little to make a point, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that I've gotten as far as I have in poker basically by pattern matching, and that the number of patterns I'm now trying to match when determining the strategically correct decisions in a hand has grown too vast for me to deal with. It makes sense. Live full ring 6/12 really only requires you to do 3 or 4 things correctly. Play tight preflop, value bet relentlessly, and push your edges in strong draws. That's about it. When I first started playing live 20/40 I really wasn't capable of much more than that, but through a combination of running good and being in games where little else was needed I was able to thrive for quite some time. But eventually things kind of got hard. I started having to deal with trickier opponents. I started getting more math based and to think about not only my cards but my entire range of holdings and how I would proceed with all of them. And eventually somewhere along the way I think the physical machinery of how I think during the actual play of a poker hand may have broken down. There are just too many things to pattern match, and it doesn't work if you want to move past crushing retards.

So what am I going to do? I'm going to focus on context, specifically on loading the correct context into my brain during the course of a hand. I used this simple example with Babar today, but it makes sense. All of a sudden you see a large man with a baseball bat. What's your line? Well obviously the events of the last 2 to 60 minutes play a huge roll in making that decision. A poker hand can be thought of in the same fashion. OK, you just got check/raised on the turn. What do you do? Well, you need to have the right frames loaded into memory so you can easily access all the information you might need. Is the pot small? Big? Huge? How many players are there? Does this guy like to bluff? All sorts of stuff like that is important, and while it may seem obvious that I need to be thinking about stuff like that, I am pretty sure I have been guilty of making snap decisions based on simply matching variables to patterns rather than trying to evaluate as much information as I can. So hopefully this process will be helpful, or at least enlightening, and enable me to keep my poker career somewhat on the rails.

In a bit of results type news....I'm not going to check my online results for a month. You heard me...no peeking at win rates or anything like that until April Fool's day. Live results obviously can't be hidden, and so far for the year have been good. My winning ways have slowed considerably in the past 3 weeks, but still the first 2 months of the year have turned out well. And I'll leave with an interesting finding. I have spoken with two pretty solid winners who have logged a fair and massive (respectively) number of hours in various LA area casinos, specifically casinos A and B. Both told me that they have won far and away more money at casino A than casino B, which to me seemed a little odd. So I checked my results since I moved down here for A and B, as well as C, and found an astonishing truth. I won a lot more at A than B, and I even won a lot more at C than B. Like 4 times more, per hour, in the same structured game, and over a total of like 1200 hours (my co-conspirators on this one had probably a little less than this number in one case and a whole lot more in the other). And if you'd asked me to rank the quality of the games, I would have put them in the reverse order of how much the three of us had won. So perhaps at this point I don't even know what a good game looks like :)

Bay Area Trip

It's official; I'll be in the Bay Area from this Thursday until the following Tuesday or Wednesday. Drop me a line if you want to hang out, catch up, or 3 bet me with 8-high.

How Much Ya Wanna Bet?

This phrase tilts the living Bejesus out of me, and a fair number of you know exactly why. People who don't gamble for a living get this one wrong all the time; even really, really smart people. How much you'd be willing to bet on a certain thing isn't the real defining measure of how sure you are of it's truth. The odds you'd be willing to lay are. Just last night Danielle and I were out to a fancy dinner at this high end establishment (to be quite honest the pizza was pretty good, and the 30 or so odd tokens I found in my drawer bought quite a bit of skee ball, pop a shot, and Mario Kart) and she said to me "How much would you bet we're the only party here without any kids?" I just kind of laughed at first, then realized that was rude and explained to her how exactly I'd think about the problem.

1. Define kid. Later in the evening we realized there was a serious edge case; 17 year old couples. Do they count as kids? In the spirit of the rule, no. But maybe they were there with their parents and siblings and were actually 15. We'd need a definition of both kid and party before such a bet could be undertaken. Let's go with the loosest definition of party (just people who met, not necessarily came in the same car) and kid (anyone under the age of 18).

2. After that, I wouldn't think about it in terms of how much I'd be willing to bet. I'd think about it in terms of trying to determine what I thought a fair price was (just glancing around the restaurant I thought a fair price was something like 9:1 against there being another kidless party).

Proud of myself for explaining something, I sat back and sipped on my caffeine free diet pepsi (partyer that I am). Danielle simply restated her question, as is her custom and that of some other intelligent people I know after someone has explained that a problem is a lot deeper than what she originally posed, but also still very answerable. I thought about trying to discuss it in terms of the Kelley Criterion, but I assume that would have to be flawed as this is obviously an edge case. The answer to such a question relies on many things, all of which are inherit to a given person and therefore likely can't be decided with a formula:

1. How much money do you have?

2. How much money do you make?

3. How safe is that income stream?

4. How much money do you spend? Could you reduce it?

5. Will you kill yourself if you lose a certain number of dollars?

6. How old are you?

After thinking about these questions, and declaring that I thought the fair price of the bet was something like 9:1, I asked Danielle how much she would bet at even odds that we were in fact the only kidless party at the fine eatery. Her immediate response was....$500. I restated the question and this time told her not that I felt the odds were 9:1, that they actually were...simplifying the problem. You have an event that will happen with 90% certainty, and someone is willing to give you unlimited action at even money that it will not. How much will you bet? I managed to get her to say $5000, but that was as high as she'd go. Now I'm not going to go into her personal finances at any length here, but she does work at Google. That is all.

She wanted to know what my answer was, and after a few seconds of reflection I responded "I think all of it." She was stunned. Now I have money in a Roth IRA, and she argued that it's tax sheltered status meant I should never touch it, not even with a 90% chance of doubling it. And she might be right, I suppose. 30 years of untaxed growth is nothing to sneeze at. And I don't have a job, so betting every penny I could get my hands on would be perhaps a little silly. But even so, I think my personal answer is "the vast majority of my liquidatable net worth," and some of my answers to the questions above are decided "wrong." I don't have a job, and my income stream isn't very safe, specifically. Were I in her situation, I literally think I might bet every penny I could get my hands on.

So anyway, I thought that was interesting, and am curious as to what other people think. How much of your net worth would you bet at even money on a 9:1 favorite?

Jimmy V's Espy Speech

I think everyone should watch this speech at least once. It will make you laugh, make you think, and maybe even make you cry. I'm not really sure why I like it so much, but I think maybe because it reminds me that passion and emotion are parts of the human condition to be embraced, not ones we fight to restrain and control as we move through the world.

Softball is Back

Or I should say more accurately, I am back at softball. I played a fair bit in the Bay Area, for at least 5 or so different teams, at the end under the watchful eyes of coach (who is an interesting poker player indeed, playing as high as 30/60 online but as of yet unable to win at live 20/40 and therefore spending time playing in green chip games to this day....obviously his 20/40 losses can be attributed to run bad, and his existence makes me feel better about my own). Anyway, coach had been at it for like over a decade, and would send out email recaps of the games, routinely with a note that someone was approaching some season or career record, such as 500 hits or some other redonkulous total. You see in California you can play softball literally like 9 or even 12 months a year, and if you play 10 games per season and 4 seasons per year....well all of a sudden 500 hits doesn't seem like that many. As an aside I introduced coach to a couple of his current players, including his current star pitcher who routinely has 4 for 5 with 2 doubles and a dinger type nights.

Anyway I finally got off my ass down here and started playing softball two weeks ago. Why did it take me a full year? Well, there are a few reasons. First of all I'm pretty darn lazy. Second of all, it's hard to find a softball team to play for when you literally don't know a single person who, you know, plays softball. And finally I was hesitant because to be honest I'm not that good. I played baseball for 10 years growing up and was quite good right up until the point that I stopped growing and was no longer the biggest kid on the team (age 13 to be precise). The problem was that I am a natural second basemen....which is to say I am a presentable infielder with silly puddy where my right arm should be. I also have never really figured out exactly how to hit a softball, and certainly can't hit for enough power to knock the ball over the outfielders heads (in softball there are 3 kinds of hits....line drives over the infielders heads, home runs over the outfielders heads, and lucky ones).

So far I've played three games, the first as a sub, the second as a now full time player for that team, and the third just tonight as a sub again. My first game was...just...awful. I left 5 men on base. In the first two innings. I went 1 for 4. I made a mess of second base. I didn't know which side of the plate to hit from (I'm right handed, but spent most of my baseball career swinging from the left side, which enabled me to actually stand a chance at hitting a curve ball. But hitting right handed still feels a little more natural). And to boot, after finally getting a hit in the bottom of the last inning to knock in the tying run with 1 out, I managed to get called out at first base for taking an early lead (before the pitcher released the ball). The batter promptly grounded out to short and the man on 3rd obviously didn't score and the game ended...in a tie.

So after that piss poor performance I figured I was done with it. I wasn't going to go out of my way to play with anybody else, and that team certainly wasn't going to call me back for another go, so that was that. But lo and behold the moonshiners wanted me back the following week, and even asked me to join the team permanently. So I figured what the hell, it can't get any worse, right? Wrong. In my first at bat I strike out....looking. You start with a 1-1 count (standard) and any pitch of reasonable height that hits the rubber mat behind the plate is a strike. That much I knew. What I did not know, however, was that any ball that landed on the plate was also a strike. That is decidedly non-standard. So I took a pitch that landed honestly about an inch in front of the plate or maybe just barely landed on it and boom the ump in ringing me up and well it's just not good. So at this point things were not looking good, but I managed to turn it around by hitting solidly left handed and taking advantage of a second basemen with roughly the same UZR as a barca lounger. I finished the game with a walk and 2 singles, both of which were line drives past the aforementioned piece of furniture standing between first and second base, and the moonshiners claimed glorious victory by way of a mid-inning (the top of the middle of an inning no less) mercy rule invocation (humorously the mercy rule run was scored by the 2nd man on base when our clean up guy hit a towering blast over the left fielders head. He cruised from second base on and eventually was struck directly in the ass by the ball sailing in from third base in an effort to score a run which did not even count). So that was good.

And tonight I got a text around 5:15 asking if I could fill in for another team and I did so admirably, making no idiotic plays in right or right center and going 3 for 4 with a triple. You see, everyone else on the team was capable of knocking the ball over the outfielders heads, so they had to play way back. So my first two at bats I lulled them into....who am I kidding I grounded into a double play and hit a soft liner over the second basemen's head. So anyway after that they played me in and I smacked one over their heads and, am told, downshifted not one but two gears while rounding third base and was promptly thrown out at the plate to end the inning, with the ump helping me up saying "sorry man, that was a hell of a throw". But it was fun and we won, so it's all good, and I'm actually looking forward to playing tomorrow for my "real" team and the like.

ORLY?

Full Tilt Poker $2/$4 Limit Hold'em - 5 players - View hand 1181613
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

Pre Flop: (1.5 SB) Hero is BTN with J T
2 folds, Hero raises, SB calls, BB calls

Flop: (6 SB) T J 6 (3 players)
SB checks, BB checks, Hero bets, SB calls, BB raises, Hero 3-bets, SB caps!, BB calls, Hero calls

Turn: (9 BB) 5 (3 players)
SB checks, BB bets, Hero raises, SB 3-bets, BB caps!, Hero calls, SB calls

River: (21 BB) 5 (3 players)
SB checks, BB bets, Hero calls, SB raises, BB 3-bets, Hero folds, SB caps!, BB calls

Final Pot: 30 BB
SB shows A 5 (three of a kind, Fives)
BB shows T T (a full house, Tens full of Fives)
BB wins 29.25 BB
(Rake: $3.00)

I played this hand on full tilt just now and have to say....orly? Let's take a look at the lines here. Now admittedly really the only thing the BB did wrong was not 3 bet preflop. After that he just went directly to batshit, did not pass go, and eventually collected like literally close to $200. But the small blind...what on earth are you doing man? OK you put in the spew cap on the flop with the flush draw. Fine, I can get behind that. But the turn and river? Seriously? I had to give the guy a new color after this one.

Things have been going pretty horribly online lately, with me losing 210 bets over the course of just 3000 hands in the past week or so. I guess that type of shit happens all the time, but coupled with the fact that I'm simply not allowed to win at 5/T and it's just gotten kind of old. All in all since I started taking the online pokers very seriously again on November 1st I've played 74K hands and won 650 bets, so I can't really complain. But those 650 bets are only a total of about $2000, which obviously means...well, you know what it means. I just don't get to win at 3/6 (I break even) and I lose horrendously at 5/T (with a very small sample size). Ah well, gotta keep trucking.

Live poker, on the other hand, is going just fine. Total earnings for the year have already passed into the five figure range, and I'm consistently finding myself in just amazing spots. The Commerce 40 shot is afoot, I promise.

And finally....I'm going to organize a poker bowling group, based on inspiration from a friend I met just this week in my live games who asked "are you the Jesse I think you are?". Let me know if you're interested, my plan is to run it somewhat loosely like a league, but really just pick up teams every time we play and gamble appropriately on the outcome.

There's a Straight on Board!

Today was one of those days that started of fantastically well, with me happy to be alive and feeling just wonderful, and ended with me once again questioning what the fuck I'm doing. I woke up feeling refreshed and alert for once and promptly logged into FullTilt and found...well, basically it looked like this. Just action everywhere, all kinds of idiots in the 3/6 games, just freaking amazing. So I even decided to game start a full ring 2/4 because what the hell that's how you get better and everyone says I should do it so I've been doing it and I basically just get to OBLITERATE this guy (who was admittedly terrible) for like 60 hands. Apparently DougL actually was watching the match and later berated me for not having Skype open, which I will admit was a serious mistake on my part. So anyway, I played for an hour or more and despite making 1.7 pears per hand against that poor human was still somehow getting crushed, then eventually made like 3 full houses at the same time with AK (or something like that...it was really quite amazing) and called it a morning. Then I went to work out and lifted weights for the first time in a week and in general just felt awesome. Cue live poker.

Things are going alright, but the game is kind of crappy and I'm just sort of treading water. I win my post-in hand and another right away and am quickly up a rack. I order fruit, a bagel, and coffee for breakfast which does more for my self confidence. I listen to good music and everything is correct in the world and there's not a worry in my mind. Then I proceed to bleed off five racks of chips over the next 7 hours, taking all manner of preposterous beats, most of which aren't even worth discussing. Except for one.....

So there are two guys in my game who are just gambling it up, having a grand old time, becoming very friendly with each other really for no reason other than they are both young and white and retarded. In theory I should be friends with them also, but they are complete idiots and have no clue what they're doing so what am I going to do exactly there? Anyway, if you've played live poker you have a good sense of what's going on; the game has turned into a social event, with people laughing and having a good time, taking jabs at each other, just exactly what a poker game is supposed to be. And everyone is having a good time because I am personally losing about $10/minute at this point, ensuring that basically nobody else, other than the partier in seat 4, is stuck. He is playing all sorts of silly hands declaring it's his only way out, etc, etc, and his new buddy in seat 5 is playing along, 3 betting him mercilessly and the like. So like I said I'm just getting fucking destroyed, and the game has crossed over from "fun and gambly" to "out of control". Everyone is playing almost every hand for as many bets as requested (which is often 2 or 3) and all semblance of order and discipline has gone out the window. Then it happens. Seat 5 opens and seat 8 cold calls the button. I am in seat 1 and defends K8ss (I did successfully call seat 5 down with king high once today, but this was not to be the outcome of our fateful hand). The flop comes:

854ddh

And we proceed directly to batshit. I check, he bets, the button (who's a terrible fish) raises, I 3 bet and he immediately caps. The button calls and I call cause I mean....I know it's difficult to put them both on diamond draws, but you're gonna have to pry this one out of my cold dead hands. To the turn, which is a beaut:

854ddh-7h

I check, seat 5 bets, the button calls, and I tank to make sure I don't want to raise before calling. To the river:

854ddh-7h-6s

LOL OK not what I expected but whatever. I check...huge mistake. They both turbo check behind me and I table my hand instantly like it's the nuts (always do this when there is a straight on board and you're first to act if you have anything at all they could construe as a hand that beats theres) and it happens...seat 5 tanks. He looks at the board, he looks at his hand....the board...his hand....and then seat 4 says under his breath quietly seemingly so only seat 5 could here but seriously I'm not deaf "straight on board...there's a straight on board straight on board" and yet somehow seat 5 isn't hearing him (and later claims to have never heard him but bullshit I say bullshit) and eventually (after the dealer admonishes seat 4 that he's not supposed to say anything...twice) some light goes on inside that vacuous dome of a head of his and he turns over...JTdd. LOL fuck, OK fine. But wait....here's the best part. Seat 8 mucks! After all that, seat 8 is actually clueless enough to muck his hand!

I am beside myself and call the floor man over because I don't know what else to do....I don't really have an argument beyond "that guy is an asshole" but make it anyway, and the floor man agrees with me that he is in fact an asshole but can't really do anything about it. So I stack up my half of the pot and then it hits me....if seat 8 mucked...I was winning the whole pot before the river. After 4000 hours of live poker it's hard to believe you still see new depths of stupidity....but I mean, it's LA.

Grumble Grumble

Freakin' Packers. I won't harp on the game much because historically the Steelers have been exceptionally fortunate in Super Bowls (AFC Championship games...not so much....but their Super Bowl Luck Box is extremely shiny indeed), but I do really feel like they just kind of loused this one up. I mean, the final score was 31-25, and they basically committed 4 turnovers (and somehow managed not to recover that muffed punt after their first possession, which is really still a mystery to me). Ben's wounded duck was a direct result of Pouncey being out (and obviously it getting returned all the way to the house was extremely unfortunate), the Mendenhall fumble was basically a fluke, and the missed FG....well that was retarded. I was practically yelling at the TV on 3rd and 12 or whatever it was the play before to just hand the ball off and run it up the middle (at which point Danielle astutely commented they were lined up in an empty set) for 4 yards so they the FG would be a nice manageable 45 yards. The Steeler's needed to have hired a special assistant for this game who's only job was to stand there and remind Tomlin every 10 minutes or so "I know, I know, he was 14/15 since you let the drunk guy go, but he's still Shaun Suisham. It's going to bite you in the ass." But no, Ben takes a sack and Suisham shankopotamus's the 52 yarder (admittedly an eminently reasonable distance from which to attempt a field goal, indoors, on turf) practically out of bounds and they hand the Packers another short field. I know the defense is good, but how good do you want them to be? Indoors on a fast track like that, with all those WRs and Rodgers prancing around back their....yeesh. In closing on the game...it doesn't count as a hurry up offense if you don't huddle but don't snap the ball until the play clock is down to 3 seconds or less every single fucking play. It just doesn't. And when you're stuck 11 with 12 minutes to go and have mysteriously incinerated two timeouts already, you need to be in the hurry up offense.

Life is going reasonable well at the moment. I think I'm actually doing some growing as a professional poker player for the first time in a while, thanks in part to re-dedicating myself to hand reviews, and in larger part to spending some time thinking about the kinds of mistakes I tend to make when I'm off my A game. I've also spent a fair bit of time thinking about what advice I really need to be listening to and what advice is sorta of optional, and I think that has been helping me out quite a bit.

Today was a fun day, with me getting stuck 2.5 racks almost upon entrance to the 20/40 game, digging myself out, losing a little more, then taking an ill-advised walk into the 30/60 game, finding myself again stuck pretty badly and....having the discipline to move back into the must move 20 which was fair and away the best situation for me to be in. For once it did work out like it was supposed to, and I ran over the game for 3 racks and left up a little bit on the day. It's kind of fun when you make good decisions and they actually work out.

Thus far 2011 is going much better than 2010, and if things continue on their current pace I'll be taking that Commerce 40 shot by Easter.

Dinner and a Movie

Danielle and I went to dinner and a movie tonight (we saw The Fighter...Meh is my official response...meh) dressed in our respective team apparel (her a Rodgers jersey, me sporting number 43). All I can say is that I think I now have at least a small understanding of what it must have been like to be:

1. A mixed race couple in 1985

2. A mixed race couple in 2011 in not California

3. Openly gay in the 90s

4. Openly straight in San Francisco in 2006 (OK I actually already knew that one)

Seriously, the number of double takes and stares and pointed fingers we got had to be in the double digits when we stopped at Ralph's alone.

End of a Long Week

So I have once again re-doubled my efforts to play as much as possible, mainly inspired by avoidthe9to5's post about engineering success (the astute reader will recall he is the one whom I whipped most fiercely in the weight loss prop bet, and I am forever grateful for his action and it is my blog so I am officially pimping his awesomeness here), and for a few days it seemed like things were going well. I won. Then won some more. Then won a lot. Then yesterday I lost a little...then today I had to stop myself out for the first time in ages. For the week I did still post a pretty good win, and I won quite a bit online also, despite the train wreck of a session I just played. I'm sitting on like 5 or 6 just amazing tables, spread out from 2/4 to 5/T (all full ring) and am pretty much in the zone picking new seats and keeping myself in 5-6 games at all time and just cruising. Then LicENsiADo sits down on my immediate right in the 5/T game and I un-check autopost because him replacing the 40/10/.4 drooler I had the Jesus Seat on was enough for me to decide to bail out. For those of you who don't know this guy, well....he's pretty legendary. He plays full ring at like 24/18 or some such in my database, and over literally 14K hands I have him winning almost 4 big bets per 100. I mean obviously he's running super duper hot, but still. I try to avoid the main. So anyway I'm about to sit out ....but wait...it comes to him and he doesn't take his blind. "Sure, I'll play one more lap!" I say to myself. There are some droolers to his right (just an amazing game honestly) and will sit out after the next orbit. So I play the blinds and nothing happens, and on my button, well....

Full Tilt Poker $5/$10 Limit Hold'em - 9 players
The Official 2+2 Hand Converter By DeucesCracked Poker Videos

CO posts a big blind (1 SB)

Pre Flop: (2.5 SB) Hero is BTN with Q Q
2 folds, UTG+2 calls, 2 folds, CO raises, Hero 3-bets, 1 fold, BB raises all in, UTG+2 calls, CO calls, Hero calls

Flop: (14.5 SB) 2 J 9 (4 players - 1 is all in)
UTG+2 bets, CO raises, Hero 3-bets, UTG+2 caps!, CO calls, Hero calls

Turn: (13.25 BB) 2 (4 players - 1 is all in)
UTG+2 bets, CO raises, Hero calls, UTG+2 calls

River: (19.25 BB) 4 (4 players - 1 is all in)
UTG+2 checks, CO bets, Hero calls, UTG+2 calls

Final Pot: 22.25 BB
UTG+2 mucks A 9
CO shows A A (two pair, Aces and Twos)
Hero mucks Q Q
BB mucks T 7
CO wins 15 BB
CO wins 6.95 BB
(Rake: $3.00)

That's the thing about this guy. As far as I can tell, he just...always...has it. And once again...he had it. So I finished out my session and put a close to the week with $3K less than I had Wednesday afternoon.

Things I Heard Today

So there is this one regular (I've probably written about him before) at the casino I was at today, and in the course of about 10 minutes he said the following things to a pair of dealers:

"I hate you. I fucking hate you, I really mean it. I fucking hate you"

"I hope you get hit by a truck. I mean that, I hope someone runs you over with a truck"

"Did I get you yet? No? Well hopefully somebody will in the parking lot"

At no point was he kidding or making a joke, and he is a 50 year old or so white American male. It's just flabbergasting what I have to put up with just because a guy is willing to drop 50K a year playing 20/40.

The Art of the New Setup

6 players limp and I stick in a raise with 65cc OTB. If back-raised I will cap, but sadly they all just call, saying things like "you're only up against 9 people" to which I respond "hey hey! It's only 8, and that's if you count the dealer!" and "your chances are real good" to which I retort "I'm going to flop it"

432ssc

To make a long story short I get it capped about 4 ways, with "guy with a set" putting in the donk/3 ying to my raise/cap yang. One time dealah!

Kh

Guy with set donks and I get the raise in, 4 ways. River Qc and I still have the nuts. He shows 44, and I drag a tape measure pot.

Very next hand I pick up 99 and get to play a huge pot with chessmaster and some woman. Flop is:

854ss

She donks he raises I 3 they call.

6d

They both call

Ad

She folds JTss face up, chessmaster calla with J8o and can't believe his misfortune. "How lucky can you get, Jesse?".

One more hand is dealt and I do not win it. I'm still trying to stack my copious winnings when Sam calls for a setup, on the assumption that my reign of terror must be stopped. The setup comes and me and another guy rush off to the bathroom and make it back just in time for me to 3 bet him with AQcc. He caps, 4 ways we go:

632ccc

That's right, I flopped it. He...donk checks...I bet they all call. Turn:

3s

He check/raises. I 3-bet quickly, he cries and calls headsup.

3d

He donks....I can't play good enough to fold and he shows me KK. The new setup has claimed it's latest victim.