John Turner

I cashed again in a tournament at Full Tilt. In the last 6 weeks, I’m up almost $2000. Not too bad at all. By “cashed,” I mean “more than $200″. I don’t count the little tournaments or satellites. For this latest, I used 50 FTPs to get into a satellite. I won that, which got me into another satellite where the buy-in was 2500 FTPs. I won that, which got me into the weekly $750K guarantee. Out of 3,974 people playing in that tournament, I ended up 82nd. I wish I could have made it into the top ten…that’s where the serious money was. I think first prize was $134K. Tenth was something like $9K, I think.

On the down side, I went to Motor City the other day to play live in their daily tournament and didn’t cash (last time I played there I cashed for $400). So, playing live I’m 1-1 (.500). If I was a professional baseball player and that was my batting average, I’d be making $15 million a year.

Depending on how you look at it, I’m either fortunate or unfortunate enough to work for a company that shuts down for almost two weeks during the Christmas holidays. If I don’t work I don’t get paid, which sucks, especially around the holidays, but then again, it is nice to have all that time off.

One of the things I did over the break was go down to Motor City with my buddy RC to play poker. I’ve pretty much given up playing online, and have decided to focus on playing in live games and tournaments this year. Aside from home games, I’ve only played against strangers live at a casino once before. Motor City has a tournament at noon every day, so we went down there last week and bought in. The buy-in was $65, with $15 going to the house and $50 going to the purse. I know, I know, $65 isn’t the big time, but there’s no reason to spend $200-$500 when you’re just getting your feet wet and practicing playing live.

So $65, it ended up being 40 people, no limit hold ‘em. [Read more →]

I’ve caught a few minutes of this year’s Heads-Up Poker Championship on UHD recently, and I think it is great that Shannon Elizabeth is having so much fun and doing so well with her poker career. But, I gotta say this: she looks like a doofus when she keeps wearing those Full Tilt baseball hats. [Read more →]

I haven’t been playing much poker lately. When I have played, it has been in heads-up tournaments, mostly because they seem to move faster and I get impatient. What I also did was read “The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time”. It really changed my perspective on the poker world. Until I read the book, I had thought that the superstars you see and hear about, like Howard Lederer, Ted Forrest, Doyle Brunson and his son Todd, Jennifer Harmann, Barry Greenstein, etc. all had some sort of magical knack for never losing at poker. The book points out, though, that every one of the poker greats you see and hear about has 1) worked their butts off for years to get where they are today, and 2) had times in their lives and in their poker careers when they were flat broke, or worse, in debt to someone else because they lost at poker. I realize now that I shouldn’t feel so bad that I am not regularly doing better in tournaments after a year of playing off and on at the amateur level. The important thing is to keep playing, keep learning, and work harder to make better poker decisions while remembering that it is about the long run, not the short run.

Almost made it to the first break. I was bleeding, licking my wounds in the small blind with only 900 left. Got dealt QJ off. Blinds were 30/60, guy in front of me on the button raised to 250. I went all-in, and what-do-ya-know, he’s got AA. Oh well…at least it only cost me $6 and not $322 like a lot of people spent. On to the next one…

I was doing really well, was up about 1500 over what I started with. I was in mid-late position, and got AQ off suit. Flop came out Ad7s9s. I didn’t have any spades. We were three-handed. A guy went all-in, I called him for something like 2,000 with my pair of aces. He had As5s, so any spade and I was cooked. And guess what? He got his spade. Ouch. I just noticed Phil Gordon is playing in this tournament, too. Yikes! Right now, a little over 500 people have gone out and interestingly enough, NONE of the pros are in the top 100. Very very interesting…..

The tournament just started…I’m doing OK. 2,755 people started, I’m ranked about 1000th right now. I was short stack for a couple minutes because I got too aggressive, but I settled down and took down a decent pot with a spade flush, Ace high. That got me up over what I started with, so its all good. Just having fun….

I’m in my first big tournament today, in about an hour. I play at Full Tilt because they’re the only site with a full-fledged client for OS X, as far as I know. Today’s tournament is part of their FTOPS series that they have every year. I’m pretty excited…the buy-in is $322, and the prize pool is a guaranteed $750K. I got in by winning a $6 six-seat SnG, which in turn got me into a $26 satellite. I won that tournament, too, which got me into the $300 big boy today. $6 to get $322…not too bad. I think first prize is something like $200,000. I’m going to play my game and see how it goes…some pros are playing, too, like Erick Lindgren, Allen Cunningham, Andy Bloch, Eric Froehlich and Toto Leonidas. It will be fun if I get to play against one of them…hopefully they don’t knock me out too early!!