yay I'm going to Vegas!

Well there were some goods and some bads about this last week poker-wise. The goods were that I put in two different sessions of about a thousand hands each, during which I played 8 tables. I played well and did not feel rushed or bothered by the number of tables, so I'm optimistic that I've finally worked my way up to being to 8-table comfortably, although I (obviously) don't have tons of experience at it, yet.

The bads were that during the few shorter sessions I had, I think I played miserably! All and all, this week I think I made three AWFUL call-offs of my stack, for a total of about $250 that I shouldn't have lost in those short sessions. I also ran poorly in the week overall, both in terms of losing all my flips and in terms of people having the top of their range in spots where they have a fairly wide set of hands, and so many of my re-steals failed. It is conceivable that they are just getting more aggressive and 5bet bluffing and 3bet bluffing the flop or shove-bluffing the turn, but given my history with these players and my history at 0.50/1 in general, in fairly confident that they were just showing up with hands in spots where their stats say they won't be very often.

So given how poorly the week went, and even though I didn't play much (given that two sessions represent about 2K of the hands), the fact that I'm still up a little over a buy in after all that makes me all the more confident that the games are as easy as I tend to think they are.

I'm leaving for Vegas in about a half hour, and I can't wait! I'm very much looking forward to seeing my friends, going to the weekly poker meetings, and playing poker live in an actual casino for the first time in a while. Given how much I crushed the live games before I started learning to beat online, I am interested in seeing how much easier the live games will be now! Perhaps an Angel Largay winrate of 20-30 blinds an hour is within reach!! I guess I'll find out, that is if I don't spend all my time hanging out with friends...

In other news, I got a very kind letter from the IRS saying that if I didn't give them $3,700 within the next month, I would be fined even more and they would come to collect. As it turns out, my 2006 tax return failed to mention about twenty grand in stock sales! This was news to me! In reality, all that had happened was I didn't know about some stock my parents had in my name and had cashed out to help pay for college. I also hadn't been able to get the W2 from dealing at the WSOP that year, so I made a rough guess on my taxes and didn't mention anything about the stocks that I didn't know about! And somehow the IRS didn't accept my return... go figure!

Given that I grossly underestimated how much I'd already paid in taxes form my wages (I got my W2 this past week, after many calls to the Rio.) and the cost basis from the stocks sold, Turbo Tax told me that I owed the IRS an additional $1. So I filled out my amended return, attached a check to the US Treasury for $1, and also attached a letter explaining that the check was not a joke! I of course also included copies of the statements from the stock sales and my W2, so they will see that the math adds up, but I thought it was quite funny that I was so close on my original return given that I left so much out and just guessed. It was all true to the best of my knowledge! I just didn't have any knowledge!

In the future, I'll have to make sure I don't miss anything—this was too much of a scare and a hassle to do more than once per year!

Next week I'll have updates on my trip to Vegas.





-Max