Vegas & The Aftermath - Diary

[DMorgan]

Not bad for a company selling fairly average products...

I bet you're cool enough to hate Coldplay.

Tesco can burn too right?

[kinboshi]

Not bad for a company selling fairly average products...

I bet you're cool enough to hate Coldplay.

Tesco can burn too right?

If he has hearing he can hate Coldplay.  I say 'hate', but they're too insipid to generate such emotions.  'Tepid apathy' is probably a better term.

[mulhuzz]

Not bad for a company selling fairly average products...

I bet you're cool enough to hate Coldplay.

Tesco can burn too right?

If he has hearing he can hate Coldplay.  I say 'hate', but they're too insipid to generate such emotions.  'Tepid apathy' is probably a better term.

great albums, want to make a fortune so sign to major label whilst keeping their old back catalogue as theirs, not labels, deliberately make toss album which sells ok anyway, plan to get dropped by label, keep fortunes and go back to their own indie label.

hard to be apathetic about genius

[gatso]

so much talent wasted making bland dreary music. if just once they'd decided to record something decent it probably would've been amazing, sadly they never have

[JaffaCake]

Was talking to Jeff Buff last night strangely enough, we're in the same fantasy basketball league and our teams are against each other this week. Obv my team is battering the yank at his own game.

Interesting point he was making about why he's lost his love for poker, saying he only plays about once a month now as it doesn't do it for him any more.

He said he's a 20 min blind kinda guy and I kinda agree. It's all very lovely that every comp now has deep stacks and lots of starting chips, it was only a couple of yrs ago you'd make a big thing about a comp having 10,000 starting chips, now that's not enough even for a £100 buyins.

I like a good structure as much as the next man but there must be a place for all structures and ranges of comps, where are all the crap shoots these days?!

[mulhuzz]

where are all the crap shoots these days?!

in Gibraltar

[SuuPRlim]

IIRC "the kid" was Marcello Marigliano: http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=91660

he has a pretty interesting story as well tikay, an extremely wealthy italian businessman who randomly appeared on the high stakes tables in ~2007 and was gloriously donating at 100/200 - 300/600 heads up NL. He later claimed in interviews that he'd played practically zero no limit holdem before jumping into HU games at nosebleeds vs the worlds best players. Obviously there was a queue the size of Sicily waiting to play him, within about 3 years very few people were prepared to give him action and he actually beating some reasonably tough no-limit line-ups - the tracking sites actually have him as a lifetime winner from NL online (this might not be true as he doubtless lost a LOT at the start) but he was almost certainly a winner from his last 2 years of play on FTP.

He also made one of the most insane bluffs we've seen on TV vs Dwan in his live Million Dollar challenge



This guy is the typical monster whale (rich, older, Italian) but certainly a terrific achievement from a middle-aged recreational player to be able to turn himself into a winning player at the top levels.

[SuuPRlim]

Was talking to Jeff Buff last night strangely enough, we're in the same fantasy basketball league and our teams are against each other this week. Obv my team is battering the yank at his own game.

Interesting point he was making about why he's lost his love for poker, saying he only plays about once a month now as it doesn't do it for him any more.

He said he's a 20 min blind kinda guy and I kinda agree. It's all very lovely that every comp now has deep stacks and lots of starting chips, it was only a couple of yrs ago you'd make a big thing about a comp having 10,000 starting chips, now that's not enough even for a £100 buyins.

I like a good structure as much as the next man but there must be a place for all structures and ranges of comps, where are all the crap shoots these days?!

problem is, imo Jeff that no-one knows what a good structure is. People think if you start with 25,000 chips then it's a "deepstack" and people are obsessed with everything being a deepstack because anything else "isn't proper poker", "it's just gambling".

Good structures don't need a billion starting chips and 4hour clocks, they just need to be structured so the average stack can remain decent for the majority of the comp, the way these "deepstacks" always play out is people start with a million big blinds and everyone plays like nits till there is 23 left and the average stack is now 13 big blinds + it is a complete crapshoot, whereas if they'd have sped the clock up there would be 8 left and the average would be ~30big blinds.  I think it's just a marketing buzz-word when your adveritising comps that its a deepstack and starts with tons of chips. Bring back the old £20 rebuys where you start with 10bb's, 2hour rebuy period and 20minute clock

[Simon Galloway]

whereas if they'd have sped the clock up and got the antes right ....

To be precise..


Even in a recent satellite, players were moaning that 5k chips 25/50 blinds wasn't 'deep enough'  2k chips would have been plenty!

[smashedagain]

Was talking to Jeff Buff last night strangely enough, we're in the same fantasy basketball league and our teams are against each other this week. Obv my team is battering the yank at his own game.

Interesting point he was making about why he's lost his love for poker, saying he only plays about once a month now as it doesn't do it for him any more.

He said he's a 20 min blind kinda guy and I kinda agree. It's all very lovely that every comp now has deep stacks and lots of starting chips, it was only a couple of yrs ago you'd make a big thing about a comp having 10,000 starting chips, now that's not enough even for a £100 buyins.

I like a good structure as much as the next man but there must be a place for all structures and ranges of comps, where are all the crap shoots these days?!

problem is, imo Jeff that no-one knows what a good structure is. People think if you start with 25,000 chips then it's a "deepstack" and people are obsessed with everything being a deepstack because anything else "isn't proper poker", "it's just gambling".

Good structures don't need a billion starting chips and 4hour clocks, they just need to be structured so the average stack can remain decent for the majority of the comp, the way these "deepstacks" always play out is people start with a million big blinds and everyone plays like nits till there is 23 left and the average stack is now 13 big blinds + it is a complete crapshoot, whereas if they'd have sped the clock up there would be 8 left and the average would be ~30big blinds.  I think it's just a marketing buzz-word when your adveritising comps that its a deepstack and starts with tons of chips. Bring back the old £20 rebuys where you start with 10bb's, 2hour rebuy period and 20minute clock

Oh my days. Bread and butter. As it happens I'm gonna take a trip down memory lane ( well the M62) tonight and go play the G in Manchester. It's a £150 freezeout for a gukpt seat but would have much preferred to have played the £30 re buy on Sunday which generated over 20 seats.

[DMorgan]

Would be a pretty amusing exercise to take the ROIs of all of the people that complain about tournaments being too crapshooty and compare them to a simulation of what their ROI would change if every tournament they played had a World Series Main structure

[smashedagain]

Would be a pretty amusing exercise to take the ROIs of all of the people that complain about tournaments being too crapshooty and compare them to a simulation of what their ROI would change if every tournament they played had a World Series Main structure

Pretty sure most of em would be out before the antes kicked in

[George2Loose]

Coldplay are amazing.

[celtic]

Played with buff a day or two after he bubbled the wsope, was the same weekend Colin mcrae died. I said unlucky, bad beat etc, he replied, not really, Colin mcrae had a real bad beat. Perspective ftw.

Recently joined the elite ' I bought Vinny dinner' club.

Top guy.

[GreekStein]

Camel made mention of Jeff Buffenburger ("Buff") somewhere yesterday.

Buff is one of those rare folks who is liked by everyone. A big smile is perma-fixed to his face, & he always sees the positive side of life, a proper glass half full guy.

He has a business - I think he trades in used Mobile Phones & Office copiers etc, he refurbishes them & resells them, probably - I don't know - to third world countries. 

If you play poker, & Jeff walks into the room, you'd pay good money for him to be on your table, he is such fun, & I've never once known him throw a sulk over anything.

He went through a bad spell about 2 years back, due to illness in tyjhe family, which never worked out well, but he seems to have got his mojo back now.

In the inaugural WSOP-E (£10k buy-in), Jeff was in good shape & they were on the money bubble. A deep-stacked kid was exploiting the bubble dynamic, & when Jeff opened with K-K, the kid jammed on him, expecting a fold, & Jeff, of course, made the quick call to find himself up against K-8, or K-10, as good as it gets, but the kid got lucky & busted Jeff. Even that never wiped the smile off his face (he plays off his own money), despite the fact that £19,000 had just gone down the swanee. 

We see "heroes" & "legends" talked about in poker every day, which is a slight exaggaration of the term, to put it mildly, but if there were suich a thing as a poker hero, Jeff would be one.

In the photos below, you'll see thr "Michigan" cap - Jeff is a yank, & in one photo, note the random fish on his mobile, tsk tsk. That, as it happens, was Luton, & on the table also was "Pepe", & Joe Grech. Plus the random on his phone.

I was sat to his left when this happened, and the bubble was over £27,000 that 1st year. Such an incredibly nice guy, didn't stop laughing and joking all day, but even he let a note of disappointment creep into his voice for just a second after that. IIRC "the kid" was Marcello Marigliano: http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=91660

LuckExpress10 who played an awesome hand against Durrrr.