Liv Boeree
Thursday, November 19, 2009 - Liv Boeree
Well Foxwoods is over and no WPT title for me this time but it was a lot of fun. My first day I had Lee Markholt to my right along with Ted Ely, Terrance Chan who were also on my table. I lost a big pot very early on to Terrance with 88s where I bluffed one too many streets but made it back to starting stack and then won a decent pot where I turned the nut flush and had my opponent bluff of a significan amount on all three streets (I check to him each time as he had position) and he took the bait on the river with an over pot sized bet – as the board was paired I was only gonna call and it turned out he had King high – lovely! I ended up finishing day 1 with around 40k which was pretty comfortable. Day 2 looked like it was gonna be really good as I had a pretty soft table of unknowns (except for Brock Parker on my left which wasn’t fun) however I lost quite a big pot to a lady who flopped the nut straight vs my top pair top kicker (yes, she called a raise out the BB with 10-7 off) and it came J 9 8 and then I whiffed every other hand after that resulting in me getting short and reshoving over an aggressive late position raiser that didn’t work out my way… Anyway, after that a group of us WPT rejects headed on a roadtrip which has now just bought me to NYC where I am presently. On the way we stopped off in Boston and had a raucous night involving Uncle Kracker and Train (don’t ask) at the House of Blues and then a long ass bus journey to NY. I need a night off!! Coming up next week is the USPC and a deepstack tourney at the Borgata in Atlantic City which will be my first time there too, can’t wait!
Tags: Foxwoods, Poker Poker Poker, WPT
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Thursday, November 5, 2009 - Liv Boeree
I’m here at Foxwoods (for those that don’t know, it’s a casino complex in the middle of nowhere in particular in Connecticut) and I’ve been playing three days solid trying to win my seat into the WPT. It’s not going well so far. I got pretty close by winning my way into the final act but then bombed from that so now I’ve only got a day left to get in. Argh! Anyway, gotta keep positive so fingers crossed today’s the day. One good thing that has come of the trip so far however was being invited to go over to ESPN to film an episode of the Inside Deal. Appearing on the show with me was Chad Brown, who’s one of the nicest guys I’ve met through poker. We got to see all the famous studios in ESPN and shown all around the complex, which is HUGE. I’m fairly sure I saw some famous American sports stars but being from the wrong side of the pond I couldn’t tell you who they were! Anyway, the episode is here and ready for viewing… http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=4619206
Gotta love our acting! Ahem…
Tags: Chad Brown, espn, Foxwoods, Poker Poker Poker, The Inside Deal, WPT
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Sunday, October 25, 2009 - Liv Boeree
So last week I finished off on me busting out of the Main Event. This left me with a whole five days of Aruban freedom to get more sun, sand and sea than you can shake a stick at. The sea part of this started early the wednesday morning when I met with Brandon Cantu, his girlfriend Leslie and Allie Prescott for breakfast, and I proposed the idea of renting a small catamaran which according to the intrepid Binger brothers, was the best and most relaxing watersport on offer. Now I’ve been sailing a few times as a kid, and even have the holder of the world record for the longest sailing circumnavigation of the globe in my family, and this gave me an over-inflated impression that I knew how to sail. I apparently exuded this confidence to the rest of the “crew” and also to the boat rental woman, who when she asked if we knew how to sail we very proudly said yes.
So after telling us we had strictly one hour, she set us in the water and handed me the rudder and sail rope(?!). Before you could say shark, the wind grabbed us and sent us on our merry way, very much alone. Things actually started well, with Brandon going “wow, you actually can sail”, everyone relaxed as we sped along the coast at one with nature’s forces. That was until we had to turn and try and go the other way. We’d been instructed to ONLY turn into the wind, as turning away from it could be dangerous and lead to capsizing. However, turning into the wind resulted in the sail going limp and all momentum lost. Therefore we opted for the latter, and the boat nearly turned over Leslie and Brandon got whacked in the head by the sail flipping to the otherside.
Stupidly, I then let the boys take over and before we knew it we had only twenty minutes left and were about two miles out to sea. Despite this we somehow floundered back at the slowest pace anyone’s ever moved back to shore and got back just thirty minutes late. Ahem.
So you’d think that’d be the last time we ever went sailing alone. Oh no. we went again and this time managed to flip the boat over twice, the first time completely by a combination of ignorance and a huge gust of wind, and the second time because the first time was so funny that we wanted to do it again.
Moving on… so the other things I did for the rest of the trip included a horse ride through the Aruban landscape (complete with galloping on the beach) and a very bumpy ATV ride to some beautiful coastal features. In the nighttime were fantastic parties, including the legendary party in Phil Hellmuth’s rooftop suite, which had a private performance by the Dan band and more bottles of champagne than you can imagine. Oh and naked girls in the hot tub, can’t forget them! The Ultimatebet closing party was stunning as well, with the Dan band performing on a stage over the pool, more naked people and bodypainted gladiator models roaming around giving you cocktails. What a perfect end to the perfect trip!
Tags: Aruba, Brandon Cantu, Phil Hellmuth, Poker Poker Poker, The Dan Band, Ultimate Bet
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Saturday, October 17, 2009 - Liv Boeree
Well where can I start? I’m sat in Amsterdam airport after a somewhat hellish, screaming child filled ten hour flight back from a certain beautiful little island. The past ten days has been my personal heaven – the Ultimatebet Aruba Classic. After a riotous few days in Amsterdam with various UB pros we arrived in the balmy tropics and got straight to the most important part – locating the rest of the team and hitting the bar.
The first full day was spent on the beach and warming up my tubing skills for the inevitable bouts of last longer bets that were to bound to occur throughout the week. A number of us (including team members Matt Graham, Roothlus, Tiffany and Billy) rented a boat and we went for a very beery cruise involving diving competitions and trying to swim back to the boat against a very strong ocean current.
That night was the opening party including all the free booze and food UB could throw at the guests, and which inevitably ended up in everyone getting thrown in the pool. Lacey Jones and I had a chicken fight aboard Matt Vengrin and Matt Graham (we won, of course), and Phil managed to get through about $10,000 getting ladies to jump in the pool naked.
Lacey and I also got $1000 for one lucky guy who was the first one to jump in naked also… gotta keep the balance between the sexes!
Monday was relatively quiet as it was day 1A, and half of the pros, myself included, had been scheduled for a new UB photoshoot which I can’t wait to see the results of. Tuesday was day 1B, which was my first day of play. I had the Great Poker Ho on my table, who was lauding it up the way only Ho can, rallying the table and generally creating mayhem with some huge pots. Sadly things didn’t go Ho’s way once Robbie Cunningham came to the table and started crushing it utterly. I swear to God he had Jacks or better every other hand for two hours, and played them tricky enough too, knocking Ho out in the process. An interesting (and kinda costly hand) for me was when I had around starting stack and the blinds were 100 200. Robbie makes it 525 in the hijack, I have queens and make it 1600 in the cutoff. However, the supertight girl to my left who hadn’t played many hands at all goes to call his initial raise before I even get chance to act. When I say wait a minute, and do my threebet she instacalls behind anyway. The SB, who has been pretty LAG and was “internetting it up” as they like to say now does a really weird min raise making it 2700. Robbie now says “what the hell do I do?” and flats. I now ask the same question, and chose to call behind too (in hindsight should’ve jammed here, I mean, Laggy guy could have anything, Robbie or the girl, if they have me beat here are reraising) and the girl flats. The board comes A j 10 and Robbie bets out 2/3, I muck, the girl mucks and the SB stuffs it in with… A-10. What does the Cunningham have? Jacks of course.
My day went pretty much downhill from there and I got short after whiffing AK three times, and then found 10s vs QQs which sent me packing to the beach for more fun and frolics that I’ll document next week… tough life!
Tags: Adam "Roothlus" Levy, Amsterdam, Aruba, aruba classic, Billy Koop, Lacey Jones, Matt Graham, matt vengrin, P0ker H0, Phil Hellmuth, Poker Poker Poker, Robbie Cunningham, Tiffany "Tiffany M" Michelle, ub, Ultimate Bet
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Sunday, October 4, 2009 - Liv Boeree
The past week has been mostly spent in and around Leicester square for the WSOPE, which despite the fact that I didn’t get to play the main event, I still found reasons to go down there. Probably the biggest of these was the players lounge opening which contained a certain little game that is very close to my heart – table football. I probably shouldn’t mention this as I’m gonna kill all my future action, but blimey do I love hustling in that game. Noone ever suspects a thing when you start playing for small stakes (10 – 20 pounds per game), lose a few to them and then suggest double or quits, and with most poker players loving a bit of gambling action they jump at the chance. Next thing I know, we’re playing for a hundred a game, multiple times. I even got two players to play me two on one, and give ME odds! By the end of the night I’d made close to a 1000 pounds!!
Aside from this degeneracy, the other fun thing this week was a trip down to my parents’ house with a bunch of my poker playing friends including team UB pro Michael Binger. Everyone had seemed desperate to get out of the city and see some of the real England so I made sure they got the full experience including a bit of horse riding, a bit of some half rugby/half american football weird game we made up and then some prop betting on who could hold the electric fence the longest. Michael won that one rather convincingly! The day ended with a proper English dinner at the local country pub – would could be better?
Tags: Amsterdam, Michael Binger, Poker Poker Poker, ub, WSOPE
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Thursday, October 1, 2009 - Liv Boeree
Well this week hasn’t been remarkably different from the last one except for instead of bubbling, I bombed out of the one tourney I played nice and early. This was event 1 of the WSOPE, the £1k buyin that got you all of 3000 chips and left you basically one hand to play with, which in my instance was Aces vs someone’s 10s which spiked a ten leaving me making friends with the bartender and seeing how many peanuts I can throw into a bowl while waiting for my friends to also bust the event.
So since then I’ve been doing what any self-respecting Londoner poker player would do when the WSOPE circus gets into town and that’s party party party (something I do even better than bubbling). Lots of the UB crew are in town including Brandon Cantu, Michael Binger and Phil Hellmuth, and we’ve been pretty busy showing London just how it’s done. We’ve partaken in an orgy of prop-betting and drunken cash games at the Barracuda (my head still hurts from that one) and even hired out the private booth at the USA Sports Bar (because you Americans can’t bear to take on our proper sports). At this bar Phil filmed a rather entertaining video which I will promote by saying that someone gets topless… for those of you who can’t resist the promise of nudity here it is: http://www.twitvid.com/122FD
FD Who said poker isn’t glamorous?
Tags: Brandon Cantu, London, Michael Binger, Phil Hellmuth, Poker Poker Poker, ub, WSOPE
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Thursday, September 17, 2009 - Liv Boeree
This week’s been one of my hardest ever in poker. As you can probably tell from the title of this blog, I experienced the agony of the bubble. Now obviously this is something none of us who have ever played more than a few tournaments have not experienced, but my encounters with it over the past few days have been none other than exemplary. It all started on Sunday, where you UB regulars may have been aware of, or indeed playing in, the 50 seat Aruba guarantee. This was UB’s $500 buy in massive giveaway of fifty $8,500 golden tickets to their annual Aruba Classic tourney (and if you don’t know what that is I dunno what planet you’ve been living on). Now I’m already going to Aruba either way, but I won a step into this 50 seat mega to try and win another seat which baEnsically equals a bucketload of cash. Anyway, I played pretty near perfect all tournament until we got to just 70 players, and then combination of factors allowed me to get short but then I did the inexcusable thing of miss a couple of vital blind stealing opportunities to get myself back to healthy. Next thing I knew there were just 55 left and I was looking like it’d all be ok with me sat in 48th. However lady luck seemed to favour a number of these shorterstacks and before I knew what was happening there were 51 left, and only 1 person shorter than me and he was at my table. By this stage neither of us had any fold equity whatsoever so I tried to play the waiting game. He decided to play it even more and left himself with basically two hands left (the antes were huge) knowing the blinds were about to go up and eat my stack completely. And they did. And I finished stone cold bubble for 51st out of nearly 800 for 50 seats after sitting up til 5am UK time and ready to throw myself out a window.
However, Monday morning made me suck it all up as I had to head up to Nottingham to play the first ever English Poker Open, a $5k buy in tourney featuring pros such as Phil Hellmuth and Doyle Brunson so I was pretty excited to be playing it. Things started slowly for me but then I got moved to the feature table with James Akenhead and Devilfish. Devilfish pretty promptly doubled me up in a really interesting hand that I’ll write about next week, and then I cruised from there til the end of day 1 with about 60 of the 213 entries remaining.
Day 2 started a bit rocky with me getting short at one point but then getting it up to about 50k average with around 35 left and rapidly approaching the bubble. I then proceeded to run big hand into bigger hand in quick succession leaving me with a short shovable stack and doing the shovey thing at what seemed like an appropriate moment to get called off by yet another monster busting me again close to the money. Anyway, starting just as I busted was a super deep structure $750 event so I jumped straight back into the saddle to play that. This one went really well and before I knew it I’d played 10 hours and we were seven from the money and I had a healthy stack and picked up those darling little weapons (the AA) and got it all in versus the big stack with 44s. Can you guess happened? Where’s the rope…
Tags: Aruba, aruba classic, Devilfish, doyle brunson, English Poker Open, James Akenhead, Phil Hellmuth, Poker Poker Poker, ub
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Thursday, September 10, 2009 - Liv Boeree
Now I’m back in London I’m having kind of a crappy week dealing with the mundane and the not so mundane, including some rather large life changes such as house moves and figuring out where I want to live for the foreseeable future. I am finding myself increasingly drawn to the “Land of the free” as you people call it, and could well be heading out west yonder (back to the country speak too). I’m not sure when, or even to which city (most like LA or Vegas) but I reckon by the end of the year for sure, so it’s exciting times!
The next thing I’m really excited about is the English Poker Open that I’m playing in next week – Phil Hellmuth and Doyle Brunson are also coming over to play the event, which is a $5k buy in with $1m guarantee, and it’ll be by far the biggest tourney I’ve ever played on my home turf so it seems only right that I should win it, don’t you think? Til then I’m gonna be playing online on UB – I’ve rediscovered my love for cash again over the past few weeks, having not played much at all for nearly a year. It’s too easy to get swept up in the glory and gratification that tourneys dangle infront of your face each time you enter one and had forgotten the joys of good, deep-stack grindery. Even just playing a few hours a week has helped re-vamp my game immensely over the past month and has truly blown away the cobwebs of stuck-in-a-rut post-WSOP poker blues!
Tags: doyle brunson, English Poker Open, London, Phil Hellmuth, Play online, Poker Poker Poker, ub, Vegas, WSOP
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Thursday, September 3, 2009 - Liv Boeree
Hey all, I’m back in the land of cool breezes and fish’n'chips now thank goodness. It’s so good to be home – I’ve come for a quick break from all forms of urbanisation to stay with the parents for good home cooked meals and bracing walks in the countryside. I love it here so much, they basically live on a farm surrounded by hills, woods and fields and more animals than you can imagine. Their most recent venture has been to get a few chickens for eggs and so on (in retrospect, what else would you have chickens for?). They told me they would be getting a couple at most. Somehow that “couple” equals TWELVE. They are awesome though, there are two that are so friendly they literally chase you across the field if you go in there, and you can pick them up for a feathery cuddle if you want.
![me-at-home[1]](http://blog.ultimatebet.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/me-at-home11.jpg "me-at-home[1]")
Anyway, enough of my parents’ animals. So last you heard I was in Macau where I was doing well in side events and had not done so well in the main event of the APT. Well the main event of the second event they had there, the APPT, went even worse. I had satellited my way in which is always nice, however it clearly wasn’t meant to be my day when I realised I couldn’t even make middle pair. Not even the filth I was dealt and folded pre could hit the board. When I then went to my happy place and played “fantasy poker”, making up hands in my head for giggles, not even THOSE hit. It was quite incredible. So obviously I had no choice but to make plays instead, but whenever I did they either a) had the nuts or b) didn’t understand how to fold. Oh dear.
After that disaster was over a few of us headed over to Hong Kong for a few days to take in the sights – the city is really quite spectacular. I so preferred it to Macau in everyway (Macau is often referred to as the armpit of Asia, although I think groin is more apt). No casinos, no horrible smells, no smoking (seriously, these people would smoke in a crowded elevator). Just friendly people, great food and better views!
Tags: APPT, APT, Countryside, Hong Kong, Liv Boeree, Macau
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Thursday, August 27, 2009 - Liv Boeree
So Macau’s been going rather well all in all! I’ve just got back from playing the 7-handed event at the APPT where I finished 5th for $35,600 Hong Kong dollars, which equals about $4500 which was rather nice. The day before that I played a super satellite for a seat to the Main event and I won that too, so even better. Then two days before that, I came second in the $300 6-max event at the APT and got about $3700 for that, so it’s been a nice payday so far!! Due to all this I’m feeling pretty confident going into the main event which I play tomorrow as I’m not only running well but actually playing some of the best poker I’ve played in a while. Between those two things I should be able to take down the whole thing I reckon…
Aside from poker, I’ve been doing the usual touristy things like shopping and beach going. The beach was gorgeous with the warmest seawater I’ve ever felt. It’s like a bath, no jokes. The clothing here is criminally cheap and I love it. However, in between every clothing shop there’s a foul smelling stand selling fouler smelling foodstuffs that are impossible to figure out. I think they are dried/pickled mussels but my understanding of sea food is that it should be kept on ice and eaten fresh, and certainly not left in the damp, crotch-hot heat that is Macau for a few days. I can see a prop bet coming on here…
Tags: APPT, APT, Liv Boeree, Macau, Poker Poker Poker
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