Tuesday, December 2, 2008 - Roothlus
I had a brief but relaxing Thanksgiving break back home in Fort Lauderdale with my family. It was a lot of fun even though I can’t stand south Florida anymore. After 15 years living in the state of Florida, it’s time to get the heck out! So I’m moving to LA after the World Series this year. Now that I’m back in Orlando I’m going to grind for a few days and then make my way out to Las Vegas for the Bellagio Five-Diamond WPT.
Sunday did not go so well for me. I started at 4:00PM because my step-dad was having a surprise brunch for his 60th birthday. So at least I was well-fed . When I was explaining how big Sundays are to everyone at the brunch, I came up with a good analogy for it. In the past, I’ve been lost with a way to compare it to anything but not today my friend. I said picture April 15th for an accountant and having that every Sunday. It’s that much more important than any other day. If you are a tournament poker player and play less than 80% of Sundays a year, what’s the point in playing tournaments?
I played a pretty thick schedule full of about $7000 worth of buyins after I went crazy in a few rebuy periods along the way. Somehow I managed to spend more with a 4:00PM start time than I would normally with a 12:45PM start time. Woops. My Sunday was filled with misery, coolers, bad beats, and tons of despair. Pretty much a normal Sunday. But all tournament players play for ‘that Sunday’ where you win some huge tourney, final table 2 other tourneys and cash 4 others. It only happens 3 or 4 times a year but boy, is it magical. My last Sunday like that was a little disappointing for me. I managed to get 40thh in the Sunday Warmup and 52nd in the Million. In any other tourneys you would be like, “Big woop wanna fight about it?!” (quote bonus points for whoever knows this). But when the tourneys have 3,500 and 7,500 people in it each week, respectively, it’s a decent feat. Unfortunately I think I might’ve blown the Million after grinding out a really short stack for a long long time. I think it was about 2 hours which is super long for an online tournament. I skyrocketed to 3rd with 2.5million chips with 75 left and was very hopeful. I had a spot where I pretty much knew I was beat but convinced myself he could be bluffing when really he is ALMOST NEVER bluffing in this spot. Just by the way the hand played and because he knows me and I know him, he generally has to assume I have an Ace in the spot. You be the judge:
So I raise A10o to in the cutoff to 155k at 30k 60k with 2.1million behind. The RookieQQ9 (a very good player) calls in the small blind with about 3million behind. I’m curious as to what he has here. I felt he would repop AQ,AK and most other big hands. Maybe slowplay Aces or Kings. I wasn’t sure if he would repop AJo here but I was leaning towards yes. The unknown big blind with about 1.5million calls as well. The flop comes A67 rainbow. It checks to me and I deliberate for a little before checking behind. I don’t like the spot either way. If I bet the flop and get raised I almost always have to fold and not many hands are calling me that I’m beating because it’s such a dry board except for maybe 78 or if the bb defended with a weak Ace. So I opt for the check so maybe I can catch a bluff or get some value from worse hands. The turn is the 8 of diamonds bringing a flush draw now. The Rookie IMMEDIATELY bets 280k into the pot of about 500k and the big blind folds. Honestly at this point I don’t even feel comfortable calling the turn bet but I know I have to. River is a brick 2. So the board is A6782. Now he thinks for about 10 seconds before betting about 550k. This spot sucks. If I had just bet the flop the whole hand plays out differently but we can’t be results oriented can we? So I think for a little bit, and convince myself that maybe he’s bluffing because of the flush draw missing. What I’ve noticed over the years is generally when I start convincing myself of something in a hand that means I’m beat. Sometimes I fold, sometimes I don’t. Today was one of those days where I didn’t. He had AJo and I shipped him about 1million in that one pot. It was very frustrating to get into a spot like this deep in the tourney but it is what it is. I should’ve, as usual, gone with my gut. It’s always right. So sick. This didn’t end my tourney but I was kind of frustrated from that hand and made a hasty decision to reshove on a minraise by a big stack with A2cc into his Queens. Oh well. There’s no going back now and ultimately the A10o hand was still kind of a cooler.
Getting back to Sunday the day isn’t really worth rehashing my lack of luck during the entire day. But I did manage to cash the 100 rebuy and 200 rebuy on Poker Stars to make up for about $4k of my losses on the day. I did cash the UB $200k, which might I add met it’s guarantee by 75 players (woohoo!), for like the 4th week in a row or something. Apparently I’m really good at mincashing that tournament. Overall, I was satisfied with my play and that’s really all that matters. Hopefully, my stellar play will turn into stellar dividends in the near future. That’s all for now. Peace.
Tags: Adam "Roothlus" Levy
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Monday, November 24, 2008 - Roothlus
Oh hey blog readers. I have not done any blogging since halfway through the WSOP. A lot has changed since then. I now have a deal with Ultimate Bet as well as a deep run in the WSOP Main Event in which I set Phil Hellmuth off on one of his best tirades ever. Apparently, the producers said to Phil that it was definitively his best until he one-upped himself with his tirade against Cristian Dragomir the very next day. That got me on ESPN for a few episodes which was totally awesome. Just the other week I managed to final table the $15k WPT Festa Al Lago event where I placed 5th for my biggest cash ever, $261k. Needless to say, luck has been on my side as of late.
Alright now that I’m done tooting my own horn, I was going to talk about my week after the Festa Al Lago and what I’ve been up to. After I busted out of the WPT I took my friends railing the final table along with my brother and mom to Nobu and quite frankly if you haven’t heard of Nobu, google that shit a.s.a.p. Everything at Nobu was as close to perfection as you can find. They have this dish with rock shrimp tempura in this lemon spicy mayo sauce that is, and forgive me for quoting all Jewish women from New York, “tah die faw.”
Anyways, after that we geared up for a night out at Body English by going to the Hard Rock poker room, which might I add is pretty fresh. We were able to get our own table going with half PLO, half NL. Oh, and the people I keep referring to as we are: JC Alvarado, my brother Justin a.k.a. Roothlus 2, Steve “Mr. Tim Caum” O’Dwyer, Mike “Sir Watts” Watson, Katie Lindsay ala Suited Connections a.k.a. my agent, Bryan “Devo” Devonshire, Darrell “DFish” Fish (‘bout as clever as Roothlus 2), and two of my friends from Florida who flew in for the final table, Brent and Mike. So that’s my crew for the night. Oh yea, and Katie’s friend Heather. We only spent about an hour playing poker but we tried our hardest to lose as much money as possible. A few of the highlights were someone who will remain nameless folding an Ace in a 5 way pot on a A664K board where it checked all the way down to the river and DFish bet $20 into like $80 for a clear value bet of the king. She showed it to me as she was folding and I nearly pooped my pants. But not to be outdone, I did something even stupider. I called DFish’s reraise in PLO with Q7910 with 2 spades. The flop came 1024rainbow no spade and DFish potted it which was basically his stack and I inexplicably folded the 10 with plenty of 2 pair outs when I could’ve been good to begin with. I even looked at my cards before I folded and it didn’t register in my head that I had top pair lol. Needless to say after all was said and done I ended up 600 up somehow.
Once we got to Body English as usual the outside host fucked us saying we were going to get 2 for 1 bottles or some shit and get a table on the dance floor. When we got inside we saw a corner booth that could allegedly fit 10 people and we weren’t on the dance floor. Obviously I was pissed but it wasn’t like we were going to leave so whatever. It ended up being a great night though. I almost got the waitress’ number but she claimed to be ‘loyal to her boyfriend’. Yeah okay whatever. In all fairness we were hitting it off really well so I’d like to think that she was feeding me bs. She was talking about how she’s a dork at heart and being a poker player, Magic player, and Fifa enthusiast we had a lot to talk about. We left after our two botttles were done and DFish and Brent tried real hard to get me to go to Spearmint Rhino with them. I refused like 10 times because I was just too tired. Thank God I didn’t go. That could’ve gotten wayyy out of hand. It ended up being a fairly cheap night for a “I just made a TV final table” party and it was a very satisfying day.
The next day JC and Katie convinced me to go to the lake with Devo and Matt “MattG1983” Graham. Hangover and all we made the trek down to Lake Mead, a beautiful lake around 30 minutes outside of Las Vegas. Bryan had some Jet Skis with him and he urged me to get on one once I got there. These are not your normal Jet Skis. These are the real deal. Not the ones where you climb on to them and go. These are the ones where you have to hold on to the handle bars and pick yourself up using your arms once you get going. It’s a three-step process and was really tough. I never was fully able to stand up and go but I made a little bit of progress and the least I could do was give everyone else not using the Jet Skis a laugh by wiping out over and over. The pinnacle of the day was when MattG got pulled over, YES PULLED OVER, for going to fast on his Jet Ski. The boat came from out of nowhere and had sirens and everything. The boat pulled him over and Matt was no longer allowed to use it so Matt and the Jet Ski had to transported back to land. At this point Devo goes out to see what’s up and Devo gets ‘pulled over’ as well because he thought his registration tags were good but they weren’t. L O Mutha FKN L. Never thought I’d see that happen. After a rough day in the water, we went home cooked some dinner and prepared for the $10k Caesars event the next day.
The Caesar’s event was such a weird structure. You started with $100k in chips at 100/200 but the levels jumped a lot like 400/800 to 600/1200 and then 4k/8k to 6k/12k. It was an untested structure that should’ve been tested numerous times, but why would they do that? I ended up busting one level after the dinner break. I wasn’t really on point with it all. While I don’t think I should’ve taken the tourney off, I definitely wasn’t playing my best. This was evident when I decided to lose 40k with J-10cc on a 6-6-4ssQ-K board. Don’t ask please, it was just me being retarded. I like to call it “I just won money so I’m going to play super sick when I really should just stick to what works” syndrome. I know it’s a really long name for a syndrome, so I guess we’ll just call it New Money Syndrome, or NMS for short. Hevad Khan went on to win it in an extremely top heavy payout structure but he deserved it anyways. If anyone knows how to capitalize on a fast structure it’s Hevad with all of his sit ‘n go experience. I heard he just murdered the bubble.
The next day, Wednesday, I decided to go back with Katie to Los Angeles for Halloween. I’m thinking about moving out there and wanted to see if I liked Huntington Beach, where she resides. It was relaxing to chill and wind down after such a fast paced week before in Vegas. Katie, her boyfriend Danny, and I decided to brainstorm for costume ideas. We did this for about a day off and on until Thursday when we decided to be poker players. Danny would be Scotty Nguyen and I would ironically enough be Phil Hellmuth. We spent the day shopping for costumes and piece by piece it all came together. I got a haircut, shaved my beard off, bought a leather jacket, black pants, black shoes, black everything and even found a fake wart to put on the side of my nose.
For Danny we found a nice rocker wig that Katie cut into a mullet as well as a bunch of tacky gold chains, an even tackier gold watch, a wife beater, white shoes, and white pants. They both came together really well. Here are some pics of us:
That night we went to this suave hotel called Sofetil. Katie’s friend Trishelle organized it and it was a pretty happening club. The notable costumes I saw was a Miss Alaska Sara Palin which I thought was pretty clever and one step ahead of all the other unoriginal Sarah Palin costumes. One pretty hilarious and easy to wear costume I saw was these two girls with signs that said “Nudists on Strike”. Bravo, bravo. The best costume all night was what Trishelle’s friend Frank was wearing. He was Ryu from Street Fighter 2. HADUYKEN! Awesome. Just awesome. I was surprised that most people didn’t know who I was but the few that did absolutely LOVED it. Frank and Trishelle both immediately knew who I was and thought it was great. In retrospect, maybe I should’ve gone to a party that was more in touch with poker but whatever. It was still a fun night anyway you cut it.
After that we went to Katie’s friend, Ryan’s house party. His house was sick and there were tons of people there. There were tons of girls there and 90% of the girls were all extremely hot. I had never seen such a good hot girl to guy ratio, let alone a girl to guy ratio. I’d say it was at least 70:30 girls to guys. This Ryan guy knows how to throw a fucking party. Things were going great until some douchebag decided to smash a bottle of wine through Ryan’s plasma TV. NOT COOL DUDE. So the party died down after that. By far the best part of the night was when I was walking around with Danny and this guy in a gray pimp suit and top hat says to me in passing about my costume: “I fucking love it.” I didn’t realize who it was until he was gone but it was Rob Dyrdek from Rob and Big . So that made my night right there. Danny and I were getting annoyed with our costumes so we decided to switch it up a little bit. I took Danny’s mullet and he took my hat. Here’s a picture of just that. Once we left the party it was too hard to find a cab so we just walked home. It was only a mile and a half of drunken walking but somehow it wasn’t that bad.
The next day we had to be up for Shannon Elizabeth’s scavenger hunt. I can’t remember the last time I did a scavenger hunt but it was one serious scavenger hunt. Apparently Shannon runs it and wins just about every year because she does all the extra credit points on it. Our team consisted of Katie Danny, this guy Hesh, Katie’s friend Jonathan, and me. We were all really hungover and kind of half-assed it from the start because we knew we weren’t going to win. Regardless, it was a blast to do and was a great way to get to know the other people.
We got done with the scavenger hunt at around 7PM and went back to the hotel we were staying at for the weekend and chilled out until we went back to Shannon’s place for the 2nd leg of her birthday extravaganza, the party. The party had good music but all three of us were kind of run down from the past two days. We saw Jeff Madsen, Maria Ho, and Liz Lieu. The funniest exchange of the night was when some random guy came up to Liz and was like “OH MY GOD! You’re that girl from online poker!” He just went on and on about poker and you could tell the last thing Liz wanted to do was talk to this weird guy at a party. I had to walk away when I heard the guy say “My name is the dominator online”. Funny how you can just be at a random celebrity’s party and some guy totally obsess about the poker player there.
We called it a night around 1:30AM. I know super early for me but I’ve been trying to get to bed earlier lately. That was my week. Pretty eventful to say the least as well as some other stories that we do not need to divulge on the Internets. What’s next for me? I’m going to take a few weeks off from traveling and grind the FTOPS online and then I’ll be back on the live poker grind come Five-Diamond Poker Classic after Thanksgiving. On that note, peace.
Tags: Adam "Roothlus" Levy, Phil Hellmuth
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