By Bond18 on April 12th, 2008 (more posts by author)

Now that the around the world schedule has been finalized I’ve had to go through the process of creating arrangements for everything outside just playing the poker. The flights are now all booked and paid for, and the Vegas house is booked in as well. The flights ended up being very reasonable, totaling about $3000 AUD each including taxes. Now I have to call hotels in Venice, Paris and Barcelona and after that all logistical issues of the trip are solved. I’m going to get out and get one of those Ipod’s that can play movies since the airlines have a very careful screening process to select the man with the worst taste in the world who will have the job of deciding which films air on the flight.

I’m going to start easing off the online volume a little bit leading up to the trip so I’ll feel pretty fresh. I’m not running quite as incredible as I was before (winning nine of ten coin flips, never losing a 70/30, always finding a bigger over pair) I’ve still been able to have a pretty successful week. Monday I won the Bodog winners choice package for $12,000, then the Tilt $50 rebuys the next day for $5,400, then the UB Aruba package the next day, which is likely about $10,000. I’m not sure, I haven’t really bothered to look into it since it’s so far off and UB likes to provide as little information as possible in their tournament lobbies.

Live poker is difficult in a much different way than online poker. Compared to the players in the high stakes tournaments online, the competition is often considerably softer and full of fundamental leaks. However, live tournaments last for days and require an enormous amount of focus for hours after hours and days after days if you go deep. They also require a pretty massive shift in strategy and needing to adjust to vastly different ranges than you’re used to. The variance is also enormous on a scale that can completely do an online players head in since you can’t just jack up the volume by firing up more tables or putting in more hours to even it out. Factor in all the distractions of a live tournament; people going partying, media, massive first place pay day, travel complications, language barriers, and jet lag and you have a whole different kind of poker. Just to get an idea of how much variance is involved in live poker, in the upcoming trip I’ll be playing roughly 50 tournaments in about 3 months time. That’s the equivalent of only 3 days of my online tournament volume. Factor in that most of the WSOP tournaments I’ll be playing in will have massive fields and the potential for a massive downswing is quite realistic.

Let’s not keep Timex up at night with that thought though.