Bodog Ari

I'm Ari Engel and am also known as BodogAri online. I've played poker for a living for virtually my entire post-college life. In the last few years I have started teaching people my style and philosophy on poker tournaments. Many of them have done very well. If you are interested in getting my help, email: thebodogari@gmail.com

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Blogs

I am actually a pretty big fan of the blogosphere, and read a number of blogs on a semi-routine basis. My big pet peeve in this regard, is bloggers who rarely update their blogs, and here I am ...

I've played in 3 $5,000 buyins tournaments over the last couple of weeks, in Indiana (near border of Kentucky- Caesar's Indiana) in Connecticut (Foxwoods) and in Jersey (AC-Borgata). Well I'm plus in frequent flier miles, and minus in cash, weeeeeee fun game, what can you do, etc.

I've been playing a little less frequently online due to those tournaments, travel/visiting people and places, and general laziness. However, I am happy with the progress of my game and my short term results. Long term, I am celebrating the completion of my third year making a living playing cards. To say I'm extatic with where poker has taken me, and completely shocked and overwhelmed by my results and the life it has enabled me to live is probably an understatement. Thankgiving is coming up, I'll save that kind of talk.

It's now early sunday morning, and today is a bigger Sunday than normal, as Full Tilt has their FTOPS series main event, which is guaranteed to have at least a $2M prizepool. One tiiiiiiiiiime?
Some people complain about how the FTOPS runs multiple times per year, while PokerStars series, the WCOOP, only runs once a year, saying that Full Tilt dilutes the importance of its series by its actions. That may be true, but I love it. Large fields are where the money is made in tournament poker, and the more opportunities to play in large buyin large field events, the better.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to play in many FTOPS events between, 3 days in AC for the Borgata Deep Stacks (finished 29, 18/170 paid), no Friday/Sat tournies (I hate that their friday tournies run at night, while their Saturday ones run during the day, thereby making sure I can't play- I really wanted to play the 100R PLO...) I think I've only played in 2 of the events, the 300R, where I put in a bunch of rebuys, and headed into post rebuy with basically a minimum stack. I proceeded to bust in the first post rebuy level when I got ak in preflop against qq. I played in the 500 Horse on Thursday, and went deep, but a number of unfortunate situations later and I was gone in 19th.

The next live series I'm going to play is here in Las Vegas, Bellagio's 5 Diamond Classic. They have a bunch of 1-5k buyins leading up to a 15K main event. One more tiiiiiime.