Taking my medicine

I'm way to old to join the ranks of fan boyz, but I'm afraid I'm there. It's hard not to trip over yourself in praise of a chubby German kid who has performed a feat of Internet pokering that you would not think possible.

Last month, Boku87 proposed a donktastic prop bet on 2+2 that he could run $100 in his Poker Stars account into $10,000 over 15 days playing nothing but low-limit SNGs. The rules stated that the SNGs could have more than 45 entries with a maximum buy-in of $16. He was looking for 3-1 odds and finally got around $10K in action.

I'd never heard of this kid, but he's apparently a highly successful SNG ubergrinder who regularly plays 30 tables or more ... on his laptop. Poker Stars got involved by escrowing the bets and updating Boku87's progress on 2+2.

Yesterday afternoon, about 40 hours short of the deadline, the sonuvabitch did it when his account drifted over the $10,000 mark. There were so many people on 2+2 at the time that the site's servers crashed.

It's hard to fathom that anyone could pull this off. He started off 50-tabling $1.10 SNGs and absolutely crushed them. It took him only a couple of days to work his way up to the $12s and $16s. His Sharkscope graph kept climbing while playing 7,432 SNGs and an astounding 381,000 hands during his run.

I had one encounter with the wunderkind. A couple days from the finish line, Boku87 added a bunch of $3.25 and $6.50 tables, which happen to reside in my neck of the poker woods. Early in a 45, I got dealt jacks UTG. That's when I discovered Boku87 sitting to my immediate left. I raised, he re-raised and I pushed AI. He called with his aces and I rivered a jack to put him on life support.

I almost felt bad for having sucked out against him, but I had my own worries. I'd been running grotesquely bad. Dog shit bad. I had really looked forward to playing a ton of poker during my rehab at home, but ended up cursing myself for ever playing this stupid game.

At one point, I failed to cash in 24 successive tournaments on Poker Stars and a robust 25 on Full Tilt. I can't remember ever being so discouraged. I didn't whether I should destroy my laptop in a fit of rage or curl in a ball on the floor and cry my eyes out. Instead, I kept playing.

Was the deck running cold? Absolutely. Redonkulously bad beats? Way more than the usual. But I knew there had to be more, that there was something fundamentally flawed in my play.

My medicinal regimen could not have been helping. Knee replacement is a painful mofo, necessitating the use of strong narcotics. (I've been writing about my brand new knee at my other blog.) I didn't feel as if the drugs were causing me to play stupidly. Yet my game was off. Nothing seemed to work and variance could not shoulder all of the blame for the downswing.

I backed off on the painkillers about a week ago, and things seem to be a little more in focus. It helps that I'm now playing a game that I've had success at in the past. I'd been doing too much meandering, playing all sorts of different tournament types and some cash as well. I'm now concentrating on 18- and 45-player turbo SNGs. I started with $6.50s, which resulted in a small loss, before dropping to the $3.25 and $3.40 varieties. I've worked my way up to six tables with some limited success.

It looks as if six tables is the most I can comfortably play at the moment. I only started cascading the tables last night. (I previously maxed out at four, sizing the tables so they slightly overlapped and I could keep an eye on the action at all of the tables.) It's strange to lose sight of big hands you're involved in when another table pops to the front. The hope is to get the bankroll to 100 buy-ins and move back to $6.50s. That might take awhile.