Sensei’s Poker Dojo

Ariel¹ was in town looking at Berkeley law school and Brian² was around hanging out as well, so we decided to go to dinner tonight at Gary Danko along with Jonas³ and Nate⁴. Apparently it is one of the best restaurants in San Francisco (if not the best) so my expectations were pretty high going in. They were pleasantly exceeded! Pardon if I don’t recall the exact ingredients, but all of the dishes I’ll mention were far more complicated and delicious than my simple descriptions may indicate.

We preceded the meal with Macallan 18 year old scotch. I don’t really drink scotch ever, but it was an interesting (and apparently quite high-quality) prelude to the meal.
While considering the menu, we were presented with small appetizers, compliments of the chef for making us wait a little for our table (and really it was only about 10 minutes, tops, which none of us minded thanks to the scotch and the company). These appetizers included a small portion of carrot soup with duck confit and ‘herb oil’ and a portion of smoked salmon and caviar atop fresh crispy bread of some sort.
My first course was a Dungeness crab and winter citrus salad, accompanied by a glass of sauvignon blanc. Most of the other guys got lobster and shrimp risotto and quickly realized that the portions were unlikely to be as small as expected for a restaurant of this caliber. Several did not finish in anticipation of needing room for future dishes, so Nate politely finished theirs off for them.
My second course was roast lobster and mashed potatoes with a glass of chardonnay. Others got scallops, a beet salad⁵, or some other seafood-type dish.
My third course was a bison loin with herb spatzle and porcini mushrooms, accompanied by a deliciously spicy syrah. I can’t remember what others got because by that point we were all in a sort of delirious food haze. (I’m sure the scotch and wine didn’t hurt.)

At some point between the third and fourth courses, we did an omaha flip in lieu of credit card roulette. Jonas’ intention was to do one flip between each of the next few courses and eliminate one person each round, but it was deemed excessive. Nate noted that it was a bit silly to pull out a deck of cards and start dealing at an establishment like this, and several others agreed. I didn’t really care either way but was excited nonetheless. The compromise was to deal a single hand and the winner would pay the bill. The board was dealt out A234J with no potential flushes. I first peeled a safe king, but then a treacherous 5, the worst card in the deck. I had to sweat out the last two cards without an ace, 2, 3, 4, or 6 to avoid almost guaranteed failure. Fortunately, they were a ten and another 5, and Brian’s aces up took the bill. Yessss.

The fourth course was a selection of ridiculous cheeses from around the world. We got to choose 4 each from about 13 total. I went with a gouda-like solid goat cheese, a firm sheep’s milk cheese, a belgian cheese made with Chimay, and a sharp English cheddar. They proved too much for me to handle when paired with a sweet glass of Madeira and followed by the fifth course, a phenomenal orange-milk chocolate mousse with white chocolate ice cream and a glass of granache⁶.

The bill was surprisingly reasonable, about $1000 for the five of us⁷ and we all left almost overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of delicious and diverse offerings. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s visiting town and really wants to enjoy a nice meal. Don’t expect to accomplish anything else that night, though!

1. FoxwoodsFiend [↩]
2. flawless_victory [↩]
3. riverboatking [↩]
4. neon [↩]
5. I cracked a joke about how the real ‘beat’ was that he was eating salad instead of lobster, but it bombed . [↩]
6. I’ll have to have more granache in the future, it was delicious and deserves further review [↩]
7. Free for me of course, ty Brian! [↩]

2/2: +12.6k, 362 hands
2/3: -19.5k, 1139 hands
2/4: +17.4k, 505 hands
2/5: +7.8k, 264 hands

Eesh. Lets hope this coming week’s results trend a little more consistently upwards (though I guess I can’t really complain about a 20k week even if involves heavy variance).

Also the graph may not be entirely correct due to database date/time issues, I think its got a session I played the night of January 31st in there too. But you get the idea.

It was a pretty busy month, life-wise. I spent a week in the Bahamas for PCA, a long weekend in Los Angeles playing ultimate and hanging out with some friends from college, and a regular weekend in Vegas playing ultimate¹. Perhaps unfortunately I didn’t play any cards on either of those trips, but I did have a pretty great time.

As far as poker goes, it was a decent month marred only by a few bad days. I played a little under 10k hands online, almost entirely PLO, for a net of -$7900. My pokerEV graph shows that I ran kinda bad, but I try to avoid giving that much of my attention. I think those graphs tend to do more harm than good, because when someone realizes that they are running below expectation they tend to
a) bitch about it more because now they have ‘concrete evidence’
b) keep playing the same way because they assume that it was luck rather than poor play which caused their losses. While that may or may not be true, its still important to analyze and review the merits of your plays and constantly strive to improve.

My online losses were mostly produced by two particularly bad days where I lost 17k and 19k respectively. The first was caused at least somewhat by playing too many tables and switching to autopilot, the second I think was mostly just an unfortunate run of cards at the higher end of my stakes spectrum. So it goes. Most of the other days I played online went well, I booked a number of moderate wins, but it wasn’t quite enough to make up for those two days. Fortunately, I won $15k for finishing 102nd at the PCA tournament, which I consider to basically be a freeroll since I won my entry and the week’s vacation in a satellite online. I also won several more G’s in live cash games down there, despite only playing a few modest sessions. My appetite for live PLO grows every time I play it! I also won about 10k splitting action with people in online games, so if you consider that as part of my online play then I came out ahead in that department too.

So it looks like overall I wound up at about +$20k for the month, which is modest but certainly not something to complain about. Hopefully I’ll be able to put in plenty of hours in February before my snowboarding trip to Colorado near the end of the month. I also plan to go down for a little of the LAPC in a few weeks. I’ll have to miss the main event due to my snowboarding trip, but I can play the 5k PLO and maybe the 10k HUNL, and I’ll definitely play in some juicy live cash games. Mmmmm.

1. but no poker! [↩]