I’m on holiday at the moment (Mar & Apr) so I probably won’t post anything else until I get home. There was poker to write about over the winter, but I was also mostly abroad and not 100% sure whether online poker was legal there, so I thought it best to play it overly safe and not advertise that I played 100k hands in their country. I’ll at least add in graphs for the missing months when I return, but it may be worth more commentary as well since I ran well below EV at the highest stakes I played, basically forgot how to play for a while, and ended up effectively just a lowly rakeback-grinder for the quarter…

This one was worth £22.5k after a heads-up deal (~even stacks) in which we chopped the £10k we were playing for into an additional £2.5k each with £5 to play for (~4.5 after tipping)

2 in a row is a really lucky long-shot, so I’m going to try to avoid moaning about below-EV cash months for a while now.

To broadly summarize this one, I was on the 10k-20 range for a very long time, until the average was maybe 50k. Then I got a double up and a few more hands in a row to get a decent stack, but stayed card dead for a while after that. 20bbs is the stack size at which I’m the least comfortable, and I seemed to spend a long time there waiting for the clearer decisions to either run up a bigger stack or wait until I had a shorter stack that I know how to play. Eventually I got the double up and got well above average, so then become comfortable picking up a lot of antes with pressure on short stacks, and I kept hold of a lot of chips as we placed in to the final 27

Today I learnt that this thread http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=45249.0 was running updates, so some of the interesting hands are in there and I’m going to have a good look through and remind myself.

I’ll add some interesting hands as I remember them, I’m going to elaborate on one now so that I can reply in that thread, because it looked like a slowroll, and I’ve certainly said others were slowrolling in a similar spot, but this one made me pause for a while…

With a couple of tables left I had about 280,000 which was an average stack for the final table, and late-mid-position player shoves for about 120,000, I think the blinds were 4k/8k or maybe even 3/6, because it was a bigger-than-usual shove. Here’s why I didn’t instantly reraise from the small blind:

1) The big blind had me covered and I considered whether she had seen her cards and whether she looked interested. It seemed like it would be a really bad mistake to lose all 35 blinds when I was aiming to put 15 at risk just to win the small profit from a majority of the equity in a 30bb pot (say 5-10bb profit?)

2) The 3 stacks after the BB were short enough to be easy to play against, meaning we could pick up a lot of antes with little risk. It was correct for them to stay pretty tight because of pay bubbles and other short stacks – this meant that as long as I had a big enough stack to stay liberal with the open-raises it might have been as profitable to fold the AK there as to call, and that’s obviously lower risk.

3) The player shoving almost certainly had a range that was ‘too weak’ to be ideal – given he plays big hands differently. I’d have preferred to think he had at least an ace so that I could be closer to 7/3 than 6/4. Note that at 6/4 I only earn (32*0.6-15) 4.2 big blinds on the call – about the same as 2 successful ante-steals. I remember watching Helmuth complain about this situation against Varkoni in the old WSOP shows.

4) After day one finished around midnight we went in to the city and drank a lot and got back early that morning! It was taking me much longer than usual to think through anything. Not a poker reason I know, but it was a genuine reason!

Of course, in the end I decided that the possible arguments for passing (or call-folding!) weren’t good enough and made the call. I know that a lot of live tournament players slow-roll a lot of clear decisions maybe because they either enjoy dwelling in their decision moment, or they maybe think that giving up on a pot without taking ages looks weak, or they saw pros on TV take a long time, or whatever, so I thought I’d write up what was happening this hand, sort of to regain credibility, but also so that other players maybe don’t mark me as a rude-tourney-donk-slowroller and so then I can keep a place on the soap-box of complaining about those who are!

So I think I’ve entered 6 since then, with 2 small cashes and 3 losses. So I learnt how to suck out; (http://weaktight.com/1653456,  http://weaktight.com/1654773), although I’m still not sure I did brilliantly at flipping in big pots; (http://weaktight.com/1654778,  http://weaktight.com/1654779,  http://weaktight.com/1654781), I did get the odd big pair at key times when someone else had already shoved.

I’d have to admit that once we got down to 20 I’m not sure there was much skill left in the game. That is, except not making really bad decisions, as a few of the 20 still failed to avoid. I’d say that it was pretty much a lottery for the top places for the other 16, although I had managed to stay in the top 3 during the closing stages so I had earned myself a bigger share of lottery tickets.

I’ve never used the tournaments section of Holdem Manager before, but if I can figure out if it gives me any interesting information about the route to victory I’ll see what I can post up here.

Haven’t played any cash yet this month, and may well take a few days off now!

I got off to a great start in the €500 main event mainly due to cathing really great cards. I must have hit sets with 3/4 of my pairs, and I made a few trips and nut straights when I got in cheap on the button. At one point I think I was dealt AA once and KK twice in 4 hands. That got me from 15k to 26k by the 75/150 level, then I got a complete gift: Raised to 450 on the button with… AA again of course, the big blind, also with around 26-30k, calls. The flop is AdQd5c, I bet 600, the big blind check-raises to 1800, I reraise to 5800 and he shoves the whole 26k.

Obviously I quickly call with the nuts and wonder whether he’s really unlucky to have 55 or AQ, or whether I have to dodge a load of outs against a flush draw with a gutshot. But, fortunately for me, it was neither. He turns over 98o for no-pair-no-draw. The turn bricks and I’m probably the chip leader at that point with 53k.

Nothing happened until the 150/300 level when I get a table change, which was a shame because my previous table was pretty good. At that point I think tiredness also set in, and I made some bad plays without having any reads on the players and with too many chips to need to take any risks.

Firstly I shoved 55 for 10k after opening from the button and being 3-bet by the big blind. I felt like he knew I was stealing and could be reraising too often to be able to call the shove profitably, but of course he actually just had QQ. Then I lost another 10k thinking my AJ was good, calling bets from out of position on KJx K x. The thing is that at a tough cash table AJ will usually be good often enough there, because opponents are aware that they need to apply a lot of pressure on boards that don’t allow me to have too many good hands, and because I’ll call a lot they can also be betting QJ. But we all know that tournament players just don’t think like that, and this one had AK, of course. He mainly tricked me by not reraising preflop, presumably because “its just a draing hand”

I don’t know where the rest went, some opens and failed c-bets, but I got down to 6k at the 200/400 level and shoved all-in for the first time with AQs. Normally at that stage you pick up the blinds a few times, hang in a while, maybe double up once. But I got called the very first time by TT, lost the flip, and was out.

There was still some excitement to be had from the tournament though, because while I was there I met a few of the other Ladbrokes cash games regulars – D33pincider, gary888 and r0lfus. The latter two were still in at the end of the day and by Sunday evening r0lfus was at the final table and went on to win it – http://poker.ladbrokes.com/en/killarney-winner . It was a pretty dirty route to first place with a lot of suckouts, but its not like the guys with the good cards played better: We had a big stack over-calling two big shoves with TT, a chip leader folding (and showing!) 88 to an ‘any two’ shove from a short stack, and then the same guy slow-rolling AQs three handed when he called Tom’s 4-bet shove (with A4o, which Tom of course won) blind vs blind.

I think there were about 30 Ladbrokes VIPs at the event, most played tournaments not cash games, but having seen the Irish tournament regulars in action it certainly wasn’t 20/1 against one of us winning it. r0lfus’ win feels a bit like a win for all of us! (hopefully it really will be, if he comes back to the 5/10 tables with new-found over confidence )

My crash out with a big stack has inspired me to learn not to screw up tournaments again, so I think I’ll be playing a few more live and online in the next few months.