Good news from our main bodog-pimp smokkee, tonight’s bodog blogger tournament (aka bodonkey donkament) has got a nice overlay of T$600!

Check out smokkee’s post about it and/or the pimp banner below for all the details…

Totally forgot: I fired up the PokerStars FPP Store tonight…after all I have racked up some FPPs since I redeposited…I “bought” Bill Chen’s book “The Mathematics of Poker”…6-8 weeks delivery time isn’t so groovy, but I was really looking forward to this book…next stop baseball jersey…although I hope they get a hockey jersey in the near future…after all Daniel Negreanu is with them now…so about time they would think about that?!!!

PokerStars just announced this year’s World Championship of Online Poker…

Sep.14 (15:00) NL Hold’em [6-max] $215 $400,000
Sep.14 (16:30) PL 5-Card Draw $215 $100,000   ***
Sep.15 (15:00) PL Omaha [6-max] $215 $200,000
Sep.15 (16:30) 2-7 Triple Draw $215 $100,000
Sep.16 (16:30) NL Hold’em $530 $2,000,000
Sep.17 (15:00) PL Omaha w/Rebuys $320 $400,000
Sep.18 (15:00) Limit Hold’em $215 $100,000
Sep.19 (15:00) Limit Omaha H/L $530 $300,000
Sep.20 (15:00) NL Hold’em w/Rebuys $215 $1,000,000
Sep.21 (15:00) NL Hold’em Match Play $320 $500,000
Sep.21 (16:30) Razz $215 $100,000   ***
Sep.22 (15:00) HORSE $215 $200,000   ***
Sep.22 (16:30) PL Hold’em $530 $400,000
Sep.23 (16:30) NL Hold’em $1,050 $2,000,000
Sep.24 (15:00) 7 Card Stud $320 $100,000
Sep.25 (15:00) PL Omaha H/L $320 $200,000
Sep.26 (15:00) NL Hold’em [6-max] $320 $400,000   ***
Sep.27 (15:00) 7 Card Stud H/L $530 $200,000
Sep.28 (15:00) PL Omaha $530 $300,000
Sep.28 (16:30) NL Hold’em Triple Shootout $530 $200,000
Sep.29 (15:00) HORSE $5,200 $500,000
Sep.29 (16:30) Limit Hold’em $1,050 $200,000
Sep.30 (16:30) NL Hold’em Main Event $2,600 $5,000,000

*** I think I’m going to try to satellite into these ones…let’s see how it goes, still plenty of time to do it…and wouldn’t it be sweet to win a bracelet while sitting at home at the compi…beautiful….

Almost forgot to pimp this, as it’s 4am over here, it’s already hammer day…07.02.2007…or 2/7/2007 for the americans…so…what’s up on hammer day?

Yes, a special hammer day event…come and play…all infos in the pimp pic below…thanks to Al and Mookie for the added  100$, get 7.20$ out of your wallet and play…thank you!

Well, well…wanted to play some poker as usual tonight, but no joy. For the first time in more than 6 years I’m having internet connection problems. I’m able to connect, barely, but with such a painfully slow transfer rate that playing is unthinkable (I’m on a 6MBit connection and my current downstream is 6kb/s). Hopefully my provider will have this sorted out by tomorrow or else I’ll have to kick some butt… Edit: …and just as I’m posting this my connection is back to normal (down > 600kb/s)…oh well…4:30am…no way I’m playing now….time to catch some sleep End Edit
No poker for me today, but still some poker “news”. I’ve been working on a little project, namely translating (half) of the PokerSavvy (aff) site into german. It’s been a long process and it was finally done some weeks ago…the graphics guru still didn’t get around to redo all the graphics (so they’re still in english), but at least the pure content is in german now.

Hopefully it’ll bring in a lot of hungry bonus hunters from the ever growing poker community over here in germany…if you want to practice your german, head on over to the german version and check it out…

Not much poker to talk about in the last few days. I was madly busy with some uni stuff, so not much poker playing. When I did play though I got ripped of royally. As you may know I started a new bonus hunt at Poker.com and every since my first deposit I get kicked in the junk, big time, every time, every single god damn time.

I think this could very well become the worst bonus hunt in history, apart from maybe my nine poker disaster. Every single time I hold a good hand, I trap someone into giving me all his chips – the bad news is that every single time, at least it seems to be that way, they catch their damn miracle card, AK vs Ax, AQ vs Ax, K10 vs K7, etc etc. On the other hand I run into cold deck after cold deck. Always nice to see AJ vs AQ headsup, Ace + two rags hits the board…hmm…QQ vs Ax…no chance….Jacks vs Kx…no chance, etc etc…I’m about to lose it…even worse: as if the junk kicking isn’t bad enough, I grinded out the HUUUUGE amount of 400 Comp Points….well….only 14600 more to go….d’oh!

Maybe I should stop reading Waffles as it seems that I caught the Waffles virus*…

*Waffles Virus aka opponents’ relentless runner-runner-goodness aka 80+% equals no chance aka I can trap them all I want they will find a way to get lucky aka …

So, I finally visited the PPA-site again and yes, they finally fixed their signup site, despite never getting back to me about my email complaining about it not working for people outside of the US. So, I finally had the chance to signup – bucks well spent I think! If you didn’t join already, do so, just click the banner below (no affiliate banner!)…

After getting that out of the way I started a new bonus hunt: Poker.com it is, for the chance to get my hands on another 1000 SavvyPoints. Started the bonus hunt right on the wrong foot, forgot to enter the correct signup-bonus code to get the initial deposit bonus, great! After that I multi-tabled some low-limit HE and did fairly well…running into the eventual cold-deck, but all in all it was alright. After that I threw away some money at BJ, old habits die hard. After that I fired up some SnGs in order to build the roll. Bad idea. I’ve honestly not seen that many cold decks within such a short-amount of time, seriously.

I dominated a match, I get KK vs AA lose…get JJ vs AA some hands later…I crack the Aces, nontheless I lose the match. Next match HU…66-88…okay I had a substantial chiplead, back to even, all good. A few hands later AA vs KJ…flop KKK…thank you very much. Next match second nut-flush vs nut-flush…etc etc…hell of a start, this is going to be a short ugly ride if my luck continues that way…

On another note: the bonus requirements seem to be unreal 15.000 Comp Points, then again take a second look and see that each hand in which you’re dealt in is worth 3 Comp Points, even at NL10 which equals 5000 hands. Shouldn’t be that hard after all, I guess I’ll abstain from running in too many SnGs the next few days though and instead I’ll multi some cash games, hopefully (re)building the roll…

So…I played in a Skat (see Wikipedia if you’re not familiar with this game, which is probably the case) tourney with my dad tonight. Usually I only play Skat in a friendly cash game (where you pay the difference in points won or lost), so playing in a tournament was quite different. The first table started pretty slowly and I didn’t get many games – which is sort of bad as the tourney consisted of only two rounds with 24 games total each. So after the first round I was pretty far behind already (nearly 1k in points which is nearly impossible to catch up). The draw for the second table was fun…I drew a seat at the “killer table” which hosted both the leader and the player in second position and boy oh boy they were on fire. The player in second after the first table played and won the first 6 hands, without any problems. The leader waited his spots and played a game here and there and the final 5 in a row…that left a whole of 4 games for me. Unreal…but unlike in Poker, in Skat you can’t play your opponents, you need to play the cards you’re dealt, so if they’re crap you’re out of luck. So…the second table was finished in a blink of an eye and we had to wait up until the other tables finished their play – which took about another half an hour. The points were calculated (in tourney Skat you get additional points for every game you play and win, you get a minus of points for games you played and lost and the other two players get points for busting you in that game). So the final result was quite amusing: My dad – 3rd (the first player after the two card racks battling for first place almost in another world (points-wise)), me – second to last, lol. Oh well…it was a fun time

After I came home after the tourney I thought it was time for some “real cards”, lol, poker and BJ. I gotta say that I much like and dislike Blackjack for a number of reasons:

Likey:

1. Good way to grind out points towards clearing bonus(es)

2. With correct strategy, good chances to at least stay even (+/-) a little – at least in theory

Dislikey:

1. When the friggin dealer is dropping Blackjacks on your ass all the time (today the ratio was about 4:1 which isn’t really cool; everything in the region of 3:1 to 3:2 is alrighty, but 4:1, that’s a cold deck)

2. When you’re running hot, then running cold losing hand after hand to unreal hands (great 20, oooh 5 card 21, great 19, 5 cards 21, …etc)

So after grinding out nearly 40 points towards clearing my bonus at Pacific – and unfortunately dropping around 30 bucks in the process (well, I was way ahead in the first session, so I basically lost all that back + some more) – I decided to fire up the poker tables, but to no avail, I just couldn’t focus. So I took a walk to the couch and watched the European Poker Masters – Dublin Allstar Challenge which was running on Eurosport. There was even a german dude hanging at the final table, so it was quite cool. Not so cool: stopping the show once down to the final four. How stupid is that? Now I can go ahead and check the schedule for the next x days to find the damn second part. Stupid!

After the cooldown I fired up PokerStars to blow off some steam and what better way to do it than to play in a turbo donkey tourney in my new favourite game – Razz. So I jumped into a two-table tourney for nearly two bucks (lol) and opened the donkey/monkey/radio-box. Not only did the players not know what hit ‘em, they also didn’t know what they were doing. Needless to say that I busted out rather early as they donks were in hot pursuit. They were running after me like the bulls in Pamplona, lol. And sure enough they tackled me and smacked the shit out of me with their “powerful” donk hands clearly behind at least a card, but strong enough to outdraw me by hitting the obvious perfect perfect about 99.9999999999999999999999% of the time

So…I’m good now…off to read me some Little Green Book which I started to read yesterday…have a great weekend and may the anti-donk-force be with you…..heeeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw!

This is not a paid review…I just wanted to let you all know that one of my favourite advertising networks is now available for blogger blogs too…They’re doing just what their name says: selling text-link-ads (see the site supporters in the left hand column, those are paid text-link-ads)…

If you would like to give it a shot…feel free to click the following affiliate banner…make some dough and make me some dough…win win

…well, not quite yet, still another week of work before I’m free to celebrate christmas, the new year and get myself in the hunt for my diploma thesis. So, the “good to be back” refers to my game

I started the evening with a token satellite on Full Tilt. Well, let’s just say that the first hand was the last one too. I just couldn’t get away from the hand, although all the signs were there – min raise preflop, reraise on the flop…I guess I was a little too excited about flopping two pair…oh well…

After that disappointment I took a seat at some crazy HA tables. It’s really surprising how many players are playing these without having the first clue about Omaha, lol. Still couldn’t start a bigger running and dropped a buyin. Not all that good.

So I fired up bodog and played some HU SnGs. Won the first two, then lost the next two. That really sucked, so I decided to quit HU for the night and as I checked the MTT tab I saw that the 2.5k guaranteed was about to start. The low buyin of 7$ + 0,50$ made the decision even easier.

Hours played: roughly 3.5

Times I was all-in and at risk: twice, early with a flip AK vs JJ…and then in the last hand..but more about that one below.

So I bumped and grinded and sometimes I really got a rush of cards (I must have held AA about four times, QQ about five times and some other lower pairs, but apart from that, well…not much). I had one goal for this tourney:

[Guess 1] Make money – nope

[Guess 2] Get down to last x players – nope

[Guess 3] Not get sucked out on – nope

The correct answer is: make correct decisions – and it worked out pretty good. It’s weird how sometimes a little pointer “back to basics” can really help you find your game again. After plowing through Super System II (highly recommended, but it’s sooo full of concepts and numerous games that you will have to read, re-read and re-re-read it on a regular basis), I started to read my next poker book entitled Pauly’s blog errm “The Tao of Poker”. It’s a set of 285 rules to “transform your game”. Well, I don’t know about the transformation part, but they certainly help. I only read the first 25 or something so far, as I said, I started to read it last night and I gotta get some sleep sometime, so can’t be reading all night. The first ones were really basic, but although you know all the concepts/ideas/rules (know when you’re beat; poker is a grind; ..) are clear and you probably have them all inside your head, but re-reading them really helps as they can’t get lost and/or blocked by other thoughts like “yeeehaaaw…donkey’s catch all the time, let me try this”…

But back to the tourney. There were 319 entrants, so the final four tables are ITM. As I already said, I went on a little rush early, before hovering around average most of the time. There are really only two hands I regret: one was when I bluffed off half my stack when we were about to get down to the last 3 tables. The last one was the last hand…at the final table

Yes, the final table…

…about time I saw one of these again. It’s been a while. (Side note: Don’t be fooled by the hand stats, this is for the whole session, so roughly the first 100 hands of that were HU with my usual 80+% flops seen)

Within the first orbit I busted though. After the first player was knocked out in the second hand of the final table, I was eager to play my AQo from LP…and why do I regret this hand?

[1] Remember the old “don’t go broke with a Queen in your hand”-mantra? It’s what crossed my mind before I raised preflop.

[2] I still had a chance to get away from the hand after the flop. Although the roughly 17k with 1k/2k blinds and 200$ antes would have forced me to make a move soon after that anyway (I started the hand with just under 23k, standard 3xBB preflop raise).

As you can see in the following screenshot, the flop came down Kc, 4d, Qc and my opponent insta-over-pushes. Well, what could he be pushing with? What was he calling with preflop? Basically it could have been any two cards preflop (BB, big stack), but after the push I should have believed the hand he claimed (Kx, maybe even with a flush draw) and waited for a better spot (within the next 8-10 hands). But oh well…I called and he showed KJ…turn K…river…K…them quads beetches! At least I lost to a really good hand…

Out in 8th of 319. I’m cool with that. Needless to say that I would have loved to move up some spots as the payout were starting to be really cool in the higher final table spots (1st – 625$, 2nd – 400$, 3rd – 277,50$, ..)…but hey…as I said earlier on, this one wasn’t for the money, it was for my mental game health – if there’s such a thing