The offline frustration today is totally unrelated to poker: my footie team had the chance to win the championship this year, but we were at the mercy of our opponents as we didn’t have a match today, but they did (we had already played our final match last thursday)…the scenario was clear: the lose, we’re the champions, the draw or win and they’re the champions…what happened? They played 3-3 and are the champions…which leaves a bitter taste in our mouths…

1. Our Opponent – Games played: 24, 17W, 5D, 2L, 74:21 goals – 56 Points
2. We – Games played: 24, 17W, 5D, 2L, 74:24 goals – 56 Points

🙁

So they go up to the next higher league and we have to play two matches, which we need to win to go up, too. First an eliminator against another league on the same level (Kreisliga B), then against the team from the higher league (Kreisliga A) which is next to last in that league. Matches scheduled for tuesday and saturday…wish us luck…

After that frustration I fired up PokerStars and entered the 3$ rebuy to the $1.000.000…no joy, so I close Stars and head over to FullTilt. First SnG, first win. Second SnG, 3rd place. Third SnG 6th place – end of the ITM series. So I step up a level and try my luck…and I win! The decisive hand was a min raise of my opponent heads up…I look down at A2 and I’ll take a flop with that…flop comes A22…hehe…he doubles me up with his AK and I’m in control. The end comes in the next hand…nice! I’m starting to get tired, so I head down a level again to play a final SnG…we’re down to 4 handed and I’m a slight chipleader (44xx to 43xx to 2.x k to 2.x k) one of the smaller stacks raises to 4xBB…the other “big stack” calls…I push to 2k…he ponders and ponders….calls…flop comes 7-3-9 rainbow…he checks…I push….he goes into the tank for a little eternity and calls…he shows Kc7c…it holds up and I’m crippled…I congratulate him on his nice play…after all they were s00ted…so why complain…before I go into the chat and blog rant mode I log off and remind myself of one thing: if you play at the donkey levels it’s inevitable…there will be donkeys making bad decisions and hitting, so move along… 😉

So, we found our way to the next home game tonight…bbq followed by a nice poker session. We played our regular NL HE tournament and with 12 players showing up, we split up to two tables of 6 players. Shorthanded play, not bad. I played three hands in the whole tourney…I was ahead in all three hands and suffered one junk kicking after the next. Not a single win and I’m ahead at all times until the turn/river….bad luck describes it best, I guess…

Hand 1:

A8 MP, raise preflop…one caller…flop 8-10-Q rainbow…I lead out and bet half the pot…call..turn is blank…I lead out and bet half the pot…call…river 9…I lead out and bet half the pot…call…opponent shows: 67o…straight….nice…NOT

Hand 2:

910s…I bet preflop…one caller…flop comes down A910…I lead out again…call…turn A…now I’m worried…but I can’t lay this down, I need to bet to find out if he’s got the Ace…call…river is blank…now I check and he bets about 1/8th of the pot…easy call…sure enough he shows A3o…nice…NOT

Now I’m shortstacked (around 1/3 of my starting stack) and I’m steaming…next hand I’m in the BB…

Hand 3:

I look down at my cards and find KK…nice 🙂 …I wait to see what happens and the Button calls, the SB calls…it’s on me and I raise All-In…Button ponders and ponders and calls…SB folds…he shows: A8o….now if an Ace comes down I won’t be disappointed, after all this is poker…it can happen…but that’s not the way it or me is going down:

Flop: 6-7-10…turn 10…river: 9…two pair kings and tens loses to straight…and I’m out of the tourney….

Wow, how unlucky can you be? Damn! Ah well…at least I finished 2nd in the side game which was played parallel to the final table of the main tourney, so I’m only slightly down for the night (and still way ahead overall), but it still hurts to go out early without doing anything wrong (?!)…ahead till the turn/river and then no joy – side note: I lost the final hand of the sidegame QJ vs 10-8, flop and turn are blank…river 8 and IGHN…I guess it just wasn’t my night… 😉

On the bright side there’s always another time to play and so I won’t lose any sleep about my early exit tonight…

1. Enter a limit Stud MTT 2.5h prior to the WWdN Ingoal Invitational
2. Hang in there for slightly over 3 hours
3. Run your hole Aces into rolled up Kings
4. Bust out in the process
5. Finish 20th of 296 for a huge ( 😉 ) profit of 1.26$ 🙂

Today I realized that I’m caught in low limit nirvana, the wasteland, nowhere, whatever you would like to call it. At the limits I’m currently playing (not higher than .25/.50) there are some good players (and I would consider myself one of those), but mostly mediocre to bad players.

Good stuff if and only if you can take full advantage of it and recently I can’t – don’t get me wrong: if you substract variance I’m a winning player and you shouldn’t count short term results anyway, so it’s all good – but still: playing at those levels keeps me in a endless loop of winning and losing (mostly on bad beats or at least getting drawn out with incorrect odds) and there’s not much I can do.

How should I put it?! Playing at those levels takes away some of your best options. You can wait and wait for monster hands and then bet the living jebus out of them, just to see them win in some cases or get a horrible beat. Nothing much in between. Example: one of the precious “tools” of poker is the bluff, right? The catch: at the levels I’m playing there’s a deadly mix of players involved in almost every hand I play – the majority will call you no matter what, even with fourth pair on a straight-, flush- or any scary-board in general…the good ol’ “I don’t believe you”, “I’ll be the sheriff this round, I can’t let anyone bluff me!”, “I wanna see that” attitude…so the bluff is mostly out of the picture (unless I’m heads up with a player which has proven his/her ability to laydown a hand – after all that’s one of the reasons why you keep book, right?). So what to do, what to do?

Two possibilities:

1. Move up in limits. That’s no guarantee for a donkey free zone though and with my current bankroll constraints it’s basically out of the picture – no point in trying to survive on a short short roll, it would be the recipe for destruction.
2. Stay at the same level and deal with the daily hurting involved in grinding it out.

So, I’m basically stuck…damn! I guess I’ll schedule poker free days from now on to alleviate the pain…I guess a titanium cup won’t hurt either, so I’m ordering one tomorrow 😉

Today’s results: Some success at FullTilt: PLO8b HU – won, SnG – ITM, some success at PokerStars: cash games, slightly up…

Didn’t get around to posting anything the last two days, well, there wasn’t much going on anyway…some SnGs…so nothing big missed there.

Today I decided to play some late night poker, yet again. I started the session with a turbo SnG and won, w00t. Just as it was about to finish I noticed that the WWdN was about to start, so I jumped in.

My starting table featured the host himself:

Groovy stuff. Played tight, didn’t take any chances and was able to hover in the top 20-25 for most of the time. No suckouts or anything until the dreaded hand came up (I can’t even remember the exact hand, but I think it was my AQo vs QJ, AQx on the flop, 10 on the turn, K on the river…runner runner goodness…yuck!) – it didn’t cripple me, but it put me right back into the average field, so it sucked, but hey…it’s poker… Then I had the “honor” of busting out Wil. My J10 flopped a pair of Jacks, KJx all diamonds though, check check, turn 10, I bet 300…now Wil only has 505 left, so he goes into the tank…at that time I put him on a flush draw, which was true, he pushed with As7d, I called and dodged another diamond on the river…w00t…presenting the Ingoal invitational (although Wil wrote it “InGoal”…):

W00t! After Wil busted I kept playing my tight game and it really worked well…until the blinds kept increasing and I just couldn’t get anything going against all the big stacks – and if I had a decent to good hand I didn’t get any customers…ah well…too bad. Out bubble+1 = 11th…not too shabby 😉

During current Hold’em session you were dealt 181 hands and saw flop:
– 9 out of 24 times while in big blind (37%)
– 2 out of 24 times while in small blind (8%)
– 6 out of 133 times in other positions (4%)
– a total of 17 out of 181 (9%)
Pots won at showdown – 6 of 10 (60%)
Pots won without showdown – 18

I’m really satisfied with my performance, but the same thing that got me that far broke my back in the end: playing (too) tight…I guess I should have been a little more lose come bubble time… alrighty…off to watch the other guys battle it out….6 left….and then it’s off to bed…already past 5am…yikes!

…nothing to show for it… 🙁

Played numerous SnGs and MTTs at both FullTilt and PokerStars…and after hours of good play I’m down…sometimes I hate the whole MTT and SnG thing…ah well…better luck tomorrow, hopefully 😉

So, we found our way to Stuttgart again to play our regular home game. Ten players showed up, so we decided to play our regular No Limit Hold ’em tournament – 5 players at each table, top 3 to the final table. I managed to get to the final table, yet again, 4th in chips overall…after some battles back and forth we finally were down to 2 players, a mate of mine (Armin) and myself…we did our best to battle back and forth too and with the increasing blinds we were forced to force the action rather sooner than later. In the end my 2d-4d took down the final pot as I flopped a pair of deuces to beat Armin’s Q6o.

Newsworthy hands of the evening that I witnessed (and/or play in myself):

• Last hand before the final table: Q6o vs Q9o…three nines on the board along with two tens…quads over full house…
• QQ (me) vs A6o (Bianca) vs KJo (Dino) – flopped trips…dodge the flush bullet on the river to take down a nice pot…
• 99 (me) vs 1010 (Armin) – tens stood tall
• 4c5c vs J6o – turned trips for me
• 2d4d vs Q6o – final hand

Overall yet another nice evening with some good poker! Winning the whole thing didn’t hurt either 😉

Played a crazy mix of games today including crazy pineapple on UB (damn that game can be fun) , Stud and different cash and SnGs/MTTs of NL HE. Got the first nut kicking by getting outdrawn time and time in the Stud MTT on Stars, not to worry though, it was a donkey 1$ tourney, so you can’t expect much. No cashes in all the other SnGs on both FullTilt and Stars with the best finish being 4th (bubble boy) on Stars.

Then I decided that it was time to finally play a WWdN again….so I logged back on just in time and registered. My starting table included PokerChamp (aka TouristHater 😉 ), Chris (drewspop), Dan (denials – live blogging the event once again) and others…

I didn’t think that this starting table would be the last one for me, but unfortunately it was. Dumped some chips in the first orbit with KJ sooted, standard raise preflop, one caller…I hit the king…on the rainbow flop and fire out another 100….call…turn is a queen…I fire out another 100…call…River is another Queen… now I check and get popped 200…sure enough I call…can’t put my opponent on AQ there…thanks dealer for a runner runner set for my opponent. Down to just above 1000 within the first orbit, damn. Next hand I decide to play is Jh10h…I flop an OESD + Flush draw + gutshot straight flush draw (as far as I remember the flop came down 9h-Kh-8c)…opponent fires 80 on every round and I call it down not hitting anything, no straight, no flush and damn sure no straight flush…and I’m down to around 900 chips. Next orbit I’m sitting in the BB with 88…drewspop pops it up to 80 (blinds still 10/20)…I ponder and call…flop is all rags 7-5-2 or something…I fire out 100 to see where I’m at…he reraises to 300…so now I’m faced with the tough choice (call – doesn’t make too much sense as I would be commited anyway, fold – not really, push – ding ding)…I push and he shows AA….noooooooooooooo! So I’m out in 95th of 98. Why do I have to run into those damn bullets…I guess I should call Phil Hellmuth, maybe he can teach me how to dodge bullets 😉

So, I tried to qualify for team Germany. The thing was setup as a heads up tourney and 143 players entered it, “paying” 50FPP in the process. The winner would win a spot in Team Germany. I started out at an empty table, like half of the field – you gotta love the format of PokerStars, so I sat out the first 40 minutes until the other tables with 2 players finished.

I used the time to chat with Sires, whom you probably all know from the WWdN tourneys. He was sitting at an empty table, too. After the whole wait I was ready to battle and battle I did, as my opponent wonm123 was hitting flops like crazy…he rivered me good two or three times…so I was down to 1k chips four times, before the decisive hand: I had battle my way back to 2.2k chips and hold 66, I push, he calls with AQ…66 holds up and I’m now up 4.5k to 1.5k soon after that he pushes with Q4…I call with K10 and win to advance to round 3. Sires put on a hard fight, but couldn’t get anything going his way either, he busted out in 77th place.
Round 3 was more or less the fastest HU game I’ve ever played: first three hands I get dealt the tourist (A7), AQ and KJ…my opponent donschmitz folds all three hands. In the fourth hand I get dealt A3 on the button…I min raises…lol…he calls…flop comes down 2-5-J…he checks…I check…turn is a 4 giving me the wheel…he bets 2k…I push…he calls and shows 5-4 for two pair…no rescue on the river (3) and I bust him…after the whooping playing time of 2 minutes in this match.

I sit around and wait slightly under an hour until the next match in round 4 starts. We’re now down to the last 32 and we’re all sitting on 12k in chips. Back and fourth for some minutes, but I can’t get anything going…when I hit piece of the flop (mid pair) I push…to my dismay he calls with 65, two pair and IGHN…bluff0r moves on to the last 16. Edit: bluff0r took it down and will be one of the players representing Team Germany. So at least I lost to the eventual winner…:Edit
So I finished 28th of 143. Not a bad showing, but I really wanted to win this one…ah well…at least I made it pasted the first few rounds. What sucked though is that I was in the tourney for over 3hours and I played the total amount of 52 minutes (0minutes R1, 40minutes R2, 2 minutes R3, 10 minutes R4)…