Played only a little poker today – man am I going to be relieved when the exam is done on tuesday, my head is full.

After hitting the books again I jumped into a 5$ HORSE tourney on Full Tilt which was about to start, I just can’t leave my hands of these HORSE tourneys, despite doing not all that good in them. This time it was not really different: played 2x HORSE and busted out in the 3rd Razz round…38th of 87…

After footie training I logged on to PokerStars to transfer the 15$ to the commish for the HUC3, and there was the 20k guaranteed 3$ rebuy tourney about to start, so why not?! Because I should have known better…either you’re willing to throw money at these things or you catch some cards early on getting all those lovely chips from donkeys or you go home pretty early. I did the latter as I couldn’t get anything going…when I hit trips, my opponent hit’s his boat, etc etc that combined with the fact that the chipleader is already sitting on a 60k stack after roughly 45 mins didn’t make me feel like hitting the rebuy button…Note to self: leave your hands of these rebuys…they’re not good for your wallet or your sanity.

HUC3 Pimpage:

If you want to have a look at who’s playing, when the thing is going down and more info head over to the HeadsUpChallenge-Blog! All the critical infos can be found in the banner below, too.

Made my way through a load of donkeys, couldn’t get to the final table though…so close and yet so far…24th out of 2178, not too bad 😉

PokerStars Tournament #21184731, No Limit Hold'em
Buy-In: $3.00/$0.30
2178 players
Total Prize Pool: $6534.00
Tournament started - 2006/03/16 - 19:05:00 (ET)

Dear Ingoal,

You finished the tournament in 24th place.
A $16.34 award has been credited to your Real Money account.

You earned 144.03 tournament leader points in this tournament.
For information about our tournament leader board,
see our web site at
http://www.pokerstars.com/tlb_tournament_rankings.html

Congratulations!
Thank you for participating.

Tired from learning / revising all day and tired of getting sucked out on in critical hands. Played a Token satellite again, nothing much to report until we’re down to 6 handed, I need some chips and push from the button with Ad8d…SB folds…BB thinks it’s a good idea to call the additional 1k chips with 4d5d…sure enough two diamonds on the flop…blank turn…and 4 on the river…and I’m out in 6th place…no token, no joy, just the urging feeling to hit something. 🙁

Maybe I shouldn’t play when I’m so tired at all…but you know how it is, a little game won’t hurt…although in this case it did…once again. A well, you can’t win ’em all…and being tired didn’t hurt my game in DADI IV or WWdN 18 the last two days, so I guess I’m just in “just been sucked out on”-mode… 😉
Addendum: Forgot to mention my little ring game before the WWdN…nothing too spectacular, played a half dozen orbits to warm up for the WWdN, went out ahead 1 buyin… 🙂

Already early again…so recap has wait until later…busted out 15th of 77 players when my 55 lost to AJ (both A and J on the flop)…

Edit: Alrighty, here it goes. Played a little bit more aggressive early on, I think as a side-effect of DADI IV Shorthanded, which was really a good thing. I was able to build my stack above average early on and hovered around average as we headed into the 1st break. Right after the first break, first hand: I look down at TT in late position, EP raised to 4xBB…I smooth-call, maybe an error, but I thought I faced and weak/medium/strong ace so let’s see a flop…flop comes down all low cards 3-8-9…EP leads out for 300…now I think my 10-10 is still good here, so I call again…turn is another blank…EP bets again…I call again…river is a J…EP bets again…I call again…to my surprise I misplaced my opponent who shows 3-3 (flopped set)…yikes…down to under 1k. So much for my hovering around average. After that I bounced around the tables like a rubber ball as I was moved time and time again…just as I was facing elimination (around 300 in chips) I quadrupled up with my AQ (vs A9 vs KK) when I spiked a Queen on the river. Nothing newsworthy after that…until my final hand came down: I’m desperate again with around 1k chips and the blinds and antes eating me alive, I find presto! (5-5) and decide to push…this time my opponent really shows an Ace…AJ to be precise…and guess what hit the flop…see for yourself:

So I’m out in 15th, another good showing IMO with just 6 from the money…hopefully I can get down to the final 9 again sometime soonish…

Side note: As Wil missed the tourney altogether I’m curious what the name of the next invitational will be…

It’s early so recap has to wait until later…time to catch some sleep (short summary: after 2h 25min of good poker I busted out in 5th of 57…final table ITM…so cha-ching 😉 )

Edit: Started the tourney on an event more shorthanded table than expected, Table 5 featured…

Seat 1: empty, Seat 2: Slimeface, Seat 3: Me, Myself and I, Seat 4: Gracie, Seat 5: hoyazo, Seat 6: presdlee. We were joined by some other players including one of the hosts (Tripjax), surflexus and others (sorry, didn’t really take notes).

After quite some back and forth at the table and my chip count bouncing anywhere from 2.xxx to 1.500 I was moved to table 6 just prior to the first break. I was hovering in the top 20 for most of the time with the peak at around 7th place until the 2nd break when we were approaching bubble time. One thing’s for sure: it’s weird to play hand for hand when there are 4 players at one table and 3 at the other (after all the final table can only have 6 participants), especially when you’re in the bubble spot! After some orbits the bubble finally broke as lifesagrind busted out Blinders when he won the coinflip (AK vs 44).

W00t, final table of a blogger tourney, again (that’s one WWdN and one DADI final table appearance now).

As you can see in the pic above I was pretty shortstacked compared to almost all players at the table, especially to lifesagrind. Nontheless I was able to double up early when my pocket 7s held up, so I could sneak up one place, before busting out in 5th place (me: K8 vs dnasty13: 77…no help for me). I’m really satisfied with my performance though. Right after busting out I said my goodbyes and went off to bed, after all it was past 5am, yikes.

I hope that someone will shed some light on the story behind lifesagrind’s demise (from over 40k chips to out in 3rd place)! Congrats to bdidde who crowned himself the DADI IV Champion! Here are the final standings:

Final words and thoughts:

1. I didn’t hold AA or KK in the whole tourney
2. I did hold QQ four times, won 3 of ’em
3. Won two coinflips when I needed them (AdKd vs 44 and 77 vs A10), didn’t play any other coinflips, at least not for a substantial amount of chips
4. Rediscovered the love for shorthanded play. It just rocks and the whole concept of playing a little bit more loose than normal works for me, as I’m usually a little bit too tight…
5. I had fun for almost 2.5h! That’s the most important fact…
6. Once again: thanks to TripJax and Jordan for hosting yet another great tourney! I’m looking to see what you can come up with for DADI V (hint: maybe Stud, Stud H/L or Razz?! 😉 )…One thing’s for sure: I’ll be there!

As I’m in the midst of what I like to call “extreme exam preparation” (the last 1-2weeks leading up to a major uni exam) there’s not much going on at the poker front as I’m just too knackered to really focus on the game, which isn’t a good thing if you’re trying your “luck” at a new (higher) level. So no poker played on saturday and little today (sunday).

After sticking my nose into uni stuff (mostly web-based integration and architecture of application systems) all day I didn’t feel the urge to really play, but playing a little poker won’t hurt to get your thoughts of the stuff, so what the hell. Donked around at AbsolutePoker for a little, playing a low limit NL HE MTT…which was a quick one despite holding AA early on (which held up on a scary board) and KK which was busted by pocket sixes to cripple me…the end was rather entertaining too…AQo vs KQs vs KQo…sure enough the two outer King hit…after that I donked off some dough at the cash tables when my pocket kings were crushed again, the hiltons held up though so only down a half buyin for the night…at least something.

In other news: I’m going to play in the HeadsUp Challenge 3 (aka HUC3)…should be fun…if you’re interested in participating and/or in reading the latest news, head over to the HeadsUpChallenge Blog

After footie training I fired up PokerStars to pick up where I left yesterday evening – at the micro SnGs. Two junk kickings later and I’m frustrated (8th place finish in NL HE, which was okay, my play sucked as did my cards – I pot it up with 99, my first decent hand of the night, one guy reraises me to All-In, I ponder and suspect that he got me beat, but the “maybe not, just suckout”-monkey on my shoulder tells me to call…so I do and he shows his black Aces…IGHN; bring in the PLO8 and everything is looking better, until we’re down to 6 handed, this is where the story of the super-charge-luckbox-deluxe begins. This one player keeps raising every pot, which is legitimate if there are three shortstacks and you’re holding a decent amount of chips, but you’re not entitled to win every friggin pot, especially not in PLO8 and even more so if you’re pushing all the time with crap like 67KQ. As soon as we’re down to 5 handed I think “okay, time to get something going”, so I’m waiting for a decent hand and then it’s time to counterpunch…he pushes again, one of the remaining shortstacks calls and is All-In and I hold AK23, so I push, he calls…sure enough there’s no low in sight and he wins with his crap hand (I can’t even remember the exact hand, but it was something like KJ57 and he hit his 7 to J straight…way to go fool)…so we’re both out and the others are in the money. I wish the other two good luck and watch as they bust within 4 hands to the super-uber-charge-magic-deluxe-luckbox…unbelievable! I’ve never seen such a rush before…)

That’s enough PS for the night and I head over to FullTilt and play over an hour at the .10/.25 NL tables…win some, lose some…big hands don’t pay off…weak hands don’t cost me much and I call it a night slightly up…so, all in all a truly uneventful evening at the tables…

What can I say. I’m pretty much speechless. Dropped around 10$ playing .10/.25 in the first session, not much I could do, believed my hands were good and they mostly weren’t. Too bad…sometimes TPTK just isn’t enough. All good there.

Then I start to play the second session tonight and there’s nothing going my way: either I miss the flop (most of the times), or I hit the nuts (flopped boat with a nice flush draw on board) and don’t get payed off despite slowplaying. Just as I’m about to wrap things up I look down at AsAc – alrighty, one more orbit won’t hurt (how wrong you can be about a sentence like this follows)…the orbit is one hand in length…buyin goes in the middle and I get kicked in the nuts…once again. It’s tough to see Aces cracked yet again 🙁

I guess in the long run variance, the old beetch, will smoothen such nut-kickings, but in a situation like this it’s hard to believe (and looking back at my not so complete statistics – I guess I should get something like PokerTracker – I’m now officially something like 3/10 to win AA)…

So that’s the session on FTP for tonight, time to stop the bleeding (21% of the bankroll over the last four days) as nothing good will come off additional play on FTP tonight…maybe it’s time to play some on PokerStars to chill out…

Sticking to things that you’re accustomed to isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it can be a real PITA. My day in poker is told fairly quickly today. Started off with a token satellite. Bad idea, once again my strong Ace ran into Aces within the first orbit – I should start to keep track of such things, what are the odds of your opponent holding pocket Aces when you’re holding one? Whatever the odds are, it seems that it’s happening more often than you think, especially when I’m holding a big ace.

After that quick bustout I decided to cool things down with the 17ET 1$ tourney, always nice to try some new things for a buck. A standard play broke my back though. I find pocket Aces in EP within the first orbit and pop it up to 3xBB, 2 callers, this could be fun! Flop comes down 9-7-3 rainbow. Checked to me, I bet the pot, one fold, one reraise to 2x pot…I think about it and if he flopped a set, so be it…I push…he calls…sure enough my gut feeling was right and he doesn’t hold a set…he’s holding TPSK (yup, that’s top pair shit kicker) – 96s in this case. To make a long story short: 6 on the turn and IGHN. Way to go, cracked Aces with 96…argh!

After that I was a little frustrated – to say the least. I wanted to spend some time (and little money) playing a decent amount of poker. As this plan didn’t work out I decided to play some ring games. Everything fine at the .05/.10 NL HE front and I quintuple up in no time. Which makes me think: Maybe it’s time to move up in limits again. This time with a better bankroll behind me (after all I more than tripled up my deposit since starting to play at Full Tilt less than a month ago). So I head to the .10/.25 NL HE games and play around a dozen orbits. I leave down a little, but not much. To change things up a little bit more I play some limit Hold’em (.25/.50) too, with not much success as the draw donkeys just keep outdrawing me.

So, why the post title “change of plan”? Because I decided that I’ll quit playing SnGs and MTTs for a while. I mean it’s all good and I did fairly well in MTTs and some SnGs, but overall I just can’t get through. So the new plan is to spend the extra poker time grinding it out at the cash tables – at the new limit of .10/.25 – until my bankroll is a little bit bigger. Then I’ll try to hit some of the bigger buyin MTTs and/or SnGs (10$+) and maybe I’ll even try to win my way into the WSOP then – the whole 100 WSOP seat tourney (July 16th) is just too tempting, especially if you could achieve satelliting into the thing.

I guess there are days when you should leave the different PokerSites rest for a day, especially when you’ve been fixing a server melt-down most of the day.

A lesson learned…played one SnG at Full Tilt…running good….sucked out on…then didn’t get it yet, so played another one at PokerStars…we’re down to four-handed…I battled myself to the chiplead…and I’m looking to win this thing (top 3 payed)…A10o on the button…enough to bully around a shortstack in the BB…sure enough he pushes…I call…he shows AA…what else is new? Two hands later I look down at a suited King and push again…huge stack calls…shows his Ace…ding Ace + OESD for me on the flop…no joy though…out in fourth…off to catch some sleep now…good luck to all of you in the WWdN and good fight, good night to Kat and Veneno (2nd match is tonight)…hopefully Waffles will post a recap 😉