Quick wrapup: it cost me more than the 10+1$ entry fee…I was a little short shortly before it began (a few cents) so I decided to do a quick hit and run at the cash tables…hit I did, outsucked I got and then I ran…to fire up neteller 😉 🙁

So anyway, started of the table with the host himself and went on a little run early on…then I went into the fold’em wasteland as I couldn’t catch a hand if my life depended on it…then I get my money in with Jacks vs wonka’s AK…A on the flop…down to slightly over 1500. Fold’em, fold’em fold’em…and then I look down at presto (55), not the best in the world, but hey…best I’ve seen in a while and the blinds are eating me alive…no joy though against A10…out in 16th (of 38).

My quick summary: fun at the tables, coinflips played: 2, coinflips lost: 2…go figure…for a live-blogging style post about the tourney check out Mook’s post…

Sick, sick sick sick. No, not the cards or that they don’t fall my way or anything, nope. I’m sick, sick as a dog. I can’t even remember the last time I was this sick, coughing, sneezing
and snoting like crazy – I guess it’s due to the fact that I don’t get sick very often (a cold every two years or something and that’s about it). So not too much poker played in the last few days.

Today was the first day I felt like I could get some hands in again though. Bad idea. You shouldn’t be playing if…

…you’re misreading the board on a consistent basis (yay I got two pair, wait, no I got one pair, d’oh)! This usually doesn’t happen to me, so I can attribute that + my impatience at the table to my cold + headache…so I’m not going to throw more money into the fish tank today. Hope I’ll be back in better shape, both physically and hence mentally, soonish.

…not much going my way today. Too bad, boohoo…I spare you the rant and leave you with my final hand of the night…

…or at least most of it. Haven’t had such a rollercoaster session before in my “poker career”. As I said in an earlier post I moved most of my play to WPX, at least for now, as I really want to see how much the juice was really impacting my limited bankroll. So the majority of all events took place there today. Sidenote: I’m taking extended notes on all activities on all poker rooms, but I just noticed today that my notes were incomplete, so it’s nearly impossible for me to calculate all the juice I payed on rooms other than WPX. So from this day forward the notes are going to be extended by some more columns. Why? Because I think that what keeps me down (apart from the fact that my roll is pretty limited) is the juice. Given the usual limits I play (as I don’t play cash games as much as I used to, I often play NL10 or NL25, which equals .05/.10 or .10/.25 blinds), so I gotta stay ahead of the rake and a “normal” small winning rate is not nearly enough to move up. So I’m really forward to the final rake stats once I’ve got the first month of play down at WPX. It could be quite a revelation and for now I’ll keep attacking the cash games a little more often as the SnG suckouts against all those donks keep putting me down (not money-wise, but mentally)…

The session included:

1. Stacking some random fools in two different cash games…no, your second pair weak ass kicker is no g00t…even if they were s000000ted 😉

2. Getting hit by suckout after suckout in the SnGs…unbelievable with what crap people are willing to call off their whole stack, without any need to do so either, but that’s besides the point. The suckouts included: runner runner flush, runner straight, two outer on the river, three outer on the river, counterfeit two pair on the river (worse kicker for me with my small pair of course), Ace baby rivering aces up against my big ace, the usual cold-deck flush vs flush, rivered boat over boat. Nice to have all those things in a span of maybe 90-100 hands. At least I won some coinflips, heehaaw!

3. Having to deal with some jerk-heads calling player names because they alarmed support – there were some hungarian dudes at the table chatting in hungarian – the player objected and they didn’t listen. This fool then went ahead and tried to put him and others (including me) on bullshit-infected-tilt, which didn’t work of course. So the good ol’ mute switch got flipped and it was all peace and quiet again…

After the up and down I spotted another triple shootout on Stars, so I jumped in…big mistake once again. I’m not going to play one again, ever. While the format of shorthanded tables is groovy and all, I just can’t catch a little momentum. Isn’t the old rule that you should only hit the flop 1 out of 3 times? Not in this ones…or I’m the problem, my 1 out of 3 coincides with at least one other player at all times, needless to say that if I flop TP he will def have his TP+kicker playing, etc. So FUCK YOU triple shootout!

Logged on to find a triple shootout to sunday’s million guaranteed played on shorthanded tables. Groovy, so you need to take down the first two tables and finish 3rd on the last table to get a ticket. Nice. I’m sitting at the first table with one aggressive player and 4 weak/tight players. Sure enough the borderline maniac hits card after card. So once we’re headsup I’m down 1.3k/7.7k. Another 35 minutes later I’m sitting in the commanding chiplead 6.6k to 2.4k. We donk around a little and I’m sitting a 6k, he has 3k. Then one of the “groovy” RiverStars ( 😉 ) hands comes off. I’m seeing the flop with QJo, a queen hits the board and I decide to set him all-in. He calls with A5o…what happens next? To quote Barry Greenstein’s book cover “Ace on the river…”. Nice, another friggin three outer headsup…hmmm…tasty. So he’s up 6k to 3k now. Damn it. Another nice hand later (Trip treys with a flush draw not enough as the flush hits the turn, but no four-flush for me). So I’m back to square one: 1.3k I push again with trips and a flush draw…he insta-calls…because he flopped a friggin straight…oops…and I’m out.

Summary:

1. I’m very satisfied with my play, especially headsup. I came back from a 1.3k/7.7k deficit with only one coinflip (AJs vs 55 which I won). So I grinded out quite some chips by playing an aggressive post-flop game.

2. I’m still annoyed about the one hand that cost me the chiplead and ultimately the table-win. It happens, but come on…why always on the friggin river.

3. I did something that I don’t normally do: I wished him good luck with the footnote that he would need it…it’s true obviously he had no post-flop skills whatsoever…but still I would normally keep that comment to myself…

4. This rant has been brought to you by the letter “g”…gimme a fuckin break!

First of all I would like to remind you all that the main event of this year’s WSOP has started. Some pros are already out, some others are still in contention.

My ups and downs of the WSOP so far:

Ups:

1. There are more and more “amateurs” (aka online players, online (semi-)professionals, …) every year. I don’t have the exact number, but it’s safe to assume that they’re making up the majority of this year’s events and it’s already more than likely that yet another amateur will rise to WSOP championship glory this year – any bets on the online poker room they qualified on (it seems that PokerStars is having the biggest number of runners so they might have their fourth WSOP ME Champion in a row, although I wouldn’t underestimate some other poker rooms’ incentives, which could be the extra motivation – as if anyone needed extra motivation with 10.000.000$ up for grabs along with the fame (although 10+10mil sounds even better – the FullTilt deal))?

2. At least some people are still trying to work their butts off to bring you interesting stories, updates and recounts as the “we sold exclusive rights, so not all goes”-approach allows. Quick reminder: Otis, Wil, Dr. Pauly, CJ and some other guys are delivering some awesome content over at the official pokerstarsblog. Dr. Pauly delivers some more of his wsop goodness, especially blogger updates over at the Tao of Poker – although the frequency of the “Last 5 Pros I Pissed Next to…” segments is steadily declining.

3. Phil Hellmuth won his record-tying 10th WSOP bracelet. While this might be a surprise, I gotta say that this is truely an up for me. He’s on of my favourite players: he’s not only one of the greatest when it comes to tournament poker, but I really enjoy watching his rants at the tables, especially when another donkey “who can’t even spell poker” sucks out on him…

4. Daniel Negreanu’s video blog…I really enjoy watching his updates.

5. Some video updates from cardplayer were quite interesting. The regular coverage mostly sucks though, so no link love for you.

Downs:

1. Coverage. While some bloggers are trying their best (see above), their efforts are still undermined by the official and exclusive coverage (chipcounts, etc). Sorry, but an update here and there with numerous errors (e.g. hand history posted smack in the middle of an update shows that someone won with a boat, yet the text says he won with a flush, etc etc etc) and delays is just not good enough (although the situation has slightly improved since the start of the WSOP).

2. TV coverage. While this is the “biggest event in sports”, there’s no coverage to be found anywhere around here. Some stations are having a poker summer and showing the WSOP – the bad thing though: that’s the WSOP 2004, yawn.

…but enough of the WSOP and off to my own playing. I decided to consolidate my bankroll by transferring money from numerous poker rooms to a select few poker rooms. It’s just not good to spread out the roll over many rooms. So I pulled the plug on mansion (too little traffic atm, I might had back sometime later) and UltimateBet (haven’t played there in ages anyway). Before I fire up the roll at Stars though I wanted to give a “newer” room a shot. WorldPokerExchange is the only poker room offering rake free play. It would be better to call it 100% rakeback as you pay the normal rake and then you get it all back after some days (once a week as far as I can tell). While traffic isn’t great (the times I played so far the numbers were something like 1-2k players), the prospect of saving all the juice is groovy though. After going through my logs of different rooms I found that what many already said is true: it’s hard to stay ahead of the rake at the low limits, especially when you count normal variance. So I’m going to play most of my SnGs on WPX for a while and see what that adds up to – I’m sure it’s going to be quite a lot as the usual rake per SnG is a flat fee of 10% which adds up, especially if you’re playing SnGs almost every day.

I mentioned firing up the roll at Stars earlier on. This is due to the fact that I set a new goal for myself. I want to take the game to the next level and out of the online poker realm. While the home game series I play in is getting better and better as we bought casino style poker tables and just started a championship race which will determine the best player over the course of a year, I would love to get in some real (casino) tournament live action. So I’ll try to qualify for one of the EPT events! I don’t know which one it’ll be, but my current favourites are London and Baden, Austria. I don’t know which qualifying route to take yet as there seems to be a lack of double shootouts, which would have been my preferred option. I’ll keep you posted on the status of my qualification…

Wow. Now that was the blogger tourney with the biggest price-pool that I can remember. 1450$ in total, after 62 buys, 160 rebuys and 48 add-ons (including the 100$ addon from Mike’s site). Really nice to see that the winner could take home 435$ 🙂

It wasn’t me though, but I’m still satisfied. It was fun, although it was crazy early on. That’s what sets rebuy tourneys apart from most other tourneys. Players are not worried about pushing their (more marginal) hands early on as there’s always the chance to rebuy until the first break. So basically the first hour is really different from any other first hour of the regular brogger tourneys (WWdN, Mookie, etc). I was able to push my 1010 into Wes‘ QQ early on, but then, after my first and last rebuy and some nice pots, the hand happened: I look down at KK and they hold up against Wes and another opponents hand and I’m looking at a monster-stack of over 15k in chips (starting chips 1500). So I was in the chiplead after 35 minutes and should remain in the spot at the sun for another hour:

After that I went into the maintain stack modus. It was easy enough to steal some blinds here and there as we approached the first break and the end of the rebuy period. Most players took the addon (2k chips for 5$), I passed as I was still in the chiplead.

Then the card-deadness set in and I thought it’d be a long night, then I look down at the hammer in the SB…folded around and I raise to 800 (4xBB)…DuggleBogey in the BB only has a stack of slightly over 2k left, so he pushes…now I can’t laydown the hammer to a 1.2k raise, so I call…Duggle shows 66…sure enough the hammer does me good with a 7 on the flop and the not necessary 2 on the river. I bust Duggle and take a note to self: “Hammer g00t!” 😉

After that it’s more card-deadness…I swear I’ve never seen so many 47o, 48o, 36o in my life. In what feels like an eternity (I didn’t really have a look at the clock, so it could have been only 20 minutes) I didn’t see a single face card, so it was fold fold fold, even when in the BB as people starting to turn on the heat. Then I finally look down at a real hand again QQ…I raise the usual 3BB, one caller…flop comes down xKx with two hearts. I check, he bets…I call. Turn is another heart. I check he checks behind me. River is another heart. Now I don’t have a heart and I’m almost certain I’m done…I check, he checks. He shows flush King high (he held 44 with the 4h). Yuck. This hand got me thinking: First mistake – not betting at least half the pot. If I make a half-pot sized bet here he can either fold, call or reraise. If he’s reraising I can still think about the pot-odds and if I believe his King in the first place. So a informational bet would have been in order here. Second mistake – bet the turn, even if he had a King chances are good he doesn’t have a heart at all or at least a small or two small ones. Third mistake – bet the river (if it would have come down to this), he had “only” 5k left, which would have put a dent into my stack, but I’m not sure he would have called down in the first place with his measly 44…so this one was clearly my fault.

After that hand I’m down to 10k with the average stack size approaching 15k. Damn! A few hands later a short-stack pushes and it’s up to me in the BB to decide: fold or call the additional 2.5k with Q9. Now I’m the first to admit that this is a loose call, but Q9 was the best hand (apart from the QQ) I was holding in ages and the fact that a short-stack can push with such a huge range of hands made me call. He shows K10, K on the flop and that’s that. Now I’m stuck with roughly 7.5k. The biggest stack at the time was smokkee approaching 50k. Now I’m not on tilt or anything, but my card-deadness, the fact that it’s after 5am and the fact that I want some chips back lead me to play looser and looser. A few preflop raises called just to fold on the flop or turn quickly lead me to an all-time low and the back of the pack with just 2.6k left. So I basically have to push with the next semi-decent hand. I’m UTG and look down at A5, not really a decent hand, but hell, next hand I’m the BB which would cost me 800…so there’s no other option. One caller…his K10o beats my ass as yet another King hits the flop. Out in 22nd place 🙁

Ups:

1. Playing at a tough, but really entertaining starting table including our table rebuy-kings shadowtwin and Wes…

2. Holding on to the chiplead for quite a long time…

3. Playing with a lot of other broggers, including “The Blogfather Himself“, Wes, Bobby Bracelet and all the others…

4. Actually having a great time along with the chance to win some nice dough…

Downs:

1. Card-deadness, especially bad when playing with some of the most aggressive players you’ll find…

2. Some bad plays I made in the end…time to get down to the analysis on some of the hands…

Last but not least: Thanks again to Jordan and TripJax for setting up yet another classic brogger tourney!

Almost forgot, next week it’s time for yet another DADI. It’s almost guaranteed to be a donkeylicious event, after all it’s the first rebuy ever! There’s added prices and what not again, so check the following pic for all the details.

…and you can always check out the posts of Jax or Jordan or the official DADI blog to get the lowdown…

What many fellow bloggers and players in general already told over and over again is really true: (some/most/a lot of) players at PartyPoker are weak. So I hit the SnGs the last few days, although I mostly dislike the costs. What am I talking about? I mean at the limits I play (usually 5$ SnGs) Party is by far the greediest poker room I’ve seen in my life – 5$ for the SnG, 1$ fee (all other rooms I play charge .50$). So that sucks, but it’s not all that bad if you’re running good. I played 4 SnGs (3 shorthanded, 1 full) and cashed in 3 (would have been 4, but we’ll leave the bubble suckout of J7o vs my QQ out of here)…so I’m up with one win and two second place finishes. All good.

Tonight I decided to get some cash into Stars again and play the WWdN. 52 players showed up and I busted out in 44th. Really ugly if all you see is 23o, 24o, etc all the time. Then you see some semi-decent hands and bust out quickly. I hold AcJc and get the blinds, in the very next hand I hold AsJs and get reraised…what to do…roughly 900chips, blinds will reach 50/100 when they hit me…so nothing much left to do, although I could have let that one go, but no…I decide that this is a good time to call the push…sure enough opponent shows AKo…K hits the flop, not that she needed it…but better out quickly than to run low on chips again after x hours of poker. So I’m not all that bitter. Off to catch some sleep now…cya all at the WWdN next week…

So, there’s a new member of team PokerStars – is it just me or are there more and more members as we’re approaching the WSOP main event? Who is it? None other than, one of my favourite players, Barry Greenstein – the “robin hood of poker”. Cool.
In other PokerStars news: they updated their software which now features the two most noteworthy features: themes and resizable tables (see pics below, click for real size)…