Only managed to squeeze in a little poker yesterday (1 SnG – 3rd place finish) and today (3 SnGs – 1 bubble, 2 earlier exits). Sometimes you’re in the junk-kicking-zone (yesterday) and sometimes you’re in the getting-a-junk-kicking-zone (today). Played the first two table SnG and really played well. When we were down to 5 handed (4 ITM), I just couldn’t catch a break and had to take a shot, missed, no biggie. Then I watch some movies and relax a little, come back, fire up PokerStars and play two SnGs at the same time. Everything looking good until I catch three hands in a row:

1. KK in LP…one early raiser, one caller behind him…then folded around to me…Push…orginal raiser calls…shows AJ….flop AJx and IGHN
2. Parallel to the first hand I catch 77, medium sized stack on the button raises…folded around to me…I ponder and decide to give it a go…push…he calls…shows Q10o (?!)…flop J78…turn the case 9, river 5…
   
3. In the very next hand I look down at As6s…I’m now short stacked and decide to push on the button as there was only one limper so far…he calls…shows KcKh..yuck…flop Ac Jd Jc 🙂 …turn Qc…oh oh….river 6c…and IGHN…
   

Enough Stars for today…let’s see if I can get some revenge on the other rooms…

No luckboxing for me though…early on I took down a nice pot when my pocket queens hit trips on the flop. Shortly thereafter I standard raise from EP with AQo…smokkee in LP pushes…now I’m faced with a decision – either fold…or give it my best shot, I put him on something like Ax/A10/AJ or a small to middle pair…so I call and he shows 1010…fair enough…Q on the flop…but there’s a 9 too…J on the turn….hmm…what might the river bring? Yup, a King giving him the nut straight…dang…and I’m down to 720 in chips…

A few hands later I pick up AKo in EP…I push….smokkee is nice enough to call me with AJo…K on the flop…a little scary that he’s holding the Ac…but this time there are “only” three clubs on the board and I’m back in the game. Then I’m literally card dead…and when I’m down to around 800 chips again I reraise All-In after a standard raise of the current chipleader (dsheep)…he calls…my QhJh vs his K10o…King on the flop and I’m out in 38 of 66 🙁
Ah well…had my fun, had the chance to chat with the guys again, so I’m not too frustrated…

Sidenotes:

1. Aces seen at my table – 3 times
2. Aces cracked by smaller pocket pair – 2 times
3. Aces holding up vs KK – 1 time; in this very hand I should have played my 35o, lol, flop A35…turn blank…river 3…man, that would have been the bad beat of the year 😉
4. Times Wil busted with KK – in this tourney: once; recently: 3 times if I’m not mistaken…ouch….

First of all let’s do the pimpin: Just in time, too…tomorrow evening/night is the next DADI event…DADI 6, Pot Limit Hold’em…if you’ve got the time, play it! I’m not sure if I’m going to make it, the starting time of 10pm (= 4am over here) is a little bit late…so don’t be disappointed if I’m not there…all useful infos in the pic below…

After that is out of the way let me make a request:

I’m an avid reader of many, many poker blogs and usually I’m an avid commenter, too. But some blogs don’t allow me, or many others for that matter, to comment at all. Why? Because the comments are only open to users of the blogger platform. Well, some of you might say that I should just get a blogger account and that’s that – I need to disagree here as I don’t want to setup a empty/fake site just for commenting on other blogs, especially as people won’t find anything useful there and I like to have a link to my site if I comment somewhere (I don’t care about PR or whatever on this site, it’s my passion and not a business site, so what it comes down to is – if I comment, ppl should be able to find my site.)

Why do I even care? Because it sucks that you’re reading good stuff about strategy, disappointments and big achievements (i.e. Hoyazo aka HammerPlayer winning the 40k on Party, etc) and you can’t give your 0.02$ or congratulate the person…so please, do as Chuck says:

Not sure if Chuck is talking about you? Some blogs immediately come to mind and there are many that I’m too lazy to single out atm, you know who you are…

…some blogs excluding non-blogger broggers:

• Hammer Player’s Poker Blog (Hoyazo)
• Garthmeister J’s Discofinery (Garthmeister)
• Pot Commited (change100)
• 100-2-Infinity (TraumaPoker)
• Weak Player (WeakPlayer)
• HellaHoldem (Shelly)
• Smokkee (Smokkee)
• The Randomness of Hoff (iamhoff)
• goberude (DuggleBogey)
• etc etc

Edit: Alright, I give up – if you find new comments on your blog which originate from ingoalscommentaccount.blogspot.com you know who they’re from 😉

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… 😉

Played some SnGs today, as I’m still in the “pad your roll”-mode. Same game (NL Hold’em), similar format (two table SnG at Stars, one table SnG at Full Tilt), totally different results:

PokerStars SnGs: 2 early exits, junk kicking included 🙁
FullTilt: 2x 1st, 2x 3rd, no major junk kicking included 🙂

Tonight I set a new record for eliminating opponents in a SnG:

I personally eliminated 7 (of the 17) opponents, four of them at the final table (including a nice hammer vs A4 win, when the flop came down 7-4-3, he didn’t improve on the turn and river either). Good news: I’m the monster chipleader when I eliminate the player in 4th place. Bad news: I catch some decent cards, but I can’t win one friggin hand against the luckbox on my left, so I double him up three times and I’m out in 3rd…yikes…

Title says it all: for all those who doubt the power of the hammer, even the s00ted one…

…and yes, this was my only suckout of the SnG: I was outchipped roughly 1:3 and what are you supposed to do with a s00ted hammer? Let it ride! It worked too as you’ve seen in the pic above. I took down the win in the next two hands (A8s vs KJ, Q4 vs J2)…and no, I don’t feel guilty about the suckout…it brought the suckout/getting sucked out on counter to 1:1 (I lost AQ vs A8 earlier at the final table)… 🙂

Side note: That’s 3 wins in the last 3 SnGs…and every time I came back from a chip deficit (1:3, 1:6, 1:3)…and believe it or not…this was really the only suckout in such a situation…making the right decisions and see them pay off (aka running good) rocks 😉

…:

1. Every hand you make is only second best…
2. Noone is giving you credit for your good hands, ultimately drawing out time and time again with incorrect odds
3. Examples for 1.: 79 in the BB flop 6-8-10 rainbow, turn x, river 10…opponent’s hand? 10-8o; K9 in the BB…flop 10-J-Q rainbow, turn and river x…opponent’s hand? AKo
4. Examples for 2.: 1010 EP, 5BB raise…one caller…flop 910x all spades, huge bet, call, turn x, huge bet, call, river x of spades…All-In…call…sure enough the dude is holding As9c – didn’t my huge bets make it clear that I had a hand…were the odds correct to draw to a runner flush? Probably not…; 88 in LP, 4BB raise, flop 8xx…you know the drill…turn: x…you know the drill…river Q…you know the drill….opponent’s hand? QQ…sigh…

But what can you do and now that this is off my chest I can breathe again. Why did I continue to play all that time? Because I was hoping to get lucky in the 5 billionth hand stuff on Stars…didn’t work out…no joy in getting dough off the table, no joy getting dough in the 5 billionth hand giveaway…ah well…at least I finally had a dqb-moment again..first in a very long time

…and I closed out the session with a SnG win at UltimateBet…so there’s that silver lining on the horizon again 🙂

Started my session with a turbo two table SnG tonight…we’re down to the final 5 and I’m on the button…I throw in my remaining chips with KK. Two callers. Nothing better than to look at a set of Kings on the flop and the prospect of a quick triple-up…then nothing more horrible than to look at runner runner goodness….at least it was only on the bubble….I saw it coming too, after the 6 hit on the turn I was hoping not to see a 9…but sure enough…the moment that 9 came down I knew I was dead meat…damn! And that’s the immediate end of my session tonight, can’t stand another junk kicking…my titanium cup is in repair so it would just hurt too much 😉 …thank you sir…very well played…NOT.