What else can I say, two things happened tonight….

1. I got kicked in the junk so hard, my sack is going to hurt for another week I guess. It was pretty unreal, I made good call/bet/raise and read after another and got fucked on all of them. Sure..3 outs is plenty…or not…tonight it was more than enough to kick me in the junk.

2. I hit my first (real) royal flush ever. It only took me nearly 3 years of insane online play to hit one…

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Seat 1: il Priore ($2470)
Seat 2: spartana82 ($2160) –
Seat 3: Ingoal ($1760) –
Seat 4: n0valogick ($1260) –
Seat 5: gmu 6 ($1125)
Seat 6: knowjack ($225)

PRE-FLOP:

Ingoal posts small blind $15
n0valogick posts BIG blind $30
Dealt To: Ingoal

CALL gmu 6 ($30)
FOLD knowjack
CALL il Priore ($30)
CALL spartana82 ($30)
CALL Ingoal ($15)
CHECK n0valogick

FLOP:

Pot: $150
   

CHECK Ingoal
CHECK n0valogick
CHECK gmu 6
CHECK il Priore
CHECK spartana82

TURN:

Pot: $150
     

CHECK Ingoal
CHECK n0valogick
BET gmu 6 ($240)
FOLD il Priore
FOLD spartana82
CALL Ingoal ($240)
FOLD n0valogick

RIVER:

Pot: $630
      

BET Ingoal ($150)
CALL gmu 6 ($150)

SHOWDOWN:
Ingoal:

MUCK gmu 6

Ingoal collected $930 from main pot

SUMMARY:
Total pot: $930 Rake: $0

Final Board:
     

Seat 1: il Priore folded on the Turn – Net Gain/Loss: ($-30)
Seat 2: spartana82 button folded on the Turn – Net Gain/Loss: ($-30)
Seat 3: Ingoal small blind showed [4d Kd] and won 930 with a Royal Flush – Net Gain/Loss: ($510)
Seat 4: n0valogick big blind folded on the Turn – Net Gain/Loss: ($-30)
Seat 5: gmu 6 mucked [Th Tc] – Net Gain/Loss: ($-420)
  
Seat 6: knowjack folded before Flop didnt bet – Net Gain/Loss: ($0)

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First session: this morning, some NL cash and 8 NL HE SnGs…mostly good…3x1st 2x2nd in the SnGs….slightly up in the cash game.

Second session: this evening, 8 NL HE SnGs…1x 2nd…that’s it…the other time I totally lost it. I basically ran into more coolers than I’ve ever seen. Sure, there was the one or other bad play in between, but every time a big pot came down, it was pretty much a hand that automatically plays itself. QQ vs KK…JJ vs AA…along with some coinflips of which I won the grand sum of 0.00000000000. Pretty sick. Especially sick was one game where a donk ran so hard over the table that it was a done deal within 15 hands. He sucked out on two fellas in the first hand. Down to for. I was next along with another player…I had the best hand going in…He busted us both….headsup took two hands before he sucked out and won. I’ve never ever seen such a SnG before where a player ships it into the middle behind on every god damn hand and wins em all…he made CJ look like the unluckiest player alive…

Random bubble hand (the usual in the second session):

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Seat 3: 11p0wner ($1965) –
Seat 5: xamou ($3615) –
Seat 6: Ingoal ($3420) –

PRE-FLOP:

xamou posts small blind $50
Ingoal posts BIG blind $100
Dealt To: Ingoal

FOLD 11p0wner
CALL xamou ($50)
CHECK Ingoal

FLOP:

Pot: $200
   

CHECK xamou
CHECK Ingoal

TURN:

Pot: $200
     

BET xamou ($100)
RAISE Ingoal ($200)
RAISE xamou ($300)
RAISE Ingoal ($400)
RAISE xamou ($3515)
CALL Ingoal ($2920)

RIVER:

Pot: $7635
      

SHOWDOWN:
xamou:

Ingoal:

xamou collected $6840 from main pot

SUMMARY:
Total pot: $6840 Rake: $0

Final Board:
     

Seat 3: 11p0wner button folded before Flop didnt bet – Net Gain/Loss: ($0)
Seat 5: xamou small blind showed [Ac Kd] and won 6840 with three of a kind, Aces – Net Gain/Loss: ($3520)
  
Seat 6: Ingoal big blind showed [As 5s] and lost with three of a kind, Aces – Net Gain/Loss: ($-3420)

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This whole SnG grinding thing is really starting to get me. It’s not so much the hours, the dedication or the frustration, it’s the realisation that you can only be profitable if you get a few less junk-kicks than you’re willing to hand out, that and the fact that the rake (“tourney fee”) keeps eating you up when you try to grind it out in the low-end of the pond.

I know that everyone is about to be fed up with the constant whining and complaining – after all all sorts of beats are part of the game – yeah, well, easy to acknowledge and to deal with it if you’re sitting on a good roll. I’m not, so it’s tougher, maybe even tougher than you are realizing. It really eats me up that I can win and win and then lose and lose and win and win and that it’s a slow but steady downwards spiral, because I can’t win enough to constantly beat the rake. There I said it, I just can’t.

Why? Because no matter how good I run, someone else seems to be running better and guess what, the house doesn’t care, all it’s digital representation says is “kaaaaaaaa-chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing, ty for your money, come again”. For those who still care, the rake at the current donk-level I’m playing is 8,3%.

In a good night I can easily crush that mark and then some. In an average night (like tonight) I might win (in a general game-related sense) but still break even or finish a small loser (due to the rake)…and don’t even get me started on a bad night. So I’m starting to think about my “strategy” in general and the future I have in online poker (if any). Maybe I should sit down and have a look at my extensive stats (both automatically logged via TourneyManager and manually kept in form of my own “results sheets”) and take it from there, as what I’m currently doing is obviously not working (side note: maybe it’s really the biggest losing streak I’ve had so far and it’s a mixture of down-swing, bad luck and bad decisions; maybe it’s just that I can’t beat the game; maybe it’s ???; to give you an idea about my downswing I can tell you this much: within the last 9 months I slowly lost 77% of my roll)…

To quote the great old green fella: “Meditate on this I will”…until then enjoy the (not so random pic dump), enjoy the kickass WSOP coverage of DrPauly and PokerNews and enjoy life…I sure will…away from online poker…cya on the other side…nn and gl at the tables…

…some would say seeing some of the brutal beats I took in the four SnGs I played after the fucktastic FullTilt-session. Others would say: hey, you got lucky first. Why? Because I usually had a monster-stack when the bad luck hit me and we all know it’s much easier to take if you’re not out or crippled when you take a junk kick. Maybe the latter is true, I got lucky in a sense that ppl were willing to donk-off their stack with second pair or some similar bs. The only true cooler hand was me raising with KK on the button after someone in MP had raised preflop. He flat-calls. We see a flop of KTT…I lead out small, he pushes…sure enough he has a T and wow…no one outer this time. But honestly, should I consider myself ultra-lucky there because my opponent thought he was Doyle Brunson (he raised and flat-called my reraise preflop with T2o)? I don’t think so. Or what do you think he put me on? Exactly…nothing at all…and even if he did…he was probably rubbing his hands because some hands in my range there (AKs/AKo/KQs/KQo/etc) would have been in dire-straits against his hand after he flopped lucky trips. Too bad I had exactly the hand he didn’t want to see.

Enough rambling though…I’m outta here with a smile….four SnGs…2 Ws…1 second…good enough to forget about the earlier FTP-incident…ty Stars for kicking my in the junk, but x times softer than FTP. I’m out…gl at the tables….

It really was a quick session…wanted to play earlier and then longer, but a quick idea got into the way. First of all I bought a new digital camera today (nothing fancy), but I thought about starting a photoblog…which has been on my “list” for quite a while, so I set that up…which took a little longer than expected…turns out debug mode helps and the problem (image magick not accessible by webuser) was solved rather quickly. But…it kept me from playing earlier…so just a quick session. The awesome part of it was that I played strictly against fish and I’m not guessing here…sharkscope approved fish…lol…and they were playing just like their icon suggests…fishy…fishy…fishy…won 3 out of 5…should have been 4..but two outs are g00t…oh well…

While playing I started to rail the Bodonkey ToC…the thing that really sucks is that the railbirds can’t chat at bodonkey…pretty fugly if you ask me. I mean, it’s a general policy and while it has it’s upsides in general (no beggers, hustlers and annoy-o-bots), but in a private tourney? Come on…at least the players who played in the bodonkey should be able to chat – on another note: I didn’t expect bodog to change this tonight, after all it was like that the whole season…you played in the bodonkey at a table and couldn’t even chat with the other tables. FUGLY, I’m telling you. I gotta get a hold of smokkee and ask him if he can pass on some suggestions to Nadia or whoever at bodog…

I’m off to the laptop to rail a little more…ToC is really slow so far. Columbo is Gigli…first break coming up…17/18 players left…

No, not Greg Mueller, but Full Blown Tilt. It really hurts when you’re making some questionable (read: bad) decisions early on in session. It hurts even more when you get your shit together and get kicked in the nuts repeatedly. Got into some nasty hands, basically cooler hands, no big deal, but the hands that really ticked me off were the dominating hands (AK no match for K5, AK no match for AQ, etc etc)…so sick when you get the money in good and your opponent has the whole three outs…and hits it EVERY GOD DAMN TIME.

I’m outta here before I bust myself…

Played some SnG-donkfests while waiting for the bodonkey to start – nothing unusual here, but I doubt that many of you would even consider to kill time until 3am…I do…not as regularly as usual, but for tonight’s bodonkey I’m doing it, again…

So I played some donkfests on Stars…and all in all I’m pretty satisfied with my play. I cost myself some money in one of the five I played. I look down at ATo on the button…I’m the chipleader, the SB is short, the BB is second in chips (I got him covered by 1k), UTG is short. As it’s a six-max SnG, we’re not on the bubble yet, but with blinds starting to rise again shortly (in this hand they’re at 75/150 and both shorties have less than 10BB) it’s crunch time. UTG folds, I standard-pop it to 450, SB folds, BB raises to 1450 which is around a third of my stack. I ponder, not very long and push. Hmm…BB obv instacalls with AKs…good timing…no help and he’s got a monster-stack now and the other two along with me are short. Next hand I open-push UTG with A6o…BB calls with QQ and I’m busto. Quick rewind. From first to out in fourth in two hands. Necessary? Not really, I mean yeah, the BB in the first hand could be making a move, but why should he with two shorties at the table? And even if so, I can wait for a better spot. So I blame myself for that one.

The other matches were pretty standard. I bubbled in one, where I shouldn’t have…money goes in on the flop KT vs K8 on a K-high board…he turns the three-outer and I’m busto. At least I was able to win one and finish second in another one, so slightly up for the night and not really in the mood to continue the “killing time theme”…so enjoy the random pic dump…and I’ll be back later after the bodonkey, let’s see how I can get unlucky this week 😉

Despite the title I really played well today. The title is referring to some players I faced tonight and especially to their play on the bubble or slightly after it. Pretty sick how stupid some people are. The last SnG I played was especially atrocious near the end. First of all we’re down to four, bubble time. I’m the massive chipleader, one player is sitting pretty (half my stack), one is short and one is ultra short. Given that setup we can all cruise till the ultra-shorty is in the BB, which will be in 2 hands. The second in chips player has another idea. He calls my preflop raise OOP. Sure, I could be running over the table…BUT I’ve shown nothing but the nuts so far at this table and given the shorty situation, oh well…let’s see how the hand goes. By the way, I have KK here. Flop comes down Queen-high and he shoves after a few seconds of delibertion. I insta-call. Not surprisingly he shows AQo and is drawing slim. Nothing hits on the turn and river and he’s busto as the bubble-boy.

Due to the bustout the ultra-shorty is the BB in the very next hand. The blinds are 200/400, he’s got 568 chips. Button raises to 1200. I fold my SB. Now comes the next atrocious play which is even worse than the play before. BB folds! I’m still rolling on the floor laughing at that play. I mean come on ppl, how stupid can you be. You just squeezed into the money, you’ve got 568…400 in the BB + 50 ante which leaves you with 138 chips if you fold and you do just that? You gotta be kidding me. Next hand he’s auto-all-in and busts. Well done sir. A few hands later I bust the other guy and I win the thing.

Apart from that the play of the seven earlier SnGs is mostly a blurr. All I know is that people don’t understand turbo strategy, they don’t care, they don’t know better or they got a ultra-secret gameplan that I can’t understand. They play tighter than a nuns punany. So if you’ve got a table with such tight-cakes there are some outcomes which will see early bustouts (e.g. coolers) or you play 7-9 handed for a long time when the SnG is quickly turning into a crapshoot. Fine with me as I can steal and steal in the middle part of the SnG (after the first 2-3 levels). But sooner or later you will have to find a hand. It was pretty funny what kind of hands I found once it was time to push it. A real gem is in the second screenshot below. No doubt I’m a massive dog here, 99 vs KK, so this is no bad beat in the classic sense, it’s funny as hell though. First I’m bummed, then I’m bummed even more when we both flop sets. Once he turns the K for quads, I’m already giggling and saying to myself: wait, the case 9 should fall on the river just to rub it in…and sure enough it hits and I can’t stop laughing 😆

Abyway, to make a long story short, I still like my game these days, it seems to be spot on…the results show it mostly too…although I still feel I should have (lost less when I had a losing session/won a little bit instead and) won more when I had a winning session…but that’s just the way it goes, can’t help it if some of the crucial hands don’t go your way, it’s just like that in SnGs/MTTs…and so I pat myself on the back again for booking a nice winning session…enjoy the short pic dump, especially the second screenshot already mentioned…and i’m outta here…oh and before I forget it: I don’t know if I’ll play the Bodonkey in half an hour, I’m pretty knackered already…but if you like overlays, you should play!

It sucks donkey balls to get 3rd place money (or outright bubble), if you’re “supposed” to win. Sigh. I don’t know what it is, but the “crucial hands” just don’t fall my way these days…pretty frustrating and annoying, but what can you do – well, first of all you can let the steam out, hello, what do you think I’m doing here, lol.

The play is mostly a blurr, but I know that I pushed in as the underdog the total number of 3 times tonight (two of which were pretty automatic as I was short). The other times I usually had my opponents down to one overcard, two outs or some similar ungroovy situation – for them. Didn’t help me much. Yes, the best hand held up every now and then…but in the end, when it mattered I got annihilated I mean when it’s a flip, let’s say JJ vs AK…my opponent doesn’t flop an ace…he flops the boat leaving me drawing dead to running jacks. When I have Jacks against Q9…sure enough three outs is enough…etc etc…really crushered…big time. Oh well, enough ranting…I’ll book the small loss and give myself a pat on the back for not playing any longer letting the steam out where it belongs…here on the blog and not at the tables spewing chips…

Enjoy the (not so) random pic dump and gl at the tables…

Ever had that feeling that you played good, made some money, but you’re still feeling slightly sick about the session? That is the case for me tonight. I played “my heart out” but it just wasn’t meant to be. When I should have made the money I didn’t. When I made the money I was “supposed to win”, but didn’t (with one exception). Pretty fugly feeling, I don’t know…I guess I should look at the bright side and be happy with the winning session, but I’m really not. Strange…but what can you do if it’s not happening.

There were basically no brutal beats, just a lot of 60/40s and some automatic hands where you hold a monster (AA) against a shorty and he’s got no choice but to call…sure enough he kicks you in the nuts royally…but oh well…all in all it was 2-6 (good beats to “bad beats” and I use that term lightly here)…

Anyway…I’m outta here…enjoy the random pic dump…oh and before I forget it, if you’re an avid HU player (or just like to donk it up head-to-head) head on over to George’s post and read the details about the new FullTilt HU donkey blowout…