Saturday, November 25, 2006

Nothing Much To Report

It has been quite quiet for me over the last few weeks. I have been short of time to play but have been playing lots of $100 NL 6-max in an attempt to hit goldstar for the first time. I'm pretty close with 5 days left so hopefully I'll scrape through.

I'm starting to get excited about the APAT even next weekend now. I can't wait to play some real poker even though I haven't played many tournies recently. Hopefully I should get some practice in this week before I fly up to Newcastle on Saturday.

It's starting to look like my Oz trip in March may not be happening. It was almost a certainty a couple of month ago but now it's about 50/50. The good news is that if I don't end up going I'll have enough holiday time left to go to Vegas in the summer! I honestly can't decide which one I want more...

Friday, November 10, 2006

APAT

At the weekend I managed to get myself a seat at the UK Amateur Poker Championship which is being held at The Aspers Casino in Newcastle at the start of December. It’s Part of the APAT (Amateur Poker Association & Tour) which has already staged one event so far this year in Birmingham.

The idea behind the APAT is to give amateur players the chance to play a deep stacked live tournament for a nominal buy-in, and bring players away from the shot stack rebuy tournaments which are typically offered in casinos. Most of the live games I play follow a structure of a 800 starting chip rebuy tournament where the blinds reach 200/400 after an hour and a half. It’s a brutal structure and the rebuy period is typically (for me anyway) an expensive one.

Other than that it’s just excuse to go on a night out in Newcastle, which I hear can be a gloriously messy affair, and meet a few players from ITH who are also attending the event. There is a WSOP package up for grabs for the two day event. A field of just 210 runners should make for some interesting and creative play and if I get knocked out early I have a few people to rail.

I’m really looking forward to it now. I hope this will be the first of many trips to live events outside of my normal haunts. Reports from the previous event in Birmingham suggest that there aren’t really any bad players and that the field is generally quite good. Hopefully it will give me some valuable experience of more structured live play, which will help if I ever decide to frequent the WSOP or any EPT events.

Monday, November 06, 2006

Sometimes 90% isn’t enough

Ironic after my odds based last post but unfortunately if you’re a 90% favourite to win a hand on the turn, it means you have to loose 10% of the time. I just wish it didn’t happen to me in the Million last night. We were down to just over 1500 runners from a stunning 6.6k entrants. If I had won the hand I would have had an above average stack and cruising towards the money. Who knows what could have been.

It’s fair enough to say that the odds will even out over time, but that situation might not present itself enough for it to ever even out. In a ring game, if you get stacked with AA you know that over the long term the money will be coming back to you. However if you loose HU on the FT of the Million for the difference between 180k and 95k it’s unlikely that even a very large amount of poker will ever make that back.

Also from tonight I’m thinking maybe I need to mix it up a little more and get myself to a stack where I can take a hit or two, leading to a more aggressive ‘bust early or go deep’ strategy. I do tend to play pretty much ABC tournament poker with a few other bits thrown in every now and again. I think the change would probably make me think a bit more about my game, so I’m going to look over my hand history from tonight and see where I could have mixed it up a little more and see if I can start to apply that elsewhere.