Friday, May 30, 2008

Biggest Cash Pot

Last week I was having a discssion about poker with a friend of mine who mainly plays live. He got me thinking about live poker again, and since I hadn't played for a while and had a 4 day weekend I thought I'd make an effort to play live.

It's fairly obvious from the title, but it went really well. I played two nights running and on the first night I made the final table of a £10 rebuy with 120 runners. I busted in 5th when I shoved 2 pair on the flop vrs a flush draw for half the chips in play and he hit.

I played a great £5/£5 NL cash game after I busted, but it broke up about 30 mins after I started playing as it was already pretty late.

I decided to play the game again the following night. It's a fair bit above my normal $400 NL games online (pretty much $1k NL) but I feel comfortable in the game, and it's not like I'm playing any significant volume.

It was an interesting mix of players, two or three players who knew each other who were quite old and nitty, two younger guys who were loose and aggressive, and the rest were either really straight forward or really awful.

Unfortunately it's not a particularly interesting hand, basically I raised preflop with AK, two callers, JT3 rainbow board, I raise, a guy in MP folds and the other calls. Turn is an offsuit Q so I bet out again, villain re-raises quite big and I flat. The river is a blank and I bet out 1/2 te pot or so and he jams.

I half expected him to have the same hand, but he flipped JT for flopped two pair and I raked in a pot of about £1200, which is roughly $2400. Not much happened in the game after that, but it was petty sweet to cash out my chips rather than just logging off after a win like that.

Not played much online this week, but have run quite deep in the $50k on Stars a couple of times. I made a pretty bad play in one with about 40 left and a decent stack, which I was pissed off about, but I played again the next night and made a similary decent run. I was runnning sooo bad in the $50k, so hopefully this will be the start of me running a little deeper in it from now on. It's pretty much the only decent tournie that starts at a good time for me, so I play it pretty much every time I'm online in the evenings.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Cash Going Well

Not too much going on recently. Didn't really get anywhere with the Sunday tournies this week. I'm a little annoyed about all the FTOPS events starting at 11pm UK time, but not much I can do about that.

I'm running at about 5bb/100 over the last 20k hands of $400 NL 6-max. Not the biggest sample size ever, but I think I'm finding my feet a little more now. I have invested some time in reading through my HH's and watching some videos on Cardrunners and PXF.

There does seem to be lots more decent multi tabling regulars at this limit, but I'm not struggling to find good games, and they also seem to want to steer clear of me unless someone is really spewing which is a good thing I guess. I'm only playing 3-4 tables at the moment, so I think it would be more of a problem if I wanted to start doing more. I can't see that being any time soon though, so I should be okay.

I'm aware I need to start posting more content, I just never seem to think about this blog. I'll try to make some notes when I'm playing so I remember anything interesting and make sure I post about it here.

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Titles?

I'm running out of names for titles, so I might start using the date in future. I should probably be more imaginative, but since my posts aren't that frequent they often cover a number of topics, so nothing really covers them all.

I have had a bit more time over the last week or so to play poker, which has made a nice change. I kept trying to play when I didn't have much time or had other things on my mind which inevitably doesn't work.

The other day I started playing what I thought was two turbo double shootouts because I only had a couple of hours to spare. They were both normal speed which I didn't have time to play. I donked around a bit and true to form when you're not trying, I won both my first tables and ran up big stacks at both final tables just before I had to go. I was 1/3 in the $650 satellite with 2 seats and 1/7 or 1/6 in the $215 Sunday million one with 3 seats.

I gave one of my non poker playing friends a quick lesson on how to play internet poker and handed over the controls. Needless to say he won neither seat, pretty much call/folding his stack into oblivion.

gg $765.

I played the Sunday Million for the first time in ages last Sunday. Unfortunately Monday is now an early start and a busy day for me at work, so normally I don't bother. It was the $530 buy-in this week and I came 70th or so for about $3,000. I basically short stacked the whole tournie, I think I had about an hour or so with above avg stack when was floating around 230k ish and the avg was 150-190k.

It's a bank holiday here tomorrow in the UK, so I'll be playing the Sunday tournies again tonight.

They confirmed the WSOP final table delay I spoke about in my last post. I still think it's a pretty crazy idea, but I guess it's probably never going to effect me. It should at least be entertaining to watch the build up and see what they can do with it. On the plus side, if it does create more hype and get more exposure then it will bring more players to the game, which is obviously a good thing.