Time waits for no man

Ok, yup you guessed it, I still haven't written up the Guineas weekend. Oh well, it'll come, hopefully while it's still fresh in my mind. Next week I'm in Madeira for a week with my family and I'm taking the laptop so I will hopefully get it written up while I lounge around the pool at the villa. I'll be building up my tan there, back at work from Tuesday to Thursday, then off to vegas for some serious partying and playing in 100f heat :o)
I had a moment of pride and joy on Tuesday night, and I didn't even have to do anything to get it ! At 11.30 pm I got this text message on my phone -
"Just won a 200 man tournament! £552, just moving through the gears before vegas!" - Twister
That's Twist's first MTT online win, so congratulations dude ! My contribution to this victory was lending out Phil Gordon's Little Green Book a few weeks ago. If you aint read it you should, and if you've already read it you should read it again, its got quality advice in short, sharp bursts that will really improve your game in MTT's. Its so satisfying to win a tourney, and it almost feels just as good to see one of your mates do it.

My foray into NL cash games has been a little frustrating of late. Very much two steps forward, one step back. I tried the $2/4 game and made some money. Played back at the usual $1/2 and lost it all back, and last night stepped down to .50/$1 to get back to even again. The best thing about the .50/$1 is it reminds me how 'short-ball' works very effectively for bankroll building. Every time I'm up at $1/2 or $2/4 I have the constant voice in the back of my head saying "You could make $400 tonight with a big hand", whereas at .50/$1 I'm much more inclined to take the long road, get up to a $50 profit and then leave the table happy with making half a buyin and increasing my bankroll. I'm starting to believe that is a good mentality for NL ring. Take the small gains where you can, don’t go looking for those big score hands too too much, cause the variance is going to hurt a hell of a lot more. When I can apply make .50/$1 attitude to the other limits it will mean I'm not thinking about the money and that will mean I'm playing better poker.

Blog redesign coming up tonight, on the proviso that all my programming skills haven't been sucked out of me by work by 5pm. Think I'll try and find a 'blogger game' while I'm doing it to pass the time cheaply :o)

swinging

There's an update of recent events on the way I promise, and it will include the recounting of the Guineas weekend, but for now everytime I sit to write a new post something bad happens to put it on hold, like my flopped full house running into flopped quads and me losing $200. So until that trend reverses and starts making me jovial again you might be in for a brief wait. Talking of waiting, Veneno, I haven't forgotten about you I promise the cards will be on their way very shortly, although I'll be in vegas in 3 weeks so it would only be a short hop to deliver them by hand !! (Yes I know, I'm lazy and deserve the bad karma for not settling our bet yet !! )

Ok, back soon. TTFN.

Two sides of the same coin

"Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid." - John Keats (1795 - 1821)

Bear with me here, it's taken two hours to get past the first sentence on this post and the ride isn't going to be smooth, with a little luck and good strategy we might just get this jumble of emotions out of my head…

Let's start with something simple to get the ball rolling - Tuesday night I decide to give ladbrokes a look-in and sign up to their $20 rebuy. I play ok and finally bust out with my KsKc v AhKh that turned a flush to finish 23/268 for $84, which was only $22 profit but better than a kick in the junk.

If you were with me last week you knew I was playing the best poker of my short career so on Wednesday night I entered another satellite, this time on Doyles Room. It was a $3 rebuy satellite to their WSOP tourney on Saturday night and started with 83 players.

The payouts were -
1 & 2 - $217.80 seat
3 - $173.40 cash

I took down 1st after investing the rebuy minimum ($9) for a seat on Saturday. When the time came for that tourney to start I was round at Hooks' place with Twister, Action Rich and Tension Girl. We played a bit of ProEvo whilst the tournament progressed and the payouts in this one were -

1 & 2 - $12,000 WSOP package
3 - $10,400 cash

Of the 217 entrants I busted out in 12th, which wasn't a bad showing and I was reasonably pleased with the way I played.

Sunday arrived and I woke up with a splitting headache, and no it was not a hangover, but it was not a good start to the day considering it would be the $1M later that night and I'd be playing using my $500+$30 seat that I'd won earlier in the week. I logged in to play a couple of $4 180's for a warm up, I was playing terribly. Fortunately Hooks' popped up with an IM and told me that everyone wanted to play a home game that night. Now I had a decision. My options were:
a) Unregister from the tourney and keep $530 Tournament $'s, which would double my bankroll and allow me to play in the live game
b) Play the $1M and stay at home and miss the live game
c) Go round to Hooks' with my laptop and play the live game and the $1M at the same time

I told Hooks that I was going for option B unless we had 6 or more players. 40 minutes later he called to say he had 6 and so 20 minutes after that I was round at his place counting out chip stacks… game on :o) I took a big early lead in the live game, but my concentration was on the $1M and I busted in 3rd place, but not before I had time to put one of Caro's tells to the test, and it’s a sure-thing, but unfortunately I can’t reveal it here lest the player(s) from our home game get wind of it !

So I focused on the $1M, and boy did I need to focus, the first two hours or so I was cold decked, I played one hand to showdown (AQ off) which lost and cost me half my stack. I spent the rest of the time stealing blinds, and I had to get dealt Aces twice with no action, before I realised the table was playing tight and giving me respect! That made things a little easier, but I was still just hanging on to the bottom rung of the ladder... then the gods smiled on me. In consecutive hands I was dealt the black Kings and got action against AK, those double ups put me back in action. In the next hour I went on an incredible rush which included the Kings twice more, and a flopped full house. By the fourth break I was the chip leader and couldn’t believe my luck, at the fifth break I was still the chip leader. I was getting hands, I was playing good, it was all going swimmingly, we were in the money and I was still right up there ! And then the inevitable happened… I totally lost focus. Maybe it was that we were 6 hours in and it was 3.30 am here. Maybe I just got over confident. Whatever it was I screwed up, I remember making one bad call and then one bad fold soon after, which is often the way. When you’re not living ‘in the moment’ at the table you let a mistake on an earlier hand screw up the decision you’re making in the here and now. No horrible suckout to tell you about, I just messed up. My final hand was AK off in MP, I pushed and JJ called right behind me which flopped trips, sending me to the rail in 97th place. I have learnt a hell of a lot from it, but I hope you can see why finishing 97th out of 2323 is generating such mixed emotions for me now. My success resembles a tragic failure.

I’m so disappointed in myself it’s untrue, but I should be proud of the fact I finished ITM for the first time and made $1,742.25. It’s a learning experience that will be etched in my poker memory forever. I can only hope I’m lucky enough to be in such a fortunate position again some day so that I can, as Keats would say, seek earnestly after what is true.