Sing to the tune of “Gotham City” by R.Kelly…lol… 😉 🙁
I’m looking over the skyline of the city.
How loud quiet nights in the mist of crime.
How next door to happiness lives sorrow,
and signals of solution in the sky.

(chorus)
a city of injustice,
a city of hate,
a city of junk-kickings for everyone of us.
We don’t need it, can live without it
Bad Beat City (oh no!!!)
…

Oh man. I’m sounding like an old card-flinger in a saloon, who’s telling everyone bad beat story after bad beat story, even though noone wants to hear ’em. This is really sad, it’s not even funny anymore. Every god damn time I’m on a “good” run – which equals (slowly) recovering from a monster bad run these days – I’m getting pwned, big time, over and over, without any mercy. Now I can live with some beats here, some beats there. My goal in HU matches is to win 60-x% of the time. Everything below that is bad news, especially due to rake concerns, so that’s what I’m aiming and I don’t think it’s unrealistic, or is it?

True, deep inside, I want to win 100% of the matches when I’m playing better than my opponent, but we all know that’s not the reality. But losing close to 100% on a bad run, can’t be the reality either. Sometimes it is though where you get hit smack in the face/junk while your opponent laughs his behind off, because he’s hitting like a madman, mostly cold-decks too. After all just winning a hand when your opponent doesn’t have anything won’t get you to the W, you’ll need some hands where your opponent makes a strong, but second best, hand too.

…and that’s exactly what’s happening. You hold Q6o…no raises preflop…flop comes down QQ5…you bet…he smooth-calls…you’re screaming on the inside, please please please have Aces or Kings here….turn comes a 4…you bet out…he smooth-calls again…you’re screaming even louder…river is a 3…you bet out again…he min-raises you…you laugh…and push the remaining measly few chips in…if he got you here, well…you have me…what does he show? Q7o to scoop the pot…well…it happens…lol…I wonder when I had the best of such a hand for the last time…seems like ages ago…

So you lost the first match…off to the next…after a few orbits, you’re slightly down in chips, but look down at AK…now, I normally wouldn’t overplay this hand, but I had a feeling that his insta-push after my raise was a bs move. I insta-call his push…he shows? 87o…errrm yeah, very well played sir…flop 7810…have a nice day.

The third match features a W by me…he thought second pair was good, I didn’t think so, he didn’t suckout. Thank you. One time.

The fourth match…some close hands…no joy in hitting ANY of my 14+ outs twice hands. Not good…so the scoreboard is 1-3…one more, if I win that one I’m quitting slightly down, if I lose it, I’m quitting a little more down.

After just a few short hands I’ve got my opponent right where I want him, pushing his 10-10 into my AA after I put in the third raise preflop…the rest goes without words…

Next hand finishes me off…I push with Qc6c…he calls with Jd6d..flop 3 diamonds..thank you…

After that, I closed the PS client in disgust and watched the EPT live coverage. This is the only upside of today’s poker play…I got to see some nice action.

After the broadcast ended quicker than expected I logged back on to play some “relax poker”, PL 5-Card-Draw…took second…far from being unstuck, but at least the PS dealer waited till we were in the money before he cold decked me in three straight hands (set over set, he starts with the lower set but boats up; two pair over two pair, he boats up; and aces vs a lower pair, he catches two pair)…((poker + bad end of variance) = the ultimate pain)…that is all…I’m off…

I can’t put the finger on it, but there’s something wrong with the initial matches I’m playing in a session. Now, this could very well be just a coincidence, but maybe it’s not, so I guess I’m going to do some data mining on these ones in particular to find out if there’s something totally off in my game right after I start off a session.

In the next few matches, it was the usual up and down, cold deck for me, cold deck against me…up and down. Win one, lose one. Really sick, treading water like that…or well, chasing “being stuck” from the first match(es). Afternoon session brought…LWLLW….evening session…LWW….oh well…break even (minus the rake), yet again…hmm…

…hurts. Getting unstuck (minus the rake) on such a beautiful (errrm horrible) night…priceless.What happened in the first two matches?

Two hands sum all this up…we’re early in both matches…and they scream to give me their money (although not all of it as they already got the best of me in some hands)…

Match Nr.1…beautiful, put his money in stone dead…well…head had outs…either runner runner two pair or trips or runner runner straight…that’s a whole lot of outs…wait, not really…

Hmm…not really a good start here. Oh well…may the deck be kind next time. Haha. First he cracks my queens by rivering two pair…then he cracks my kings by calling preflop with 94 s00ted…I’m good enough here to lay it down or else I would have been busto here already…then the next hand goes down…JJ…wheee…now I already here you scream: “You’re such a card rack here, why do you even complain?” Well, maybe because this time it get’s even worse…

Well, well, what do we have here…a nice little flip…I flop a set…nice…not good enough though…after all he had runner runner outs…which is basically a monster after the flop…lol…well…after that I thought about using one of my precious suckout barf-bags…

…but I didn’t, after all this should be enough junk kicking for the night. Jumped right into the next one and low and behold, I actually won it. Wheeeee….so I’m 1-2…things are looking up.

Next match and I trap him beautifully with a turned flush…he’s got me slightly covered, but with 2700/300…everything should be dandy…he pushes on the next flop we see…and things are not really looking good for him…me TP…he second pair…

This time it’s the turn that get’s me and I can’t feel to mad about his play here, he’s very short, he hit the flop…all good. After that my stack desintegrates though. Yes, maybe I pushed to hard on some hands, but in the end, it was just not to be. I lost hand after hand on beautiful flops where you flop two pair – he flops a set. You flop OESD + pair…he rivers two pair…etc etc…so I lose. Boohoo. 1-3.

Now I’m seriously doubting myself. Can it be that there’s a flashing light on my avi that reads “If you’re a donk, please play me, you’ve got a 10:1 shot on every 1:5 longshot”? I guess not, it’s basically just the anti-luckbox and a few in a row of those can really make your junk hurt. So I ponder logging off…but I don’t…which was a good move.

I played my usual game against the next two opponents and they wanted to give me their chips drawing close to dead again…the difference? This time my hands held up…the beauty of it all. So I log off tonight at 3-3 and the only thing that bugs me is that I spent 1,5 hours treading water due to some sick hands…oh well…may the turn and/or river be kinder next time…it can’t get much worse anyhow…so things are looking up 😉

*lol* man, I’m so steaming right now, I can’t even begin to tell you. Now the following recap of some sick hands could be interpreted as telling bad beat stories, far from the truth, as most sick hands were not so much bad beats, but either bad luck or the “usual beats” (aka I can have 20 outs twice, it doesn’t matter, at least not when it’s for all the marbles)…

I played only one match this afternoon, won it easily against a fairly good player. After footie training tonight, I decided to play some more and after playing this session, I can’t help but feel sick and smile at the same time. Unreal that I can’t win against pure donkeys, no matter what. I looked all three opponents up and they’re all pure losing SnG players. TPNK = gold and may the river be kind to them always…that said, I was on stone cold tilt in the last one after sick beat after sick beat, so that one was the icing on the poker shitcake tonight…just wait until you see the last hand below…it’s a usual coinflip, I don’t even need to tell you that I lost it, but how did I lose it? DQB! Nice job donk…

First match of the evening session, I chopped away and chopped away at his stack and when I had his first 500…he decided to get cute…I got AsKc on the button…and I overraise…usually only a donk will fall for this, but lucky enough for me, I had one in front of me. He pushes…now usually I would hesitate a little here, but not against that player. He shows A10o…nice…now the usual sickness begins…

Preflop: 71%/24%

Flop comes down Ac 10c 6c…44%/55%

Turn…rag…27%/73%

River….rag…0/100

Well, well…he put his money in a huge underdog…he outflops me, but I got 3 Kings and 9 clubs so 12 outs twice as my redraw…no such joy…what else is new…so, he has got me 2:1 in chips all of a sudden…and some major pots later he lucks out again…called all the way down with second pair king kicker…king on the river and I’m busto…nice job…

The second match of the evening session went down on a similar note…I don’t recall most hands as I got so fed up of getting outdrawn on time and time again that I decided to go with the next “good” hand I found…I find 72o…the hammer baby…on the button…I got around 900 left…I pop it preflop and he calls…flop comes down Ah 2h 7h…now I’m aware that he probably got an ace after he called my preflop race…I just hope that he doesn’t have a heart and push…he install calls with AcJh…no surprise to see the Ace on the turn and heart on the river, just to rub it in…god damn it…how can the hammer betray me here?

After that one I should have logged off and/or abstained from looking up my next opponent on sharkscope. Yes, another donkey, yes another round of sick calling calling pushing bs…so when I find the next hand I decide to repop his preflop raise…he pushes…yet again…and I’m hoping for a flip and maybe one time I can win one against a donk for all the marbles…not really….flops the boat…rivers dem quads biatches…go f yourself damn it…I’m outta here for the night…

Well, played only two HU matches today and I’m starting to like it at the “new level” (I switched to the 10$ ones for now, until I get some under my belt and have a look closer look at those numbers, then it’s probably up one more level). Won both of those matches easily.

Tonight, it was time for the WWdN…due to whatever reason, it’s not the xyz invitational anymore, so I had to do with a description that I busted Wil last week. Fine with me, although I’m not InGoal, but Ingoal, ty 😉

The first table featured the blogfather himself and I had a hard time finding any playable hands. I folded into eternity for the first 30 minutes and when I tried to play a hand, well, in the words of tuff_fish “…ppl called me like crazy”.

So…besides folding, I played three noteworthy hands in the first hour. The first one was 99 vs 55 all-in preflop….someone raised preflop…I hoyed him back…he thought long and hard, stating that he thought his 55 was good, then pushed…my nines held up and I was up and running. Two hands later I find AQo…raise preflop…one caller…flop comes down ace high…I bet again…he folds…the third one was me holding AA in EP…I make it 4x…Iggy shoves…I call….he shows AJ…the rockets hold up. Nice…

So, after the first hour of played, things were looking up, but no all that long. Second hand after the break I find 88 in LP…button reraises me…I think hard…and I put him on A10-AJ here…so I push…insta-call…he shows AA…d’oh. A few hands later I find AQo…I pop it preflop, the same player that busted me last week (and who’s pretty short at that momemt) shoves…I call..he shows A10…nice…I see the ten in the window…then I realize that the JK is actually giving me the nuts…the turn J makes me sweat a little..but the river is kind…a nice little 3…so I’m back…fast forward a few orbits and I look down at 33 in the BB to a min-raise…hmm…could be AK…could be AA…let’s see a flop and try to hit the set…expensive at 400BB…but I’m half-way in…so let’s see it….flop 789…not what I wanted to see…check fold…I then donk off another portion of my stack…I look down at 66 UTG…normally I would pop it here…but I try to limp…flop comes down 3Q10 two hearts…he checks…I check…turn is 9h…he bets…I call…hmm….what was I thinking?…river…another low heart….he bets out small again…I make a crying call to see his 5h…he had Ks5h…damn…could I have played this hand any worse? Not really…first, pop it preflop and he most certainly goes away. Secondly fire on the flop…he most certainly goes away…thirdly…reraise on the turn…he most certainly goes away…that’s all.

So I’m getting desperately low in chips and just as the second break is about to roll around I’m dead last in chips…down to slightly below 400….damn. I look down at Ac3c UTG….I push…four callers….flopd Q3x…one guy bets out big…the others fold…he shows AQ…turn 3…boom headshot…I type in sorry and head into the second break…

As the blinds increase to 300/600 ante 50 after the break I’m not in that great a shape even after totally lucking out there. I fold Q8 in the BB and 35o in the SB…and i’m back to square one…with 1k…I wait until the blinds are about to hit me again to push in with the hammer…and looking at the screenshot now, still makes me laugh…what better way to exit than with the hammer rivering three deuces…but falling victim to flush over flush…lol…out in 16th….

Haha! Sometimes to beat a donkey you gotta play the borderline hands, hard. Sometimes? Maybe more like “almost always”. Anyway, I had to do just that against two out of three opponents today. Good news, I was right, they were borderline donkeys. Now they weren’t pure fish, but pure losing poker players. The bad news, they caught like crazy on me in the right spots. Oh well…can’t do anything about that…so…moving on…

I’m really looking forward to the EPT grand final in Monte Carlo. I’m pretty excited to see that the webcast of the german EPT from Dortmund was such a huge success that they’ll continue to do it…finishing off the season in Monte Carlo. For those of you who missed it: they do a live webcast of the feature table and the final table. Now, it’s not as exciting as the WPT or similar edited formats as you don’t see the whole cards – then again, it’s exciting nontheless as you can try to put people on hands yourself and the commentary is usually really good (I really enjoyed John “The father of the EPT” Duthie on the Dortmund webcast)…check EPTLive.com for more info about this thing…

Poker, oh poker, it’s all skill, start with the worst hand and go all-in…lol…that should be the new Matusow donkey/poker song…apropos Matusow…out of the new FullTilt commercials, I like the Matusow/Cunningham one the best…although some of the others (especially the Phil Ivey and Chris Ferguson ones) are pretty good, too…check them out…here…

As for offline poker stuff…I finished both Joe Navarro’s book and the Suicide King and liked them both for different reasons. The Navarro book is a real eye-opener and I’ll be happy to at least try to apply some of the stuff he’s talking about. One thing will be hard though and that is deciphering  the “tell to reason for the tell”-relationship. Why? I discussed this with a fellow poker player of “my home game” and my point was this: It’s one thing to spot something in a player. If you spot this or that behaviour, cool, you should normally be able to put him on a narrower range of hands with this info. True and not true. The (big) problem? I’ll call it “hand perception”: Headsup pot, no raise preflop, Player A in EP holds nothing on the flop containing two hearts, it goes check, check, turn brings a low card, Player A exhibits a high confidence tell….what does he hold?

Now, if that Player A was me…I would have probably hit a set there…but the Player A, I’m talking about, just hit his pair (let’s say a pair of sixes) and he still got a flush draw (somewhere along the lines of the fifth nutflush draw)…see the problem here? He thinks he holds a monster, hence the high confidence tell…I don’t think so…but he does…so spotting the tell is worthless without the context and this is that much harder with people who don’t operate on the same “hand strength”-scale as you do…that said, if I spotted the same tell vs Player B on the same board, I would know almost exactly where I’m at…the beauty of poker…that said, about time that I get into a live game again…I’m itching to sling some cards…hopefully it’ll happen within the next two weeks…

As for the “Suicide King” book, it was really entertaining…now I gotta wait until Amazon get’s into gear and finally delivers me “Hunting Fish….” 🙁

Well, it has been a weekend full of surprises. Surprise Nr. 1, I didn’t play a single hand on saturday. I just didn’t feel like playing and why force the action if you’re not really in the right state of mind. Surprise Nr.2, late saturday night my laptop reminded me that it had adjusted the time due to DST. Wheee…there’s goes an hour of sleep. Surprise Nr.3, got owned in footie today. We played with our best squad and lost. The team we lost to is a real ugly bunch of guys and they shouldn’t even play in the same league as we do, but they do, and they did their job. We didn’t. So instead of being 8 points clear at the top of the table, we’re back to 2 points clear. Fugly!

That’s about all the surprises of the weekend. Today, I played some HU, but only two matches. Won both of them. The first one was the classic me vs donk. He pushed into my nuts beautifully. The second match was totally different. Either he was a complete donk or a genius. I guess the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes. I bluffed off half my stack early on as he called me down with any pair. I got lucky to catch a hand to double up (A5 vs hs A3)…and then the same thing happened again, he just wouldn’t fold. So either he had a very good read on me or he just lost his mind (and got lucky that I had apeshit every time he really called me down)…anyway….after I was down to 600 again…I switched gears back to the regular game. I doubled up when I flopped a set with presto…which we all know is gold, lol, just ask Fuel 😉

After that I won some smaller pots to take a small chiplead, when I finally connected with the flop a few times. Then the hand came down. 77 on the button…raise…call…no surprise…flop 7KA with two diamonds….he bets…I raise…he pushes…no way I give him AA or KK here…so I insta-call…he shows 8d9d…turn is the 10d…damn…pair there board, pleeeeeeease….river…10c…thank you. So, you could say that I got lucky in that match. I almost lost my mind, but came back to my senses just in time to win it – no doubt, the cards helped there, too…when’s the last time I flopped sets with small pairs back to back…I don’t even remember…me happy…good night…

Back in the days, I used to hate the fish, especially after they beat me. Nowadays, I sit in front of my screen and laugh…then I feel pity for them. “Pity? After they won against you? But they got the money!” – true, but they’re basically just holding on to it for the real poker players. It’s really sad to see people playing like crap and there’s really only two ways they can win (and I’m talking HU specifically here):

1. Get an insane run of cards (+ you making some sort of second best hand you can’t get away from)

2. Get lucky

I had some encounters with some nice fishies tonight. Why do I call them fish? Because their Sharkscope numbers tells me that they’re fish…and all I see is the nice fishbowl:

So I’m sitting there and I don’t let this knowledge affect me all that much. I just play my solid game, although I assume that they’re less likely to fold a hand than the regular player (so no sick bluffs against them, because they probably won’t fold). That said, I dominate most of them, because I can fold a hand…even if it might be the best hand. As for tonight, I came at them from all angles and they couldn’t do anything about it.

The theme was similar in all those matches: I get ahead, I get a little more ahead, I get waaaay ahead. Then, when it comes to finish them off, they get insanely lucky on my ass. (And even if I make a mistake somewhere in the middle here and I’m down, it’s usually just temporary as they will give me back all those chips and then some later on.) I lost 2 out of 3 matches against the fishies. The scenario: I’m ahead along the lines of 2200-2600/400-800…it all comes down to one big pot and I move my money in as a significant favourite or in rare cases not worse than even money…I lose all those hands and they’re back in business…sick…but hey, what can I do? Tilt. Steam. Get angry. No, I don’t think so. I continue to play my game, I’m confident. Then it happens again and again and they win.

Now I’m not going to say that it doesn’t bother me, every loss bothers me especially against bad players, but I’m at the stage of my “poker career” (if there’s such a thing), where I’ve come to terms with “poker reality”: They’re going to get lucky…they’re going to win matches they’re “not supposed to win”…you can’t win every match, even if you’re the better player. What really counts are decisions and the long-term results…so…even after such a loss, or two, or three…I’m sitting here with a smile on my face and some pity in my heart. Can you imagine what it must feel like playing like that, where basically the only way you can win is to get lucky? The only thing that keeps it from being pure torture is the fact that most of the donks won’t even see the situation they’re in as clearly as I do.

That said, I don’t want to sound too cocky here and I put a little disclaimer on everything that has been said above: I’m talking specifically about the low limit HU SnGs (5$/6$/10$/12$) on PokerStars here, where I feel that I’m a better player than most opponents. That said, I did come across some players, who were at least “as good” as myself and some even clearly dominated me (or kept me off my game), but in general, the “quality of play” is so bad, that it’s not even funny…and I’m seriously working on getting the roll to take a leap in stakes…can’t stay in “low limit hell” forever 😉

Before I log off…here’s my favourite hand of the night…it fits right into the scenario I described…I beat him down…I’ve got him right where I want him (one overcard, money in preflop) and he flops the joint…needless to say that similar hands occured two more times and I lost…

Today was a rather slow day for me, nothing much going on, so time for some HU matches. Won 3 out of 4, easily. Some could have been much quicker (like 60 hands less), but people tend to suckout on me just as I’m about to finish them off. The record was a dude being down to 200…he doubled up…400…doubled up…800….doubled up 1600…yikes…now, even though he had the “better hand” two out of three times, I’m kind of entitled to win at least one there…lol…at least I felt like it. Oh well, beat him down again and finished him up.

After that, CC‘s thursday bash was about to start…now, I never played this one before as the starting time (without the DST) is too late, even for my crazy taste. A lot of familiar faces, kind of the smaller version of the WWdN, without all the n00bs…it was fun and I bounced all around the table, dropped a hammer or two…enjoyed myself. Only 15 runners meant that we were down to the final table just before the first break. At the final table two deciding hands came down.

I’m at the bottom of the pack and I look down at 99…the blinds are 75/150, one EP caller, I pop it to 600…button calls…BB calls…limper calls…not what I wanted to see…flop comes down 8 high…now my head screams push push push…then my head says…hmm…even if they’re all on overcards, you only got 1k behind and the pot is over 2k…so you’re laying someone 3:1 here…hmm…I check…and it’s checked around…turn J…now I know I’m screwed…I missed my chance to push on the flop…I guess, I could have taken it down…(the other hands were Js10s, KhQh, A10o)…oh well…down to 1k…grrr…slightly over an orbit later it’s time to exit…I look down at AKo…I push over the initial raiser…he calls…shows JJ…no help for me and I exit in 9th…oh well…not all that bad…I’m still wondering though what would have happened in the 99-hand if two things were different:

1. The caller on the button pushes over the top…I’m almost certain the other two will fold there with KQ and J10…I scoop the pot

2. I push on the flop…

Could have would have should have… 😉

*lol*…nevermind. After yesterday’s WWdN “bubble-incident”, I was more than ready to play some more poker today. Footie training and the first good night’s sleep in weeks got in the way though, so no afternoon session. So, it was another evening/night session and boy, the donkeys were dancing, taking dumps on the table and spewing chips like crazy.

Worst moment: getting all the money in preflop with KK vs 33…3 on the flop…teehee…it was the fourth hand, so I already had him covered by 200…down, but not out…next hand…he sucks out a runner runner straight…teehee…this was one of the “destined to lose it”-matches…

Best moment: the board reads AQKJ9…little rewind: your opponent called the BB preflop…you check the flop…he checks…the turn is the most beautiful card you’ve ever seen, why, because you hold T5o…lol…no flush out there…you bet out…he calls…the river is the uneventful 9…you push…because the only way he’s going to call anyway is if he’s got one of the other 10s…think again…he insta-calls with A6o…rofl…man, that just made my day… 🙂

3Ws 2Ls…slightly up and with a big smile on my face…can’t get much better than that…lol…good night…