*lol* where ppl can call pot-sized bets preflop, on the flop, on the turn and on the river….pretty nice…especially if you lose with trip aces…then the very next hand same deal, this time it’s pot-sized bets preflop, on the flop and on the turn (all-in) and you get call by TP and a gutshot against your Aces with the nut-flush draw…sure enough the gutterball hits on the river….*lol*…that’s so sick that I can laugh really hard about it…

Apart from that I went 2:1 in HU SnGs…and enjoyed myself listening to PokerRoad’s Crew (including Annette_15) ribbing my main man smokkee about his WSOP backing deal…who pitched it to them? The Smokkeester himself :p

Good night and gl at the tables….

That pretty much sums it up. It was pretty unreal what kind of hands came down tonight and I’m not talking about “some coolers”, it was like it was anarctica day – going both ways. It started on bodog where I donked around a little on the HU-SnG-killing-fields. I toasted a donk twice, he literally had no chance, I mean it was pretty sick how he payed me off even with his worst hands. It took quite a while to bust him though as he kept hitting two and three outers on my ass, but oh well, a W is a W and such a W is even sweeter because I didn’t let it get to me during play (not calling shoves etc, but continuing to play small-ball until I busted him). Then I jumped to Stars where I started with A HU SnG as well, busted the guy pretty quickly.

In the end I finished the session with a Double-Shootout to the Sunday Million on Stars…and it was an interesting match. I got coolered in the mid stages of the first table, then coolered the player right back in the next hand (QQ vs AA…Q on the flop…boom)…in the end I won the table.

Then came the second table and while the table was tighter than a virgin’s punani to begin with, it tightened up even more once we were on the money bubble (8 left, 7 payed). That’s when this hand came down. In retrospect I guess I could have folded after the big-stack cold-called my raise and the following shove by the shorty, then again, if they are both drawing to a flush or hold TPTK or something I’m golden and the only way I’m out of the money is if the shorty wins the hand and the big stack has my hand beat and on the upside, if I win the hand I’m the chipleader by a long-shot and can start to bully ppl around bringing me closer to the 215T$. So I went with it. Made my boat on the turn, but too bad that the big stack indeed held a set…making him a bigger boat…oh well…

Free hand converter brought to you by CardRunners

Seat 1: kent2ben ($1573)
Seat 3: bertbarndoor ($1692)
Seat 5: mistery31000 ($900)
Seat 6: dedor ($2495) –
Seat 7: zwerg12 ($2010) –
Seat 8: Ingoal ($1795) –
Seat 9: AnotherTran ($1210)
Seat 10: eltigre666 ($3325)

PRE-FLOP:

zwerg12 posts small blind $25
Ingoal posts BIG blind $50
Dealt To: Ingoal

RAISE AnotherTran ($100)
CALL eltigre666 ($100)
FOLD kent2ben
FOLD bertbarndoor
FOLD mistery31000
FOLD dedor
FOLD zwerg12
CALL Ingoal ($50)

FLOP:

Pot: $325
   

CHECK Ingoal
CHECK AnotherTran
BET eltigre666 ($300)
RAISE Ingoal ($600)
RAISE AnotherTran ($1110)
CALL eltigre666 ($810)
RAISE Ingoal ($1695)
CALL eltigre666 ($585)

TURN:

Pot: $5425
     

RIVER:

Pot: $5425
      

SHOWDOWN:
Ingoal:

eltigre666:

AnotherTran:

eltigre666 collected $1170 from side pot 1eltigre666 collected $3655 from main pot

SUMMARY:
Total pot: $4825Main pot: $3655
Side pot: $1170
Rake: $0

Final Board:
     

Seat 1: kent2ben folded before Flop didnt bet – Net Gain/Loss: ($0)
Seat 3: bertbarndoor folded before Flop didnt bet – Net Gain/Loss: ($0)
Seat 5: mistery31000 folded before Flop didnt bet – Net Gain/Loss: ($0)
Seat 6: dedor button folded before Flop didnt bet – Net Gain/Loss: ($0)
Seat 7: zwerg12 small blind folded before Flop – Net Gain/Loss: ($-25)
Seat 8: Ingoal big blind showed [7d 4d] and lost with a full house, Fours full of Sevens – Net Gain/Loss: ($-1285)
Seat 9: AnotherTran showed [Ks As] and lost with two pair, Aces and Fours – Net Gain/Loss: ($-1160)
  
Seat 10: eltigre666 showed [5h 5s] and won 4825 with a full house, Fives full of Fours – Net Gain/Loss: ($3030)
  

Free hand converter brought to you by CardRunners

So I’m logging off up a little…and I’m happy with that…gl at the tables….

…as I’m still on the mini-hiatus, calming down a little, regrouping…don’t worry though, I’ll be back soon enough, once I get “the itch” again.

Not playing doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about the game or in this case reading about the game. I just finished Tom Schneider’s book “Oops I won too much money…”. I gotta say it’s one of the few books that I read cover to cover in less than two days. I did that not because it doesn’t contain much – well it’s not strategy book like the book I read before this one (NL Hold’em Theory & Practice) – it does contain a lot, but not strictly poker strategy…the book is made up of 60+ little chapters covering various aspects of poker/business/life…and every chapter has a lesson….really entertaining, at times funny, too and overall a really enjoyable book. I can recommend it…

Next up on my reading list is Johnny Hughes’ “Texas Poker Wisdom – A novel”…you see, my poker library is growing and growing…that’s all for today, I’m off to sweat the (german) Luckbox at the Stud8 WC final table…Poker-News.com-coverage making that possible….double thumbs up…gl at the tables and stand by for “real poker content” – it shouldn’t be long 🙄 😉

If so, and I’m talking about playing RAZZ with poker bloggers here, make sure you check out Brickin the nutz (just click on the pic below) to find all the details about the new 200+16$ KORS…

If you’re currently using tinyurl or a similar service to fit your long url into the tiny little 140 character tweet, please think about using ZZ.GD for a change, it’s results are even smaller urls (because of the 4 character domain including tld), and feel free to pimp it. Thank you very much

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….

Of course…

• …there’s no way to beat the game with such a huge short-term downswing.
• …there’s no way to ride out a cold-streak if ever god damn micro sng represents 10% of your roll.
• …it’s normal that you can lose every coin-flip short-term.
• …it’s normal that your opponent calls all-in with one card to come with any draw (ranging from 2 to 8 outs).
• …it’s normal that they hit each and everyone of these draws on the river.

That being said, of course I’m never ever ever coming back to “Full-Tilt-rape-my-asshole-all-day-every-day”-Poker unless one of two things happen:

1. I get a start-roll that is big enough that a donkey-SnG represents less than 5% of my roll at any given time.
2. A miracle happens.

Until then it’s bye bye and never see you again….FullTilt fuckers…and this time I mean it, mark my words!

So…I decided to make a comeback at FullTiltPoker tonight. I haven’t played there in months as I had the most horrific luck and totally busted out in a rare tilt-flash a few months back. So I decided to reload tonight to join Kat’s rebuy madness. Because the start of the tourney is so late (for me – 3am), I decided to kill some time donking around at the PlayMoney Horse-Tables…and to my surprise, after a few minutes, a red pro sat down. David Bradley, the stud specialists, joined the game and was quite chatty and all. Sure enough the table chatter was starting to fire up and the wait list grew. So I played a while and then gave my seat to another player…

So, then it was time to start the donkarama…and it started out like a charm. Rebuy. Rebuy. Rebuy. Quadruple up. Rebuy. Rebuy. Rebuy. Well, double-rebuys can really be a PITA quite quickly. So in the end I decided no to rebuy anymore after I had already rebought 15 times and my second real hand of the night (JJ) was obv cracked as I couldn’t dodge two overcards…too bad…the first time ever that I didn’t even last through the rebuy period…but honestly I didn’t see much point in dumping more chips and cash…enjoy the random pic dump and I’m outta here…

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…