…well, not quite yet, still another week of work before I’m free to celebrate christmas, the new year and get myself in the hunt for my diploma thesis. So, the “good to be back” refers to my game 😉

I started the evening with a token satellite on Full Tilt. Well, let’s just say that the first hand was the last one too. I just couldn’t get away from the hand, although all the signs were there – min raise preflop, reraise on the flop…I guess I was a little too excited about flopping two pair…oh well…

After that disappointment I took a seat at some crazy HA tables. It’s really surprising how many players are playing these without having the first clue about Omaha, lol. Still couldn’t start a bigger running and dropped a buyin. Not all that good.

So I fired up bodog and played some HU SnGs. Won the first two, then lost the next two. That really sucked, so I decided to quit HU for the night and as I checked the MTT tab I saw that the 2.5k guaranteed was about to start. The low buyin of 7$ + 0,50$ made the decision even easier.

Hours played: roughly 3.5

Times I was all-in and at risk: twice, early with a flip AK vs JJ…and then in the last hand..but more about that one below.

So I bumped and grinded and sometimes I really got a rush of cards (I must have held AA about four times, QQ about five times and some other lower pairs, but apart from that, well…not much). I had one goal for this tourney:

[Guess 1] Make money – nope

[Guess 2] Get down to last x players – nope

[Guess 3] Not get sucked out on – nope

The correct answer is: make correct decisions – and it worked out pretty good. It’s weird how sometimes a little pointer “back to basics” can really help you find your game again. After plowing through Super System II (highly recommended, but it’s sooo full of concepts and numerous games that you will have to read, re-read and re-re-read it on a regular basis), I started to read my next poker book entitled Pauly’s blog errm “The Tao of Poker”. It’s a set of 285 rules to “transform your game”. Well, I don’t know about the transformation part, but they certainly help. I only read the first 25 or something so far, as I said, I started to read it last night and I gotta get some sleep sometime, so can’t be reading all night. The first ones were really basic, but although you know all the concepts/ideas/rules (know when you’re beat; poker is a grind; ..) are clear and you probably have them all inside your head, but re-reading them really helps as they can’t get lost and/or blocked by other thoughts like “yeeehaaaw…donkey’s catch all the time, let me try this”…

But back to the tourney. There were 319 entrants, so the final four tables are ITM. As I already said, I went on a little rush early, before hovering around average most of the time. There are really only two hands I regret: one was when I bluffed off half my stack when we were about to get down to the last 3 tables. The last one was the last hand…at the final table 🙂 🙁

Yes, the final table…

…about time I saw one of these again. It’s been a while. (Side note: Don’t be fooled by the hand stats, this is for the whole session, so roughly the first 100 hands of that were HU with my usual 80+% flops seen)

Within the first orbit I busted though. After the first player was knocked out in the second hand of the final table, I was eager to play my AQo from LP…and why do I regret this hand?

[1] Remember the old “don’t go broke with a Queen in your hand”-mantra? It’s what crossed my mind before I raised preflop.

[2] I still had a chance to get away from the hand after the flop. Although the roughly 17k with 1k/2k blinds and 200$ antes would have forced me to make a move soon after that anyway (I started the hand with just under 23k, standard 3xBB preflop raise).

As you can see in the following screenshot, the flop came down Kc, 4d, Qc and my opponent insta-over-pushes. Well, what could he be pushing with? What was he calling with preflop? Basically it could have been any two cards preflop (BB, big stack), but after the push I should have believed the hand he claimed (Kx, maybe even with a flush draw) and waited for a better spot (within the next 8-10 hands). But oh well…I called and he showed KJ…turn K…river…K…them quads beetches! At least I lost to a really good hand…

Out in 8th of 319. I’m cool with that. Needless to say that I would have loved to move up some spots as the payout were starting to be really cool in the higher final table spots (1st – 625$, 2nd – 400$, 3rd – 277,50$, ..)…but hey…as I said earlier on, this one wasn’t for the money, it was for my mental game health – if there’s such a thing 😉

…so despite having to work today, I squeezed in a little play here and there. Bodog was not particularyl kind to me, yet again, but at least I was able to donk around at Full Tilt a little. The new mixed games rock. I guess I’ve never ever seen such an amount of “donkeys” invading the games before. The are probably good hold’em players, at least some of them, but bring in the other games and the game is a whole new animal.

Played some “HA” and said “HA! Got you” everytime I stacked up someone else’s chips in the A (Omaha Hi) part of the game, before handing some of them back in the H part of the game. In the end I was able to recoup the prior SnG losses to break even…so not really a good run, but at least not a bad one either…

Well, well…it’s been a while since I hit the tables, mostly due to work and an upcoming deadline of a little poker project (more on that once it’s live). So, a little SnG action on FullTilt…but wait, wow, they added mixed ring games, nice. Nah, fight the temptation to donk around…play some SnGs. 6max it is…and boy, you gotta love when you push your hand into the nuts EVERY single time. Sob. Ah well, let’s see what the bodog donks are up to…well, they’re up to taking my money. Hmm…Ace = gold…unless I hold one, that’s for sure 😉

Anyway, enough babbling…wish I could be in Vegas to donk around and drink my arse off…no such fun, so I’ll have to do the drinking around here. Good thing that the first christmas dinner is taking place tonight. My footie team has rented a restaurant like every year and by 8:30 tonight, I’ll hit the (dinner) tables hard…booze please. Thank you very much, lol! 🙂

Have a great weekend!

…so not much playing or writing about the game. Let’s just say that I went from good (W) to bad (L) to worse (Tilt-L)…what put me on a slight tilt was the second HU match I played.

Did you ever play a guy that has got to be a little leprechaun sitting right on his pot of gold? You dominate him and build your stack. Then you hit TPTK, he hits bottom set, you pay him off. You rebuild your stack. You hit top two, he hits middle set. You pay him off. You rebuild your stack. You hit a straight…he turns a flush…you pay him off…etc etc. Unbelievable. Well, it’s believable, it’s just what it is – he was on a rush and caught the cards when he needed it…

That shouldn’t be enough to put me on tilt and drop the next match within the first 10 hands though… 🙁

Maybe I should stop altering my game all the time. Did you ever start to do something similar (tweaking here and there all the time) when you’re running bad? I guess the answer is a “yup”…sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes it’s not…in my case I think it’s bad. I lost my groove. Not groovy. Time to sit back, check some hand histories and re-focus on my original style of play…

Side note: Despite dropping some dough at the tables today, it was a good day. First of the month, friday, weekend, time to relax and catch up on sleep and the money kept coming in…gotta love those “You received a PayPal Payment” mails…thanks to all the good folks buying text-links and reviews on this humble little piece of web-estate 🙂

Hehe. Today I hit the Razz tables again…and my junk is still hurting from all the kicks…but hey…I only dropped twenty before being fed up, so not too worried.

After that I ran back…well…to the Hold’em tables ;)  Not too much going my way there either, but at least I finished up a little…

Well…Hold’em is totally annoying me atm. I can do what I want, good decisions, decent decisions, mediocre decisions, bad decisions…they all end in the same result – someone backing up a few steps and then kicking me in the junk with full force 🙁

So after the most recent ball-busting junk kickings (yesterday afternoon) I decided that I’m going to walk away for a few days…maybe even a little longer. No, I’m not quiting poker or anything, I’m just putting hold’em on hold…for now.

My equalizer for now is going to be limit razz. Yes, I usually hate limit games as your space to (out)maneuver your opponent is, well, limited. In Razz it’s a little different though. True, just like in any other poker game you can still be kicked in the balls (which formed my new mantra “brick brick brick, really makes me sick” ;)), but it doesn’t hurt all that much. Why?

Because if you just stick to some BASIC game strategy (start with a decent hand, depending on the table 86low or better), you should come out on top most of the time. On another note: yes, Razz is more of an automatic game due to the limit structure and board information – on the other hand it’s a fun and challenging game as you gotta switch on your brain again (remember board information, discarded cards, etc)…so it’s quite a change and so far I’m enjoying it…

…needless to say that I had my fair share of unbelievable beats already (board lock, sixth and seventh street go brick brick (me) perfect perfect (opponent) etc), but I’m proud to say that despite all that, I didn’t have a single losing session (yet) as I was pretty far ahead already when such wicked beats occured…

…so for now…expect me to write about the all new Razztastic adventures happening in a country far far away from one-outer hold’em hell…. 😉

Bodog: Well, my hot-streak is definitely over. I mean, I’m not losing big or anything, but I’m losing (money). Played 9 HU SnGs after work, won 5 of them. Cool, so far…although I’m still thinking about the four matches I lost…1 was a wrong move by me…that’s cool…but the other three…well, they just sucked. Pushed with the best hand (postflop)..lost to a runner runner straight…pushed with the best hand after the turn…lost to a rivered flush…pushed with the best hand (postflop)…lost to a runner runner flush…and the last one was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen: I totally outplay my oponent and I’m up 1850/150…I look down at AK…I push…he calls…shows 77…the lucky sevens hold up. Now we’re at 1700/300…next hand I push him in again with Ax vs Kx…King hits on the turn…now we’re at 1400/600….next hand I push him in after the turn…he got the nut flush draw with one card to come…it comes….now we’re at 800/1200…next hand we get the money in again after the flop…my 99 is best…until he pulls the runner runner flush out of his ass on the turn and river…nice play, luckbox!

After footie training I fire up bodog again and as I lose 3 matches in short series I quit…best one was me holding A2…flop comes down A27 rainbow…I bet…he raises…I reraise…he pushes…hmm…I call…he holds? Yup, 22…nice that the case 2 on the flop could make it…

FullTilt: After the bad hold’em run it’s time for a change of scenery…so I fire up the donkey razz tables…weeeee….and boy can the donkeys get pissed off as soon as someone is really playing the game as it should be played (raising at every spot that justifies it)…took down some dough…nothing major…but at least I enjoyed it…

Fresh of yesterday’s win at Red Rock, Phil Gordon was playing this afternoon…at a .05/.10 NL Hold’em table…nice to see Phil donking it up with the guys and gals at this level!

And last but not least, german comedian Stefan Raab is setting up his second celebrity poker night, which will feature german celebrities and one online qualifier. In contrast to the first one this time he’s got PokerStars to join in this time. Freerolls are starting immediately, only available for german players though…hmm…maybe I’ll give it a shot if I find the time this weekend…(100.000$ prize pool doesn’t sound all that bad, although the chances are slim – first you gotta make through the online qualifiers 1:x, then you gotta beat the five other “donkeys” at the tv table…tough….)

Bodog: W, ooh you got Aces…nice – L, oooh you chased with 68o…nice – L, ooh the river brought you there…nice – L
FullTilt: Razz…groovy…start at the low levels, see how it goes. Bad…dropped some dough due to chasing donks…and who can blame ’em when a complete bet is so low.

Jump up two levels to 1/2…nice…jab jab…grabble…(A3)5…6….K…9….(A)…opponent (55)7…6…J…A…(3)…there’s goes the twenty…really nice to see that my luck today can be described with a single character: 0 🙁
That’s it for today…better luck to all of you…

Edit: …and as you might have guessed, my “losing tolerance” is really low these days 😉

…so hard, that it’s hard to focus on the game that is in progress. I fired up bodog yesterday eve and hit the HU tables once again. One match stood out and it was not due to the game itself, or the result (I won, duh!), but my opponent or his trash talk to be precise.

I sat down at the table and my opponent was already waiting. The first thing he types into the chatbox is “You can only win if you suckout”. *lol*. Now I’m usually not even starting to chat during the matches, I’m focussing on my game and that’s that. If my opponent starts a quick friendly chat (the “gl”…”how you doing” type of chat), I’m cool with that and I wish my opponent good luck before getting down to business. In this particular case I had to get involved though. I went ahead and told him that it’s probably the other way around and that I wished him good luck trying to beat me. He went into insta-trash-talk-mode and tried to get under my skin with a variation of (what he thought) cool ways to get your opponent on tilt.

He started of by telling me that he was Johnny Chan to me. My comeback line was that he should stop sniffing his insecticide infested orange. *lol*…that shut him up for about half a minute before he went on about telling stuff about my mom. Now I’m all for good fun, but that’s borderline, then again, he was probably a little immature boy trying to be cool. So I schooled him a little about mommies and how I’m going to tell his mom that there should be no more WSOP for him on tv. etc etc…so it was all funny as hell, at least to me. I finally busted him after around 30 hands and he told me about how I sucked and all…I just typed a quick reply telling him that I hope that the 5$ he just lost wasn’t his whole month’s allowance…*lol*…

Another cool match was against a familiar player. I had played with him before and he’s ultra-passive. So I opened the cage and let the aggression monkey out, raising EVERY pot, c-betting every flop and generally putting constant pressure on him. In the final hands he got lucky on me twice – the last hand was A9 vs A8…he hit his 8 on the turn and I couldn’t improve on the river. To my surprise he instantly started to talk shit in the chatbox about how he finally caught me (errm yeah, getting in behind and catching a lucky card is totally catching me, d’oh) and I thought “WTF?!” so I told him what I thought about that line and he went on to tell me how I was playing to aggressive and blablabla…I justed laughed and told him that his style sucks (sir fold-a-lot) and that he’s the one that needs to be lucky to win, not me and that I’m not too aggressive, after all I “only” had a look at 72% of all flops in that particular session (~ 400 hands) 😉

All in all a nice session yet again, won 15 out of 20 matches, should have been 17, but hey…can’t count on your opponent not hitting his (few) outs all the time, so ‘s all good…

After that bodog session I remembered that I still have some bonus clearing on FullTilt to do, so I fired up some CAP NL games for a quick hit and run session – which was successfull. Then I played some Stud and Razz to close out the night. I gotta say I’m now starting to grasp why many people like Razz so much (e.g. Jordan‘s “high-roller” razz experience), it’s basically one of the easiest games around. Hell, I like 7Stud, I like 7Stud H/L even more, so Razz is basically the logical next step…just low, no straights or flushes to look out for…sweet. I guess I’ll have a go on the lower limit tables in the near future, hoping not to go brick-brick-brick all the time 😉

After a long week and long day of “playing” with databases at work yesterday, it was time to hit the tables before heading out to a birthday party.

No long session but I managed to squeeze in 8 HU matches. 6Ws later and I’m out to party…

Forthcoming:

1. Post about today’s play.

2. Post about new opportunities to make some dough.

3. The first sponsored post in poker-tastic’s history.

4. Probably tomorrow: post about the last year (first year of poker-tastic in the online poker blogging realm)…yup, it’s almost a year since the first post on november 13th 2005

…so…stay tuned…