Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Damn it! Now that’s a hell of a start, lol. Starting already. I can’t catch a god-damn hand. Run run run. (Thanks Tony for lending me those words).

Well, what a crappy session at Full Tilt. Un-friggin-believable. I sit down at a shorthanded cap NL game as there was no full ring going. First hand I turn the nut flush (holding QhJh)…we push it all-in (CAP) and he shows Quads friggin Aces. Nice. I bounce all around the room for another twenty minutes, before I decide to leave, slightly down. I’m on the lookout for another game and I think it’s a good idea to fire up some Stud. Haven’t played that in a while and a while back I considered it to be my best game (as there’s so much information available).

So…I hit the table hard and everything is working, apart from one thing: I can’t win a friggin pot. Chaser #1 hits on 6th and 7th street like it was nothing. Runner runner flush to beat my straight. Runner runner straight to bust my two pair. Hell, even runner runner boat to beat my boat. That made me so fuckin mad that I only had two options:

1. Stay and donk off all my remaining chips.

2. Leave and curse the fuck out of all the lucky sobs catching all day against me – not in the pokerrroom, but on here. And so that’s what I did.

This post has been brought to you by the letter “L” – L for lucky chasing runner runner catching scumbacks taking my money 😉

That’s all…I’m out…weekend over…

…so I was hitting the tables tonight. I started the session with some donk-a-licious CAP NL25 and I was all over the place. Then the shit turned sour and I should have left, but I didn’t. So, I gave back all my winnings and then some. How often can you run pocket tens into pocket aces? Twice. Nice. Not!

Then I thought it would be a good idea to get my hands on a token…not such a good idea either. I had totally forgotten how long ass and boring these regular things (6+.6) are..should have played a turbo I guess. Didn’t do all that bad until the blinds went up and it was bubble time…card dead describes it best so I was literally left with two options: a) push with one of the next hands which would preferably be something at least resembling a good starting hand or b) get blinded out in a hurry. So I push within the next few hands and I even held the best hand…until the river…so I bubbled. Not good.

Off to bodog and I’m hitting like crazy…first two SnGs bring a win and a third place finish. I guess I should have left with a smile, but didn’t and promptly crapped my way out of the next two. That’s enough for the night…at least I’m still up a little.

Some interesting “facts/stats” of the night:

Times I ran pocket tens into pocket aces: 2

Times I sucked out with the pocket tens: 0

Times I folded quads preflop: 1

Times I ran my boat into quads: 1

Edit: Just went back to bodog, just didn’t feel like sleeping yet, so I fired up some Heads-Up matches…2 played…2 won…thank you very much. I guess this could be a new source of income…after all a HU is basically 50/50…although I see myself having an edge on most of the donkeys there, so it’s basically better than even money and the thing is much less time consuming than the regular SnGs…hmm…we’ll see…

Yesterday we finally made it to the live tables again. It was really fun to hang out with the guys and the chipslinging and card-flinging was in full effect all night…I actually made my way home at close to 5am. That was the joy part…the no joy part was evolving in the games itself…

I chipped up early when I flopped a straight, which held up. From there on it was a grind as my chip-stack went on a roller coaster ride…up…and down…and up…and down…and down and down…it was not so much my bad cards (I actually held AA, KK, 1010, 99, 88 and 66 throughout the evening, but couldn’t capitalize on most of the hands as my opponents had next to nothing….and apart from those hands the old “keep missing flop”-dilemma was in full effect)…

In the end my exit was pretty cool and pretty fucked up at the same time: I look down at Q9 s0000ted…I’m UTG and push my remaining stack in the middle and the table goes fold, fold, hmmm….call…he shows 10c8c….alrighty then…double me up baby…flop Jc9c7c…I push the chips to my opponent and stand up as a meaningless queen hits the turn…

Then it was sidegame time and some weird hands happened to me again…let’s just say that the timing of these hands was not in my favour….I hold 8h9h…flop comes QA9…heads up pot…my opponent, who had min-raised preflop, checks…now I’m thinking…probably AK/AQ in his hand…if I catch another nine I’m probably stacking him…turn 9…he checks I bet he calls…river x…he pushes…now he’s either done a nice slowplay and my range I put him on was wrong or I got him…as the pot is laying me over 3:1 anyway I have to call…he shows QQ for the boat…

After that sidegame was done we played yet another one…and damn me, one-card-straights are ugly, especially if they’re gutshots and yes, the seemed to come EVERY time yesterday…I flop Kings up fire…call…turn makes the straight…unlucky me…I flop pair of Queens…fire..call…turn gives me queens up…fire…call…river makes the straight…hmm…another three-outer…boom! Headshot!…

Oh well…at least I had a great time 🙂

…spent quite some time at bodog again today, grinding it out in the SnGs and throwing in a little NL25 action to spice things up. Played 8 SnGs today mostly two at once, it’s just too damn boring just playing one and boredom sometimes leads to stupid (action hungry) action which I like to avoid these days. Play wasn’t great at the tables, nothing new there, and I restrained myself from doing stupid things, mostly…one time I pushed my QQ into Ace rag although an Ace hit the flop – should have known better, but hey…it happens.

So, I cashed in 6 out of 8, but only taking down one win. I blame it mostly on the bad timing on some of the hands: today I didn’t only play and write down user notes on tendencies and stuff, but I also kept track of some of the usual situations that come up during a session, namely coinflips and their result and “coolers” – now I use the word cooler loosely, I mean it’s definitely a cooler when you’re Daniel Negreanu holding 66 against Gus Hansen’s 55 on High Stakes Poker (Season 2, Episode 11) and the flop comes down 965…and then the turn is another 5 and you lose to the tune of 300.000$ out of your own pocket, so excuse that I use the term “cooler” here at all (after all I’m playing LOW limits), it’s just that I fell in love with the expression as it totally fits when it comes down to certain situations (you are playing Fold’em for half an hour as you can’t even get SMTL or the hammer, left alone a “real hand”, so you get dealt AQ, AJ or whatever and every friggin time someone is holding a stronger ace).

So the stats for the two facts would be:

1. Coinflips played: 2, won: 2, 99 vs AK flopped a set, AK vs 44 hit a King

2. “Coolers”: AJs vs AQ, AQs vs AKo, A10 vs A6…and you guessed it, I didn’t get lucky on any of them and even got unlucky on the last one (board A-10-6, turn blank, river 6)

So all in all I almost doubled my deposit so far and I’m on my way of getting to the 200 bodog points, which will result in 900 PSO points soon enough…nice.

…it’s unbelievable how many hands can go absolutely wrong. I mean we all go through the motion and run bad sometime, but today’s SnGs just destroyed me. The only exception was one of the early one where I took down 2nd place, but apart from that one junk kicking, suck/resuck, suckout or cooler after another…unreal. My personal favourite hands tonight where the following two:

1. (I was too slow to do a screengrab, so here’s the lowdown) KQs in LP, I pop it up preflop, one caller, flop comes down J-10-4 rainbow. Caller in EP bets half the pot, now I’ve got to options: call or raise…I decided to go with the raise, because even if he has TPTK, I still got 13 outs (3K, 3Q, 4T, 3A) and he needs to make a tough call…so I push and he calls…well…turn is a lovely A…now he’s dead to one of the remaining two Aces and three Jacks. Ace on the river. Yuck! After the hand I can’t see a way I can get away from the hand, if I only smooth-call the flop the Ace hit’s the river and there’s no way in hell I can lay it down there. So the only true option would have been to fold after the flop came down, which I didn’t like: I already commited 20% of my stack, I’m in the SnG to win…

So that one went bad…dog preflop, lots of chances on the flop, golden on the turn, shit hit the fan on the river. That’s the way it is sometime. Made a nice comeback after that, but lost a random hand shortly after that to go out as the bubble boy. Annoying.

2. This one is so good it makes you wanna puke, at least it made me almost lose it. How the fuck can this donk call on the flop with top pair no kicker*? What made it even better is that this was the very first hand of the SnG, so can anyone tell me why he feels he needs to call of his stack there? Even better, after the hand he tries to lecture me about how badly I played the hand – damn he’s lucky that the “wireless-slap-down” (TM) wasn’t invented yet.

* after all he runner-runnered a better boat than mine so he’s a genius. Wait, not really. I just told him that he’s a fish and that at least the dough I invested was a good investment as it was material for yet another bad beat post – that and that he had every right to call in that spot, after all his TPNK was s0000ted 😉

So anyway, enough of the rant, if you come across the player x (name removed, after all there’s more than enough fish around bodog, so no point in even going after such a low limit donk), feel free to skin him, he’s a stuck-up, arrogant donkfish, but beware of his unbelievable vaccum-like suckout powers… 🙂

After that lousy shit in SnG after SnG I thought I’d give NL25 another whirl and promptly doubled up…so I’m still up for the session, which is nice, but money can’t buy back the nerves I lose due to such donkeys stealing my money and time…

Yes, tonight the poker preacher, aka me, myself and I, held court on bodog’s low limit SnGs. Yes, I signed up with bodog yesterday and no, I didn’t sign up because of mr. WSOP Champion 2006 Jamie Gold. I signed up because I wanted to continue my bonus hunt and bodog seemed like a fine deal. As my favourite online site for free poker gifts doesn’t have a deal with bodog atm I had to look around for another way to get something extra. So I fired up PokerSourceOnline (feel free to use referral code Ingoal if you want to sign up with them) and yup, they’ve got bodog in there list.

So I opened an account and started by depositing some dough – which in term lead to a nice middle in the night phone call to Neteller as I hadn’t confirmed my identity before. Amazing that people are working 24/7 in those call centers. Even more amazing that they have interpreters around, too. Not that I really need one, but the automated phone system said that they had german speaking staff members so I asked for one. Instead of a german speaking staff member I had an english girl plus an interpreter in the line, which was quite funny 🙂

But back on topic. I only played a few minutes as it was really early, yet again, and so tonight was the real first session. I played 6 SnGs and two tabled some NL10, which was fun, although I made a tough laydown which turned out to be a bad one – QQ in the hole, flop is A73 rainbow, I lead out to see where I’m at two callers, turn is another A, I check, one player bets, the other raises. Now I gotta give one of them the Ace, at least that’s what I did. So they push each other all-in on the river and what do they show? 88 and JJ…damn, that would have been a nice pot in that spot.

But back to the SnGs, I realize pretty quickly that the easiest way to make some dough was to wait for monster hands and push with them. You wouldn’t even believe how many times I got called. In return you wouldn’t believe how often I got sucked out on in the later stages (3 handed). But that’s alright, it happens and that’s why poker is fun. You win some, you lose some. But then something happened in the last SnG that just made me go off (a little): I didn’t curse noone out or nothing, I just tried to educate some people – hence the title: the poker preacher 😉

The situation: I hold two pair in the early stages of the SnG and the board is pretty scareless for me so I bet all the way. The only hand that could beat my top two pair would be 9-10 for a gutshot. Sure enough the dude calling off half his stack was holding just that to make him the straight on the river. Alrighty, you made a “bad play” and it payed off – more power to you. But then it happened, yet again: a player at the table goes ahead and tells him what a “nice hand” that was. Excuse me? Let me get one thing out of the way first: we all know that “nice hand” (nh) and “good game” (gg) are overly used these days – because if people were honest they wouldn’t say it all the time, as there’s no need to overuse it, or am I off on this one? But even knowing that, I still can’t understand why people are saying “nh”, “well played”, “wow, …”, “whatever, you’re so groovy,…” on such hands. What’s the point? If I lose a monster vs monster hand (e.g. Kings Full vs Quad Kings, like it happened in one of the SnGs tonight) or I lose to a good hand, because I didn’t believe him/her or because I couldn’t laydown my own (good) hand, then I’m more than happy to say “nh” and I might even add a “(very) well played” if that was the case in the hand. But on such miracle/suckout/draw with incorrect odds/… hands I refuse to say “nh/…”.

Why? Because I don’t like to encourage people to play that way. I mean it’s alrighty to play happy go lucky and neither should or can you assume that everybody (or even anybody at any given table) is playing the game “correctly”, but that still doesn’t mean that everybody needs to get sucked into the “fake poker world”. I mean, new(er) players are brought into the game watching the WSOP, the WPT or poker shows like High Stakes Poker, which is fine, but an edited poker format which only shows “interesting hands” (big bluffs, monster pots, etc) is not the real deal. Why do some players on those shows play they way they play in some of the hands they show you? It might be because the know each other so well, because their observations about the play that session/night/day justifies it, because they know that the other player(s) can laydown a hand (especially out of position), etc. Information is key and knowing basic stuff like outs, pot odds, etc is the only way to make money in the long run. There’s no game without the occasional suckout (even when “perfect players” square off), but don’t let yourself be fooled by such a miracle hand. Yes, you made money with it this time, but x out of 100 times you will lose money with it. Think about it! Think!
So those new players (although I wouln’t want to exclude all the “oldtimers” who still play like shit and get payed off by magic cards sometimes) might not even know what they’re doing “wrong” – which explains why some people are so quickly offended once any player at the table says something about the miracle card or how bad they played that hand, although it’s safe to assume that many of those are just dickheads anyway who feel they’re entitled to win that hand because they made such a “brilliant call/bet”.

Which brings me back to the “poker preacher” title: Although I know that it’s mostly a waste of time trying to educate even one single player at a table at any given time, as most feel that you’re being a “wise-ass” or that they’re soooo good and/or better than you anyway, it might still be worth the time in the long run. I know, some of you might say that it’s not worth the hassle and that educating the “fish” might be a bad move as it’ll be more difficult to take their money and I hear you, but I still think that if the level of play improved just a little bit for everybody, there would still be more than enough dough to pick up, with (a little) less nerve-wrecking junk-kickings 😉
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, after all my regular readership includes many good and even some great poker players, who are more than aware of this and much more, and who are trying to both spread the good word and elevate the level of the game at the same time, but it’s what was on my mind tonight and a good topic to blog about. So excuse my long ass sentences, feel free to add your own perspective about this whole thing and remember: educating even a single player might prove to save YOU personally money, if you happen to cross his/her path, by letting him/her laydown a hand and not outdraw you with incorrect odds 😉

…or at least most of it. Haven’t had such a rollercoaster session before in my “poker career”. As I said in an earlier post I moved most of my play to WPX, at least for now, as I really want to see how much the juice was really impacting my limited bankroll. So the majority of all events took place there today. Sidenote: I’m taking extended notes on all activities on all poker rooms, but I just noticed today that my notes were incomplete, so it’s nearly impossible for me to calculate all the juice I payed on rooms other than WPX. So from this day forward the notes are going to be extended by some more columns. Why? Because I think that what keeps me down (apart from the fact that my roll is pretty limited) is the juice. Given the usual limits I play (as I don’t play cash games as much as I used to, I often play NL10 or NL25, which equals .05/.10 or .10/.25 blinds), so I gotta stay ahead of the rake and a “normal” small winning rate is not nearly enough to move up. So I’m really forward to the final rake stats once I’ve got the first month of play down at WPX. It could be quite a revelation and for now I’ll keep attacking the cash games a little more often as the SnG suckouts against all those donks keep putting me down (not money-wise, but mentally)…

The session included:

1. Stacking some random fools in two different cash games…no, your second pair weak ass kicker is no g00t…even if they were s000000ted 😉

2. Getting hit by suckout after suckout in the SnGs…unbelievable with what crap people are willing to call off their whole stack, without any need to do so either, but that’s besides the point. The suckouts included: runner runner flush, runner straight, two outer on the river, three outer on the river, counterfeit two pair on the river (worse kicker for me with my small pair of course), Ace baby rivering aces up against my big ace, the usual cold-deck flush vs flush, rivered boat over boat. Nice to have all those things in a span of maybe 90-100 hands. At least I won some coinflips, heehaaw!

3. Having to deal with some jerk-heads calling player names because they alarmed support – there were some hungarian dudes at the table chatting in hungarian – the player objected and they didn’t listen. This fool then went ahead and tried to put him and others (including me) on bullshit-infected-tilt, which didn’t work of course. So the good ol’ mute switch got flipped and it was all peace and quiet again…

After the up and down I spotted another triple shootout on Stars, so I jumped in…big mistake once again. I’m not going to play one again, ever. While the format of shorthanded tables is groovy and all, I just can’t catch a little momentum. Isn’t the old rule that you should only hit the flop 1 out of 3 times? Not in this ones…or I’m the problem, my 1 out of 3 coincides with at least one other player at all times, needless to say that if I flop TP he will def have his TP+kicker playing, etc. So FUCK YOU triple shootout!

Playing while drunk can really be fun, although it still hurts if you lose with Ax vs Kx three times in a row, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Friday started out with some SnGs at FullTilt and trying to catch up with all the revealing trip reports of all those in attendance of the WPBT Summer Classic. Man, I really really wanted to be there, but it wasn’t to be. Maybe next year when I’m finally done with my degree at university.

So we headed to a mate’s birthday (the host of our regular home game) and we basically had no intention to play any poker 😉 but in the end it was the good ol’ drunk early morning game. I was able to finish ITM in the first one, then quickly donked out of the second one. In the third one I was the monster chip leader at one point – 3000 chips were in play and I held around 2200 of them. Then the already mentioned three in a row Ax vs Kx hands happened: I called a double-All-In with my Ace rag and one of the other players almost tripled up. Then we were All-In again, same result. Then again and it was over with. Let’s just say that neither luck nor concentration was on my side – we were approaching 8am (!) and were slightly buzzed up to say the least. Come next friday we’ll play our regular home game again, which brings me to the next topic…

…we talked about finally getting a (semi-) decent poker table for our game as we were playing on a regular table with some felt thrown over it, which is kind of ugly. So I ordered one tonight, a foldable one, a true bargain considering the regular listings around here. I’m really looking forward to play at a real table.
On saturday, after the ultra-relaxing (note: lie) 2 hours of sleep on the couch I already needed to get up again as I was picked up at 10:30am to play a private footie (that’s soccer for the americans) tourney which involves drinking, too. Well, it basically revolves around drinking…nothing like getting your buzz on again easily with a nice cool beer. Play and drank the day away and when I finally made it home at 9pm I was so knackered that I almost fell asleep on the spot. Then I remembered that I should take a shower and treat my sunburn from drinking and playing footie in the sun all day. Almost needless to say that I was well awake again after the shower, so I watch a movie and at midnight I was finally going to bed…just to get up again at 9am today (sunday) to help clean up the location of our tourney.

So some live poker friday, no poker on saturday and only one SnGs on Party – a one shorthanded table donkfest which I won after I successfully trapped two donks in a row (nice to flop or turn the boat, seeing your opponent chasing the useless flush and pushing when it hits: priceless). Apart from that I was looking around at FullTilt and PokerStars and unbelievable how many players turned out to play the monster seat tourneys (FTP: 100 seats, Stars: 150 guaranteed) tonight. Good thing that you don’t need to win those things to earn a seat, but by looking at the numbers I would say that the guy/gal who wins the one on Stars should save some himself some time and stay at home – after beating a field of 7737 (s)he should have used his/her luck for the whole year, so no point in showing up in the main event 😉

Alrighty…enough babbling for tonight…I should catch some sleep anyway after this quite exhausting weekend, especially considering that I’ve got a dentist appointment tomorrow…

So I decided to try the latest PokerSavvy (aff) promotion and signed up for Mansion Poker. Deposited some dough and jumped right into the first SnG (what else is new?). The play dragged on and once again people were calling stuff down like crazy, so I decided to pop it up preflop whenever I held something decent and pound those suckers at every chance after the flop. It worked quite well and I was in a comfortable chiplead, then I was gone in fourth place after getting kicked in the junk three friggin times within two orbits…

1. KK vs J2o, backdoor four flush board goodness

2. KK vs J10s, turned flush goodness

3. A10o vs Q9s, I raised to 6xBB preflop…flop comes down 95A…I push…he calls…just to turn a 9 against me…

Well done there once again. So I played one friggin SnG and I could already rip some of their players’ throat out for playing like friggin retarded half-monkeydonks and having the guts to trash talk after their crappy play…side note: and yes, one single player, probably both the dumbest donkey and the luckiest git I’ve ever seen, sucked out on me in all three hands… (his screen-name is millar33 so beware of him, he must have interbreed CJ’s luckbox with the “Back from the future” home fusion generator…)

I’m going to cool down now and come back with a vengeance later 😉

Edit: To hell with cooling down, I hit the cash tables and what would you think who sat down a few minutes in? Yes, Mr. Suckout himself. I don’t want to get to deep into it, but let’s just say his suckout are limited to SnGs and/or very short-term as I stacked him three times within 20 minutes 🙂

…by not telling some random “bad beat” stories 🙂

All I’m going to say about today’s sessions at PokerStars, Full Tilt and Party is: …at least they were s00ted…nice call sirs… 😉