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…

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….” 🙁

I made a quick exit in the BloggerPods, I’m not big on excuses, but I’m just saying that I was a little bit busy watching the EPT Germany Final table…so I didn’t mind busting early…

Thanks going out to Mike from PokerOnAMac.com for hosting the tourney, appreciated…back to EPTLive.com to watch the final four, our own Sebastian “MiamiVice” Ruthenberg from Luckbox.de is the current chipleader after winning a monster-pot with trip eights…

Edit: Ouch…Miami self-imploded down to three-handed…A5 vs KK…he had outs…but why mess with the other big stack and not sitout and wait for the shorty to bust…damn…that was one costly hand (at least 160k Euro (difference between 2nd and 3rd))… 🙁

Well, the first ever EPT Germany started yesterday and Jan over at PokerStarsblog.de is doing the coverage (in german). For all fans around the world PokerStars is doing a little something that is even better than liveblogging though…can you say live webcast!!!

Webcasts will be running both saturday and sunday and will be available with german and english commentary…check EPTLIVE.com !!!