No joy in the token satellite. I can’t remember the last time I played one, but it was once again good fun, seeing donkeys sticking with the ever so popular motto “push early, push often (no matter what you’re holding)”…so we were down to the final table quite quickly. Sad part was that I was really card dead and sure enough, once I get a playable hand (AJs) someone is holding bullets – unfortunately I’m not Phil Hellmuth Jr., so I couldn’t dodge ’em 😉

Played 4 other SnGs afterwards, 1 win and 1 third place along with one bubble and one early exit, so not to shabby.

Side note: It would have been fun one way or another after the following hand evolved

1. You’re looking down at 66 in the BB
2. MP decides to min-raise
3. One caller in front of me, I call
4. For the rest of the hand see pic below…I guess I don’t need to explain that I let him hang himself 😉

There’s nothing like playing poker in a live environment. It would rock more though if you would get the hands to go along with that feeling. The only playable hands that I got prior to the final table were rare (QQ…which I layed down after a possible/obvious flush board presented itself, an AQ which I layed down to yet another possible/obvious flush board and AA – just when I needed it). So I made the final table again, but I was unable to take control of the table as I was on the shortstack and so the possibilities to push one of the pot were rare given the huge blinds. So my end came in 6th place when my KdQd received no help vs 1010…too bad…at least I made the final table again….

Sidenote:

1. Being on the shortstack – sucks
2. Sitting in the BB at the same time – sucks
3. Having three limpers in front of yourself – sucks
4. Looking down at AA and more than doubling up against the other shortstack to reach the final table – priceless 😉

No luckboxing for me though…early on I took down a nice pot when my pocket queens hit trips on the flop. Shortly thereafter I standard raise from EP with AQo…smokkee in LP pushes…now I’m faced with a decision – either fold…or give it my best shot, I put him on something like Ax/A10/AJ or a small to middle pair…so I call and he shows 1010…fair enough…Q on the flop…but there’s a 9 too…J on the turn….hmm…what might the river bring? Yup, a King giving him the nut straight…dang…and I’m down to 720 in chips…

A few hands later I pick up AKo in EP…I push….smokkee is nice enough to call me with AJo…K on the flop…a little scary that he’s holding the Ac…but this time there are “only” three clubs on the board and I’m back in the game. Then I’m literally card dead…and when I’m down to around 800 chips again I reraise All-In after a standard raise of the current chipleader (dsheep)…he calls…my QhJh vs his K10o…King on the flop and I’m out in 38 of 66 🙁
Ah well…had my fun, had the chance to chat with the guys again, so I’m not too frustrated…

Sidenotes:

1. Aces seen at my table – 3 times
2. Aces cracked by smaller pocket pair – 2 times
3. Aces holding up vs KK – 1 time; in this very hand I should have played my 35o, lol, flop A35…turn blank…river 3…man, that would have been the bad beat of the year 😉
4. Times Wil busted with KK – in this tourney: once; recently: 3 times if I’m not mistaken…ouch….

First of all let’s do the pimpin: Just in time, too…tomorrow evening/night is the next DADI event…DADI 6, Pot Limit Hold’em…if you’ve got the time, play it! I’m not sure if I’m going to make it, the starting time of 10pm (= 4am over here) is a little bit late…so don’t be disappointed if I’m not there…all useful infos in the pic below…

After that is out of the way let me make a request:

I’m an avid reader of many, many poker blogs and usually I’m an avid commenter, too. But some blogs don’t allow me, or many others for that matter, to comment at all. Why? Because the comments are only open to users of the blogger platform. Well, some of you might say that I should just get a blogger account and that’s that – I need to disagree here as I don’t want to setup a empty/fake site just for commenting on other blogs, especially as people won’t find anything useful there and I like to have a link to my site if I comment somewhere (I don’t care about PR or whatever on this site, it’s my passion and not a business site, so what it comes down to is – if I comment, ppl should be able to find my site.)

Why do I even care? Because it sucks that you’re reading good stuff about strategy, disappointments and big achievements (i.e. Hoyazo aka HammerPlayer winning the 40k on Party, etc) and you can’t give your 0.02$ or congratulate the person…so please, do as Chuck says:

Not sure if Chuck is talking about you? Some blogs immediately come to mind and there are many that I’m too lazy to single out atm, you know who you are…

…some blogs excluding non-blogger broggers:

• Hammer Player’s Poker Blog (Hoyazo)
• Garthmeister J’s Discofinery (Garthmeister)
• Pot Commited (change100)
• 100-2-Infinity (TraumaPoker)
• Weak Player (WeakPlayer)
• HellaHoldem (Shelly)
• Smokkee (Smokkee)
• The Randomness of Hoff (iamhoff)
• goberude (DuggleBogey)
• etc etc

Edit: Alright, I give up – if you find new comments on your blog which originate from ingoalscommentaccount.blogspot.com you know who they’re from 😉

The offline frustration today is totally unrelated to poker: my footie team had the chance to win the championship this year, but we were at the mercy of our opponents as we didn’t have a match today, but they did (we had already played our final match last thursday)…the scenario was clear: the lose, we’re the champions, the draw or win and they’re the champions…what happened? They played 3-3 and are the champions…which leaves a bitter taste in our mouths…

1. Our Opponent – Games played: 24, 17W, 5D, 2L, 74:21 goals – 56 Points
2. We – Games played: 24, 17W, 5D, 2L, 74:24 goals – 56 Points

🙁

So they go up to the next higher league and we have to play two matches, which we need to win to go up, too. First an eliminator against another league on the same level (Kreisliga B), then against the team from the higher league (Kreisliga A) which is next to last in that league. Matches scheduled for tuesday and saturday…wish us luck…

After that frustration I fired up PokerStars and entered the 3$ rebuy to the $1.000.000…no joy, so I close Stars and head over to FullTilt. First SnG, first win. Second SnG, 3rd place. Third SnG 6th place – end of the ITM series. So I step up a level and try my luck…and I win! The decisive hand was a min raise of my opponent heads up…I look down at A2 and I’ll take a flop with that…flop comes A22…hehe…he doubles me up with his AK and I’m in control. The end comes in the next hand…nice! I’m starting to get tired, so I head down a level again to play a final SnG…we’re down to 4 handed and I’m a slight chipleader (44xx to 43xx to 2.x k to 2.x k) one of the smaller stacks raises to 4xBB…the other “big stack” calls…I push to 2k…he ponders and ponders….calls…flop comes 7-3-9 rainbow…he checks…I push….he goes into the tank for a little eternity and calls…he shows Kc7c…it holds up and I’m crippled…I congratulate him on his nice play…after all they were s00ted…so why complain…before I go into the chat and blog rant mode I log off and remind myself of one thing: if you play at the donkey levels it’s inevitable…there will be donkeys making bad decisions and hitting, so move along… 😉

So, we found our way to the next home game tonight…bbq followed by a nice poker session. We played our regular NL HE tournament and with 12 players showing up, we split up to two tables of 6 players. Shorthanded play, not bad. I played three hands in the whole tourney…I was ahead in all three hands and suffered one junk kicking after the next. Not a single win and I’m ahead at all times until the turn/river….bad luck describes it best, I guess…

Hand 1:

A8 MP, raise preflop…one caller…flop 8-10-Q rainbow…I lead out and bet half the pot…call..turn is blank…I lead out and bet half the pot…call…river 9…I lead out and bet half the pot…call…opponent shows: 67o…straight….nice…NOT

Hand 2:

910s…I bet preflop…one caller…flop comes down A910…I lead out again…call…turn A…now I’m worried…but I can’t lay this down, I need to bet to find out if he’s got the Ace…call…river is blank…now I check and he bets about 1/8th of the pot…easy call…sure enough he shows A3o…nice…NOT

Now I’m shortstacked (around 1/3 of my starting stack) and I’m steaming…next hand I’m in the BB…

Hand 3:

I look down at my cards and find KK…nice 🙂 …I wait to see what happens and the Button calls, the SB calls…it’s on me and I raise All-In…Button ponders and ponders and calls…SB folds…he shows: A8o….now if an Ace comes down I won’t be disappointed, after all this is poker…it can happen…but that’s not the way it or me is going down:

Flop: 6-7-10…turn 10…river: 9…two pair kings and tens loses to straight…and I’m out of the tourney….

Wow, how unlucky can you be? Damn! Ah well…at least I finished 2nd in the side game which was played parallel to the final table of the main tourney, so I’m only slightly down for the night (and still way ahead overall), but it still hurts to go out early without doing anything wrong (?!)…ahead till the turn/river and then no joy – side note: I lost the final hand of the sidegame QJ vs 10-8, flop and turn are blank…river 8 and IGHN…I guess it just wasn’t my night… 😉

On the bright side there’s always another time to play and so I won’t lose any sleep about my early exit tonight…

1. Enter a limit Stud MTT 2.5h prior to the WWdN Ingoal Invitational
2. Hang in there for slightly over 3 hours
3. Run your hole Aces into rolled up Kings
4. Bust out in the process
5. Finish 20th of 296 for a huge ( 😉 ) profit of 1.26$ 🙂

Today I realized that I’m caught in low limit nirvana, the wasteland, nowhere, whatever you would like to call it. At the limits I’m currently playing (not higher than .25/.50) there are some good players (and I would consider myself one of those), but mostly mediocre to bad players.

Good stuff if and only if you can take full advantage of it and recently I can’t – don’t get me wrong: if you substract variance I’m a winning player and you shouldn’t count short term results anyway, so it’s all good – but still: playing at those levels keeps me in a endless loop of winning and losing (mostly on bad beats or at least getting drawn out with incorrect odds) and there’s not much I can do.

How should I put it?! Playing at those levels takes away some of your best options. You can wait and wait for monster hands and then bet the living jebus out of them, just to see them win in some cases or get a horrible beat. Nothing much in between. Example: one of the precious “tools” of poker is the bluff, right? The catch: at the levels I’m playing there’s a deadly mix of players involved in almost every hand I play – the majority will call you no matter what, even with fourth pair on a straight-, flush- or any scary-board in general…the good ol’ “I don’t believe you”, “I’ll be the sheriff this round, I can’t let anyone bluff me!”, “I wanna see that” attitude…so the bluff is mostly out of the picture (unless I’m heads up with a player which has proven his/her ability to laydown a hand – after all that’s one of the reasons why you keep book, right?). So what to do, what to do?

Two possibilities:

1. Move up in limits. That’s no guarantee for a donkey free zone though and with my current bankroll constraints it’s basically out of the picture – no point in trying to survive on a short short roll, it would be the recipe for destruction.
2. Stay at the same level and deal with the daily hurting involved in grinding it out.

So, I’m basically stuck…damn! I guess I’ll schedule poker free days from now on to alleviate the pain…I guess a titanium cup won’t hurt either, so I’m ordering one tomorrow 😉

Today’s results: Some success at FullTilt: PLO8b HU – won, SnG – ITM, some success at PokerStars: cash games, slightly up…