Imagine the following setup: You’re playing a five handed SnG. Top two ITM. Payout is 70/30.

You’re playing in that SnG and it’s obvious that second place isn’t really what you’re gunning for, first is what it’s all about. The first player is eliminated so you’re down to four handed. Then you look down at Aces. You raise, get reraise and reraised. You sit there with a big grin. You push and both players call. They show KK and 88…and your rockets hold up. You’re ITM with a 3:1 chiplead. What better spot to be in…and now, the jokester across from you is starting his trash talk how he’s going to take you down, yadda yadda. You sit there and laugh…you tell him that the only way he can win is if he get’s lucky, so let the cards speak and speak they do. Jab and grabble a little and soon enough he pushes preflop on the button…hehe…I got queens baby. Instacall…what does he show? 62o…alrighty…flop 6xx turn x river 6. Thank you very much. Yuck. A few hands later he does the same shit again. This time you don’t have such a monster, but you think he’s on a bullshit move, so you call with K9 s00ted. He shows Q2o. Errm yeah part #2…flop? QQJ…errm yeah turn no ten…river…no ten…and you’re out in second. Unbelievable.
After that I logged out of WPX immediately, because I didn’t want to throw away money as I was slightly annoyed, to say the least. I jumped over to PokerStars and played some headsup. Two easy Ws. Gotta love people who are transparent as glass. Raise: never, unless monster preflop. Bet: at least TP. Rest: check. That play is going to get you far boys, well, not really.

After those Ws, I jumped into a six handed SnG and it was a true drag. Doubled up early on, card dead after that. When I finally decide to take a stand preflop four handed (KQo UTG) the BB wakes up with AK…no help for me…and I’m out in 4th after 50 minutes of play. Now that’s double double -ev…I’m outta here…

Today I decided to redeposit with WorldPokerExchange. To my surprise the traffic level is still low and I really can’t figure it out. What would keep players from playing at a rakefree poker room? I really don’t know, maybe it’s the endless cycle of players signing up, then realizing that traffic is low, then leaving again…rinse repeat. I’m going to hang around for a while, like I did last year, as you just can’t beat rakefree, especially if you play a shitload of SnGs. Just think about it…if I play 10 HU SnGs per day, it’s 2,5$/5$/10$ juice (5$/10$/20$ SnGs)…per day. That is pretty hard to overcome, especially if you suffer from suckoutitis or riveritis 😉

After moneying two out of four SnGs, I decided to give PokerStars another spin, can’t be that unlucky all the time and indeed I hit it pretty good early on in my first HU match. Then I get rivered a few times again, or this match would have been over already, but still, I’ve got my opponent down to 640 and after (s)he minraises preflop we see a flop of AJ4 with two spades…bet raise raise raise raise call…and I’m way ahead against QJo no spade just like me…then the usual happens…

And we’re almost back to square one. Some chasing later I’ve got him/her down to about 500 again. This time we get it in again with TP vs SP…and lo and behold…my TP stands up and I score the W. Did it feel good, yeah, but I still don’t feel like playing another match tonight…not in the mood to get unlucky and logoff with a bad feeling…so I’ll leave it at that for tonight…

…as for headsup…that’s the only thing that annoys me a little when it comes to WPX…they don’t have HU tables…oh well…at least they’ve got five handed SnG…talk about playing short handed, good stuff…top two ITM…I guess those will be my feeding grounds for the next couple of weeks…

After yesterday’s bad run in the live game I wasn’t even going to play today, to hell with it, just a quick game 😉

I almost regretted it immediately as I took charge of the SnG table on WPX, just to have my straight cracked by a boat on the river, followed by my boat getting cracked by quads on the river in the very next hand. Nice…damn it!

So I left WPX and took a seat at a HU SnG on bodog. 14 minutes and I walk away victorious. Nice…although I almost lost it during the match…times I had Aces and AK sooted: once each, back to back…won a whoopin SB and a BB (which were rather small at that point)…times I ran my top pair into Aces: once…it cost me the chiplead and I had to fight back…which I did…so the 0 for 1 in coinflips (77 vs AQ) didn’t matter in the end…at least I can end the night on a high note…let’s see what the poker gods have in store for me tomorrow….

Well, what can I say, I’m not doing good in the nine promotion so far. I’m not even half way through the points and all the suckouts and the bad run in the other side games (especially guts) is really taking it’s toll – half the bankroll gone and half my nerves with it. It’s just making me sick how unlucky I get in some of those pots, especially in guts again…I’m holding the nut straight in a monster pot, someone has three of a kind…I’m holding the nut straight again in a monster pot, someone has a straight flush…this is so sick – even winning one of these pots would have brought me right back to life, but no such joy. Then I get stacked in the ring games by a chaser with one card to come and I call it a day over at nine. Maybe tomorrow will bring me some better luck.

Off to WPX I go to play some SnGs. Same game, same shit, same results. Chasing M*****fuckers catching every time. So I call it quits there too and head over to Full Tilt.

At least some went my way there as I was able to stack some people who just couldn’t let go of their TPTK/TPSK. A HORSE SnG to finish the session and I hit brick city in Razz, then Stud H/L and finally in Omaha to seal the deal.

So I’m done for the day, at least I had some fun watching the latest tuff_fish (party poker) monster “shows”…man, tony just keeps crackin me up – even when I’m running bad 🙂

Sick, sick sick sick. No, not the cards or that they don’t fall my way or anything, nope. I’m sick, sick as a dog. I can’t even remember the last time I was this sick, coughing, sneezing
and snoting like crazy – I guess it’s due to the fact that I don’t get sick very often (a cold every two years or something and that’s about it). So not too much poker played in the last few days.

Today was the first day I felt like I could get some hands in again though. Bad idea. You shouldn’t be playing if…

…you’re misreading the board on a consistent basis (yay I got two pair, wait, no I got one pair, d’oh)! This usually doesn’t happen to me, so I can attribute that + my impatience at the table to my cold + headache…so I’m not going to throw more money into the fish tank today. Hope I’ll be back in better shape, both physically and hence mentally, soonish.

…not much going my way today. Too bad, boohoo…I spare you the rant and leave you with my final hand of the night…

No, I’m not dead…I just didn’t have that much time to really play a decent amount of poker over the last few days, so just a quick roundup will have to do, for now.

I continue to play most of my SnGs over at WPX and so far so good, I almost double my deposit, w00t. 100% rakeback helps, but it’s not just that. I like to play shorthanded SnGs, so WPX is a perfect fit as their shorthanded SnGs are really shorthanded – 5 players at the table, 2 ITM (70/30 cut). It took a while for me to adjust to the 10 hands/level structure (instead of the x minutes/level which is used by most other rooms), but now I enjoy it – in the beginning it’s easy, you get to be the BB twice per level, then after a few eliminations things are speeding up, which is a good thing. The highest (in game) levels I’ve personally seen thus far were 500/1k with a table full of rocks, usually the games are much faster though, especially if you’ve got dudes at the table who like to severely overbet the pot or outright push from EP with blinds of 10/15 – good idea donks…no…your pair of treys is not good there most of the times, duh ;)  One of the ups of playing that many SnGs in such a short amount of time is the biggest downside as well: you get to experience quite a decent number of junk-kickings – I have never ever lost such an amount of dominating hands in such a short period of time, but I didn’t let it get to me. Most of the times I was even able to come back despite being severely crippled by dominating hands (AQ vs A6, AK vs A3, etc etc, 80% favourite – runner runner straight, 73% favourite – runner runner flush, etc), so I can slowly but steadily see some major progress in my game: a few weeks ago I would have (tilt) pushed the next hand in order to end the SnG and/or donk off my chips in the very next SnG – now I can sit there, steam a little, but don’t cloud my judgement, which is really good to say 🙂
As the WSOP wasn’t on around here (and I was too cheap to cough up some bucks for the final table PPV) I relied on Pauly’s coverage along with updates from pokerwire. I couldn’t follow the last few hours as I was heading out to an interview for an internship (my last requirement prior to writing my diploma thesis), so I missed Jamie Gold taking down the win and 12 million. I’m hoping to get my hands on a recording of the final table once ESPN airs it, should be fun to watch. So, bye Joe Hachem, hello Jamie Gold – newest hot commodity of poker. I guess we’ll find out soon enough if the fact that yet another amateur won will bring us the next “boom” / “explosion” in poker…and I’m also wondering if bodog is going to market the shit out of this (which is almost certain) and if they can catch up in terms of traffic.
Over to Full Tilt: I received an email today that the stuff I’ve won in the WSOP Fantasy thing will be credited in points. Cool stuff, so there should be 2200 Points more sitting in my accont shortly – I had won 4th place in one of the early events which was good enough to win a FT baseball cap (which equals 2200 points). I guess I’ll be using those points for tournaments instead of the cap. As I finished in the top 20 of one of the freerolls during the fantasy promotion I had the chance to win a seat for the 2007 WSOP tonight…wasn’t meant to be. Started out good by busting some dudes, but then I pushed right into the nuts to lose half my stack (hammer flop 772 rainbow, I hold 1010 and push, one of the guys in LP calls, he shows 77…ouch). Then I lost some coinflips and I was gone – upside: I went with my gut feeling, made the correct reads, put the money in (way) ahead or at least even money (e.g. a player in EP overbets the pot by some hundred chips, I put him on a small pair…I push with AK…he shows 33…but I don’t improve) the cards just didn’t fall my way sometimes and while that would be awesome (cards falling your way all the time) it’s just not the reality, so I’m good.

Over to poker books: I finished reading the book of bluffs and while some stuff in there was obvious, some stuff just made me think a little more about certain situations and I think it helped my game – short term: check, long term: we’ll see about that, but I’m confident.

That’s all for now, time to catch some sleep before I have to get up for footie training in less than five hours from now, yikes! So I’m leaving you with two of my new/old favourite SnG/MTT mantras:

1. “You must be willing to die, in order to live.” (Amir Vahedi)

2. “The best you can do is get your money in the middle when you have the best hand and hope it holds up.” (unknown)

Today I was planning on doing a “little” server upgrade. So I go ahead and backup all the shit that’s sitting on the server (which is quite a lot of stuff) using both self-engineered linux script goodness and the integrated backup solution of my server-admin-tool of choice (plesk 8 ).

After everything is done I flip the switch to upgrade to the new OS (Suse Linux Prof. 9.3 to OSS10) and wait till the setup is completed. Then I go ahead and try to restore everything using the integrated backup solution. Errm yeah. Let’s just say that it didn’t work out all too good – can anyone tell me: who in their right state of mind would program a backup tool which supports both local and remote backups with a restore tool which supports one thing: “browse”…you know the good old file button which brings you to the explorer on your desktop? This is ridiculous! Why should I do a remote backup (to another server with a kickass connection) just to find out that I need to download the shit to my desktop computer to upload it (via the not so groovy dsl connection)? Oooh well, so I only restored the domains with little content (size wise) and did the rest via scripting. *Sigh*

So, as you see, poker-tastic along with most of my other sites are up and running again. Coolio. So now I fire up WPX for one SnG, then it’s time for some sleep – almost 2am, my neck and back are killing me. Which brings me to the “I can’t talk about it”-part of the post: you know you shouldn’t dare to talk about a good run, so I’m not going to do it. What I’m going to do though is talk about WPX: It rocks. Plain and simple. While the traffic is still not really good (the most I’ve seen online at a time were slightly under 2k players, compare that to 70-100+k on Party and Stars), the games I frequent (low limit games along with low limit SnGs) are only a few minutes (max) away…and the 100% rakeback, w00t. Let’s just say that my constant SnGs along with some ring action is adding up…more than I thought it would. So I’m going to continue to play most of my games there, at least for now. I guess I’ll have a better idea of the total rake saved once I’ve played a whole month there.

Off to the Iggylicious part 🙂 Yesterday I finally had the chance to listen to the episode 81 of cardclub, which featured an uber-interview with the blogfather himself, Iggy. If you haven’t heard it yet, go ahead and download it, now, damn it! 😉

…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!

First of all I would like to remind you all that the main event of this year’s WSOP has started. Some pros are already out, some others are still in contention.

My ups and downs of the WSOP so far:

Ups:

1. There are more and more “amateurs” (aka online players, online (semi-)professionals, …) every year. I don’t have the exact number, but it’s safe to assume that they’re making up the majority of this year’s events and it’s already more than likely that yet another amateur will rise to WSOP championship glory this year – any bets on the online poker room they qualified on (it seems that PokerStars is having the biggest number of runners so they might have their fourth WSOP ME Champion in a row, although I wouldn’t underestimate some other poker rooms’ incentives, which could be the extra motivation – as if anyone needed extra motivation with 10.000.000$ up for grabs along with the fame (although 10+10mil sounds even better – the FullTilt deal))?

2. At least some people are still trying to work their butts off to bring you interesting stories, updates and recounts as the “we sold exclusive rights, so not all goes”-approach allows. Quick reminder: Otis, Wil, Dr. Pauly, CJ and some other guys are delivering some awesome content over at the official pokerstarsblog. Dr. Pauly delivers some more of his wsop goodness, especially blogger updates over at the Tao of Poker – although the frequency of the “Last 5 Pros I Pissed Next to…” segments is steadily declining.

3. Phil Hellmuth won his record-tying 10th WSOP bracelet. While this might be a surprise, I gotta say that this is truely an up for me. He’s on of my favourite players: he’s not only one of the greatest when it comes to tournament poker, but I really enjoy watching his rants at the tables, especially when another donkey “who can’t even spell poker” sucks out on him…

4. Daniel Negreanu’s video blog…I really enjoy watching his updates.

5. Some video updates from cardplayer were quite interesting. The regular coverage mostly sucks though, so no link love for you.

Downs:

1. Coverage. While some bloggers are trying their best (see above), their efforts are still undermined by the official and exclusive coverage (chipcounts, etc). Sorry, but an update here and there with numerous errors (e.g. hand history posted smack in the middle of an update shows that someone won with a boat, yet the text says he won with a flush, etc etc etc) and delays is just not good enough (although the situation has slightly improved since the start of the WSOP).

2. TV coverage. While this is the “biggest event in sports”, there’s no coverage to be found anywhere around here. Some stations are having a poker summer and showing the WSOP – the bad thing though: that’s the WSOP 2004, yawn.

…but enough of the WSOP and off to my own playing. I decided to consolidate my bankroll by transferring money from numerous poker rooms to a select few poker rooms. It’s just not good to spread out the roll over many rooms. So I pulled the plug on mansion (too little traffic atm, I might had back sometime later) and UltimateBet (haven’t played there in ages anyway). Before I fire up the roll at Stars though I wanted to give a “newer” room a shot. WorldPokerExchange is the only poker room offering rake free play. It would be better to call it 100% rakeback as you pay the normal rake and then you get it all back after some days (once a week as far as I can tell). While traffic isn’t great (the times I played so far the numbers were something like 1-2k players), the prospect of saving all the juice is groovy though. After going through my logs of different rooms I found that what many already said is true: it’s hard to stay ahead of the rake at the low limits, especially when you count normal variance. So I’m going to play most of my SnGs on WPX for a while and see what that adds up to – I’m sure it’s going to be quite a lot as the usual rake per SnG is a flat fee of 10% which adds up, especially if you’re playing SnGs almost every day.

I mentioned firing up the roll at Stars earlier on. This is due to the fact that I set a new goal for myself. I want to take the game to the next level and out of the online poker realm. While the home game series I play in is getting better and better as we bought casino style poker tables and just started a championship race which will determine the best player over the course of a year, I would love to get in some real (casino) tournament live action. So I’ll try to qualify for one of the EPT events! I don’t know which one it’ll be, but my current favourites are London and Baden, Austria. I don’t know which qualifying route to take yet as there seems to be a lack of double shootouts, which would have been my preferred option. I’ll keep you posted on the status of my qualification…