| Game Type: | No Limit |
| Buy-in: | €2,000 |
| Rebuys: | no |
The most fun of all the Unusual Suspects competitions, The Grand Casino Helsinki's 20,000 starting chipped, hour clocked, superbly run tournament was the only thing I actually wanted to play this year, so much so that instead of playing other events in the preceding months, I simply added to the €2,000 kitty so that I could have another go at it. For a smallish bankroll like mine, this was quite a chunk, but anything is doable if properly planned for. I suppose saving for something one wants is kind of a discipline-trainer in itself.
Perhaps sacrificing playing live for a while just to put lots of my eggs in one Finland-shaped basket wasn't the most sensible thing I could have done, but it's definitely the most enjoyable. I stand by that despite going out before the dinner break... Tikay showed up in the morning after about three straight days on the go, while I had arrived in the middle of the night, so as to provide myself with as much sleep as possible. I can pat myself on the back about that while he happily drifts towards the final.
So what is there to relate from less than half a day's play? Well, the whole ambiance of my table this time round was completely different. Businesslike, tight (yes, tight) and taciturn, these were not the players I remembered from the Winter. Other tables seemed to be happily knocking players out right from twenty minutes into level One, but not mine. The blinds actually start at 50/100, so it's just like being given 10k in starting chips and beginning 25/50, but there's something nice about getting a whole load of 1,000 chips for no reason. It boosts the confidence.
Anyway, the raise-everyone-folds thing couldn't last for more than an hour, and it didn't. Eventually two players started doing more than their fair share, and at last some kind of information could be gained (for example, a preflop raising player called a 4,000 check-raise on a Q x x two diamonds board and his KQ held up against the other guy's lower pair and flush draw, while this same player put a 10k bet in on the river two hands earlier forcing someone else off). In short, some hands were being shown and even the occasional bluff. Not from me though, the closest I got was re-raising the cutoff from the small blind with notalot and then betting the flop since he was one of the two raising fairly regularly. I won that one, by the way, but it's about all I won.
I lost most of my chips in two lots with QQ each time - the first time only a little (2.5k) after I raised preflop and got a young caller and an Ace-high flop, with the 5 4 spades. Yuck. I check, he checks, so I bet the spadey turn and, call. Double yuck. The river looks harmless, the 3d, so I consider it for a while and wonder whether he will just have a go at it with nothing (as I reckon he would check if he were as unconfident in his hand as he appeared up til now, or thought he'd only be called by a better hand), and call 1k on the river. He has A2 of hearts for the straight. Surprise! No big deal, though; I played that pretty poorly but lost only a fraction.
Enter player seat left, who, when I raise to 600 (I have 17k left, blinds 100/200) with pocket Jacks, re-raises to 3,000. I pass. Then the very next hand, I raise to 600 again with pocket Queens, and he does it again - 3k. I call. With no Aces or Kings on the flop, I genuinely think I am going to be ahead and look forward to him betting anyway. Flop: Th 4h 5d. And that's it - I check-called his pot bet on the flop and moved in for 9,000 on the 4d turn. He had AA, and that was the end of that. I consider that I could have folded a)preflop, if I'd figured out he had a genuine hand, although I'm not sure I'm good enough to tell in that instance or b)on the flop, if I bet out fairly sizeably and got raised even more so, which I'm sure is what would have happened.
To be honest, I know full well there's no reason to lose one's whole stack with one pair - even when you know that the flop can't really have brought a sneaky set or any kind of straight, etc etc. The only explanation for it would have been a purely aggressive bet on the flop as he felt he rather ought to with AK(h?) or a smaller pair, or that he had the goods all along, and just bet as strongly as possible. Yes, the latter, not the former, is the case, and had I just joined the table there's no way I would have thought my Queens to be winning - it's a case of Paying Attention Paying You Back - in a bad way.
With 70-something players left in, it's a long long way to the money (final nine only) but I look forward to tikay getting to his umpteenth final in a row (I refer you, ladies and gents, to Luton last week). This is still a fantastic tournament and if at all possible I'll be back when the snow is four feet deep and there's little or no sunlight to try it again.