Sky Poker Tour UpdateLast Month, I managed to qualify for the most recent leg of the Sky Poker Tour in Birmingham, which took place on Saturday. When I qualified, I was considering going to Birmingham on Saturday morning, play, then go home either Saturday evening or get the first train home on Sunday morning depending how I performed in the tournament, although it wasn't long before some other Sky regs convinced me that I should be there on Friday night as well.
They were right.
I got a text at about 5pm to meet up in a bar with some Sky regs somewhere near New Street station, before going around a few hotels in Birmingham city centre to pick up people and allow others to check in, usually getting a pint from the hotel's bar while we were there. It had already been arranged for a group of about twenty of us to go to Akbar's curry house later that evening. A few people went back to the casino for the side event, but given that it was a deepstack starting at 9pm (LOL), it was an absolute no brainer to not play this and be up until stupid o'clock. I heard several rumours of when the tournament actually finished, the earliest being 5am and the latest being 8:30am after a 7 way chop as the casino closed at 9am. I don't know exactly when the tournament finished, but having the normal Friday night deepstack starting at the usual starting time when the casino should've expected to have more than the usual amount of people due to it being labelled an SPT side event was a pretty dumb move on the casino's part IMO.
As a result, most of us went to a pub a couple of hundred yards down the road from the curry house where we stayed until shortly after 11pm when they stopped serving drinks for the night. We eventually ended up back at the casino shortly after midnight, and I didn't end up back in my hotel room until about 4:30am. It was lovely to meet some of the Sky Poker regs and do something other than play Poker.
Saturday, by contrast, wasn't so fun. I started the day running bad by missing breakfast by about 5 minutes, and my tournament lasted exactly one hand - AA v JJ AIPF. I still don't really know what the best line is here, although I'm leaning towards just folding to the 3bet.
The blinds were 25/50, and we had 7.5k starting stack. It's a one day event with 30 minute clock. The opponent was a random player who I didn't know from the site, and they didn't show up when I checked the Hendon Mob database after the table draw was published, either. I'd usually open to 150 but I was thinking "I have Jacks, live players are terrible LOL, let's go to valuetown", so decided to make it 200 instead so that the pot was bigger when I inevitably got stationed by someone, This is when the hand starts going wrong. The guy to my left 3bets to 700, and I'm hating my life.
The blinds were in seats 1 and 2, I was seat 6, the villain was in seat 7.
There was a chance the random guy knew me from watching me on Sky's televised "Master Cash" tables, although I'd taken my name badge off before the tournament started to stop people from knowing who I was and potentially gaining that advantage. As I've never heard of this guy, this isn't something that ever comes into my thought process here.
At this point, we either:
1) Fold - I have Pocket Jacks. It feels really bad to fold to a 3bet, even in the first hand of a live tournament vs a random unknown player.
2) Call - We're out of position. We check to the pre-flop aggressor and we're always going to be in awkward spots post-flop unless we flop a Jack because it's the 1st hand so he should never be doing this light. Donk betting in a 3bet pot is awful readless. Set mining Jacks in a 3bet pot given the amount we have to call and the stack sizes is unprofitable too, IMO. How often do we check/call the flop then check/fold on a later street? Being out of position makes this a poor option.
3) 4bet - Do we want to get Jacks in here? Probably not. Do we want to 4bet and fold to a 5bet? Again, probably not.
I hated every option available to me, and in hindsight, the best option is probably to just throw it in the muck once we get 3bet. I really don't know as I don't really play enough full ring or live Poker tbh. Nobody would ever know I folded Jacks there either, and I would still have 7.3k chips. As I believe I'm better than 90-95% of the field, this probably makes it easier to fold too, as I should be able to bully people who don't know how to play a 10-20bb stack correctly and don't know how to adapt to having antes later on (There's no antes on Sky).
Being an aggro donk, I decided that when in doubt, I should snap 4bet to 1.7k and get it in without thinking about it. If I'd thought about this for 30 seconds, I would definitely not be 4betting here. Villain turns over Aces and holds. Gg me. The only consolation was that if I'd flatted, I probably stack off anyway because the flop was low and monotone, and I had
as well as having flopped an overpair.
Inevitably, I post what happened on Facebook and get the usual "You're shit at Poker, WTF are you doing putting your tournament life on the line with JJ?" from certain players. This shows exactly why getting JJ in here is bad, because the vast majority of people are never, ever getting it in with worse here readless.
As I was already in profit from satellites anyway, this result isn't a disaster, but it was a massive disappointment to go out first hand nonetheless.
I had to wait for ages for a £1/£1 cash game to start, as the casino didn't have enough dealers. I got into a £10 SnG which I chopped HU for £35. Probably lost a few pence of equity but whatever. When the cash game did eventually start, nobody could decide what to play. We eventually ended up playing £1/£1 NLHE + PLO. I spent the following 3 hours topping up constantly, because I couldn't win a pot. Already down a buy-in, I managed to get KKxx in the PLO round, and get into a pot against an awful player. Flop comes K54 rainbow. Top set on a dry board. Finally, my luck is changing. The session had been a grind, but maybe I'll stack this fish and end up winning a few quid after all. The villain ended up somehow getting to the river with a bag of spanners and hitting a backdoor flush. Marvellous.
£410 down and tilted, I stopped playing cash and went to rail some friends - One was a team mate and another was a friend who I had 10% of, and there was a couple of other familiar faces in there too who I wanted to do well. But the only thing on my mind was my exit hand earlier and how this fish had managed to stack me (Yeah, entitlement tilt. Must reread "The Mental Game of Poker"). I looked at the table to see that someone had snap moved to his left as soon as I left the table, and within a few minutes, the fish had left the table with my money. However, I wasn't enjoying being in the casino any longer, and was just staring at the ceiling looking pissed off, anyway. I left the casino, although I felt bad for not sticking around to rail people who were deep in the tournament who would've probably railed me.
As for the venue, it was terrible. The most tilting thing was that there was a dealer on the PLO cash table who didn't know how much pot was in a £1/£1 cash game when I announced "Pot" with no straddles or action before me, so until that dealer left I had to actually work out how much "Pot" was and announce that amount when raising pre-flop. If the dealer doesn't know how much pot is, then don't put them on a table where there's PL games being played ffs. I was also disappointed that they couldn't have spread the tables out a bit more, as the tables were cramped to the point where I couldn't get out from my seat when I busted the tournament until I'd asked the guy behind me to tuck his chair in!
Maybe it wasn't really as bad as I thought and we're just fortunate to have great venues like DTD in this country. Genting Birmingham was very impressive when I was there for the GPS in February, as well. Broadway was definitely the worst place I've played Poker to date, though.
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In the meantime, my downswing at the start of the month seems to have ended. I've only played 4 of the last 8 days online because of SPT, but results have definitely improved, and I was delighted with how I played on Monday, too, especially considering I usually play terribly after something like what happened at the SPT because I start lacking confidence in my own game, so it was great to immediately get back to winning again. I need to start putting in some volume, though.
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Results 11th June Online since last update: +£178.78, +$6.70
Live since last update: -£385.00
This month online: -£14.06, +$1.10
This month live: -£385.00
This month total: -£399.06, +$1.10
20NL hands played: 2,517 (+£211.96)
30NL hands played: 3,968 (-£108.95)
Sky Poker Points: 1,523/7,000 (= £15.23 rakeback)