An Ape and a notebook, how long will it take?

[jgcblack]

Thanks, that's the plan obv.. just need Rob to bring back the DTD500 sats and its a cert.

[strak33]

Bad res for the monitors.

[jgcblack]

Bad res for the monitors.

Talk to me...

this isn't very helpful alone...

[jgcblack]

Full trip report to follow -

Cliffs
We played Genting Poker Series London Friday and Saturday with 60% of ourselves (20% Pleno/ 20% D'L)

We made day 2 with 145k (2x avg), shoulda had 250k but lost KK vs AK last orbit of day 1c
We played super solid in day 2 with some terrible starting hands and tough seat draws
made a few small mistakes but some big improvements in previous error spots
Cashed for £860
Somehow lost  vs Tim Cheung  aipf - POKER IS RIGGED!




peace

[jgcblack]

Mouse n keyboard have arrived!
Monitor stand has arrived also and its so sexy! but it is pretty big... this could be a struggle to fit it in. - woops

Managed to win a dtd150 and ukipt seat for tonights sats already, lets turn them into real seats pls!

Text received to confirm tomorrows deliver of uber grind PC - cant wait.... tomorrow will be torturous at work knowing its here ready to be opened and setup



I'm enjoying the cash games online and managing to play much better overall than I ever have before.  But I'm not winning at the rate I think I should be yet, I'm still making some mistakes for stacks that I really shouldn't be so going to be working with Patrick and a friend of his 'Ben' who is crushing small stakes and will help me get rid of those leaks that's causing me problems at the minute.  Not a massive issue as I'm certain its a couple of small things I'm just not sticking to that will mean big changes in my winrate.
The harsh reality of how hard it is to 'win @ poker' - its the hardest way to make an easy living.....    (#unlessurcalledgoulder)

[Pinchop73]

Grats on a nice run

[jgcblack]

Grats on a nice run

Thanks dude, not enough for me im afraid! I want one of these tournies for my own! (the £50k might be nice but I know I can win one!)

Turned out to be a long one.... Bear with me please.  I've colored it an everything to make it look pretty and entertaining.


Genting Poker Series Leg 2 - London
These tournaments are fantastically structured.. with 25k and 1 hour clock, all the levels and super soft field full of satelliters and 'wannabes' like me who think they're ready to step up.  There are of course some fantastic live and online tournament players to either avoid or to defeat on the way.

Day 1c - Palm Beach
I received a text from the Palm in the morning to inform me that my leg would be conducted there as there were too many players wanting to play the final day.  I turned up in time to sit down after missing a couple of hands and begin paying as much attention to my table as possible.  I double checked all the rules, making sure I knew if they were being strict on anything (they were - actions out of turn, instant 2 hand penalty, no warning!).  And then spent some time finding the names of all my table mates and hendon mobbing them for 'obvious regs'.  I knew the most prominent one - Richard Horton and have played with him before at dtd in the £300 deepstack last year.  He seems solid aggressive but I only played with him on day2 when we both had decent stacks.  So this would be different when its early days, again I was also sure he didn't remember me (bonus ofc).

We played really solid and tight, just making observations as we went along.  Turns out we had probably the 'nut' seat of the table, the two 'reggish' players to our right, and two face up fish on our left, with our direct left being unoccupied - giving us two buttons/ orbit .
As silly as it seems we really didn't do much about that until we managed to get some chips to play with.. I appreciate that 25K @ any of the first few levels is still 00's of bb's but I didn't want to get down to 15K and be having to put my tournament on the line anytime i played a decent sized pot.  Instead I patiently waited and made a few hands, lost a few and did something very unusual..

- I flatted  IP preflop because I was in HJ and wanted the fishy BTN and SB to come along since the CO and BB weren't there at all.  No one had 3bet at this point and I felt like it would get way too much credit, so instead decided to try and play my hand as a 5-7k pot type hand and get 30-50bb's with it.  That all ended with an  flop and a cbet, my call and a call behind.  I folded turn and they ended up both shown down an Ace - I ended up losing less than what my 3bet would have been.

- We plod along for a few more orbits and eventually find  in CO, make a standard open and get 3 callers.  We flop the disinteresting  and get check raised by the SB..  Hmmm.... We flat and decide to let him barrell off worse, probably only calling down if he gives us 3 streets.. (on a raggy board his Ax ss becomes more likely imo)
He bets a turn brick big but checks the river brick.... hmmm maybe he's just got a set or two pair...  We take a while and eventually settle with a big almost pot sized bet as I expect to NEVER get check raised here!  He takes a while himself but sigh puts it in and we take a lead on the table.. up to 42K and looking good.

- Just an orbit or so later we open to 525 utg with and have an interesting spot when we get 3 callers and then the btn who I think is a 'wananbe genius' who has seen a video or two reraises to 3600 from 14k.  I take my time and look at the spot, realising that I'm sure his range isn't nutted enough that I can't put some pressure back on him.  I don't expect him to be 3betting 10's down as that would be pretty horrible in his spot when he could just flat - if I come over the top for example, what will he do with 10's vs my range utg into 4 people? (I'd puke if it were me).
Armed with this thinking and that there just arent enough calling hands (JJ+/ AQo+) then I work out I'll easily have the 35-ish % required to set him in here (turns out its 39.3%)
So I make it 11k which doesn't commit me to anyone but him and they all snap fold, he takes a few seconds and flicks the last 11.5K in and I snap call - to which he looks suprised (its 3k extra into 30k ofc im snapping).

And then he shows his  ..... FFS... idiot has played his hand badly and then faced with a utg 4bt from a tight young guy who's only showed 3 hands (all were the nuts) and he just sighs his tournament away with the old TT. 
Guess we better get there then since this will put us back to 30k and only a small CL on the rest of the table.
Obviously we bink an  on the turn and seeya pal! Now we're up to 60k and going strong!


We don't play too much from here on, messing around a little bit... in one spot we b, c, b air on QJx9x and take a while before overbetting 5100 into 3850 on the river.  I actually expect the guy to have a hard time calling AQ here from the way we've been playing so far.. but then he raises to 9.5K more leaving 6K behind... this really puzzled me, I really wanted to set him in, figuring he can't really have anything here that will love a river 3bt.  After a few seconds I decide to reign it in and stop myself busting my 'lead' in a speculative spot when the guy could just be pretty bad and overplaying QJ or something.

In the next hour or so we see both Sinem Melin and Paul Jackson come to the table and do their stacks into the same guy within an orbit each.  Sin had KK vs AK and PJ decided to raise, cc, cc, ccain with AA on Q9xxx - guy had 99 obv.  This one was a particularly interesting hand to me as I like Paul's play but something that made it really a big mistake to me was the 'live' aspect of the hand.  The guy 'sigh' set Paul in on the river after betting relatively small all the way through.. To me this coupled with some standard live reads lead me to believe the guy had exactly 99 as he is going to be 3betting QQ pre.  I've found out since that Paul was tilted from his other table and couldn't see clearly at the time = that'll explain it then.

We finally get moved tables to table 1 and find BBP pro 'Wayne' someone and Julian Thew on our table, along with the TD of G Southampton - Henry.  This table looks pretty fishy other than Wayne and Thewy but they're taken care of within an orbit or so as Thew stacked Wayne with KK vs A10 on 3K310 with some fun 'banter' along the way.  And then Thewy decides to play strange in a 3bet pot OOP by cc 8xx hh and cshoving xh.  The OR has AQhh and Thew gets 90% stack in dead which takes care of him for me.  Now I'm thinking I'm well on the way to day2, just have to keep grinding away!

I play really snug while getting some reads on the table (had been on my other one for like 8 hours) and decide to play AK pretty passive when I open utg and get 3bet by the old man to my left who stacked Thewy.  I just called pre and cf a Qxx board feeling that it would be hard to 4/5bet shove vs an older gentleman and have AK in good shape a lot.. (Fair I think TK - )

Having said that I then find a really nice spot a couple of orbits later, where the following happens.
- UTG opens for 2200, I call  UTG+1 and the older guy on our direct left makes it 8k (from 130K)
- Folds to UTG and he now makes it 21K (playing 70K) and I get a live read on him that he is 'weak'/ fedup/ frustrated
- I decide to snap shove my 56K over his 4bt, effectively I cold 5bt backraise 56K over 21K vs UTG and UTG+2.

Which I realise seems crazy but with the old blockers to AA/ KK and imo plenty of fold equity since UTG is weak and the old man is going to crap himself with <QQ I think its an easy spot to pickup 30K and increase my stack by over 50%. I haven't done anything strange or out of the ordinary, hardly been playing any pots and no one has any reason to think I'm at it here.

The older guy really starts to think about it and I'm trying to work out if he's sighing me off with QQ or worse.. obv I don't hate it as a double up will set me in great state for day2!  After counting his stack and taking a couple of minutes - he sigh's me off with  and the UTG hollywood folds - declaring AK, then our hands are tabled and I less than believe him (live reads FTW!)
Obviously getting the guy to fold KK wasn't part of the plan but we've got 30% I guess = so lets get there!

We make a rivered backdoor gutshot and the old  has never been more welcome!   So we get a full double +25K dead money and we're up to like 130K, probably CL in the whole tournament and going to be going for overall CL at 200K with the table we have!



Nikhil Persaud
The day carries on pretty standard, and eventually we get Nikhil Persaud moved to our table, he's a 5/10 reg @ The Vic and a partner in Black Belt Poker I believe.  I had the pleasure of railing his cash game for a few hours a year or two ago after I bust my own roll earlier that night and after we chatted about a few hands he asked if I'd take £200 of his money and go 50/50 on profits.  This was my introduction to backing but I couldn't stand it after I lost the money and went and got £200 of my own to pay him back with (lolz I know).

However I am literally 10x the player I was then and decided that with my table CL I wasn't going to let him come to my table and 'own' it with his 3bt's to commit the weaker players, to play off his image as a 'nit' and get people to hand him a lift up the chip list (I know this is something he does in these positions - e.g. late in the day with a middle-ing stack).  I watch the table react to him and eventually make a move, I 3bet his 3rd open in a row to 3800 - now UTG+1 from the CO with    to 10.7k leaving him an awkward stack size of 48K ish and I cover him twice over.  He takes an agonisingly long time while I just stare and the felt, occassionally looking up to see him squirm.  After complimenting me on my betsize (thanks) and giving me the 'eye' he sigh folds  apparently and Henry the G S'hmpton TD tells him I'd have shown a  if I had one (as I had done that a couple of times by now).

The temptation to show was so strong but I had to resist as I felt that he wouldn't believe me afterwards and I knew I'd need to tangle with him again.


Other than this we play really solid for the rest of the day, using our stack (140K+, avg was 50K) to our benefit and slowly climb toward 200K. 
In the last orbit before the end of the day we've 3bet two hands on the trot, then open three hands in a row, and finally find  , we open UTG and get flatted by John (old guy) and then shoved on by UTG+2 'nit' and are super happy to flat once they all fold getting ourselves HU in a 110K pot vs his  .  I'm already thinking it would be fair and just if he wins this one after my earlier hand.  But if we win it we will finish the day as overall Tournament Chip Leader and day2 will be ours to lose.  This was a fantastic feeling - I want this again!

We see a board of
  and start picking up the chips as his hand is mucked.

"but he has a flush....." says someone.  I can't quite see his hand and didn't realise he had - I thought it was offsuit.

I look up to the TD who is already looking to me to say "The hand was tabled John, it stands." as I'd been talking to Ralph throughout the day, he was a great guy - wp sir!

So I happily ship over the chips and recount.. 155K, hmmm its ok I guess.

We see two more hands and on the last one we call a shortstacks 3bt shove for 10k with  , we end up HU as the OR folds afraid of me leaving us 9K of dead money and we're being 'paid' to take a hand vs AKo.
We flop an 8 but he rivers an A to stay alive and come back to day2 with 14bb's.

Meh - We bag up 144K and we're double average, playing some aggressive solid tournament poker and with a little rungood expect to make a deep run at Day2 with £50k up top.


Day 2
I'll make this short for those of you who have gotten this far...

Day 2 consisted of me repeatedly raise folding <77's in late position to shoves and winning chips off of the 'special lad' to my left, but losing them to Mr Huxley on my right as he 3x opened and insta-shoved over my 3bet's.. despite my playing tight.  I think he was a little too quick to do this tbh, but luckily for him I didn't find a real hand to do it with.  I end up moving table after having a strange hand mean I didnt play vs  for a full double up.  Luckily I get  next hand and while still discussing the ruling with the TD Colin (also a legend)  I knock out a shortie to get back to just under average.

I then move tables next to current CL Tim Chung and someone else who I 'understood' to be a decent winning player but I don't know his name.. both had me covered and I knew I had to be careful.  Tim respects my game I think.. so I didn't expect him to mess a lot, figured he wouldn't want me with more chips than I had to have.  We play our table pretty well for a few hours, ride out the bubble and I manage to play my 20bb's pretty well i feel.

Eventually we are getting close to breaking and I figure I'll try to get a few chips before I leave, use my fostered 'tighter' image to nick a few blinds and try to get in good shape knowing that any table would be trouble.

A guy who ends up on the final table 'Robin something' is blowing up as the whole table has owned him once or twice.. he coolered Tim a few orbits before with KK vs 99 for 180K aipf.. but he's down to like 210K now and steam is coming out of his ears.  I 3bt shove SB knowing he's folding vs me 90%+ and ofc Tim finally wakes up with a hand, the old  .

We flop a gutshot and turn a flush draw but can't get there one more time!  We cash 43rd for £860 and unfortunately just couldn't find enough hands on day2 to get paid with.. its a shame but I feel I played some of my best tournament poker and with only a few value hands would have gone very deep in this tournament!

Next one is Edinburgh and without a satellited seat I doubt I'll be going that far.  But I'll play as many of them as I can.




The reason this has been so long is because I was grinding a DTD150 sat while doing it and have just gotten another seat (had one already) so tonight hasn't been a complete loss.  Still need a UKIPT seat though and may resort to playing live and online sats at the same time later in the week if necessary (I assume we're allowed?)



Well writing is more nackering than I could have ever imagined before I started this blog, but I am so glad I did and it is helping me so much. 

For any aspiring poker players who come across this I really feel that embedding yourself into a community like Blonde is an essential part of the development needed for overall greatness in ones field.

And I pledge now that 5% of all £10K+ scores this year will be fed back into the blonde community in some way or other - freerolls in DTD or into the DTD League or something!
So lets get some rungood together and bink something worth talking about!

[pleno1]

lol good read

The 88 seems really bad, but sounds like you had alot of fun and glad you got another flag

[Leatherman]

Well done on the cash an flag fella.. Are you playing this weekends Deepstack?

[jgcblack]

lol good read

The 88 seems really bad, but sounds like you had alot of fun and glad you got another flag

Do you understand where I'm coming from with the 88's?  Its like I turn my hand into a range looking like JJ+/ AK and so his calling range should be JJ+ AQo+ against which Im in great shape.  Even though I have 88 here, I expect to be against 99/ 1010 so rarely that it's not a factor.

Maybe I'm over estimating the possibilities.....

Marks for effort and showing workings out?

Well done on the cash an flag fella.. Are you playing this weekends Deepstack?

Thanks, but tbh I won't be satisfied till I've FT'd one of these £300's+ this year and made my mark on it!


5% to blonde members!

[jgcblack]

Mini report

Thursday 05 April
DTD150 sat
Played well and ran like god. Had 4-6x average the entire way through the tournament... then when 20 left and 11 seats i decide to put some pressure on the other two bigstacks at my table.  I 3bt SB K9o covering both, UTG folds and BTN decides to be a hero and peel.
Flop
KQ10
not bad, not amazing but we cbet 1/2pot as std, he calls.

Turn
Xo
Complete brick I think, figure the majority of his range will be 1pair here as i would expect him to raise that flop with strong hands to get it in.  I decide I can make him fold all of his hands except QQ, 1010 or AJ by check shoving turn.  And I've been seen to always have the nuts at showdown today.

He snaps. This is bad.

AJ... wp sir. nh, gg, etc etc.................

River
Who cares>??

We lose a 150k pot when average is 25k... wp john.  Just given up my 'locked' seat. Woulda been 3rd seat in 3 days.



[ ] learned to not bluff ever in these comps.


WPT Cash Grind
Did a session over teamviewer watching a guy from my study group (fitzy) and played a really solid session afterwards, began to climb back out of a few sessions in a row losing streak.

Mixing up my styles, trying some looser, some tighter, some more aggressive and some allowing people to hang themselves.  It's tough to work out the best style vs each OP but that's the point i guess.


Friday 06042012
Another session with fitzy but this time analysing a session where he hit his stop loss and had to quit.  After 2.5hours of going through it we realised that almost 50% of his losses were spew/ mistakes when you look at the right stats/ reads/ std tendancies at our levels.
These sessions are definitely the way to improve and work out what to be looking at stats wise, what to be doing as adjustments pre and post-flop... we even spent some time discussing note taking systems to suppliment our 'notecaddy' which we both have with our HEM2.

[X] Notecaddy is the mother****************bollux!
[X] Notecaddy is easy to use

Discussed with Pleno and we're going to do a 3way discussion sweating either fitzy or myself and im really looking forward to it, with P's direction I reckon he can steer us to get 'there' so much quicker than if we were alone!
100NL here I come!



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Interesting?!
Then watched an interesting video today on 5betting and how without a seriously aggressive history you actually don't want to 5bt  and ever get called! weird huh?

Turns out when you run the math that actually 5bt-ing and getting a fold is more +EV than getting called by any reasonable range, even if it includes QQ/JJ etc....

I'll give a rough and quick rundown of the math if i remember it correctly (please correct me)

open to 3x
3bt to 9x
4bt to 24x
5bt shove 100x

When you fold to the 4bt you're left with 91x
When you 5bt shove and he folds you win 124x  (his 24, your 100)
When you 5bt shove and he calls with QQ+ AQ+ he is 36.89% and therefore he 'owns' 37% of the 200x pot (his 100, our 100)
So he owns 75x and you own the other 125x of the pot.  So you win the same as if he folded.

As soon as you take AQo out of his range and make it AQs+, AKo+, QQ+ he now owns 41% and your losing to get KK's in pre.

Obviously if you have a dynamic where someone isnt folding AJ+, 10+ or wider then your looking at 31% or less for him.
But clearly this won't be common at micro or maybe even small stakes very often??

Definitely worth a ponder..... Seen some Nikachu stuff today and he's refreshingly light and honest about how being a 'pussy' tight nit is just so profitable when you use it to exploit your opponents acceptance of 'coolers'.


#discuss....







DTD150 today after I've picked up my new monitors from City link and I'll have a pic posted on here if I can,

- I7 processor,
- 8GB RAM
- 2TB WD Black HDD
- Radeon 6870 eyefinity GFX
- 3x HP LP2475w 24" monitors (sick! check em out here http://www.amazon.co.uk/HP-LP2475w-display-widescreen-DisplayPort/dp/B001EI8TH8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333761488&sr=8-1)
- Microsoft 7000 ergonomic desktop
- Triple monitor stand (http://www.amazon.com/Ergotech-Triple-Horizontal-Monitor-100-D16-B03/dp/B001NPEC5A/ref=sr_1_1?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1333761604&sr=1-1)
- And a new cactus called Bob.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Euphorbia_Pentagona_1.jpg

[cambridgealex]

nice mini report

[cambridgealex]

Thursday 05 April
DTD150 sat
Played well and ran like god. Had 4-6x average the entire way through the tournament... then when 20 left and 11 seats i decide to put some pressure on the other two bigstacks at my table.  I 3bt SB K9o covering both, UTG folds and BTN decides to be a hero and peel.
Flop
KQ10
not bad, not amazing but we cbet 1/2pot as std, he calls.

Turn
Xo
Complete brick I think, figure the majority of his range will be 1pair here as i would expect him to raise that flop with strong hands to get it in.  I decide I can make him fold all of his hands except QQ, 1010 or AJ by check shoving turn.  And I've been seen to always have the nuts at showdown today.

He snaps. This is bad.

AJ... wp sir. nh, gg, etc etc.................

River
Who cares>??

We lose a 150k pot when average is 25k... wp john.  Just given up my 'locked' seat. Woulda been 3rd seat in 3 days.

[Beaver808]

Thursday 05 April
DTD150 sat
Played well and ran like god. Had 4-6x average the entire way through the tournament... then when 20 left and 11 seats i decide to put some pressure on the other two bigstacks at my table.  I 3bt SB K9o covering both, UTG folds and BTN decides to be a hero and peel.
Flop
KQ10
not bad, not amazing but we cbet 1/2pot as std, he calls.

Turn
Xo


Complete brick I think, figure the majority of his range will be 1pair here as i would expect him to raise that flop with strong hands to get it in.  I decide I can make him fold all of his hands except QQ, 1010 or AJ by check shoving turn.  And I've been seen to always have the nuts at showdown today.

He snaps. This is bad.

AJ... wp sir. nh, gg, etc etc.................

River
Who cares>??

We lose a 150k pot when average is 25k... wp john.  Just given up my 'locked' seat. Woulda been 3rd seat in 3 days.

+1

[jgcblack]

So I went to get the monitors this morning from city-link as I'd paid for next day delivery so i could set up 'the beast' asap and then get grinding propa-loike innit bruv?!

I've attached some photos to show you the final setup, its beautiful, with just so much screen-age I can't even express it.

Took a while to sort out though as the computer was being a smart ass and arranging the monitors 3 1 2 which meant that the middle was the 'main' and it went smoothly to the right but to get to the left screen you had to go to the right hand side of the right monitor and then it would appear on the far left.
[X] a little bit tilting..

Now its sorted and to 'test' the resolution for poker I decided to open up as many tables on WPT as I could, at a current bankroll of $360ish that equates to 360/25 = 14 tables. This took one monitor and just went over to the second.  This proves when/ if I ever want to mass multi-table that it will be comfortable and easy to do so on one or two monitors and have a third for internet/ skype/ porn/ etc....
Now to sit back, admire and say ahhhhhhhhwwwwwwwwwwwwww isn't IT amazing?
No longer than 30mins after getting IT ready I had to leave for the dtd150 £100k GTD and use one of my 2 available bullets to build a stack and get through to day 2!







DTD150
Due to the above setup and issues relating closely to parent like child abandonment issues I eventually arrived at DTD 15mins late-ish and bought in the 'magic goulder' as I owed him a few ££'s.  I then misheard my seat number and went to 43 seat 8, when in fact I should be in 43 seat 3.  I quickly change seats before I play a hand and look down at  otb.  Oh hello dere!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First Hand
We raise when a could of people limp in front, and get 3 callers. 
Pot $1125
FLOP
  (or similar)

SB checks, MP checks, CO checks, we bet 225...
This was deliberately small, in order to squeeze value from all hands worse than ours, protect against raises on this board from any random pair thinking we have AK and to allow for some cheap hand reading when cold, first hand in.

SB raises to 850 and the other two fold.  Well I'm not folding, so I call.

Pot $2825
TURN

SB checks and I'm thinking he has 8x or 99-QQ a lot here! So I bet 1600 to set up a 4-6k river bet hoping to get some curiosity first hand in. He calls.

Pot $6025
RIVER

SB snap leads for 1300 and we SNAP call.  He takes a few seconds and tentatively announces 'set' and shows  for a horrendously played set of Q's and looks like a right tool when he 'nervously' shows his top set.  Wp sir, gg.

[ ] Nice start...

- lets get back to our 10k stack and 25/50 blinds please.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cliffs
- We play pretty solid and notice we have a pretty call happy table, we learn this as we try to get one guy to fold a 7 on a  when our  misses OOP.  He calls the pot bet and we say nice call sir.

- We also lose with an overpair w/spade vs  UTG on a    .  Must be nice to raise first hand he plays UTG then flop a flush and get paid?!

- Lose a bunch more small pots and we're down to 7k pretty quickly.  Kept going over hands, realizing I played them as well as possible and I still have X amount of bb's.

- Eventually we find a value hand in the old  and raise UTG, we get the hero from earlier (QQ 'pot controller') in UTG+2 and a few others, its looking scary until the  flop when we decide to cbet/ give up in order to get value, but our 'hero' comes along so quickly on the flop we're fairly sure he has that final A! (yelp of yay!)
We decide to take his 'pot controlling' skills to school and bet pot on turn and he realizes this will create a 1/3 pot river bet so just sets us in! We snap with the nuts and he's drawing dead to give us a double up to 16K, tyvm sir, wp again.

- Carry on playing pretty solid but struggling to play or win many hands.  Instead chatting a lot to Jonny Chapman a very nice young man who used to work at DTD as a dealer but is now the hospitality manager for the Pokerstars Supernova/ Supernova Elite players.... MBN sir, sweet job.

- Eventually we've folded our way through a few levels and we're rocking a 30bb stack... we're ready for <30bb poker and have been working on that part of my game a lot recently, especially how long a short stack can last when played properly.  So I'm ready for this and have a great table for it as they won't call correctly and I'll get some silly folds and insane double up's vs different villains.

- We make a few shoves n keep ourselves around the 22-28bb mark but are struggling to find value hands....

WHEN

- We find the QQ's in CO and have had the table 'captain' who has won every pot and has around 50K (avg like 17K) limping into every pot.  We decide to 4.5x it here (1650) and he obv limp calls.

$4300ish
FLOP
256r
He checks, we bet 1425 and he calls... we do this to set up a turn shove of almost pot... figuring he'll think we're bluffing when we bet this big on a turn card, and we pray for no A no K please.

$7150
TURN
4o
He checks again and we take 20 seconds then shove our remaining 5400 and he calls quickly.

Our QQ are up against the mighty, strong, massive, common limp calling- check calling             8 2o!
(well this is pretty sweet, just need no 2, 3, or 8 please dealer)

$17950
RIVER
3o
CHOP CHOP CHOP CHOP it up and give that nice young man his soldiers back please dealer man, we've signed a peace treaty on this hand and would like to share it evenly.
I didn't say a word, no tilt, just swallowed the unfortunate reality of tournament poker and tried to quickly refocus and get it in again as good soon!



[ ] We got it in good
[X] We got it in soon-ish..
[X] I genuinely didn't tilt as a result of this hand, I just got back 'to the grind' - need another 'value' hand please Mr Dealer - man.




A level or so later after a few standard shoves with 15-22bb's we find ourselves distracted by some off table chat, peel the  in the bb and see Jonny has min raised in early-ish position.  Now we haven't been messing with him mainly because he's played pretty tight and therefore will have a strong range very often.  For whatever reason I thought he would be folding plenty here and decided to shove my 14bb's into the middle, he snaps and we're in an all in for almost 30K with very little equity vs KK.

Woops... in retrospect this was a 'blowup' of somekind.  I actually think I could have won the hand if I played it like this.....

Flop
 

Turn


River


If I min3bt pre, checked the flop (think this woulda freaked him out) then bet small on turn + shove river... or to shove turn.
This is because if i min 3bt and he just calls (probably good idea since my min3bt will be KK+) then when I check that board I don't think he think's I'm ever giving up, ever! So by turn I can only really have QQ (now a set), KK (same hand) or AA that I would be playing such a 'small' pot vs his tight range.

Alternatively I could have just folded pre and carried on shoving my ever shortening stack in good spots vs villains that will fold and call incorrectly and more than likely get myself into a good spot to double up and then play my way through the rest of the day.

[X] My tournament discipline is getting so much better every single time I play atm.
[X] Made one mistake today
[X] It cost me my tournament
[ ] Tournaments are an easy game



So we continue to battle onto our first 'major' DTD final table.  Next time pls.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DTD UKIPT SAT
I decided to try my play at a live sat for the £1Million GTD UKIPT at DTD next week in a £56 Re-Entry tournament, I won the first two hands in my first buyin and no more....
And only played one hand of the second @ 400/800 with 10K I get all in pre flop with  vs  and  ... for a 3 way 35K aipf.
[ ] I won the 'flip'.



After that I decided enough was enough and despite often being one of the best players on any of the 50/1 cash tables and often a strongly ++EV player on the 1/2 or 1/3 tables I am not rolled for them atm and as such refuse to play, yet!

When I am rolled for them you better watch out because I will be crushing them at every opportunity! AGoulder an all!




So here I am at home on 'the beast' and enjoying her simple pleasures, I'm going to crack out the Warcraft: Frozen Throne mini games online for a bit and have fun building some towers or levelling up a hero or two....

Night all, hope you run good and GL to Jonny Chapman and our 5% swap..... 211K going into tomorrow and I believe we're a top10 chipstack.