hero calls

i played a little last night and for some reason i decided to be a hero and make some loose calls to show off how great my hand reading skills are.

the first time i called a c/r all-in w/ 99 on Jd6d5x board. action went ep raise, i flat call in the CO and villain calls out of the bb. checked to me on the flop, i stabbed at it and bb re-raised all-in. i bet 380 into a 760 chip pot and bb c/r shove was for 2.3k. i really ruled out a big hand since he's playing it so fast. i put him on a flush draw a large portion of the time and a weak Jack or straight draw to a lesser extent of the time.

i called and he showed me JJ for top set and was probably playing scared of the flush draw.

the second one was less dramatic. (and just plain bad) basically it was an over push from the blinds that most of the time is AK but also could be in the 99-JJ range. my 88 is in rough shape against that range but i managed to convince myself it was AK and called it off. he showed me QQ and it was another gg.

so not a great night play wise but those days will happen.

i've been cashing a lot in the $22 turbo sngs but it seems im always busting 3rd. i bucked the trend by taking down 1st in my last two of the night which felt good.

the limit holdem tourny stunk, i ran KK into AA again (thinking about changing the title of this blog to "Kings into Aces") which cost me even more than usual since we had a donk in between us trying to cap every round (including the turn) w/ a naked flush draw. that took a good chunk of my stack and then i played an AJ hand very well (imo) but got rivered by a guy calling multiple bets on the turn w/ a gut shot.

other than that i played 4 45 player sngs and took 5th in one and got knocked out at the midway point in the others.

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the world series finish off last nite/early this morning. another year in the books and another year that i have failed to play an event. this year was looking promising since i had a 13k bankroll put together but for a plethora of reasons i didn't make it.

im hoping that by next year i will have a roll big enough that i'll be able to play some of the smaller events and maybe try to satellite into the main event. it's weird but i don't really have that much desire to play the main event. i'd much rather play a bunch of the smaller events.

another goal that kind up just snuck up on me is the WPT North American Poker Championships. last year was the 1st year this tournament took place in Niagara Falls (Canada) at Fallsview casino. im only about a 25 min drive from Fallsview and it would be so sick if i could somehow satty into it. Last year they also had the Canadian Poker Championships held there a week prior to the WPT and had a much smaller buy-in of 2.6k.

i haven't heard anything about the Canadian Championships yet but the 10k is a go. they don't run any prelim events for this leg of the wpt since fallsview's poker room is only about 10 tables. from what i understand they totally revamp the casino floor just for this one week tournament.

i downloaded the satellite schedule and they have a lot of different options to getting in. it's pretty much like the party step sngs. i'm going to make an effort to get down there and play a few since last year i heard they were super soft and if that fails i might take a few stabs on ftp with the winners choice tournaments.

i also realized today that im only 2 months away from a planned vegas trip. i've never been to vegas (or on a plane for that matter) and i haven't booked anything of yet but me and a few friends are looking at going down in late september. this means i need to build up a bigger roll in a hurry! my original plans were to bring about 3k for playing purposes only and right now that would be case money which is not an option.

hopefully in the next 2 months i can keep improving, get a little lucky and take down some nice scores.

tg