Wednesday, August 22, 2007

back in action

so haven't really played too much lately. was away/hungover all weekend so had no time to play at all.

i played a little last nite with decent results.

i started at 7pm and only played two tournaments for the nite. the tournaments were the 7pm $75 on ftp and the $109 on party.

both went well to start with. i built a big stack in the $75 due to having a complete donk to my right that would overshove bluff like it was his job. things were going well but i had two players to my left that kept flat calling every one of my raises. even when i raised and they were in the blinds they were flatting me. i managed to take most pots down w/ c-bets on the flop but i pretty much had to stay tight because i knew it wouldn't be long before they hit a flop or made a move on me.

so i basically i got eaten up by the blinds for a while and was down to about 10k @300/600/50a. i opened in ep w/ 55 since i had been playing tight and folded to a min-raise when it was pretty clear that the villain was trying to bait me into pushing. the very next hand w/ 8.2k i open shoved 77 from even earlier position and the same villain snapped me off w/ KK. both plays were pretty poor and annette_15 recently made a post on p5's about pp's late in tournaments with her own guidelines. i'll brush up on that and hopefully plug the leak.

the $109 on party had 226 entrants and i pretty much folded my way around the first 40mins. after that i won a couple good sized pots re-stealing and shoving mid pocket pairs and slowly built up an ok stack. i then got it all-in w/ AK vs QJ (the player limp/called all-in after a re-raise, shove and cold call) vs 88. i turned broadway to win a big pot and was primed for a deep run. i was probably top 5 in chips w/ 20 left, lost 2 huge pots but managed to get most of it back. by the time we got to the final table i was about 8/10 but only had 9bb's. average stack only had about 15bb's though so it wasn't the worst spot. i picked up KK but got no action and eventually busted 9th (maybe 8th) for about $550. the bust out seemed routine but in thinking the hand over after i think i played it wrong. blinds 2k/4k + small party ante, utg raises his 2nd hand in a row to 10k (he had about 60k behind), folds to me in the bb and i shove for another 27k more (shoved my 9bb's) w/ 55. at the time i thought it was a good shove because although i don't have a ton of mathematical fold equity, i thought i had a lot of fold equity when it came to stack size comparisons. anyways, he thought for a while before calling w/ 66 and i guess i don't blame him.

this is really a perfect spot for a stop n go and im 90% sure if i did pull a stop n go he would have been forced to fold the flop. (it came something like QJ7) just folding pre-flop might not be the worst decision either.

oh well, if i keep learning from these mistakes i can only get better.

i ran about 5 $55 turbo sngs at the beginning of the session and only cashed once for 2nd.

after those ran i pulled up 2 tables of 1/2 nl full ring cash and a 8 handed 3/6 omaha hi/lo game. i ran and played well in the nl games and ended up winning about 2.5 buy-ins.

i had some tough decisions in the nl games but seemed to make the right ones each time. i made a nice push w/ AA on a K high drawy board to a turn raise and was right with my read when villain folded.

on this hand i make a big laydown.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1396821

as soon as he check raised i knew i was folding. i don't think he raises here with a flush draw or top pair. you can't always put a guy on a set but this is one of the few times where i think it's fairly transparent. plus, the button could very well be slow playing a big hand. i don't usually ask people what they had since 9/10 times you get a bull shit answer anyways but i did type in my usual "boy i would of loved to see that one". he replied that i didn't want to see it and that he had a set of Tens which i believe.

i dropped about 9 big bets in the O8 game ($54) and basically played donkish the entire time. i like playing O8 but to play at anywhere close to a winning level i would have to 2 table max and give it all my attention.

so a decent profit on the night all though it would have been nice to take down the 6.1k 1st place prize on party. oh well.

tg.