Poker Month - Day 1

I’m going to be in and out of the office for the next few weeks, so thought I’d use today’s day off to play a solid session online.

The online Omaha started pretty disastrously, but I managed to claw back to level after controlling tilt for a change.

I also signed up for a raft of tournaments in the afternoon, and played fairly well cashing twice. Unfortunately I imploded with 12 runners left in the biggest event (the PS $109) to go from 4th spot to out within 3 hands.

The table dynamic was kind of weird - I was the biggest stack with one other active player, and the other 4 runners were basically trying to ladder up the money with shorter stacks. With the active player to act before me, he was correctly raising frequently to steal the blinds of the ladderers, but it hemmed me in totally. I re-stole a few times and then this happened.

Active raiser makes it 5k from button, I make it 15k with K9 from the SB and get flat called. Flop is AK7 and somehow I elect to put him all in and he snaps me off with A9. This sends my stack from 90k to 30k and was a really stupid move.

I then lost calling a short stack’s all in with J9 whilst on tilt, shoved A5 into A9 blind on blind to leave me with 5k and then lost A4 v 56 when the blind had to call my stack with anything. A quite splendid implosion, to leave me with a $400 prize as opposed to challenging for the $5k for 1st.

In the other FT tournament I was running 15th out of 45 (in the money) when I got my stack in against another big stack with a set of tens against an up and down but I failed to hold, thus leaving me with $53 as consolation.

Oh well - played fairly well apart from the blow-up, accumulating decent stacks in all but two of the eight events I played. Hopefully the bigger scores will come, although I do find tournaments frustrating.

Have some business to attend to tomorrow, and am busy at the weekend, so doubt I’ll be putting in many more hours till Monday. On the live front the WSOP league is on Tuesday, and I’m going to try and make it to the Vic on Thursday for their £100 event.

The following Saturday sees the International host their monthly £330 event which I shall hopefully play if I can summon the motivation to play a tournament with a 20k starting stack and a 50 minute clock!