Long Weekend

Well this weekend sucked about as bad as I thought it would. The company I work for does their annual physical inventory at all the stores on the first two weekends in December each year. I work at the regional office and have to oversee several stores to make sure they are on track and don’t do any funny stuff. I had to work some Friday night and then from 8am to 10:30pm on Saturday. I was supposed to have Sunday off but I ended up having to do some more work yesterday. That bites and I am going to have to do it all over again this coming weekend too. Understandably I got almost zero table time in this past weekend. I couldn’t swallow taking the whole weekend off from playing so last night I signed on after the family went to bed to squeeze in a couple hours at least. I ended up playing over 5 hours and was up until 3:30!! Oops!! Oh well…I can always sleep when I am dead..I do this all the time anyway..LOL. I have started experimenting with 3-tabling my DON’s with not much success. I think my biggest problem is staggering them properly so I am not having to make several key decisions at the same time. I keep wanting to start them all at the same time and it’s causing me problems in the endgame. I am going to try it a few more times and stagger them about 10 minutes apart and see if that helps. I have no problem 2-tabling so I think that should solve my problem. I have no idea how some of these guys are 15-20 tabling SNG’s! I have come across 3 or 4 of them and they all seem to be running right around a 10% ROI on the $5.20 DON’s. Not a bad profit for dinky $5.20 SNG’s when you are running 3000 of them a month! Nope, not even going to attempt to go there.. I don’t see myself ever going past 4 tabling. Maybe I am just too old, but I like to get reads on the tables so I have a better idea in the endgame of how likely I will be getting called on my pushes. I also enjoy playing and multi-tabling that much would make it too much of a grind and no fun at all!
Well I ended up running 5 out of 7 on my DON’s last night..then I tossed in a Pot Limit Badugi Tourney while my final 2 DON’s were finishing. I wrapped it up by signing up for a Sunday 200K satellite. I had problems getting going on the Badugi and hovered around starting chip count for the 1st hour! I finally got some cards and got up to 10K in chips which was 3rd at the time. Then I lost ½ of them on one hand when my 9 high starting Badugi hand was called all the way to the final draw when I was Pot betting the pot each round. Idiot finally made his hand on the final draw and beat me with 7 high Badugi. Hello!! I guess he didn’t care that I was standing pat for each draw the whole time! LOL.. Then I lost most of my chips a few hands later when I got an 8 high starting Badugi and started Pot betting pre-draw. Guy made his Badugi after the 1st draw and raised me.. I just called him down and luckily he didn’t put me all in. He also had an 8 high Badugi but his kicker was better. I was down to 1,000 chips now with blinds at 250-500!! Luckily there are no antes in Badugi so you can just sit there and wait for a hand. Well I never managed to get much more than that and just squeezed into the money and went out in 13th out of 104 runners. The 200K satellite looked like a repeat of my Badugi tourney! There were 106 runners and 19 got tickets and 20th received $3.00. I was utterly card dead almost the entire tourney!! At the 1st break I was at 1,400 chips with 100-200 blinds and 25 antes!! LOL.. I just stayed tight as a snare drum and pushed a few times and my hands held up. Towards the end I checked my stats and I had only played 10% of my hands and most of those were in my big blind! 2 hours of play and I only played 11 hands and 7 were in the big blind! LOL… what a nit!! I am not usually that tight, but I wasn’t going to push with garbage. But I made it and got a ticket to the Sunday 200K. I was signed up for it for maybe 20 seconds before I unregistered and got my $11 bucks..LOL.. I play these things like a SNG except it has a flat 400%ROI payout. Well, that’s it for now…C-ya at the tables!
Dave
Starting BR: $200
Ending BR: $225

Deep MTT run

When I first started playing poker all I did was play the big MTT freerolls. Once I finally deposited and started playing for real I quit the MTT’s. They take up an awful long time and usually your payout is not worth the time invested. About the only MTT’s I have played lately are a few FPP buy-in’s. Well last night I had ANOTHER bad run with the $5.20 DON’s and was down $20.00. I got some back playing HU SNG but wasn’t in the right frame of mind to focus for heads-up play. I went ahead and signed up for the little dinky $.25 buy-in MTT that was about to start instead. I figured I would get an hour or so of play for $.25 and just have some fun and then call it a losing night. There ended up being over 3,600 people registered when it began and it was paying 702 places. I think you could just sit out and make the payouts in this tournament if you wanted to! People go out faster than a freeroll! I know it’s only $.25 but come on…the first 20 minutes and a 1,000 are already gone! My strategy for these low buy-in MTT’s has been to limp in late position with suited connectors or hands like KJ or KQ and hope for a very nice flop…or if I have a pair to push it pretty hard. The higher the pair the harder I push.. In these things if I have 10-10 or better I am really jamming the pot preflop..400-500 in the early rounds.. I am going to be moving all in after the flop with these hands anyway since at these buy-ins idiots will call with almost anything so I give them no credit early on. If I am beat by a monster oh well. I definitely small ball it until I have a really nice hand. I don’t get to pushy with top pair early on. I don’t get too concerned with building a stack in these until we are in the money. If I can maintain around 2000-3000 chips the first hour then I am happy. After the first break is usually about the time you hit the money.. it’s also about the time I go into push or fold strategy. Now the blinds are big enough that they can really increase your stack even in noone calls you. I just wait for a nice starting hand and push. I will normally get called by a big stack that has been playing almost every pot the whole tourney and just got lucky a few times. Bam..double up number one…in one hand I am above average chip stack again. The weak players that like to limp every hand or raise with garbage just don’t know when to back off and they lose their stacks pretty quickly. So back to last night…….. 1st hour..about average stack and only played 3 or 4 pots…hit the money just after 1st break..Yay.. I’m rich..LOL… 2nd hour… still about average stack but I upped the number of pots played to 10 and we are down to 400 left. 3rd hour I get some nice hands and double up a few times and then I can finally start to steal some pots. I made it all the way to 2nd chip spot for a few minutes and we are down to 150 left. 4th hour (yes these things are long!) I go card dead (and I mean dead!!!) I probably only played 5 or 6 pots that hour and watched my stack slowly dwindle from top 10 stack down to just average and we are down to around 25 left. 5th hour I figured we would burn through to the final table pretty quickly…nope!! It took the whole hour to get down to the final table. I got one double up to get my stack back up and then picked my spots to steal. 6th hour I went into final table 6th in chips out of the 9. Now the payouts really jumped and the people started dropping like flies. After 6 hours of play and now they choose to play like donkeys when the $141.00 is in reach?? I don’t understand it. One guy raised preflop and was called. He pushed all in after the flop with K-2 when he had bottom pair and two other face cards were on the board? Well in 30 minutes we were down to just 3.. and we were all about even stacks. With the big payout in reach it was my turn to make the donk move!!! I push all-in w/ A-9 and the small blind snap calls with A-K and I am done… Sheesh what an idiot I am.. well the $48.00 helped ease the pain of being an idiot, but it still sucks going that far and messing up. Still all-in-all a good run for me.

C-ya at the tables
Dave

Starting BR $100
Ending BR $132

so so weekend

Well I guess my good run is over. The past 3 days have really been a struggle. Variance has been biting me in the ass a lot lately. I thought I had one bad beat, but once I reviewed the hand I realized it wasn’t. 7 people left in a $5.20 DON and 3 short stacks (I have 1000 in BB, early pos has 600 and mid pos has 900 and blinds are at 200-400!) early pushes and mid pos calls and I choose to go all-in instead of calling with A-K. The early position had garbage and middle position had 3-3. A-K-5 comes the flop and I am thinking I am now good with my top 2 pair, but of course the 3 comes on the river. I was left with 100 chips and was all in next hand in small blind and was out in 6th! I was steamed since he hit a 2 outer on the river, but then I realized he was favorite pre-flop anyway!! That calmed me down some..but it did still suck..LOL.. Then it made me wonder if I only called pre-flop if he would have folded his 3’s and saved his last couple hundred???? The rest of my losses have been in coin flips or the occasional high pair vs higher pair. I have been playing pretty well and have run deep in most of my SNG’s. I am still bouncing back and forth between $5.20 DONs and multi-table $1.10 DONs while mixing in a few multi-table SNG’s and some heads-up SNG’s. I don’t like playing the same type of tourney over and over again since it gets stale and I think it hurts my play overall since each kind has a different strategy and plays different. The good news is the bankroll is still climbing..just very little the past few days. I played quite a few hours the past 3 days and only saw a minimal increase in my bankroll. Considering I don’t think I was running very well during that span I do think it’s great that it still went up though. One other thing is that I totaled up all my buy-ins on MTT & SNG and in the past couple months I have bought into almost $800 worth of tourneys. Wow..not a bad bang for your buck for some fun entertainment. Beats spending $20 to see a 2 hour movie! At a 10% ROI if I want to get to a $1000 BR I would have to buy into $10,000 worth of tourneys! Wow.. that’s sick..LOL.
Dave

Starting BR $93.00
Ending BR $100.00