Time to buckle up. Not because I rented another U-Haul, but because I put in a big session of cards on Sunday which I'm sure will also buck you off your seats with excitement. They shifted all of the big Sunday tournaments 2 hours earlier to target the influx of overseas players and the exit of US players. At first this made me feel a bit alone and afraid, but I've come around and am feeling good about the change. Basically it just means if I take a tournament really deep I get to bed 2 hours earlier than I normally would, or have an additional 2 hours in the evening to perform my victory celebration. I can't tell you exactly what my celebration ritual entails, but I can tell you that it involves lunges, ice cream, McGivor re-runs, a yo-yo and a top hat.
I hadn't put in a big session for a while, so I pretty much planned on entering every tournament on the schedule that wasn't a micro buy-in. It was going to be a big day one way or the other. The Sunday Warm-Up now starts at 9am, which is when I started my day. Actually I'm lying. I started at 9:30am since I decided last minute to go to Higher Ground for coffee before getting started. I only went there for coffee though, no muffins. I got home and registered late for the Warm-Up like a big shot, and got elimated shortly after. Oh. Over the next few hours I played in various other tournaments ranging from $22 to $109 buy-ins. If you have ever wondered why the buy-ins aren't round numbers, it's because the buy-ins include the entry + a fee. So, $22 is actually a $20 entry (goes into prize pool) + $2 fee (which goes to PokerStars). That's how they make their money. Bigger buy-in, bigger fee. Just for kicks, let's take the Sunday Million. $215 = $200 entry + $15 fee. Yesterday there were over 10,000 entries. 10,000 x $15 = $150,000....from one tournament. There are tournaments starting every minute. Not to mention sit n go and cash game rake. Oh wow. No wonder the US government wants a piece of this action. Well I digress. The Sunday Million kicked off at it's new fancy time of 12:30pm. I actually didn't even realize till about 12:50pm that it had started already. So like a big shot once again, I registered for it late only to be knocked out just over an hour later. Good. So at this point my day wasn't going very well. Actually it was going quite poorly. Some bad beats, compounded with some sloppy play and I was approaching 1K in entries as I moved into the afternoon wave of tournies, and no return on those investments yet. Sounds like a lot of money, and it is, this ain't no game of rummy down at the Lions Club, ya hear. It's all relative though, I won't risk more than 5% of my current bankroll in a given session. So I continue with my regular schedule, the $55 Sunday Special (200K GTD), $215 Second Chance (250K GTD), $215 80K GTD, $109 60K GTD etc....and managed to get my act together and cash in all 4 of those, and make pretty deep runs in a couple. Made for a +$1200 day overall, which doesn't warrant a trophy on my mantel (I'm just pretending to have a mantel), but I'm still happy that I powered through a rough start to play well in the second half of my day and muster up some results.
The way I exited the Second Chance was a bit frustrating. First prize for this one was 55K. You can get a lot of free hugs for 55K. However, I was eliminated in 25th-ish out of about 1600 entrants. Still good for over 1K. I was top 5 in chips for a long while when things started to unravel like a runaway roll of toilet paper. And once it starts to unravel, you can never get it rolled back on like it was originally, you know? Frustrating. Poker can be the same way. Anyway, one cooler (not the kind you load up with beer), then one bad decision and I was out. If you don't know what a cooler is, you'll soon find out. I got dealt Q-Q in the cutoff position (one before the dealer) and a mid-position player with about half my stack size raised. I re-raised which is pretty standard. He flat called and the flop came A-3-3. Blah, pretty ugly flop for me. He could easily have an A, obviously. He checks to me though, so I'm happy to check and see a free card. Just because he checked, I did not rule out the possibility of him having an A (like A-K or A-Q). The turn was a blank, say a 5. He checks to me again. Hmmmm ok, well at this point I'm happy just checking it down. He could have a hand like J-J and is also scared of the A. The river is a Q. I hit my gin card, and now certainly have the best hand. However, if he does have a hand like J-J I'm not going to extract any more chips from him. The only way is if he is holding an A and was slowplaying it. He checks to me again, so I have to bet to try extract some value from my hand. So I bet a small amount to try entice a call, and he raises...raises?! He flat calls pre-flop, checks the flop, checks the turn, then check-raises the river? The only 2 hands that beat me are A-A and 3-3. He doesn't have 3-3. I don't care how good you are, you can't put somebody on 4 of a kind and fold a full house, the odds of that happening are so small that it would just be silly. My first instinct was that he was just making a play at me, thinking I didn't have anything. I was just tickled to throw my entire pile at him....and he INSTA called me. When he called that fast, before his cards even turned I blurted out "darn" (or something less PG), and *drum roll*...he turns over AA. He slowplayed it the whole way, and it turned into a total cooler when I nailed the river. A cooler is when you lose with that hand that's impossible to get away from since it'll be the best hand, say, 97% of the time in that situation. Big hit to my stack but I'm still alive. Reflecting back on the hand, of course his checks make sense because with his hand and that flop he wasn't going to get much action unless I catch a piece on a later street (which I did, sigh). He could see 3 of the aces, so the chances of me also holding one were slim, and I obviously didn't have a 3. He played it well, he disguised the fact he had A-A by flat calling me pre-flop and not re-raising. Of course there is some risk involved in his play, but it can pay off big sometimes if you have the guts to do it.
My elimination hand I was dealt A-Q in early position. I raised and the player on the button, who was playing aggressively and had a MONSTER stack, re-raised me. I just figured he was being a bully so I re-raised all in. He snap called me with K-K and his hand held. A good percentage of the time my play is a profitable one, but I didn't think it completely through. With our stack sizes and the amount he already put in the pot, he was basically priced in to call me with whatever hand he hand, so even though my hand was fairly strong I'm taking a bit of a gamble knowing that he's going to call no matter what. It's called fold equity (having enough chips to make someone mathematically fold) and I didn't have it, but didn't think long enough to realize it. I'm still torn on the play, I think a good percentage of the time A-Q is ahead there since he'll be re-raising light with his big stack. It just deserved a bit more consideration at that stage of a big tournament.
The rest of the weekend was spent mountain biking, golfing, and playing guitar. The mountain bike trails were rather moist and I returned home covered in mud. Went out to Jumpingpound for an easy ride and got a bit more than I bargained for. The golf was good (except for the cold, wind, and rain), second round of the year and I hit the ball really good. I was 1 under through 7 holes but then my short game abandoned me and I made 6 bogeys stumbling in to shoot 77. Still an awesome day even though the score tailed off a bit. The guitar playing is slowly coming along. Still sounds like wounded puppies caught in a train wreck at times, but it's sounding more like music than it did 3 weeks ago when I first picked it up. Maybe I'll post a tune once I really master one...just to prove I've actually been practicing and not just carrying my guitar case around trying to impress chicks. Don't hold your breath though.
That's all for now, hopefully you've all been keeping fit and having fun.
Josh
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