A bit of a catch up!

Prior to breaking up for Easter I thought it would be the biggest slackfest, I'de get in a ton of volume at the tables and be able to rake in a load of dough..how wrong I was!

It's been absolutely manic here for one reason or another. My daily schedule lately has been waking up around noon and hit the gym. Head into the office to help out with the phones and do some uni work until 5-6ish. Get home, have a quick bite to eat and then off out into town/to the beach/seeing friends and getting home in the early hours. I've got to say it's a lifestyle I could get used to if the weather holds up but unfortunately there leaves very little time for poker!

I've come to the realisation that when I return to uni in a week and a bit I won't have time to play all of the daily donkaments unfortunately. It is a shame as I enjoy them but going cold-turkey on poker for a couple of months due to exams seems pretty lame to me. So as a solution, I think I'm going to try my hand at PLO again. It's not the first time that I've played this game. Last summer in fact I started playing 25c/50c plo on full tilt and must have gone on a massive heater trippling my original deposit before withdrawing it and spending it on holiday. Since then I've hardly touched the game other than the occasional punt live at Dusk Til Dawn.

You may wonder why I'm thinking of spending time on PLO rather than my bread and butter: NLHE. Well just from a quick session I played on iPoker this afternoon I had 4 tables of 50c/$1 up. It was ridiculous! I obviously didn't table select as I have no idea who the regulars are or whatever, but everyone seemed to be running at 21/17 on poker tracker (for those not in the know this is a very good style of preflop poker so not donks limping their 49o utg etc.). And it was mad 3-bets pre. Considering I haven't played cash properly for getting on a year, I really just thought do I want to be relearning this somewhat saturated game where its reg v reg grinding rakeback. No thanks! Instead I think I'll learn PLO.

Anyway, enough of that rant. Onto my trip I was talking about in my previous blog post.

Norweigan Poker Championship

This has to be the highlight of the live poker year for myself. I hope in a couple of years for me it will be Las Vegas during the WSOP but until then the Norweigan championship at Dusk Til Dawn fits the bill quite nicely. For a week each year the Norweigans and their hyper-loose aggro fashion jets on a plane up to Nottingham to prove who is the LAGiest of them all. And they certainly do it in style.

I withdrew £600 before I left from my DTD-Boss account to play around with there buying in for £100 a go. There's me reasonably thinking that at £1/£2 I'll get a good run for this money and if I hit the deck well may spin it up. The first hour I was in the club I was £400 down. Haha, oh dear! But what a way to loose £400. So there I was sat with my measly £100 stack when surrounding me were the crazy Norweigans sat with around £2,000+ each. This is £1/£2 so the typical buy-in you would expect here would be £200, oh no, not here! 1000BB+ is what can be expected at this table, and they weren't afraid to use their stacks either.

I sat down with my first £100 and looked down UTG at KK. I raise to £17 (don't worry that's standard here) and got 5/8 of the table calling, oh great. It then comes round to the BB who looks at me and raises to £180. I ship my first £100 in and get a caller behind me. The flop came 5 6 A rainbow. By this time I'm reach in my pocket to get out the next £100. But as the action happened both players had effective £800ish left. The BB bets out £200 into the small side pot and the guy to my left reshoves the £800. BB tank/calls and flips over A7 (cheers lol) and the guy to my right shows pocket 8's. Smooth. The board bricks and I'm onto buy-in 2. After having AA cracked 2 more times pre I think it's time for a break and to really get my focus back on. If there is one place in the world not to tilt, it would be at that table there.

Now that makes it interesting is that these Norweigans aren't fish. Far from it. From speaking with a few of them they are all $1/$2 to $10/$20 grinders online, but something in their blood just means that they seem to try and bluff/win every pot. So you can imagine what a table of them is like. As a result, I resorted to playing a very tight passive style and basically set mining. Live 1 table set mining...yawn.
Well not really as the action was so crazy. Not a single street went by in most pots without at least a 3 or 4 bet lol. Followed by the other person folding and the 4better showing 2-5offsuit or something.

One of the biggest pots I witnessed was with 3 players, where a ~£5k pot was won by 22 vs AA on a A29 2 4 board. That was quite funny. Just because the turn was like raise 400bb's, reraise 1100bbs.

Anyway, I'm blabbing on too much now and this is getting long. But basically I hit a couple of sets and got paid off leaving the holdem on the first day roughly £100 up and then took my money to PLO for the second day. My stack fluctuated ridiculously but I eventually ground the £100 I sat down with up to £450. Now normally, I'de wait a while and leave the table as this could have been used quite nicely elsewhere starting again with the £100. Plus I had been playing a few hours now and was probably off my A-game slightly. But then it happened. Some bloke wandered over to our table tripping up on the way, sat down and splashed about £800 in front of him in a big pile. He was verging on paraletic. So so so drunk it was so funny to watch. I didn't really know what to expect until he started potting every street (most of the time out of position) without looking at his hole-cards.

Pot pot pot pot pot pot! So funny. But the way he did this wasn't by asking the pot of the dealer and placing the correct chips in. He'd literally heff a load in every time and wait for the dealer to sort it out. They were getting so pissed off it was hilarious. Felt a bit sorry for them in a way as preflop the limit to pot is £8 so he shoves about £200 in £5's every time and constantly trying to go all without realising there is a limit so trying to shove his stack into the middle much to the dealers annoyance. Anyway, you've got to be thinking at this point that leaving the table now is basically burning money. So I waited and tightened up big time. You cant be getting into marginal spots with a guy potting every street blind.

Anyway, somehow this guy, who kept ordering Sambuca shots every pot he won (which was a lot!), managed to go on a heater of a life time. At the £2/£2 plo he took about £3k off the guy sat next to me. I couldn't help feel bad though it was literally sick cold decks. At the end the pissed bloke would pull 1 card up at a time for the deadliest of slowrolls and to everyones shock he was just pulling in every pot! My stack had dwindled a bit down to around £400 by trying to see flops and if I can catch 2 pair/set/straight but to no avail. Then it happened, I looked down at AA33 double suited and just thought, well I guess this is the time to risk it all!

The action went, limp, limp, and I limped. Drunk guy pushes about £200 in the pot as the dealer highlights for the umpteenth time the max bet is £14 and sorts his change out for him. The UTG repots, UTG+1 repots again. Now there is a sick amount of money in the pot and I've got a seriously good hand. I repot again. Drunk guy calls blind, then says "oh crap I didn't see it got raised". Real smart lol. UTG calls my repot (shove) and then UTG+1 repots again. UTG+1 had around £1.5k in front of him with the drunk guy covering. Drunk guy calls and its a 4 way all in. I hit a set of 3's on the flop. PAIR THE BOARD PAIR THE BOARD 1 TIMMMME FOR £1.3k!! PAIRRR. But unbelievable drunk guy hits runner runner flush with his 8c4c2dks lol. Unreal! At the time I was like, well that kind of sucks, but it was very funny.

I reloaded for another £200 and lost that 3-way with nutflush and open ender vs drunk guys 2 pair (he was blind) on the flop which then turned a full house. FML!

Having just lost so much to some brainless mule I was feeling myself starting to tilt, i took a little break and when I got back drunk guy had gone. Apparently he was being sick somewhere so I decided to call it a loss for the day. Regardless though it was great great fun.

I have to say, although the trip in the end was a loss (a near massive win), it has to have been the most fun I've had playing live poker so far. The Norweigans are so fun to play with and the action is literally insane.

I'm going to focus and really learn omaha now as the quality of play seems to be so bad and if i could actually get pretty decent, I think i could crush the game for alot while im having my small tournament break!

Sorry for the super long blog, hope everyone is running well at the tables!