Monday 22 June 2009

Sick Upswong to End Weekend

Hey,

After having a really long sleep, I woke at 6:30pm yesterday and was feeling pumped for a long session on the felt. I ate through a couple of bowls of Kellogg's Crunchy Nut (which for what it's worth is definitely +ev) and packed my bags with the intention of leaving Nottingham at the end of the night.

The tournament of the day was either a £25+£6 or a £75+£11. Neither of which I'm too happy about the large rake, but regardless, I just couldn't stomach sitting down in the NLHE cash games again, so opted in for the £75+£11 tournament. It wasn't too long in when I found myself with 99 on a 9d5d6s board facing a large check raise to my cbet. I was at 50/100 and I was about 35bb's deep effective, so couldn't get away with it but was quite dismayed when my opponent flipped the 78 for the made straight. I failed to fill up and out I busted.

Out of the initial £1200 I had brought for this weekend (Original £800+ top-up £400), I was down to my last £450 with food/tournament buy-ins taken out of the roll. Not too impressive by anyone's measure. Feeling in the gambly mood I put myself on the list again for the £5/£5 dealers choice, the £2/£2 PLO and the £2/£2 dealers choice with the intention on primarily playing the first table to open and then to judge which table to play at for the duration of the night with who was playing.

The first table to be formed about 5-10 minutes after I busted the tournament was the £5/£5 dealers choice with a really good line-up, so I was quite happy to sit down straight away and see what I could make of my £200. I'll cut the crap so no-one skips the rest of the article, but in the end I cashed out for £1600 from the original £200 investment. Let's just say that tonight the cards were more in my favour than the previous night.

For instance in 4 card PLO hi, I straddled to £10 and was dealt AsAc4s6c for a really really sick starting hand. The whole table called and I repotted to £70. UTG+1 called, UTG+2 reshoved his short stack of £135 (meaning I could reraise again). One person called this £135 and as I came back to me, I repotted for £600 putting the rest of the players in the hand all in. There was another called and so we were 3 way. Somehow, on a QQ743 board with 3 hearts, my hand held. Although I got it in as an equity favourite, you do need a lot of luck to hold especially in a game such as Omaha where with a random AAxx hand you can almost be flipping with 3456 double suited where as in NLHE AA vs 56suited is much more in the AA's favour.

There were a few times that I really found that I didn't know what the fuck to do and made in retrospect pretty bad moves. I have a long way to go to be a competent 7-card stud player and my Omaha hi-lo game has a lot of work to be done on it too.

An interesting hand came up when we were 3 way and really deep. All of us had about £1200-£1500 stacks playing 6-card PLO hi-lo. I held A34K9 on a 2d5d8s board without any diamonds. Therefore I had the nut-low with low redraw. I did however have the bare ace of diamonds. With my perceived image at the table I think that if the flush did come on the turn I could lead out with strength and often take it down, or get called by another hi-hand and in most cases split the pot anyway.

As the action went, UTG (Very strong LAG) led out £75, I called and so did the guy behind. The reason I didn't raise with the wheel wrap and nut-low is for the hope of a diamond on the turn and also in hi-lo games it seems to be much more profitable to keep more opponents in the pot as splitting the pot is a very common occurrence.

The turn came the King of spades. I now had the lo hand for sure and was still drawing to the wheel draw. UTG led out £150, I called still with the intention of bluffing diamond river and hoping to get to a relatively cheap showdown. Now interestingly, the guy left to act behind me, min-raised to £300. He's an Iranian business man who loves to gamble and can definitely show-up with crap draws a lot of the time. Then UTG min-raised again to £600. Eww..

So I've invested the best part of £250 in this pot where I will definitely win some money back in terms of the nut-low. Given stack sizes, I no longer have enough fold equity if the diamond does come on the river to represent and it's very likely that one if not both of the other players has the same lo-hand but with a stronger high than my bare top pair and bottom wrap. Bad bad spot. I ended up folding to find that my lo- was good but, after much thought I think this was the best choice and it would be too results orientated to play a similar situation differently in the future. I could have raised the turn but given how deep we are and my relatively weak hand this is pretty spew. Who knows eh.

At 4:30am, the club was closing and I happily cashed out and immediately started my journey back down south to Dorset. The sun was rising and the radio was playing awesome tunes, so the 3 1/2 hour journey was a doddle. I'm now going to try and stay up all day and sleep after dinner tonight so as to resume a "normal" non-nocturnal sleep pattern as it must be nice to see the sun on occasion ;)

I'll fill the day in with unpacking, cleaning my car, sorting finances, watching some tennis, play some early morning donkaments, and perhaps bask in the Sun!

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