SwingSwingSwing's Poker Journey

Once again, life has been getting in the way of poker playing. 

In May, I managed the grand total of 14 heads up SNGs. Mind you, I won 71% of them, i.e, 10 and lost 4 which was nice.

That wee run was fortuitous as I had a bit of downswing after my last post and at one point was back into negative territory winnings-wise at the $10 level. I was playing terribly and tilting badly. I came across one guy, Ali 65, who is, without doubt, the worst player I have ever came across. Sharkscope has his ROI as -52%. I think I lost three in a row to him. The tilt was unbearable.

Anyhoo, I've recovered now.

Scores on the doors:-
$10 Heads Up SNGS
Played: 146
ITM%: 54.8%
ROI%: 4.4%

Not much else to report poker-wise.

I played a SCOOP event and cashed although looking back I wonder why I bothered. I won an $11 SCOOP ticket in the World Blogger Championship a while back. Browsing the SCOOP schedule I realised that there really weren't many tournaments that I would be able to use the ticket for. For most of the tournaments the "low" tournament entry was $22 or higher and of the ones that had an $11 low, the start times were terrible for a UK based player. The only real option was the $11 Pot Limit 5 Card Draw. I have played quite a bit of 5 Card Draw and, in fact, it's a game I really enjoy. But it's all been fixed limit. Pot limit would be new to me. But it was my only option so if I was going to use the ticket, that would be the tournament.

Having decided that, I then almost missed the tournament. If I recall correctly, it was 7pm start on a Wednesday evening. On that particular Wednesday I had decided to walk home from work (as part of my "fitness" regime - 5 miles and it takes me about 1 hour 20 minutes). I get in the door at 6.30, knackered, and the first thing I do after feeding the dogs is to have a bath. Now, the bath is where I do most of poker learning. My little netbook gets perched on the side of the bath and I lie back, have a soak, while watching a poker video or two and hoping that I don't fall asleep and drown.

So I'm in the bath, watching a video from SNG Grinders and I suddenly realise that the 5 Card Draw tournament starts at 7pm. Now I've got a dilemma. Do I curtail my bath, get out and play the tournament on the main laptop? Or do I stay in the bath and play it on the netbook? Given that I wasn't long in the bath and I wasn't that bothered about the tournament I decided to stay in the lovely, warm water and play it from there.

So I fire up PokerStars and get myself registered about 5 minutes before the start. At that point there were about 2200 players registered. Not too many, I thought, maybe about 4 or 5 hours to the final table. But, alas, I had not factored in the effect of the extended late registration period. As I played from the bath, the number of players grew and grew, getting past 2500, 3000, 3500 and then 4000 basically doubling the field. My estimate of 4 or 5 hours was now looking a bit optimistic and I seriously considering just sitting out. But just before the first break and I had managed to grow my stack quite considerably and was in a position to make a good go of it. The first break came around. I closed down the netbook, got out the bath and rejoined the tournament on the main laptop in the living room.

Despite this being my first experience of Pot Limit 5 Card Draw, I was doing quite well. And as the tournament progressed I was keeping my stack above average and got through the money bubble without any bother at around midnight. At 1am, PokerStars then decided to have a 15 minute break much to my annoyance and to other UK players. One guy said that if he'd know that was going to happen he'd have just pushed any hand and went to bed! My stack was getting small and I was getting tired. But there were lots of small money bubbles coming up. I went into short-stack ninja mode and ended up busting out in 222nd place of out 4500ish at around 2.30am when my two pair ran into a higher two pair. And my prize for 7 and half hours work?........$22.

Why the fuck did I bother?


PS For any BritBloggers reading - I've never played the BritBloggerment from the bath.

A quick update on my shot at the $10s. I played 20 tournies over the weekend and I'm currently running at an ROI of 20%! I doubt that will last but we can always hope.

Play is definitely tougher than the $5 although there are plenty of fish. I played a series of three games against a guy who had a tendency for huge overbets at any stage of the hand. He was a definite fish but his overbets did cause me a bit of bother. He won the first match but I took down the next two.

The trickiest set of games were last night against a very aggressive player. I had just busted out of the weekly BritBloggerment and wasn't particularily happy, having run into big hands at the wrong times. I knew at the time that I should have just closed PokerStars down but it was still early so I went to the HU SNG lobby.

I found a player sitting who had a Spanish sounding screenname. And his screenname had a space in it. I've come to the conlusion over time that this can sometimes be an indicator of fishiness so I jumped in. Unfortunately, he was aggro to the extreme, raising nearly ever hand preflop and forcing me off hands with some unexpected and large check raises or river raises. Post flop he was absolutely owning me.

This got to me. The first two games he won easily. One of them was when he raised with 52o and I called. I think I had top pair on the flop and made a big bet. Unfortunately, as the board had brought two fives I was toast.

Now, at this point I should have walked away. But no, I rematched him again, which he was loving. "You are a loser" and "I like you" were a couple of his comments. For game three, I decided to make the game more of pre flop affair. I started pushing over the top of his raises with decent hands and he would fold. He then started limping, which suited me fine as long as I kept it very simple and didn't let myself get into any tricky situations. He got bored with taking these little pots that he went back to raising preflop. To which I responded to by pushing over the top. He was still in the lead when I picked up a pair of tens. He raised, I pushed, he called with A6s. And hit an Ace on the flop so it's now 3-0 to him.

Christ, was I angry and immediately rematched (which again was probably the wrong thing to do!). But I think I had a strategy that would be successful. Game four was over pretty quickly. I had pushed over the top of couple of raises to get a small chip lead then had Kings on the button. I just push it all in. He calls with king ten offsuit. Yip, KTo. Now it's 3-1.

Games five and six followed the same pattern. I just kept pushing over his raises with decent hands and when he called he had the inferior hand.

At 3-3, he left which I regarded as a moral victory for me! Yay.

Looking back, I got off lucky in that series. It could have been much worse had I not won my 60-40s.

So let that be a lesson to you all, never play when you're in the wrong mindset. Just don't do it. It will cost you money.