SwingSwingSwing's Poker Journey

I'm now only a small loser at the $2 heads up SNGs on Full Tilt. A run of eleven consecutive victories brought me back into respectability.

Meanwhile on Stars, I've been playing freerolls and crap like that. I've managed to qualify the for Turbo Takedown next week and on Sunday night I final-table-bubbled the UK £2000 guaranteed freeroll rebuy, finishing 10th out of 4500ish.

This is a strange wee tournament. It's a free to enter rebuy. So you get in for free and you can rebuy and get 1000 chips for ten pence. The great thing is that very few of the participants know anything about playing rebuys. Only one or two of your initial table will rebuy at the start and not that many take the addon either. This means it is an easy tournament to cash in. Just rebuy at the start and take the addon and you're almost there. I've played most of them this week and cashed in them all, finished 10th on Sunday night and had a top 200 finish as well. As it's essentially a freeroll, it also means there's a fair bit of overlay. Sunday night's total of rebuys and addons was only about £250 meaning there was £1750 added by PokerStars. And PokerStars even give you a micro stakes SNG ticket if you cash having rebought at some point. 

Easy money. OK, easy micro money but easy money none-the-less.

...it keeps getting in the way of me posting.

As a few of the BritBloggers will know, MrsSwingSwingSwing and I had applied to immigrate to Canada. Now this was a couple of years ago. Well, they've only gone and accepted us! They asked for our passports at the end of June and last week, we got them back with visas attached! But what's really set the cat amongst the pidgeons is that the visas expire in August. Yip, August.

After the initial panic, we've realised that we haven't got time to get everything sorted before the expiry date. So it'll be a two stage plan. Stage 1 - go over to Canada, go through the landing procedure which activates our permanent residents status, stay for a week or so, apply for various bits and bobs and then come back. Stage 2 - get the house sold, pack up and go.

Needless-to-say, we've got a million and one things to do so the poker has taken a bit of a back seat. It hasn't been totally shelved though. I've stopped playing on Stars for now, just to make sure I preserve my bankroll. But I have been playing on Full Tilt with my massive $80 'roll. I was just going to play for fun and see how much I could grow the 'roll playing heads up sit'n'gos. I'm not too proud to say that I'm running at -10% ROI so far, playing the $2s. And that's an improvement as I was running at -24% for a while! I am a fish of the highest quality. People have been looking up my stats and calling me a loser. Now I don't know what's sadder - that I'm a fish at the $2s or that people actually bother to use Sharkscope at that level. One guy in particular made me laugh. He had looked up my stats, saw that he was in for an easy time and played me for a bit. Of course, I won the majority of the games which put him on massive tilt, particularily as I did have a couple of suckouts! During that tilt, he was berating me big time for my poor stats and likewise I was berating him for even bothering to look up opponents at that level.

If you need to use Sharkscope to get a handle on opponents at the $2 level you are destined to spend an eternity at that level.

Despite having lots of other things to do, I played some poker over the weekend. To hell with the garden, and the fence, and fixing the blinds. See me, see living on the edge!

My Heads Up SNG adventures continues with my recent downswing now just a minor blip.

Stats are now:-
Played: 158
ITM%: 55.1%
ROI%: 4.9%

But I still need to get a handle on tilt. An example -  idiot opponent pushes 42s for 15BB or so and as he had been pushing quite a bit, I call with my 77. Flop comes A3x rainbow. Of course, you just know that the 5 is coming. And it does. Cue insane monkey tilt and I go on to lose the match. Arghhhh.

Although my Heads Up SNG adventure isn't exactly bringing in lots of money (yet!) it has definitely improved my overall game. Evaluating hand ranges, analysing flop textures, etc is much easier now and because of that I'm able to make better decisions.

For example, last night's BritBloggerment. It came down to dasertr and myself and the effective stacks were around 20BB, certainly not shove-fest territory yet, and I had the chip advantage. If I had been in this situation a year ago, I would not really have known what do. Stacks are too big to shove and my post flop play wasn't great. But last night was different. I went into the heads up battle, confident and eager.

And I won :-)

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.