just a blog of my online and live poker experiences. What a fun ride.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

No more smooth sailing.

Ever since my first two adventures with the mini step tourneys, it has been harder than shit to advance consistently in those things. I played 6 of them last night, I started off in 2nd step and made it up to the 3rd, only to get knocked back down to 2nd.

I played the first 2nd step and got top two right off the bat. Started the 3rd step and took a river beat about 6 hands into it to lose a little portion of my stack. $10/15 level, I had J4 in the bb and it there were 6 callers no raisers. I check the flop is 44T I got trips, WOO HOO. I check and the next guy throws out $50 into a $105 pot. Call, call, call, fold, fold; alright $305, I decide to take it down right there and I bump it $250, but low and behold I get a caller. So I’ve got $685 left the pot has $805 in it. The turn is a 7, I bet $175, call. $510 left, he must have a ten. River, F’ING 10, I check he bets $100 I call, he turns over KT and I’m sitting ugly with ten people still in it. I wound up doubling up and making it down to 4th and getting a re-entry, thanks to some foolish plays by other that had gotten short stacked.

So I played the second the 3rd step and wound up getting knocked down to the 2nd step again. I can’t recall the hands from all of those I know there were several times that the chip leader would fold to an all in raise, where he would have only had to have called $150 or so more, when the blinds were around $150/300. It’s like giving money away, that pisses me off to know extent. I just screws everyone else over, oh well. I plan on playing more steps tonight and hopefully getting up to the 5th pretty soon. I’ll have to start off in the 2nd again tonight.

 

Monday, June 27, 2005

Wow, I need to keep this thing more up to date

Well, I haven’t had a real eventful month thus far. I’d say the most exciting poker venture I’ve had since last posting was a $3 rebuy tournament on Pokerstars. I just recently started playing on stars, up until now I have been strictly playing on PartyPoker, but I figured I might as well check it out. So far I have done fairly well too. I’m just now starting another trip up the steps on Party. Hopefully I can do better than my last two attempts. I bought into the 2nd level and I’ve played three times at that level only to go out in 3rd place twice. Once due to a donkey hitting his 2 outer, and the second time due to the chip leader being extremely stupid and doubling up the short stack, to make me the short stack and no room to improve. Oh well, back to the exciting event.

 

I was playing stud on stars and saw a $3 rebuy HE tournament was about to start up at 11:30 p.m. I thought what the heck. I hadn’t ever played a rebuy and it was getting late, I figured I do my best D.N. impression and just go all-in with any kind of decent starting hand. I was going to allow myself 2 re-buys and the add-on. So I paid my first blind and then did a rebuy. I caught some really good cards and wound up doubling up a couple of times by the first break.

 

I started looking at the number of players and avg stack and such and realized that I was sitting really well. I was 37th out of 150 with about $25K in chips, the avg stack was $18.4K. So I bought the add-on and I’m only into the tournament for $9. I check the clock and it was 2:11, I figure I’m going to be up a little later than I had planned but I might be able to do pretty well. The final numbers for the prize pool were 496 entries, 997 re-buys, and 261 add-ons, for a total of 24 $215 seats and 25th got $102.

 

The next hour or so flew by and quite a few players got knocked out. By the second break I was 29th/49 with $41K and the avg stack was $56K the chip leader is sitting directly to my left with $198K, so I haven’t been able to steal ANY pots. Somehow I made it down to 17th/28 with $75K and then shortly after I made it to 10th/26 with $95K. So I definitely can make it to the top 24, seeing that several only have around $30K and the blinds were up to 6K/12K with only  26 players remaining.

 

Then I had a stupid epiphany that I wanted to get the money instead of the seat. I was thinking that stars wouldn’t allow you to sell a tournament entry, like Party. So as soon as the 26th player got put out, I went all in with total junk to try to get put out and get the $102 instead of the seat. It worked, and then I found out that I could have sold my entry for about %80 of it’s value. Oh well, live and learn. It was now 4:40 a.m. and I had to be at work by 7:00; YESSS…