Monday, August 20, 2007

Pretty good week!

I came out of my little slump on Cake and erased the rest of that $80K downswing, up like $55K on the month there now. Party worked on my computer a bit this week so I was able to make a few buy-ins in the 10/20 and 25/50 games on there too. I'm going to get a new desktop and a second 20" LCD monitor when I get to Toronto and format the laptop so that hopefully this won't be an issue for much longer. Not being able to play Party all the time has to be costing me a lot of money since I'm basically only playing cash games on Cake now and those games aren't running all the time.

I had some close calls in tournaments this week but only one big score. I finished 26th in the 300+rebuy 6-max FTOPS event, which is an awesome format, for like $4500 (in for $1500). I also just finished 17th in the Sunday evening Stars 100r when I had a ton of chips but then lost 3 all-ins in a row, that paid like $2200. There was a 17th in the nightly 100K on Stars too one night. I did however finish 3rd in the $100 rebuy yesterday afternoon for $11.2K, so it was nice to a have a fairly big tournament score again. The $2500 FTOPS 2-day tournament was the event I was most excited for this week but unfortunately despite playing pretty well I really never had a chance as I flopped a set against a flush in a reraised pot for most of my chips, and lost a flip for the rest or something.

I feel like I should do a strategy post again at some point but I can't really think of a lot of good hands to talk about and I don't have hand histories for all the Cake hands. I think I'll just wait for the live tournaments and do the usual write-ups on interesting hands from those. Speaking of which I found out this week that Daniel Negreanu will be our celebrity player added to the team for the World Cup, which is definitely good news. He's a strong player first of all and also an interesting personality to say the least. There's not a lot of the big name TV pros that I actually care about meeting, I'm usually a lot more interested in just trying to take their money, but Daniel is one of the exceptions. So that should add some extra fun to an already exciting trip. One thing that's clear from reading Daniel's blog is that he's super-competitive and proud to be Canadian, so even though the 20-25K he could win at most probably isn't substantial to him I'm sure he'll still give it his best effort.

This week I'm travelling all over the place and probably won't be playing too much, I'll try to post pretty regularly once I get to Barcelona though.

Mike

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Mike, Can you take a look at this hand I played in the sunday mil. Is there anything I could have done different? I finished 245th place. I know if I had Js it would have been an easy fold for me. Thank you Mike
PokerStars Game #11583110171: Tournament #57884820, $200+$15 Hold'em No Limit - Level XX (6000/12000) - 2007/08/19 - 21:54:31 (ET)
Table '57884820 643' 9-max Seat #4 is the button
Seat 1: Dracospinner (127080 in chips)
Seat 2: vinny88 (123072 in chips)
Seat 3: thesidedish (296844 in chips)
Seat 4: txnphil (318024 in chips)
Seat 5: Crazyhug (353106 in chips)
Seat 6: superbugsly (215056 in chips)
Seat 7: mulltusha (82599 in chips)
Seat 8: BOTL (278342 in chips)
Seat 9: The_child2 (94476 in chips)
Dracospinner: posts the ante 1200
vinny88: posts the ante 1200
thesidedish: posts the ante 1200
txnphil: posts the ante 1200
Crazyhug: posts the ante 1200
superbugsly: posts the ante 1200
mulltusha: posts the ante 1200
BOTL: posts the ante 1200
The_child2: posts the ante 1200
Crazyhug: posts small blind 6000
superbugsly: posts big blind 12000
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to BOTL [Ks Kh]
mulltusha: raises 69399 to 81399 and is all-in
BOTL: raises 195743 to 277142 and is all-in
The_child2: folds
Dracospinner: folds
vinny88: folds
thesidedish: folds
txnphil: raises 39682 to 316824 and is all-in
Crazyhug: folds
superbugsly: folds
*** FLOP *** [Th 7d Jd]
*** TURN *** [Th 7d Jd] [4d]
*** RIVER *** [Th 7d Jd 4d] [3c]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
BOTL: shows [Ks Kh] (a pair of Kings)
txnphil: shows [Jh Jc] (three of a kind, Jacks)
txnphil collected 391486 from side pot
mulltusha: shows [6h 6s] (a pair of Sixes)
txnphil collected 272997 from main pot
Buckohfive is connected
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 664483 Main pot 272997. Side pot 391486. | Rake 0
Board [Th 7d Jd 4d 3c]

Mike said...

Obviously you played it correctly, it's a tough spot for the guy with JJ though. The guy pushing UTG is really short and therefore doesn't need to have too big a hand (depending how tight he's been playing, I'd expect most people to push at least any pair, AT+, KQ, and really he should be moving in with way more hands than that). You're way out of position so you have to be careful about what hands you isolate with, but assuming he's pushing that semi-wide range you can probably have something at least as wide as 99+,AQ+ even with that many players behind you. Without doing the exact calculation calling with JJ there is probably correct against those ranges.

I think UTG and you would both have to be pretty tight for JJ to be a fold there, though it's probably fairly close.