Bad Habits, a Donkament Score, and High Stakes PLO

Since arriving back in Toronto I've quickly gotten back into my normal lazy at home routine. I stay up too late, then sleep away the hours of the day in which I could actually go out and do productive things, then play some tournaments and cash games, watch TV, download the TV I miss, and various other lazy activities which keep me up all night. It's not like I'm super upset about it, not having any real obligations and being able to live on such a ridiculous schedule if I want to is a pretty sweet luxury to have. I'm enjoying my time relaxing, but at times the unproductive and lazy feeling of a day mostly spent at a computer or TV screen can be pretty gross, even if I've spent a lot of that time "working". As an example, this blog is being written at 7:30am and I assure you I did not just wake up. I'll get to what I was doing tonight shortly but first let me recap what else I've been up to since the last time we talked.

FTOPS started and I've played a handful of events. I didn't have much luck at all with tournaments through this weekend unfortunately. I final tabled the $100 single rebuy $100K Gtd tournament on Ongame on Sunday but busted 9th for ~$1600 and didn't have any other particularly notable cashes until tonight. I've also been playing some more big PLO. 25/50 and 50/100 Cap games as well 200/400 shortstacking shots have been up and down quite a bit but overall going pretty well, and of course some 10/20 and 25/50 games on Cake when they are good. OK so on to tonight.

I skipped most of the nightly tournaments but decided to play the 9pm ones on Stars/Full Tilt. There were two FTOPS events tonight, the $500 HORSE and $200 turbo NLHE. Both of those are really fun formats even though I seem to suck at HORSE. Anyways the turbo was where I picked up a big score. Running good in a turbo donkament is really really fun. There were almost 2600 players and the whole thing lasted just over 3 hours (it ended before the 3rd break). The beauty of the turbo donkament is you more or less skip all the boring deep stacked play and get right to the best part: Jamming your stack in with crap and hoping they all fold or you suck out.

I mean really, what's better than pushbotting? Every hand there is a very real possibility you could double up or go broke and that's pretty exciting. Well I'll tell you what's better, pushbotting deep in a tournament when substantial money is on the line and everyone is too scared or too bad at poker to do it properly. Obviously running sick hot and winning every time you have to call someone or they call you makes this significantly more fun, and that was what happened tonight. I held the chip lead for a decent while in the latter stages of the tournament before slipping a bit as we got down to two tables. But then I owned some chump's 99 with my K6s and made the final table 3rd in chips. The final table got off to a bad start as I lost AT vs AK and was super short. I luckboxed a couple double ups and some blind steals though and made it to 3-handed play 2nd in chips. Unfortunately djk had a big chip lead though, and he's even better at going all in every hand and winning every time they call with an obviously superior hand than I am so when he shoved my BB and I called with A6hh I was eliminated by his Q8ss. I still got $50K for 3rd though which is a solid three hours work in my opinion.

So then I ended up playing a bunch of high stakes PLO all night as the games were really good and only lost around $9k which wasn't too bad. Overall it was a pretty solid night. I even recorded a session 2-tabling 50/100 Cap PLO which I think I will turn into my first PokerSavvy video, hopefully by the end of the week. I'll let you all know when that actually happens. Anyways I should probably go rest up now I've gotta do this all again in 12 hours or so.

Mike