‘…some shitty tournament’

Firstly, an apology. To the few of you who don’t consider my posts a chore to read, sorry for not making as many of them recently as I did at the start of the month. It’s pretty bad form considering I bring so much attention onto myself with all these challenges. But, for those of you have been following my blog for a while, you’ll know that a week of non-posting = a week of losing money. I have a bad habit of not blogging the times when I’m either running badly or playing badly (the former usually leads to the latter). I have to stop doing this because it doesn’t look good for the blog to have gaps, sometimes weeks long, missing from every month!

I will try not to let losing money affect my blogging in future, and no matter how grumpy the post may be, I’m going to try to post something after every day’s play from now on. Happy now, Darkstar?! Always a pleasure to share a table with you btw, even though you probably stacked me about three times during my tilty phase this week!

From my last post:

‘…I’ve made $600 in five days at $25 so, with 19 days left of the challenge, I should cruise to the further $1700 I need to succeed…’

A lesson to all bloggers new and old, never post a sentence like this unless you’re willing to accept the ridiculous luck that poker karma has to throw at you as a result. A long, swingy week later my BR has only just recovered, and is finally back over the $1k mark. But it was a really tough week and, as you can see, I’ve done very little to further dent the required $$ needed to complete the December challenge.

Promisingly though, I had a +$150 session at the $50 tables last night so, with 13 days left of the challenge, I should cruise to the further $1700 I need to succeed.

Within two days of my ‘$1k bankroll’ update last week, I was knocked down to $780 after some really bad times at the NL $25 tables. AALx is rarely an underdog in O8 and a lot of the bad players tend to call all in pre quite light, so in NLO8 open shoving any AA hand seems to be the thing to do. I managed to get scooped in five of these in a row (three for full buyins) early on Saturday, the day after my last post. Luckily it was all before breakfast so I had very little to throw up.

The last stacking was my AA24 vs one of the regs who made a ridiculous snap of my sb shove, having raised the CO, with A45J. He must have known what a mare I was having at my other tables as well because he chose that moment to try and wind me up.. When the river fell, and he scooped (obv), I said, ‘nh’ in the chat. He responded with, ‘I am just learning this game, how am I doing pgchips?’ Coming from an experienced player, a player I’ve played a lot with, this was a ridiculous thing to say. I hope his comment made him feel a little bit better about his awful call though. By the way, if you happen to see Donrio35 on your travels any time soon, tell him pgchips said ‘nh’.

I went through a short spell after that, that I’m sure we’ve all been through, where it seemed that ALL my bluffs were getting snapped off, all my made hands were being folded to and I was playing badly and just steadily losing money. So, in typical pgchips style, I took a couple of days off.

Sunday, I drank, and then most of Monday was spent down the snooker hall. It was nice to take my mind off the cards for a bit, and I very nearly made, what would have been, only my third ever maximum break as well… I was dead straight on a black to middle with the few remaining reds pretty much over the holes. But, as I sent it heading straight at the heart of the pocket, I can only imagine the nap of the cloth took hold as I narrowly missed by a matter of feet. Still, a break of 25 is not to be sniffed at, my friends.

Tuesday, I came back to have another crack at the cards. Opening the cashier and seeing only $780 in there was a bit depressing and it made me feel like I didn’t want to open any O8 tables. It’s ridiculous really how such a small downswing can have such a big adverse affect on me. So, instead of O8 cash, I decided to put my 5k fpps to good use and played 24 of the 210 fpp sats to the Sunday $200k. I won 14 of them for a nice $154 return on 5040 fpps. I’ve said it before but, a $50 bonus costs 5k fpps at the lower VIP levels so, if anyone reading this was considering buying one of these bonuses, I would strongly recommend that you play these sats instead. The obvious downside is the time factor but, as they only take about half an hour each (if you win), if you can multi table them I’d say the extra $$ that can be made makes it worth the time spent.

I sold the $T and this time added the money to my roll. Is this cheating? Err, let’s call it rakeback…

From my last post:

‘…some shitty tournament’.

Wednesday night/ Thursday morning was the O8 leg of the blogger qualifiers, which I originally wasn’t going to play because it didn’t kick off until 3am our time. Luckily for me I did play it because come 8.30am I was scooping the final pot and shipped a load of tournament tickets. I learnt a lot about tournament O8 during the night and it was a lot of fun, especially with two tables left, to be playing with what I would consider to be some really good players. Heads up was a bit of a marathon but I’m glad I eventually got lucky and came through for the win.

The tournament tickets I won are:
3x $215
1x $530
1x $11 (??)

As this total of $1186 is more than my current BR stands at, I’m looking to sell some of my action. This Sunday I’ll be playing the $215 PLO8 and the $530 NLHE $500k. I’m hoping to sell 50% in both. A couple of people have already expressed interest (I still have 15% of the O8 and 20% of the $530 to sell) so if you fancy getting in on it, let me know. I’m selling at face value so if you can spare a few tens of $$ it might be worth investing. Just $21.50 for 10% of me in the O8 and $53 for 10% of me in the 500k. Might be worth a spin. Ship me on Stars or let me know here, whatever.

I’ll post about my move up to the $50 tables later, this is far too long already and I’m hungry.