Hey hey, I got in safely yesterday in time to play Sunday tournaments online. No luck in the tournaments but I had a profitable day because of a good cash session. Cash has continued to go well overall. I've been playing a lot of 25/50 NL so the swings are pretty solid, I had a +$44k day and -$26K day last week, but overall I seem to be moving in the right direction. The games I've been playing have been really good, and I've been putting in a decent amount of hands lately, it kind of reminds of the good ol Cake Poker days of last summer. Anyways today I played my first event of the LAPC, a $2500 event with 167 players. It went a little something like this.H

Hand 1: A bunch of small pots have happened and I'im up to 6K from 5K starting stack. I've opened a few pots but nothing particularly exciting. In one hand I opened UTG to 200 at 25/50 with AKo, a donk calls, and the SB makes it 700, I reluctantly fold. Now in this hand I make it 300 UTG @ 50/100 with AKs. Donk makes it 900, I decide screw these guys I don't really want to fold again (notice the expert thought process and decision making skills used here) even though he seems to be the loose passive type who wouldn't reraise without a huge hand, so I make 2K more and call his instashove. His AA is good and I have 900 left, looks like I'm going to make it back to the hotel in time for the $1K FTOPS event online.

Hand 2: Shove 725 UTG with A3cc. Get called by AT and 66 so I'm basically drawing dead but flop trip threes.

Hand 3: Jason (JP_OSU) opens to 450 UTG, I shove 2250ish with AK and he said he miscounted the pot and called with AQs so I'm back around starting chips when I hold.

Hand 4: I raise TT in the CO to 450, SB calls. Flop A56 two spades, he checks and I decide to check behind. Turn T, he bets 250 and I make it 1000. He calls. Turn Js. He bets 3000, I tank for a bit and call. He says "2 pair" and I table the winner.

Hand 5: I'm not in this hand but it was pretty hilarious. Middle-aged Asian guy who limps a fair bit and loves angle-shooting and giving reverse tells limps UTG and says something about how he always miss the flop, try one more time. Another guy limps, Jason has recently bluffed off his stack and shoves his last 800. BelowAbove is in the BB and raises to 2200 to isolate. UTG now makes it 3600 more. Folds to below who tanks for a while and calls. Flop KTx, below shoves 13K, asian guy beats him into the pot and obv shows AA. Below has QJo???!!! and misses. Jason has KQ and rivers trips to get back in the game.

Hand 6: I raise AJs with 6 players behind me. Guy on my left who seems to always call my raises calls, and now below on his left shoves 5K more. It folds back to me and I figure it's got to be really unlikely that he'd shove on me light there since I usually have a pretty big hand and I'm not going to give him any credit. But on the other hand he is belowbove.... I finally decide to fold but I'm not entirely sure it's right.

Hand 7: I have around 8300 now. Open the HJ to 600 with TT, guy on my left calls yet again. Now the asian guy from before very quickly makes it 2600 on the button without saying anything. I figure this is far too good a spot for him to squeeze, and as much as I hate putting much faith in my live reads, the speed of his action and the fact he didn't try to Hollywood at all makes me think he's weak. I think for a bit and decide I just can't fold, so I stick it in and he tanks for a bit and eventually folds.

Hand 8: I now have about 11.3K, and a very solid table image. Folds to the CO who seems not overly loose or overly tight so far, he hasn't really showed any hands since he got moved here, who open to 625 at 100/200 a25, his standard open size. I reraise to 1825 in the BB with 76o, but he quickly calls. Flop 542r, I check intending to checkraise all-in, but he bets only 1200. I sense a trap and decide to call. Turn Qc starting a backdoor flushdraw, I check he bets 2500. This time I just can't resist the temptation to shove on him, but he instacalls and table the nuts and more: 63cc. I don't get there and that's that. It would be fair to say most people at the table were a little surprised when the hands got turned over. I overheard him make some comment about how he thought I had a monster preflop but I "priced him in if I could hit the right flop". lol.

Anyways tomorrow is a $1k tourney which I guess I'll play. I'm a bit unimpressed by the size of the field today though and it's kind of tempting to skip some of these prelims and just grind online if they're not going to be very big, or maybe even play some live cash. Anyways I'll be blogging more regularly for the next couple weeks as always when I'm on the road. Talk to y'all later,

Mike

He won EPT Dortmund yesterday for 933K Euro or just shy of $1.4M USD. He's just been on a tear to start the year. Sadly I didn't have any of his action this time. I'm taking a rare Sunday off today to go to a Superbowl party. I figure I'm probably saving around $6K this way anyways so it's all good. I guess there should be some kind of content in this post. Here is my January graph where I crush over an insignificant number of hands.



Almost $8/hand, wish it was always that easy.

Mike

It all started when Scot from TwoRags IM'd me to ask if I was going to the LA Poker Classic. I explained to him, as I wrote 2 days ago in my last entry, that I most likely was not. He said that was too bad as TwoRags has some connections in the area with the Commerce etc (I'm pretty sure he lives in LA)... and he had some special events planned. This was somehwat enticing but I still wasn't too interested. Nonetheless I checked the schedule of events again on the CardPlayer website and it turned out it was much better than I remembered. I thought it was basically all $1000 buy-ins with one $2500 and one $1500 mixed in or something. It turns out there are three $2500 events though (one is limit holdem but that's ok), a couple $1500s, and then several smaller ones. Not so bad I thought....

Kyle (grafyx) had asked me if I was going since he needed a roommate. I'd of course said no at the time but I messaged him back and he was still looking for one and had already done the work looking into hotel rooms. So I then decided to go ahead and have a look at flights just in case. It turns out Air Canada has a seat sale on and I could book a round trip flight for just $400. Well now... It seemed like everything was just falling into place but I still wasn't sure. I had to check how this fit my schedule. Ideally I would show up for the $2500 event on Monday the 11th, the first of the big events, and then stay until the end. I have Raptors tickets for the 8th and had made plans a while ago with a friend for that night. Perfect timing there. I also have tickets for the game on the 20th, but Scot said he might be able to hookup a Lakers game for us there, so that's at least an even tradeoff. Damn, I guess someone out there really wants me in LA. And finally, I'm up around $40K so far this month online, so even if I 0-for another series losing 20-30K down there wouldn't be the end of the world. LA, here I come.

Anyways to add some poker to this here are some cash hands. I realize I haven't posted any cash game stuff in a while and that's one thing I want to do more of. I'm going to concentrate on some hands from my best session of the month. I'm playing two 25/50 NL full ring tables with this fish VARBED. When there's a big fish playing way too many hands it basically becomes a big fight among the other players to try to get his money. I'm going to be raising almost anything playable to try to isolate him when he limps in, or sometimes limping behind speculative hands hoping to flop big on him. That's the dynamic that is important in these hands.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2020495 - The session actually got off to a poor start with this cooler. I think the lead on the flop is the best way to get max value from AK or AQ.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2020483 - He liked to minraise with all sorts of garbage so I put in a reraise here to isolate him in position with the best hand. Postflop I have to figure I have the nuts against a player like this, especially given his weak little lead, so no slowing down to control pot size here, I want to get stacks in.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2020506 - This biggest pot I won was actually not from VARBED but resulted because of the dynamic he created. As I'd been isolating him a lot with weakish hands trying to keep him to myself, the other players obviously pick up on what I'm doing and want to stop me so that they can play more pots with him too, so the obvious idea is to just reraise me. I'd had to fold to these reraises a couple times but this time I have a hand I can make a stand with. I make a smallish reraise to $2250 to make it look like I have room to fold if he moves in on me, and give him the chance to make a bad bluff. Fortunately that's exactly what happened and I won a big pot.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2020523 - I got really lucky here. He telegraphs his hand as a big one preflop and gives everyone the odds to try hit a flop on him and crack it. Luckily I'm able to do just that. I guess either leading or checkrasing here are both good options on the flop, I went for the lead again.

Mike

Hey everyone, I'm back safely in Toronto just chilling. Really it was a super lazy week. Anyways my plan for the next couple months is to really get back to griding online and putting in some hands. I've had a lot of fun lately travelling around, and while I play a lot of poker on those trips, if I really want to make some money I'm much more profitable online. Even though the games are tougher on average, being able to play 4-8 tables at once just lets me play so many more hands that live can't really compete. Also, being able to table select across multiple sites allows me to find the best games to help offset the generally tougher opponents. Also, it's important for me to play a lot more cash game hands since my hourly rate is much higher in those than in almost any tournament assuming I can find good games.

This week I put in a decent number of hours playing both tournaments and cash games, and was lucky to run pretty well so I turned a nice profit. I've been playing 10/20 and 25/50 on mostly some of the smaller sites, and the games have been pretty good. I've also been playing the usual evening and weekend tournaments, and after a ton of close calls and a lot of frustration I finally broke through for a nice score in a major Sunday tournament, the new "Sunday Brawl" on Full Tilt. It's a $240 buy-in where $200 goes to the prize pool like usual and $40 goes towards your bounty, meaning whoever busts you gets your $40. Of course whenever you bust anyone you get their $40 bounty, so it's a nice little twist added to the usual tournament format. It certainly adds a little incentive to go out of your way to try to bust people, though the strategic adjustments required are nothing major as the bounties are not too big compared to the prize pool. This week's tournament had almost 1600 runners.

I managed to finish 5th for $19K, plus I believe 8 bounties ($320) to top it off. The final table was both lucky and unlucky for me. I picked up more premium hands than I ever have in such a short period at a final table, but unfortunately they did not hold up in some key pots. I lost a big coinflip with TT vs AKs, and then on the very next hand I slowplayed KK by just calling a raise. A shortstack moved in behind me with AK, the raiser folded and I called, but an ace flopped for the 2nd hand in a row. Fortunately as I'd been picking up so many hands I still had some chips left and managed to double up and hang around for a while, but eventually I lost another all-in preflop as a decent favourite (KQs vs JTo) on the shortstack to bust 5th. Still, it was nice to make a major final table and book a nice win for the weekend. The 1600ish players was the biggest field I've ever gotten through to the final table since my $10 freezeout days. Like I mentioned I had close calls in several other tournaments, in particular the late $100 rebuy where I finished 16th for $2K.

So the plan for coming weeks is to keep putting in a lot of hands and get myself nicely into the black on the year. There's a small chance I may decide to go to the LA Poker Classic for the main event and the legendarily soft cash games at the Commerce towards the end of February, but most likely I won't be playing any more live events until EPT Monte Carlo (the one in Europe not the one that was on fire in Vegas) in April, and possibly the EPT in Italy just before Monte Carlo. I'm out, take it easy,

Mike

So I bubbled both of these. I played pretty well though, there were some sweet hands. In the first round of the HU I played Doug Lee. As far as I know he's basically a terrible spewbox, but I didn't play very well against him and didn't make many hands. Fortunately I luckboxed some coinflips to scrape by after losing the first game in the best of 3. In the next round I played Anna Wroblewski. I thought she was spewy aggro too but she was actually kind of solid but on the passive side. Anyways in this match I stopped being a pussy like I was against Lee and started trusting my hand reading to make some good river calls.

Hand 1: She limps and I check T3o in the BB. Flop J73 chk/chk. Turn Kc starting a possible flush draw. I check/call her bet. River K, I check, she bets and I figure enough draws and stuff missed that I should call and beat her 45.

Hand 2: She limps I check 96o. Flop 644, both check. Turn 5, I bet 3/4 pot she calls. River 2, I check and she bets some normal amount. I don't think she'd call the turn with just a 3, but probably would with a 7 which she'd be likely to bluff with here, so I call and win again.

I ran pretty good against Anna and made some hands at key times to win the match 2-0. In the third round I played timex though and he kicked my ass. I got behind in both, then won key races to get the lead, then lost really key races to lose. Fortunately we had traded a lot of % so I still got some money out of this tournament.

Today was the $2K 6-max which had a really great structure. I was doing really well for a while, and played some pretty interesting hands, unfortunately I busted 29th when 24 paid in the end though.

Hand 1: There's an aggressive player on my left who's 3-bet light already preflop against other players but not me. I can tell from the way he's played other hands though that he really knows what he's doing, he's not just some crazy spewtard. At 75/150 I open A6s UTG 5-handed to 450 with about 12K. I've been semi-active and as Im putting the chips for my raise in the pot I'm thinking this guy is going to 3-bet me soon, possibly this hand in fact. He quickly makes it 1350 and it folds back to me. It's a lot easier to trust your read and make a biggish move in a situation like this when you can predict his move, so I make it a goofy 3350 representing a monster but leaving room to fold to a push and he folds.

Hand 2: I've since 4-bet the same guy again, this time with AK, and had him fold again, and also been raising a ton of pots since I keep picking up pretty good hands and opening. It folds to me in the SB, I now have 15K and the BB covers, and I raise to 450 with A4ss. BB calls and we see a flop of 663 2 spades. I bet 600 and he makes it 1600. I don't really believe him because he's some middle aged guy and they would almost always slowplay trips here to trap the young overaggressive kid, but we're deep enough that I don't really want to pop him back since if he does happen to have a big hand I would pot-commit myself in a bad spot. Also my ace-hi can easily be the best hand if he's bluffing so I don't necessarily need to bluff him back. The turn is an offsuit 8, I check and call 2500, still hoping to make my hand but also thinking my ace may well be the best hand. The river is another 6, I check and he bets 3500. At this point he's representing basically nothing. It's so unlikely he has quads (he was already unlikely to have a 6 because he didn't slowplay, and now with 3 of them on the board and his small bets it's almost certain he doesn't), and he wouldn't play a 3 or 8 this way, he'd check at least one of the turn and river probably. So A-hi basically looks like the nuts to me here, pretty sure he has to be bluffing, so I call and he taps the table and says nice call. Then turns over his ATo. Damn.

Hand 3: So I'm down to around 7K, then get down to 4K. Still 75/150, CO, button and SB all limp. I check Q3o in the BB. Flop QT3 2 clubs. I lead 450 and the CO calls. Turn K, I bet 1K and he calls. River T, counterfeiting my hand. I check with 2850 left and he quickly put me all-in. I'm pretty frustrated, but then start thinking about what could he possibly have. I dont think he'd bet a king this big. If he was ahead on the turn he would have raised. How can he have a ten? JT maybe makes sense. So does busted clubs though. Eventually I stick it in, and he taps the table (he didn't accidentally have a better hand this time). Nice.


Hand 4: I win a race with KQ vs A8 aipf to get some chips, then pick up KK and AA and bust players on consecutive hands to get to 55K at 200/400 a50, around a twice average stack. Then I donk a bunch off though at 300/600 a50. It folds to the HJ who is pretty new table. As far as I can tell he just plays every pot. I can't recall a time in the 3 or so orbits he's been here that it folded to him and he didn't raise. He makes it 1700, and I find 66 in the CO and decide to just reraise to 5100 and take my chances since it seems like he's so ridiculously out of line. Instead he moves all-in for 20K more and I'm getting too good a price to fold against a guy who as far as I know could just be a psycho. He has JJ though and I lose half my pretty stack. I really hate playing for so many chips prelop with 66 I would never normally do this, but as far as I could tell he was raising practically any 2 cards.

From there less interesting stuff happened. I got into shortstack ninja mode and did my thang. Eventually with 30 left, 24 getting paid, Joe Sebok limped UTG at 800/1600 a200, CO limped, and the button raised to 8500. He was very aggressive so I figured he could easily be raising pretty light. I found 99 in the SB and shoved my 29K stack, and he called with J9s. Door card J, fun way to spend a day. Tomorrow is my last day here in Australia. There's a $1k event. I'll see how many players it gets, decent chance I'll play I suppose but I may just pass on it and make the most of my last day here instead. I did get around to going to watch some Australian Open tennis a few days ago which was really fun. We didn't get to see any big names, but watched some pretty competitive matches and I got a nice sun burn. OK bed time for me I guess. Later,

Mike