The Week of the Turnaround. Possible Heater?

I'm sure you're all getting a bit sick of me moaning about results not going well, or at least those of you who follow me on Twitter are. So here you are, a blog post where I'm happy, cheerful and not banging on about how bad I'm running!

Of course, I'm only considering the short term and essentially the 150 tournaments in the past week is nothing in the long run, but from a mindset point of view, it's really great to start putting up some numbers. In the past 7 days I've manage to ship the early $22 PLO8 twice and the $11 6max PLO once, all for scores of near enough $500 each. I've also managed to final table the $5r PLO8, possibly the softest tournament on my daily schedule.

I can't exactly put my finger on why I'm suddenly winning again but even while I was breaking even/downswinging, I felt like I was still playing a solid game and that the dead money was still there. All I needed to do was win the important flips down at the business end, and as we all know, poker still has that element of luck. Building stacks in tournaments doesn't seem to be an issue, early on the fish will always give up their chips easily before possibly tightening up later on, but towards the end, especially in red labels, luck becomes a pretty huge factor.

Thankfully I've been working hard on my short handed game and I think it's paying off. I noticed that I was particularly busting a lot of PLO MTTs in short handed spots, i.e. FT bubbles and final 2/3 tables etc, so I did a lot of HH reviewing on it and changed up a few things in my game. Luckily for me I have a great group of players around me to give me advice on certain spots as well as posting their own hands, allowing me to learn with them. I've specifically spent a lot of time looking at how to play draws out of position, but that's a discussion for another post.

So there's a little update as to what's been going on recently. Make sure to stay tuned though because I'm going to make another post today about something particularly exciting which happened this week. My followers will already know what I'm talking about. I'm just starting my Sunday session now so hopefully I'll have even more good news for you very soon, although we all know how fickle Sunday's can be. I hope Sunday goes well for you guys too and I'll speak to you all soon!

Trip Report: Coral 30/30 at Aspers Stratford

Apologies about the lack of warning that I was going on a trip to a live tourney but in my defence, I only had about twelve hours notice myself!

So it's Friday afternoon, I'm sitting in the waiting room of the doctors surgery waiting for an appointment, and I see this peach of a tweet:

I was absolutely gobsmacked! I then got contacted by a staff member at Bluff who went over all the details with me, confirmed that everything was above board and that I'd really won a £330 tournament entry just for retweeting Bluff Europe. Included in the deal was a little section in next month's issue of Bluff with my picture so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Onto the trip report. I arrived at the casino a little early to sign up for a membership, which considering it was possibly my tenth trip to Aspers was quite strange. I love the casino. It's located on the top floor of Westfield shopping centre, right next door to the Olympic Stadium and it really is incredible. I particularly love the sport betting area where there are rows of insanely comfortably leather chairs pointed at around 30 TV screens. I had a little chill out while watching the first half of the Hull-Man City game before we got down to business.

The tournament had a 30,000 chip starting stack and 40 minute levels beginning at 50/100. This allowed for tons of play in the opening levels and, what you might have thought, made it very difficult for people to bust early on, yet that didn't seem to bother some people. Within the first level, we'd already lost about three or four people, but thankfully they reached back into those deep pockets and bought in again. I'd normally be a proponent of late registering a tournament when the starting stacks are so deep, but in fields like this one, where players can honestly stack off 300BBs with marginal hands, you'd be missing out on so much value.

I proceeded to get stuck in, opening a ton of pots with a wide range of hands looking to get paid off. I managed to stay around even for the first two levels orso, winning and losing my fair share of small and medium sized pots, until my first decent sized pot of the tournament.

I open AQs from UTG+2 and am met my a 3-bet from MP. The villain seemed around his late twenties/early thirties and had a PartyPoker cap on, I'm assuming from playing some sponsored live event. He seemed like a solid player so I wasn't going to get too out of line against him. It's folded back around to me and I make the call. The flop comes 9 5 4, I check and he checks behind. The turn comes a Q and I lead out. I'd been pretty aggressive so far so maybe he could see this as a steal attempt and I can get two streets from a mid-pair, maybe 7s/8s. Tens and Jacks probably continue on the flop, likewise decent suited connectors. Villian then raises, but I'm still not too worried as he seemed competent enough to try and make a play for the pot like this. I called and the river bricked. I check and he bets big. Looking back on the hand, I think it's at this point where I can lay down the hand as it's early on in the tournament and we're now looking at a pretty big pot relative to the blinds. I called anyway hoping that he got carried away on a bluff with AK but he flipped over 5s for a flopped set. I think he played the hand really well and got paid the maximum, courtesy of this Omaha donk!

I wasn't deterred though, I kept up the aggression and got right back into the swing of things. My next big pot came about twenty minutes later. I raise 23s (LAG ALERT!) from LP and only the big blind calls. The villain is an older, very talkative gentlemen. He clearly had a lot of experience playing in a live setting but was definitely a recreational player. The flop magically comes 4 5 6 and I'm doing a little dance in my head. Even better, the villain leads out! My hand is still vulnerable though so I put out a small raise which he quickly calls. The turn is my worst nightmare, a 7. The villain checks to me and I have no choice but to check back and give him a little rope with which to bluff the river, which comes a 9. Villain bets just over half the pot and I call, after the appropriate amount of sighing and bemoan my luck when he flips over K8o. Solid flop bet/call.

From then on I tightened up a bit, found a copy of Bluff Magazine and settled in to wait for push/fold poker to start, my wheel house! I managed to bleed down to a low of about 6k before finding a sweet little double up with AQ over AJ which got me back up to around 25BBs. I managed to grind back up a little bit until I got coolered to bust, 3-bet jamming QQ into AA. Unfortunate, but nothing you can do about it. I was hoping to go a little bit deeper, or at least to have lasted until the end of late registration but I suppose I can't bemoan my luck when I got into the tournament for absolutely nothing.

I really enjoyed myself for the brief time I was there. The table was really friendly and chatty and the atmosphere in the room was really relaxed and laid back, more so than some £25 tournaments I've played before. As I've said before, the casino is fantastic and the dealers were fast, friendly and engaging. I'll definitely be heading back and the APAT WCOAP Series in April seems a perfect time to do so, not to mention the fact that they have a £55 PLO8 event!

I really want to thank Bluff Europe for buying me into the tournament and Aspers Stratford for running it. For sure I'll definitely be entering any future competitions but hopefully run a little bit better in the actual tournament.

Hopefully you guys enjoyed the trip report and I hope I have a few more for you to read in the near future, after all, I still a way to go to achieve my 2014 goal of £5k live profit. Normally I bit of a bad taste in my mouth about live poker after busting a decent tourney but this time all it's done is wet my appetite, I guess that's what happens when you don't spend anything to get in! Until next time though I wish you all good luck at the tables and I'll speak to you all soon!

Deep TCOOP Run : $109 PLO8

So sometimes, when it comes to PLO8 MTTs, you can go months without any sort of interesting big buy-in tournament, and yet somehow I managed to play two in the space of three days! With the NLO8 offerings being a $82R and a $109 Hyper, this was the optimal O8 tournament of the series for me.

The day started perfectly. PokerStars set a brilliant satellite schedule with tons of $11 FOs and $5r's which were just beyond soft. I only managed to play 11 satellites in the afternoon as I was busy for most of the day but I still managed to ship four seats and truly free roll the event and start the week with a ton of T$.

In the actual event, much like the £220 PLO8, I managed to chip up a lot early on while the blinds were small and double my stack without having to play an all-in pot. The field was a lot more passive than expected from a mid-stake buy-in online tournament but sometimes that's what these xCOOPs are like and I was definitely thankful for that. I flopped well, ran good in all-in pots and and consistently managed to increase my stack over the first hour and a half.

The first problem I encountered was this hand. Like I said, I'd run really well in all-in pots beforehand and built up my stack nicely, but this guy took the biscuit, he was running like Usain Bolt. This pot was just before the bubble so it was a bit disheartening to watch but thankfully I had enough chips left to recover.

Because this pot was just before the bubble, it actually forced me to calm down, and stall a little bit unless the money, which thankfully meant I didn't punt off my stack which usually happens after spots like this. A min cash in this event would still be a decent chunk of money so taking a flip here would have been quite silly, especially with the pace at which people were busting and the average stack which was around 8BBs.

I made it into the money with around an average stack and got to work. I got a ton of steals through and used my above average knowledge of pre-flop equities to get into favorable situations and build my stack. In tournaments like these, fold equity is everything, so sometimes it's worth passing up on a near flip when being shoved into in order to preserve a large enough stack size to win blinds uncontested. It's a concept well documented in NLHE turbo tournaments but is definitely under utilized in PLO8.

I carried on chipping up and up until there were only nine players left. I was definitely getting nervous and a little excited about possibly final tabling a major tournament. Then came this hand.

It was definitely a spot to get it in, even if I were deeper than 6BBs. I was pretty happy with the flop and still quietly confident on the turn but the river was truly gut wrenching, needless to say, a few things on my desk took flight. I wouldn't call it a bad beat considering the equities pre-flop, near enough 50/50, so although it's a bit disappointing to miss out on the big money, I can't be too upset.

It's my biggest score in O8 and even though it's tough to be only 8 players away from $24k, I'm still very happy with a $2k score and TCOOP isn't even over yet, I still may have a shot at a big one! I'm planning to take a long weekend off poker so I don't get burnt out and thankfully this bink affords me some room to do that, however I'll be back on the grind next week, ready to make even bigger and better scores! I hope I'll have more posts like this for you guys in the future, but until next then I wish you all good luck at the tables and speak to you all soon!

P.S. Big shout outs to some of the O8 heroes having great TCOOP scores! Congrats to bokkie87, trelskig and Giffordonian who all had big five-figure scores in the past week! Good job lads!