Tuesday, August 29, 2006

A little luck, a little out of my comfort zone.

So I played a few tournaments over the past few days. They're all kinda running together, so I need to get posting to this thing more often. I'm just so lazy.

My greatest triumph was making it to a new personal high of 29th in a Poker.com freeroll. Of course it didn't happen without an early double-up from bullets in the hole, not to mention about 3 sets of KK, and 2 big slick. Raising hands always help you scoop if nothing else, and I was able to maintain a solid stack, and set a new high stack mark I think somewhere around the 16k mark. It looked like I was actually going to be blinded away before my previous record of 33rd, but then I did manage to double up when my A 8 hit an A and held up. My last hand was a 9 2 in the big blind alone. It folded around to the guy in last position who called. The flop came like 2 10 J and he bet. I put him on a weaker hand making a call just so I couldn't scoop my short stack blind, or a stronger hand with a K or an A and an average kicker, maybe suited, so when he bet, I called with my pair of deuces, but he did have K 10 in the hole (I was half right) and that was it for me. Initially I was happy with going with a made pair and my "read", but then I started 2nd guessing myself. I had another trip around the table to pick up a better hand, and that close to the money, I probably should've tried to hang around as long as I could. So who knows.

A monkey could make it to the top 500 of these Poker.com tourneys, but I really think they're helping my game a lot. With the aggressive structure of the tournaments it makes me get out of my comfort zone and play a few more hands, trying to scoop some chips. I have been getting a lot of top 10% finishes in a lot of MTT freerolls lately, and the cool thing, but also sucky thing because I don't have any money in, is that if these are real money tourneys, top 10% usually pays. So I'm confident that when I finally win some money, I'll be able to make something of it.

In other news, PokerRoom still continues to beat the hell out of me. PokerRoom is the bully to my scrawny nerd. Its thanks to that site screwing me over that my real money priveledges have been revoked.

After signing up for the 5:00 Poker.com tourney on Tuesday, I was bored and didn't want to wait, so I signed up for a Limit 7 Stud tournament on PokerStars. Three hours later and a decent 129th place finish in the Poker.com tourney way gone, I was going out 208th out of 4096 in the 7 Stud tournament. I like throwing in an Omaha and a 7S game here and there. I've even been playing some hi/lo. Limit helps because I can't piss my stack away on a stupid all-in, but all these games really take is an understanding of the basic principles of poker and odds, and you can be pretty successful. I won't be playing 7 stud or Omaha for money anytime soon, but its fun to throw them in every now and then.

That's about it for today. Looks like the next time I'll be playing poker is 2:00 on Saturday in the ParadisePoker Million Dollar Freeroll. And before I forget forever and ever, in the qualifier for that tourney, I was sitting in 5th place when the 10th place person was knocked out, and the starting field was 1959. Probably my biggest poker accomplishment yet, and its got me in the Million Dollar Freeroll, playing a decent structured tournament for the first time in my life.

Originally Posted 7/20/2006

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