Secrets of the Amateurs

More angst last night as I reached the last 4 tables in the Full Tilt Sunday Brawl and the iPoker $300K before being doomswitched into 27th and 33rd respectively. Hyachachachacha. People on 2+2 and so on are asking if the games are getting tougher ; in the tournaments I play, they seem to be getting even softer, with more and more bad players making more and more bad plays. And hooray for that ! Definitely not complaining.

Sometimes this gives you an opportunity to release a hand that you miss through "auto-playing". I picked up AK in first position in the Warm Up last night, playing about 40 BBs, and made a standard raise. A random player in late position made it about 2.5 times my raise, about 7 BBs. So all I can do here, I thought, is shove. There's no point calling or raising less than all in. So I shoved and lost to AA. But why couldn't I just fold ?

A random player in the Sunday Warm-Up just isn't going to make a move against an UTG raiser in that spot. It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that he has [AK, JJ+] and that he isn't going to fold any of it to the re-jam. In addition, the smaller reraise weights his range even more towards big pairs and away from AK. Even without this extra weighting, I'm about 40% against his range, and I need to be 45% given the size of pot and stacks. And frankly JJ might even be a bit of a stretch. 30 BB stacks would have been OK, or if I was in a later position, but here, maybe "I has AK and we're not deep" isn't good enough. One to think about.

While I'm here, I will be playing in the "Marty Smyth celebration tournament" on BoylePoker tomorrow at 8pm (GMT), which should be fun, there are lots of bounties planned. I will also have my own cash table (now that's fame) opening up which I'll have a spin on, so come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. Considering the blinds will be .25/.50 though, that's not really very hard ...

I made the last 8 of the Heads Up tournament on Stars last night, taking my game-by-game record in the tournament to something like 15-4. In the first round I laid down the pwnhammer on Dario really hard, as follows :

Hand #1
Poker Stars $200+$15 No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t10/t20 Blinds - 2 players
Hero (BB): t1680
Dariominieri (BTN/SB): t1320
Pre Flop: (t30) Hero is BB with Jc Th
Dariominieri raises to t60, Hero raises to t240, Dariominieri calls t180
Flop: (t480) 5d 9s 9h (2 players)
Hero bets t260, Dariominieri calls t260
Turn: (t1000) 4h (2 players)
Hero bets t1180 all in, Dariominieri folds

Hand #2
Poker Stars $200+$15 No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t10/t20 Blinds - 2 players
Hero (BB): t2110
Dariominieri (BTN/SB): t890
Pre Flop: (t30) Hero is BB with Kc Js
Dariominieri raises to t60, Hero raises to t240, Dariominieri calls t180
Flop: (t480) 6d 5d Ah (2 players)
Hero bets t260, Dariominieri raises to t650 all in, Hero calls t390
Turn: (t1780) 9h (2 players - 1 is all in)
River: (t1780) Qc (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: t1780
Hero shows Kc Js (high card Ace)
Dariominieri shows Jh 8c (high card Ace - lower kicker)
Hero wins t1780

Total domination I'm sure you will agree. I also shipped 4th in the Party $500 for $5K + change so it's been a good start to the month. I've been making another beginners video for Pokerswat, and something I was talking about there struck a chord with my own play - I've been avoiding certain sites and tournaments because I've been running bad in them, which is stupid. At the end of the day there really isn't that much difference between tournaments with the same buyin on various sites, and I'm cutting down my volume pointlessly. Hopefully fixing that will help with throughput this month.

Unless I pull something off deep, deep in injury time (one tournament still playing, 250 runners left) it's going to will end up have been a slightly frustrating month. Lots of nerdy 7th and 12th place finishes with only one decent score, 2nd on Ladbrokes (in a chip count because they were taking the server down lol) for $9700. So with just one late result to come, it's $40.5K in, $34.0K out for a $6500 loss. Meh, I can live with two winning months and two losing months when it goes +88, -13, +52, -7 . At least I put good volume in, although the festivals (GSOP, ECOOP, FTOPS) all helped with that and I did next to nothing in them in terms of results.

What we've learned

Not sure it's all that much really, which is a disappointment. I've been playing more aggressively on the various bubbles, which is good, as I was in danger of slipping into bubble-wussiness at one point, but it hasn't really paid off because I haven't caught the breaks in finals. Certainly for spells I haven't been playing all that well, and maybe need to slow down and avoid super-marginal spots where my estimates of peoples' ranges are a bit off. Anyway, I've just run AK into KK so that's a definite final score, and at least I can go to bed.

I know I'm going to get no volume in at all till next Sunday so $30K is maybe even an optimistic target for volume next month. If I end up having a new kitchen fitted I might as well write the month off almost entirely, but we'll see what happens.