HDouble, his buddy Matt and I hit Hollywood Park last night for some mixed results. He made money and I didn’t :-) I also finally got to meet HP’s tournament director and fellow blogger, OJ, so maybe it was a wash.
HDouble and I played in a single table qualifer for another single table $10,000 winner take all matchup. We were at a very tough table with three of the other players being regular tournament winners at HP. As they started chatting with each other about their first and second place finishes in this or that recent tourney HDouble and I sort of looked at each other and Henry finally blurted out “I think we should have picked a different table.”
Now, that being said, HDouble and I made it to the final three. I was the chip leader, Henry was in third but with a healthy stack and we had another guy at the table who (IMHO) was playing far more loose and aggressive than he should have been the entire tournament. At this point I’m thinking that HDouble and I should team up on him and take him out and then he and I can just play heads-up and split any winnings from the $10,000 match (they routinely chop up the winner take all so there was almost a guarantee of making something just for sitting down at the final table).
Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way. I’ve got K9 and take it heads-up with the LAG. Flop comes Kxx on a pretty uncordinated board. With the blinds starting to become a significant chunk of each stack and with them coming around every other hand I figured I would take it down right here with an all-in. I get called by K2 making me an 84% to 16% favorite. River comes a 2 and I’m down to just over a small and big blind. I push the next hand with K6 and get busted out. Now HDouble is facing a guy with a significant chip lead over him and he lasts a few more rounds before busting out in second.
The title of this post is “keeping it in context” because I think I played this tournament about as well as could be played. As I go back and think about each battle, I selected my spots wisely and got my chips into the pot when I thought myself to be a substantial favorite. In other words, I think I played the game well but the results don’t reflect it. Obviously I would have been more happy winning $10,000 but I’m very satisfied I played a solid game.
That feeling of satisfaction would be all I took home with me that night though. I got spanked at the $100 NL tables too. Nothing bankroll destroying (less than 2 buy-ins) but I felt that I should have been up rather than down based on my opponents and how I played. I did make a few bad plays but I think they could be counted on one hand and they didn’t seem to be pivotal to my overall results. It was just one of those nights that cards didn’t seem to want to come my way. At one point, a very solid player who was the dominating chip leader when I sat down and had since seen his stack whittled down bad beat after bad beat, said something along the lines of “I know I haven’t hit anything in a while but you haven’t played a hand in over an hour.” I smiled and said, “Hell, I’d play 67s UTG right now if I could get a hand that strong.” :-)
Stats for the NL session (almost 8 hours) looked something like: Flopped sets: 0. Flush draws completed: 2. Straights completed: 2.
I doubled up on both my flush draw hits as well as one of my straights. Considering my inability to get my chips in the pot with a hand that had a chance of holding up I would say that my results weren’t that bad and again, being satisfied that I played well is about all that I can hope for.
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
The old “performance matters, results matter not” dilemma. I thought you played nearly perfect poker in the SNG, so you should be happy about that.
Sitting and waiting for hands is why I hate playing the low buy in NL games. It’s just much more of a grind than the implied odds battles of 6 way pots in limit games.