I knew the hard work would pay off eventually. It all came together last night. I've been cashing in tournaments and making some good runs, to no avail. I would get deep in a tournament and run into the inevitable cold streak and bad beat. A couple of weeks ago I got deep in a tourney to go out 13
th when my AA ran into
JJ. Flop came
XXJ, UGH! Ace hit the turn, YEAH! Jack hit the river. I wanted to throw up, and punch a hole in the wall. But I took my decent cash and moved on.
I cashed in a couple more tournaments and just couldn't get anything going. I never got any thing decent to play. I was proud of myself for playing disciplined and waiting for good spots to steal when I started getting short and for not shoving hands that could be easily dominated. So many times when stacks get short you see players shove with Ace rag hands. They get called by a better ace or mid pocket pair and you shake your head. So many other people will call those plays standard. Yeah you might win the blinds, but when you get called you're usually in trouble. So I look for hands that play much better when not dominated.
Think about it. If you shove 78 suited and somebody calls with A10, you're only a 60-40 dog. If you shove A5 and somebody calls you with the same A10 your a 75-25 dog. So in those situations I would rather have any pocket pair or connectors rather than the magical ace. So all in all, I played pretty well over the last month, minus LAGGING it up at Rush poker. Don't even get me started there. I've cashed in about 60% of the tournaments I've played in and 2010 is off to a good start.
The tournament I played in last night was a
freeroll for me. I've won a bunch of $26 tournament tokens and decided to use one last night. At the beginning I was playing a very tight strategy. Erick
Lindgren's video on playing cautious early worked well for me. I was waiting patiently for spots to extract chips without putting my whole stack in jeopardy. A couple of times I flopped good top pair hands, and good draws. Some panned out, some didn't. So after 4 levels I added about 1,000 chips. Not too bad, but mainly I was just trying to survive the
donks and fish who 1.) can't
laydown any kind of hand, and 2.) players that chase no matter what price. There's no use trying to get a calling station to fold without a hand, it's a recipe for disaster. They'll call you down with 4
th pair on an
AKQ board. So you value bet them to death and bluff, well NEVER.
So later on, I finally pick up a couple of hands and get a few chips. I'll post some of the hands in a later post. Then the inevitable cold streak happened. I went from about 60
BB's to 10
BB's from getting blinded down and having players 3 bet my opens when I had junk. I tried to steal, figuring my image was really tight and my raises would get respect. WRONG. They were either
Agrotards or
actually picked up hands and my timing was off. Either way I just moved on to the next hand and tried to stay focused and patient.
The first hand in my rise was when I was in the BB with
KJ suited. Everybody folds to the SB who had over 110
BB's and I had about 10
BB's. He shoved, and I knew he was just stealing.
Every time he had a strong or even decent hand he raised somewhere between 2 and 3.5 X's the BB. Now all of a sudden he's shoving? Sure I was short but it was the best hand I saw in about an hour. He had K6 off and my
KJ held. I slowly went up and down between 15 and 20
BB's. I made a couple of steal attempts and got AA at the right time and doubled up again. From there it was game on. We slowly got down to the final 5 tables, then 4 and I stayed patient and kept finding good spots to steal.
We finally get down to the final 2 tables and I made a couple of mistakes. First, I kept watching the payout structure and the player chip counts. I should have kept my attention on the table and stop worrying about the stupid money. Most of it was because I kept getting deep without a major cash. I kept thinking to myself, if I can get to 6
th I'll be even for the month. Bad way to approach poker. You have to keep yourself in the moment and make good decisions. You can't worry about the money. By the way, all of the losses that I was trying to recoup were from Rush poker. UGH!!
I took a couple people out, without being in major trouble of being eliminated and having a dominate hand. So that took us to the final table. There were a couple of good players, but the rest were complete shit. Shrubbery was a great player and I give him/her a great deal of respect. They played really well and seemed to be a very
knowledgeable player. Like I said though, most of the other players were totally outclassed and it was almost like they had never played the game before. Here's a perfect example. I raise
UTG in an 8 handed game with AK off. The player on the button 3 bet. I raised to 9275 with the blinds at 2000/4000, and he 3 bet to 46,000. His 3 bet percentage was 16%, that's not a typo.
Pokerstove it, 16% is a ridiculous 3 bet percentage. Most people don't have an open raise of 16%. So I knew my hand range was smoking his. He had me
outchipped by about 20,000. So with 322,000 behind I shoved and he snap called. When he snapped I thought, "it's a race". Flip the cards and he snapped with A8. Huh??? I flopped a king and he went broke the next hand.
So we get down to 5...then 4...now it's 4 in the morning. I was started to get a little tired and knew I needed to get to bed soon. So I proposed a deal, but nobody wanted to respond. I was sitting second in chips and figured they wanted to play it out. So game on. We got down to 3 handed and I kept
ratcheting the aggression up. I was raising more
IP and kept pressure on the
shortstack and was just trying to grind out the chip leader. The
shortstack finally snapped when he only had about 250,000 and I had about 1.1 mill. Blinds were 12,000/24,000. He was eliminated and we were finally heads up.
I decided to take a page out of Daniel
Negreanu's book and just small balled him to death. We both had between 1.3 and 1.5 million in chips. So we were both pretty deep. I made some timely 3 bets when I knew he didn't have much and played
OOP a little more timid. Well, not timid but was looking to bluff catch more
OOP and value bet more
IP. I never varied my raise on the button and relentlessly raised him. I decided to only min raise from the button and punish him
OOP with a 3.5 X raise. It was pretty humorous. There were a ton of
railbirds rooting on Shrubbery, and I guess I have no fans....and I didn't tell anyone I was heads up. He's a great player and everybody kept reading me as a gambler or loose fish, but what they don't understand about poker is that
preflop and
postflop aggression are completely different. You can raise any hand
preflop, but once the flop comes down, hands are starting to become defined and if you know anything about probability and statistics you can make good decisions. So I was playing pretty aggressive
preflop and was trying to keep pots small on the flop, and get some reads. I kept chipping him away and had his tournament on the line a couple of times. I eventually got him down to a 4-1 chip deficit and took him out.
A really great tournament and I was really proud of how I played. It felt great to win, it's been a while. It's been a couple of years since I won a big
MTT, so hopefully this is a good sign of things to come. The bankroll is bigger than ever. So on to the next tourney and I'll recap in specifics this tourney soon. Hopefully I'll find some spots where I think I made some mistakes and some hands that I played well.
Good luck at the tables.
