Close But No Cigar...

With her indoors out for the evening I managed to fire up around a dozen donkaments. After the disaster that was Saturday, I wasn’t feeling particularly positive but was happy to get some play time in all the same.

I failed to cash in all three on Stars (obv) and all three on Party but managed 7th in the $163 for $2k and a small cash in the $22.5k gteed on FTP. The bust out hand on FTP was gross, I got all in with a quite bad Russian pre-flop with TT vs JJ, spiked a T on the turn and he rivered a J, which was unsporting of him and stopped me typing “on your bike, Russian” in the chat box. The final table wasn’t particularly strong but I’m not unhappy with my play overall (managing to constrain my spewy tendencies for the most part whilst maintaining a reasonable amount of aggression) and it was good to get something approaching a result under my belt.

I also enjoyed playing with Jonas (Joka) for a while in one of the $26 FTP tourneys, until he open shipped T9s over a button limper from the SB and I overshoved in the BB with AK. I failed to improve and he made two pair, so I crossed him off my Christmas card list and sent him a dog turd in the post as a token of my esteem. I’m joking, obv, you know you’re my hero and doubly so for five betting Moorman with AK at the WSOP Europe after he had four bet UTG.

Over the last few months (and having experienced a big upswong at the end of last year) I have really understood just how much variance there is in tournament results. As a result, I have come to accept this and (when I am in a reasonable mood) take the beats and successive lost flips as they come. Reading on 2+2 about 100 BI downswongs being pretty standard (aaaaaa was currently on a downswong of over 300 buy-ins), it gives a pretty good idea of what bank roll requirements are and why so many players are backed.

There is a certain poster on PXF he continually spams the Brags & Beats forum with how Pokerstars is rigged etc. I find it annoying, but like bad programmes on TV, even though they suck, I often watch them all the same. Interestingly, another poster looked up his results and his ROI is above 50% (considerably higher than mine on that site, FWIW).

We are all predisposed to thinking that we are don’t run well, where as the simple fact is that most MTT players will spend 80% of their poker lives running what they consider to be bad. As Bond18 said about Joe Hachem “He has the strange habit of talking like he runs bad, which we all know can’t be true”. This is probably just be due to Hachem being a whining Aussie douchebag. :)

I am off too catch up with an old friend tonight for a couple of beers. I am looking forward to it, we can reminisce over how shit our haircuts were back in the day (to be fair, his has hardly changed).

I’m likely to be able to squeeze in some donkamenting on Friday night. Otherwise this weekend I’m planning to see my parents (Dad will just be recovering from another bout of chemotherapy but should be over the worst of it by then) and then go out for some beers with some friends on Saturday. On Sunday we are planning to go to Kew Gardens and then see “The Damned United”. I’m particularly looking forward to the film – the book was superb so it will be interesting to see what kind of job that they have made of it.