Online Poker Tournaments - Disconnect!!!!

Since I decided to start blogging for Gulfcoastpoker.net, I thought I should start playing online poker again. I pretty much stopped playing online in October and just stick to live games. However, since there are many online players out there, and you can find nice sized tournaments, I thought I would get back into it. I traded a friend $80 to transfer me some money on Full Tilt and got started. Since $80 isnt much of a bankroll, especially for tournaments, I started playing Omaha hi/low cash games to build up a small bankroll. After a couple days, I got up to over $300, so I decided to start in on the tournaments.

Tournament 1: Min cashed in the $24+2 multi-rebuy.
Tournament 2: Made it fairly deep in a $69+6 freeze out, but lost with QQ vs TJ
Tournament 3: This was last night in the $150+13, $50K guaranteed at Full Tilt, and the main subject of my blog today. I happened to be tiling my kitchen while playing, so I missed quite a few hands early, and I got my laptop pretty dirty. I started out very strong and built up a nice chip stack and made it as high as 2nd in chips overall. For the first 2.5 hours, I maintained a position somewhere in the top 5 overall. Cards were running over me, and I was using my stack to push people around. Then I get AA under the gun and make a 3X raise. The big blind makes a call with ThJh. The flop is 6h7hJc. He bets about 1/2 the pot, and I raise 3X his bet. He moves all in, and I call. He catches a heart on the river to cut my stack in half.

I managed to rebuild and make it into the money. We are down to 4 tables when my internet connection craps out. I was short stacked and was about to get the BB blind, so I panicked and tried to get it to reconnect. By the time I did, I was under the gun again and down to almost nothing. I went out on my small blind with A2 vs AK. Needless to say, I wanted to throw my computer through the window. I spent 5 hours to go out because of a technical failure. I dont mind losing because of bad luck or bad play, but losing because I cant access the tournament to make a decision feels like the worst beat in poker. I have taken runner runner suckouts better than this.

So keep those modems in good condition and give yourself a backup when big money is on the line.

My first blog entry

Since this is my first blog entry, I am assuming that it will get little attention. It will be nice to get my feet wet on this without a large audience. This will also give you a little background on my poker experience.

I was first introduced to poker sometime in grade school. I used to play different games with my friends for pennies. We stepped it up in high school where we would play pot matching games and it wasn't unusual to win or lose $100. That was a lot of money for some 15 year old kids. After the 2002 WSOP main event, I really started to get into Texas Hold'em. We changed our dealer's choice game to hold'em tournaments, and my quest for bigger and better poker began.

After playing at least 20 hours a week online, I got with a group of investors and started an online poker site called www.letspoker.com. Unfortunately, that site didn't make it, but it was a great experience, and we built some really great software. During that time through today, I have played in many large casino tournaments, including 9 wsop events and have 6 cashes that qualify for pokerpages rankings. I hope to dedicate more time to playing in large tournaments in the near future.

Although my favorite part of poker is playing large tournaments, I tend to play in a lot more cash games as the time to payout ratio tends to be higher. There are also a lot more cash games than tournaments, and the time commitment for cash games is less. The attraction to the tournament format for me is that it is set up as a competition with a clear winner. I have always been an overly competitive person, so tournaments fit with my natural personality. I will be playing in a local freeroll tournament on Sunday, so I will post my results then.

Til my next post. Good Luck!