Friday, August 31, 2007

1.92%

First off, I would like to apologize for not updating this the last two weeks. I really don't have a good excuse, I was just being a slacker. Now on to the good stuff, or bad stuff actually.

After my short break from poker to get my head straight after the last big tournament, I have been playing more the last week with some moderate success. My real job keeps getting in the way of all my poker fun, but last night was the big monthly tournament. We had 42 players at $500 each, so the pot was rather nice, and first place was over $8500.

I start off with a couple bad beat and get short stacked early, but make a nice comeback with back to back hands of AdJd. The irony of it all is that I have been knocked out of more tournaments with AJ than any other hand (or at least that is how I seem to remember it). We get down to 11 players and I am under average stack, but still not in desperation mode when I get 3d3c in middle position. We are at 400/800 with 75 ante and I have about 10K in chips. There is one caller in front of me. I call. Two callers behind. SB fold and BB checks.

Flop is 6c4c3s. BB goes all in and has me barely covered. Fold. I actually stress out for a minute about my call because of the possible flush draw, and the possibility that he might have 74 in the BB. I do eventually call. Fold. Fold. He shows Qs6d, and immediately starts counting out how much he has to pay me out. As you can probably guess from the title of this blog, he had a 1.92% chance to win the hand. Since this gets us to the final table, we have a crowd of about 30 people watching the hand. Turn is 4h. River 6s.

Obviously I was in shock and disbelief. I did handle it about as well as you can possibly handle a beat like that. Since it is the tournament I run, I then had to consolidate to the final table and then distribute the cash prizes. It was difficult to go from devastated tournament player to courteous tournament director, but luckily I have some good friends who helped with the transition. Everyone was very supportive and apologetic, especially my friend who actually won the hand. Unfortunately, you cant cash supportive and apologetic chips.

I still had a great time, but $8500 would have been much more fun. I promise to update this every Friday from now one.

Good Luck!
Martin

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Burnout?

As you may know from my last update, I had my big tournament a week ago. I kept a positive attitude the whole way, but still went out around 23rd with 54 entries. I went card dead for almost 2 hours. I bled from 13K in chips to 5K in chips before I pushed on the button with K5 and hoping to take down the blinds. Both called and the SB knocked us both out with A4.

I really wasnt that upset. It was a fun tournament, and I just could get rolling. After that, I decided to play in a side cash game. I went down 2 buy ins immediately and began to get frustrated. I then made a huge turn around and built up my stack to 8 buy ins before disaster set in. I lost 6 hands in a row that busted me out and another buy in. All 6 hands, I flopped the nuts, got all the money in on the turn, and my opponent sucked out on the river.

At this point, I was extremely frustrated and upset. I left the place with such a bad attitude that I decided it was time for a break from cards. I was getting wrapped up in trying to force good things to happen, and that is usually when it all falls apart. I really think I burned myself out that night. So I have pretty much taken the week off, but more like a golfer takes off. I still played a couple of small cash games this week, but only sat down for a total of 3.5 hours. I made $200 combined sessions and was happy to go do something else. I will probably get back on the train in a week, but I do have a $14K freeroll to play in this Saturday. I am playing for a friend, so we get to split the winnings. Wish me luck!

Thursday, August 2, 2007

My favorite day of the month

GCP has asked me to make my regular updates to my blog on Thursdays. It just so happens that this coincides with my favorite day of the month this month. Once a month, I run a very large poker tournament in Austin. It used to be over 200 people at $100 buy in with $100 rebuys for the first hour. It was great, but just got to be too large to manage without compensation. (it is illegal to make money operating a poker game in Texas. Stupid law, but that will be a topic for a future post.)

Anyway, I started these up again 3 months ago but with a much larger buy in to thin the field a little, and Thursday, August 2nd, is the next one. The format is $300 buy in, with unlimited $300 rebuys for the first 2 levels (40 minutes each) with a single $300 add on. The tournament is capped at 50 people and should be full. I finished 2nd in a small $300 buy in on Tuesday, so I am ready for this one. I will post my results Friday or Saturday, and I will try and remember a few key hands for your critique, but for now, I want to talk about what I will call "tournament anticipation."

I am sure everyone gets this, but I am convinced that this is what keeps me coming back and spending insane amounts of money to enter tournaments. I don't think there is a better feeling in poker than knowing you are about to participate in an event that could pay off a great deal of money. Everyone walks in the room, absolutely sure that they are destined to win. Once you get started, every win reinforces that feeling, and every loss forces you to dig deep to believe that you will overcome that drop in chips to win in the end.

What I have noticed playing many tournaments is that when that 'invincible' feeling starts to fade, that is when I lose. Although I am just beginning to analyze the effect of this feeling on the game, I really believe that maintaining that feeling is a key factor in winning tournaments. It isn't that I believe that emotions can control the cards that come, but I believe that your beliefs and emotions can project tells to your opponents, thus making the feeling a self fulfilling proficy.

For example, in the tournament on Tuesday when I finished 2nd, I had that feeling I was going to win all the way until we got heads up. Suddenly, I just started to 'feel' that I was going to lose. From that point, all the decisions I made were wrong. The odd thing was, the entire final table, I was hoping to get heads up with this guy, because I thought he would be the easiest to beat. He did get a crazy run of cards (KK five times heads up), but I should have been able to overcome that.

Tomorrow, I will focus on maintaining those positive thoughts and see where it takes me.