First up - big hugs and loves for Stu. These are tough times for him at the moment and I hope his love of poker helps him to find a space where the worries and concerns about his dad can be set aside for a while. We need an escape valve and poker provides an environment where we can cocoon ourselves in thoughts of pott odds, 3bet ranges and whether our bets tell a sufficiently strong story to get our opponent to make the fold or call as appropriate. The mental strength needed as he helps to care for his dad will need to be replenished and I hope the love he gets from the Nobbers helps with that.
So - after last week"s trip to DTD I wasn"t full of confidence or enthusiasm for poker, but I ventured out to the local pub game with Lucy and made a predictably early exit.
I wasn"t the only one there with a decent DTD result this week, one the final table from the £300 was also there. He"s a mate and fellow off-shore worker with Chris Wood who is himself a local poker hero and has taken to travelling with Chris. To say that his achievement was surprising would be something of an understatement. Suffice to say, I know that running good is a key factor in winning tournaments and that on our day we"re all capable of a decent result. The top guys make more days into their days than the rest of us though. They take the run of offsuit 4 9 and turn them into winning hands. They pick off the bluffs better than us and they extract more value from the marginal hands than we do.
I left after my restart stack of 1500 chips had been doubled and then doubled again before succumbing to the inevitable loss with AQ<88 and headed to G.
No game when I got there and eventually we sat 3handed in hope of attracting others once they could see there was a game on. I won 75% of the pots 3handed, mostly for small amounts but chipped up to around £130 from my £100 sit down and then we got to be 6 handed for a while. Flopping a set of threes and turning a full house helped to boost that to the £185 I cashed out.
Thursday"s home game was fun - I inadvertently value bet bottom pair vs PhilTC and got called by J high which for some reason he thought might be good vs me, but then lost my first stack when one of our newer members decided to complete from the small blind without looking at his cards. I raised, but obviously not enough to make him look. He flopped two pair with the Thursday night auto-fold hand Q4 and managed to take all my chips with it. Cue horror from the rest of the table and a lot of insults. We have few principles, but not playing Q4 is strongly held and the last time I won a hand with it in similar circumstances (I raised blind) I declared my hand dead and returned the chips.
I bust eventually and migrated to the cash table to book a small loss
Saturday was the monthly £100 at G which I swerved in favour of going to see Les Mis the Movie with Anita. I have no regrets about that choice. We weren"t sure about this but some excellent reviews and the fact that we"ve seen th stage show in both professional and youth productions and enjoyed it a lot took us along to the cinema.
Recommend it to anyone, whether you"ve seen the stage show or not. The film tells the story with more clarity than the show, the music is stirring and some of the performances are outstanding. Ann Hathaway owns I Dreamed a Dream in a way that SuBo can only fantasise about and although Russell Crowe"s singing voice is short on quality his acting gets him through to a very moving final scene. It"s almost guaranteed that the stage show gets a standing ovation at the finale, and it would be no surprise if a full cinema didn"t burst into applause at the concluding scene which owes a big nod to the stage show.
Back to poker on Sunday and finally a proper result in the G £15+£15. I managed to dust off my first entry inside the first two levels (a misguided raise with J5 and calling a shove from Dr Donk on AJxhh for the first 5k, and 3betting AQhh vs someone I had thought to be competent led to me being allin on a 763hh flop vs his 77, brick brick)
I re-enter and refocus and get to the Final Table of 10 with double average and pick up big pots in the first two hands to go to around 140k of the 515k in play.
HU I have a small chip lead and we agree to chop with me taking £335 him £330.
It"s been a while since I had a decent cash in this game and ultimately it"s down to my not having been taking it seriously enough (and running bad in some spots). I played somewhere close to my best last night, and ran pretty good too.
I got active once I had a stack and picked up a lot of pots without showdown, and some that I should have lost.
For example, at 300/600 I open
to 1550 from a stack of c50k in late position over a limper and get a call from the SB and the limper
Flop
and SB leads out for 1125 leaving himself with two 5k chips. Seat 9 calls as do I.
Turn is
and everyone checks
River is the
and SB bets out 5k
Seat 9 folds, I call declaring "straight"and he flips As
having played it about as badly as it would be possible to do.
Managed to fold AA on the river of 4xKQx having 3bet villain for the third or fourth time and run into a little more resistance than usual. He check called the flop, donked the turn for around 1/3 pot and shoved the river for just over the pot. He"d flopped a set of fours apparently. He gets more chips if he checks the river, and even Daniel Negreanu can probably find a fold often enough on that board to make the shove -EV bearing in mind that he has bottom set in a 3bet pot.
For those who have made it this far, thanks for reading.
