A couple of monthlies and a lot of online

As Vegas slips into the memory bank, I'm getting back into the swing of my online grinding. I basically had a couple of breakeven/slight profit weeks followed by a mini heater.

On Tuesday of last week, I played the IWF rebuy satellite on Ipoker. 4 or 5 hours in, I'm headsup when I suddenly realise the blinds are not increasing. Slight problem given that my opponent and I are about 500 big blinds deep, and he's too good to be getting 500 bigs in with one pair. About 7 hours later he's going mental in the chatbox saying he has to go to work when Ipoker just aborted the tournament and awarded us both packages. Result! Long difficult night though: Mireille stayed up with me to make sure I didn't fall asleep at the screen. I think my opponent almost did at one point: around 4 AM he seemed to lose all his aggression and start doing loopy stuff. He got it back though and the battle raged on. Meanwhile, Mireille's attitude was veering from how cool it was to watch me "work" and explain my thought processes to yeah yeah raise the donk lead cos it's never strong oh God this is repetitive. Thanks to Alan F in Paddy Power online support for his help, and fair play to Ipoker for doing the decent thing in the end.

On Thursday, I played the Fitz EOM: never got going and lost what was effectively a flip. On Saturday I headed to Navan for the JJP monthly game and played like an absolute donkey on coke. My exit was unfortunate but the damage was done before that as I spewed off over half of a 20K stack in record time. It was like I forgot everything I'd learned about how to play live tournament poker in Ireland and played my standard online game instead which really doesn't work against players who'd never dream of folding once they've put a few chips in the pot. Exit was quite funny: over half the table limped at 100/200. With AK in the BB and 8K, I bumped it up to what I thought a sufficiently hefty number to test their collective resolve (1500). The second limper (utg+1) cold called, as did the SB. I got it in against the second limper on a K98 flop and he tabled a most unexpected K9o. Well, unexpected to me anyway but maybe it shouldn't have been given that it was live. Not much folding goes on live, as they say.

Suitably tilted by that performance, I covered over 5 kilometres walking towards home in the 30 minutes it took Mireille to come and get me. I think my biggest strength as a poker player is how quickly I recover from disappointment, and no sooner was I out of the car back home than I was grinding some online mtts. Cue the mini heater: the next 24 hours saw me win 5 tournaments on 4 different sites, yielding me twice as much in profit as what I'd have got for winning the live game, with a UKIPT Dublin package thrown in for good measure. They all came in the smaller runner fields that are my bread and butter these days, but I came close to some really big scores in some of the majors. I was one of the chipleaders in the Bruce 100K with 30 left before I lost a few races, and had a few similar crossbars in Sunday majors on other sites. I feel the really big one is just round the corner.

With that in mind, I played the first FTOPS last night and cruised through the early levels to a decent enough stack. Card dead and people's increased aggression as the blinds rose saw me settle into an approximately average stack on the bubble. A few well chosen reships saw me comfortably through the bubble only to lose a perfectly standard race. Must race better. Still, online has gone so well this year I do find myself wondering at times why I ever bother to leave the house.

Live agenda for this week includes the Bluff monthly tournament (tonight), the Fitz 500 game on Saturday, and possibly the team event in the Bluff on Sunday. If anyone sees me trying to make people fold in any of those games, please pull me aside and have a word.

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