Thursday, June 4, 2009

Grindward ho

On second thoughts, maybe best leave the word inventions to the likes of Jemmy Joyce.

Not really much to report. Livewise, I played the Bruce event in Maynooth. Great fun, great value, I got doubled up first hand when some loon nonsensically shipped the river. I say nonsensically because the line made zero sense except as a lunatic bluff. Going well until a very bad read lost me half my stack. I raised with 66 and got called by a blind. Flop T42 and my cbet was called. Turn another 2 and he shipped. I found it hard to believe he had a 2 in his hand, or anything on the board for that matter. Having played with the gent in question before and knowing him to be a very good player well capable of a move in this spot against someone like me most likely holding two unpaired high cards, I decided to call. I was right in my view that he hadn't hit, but he didn't need to. Slowplayed aces. Nice.

A few hands later, the rest of my stack was now Bruce's stack, after his 9s made a set against my aces. Oh well, not to worry.

As already reported, Sunday's highlight was qualifying for the WSOP ME on Stars, and snagging a ticket for the ECOOP main event. Played the shorthanded $300 event tonight and cashed for just over $800. Played very well although on reflection my exit hand is a bit dodgy. Holding AT in the BB and looking at a button raise to 3600 (3 bigs) and a small blind flat, I decided this was a great squeeze spot and shipped for 28K. Pretty standard under normal circumstances. If they both fold my stack increases by 30%, and I shouldn't be in that bad a shape if I get called as normally the button could have almost anything, and the SB most likely has a pretty two picture card hand such as KQ, or a smallish pair, or suited con artists. "Under normal circumstances". These were not normal. I failed to take into due consideration that I'd already pulled this move at least twice, thereby establishing a very blind defensive image, and the button had backed off for a while, so his raise now was more than likely legit and perhaps even trapping. Furthermore, the SB was a total nit so while the aforementioned hands like KQ were in his range, so too were hands like AK and QQ that a normal person would reraise.
As it happened, they both called, the button with AQ and the SB with AK, so yeah, pretty horrible. In general, my more hyper style online as opposed to live is paying dividends, but in some senses I still have LAG L plates. Most of my mistakes stem from undue consideration of the very different table image I typically have online to that I would have live. Oh well, all part of the learning curve.

Other than that, the grind has been going very well. Most days I clear $1K in profit in sit and gos without too much effort. I've set as my goal to establish my Full Tilt account as the best in the world at my chosen specialisation. So far I'm well on track. The ranking is done by average profit per tourney, and at the moment the top performers average in the mid $30s. I'm averaging over $50, but you need a sample size of 500 to be considered (so far I've played 228).
My typical schedule at the moment is grind SNGs in the afternoon, play MTTs in the evening, and switch back to SNGs after midnight.
Next on the agenda live is this weekend's European Shorthanded which I'm looking forward to, and Vegas is only two weeks away now. Eek.

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