Sunday 20th May

For the whole of last year I made the majority of my money from online mtt’s, including a win in a paradise masters event, and winning the 100 rebuy on paradise 3 times in 1 month. However, as the year progressed the tournaments were becoming tougher all over the place with so much information available in the mainstream about tournament poker. People were just not making that many mistakes, people were playing good short-stack poker and in my opinion was becoming a lot more luck orientated as the skill balance was evening out. I made a decision in December to concentrate my efforts on cash games for a few reasons. The first was what I just mentioned above, another was my lack of social life due to horrendous hours required to play online tournaments. I also planned to be travelling a lot in 2007 and wouldn’t have the time to regularly sit down and play mtt’s for hours on end. I was already a winning player in 3/6 and 5/10 NL to supplement my income when I was running badly in mtt’s. Since I have just booked my trip to Vegas for the WSOP I decided to have a few weeks of mtt’s to get back into the mindset, this started on the Sunday just gone………

For those who read blondepoker forum, a thread is starting every Sunday to document the ups and downs of the biggest day of the week for mtt players. When I play I contribute to this thread and like so many others my posts are filled with frustration at either my bad play or the moronic play of my opponents being rewarded. However the same faces show up every week, gluten for punishment, it’s like smack. This Sunday was going to be the same as every other for me, I played really badly in the warm up, bluffing in horribly spots and lasting about 40 mins. In the stars million I was going well, then about 5 players from the money had 97spades on 9 8 5 flop. The original raiser bet and I moved in, he went into the tank and made the call, remarkably he looked me up with AK and got there, next……………… Full tilt had the main event of its online festival a $500 buy in with a wonderful structure. I lasted about 2 hours before getting involved in a huge flop, with the bulk of the money going in on the turn. I had the nut str8 and a flush draw, my opponent had top set and housed up on the river, no real complaints on my part, just one of those things, and if the tables were turned I would have gone broke with top set in his shoes also. My best shot at big cash was the UB 200k, I managed to make the last 40 then managed to win a massive pot with 35 left to take the chip lead. If I was in normal tournament mode I would have switched gears, conserved my stack and almost guarantee myself a final table spot. Hindsight is 20/20 because at the time I kept firing on all cylinders eventually finishing about 30th for $1100. This demonstrated to me that I was correct in my thinking that I needed to play a lot of tournaments to prepare for Vegas, my focus at the business end just wasn’t sharp.

So after all that fun? I was around $200 up for the day, this was due to the cash game session I had before the tournaments started. If I had just played solely tournaments I estimate I would have been stuck about $2k for one day on tournaments, $3k if I didn’t cash in UB. I’m sure ill be ready for the same rollercoaster next Sunday