So, after much deliberation I decided to go and play the APPT macau event. Macau is a place I wanted to visit and coupled with the face that a few people I knew from the UK were going I was looking forward to a good trip. My flight from singapore gets delayed which means I miss the turbo ferry out of Hong Kong and it takes me 4 hours to get from hong kong to macau. Check into my hotel at find that there is no internet facilities in the room, wtf. After a pretty goods sleep I get a taxi to the Grand waldo hotel and set about trying to buy into the tournament. I go to the cashier and ask fro $5000 from my visa debit card, no problem sir blah blah. 10 mins later, sorry sir it needs to be a proper credit card. Am looking for anyone that might know me who plays on stars who can lend me some cash but nothing materializes. Finally bump into rick and booder but none of them have any spare cash. Speak with a pokerstars rep about buying in from my stars account, no go. Eventually get a name of a guy staying in the hotel who might be able to help. 20 mins later and a guy opens the door of his hotel room and hands me $4k cash what I transferred to him on stars a moment ago and quickly closes the door without saying a word.
Eventually fill out all the paperwork and get bought into the comp with 15 mins to spare, phew. I was an alternate though and they had already squeezed some extra tables in beforehand so there was no chance of any more so i had to wait patiently. If i hadnt travelled so far and had all the BS so far i would have not bothered playing. 1hr 40 mins in and I finally get a seat. I hit peak of around 14k stack but never really get going. No real hands of note before we enter the 150/300-25 level with me on a precarious 8k. 3 limps in front of me and I limp with A2 clubs on the button, SB completes and BB checks. Flop comes K 8 2, and it is checked all the way round, turn is another 2 and the SB bets and the BB calls, action to me. The SB has played some of the strangest poker I have ever seen so far, he limped for 200, and after a short stack pushed for 2k who was called, then another guy is all in for 4.5k, he calls the 4.5k leaving 3k behind. The other guy in the pot who called the original short stack push also calls the 4.5k total. Flop comes 8 high and they both check, turn is a K and one guy pushes and the guy who originally limped for 200 passes, he said he had 99. So back to my hand, the SB could have anything and the BB is likely on a draw, I push all in and the SB calls and the BB passes, SB flips KK and im toast. Such a weird hand, but im never passing in that spot.
Because I busted before the dinner break I was not issued with a ticket for the buffet, how tight? Rick and booder also failed to make the dinner break. I went back to the hotel and ordered some room service, 4 hours later and misfortune number 400 for this trip strikes and im shitting through the eye of a needle for the next 2 days with barely 10 mins between each sitting. My ability to play any more poker, sightsee, or hang out with rick and booder gone, I was happy to check out and get to the airport. I will definately try and re-visit macau at some point to exercise all the demons from this trip. Also Ill make sure im bought into any tournaments well in advance as being an alternate sucks.
I should have sensed bad things were going to happen on this trip as the day before I left I played an online session and dropped $12k on ipoker, but to be fair I played really bad and could have easily lost more. Since then I have been playing on Full tilt and managed to drop $25k making nice $37k downswing for the week, weeeeeeeeeeeee. On my mac at the moment so dont have any hand historys to post, but my last session on full tilt was painful, 3 times all in on the turn with nut str8 vs set, lose all 3, one for $8k pot at 10/20. Another two buy ins were set over set and the final straw for the session was AA vs QJ all in on Q high flop. A pretty rough week overall, but the downswing on poker was probably to be expected as I had the crazy $100k upswing over 3 weeks not long back. Probably gonna stay off the poker until december kicks in, forget about november, lol
