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Card dead?

Yikes its been a bad day today. I’ve played in 4 MTT’s and I have won a grand total of 5 hands in that time! I have had no cards to speak of at all and the only Aces I saw where the ones that I walked into (twice!). Should be good for Razz later..lol

MTT’s yesterday

I managed to play a number of MTT’s yesterday and I didn’t play too bad. First up I was in a $10 625 player No Limit Holdem game on PokerStars which has to be one of the tightest tournaments that I’ve played in for a while I tried to make some moves on my table to try and counter this but I always seemed to come against a premium hand. I just scraped into the money but bubbled on the level where the money was due to go up.

I then went to Hollywood Poker to play a $10 MTT $2000 Gtd tourney.  For the 2nd time in 3 weeks my PC suffered a malfunction when it went to load up the table and by the time I got back into the game 20 mins had gone. I had only blinded off about 100 chips so it wasn’t too bad but in comparision to the previous game this was quite loose and I lost a few key hands when I had the best of it in multi way pots (aargh!) and then came the great suck out! Oh well never mind this happens and we just have to move on to the next tourney!

The next game was the weekly WAPT London event at PokerStars where a handful of us play each week. Anyway we were early in the tournament and I have AK which I have raised 4BB and I have been called. The flop is a nightmare with QQJ but I need to get rid of at least one or both of these players if I want to win the pot so I put in a half pot raise. Everyone calls. What could they have? I’m thinking that if the Q or J are out there that there would have been a reraise at this point so I think that they are just on a draw. The turn brings a 10 which gives me the nut straight and I’m pretty sure at least one of the others is on the second straight but there is only one way to find out and that is to stick the chips in and sure enough there are 3 of us all in. The hands come AK (nut straight) and K9 (second straight) but we are dead in the water against 10 10 who now has a Full House!

To try and take my mind off that carnage I played an $8 PL Omaha tourney on PokerStars which was a bit wild but I managed to cash in this one as well (18th out of 170+ players) which is the first time I have ever cash in an Omaha MTT so I quite with this one even if it was only for $17.

I’m gonna try to get into the Mansion $100k later today and there is also The Online Poker League event at PokerStars which is Razz. I just hope that everyone else is as bad as me on that or I have no chance!!

Poker Tracker problems

I’m having a devil of a time getting PT to upload my hands from Hollywood Poker (Ongame Network). I think after an hour looking at it I’m going to give in and check the PT forum to see if they have any ideas!

Had a small winning session on Hollywood and on Battlefield Poker last night and I am quite keen to get the stats updated.

Pruning my sites

I have been doing quite a bit of pruning of my poker rooms recently because I have now discovered rake back (2 years too late) and I am trying to get as many of my favourite networks on rake back as I can. I have withdrawn money from all of my Prima accounts to Neteller and opened an account with Battlefield Poker with a 30% rakeback and I have done a similar thing with Absolute Poker to Vegas 247. For Ongame I am taking my money out of PokerRoom and I have opened an account with Hollywood which has a perpetual reload bonus (rakeback in effect). I will be posting some of the deals on here in due course so look out for some of the best action from the rake back market on here in future.

In the meantime you can find out about rakeback here: http://theonlinepokerleague.com/rake.html

Hollywood Poker $5.50 tourney

I had a bit of a stormer tonight with a 2nd place in a $5.50 tourney at Hollywood Poker. There were 582 players and I managed to survive being dealt a cold deck for the first two hours (best hands 6’s and 7’s - but doubled on both!!) and then I managed to suck out against AA 3 times with K 10 & KJ. Ultimately I got to the heads up stage slightly behind and with some aggressive play got to being 2:1 ahead but unfortunately I had a bad hand and then my AJ came up against AA which put me down to 15% of the chips and it wasn’t long before I went out. Still this is my best finish in a tourney and whilst not my best cash of $363.75 ($3,750 on Pacific a few weeks back) it is confirmation that I do seem to be going in the right direction.

Mansion $100k Gtd tourney last night

I managed to get into the $100 buy in $100k gtd tournament again last night and this time I got in by winning a $10 satellite which I was quite please about.

In the game itself I had unbelievable hands at the start with nothing but paint for the first half a dozen hands which I managed to not get involved with at this stage of the tourney. I then picked up AA three times in about twenty hands and only managed to make any money on the last one as I couldn’t get anyone to play with me for even a small raise. On the last one I managed to more than double up and got myself into 3rd place. I then managed to keep myself in contention and even had AA again so that when it came down to about 150 players I was still top 25. Unfortunately at this stage I got caught with AJ making a 3,000 raise which was called and then my 3,000 on the flop was also called. In hindsight I wish I’d shoved my chips in and see what his reaction was. I then checked the turn and he put in a big raise which I then folded to. Granted I hadn’t hit anything but the board was mainly low cards and whilst he may have been a playing a bit tricky with A5 or something he may have just had two high cards. I meane what else could he have called my pre flop raise with - a mid pair perhaps but likely to be a high A or KQ? Anyway after that I managed to hang around for a bit but went out in about 132 place.

Still I’m generally please with my play at the moment even though I’m down on the month and I hope to have another go at this next week.