Finally, A Final Table!
Woohoo, I've at last had a decent tournament showing!
I've been trying to play more tournaments recently as there's always the potential to hit a really big win. I've had limited sucess in the online tournaments I've played so far. I've finished just inside the money places on several occasions, but never won anything substantial. In the few live tournaments I've played in I've had a couple of finishes just outside the money but nothing else.
So, last night I headed down to the Gutshot Cardroom in London to play in the 'Beginners' Night £5 No-limit Holdem tournament. I hadn't planned on heading down untill that afternoon when I got a call from a friend saying he was going to be there. I ended up being really short of time after waiting an age for the bus to show up and because of the low buy in it's a really popular tournament so I knew the places would fill up early. I phoned up the club to see if I could reserve my seat and but after about 10 minutes on the phone trying to persuade them, I realised that it was a no go, but I was on the bus already, there was no way I was going home now. At 7:40pm, 20 minutes before the tournamet was due to start while standing on the platform of Notting Hill Gate tube station about a 30 minute journey from the club I got a phone call from my friend saying that he'd managed to wangle me a seat but I absolutely [b][u]had[/b][/u] to be there in time. Yikes!
I sprang off the tube slam into a huddle of people waiting to get on and I nearly took the bariers with me as I left the station, but at 8:05pm I arrived panting and sweating just in the nick of time to take up my seat right at the back of 115 eager chip-riffling poker players all crammed right together - sardine style.
Being a rebuy tournament naturally one would expect play to slightly looser during the first hour. Never had I seen anything as wild as this. There were 50 rebuys on our table alone. Most pots had more than two people all-in and what with all the calculations needed for the numerous side-pots that arose, we only managed two laps of the table during that first hour. Needless rto say within those 20 hands or so I didn't get delt anything spectaular. I rebought a couple of times when my AT and then AJ failed to stand up in 6 handed pots (fairly unsurprisingly). I got lucky on the very last hand of the rebuys period when my A8 overtook JJ 99 and a couple of other hands (everyone all-in, naturally) to quintuple me up. This, together with a final top up, left me with just over 3000 chips (each buy in having been for 500) and in a pretty comfortable position going into the freezout part of the tournament.
For the rest of the tournament I got delt fairly mediocre hands and was always slightly below average in chips, but I made enough of the right moves at the right times (mostly stealing blinds) to ensure that I kept my head above water.
They were playing as many as the final 18, proably becasue the night was aimed at 'beginners', (although there were pleanty of the usual suspect there too) but there wasn't any significant money in relationship to the buy in untill the final 9. As may be obvious from the title of this post, I made the final tablem albeit with a somewhat vunerable stack.
The final table started off serisouly tightly with the first 5 or 6 hands being folded round to the big blinds. But soon enough people started knocking each other out and I was barely involved in a pot before I found myself looking at 6th place at the worst and the real possibility of a decent score, but it was getting to the point where I was going to have to win more than just a few blinds. Fortunately this came when my allin bet holding QJ on a Q42 board was called by some egit with K4 who thankfully failed to improve.
By the time we had wittled ourselves down to four there was one guy sitting on a massive stack with about 120,000 chips. I had about 30,000 and the remaining two had around 20,000 each. I was relying on the big stack dealing the crushing blow to one of the other stacks but unfortunately the one knocked the other out so I was gonna have to work hard and/or get lucky to make second spot. In the end I could cope with the blinds of 5,000/10,000 and found myself all-in with A3 which lost painfully to Q8 when an 8 came on the river.
All in all, I was very happy with my play and, obviously, the £250 I got for 3rd place! I think my play has definately improved over the summer; I'm now going to those extra levels of thinking necessary really to make the difference.
Things have also been going very well on the internet recently, although somewhat at the expense of the ammount of work I'm putting into my research project, but those are two stories that can wait a while.
In the meantime I'm off on holiday for an extended weekend to Brussels. I'm surprising my finacee so I only hope she doesn't read this before then!
Laters.
I've been trying to play more tournaments recently as there's always the potential to hit a really big win. I've had limited sucess in the online tournaments I've played so far. I've finished just inside the money places on several occasions, but never won anything substantial. In the few live tournaments I've played in I've had a couple of finishes just outside the money but nothing else.
So, last night I headed down to the Gutshot Cardroom in London to play in the 'Beginners' Night £5 No-limit Holdem tournament. I hadn't planned on heading down untill that afternoon when I got a call from a friend saying he was going to be there. I ended up being really short of time after waiting an age for the bus to show up and because of the low buy in it's a really popular tournament so I knew the places would fill up early. I phoned up the club to see if I could reserve my seat and but after about 10 minutes on the phone trying to persuade them, I realised that it was a no go, but I was on the bus already, there was no way I was going home now. At 7:40pm, 20 minutes before the tournamet was due to start while standing on the platform of Notting Hill Gate tube station about a 30 minute journey from the club I got a phone call from my friend saying that he'd managed to wangle me a seat but I absolutely [b][u]had[/b][/u] to be there in time. Yikes!
I sprang off the tube slam into a huddle of people waiting to get on and I nearly took the bariers with me as I left the station, but at 8:05pm I arrived panting and sweating just in the nick of time to take up my seat right at the back of 115 eager chip-riffling poker players all crammed right together - sardine style.
Being a rebuy tournament naturally one would expect play to slightly looser during the first hour. Never had I seen anything as wild as this. There were 50 rebuys on our table alone. Most pots had more than two people all-in and what with all the calculations needed for the numerous side-pots that arose, we only managed two laps of the table during that first hour. Needless rto say within those 20 hands or so I didn't get delt anything spectaular. I rebought a couple of times when my AT and then AJ failed to stand up in 6 handed pots (fairly unsurprisingly). I got lucky on the very last hand of the rebuys period when my A8 overtook JJ 99 and a couple of other hands (everyone all-in, naturally) to quintuple me up. This, together with a final top up, left me with just over 3000 chips (each buy in having been for 500) and in a pretty comfortable position going into the freezout part of the tournament.
For the rest of the tournament I got delt fairly mediocre hands and was always slightly below average in chips, but I made enough of the right moves at the right times (mostly stealing blinds) to ensure that I kept my head above water.
They were playing as many as the final 18, proably becasue the night was aimed at 'beginners', (although there were pleanty of the usual suspect there too) but there wasn't any significant money in relationship to the buy in untill the final 9. As may be obvious from the title of this post, I made the final tablem albeit with a somewhat vunerable stack.
The final table started off serisouly tightly with the first 5 or 6 hands being folded round to the big blinds. But soon enough people started knocking each other out and I was barely involved in a pot before I found myself looking at 6th place at the worst and the real possibility of a decent score, but it was getting to the point where I was going to have to win more than just a few blinds. Fortunately this came when my allin bet holding QJ on a Q42 board was called by some egit with K4 who thankfully failed to improve.
By the time we had wittled ourselves down to four there was one guy sitting on a massive stack with about 120,000 chips. I had about 30,000 and the remaining two had around 20,000 each. I was relying on the big stack dealing the crushing blow to one of the other stacks but unfortunately the one knocked the other out so I was gonna have to work hard and/or get lucky to make second spot. In the end I could cope with the blinds of 5,000/10,000 and found myself all-in with A3 which lost painfully to Q8 when an 8 came on the river.
All in all, I was very happy with my play and, obviously, the £250 I got for 3rd place! I think my play has definately improved over the summer; I'm now going to those extra levels of thinking necessary really to make the difference.
Things have also been going very well on the internet recently, although somewhat at the expense of the ammount of work I'm putting into my research project, but those are two stories that can wait a while.
In the meantime I'm off on holiday for an extended weekend to Brussels. I'm surprising my finacee so I only hope she doesn't read this before then!
Laters.
posted by Pinky @ 1:59 PM
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