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Saturday, September 09, 2006

First day of the "Schenefeld Deep Stack Tournament"

This tournament is absolutely great. The best I've played ever. Congratulations to the casino Schenefeld and Marcus Jost as well as Katja and Jan who supported them regarding the setup!

This was a long day for me that started with the last quarter of the PIT/MIA game in the morning. I then had to work and went to the airport early afternoon. The plane was 30 minutes late due to a flat wheel but I got my rental car fast so I manged it to be there on time. Currently they celebrate 750 years of Schenefeld so the whole area around the casino is a zoo.

Katja was already there as the "Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)" filmed some scenes for a report they will send later. She is obviously doing a great job in promoting poker.
I met Cort and Sutti from the poker-tester forum and we had some nice talks before the tournament started. Unfortunately I couldn't watch him during the tournament as he was on a different table. We met Sebastian (miamivice) as well as Michael Keiner. So we expected a very tough field and not many bustouts during the first day (5 levels 45 min. each) due to the 7,000 starting chips and the moderate blind structure. So wrong!

The tournament started somewhat late but we had a great time anyway. I got seat 5 on my table which was a good position. I had Michael Keiner on my table but unfortunatly he didn't play many hands (for whatever reason). The first levels started well and after some after-flop folds I got into the right gear and could play the aggressive way I prefer to play. My stack was always at or slightly above average.
Cort was sandwiched between "miamivice" and Andreas Krause which wasn't a comfortable position at all.

Unfortunately our table was broken shortly before the end of level three. I didn't know any of the players on the new table (except for one guy from the former table) and I got the ugly 10-seat. This table had a fast pace but I was able to pick up some pots and maintain my stack.

The first player went out of the tournament during level one and Andreas Krause busted two on his table. But my new table had some really hot seats. We lost 6 players at our table in just one and a half level. Due to table balance we got some new players including Katja and Andreas who had over 30,000 chips at that time.
In total we lost more than 20 players (out of 67) which shows that a lot of people don't know how to play a deep stack tournament. One of the most arkward hands happend on my first table: During level 2 it was raised heavily before the flop and more after a ragged 932 flop. My estimation was high pocket pairs against each other (like KK and QQ maybe AA). The turn was another blank and the betting between the two players continued resulting in an all-in that was called. AA vs. QQ with one card to come. The river was a Q for a 2-outer and we lost one player. The Q's were very lucky here. I know it is tough to let the ladies go but if I would have holding those Q's in that situation I'm sure I would have folded them.

With the last level of the day the antes kicked in. Unfortunately I went card dead most time of that level (getting 72 two times in a row and other crap). Fortunately I got some cards again before the level was over and was able to recover my stack. At the end of the night we were down to 43 players and I had an average stack of 10,900. Katja has exactly the same chipcount, I think Jan has about 7,000 and Cort something above 6,000. Miamivice is in good shape with more than 16,000 and Andreas is day 1 chipleader with 37,000 chips.

Play will resume on Saturday 6pm and luckily our table will be the next to break. There's no official payout schedule right now but we can expect 9-10 player being ITM with 1st place maybe around 30% of the total prizepool of € 46,900.
The German PokerStars blog (written by Jan) has some additional informations and pictures of other known players in the tournament.

My day tomorrow will be easy going. Don't get up to early. Enjoy the great breakfast wich is available till 11am. After that I will make some sightseeing and/or shopping in Hamburg. Hopefully the hotels massage therapist is working tomorrow. I have some back-pain from some aerials we did during our last dance trainings and sitting the whole night wasn't really helpful.

I said it in the beginning but it can't be said enough: this is the best tournament structure ever offered in Germany and I'm happy being part of it. I really hope they do it again. And if they do I will be back!

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