2008 APAT European Amateur Championship - Day 1

The 2008 APAT European Amateur Championship started quite bad for me. Although the structure was great (10K chips and slow 40 min. levels) I went down to 5.5K very soon. First tough hand was AA. I got a raiser in front, re-raised and got called. Flop was all diamonds with a Queen. Although I didn't had the Ace of diamonds I led out with a bet just to face an all-in of 7k against my 9k. No way I would call this in the second hour of a deepstack tournament. A little later I lost against a rivered flush while I had flopped two pair.

Not much to report for a long time then as I was very very card dead. Finally I got something back from the guy who made me fold my aces when I called his raise with AQ and flopped two pair. He made a strong bet and I went all-in against him this time as I wanted to take the pot down immediately with two spades on the board. He was so kind to fold ;-)

The weirdest hand was a steal attempt on the last hand before the first break. With K2s I made a standard raise from the button. BB said "sounds like a steal" and SB made a min. raise. BB folded ... chicken ;-) I thought "damn ... don't want to show that he was right". So I called. Flop came K-3-5. He checked, I bet, he hesitated but called. Turn was a 3. He checked, I checked. River was meaningless and we checked again. My King won against AJ and I took down a huge pot that brought me from 7k to 11k. Weird hand.

Shortly before the dinner break our table was broken. New table was much better to play. Better cards and opponents that I could play much better than on the other table. The table also included Martin Klaeser from Cologne who was the winner of last years "Full Tilt Poker Tour".

After the dinner break I got involved in another difficult hand. MP made a min. raise and I found JTs in the big blind. Clear call. Flop was J74. I bet half the pot and he went all-in and had me covered. Bad play on my part. I should have gone all-in right away as I was pot comitted anyway. It wouldn't have made a difference ... I was up against AA. Turn was a Ten and I doubled up to 24k with two pair. Lucky on my side but also bad play from the raiser. I most probably would have folded against a standard raise.

From there I reached my highest point at 32k. Unfortunately I got several good hands that I had to fold because I missed the flops completely. So in the next 2 hours I went down from 32k to 10k just because I wasn't able to hit any of my raises in the right way. As we already had reached the 800/1,600 level you can imagine that it doesn't need many missed flops here.

Finally I went all-in with my last 10K with QJ vs. Martin Klaeser who called from the BB with 88. Flop is 9-9-4. Turn is another 9 for a Full House for him. But still any Queen or any Jack will give me the higher Full House. No help and I am out on 63rd position of 188 players and 8:14h playing time.