Survived Day 1 at the Pokertour in St. Pölten

After making the final table at this series two times last year I had high hopes for this event ... but still experience a huge downswing im my general game. And down was exactly how it started. At the beginning nothing seemed to work right and my stack went down to about 6k (from 10k start). Nothing to worry to much with 45 minute blinds at 100/200 in the second level. But not how it was supposed to be ;-)

Finally I turned it around when I got a huge payoff with Quad 5's versus a Full House. Up to 12k and even 15k somewhat later. Then I got the opportunity to force an all-in from a smaller stack while I was holding Pocket Aces. Flop was J-Q-x. Turn was blank. All the money went in on the turn and he showed KQ for just one pair! He had called my big bets on flop and turn with that? He must have smelled that something was coming! A King on the river smashed me down to short-stack-land.

What followed then were the best two hours of poker I have ever played in my life so far. I manged to convert my short-stack into a medium stack and controlled the whole table from there. Within those two hours my stack went from 4,500 to 25,000 by winning a lot of small pots but not a single big pot. Can you imagine how the action was at the table? "Terror-Shadow" was on the run ;-)

Unfortunately I gave up control by overplaying an OESD and destroying my good chipposition. Back into short-stack-land ... but not by a bad beat. Just by one single bad play. I then got my daily share of luck as my desperate 57s advanced to trip 5's and survived against KK.

From there I started to regain control again. After a table change I was able to bust a shortstack and cripple another one. Now we are talking about big pots as we are now in the 800/1,600 (200) blindlevel. At the end of the day there were 20 left out of 87 starters. The final table of nine will be paid. I am sitting now at 47,500 chips (avg. 43k) and reside in 10th position in the chipcount. My table draw for tomorrow isn't too bad.

The biggest stack has 77k and the smallest has 7k. There's so much that can happen when play restarts at 5pm CET. None of the 20 is guaranteed to make the money at this time.