"Survival Deepstack" in Kufstein

Well, that was a really interesting weekend. As expected the increasing blindstructure of the "Survival Deepstack" at the Poker Royale in Kufstein created a well playable tournament. Also as expected a good number of player didn't understand the technical basics behind that structure and started to play it like a turbo tournament in the beginning. Huge mistake ... especially with 20k or 30k stacks behind!

I was running quite good in the Warm-Up event on Friday and ended 12th of 55. No cash but at least some good hands to play. Much better run than in the last few months. Seems I can start to play real poker again ;-) But even with a good structure - running into Aces two times with big hands will hurt anybodys tournament life severly.

I didn't last so long at the Main-Event (about 60th of 81 or so) but this was an even much more interesting tournament for me. I got a nice portion of good starting hands and was able to play my most aggressive style of poker for a long time - and I really liked it ;-) Unfortunately I missed to hit on some key pots but also had a very aggressive (and very good playing) female player to my right. Playing a similar style than me we both played almost all of the first hands against each other. In the first two hours my stack went up from the original 30k, then down to almost 12k and back to 27k.

Finally my female opponent and one other player (aggressive but easy to read) went into a pot that ended up to get a size of about 80k. We had some limpers at the 500/1000 (100) level and I decided to to limp as well with a pair of 7's as my usual raise wouldn't have limited the competition in that round by very much. A higher raise on the other hand wouldn't have suited me too because of my 24k stack.

The flop looked very good with 7-T-J but included two spades. As the pot already had a size of 7k my plan was to raise my set in order to limit the competition now. Surprisingly the female player on my right made exactly the bet I wanted to do (4k). As she had shown a lot of aggressiveness this could have been either a simple conti-bet but also a draw or made hand (maybe something like two pair with JT, didn't expected a higehr set for some reason). So I reraised her two 12k. It was folded around to the aggressive guy who went all-in with about 26k. Knowing his style I was now quite sure that he was the one with the flush-draw. Obviously my right neighbour expected the same and she went all-in for about 20k. Wow, now I also gave her a possible straight with 8-9 ... but now the pot was too juicy to let a set go.

Finally the cards were opened and it was exactly like expected: My set was running against a flushdraw and straight. No further help and she scooped the whole pot. I was out with my baby stack two hands later. Would have loved to play longer but as usually it hurts much less to lose the stack against a good player!

I was a bit sad that they only had 55 and 81 players. At least they hit their guarantees of 2.5k and 10k but I really thought that pokerplayers are more progressive and interested to test new ideas. So if you are a poker player who knows the value of good level- and stacksizes I can absolutely reccomend that kind of tournament to you.

Another thing that wasn't so great is that it seems that the new breed of players isn't very competitive. Nothing against deals in general ... I did a fair share of them on my own. But making a  10-handed deal at the beginning of the final table when the best and most interesting part of the tournament starts is a thing I absolutely can't understand.