Fifthstreet Blog

The 50K guaranteed at the Kings and some major changes to my blog

2011-04-07T11:14:00.003+02:00

I went back to Rozvadov two weeks ago but it wasn’t meant to be my day. I was really waiting for that weekend to use my €330 voucher and play the 50k guaranteed after such a long time again but it was one of those days were you never had a chance.

I started very well with AA on my very first hand and continued with some nice moves but from there I either got nothing at all or tried my best but wasn’t able to connect with the board. Too bad as this was a table that could have been outplayed easily with my style of play. Good number of people that loved their own traps so much that they wouldn’t see the moment being trapped themselves. Unfortunately for that kind of play you need a good/strong hand once in a while … and more unfortunately I never got one.

Therefore it was all over after around 4 hours and I left about 82nd of 120 players, took my time at the nice and free buffet and went back home way too early.

But there’s more coming up in the near future and I’ve finally learned that you just have to accept that days like this happen – as well as days that work the other way round (and are much more fun of course).

Time to look forward to the next big event which will be the Austrian Deepstack Poker Championships at the Montesino in Vienna in mid April. Another super deepstack with 60 min. levels and 50,000 startchips (organized again by Mike Lacey and D4 Events).

After that nothing big is planned for now … until early July. Because we now have finalized and booked our summer holiday. And beside two weeks in Denver, Yellowstone, Seattle and Vancouver (most probably without poker at all) the trip includes almost a week in Las Vegas with at least two Venetian Deepstack Extravaganza tournaments.

So there will be still a lot interesting poker content coming up in the next months. But theres much more to happen. My blog will see some major changes. If you accessed my blog via my homepage adress http://www.fifthstreet.biz then you can see those changes already. If you are using http://shadowbj21.blogspot.com you are reading this text still on the old blog.

Because the first important change is that I finally moved to Wordpress. Blogger is nice and it was able to suit me well for a long time. But with the changes coming up I didn’t feel comfortable with blogger anymore. I won’t delete the blog immediately but this will be definately the very last entry here. So if you like to continue reading then you have to switch over to the new blog.

After you switched and I assume you did so at least by now ;-) you will see that there is a new design … hope you like it :-) This will allow me to use Wordpress not only as a blog but as a whole homepage with extended functions. By using http://www.fifthstreet.biz you will always reach the new homepage. But you can of course access the blog directly. But there it depends on your interest what link to use (I will give them to you at the end).

Because the next important change is that I won’t limit my blog to straight poker content anymore. I think that limiting my blog to just poker is like cutting a picture into pieces and just framing only one part of it. I have so many other interests (e.g. technology, dancing) that are part of my whole life and of course have an influence on the poker part of this life as well. I assume that this is the major reason why I started to get a bit tired about blogging in the last time.

My twitter account isn’t limited to poker for some time now and the same will happen here. On the other hand I understand that there might be people out there that may be only interested in the poker content – and there’s nothing wrong with that. So all of my posts will get a category called either poker, social media, dancing or personal life. So if you are not interested in all the stuff you can jump directly to the category you are interested and only read the appropriate content … but I assure that you will miss something if you do so ;-) I will try to focus on on topic per post but on occasion will do some crossposting (having posts with more than one category). Of course it’s an interesting experiment and I will take my time to find out how this works out.

I have migrated the old content and re-categorized all my posts (thanks to Wordpress’ import/export feature that was quite easy). But there might be still some posts that need some manual work in design. So bear with me if you browse the archives and find something badly formatted.

Finally here are the links you can choose from:

http://www.fifthstreet.biz will lead you to the homepage (this one will take some time until the change is active!)

http://blog.fifthstreet.biz will lead you to the whole blog directly

http://poker.fifthstreet.biz will lead you just to the poker related blog posts

Don't forget ... this will be the very last entry here. All newer posts can only be found in the new blog!

And now … enjoy!

Back to Rozvadov after two years and cashing again

2011-03-13T18:32:00.004+01:00

It now nearly two years that I went to the Kings Casino in Rozvadov. At that time Deepstacks with a buy-in of €275 (and especially a guaranteed prizepool of 50k) were very rare everywere around. Unfortunately I wasn't running good in that event and left after only a few levels. At that time this one was a two day event and as I had booked my hotel anyway I came back the next day for a side-event ... and took it down :-)

Unfortunately they changed that 50K event to a higher buy-in, mad it a one day-event and even a second chance. With deepstacks and better structures emerging around everywere there was so much to play in closer distance that I didn't came back to the Kings until last Thursday.

As you may have read in my last blog I'm a bit dissapointed how the tournament scene around Munich is developing. Regular events are losing quality and the big ones get destroyed by places fighting each other. Therefore it was time to check out the Kings again.

Daniel Dawid is their new Pokerroom-Manager and he's the guy who was responsible for making the Poker Royal in Kufstein successful. And by checking out the regular tournament plan I could see that he's already working on some postive changes.

With all the informations and structures available on the webpage it is quite easy to compare the tournaments and I decided for the €135+20 with 12k chips and 25 minute levels. It suited my style of play best although none of the other tournaments is bad either. Unfortunately I choose a day with only 22 participants (while they usually have 40+ in that tournament). But wait, unfortunately is the wrong term here ... with a €5,000 guaranteed prizepool that was a nice overlay for those 4 making it into the money :-)

The tournament was played in the separate tournament area (only the final table took part in the main casino). It's very nice there also it was a bit cold during the first levels. And I was running cold too. Seemed like I always became just second in a race. At the end I decided to take my chances and was all-in with a flush-draw vs. a set. The flush hit and I was back in the game. From there things went much better and I was able to get as high a 39k with average around 20k. From there it went down again but I still made it to the final table. First I doubled a small stack, then I doubled myself and left the immediate danger zone. So I was able take my time and see others bust. With 5 left I went against the guy who I had doubled early on that final table. We both held crap (I was in the big blind and there wasn't much to pay to cover his all-in) but I was slightly ahead. He busted and we were down to 4 and ITM.

Shortly after we made a deal that granted me €1,000. Three of us were almost equal in chips and the chipleader held more than 50% of all chips. Placement was made by chipcount and I came finally third in this tournament. Unfortunately it's one of those tournaments I ranted about in my last post. So I only got €650 in cash and a €330 ticket for the big Saturday tournament. It's fine for me to play the Saturday tournament again as it has a great structure but I stand by my attitude that I would prefer cash in general!

One word regarding the so called "Second Chance" (an option for most King's tournaments). This is not like a single rebuy (or even the possibilty to start with a double stack). It's only an option to go to the cashier after you busted, buy-in again and get a new seat assignment. So playing this like a regular freezeout is no problem here (especially as very few take the second chance).

Going to Rozvadov two times and cashing both times is a very good rate ;-) although I doubt I can keep it that successful I will be back on March 26th to use my ticket in the Saturdays 50k guaranteed.

With an almost 2-hour drive this is definately not the closest option to play. But they offer good tournaments, free drinks, free food (buffet), free wireless-lan so there's no reason not to go there on occasion again!

What's wrong with the nearby tournament scene?

2011-02-27T16:19:00.000+01:00

I start to get somewhat disappointed about the tournament scene in the short driving distance around Munich. I already wrote a blog entry about how much I dislike it to find places that advertise events with many chips but then destroy them by crappy structures. But in other places it doesn't look better at this time.

One of my favorite places now offers almost only satellites during the week. Satellites might be a good thing if you live close to that place ... but not if you have to drive one hour or more. The only "real" tournament during weekdays (10k chips and a decent structure) has a guaranteed €1.500 for first place. Not bad if you get 80+ players ... awful if you only get 30-40 players. In that case you end up with a payout-structure offering something like €150 for second place and so on. Of course in most cases this will result in a deal at the final table - which makes the idea of a fixed first price even more worthless.

An other place adds tickets for other events to the prize-pool. Well, adding isn't the right term because they are part of the prize money. This ends up in playing a tournament for €175 or maby €350 and not getting any cash before the final table as a lot of the first ITM places just get a ticket of maybe €1.000. Nothing wrong with the ticket in general (as it is for a very good tournament) but personally I prefer cash and like to decide for myself if I come back another time and invest all or a part of my cash won.

Don't get me wrong, I love creative tournament concepts. But they must be creative and helpful for both sides - the customers and the card-room. It seems that currently the marketing of an event seem to be most important. Advertise many chips, huge prizepools and big first prizes and the people will come. Currently the advertisers are right. Most people allow themselfs to get flashed by those marketing-stunts and don't really look at the ratio of cost and potential outcome. But I am not sure if this will be valid in the long run.

On the other hand, if there is a real good event somewere you can be sure other places nearby try to offer something similar (or better) at the same time. So instead of playing 2 or 3 good events on two or three weekends you are stuck with playing just one and make a decision. And again the places steal people from each other. So guaranteed prizepools may result in overlays or have to be lower as they could have been. Another thing that can't be good in the long term although it might work short-term.

Both, the marketing-stunts and the hard competition during events seem to indicate that we had too many places in the past (or not enough customers for all those places). The competition becomes harder and card-rooms try to find options to get enough customers.

I'm not sure how this will work out in the end and who will survive but what happens at the moment isn't very good for the customers. And those who can calculate correctly will do the right thing. Looks like I will play less regular events in the near furture and keep my money for really good events somewere else. As I wrote several times: With proper planning it isn't really expensive to get to Nottingham, Dublin, Vienna and some other places and play real good tournaments for real cash options. I love to play Poker but I am not playing just to play. If I don't like what is offered ... then I don't play!

PS: There is a reason I didn't name anybody directly here in my blogpost. Although I took real life examples I have no intention to side with anyone. In fact nobody is better than the other here ... and those who have read the whole post will realize that everybody around Munich got "slapped" the one or the other way!

Deep run at the EDPC ... but not deep enough

2011-02-13T16:56:00.001+01:00

I definately should go back to my old routine that was posting every day during a trip. Much easier with several short blogs than to compile a long one after I am back from my trip. Especially if you can't post directly after your return.

Nevertheless here's what happened in Dublin. As said in my last post I was forced to travel one day earlier due to AerLingus problems with their cabin crew. At the airport we got informed that the flight was operated by Ryanair instead of AerLingus. I don't like Ryanair too much (especially as I paid AerLingus fares) but anyway ... most important thing was to arrive in Dublin early enough.

As I arrived late at 10pm I just went to my hotel room and took a long nap. On the next day I was lucky with my new hotel room (I stayed in another place for that first additional night). I arrived there at 12am and they told me that my room was already cleaned so I was able to check in immediately. Went down to the Ballsbridge (a short 10 minute walk) to watch the start of Day 1A of the EDPC and to take some photos. Met some of the other germans like Reinhard, Roy and Hanns-Peter. Roy told me he had switched from Day 1B to Day 1A and for a short moment I thought about doing the same. But I decided to stick with my game plan and not rush anything.

So this was an easy-going day that ended with dinner at Eddie Rockets round the corner and a trip to the Fitzwilliam card room. I really love the burgers at Eddie Rockets and especially their 50's style. The Fitzwilliams was a first time visit for me and it's something like in between of the Jackpot and Sporting Emporium in regards of their style. This evening they had a low-buy-in rebuy tournament that gathered over 85 players. With mostly french speaking players at the tables you could imagine that this tournament is much smaller on any other day. It was a nice warm-up but nothing special for me as I busted somewere in the middle of the field.

At least I got enough sleep for my starting day at the EDPC. It was a real roller-coaster on that day. First it went down from the 50k starting stack to almost 30k. Then up again and down again. It looked like whenever I made it to my new high something bad happened. At least I didn't do anything bad myself. I avoided a blow-up for the whole day and never invested too much money in bad spots. Finally I got a break when I got an almost full payout with A's that improved to a set on the flop (I got Aces 4 times that day!). That was the first time I broke the 100k mark and never look back to two digits during the rest of the day. Then I busted another player and his 70k stack which got me to my high at 210k. At the end of the night I was able put 197,800 chips into my bag. 36th in the combined chipcount (and third best german).

Of course I slept very well that night. This was a very good starting point for Day 2 which was planned to end in the money. And it started perfect. A weak button call allowed me to sneak in from the small-blind and to bust the big-blind as I flopped two pair (vs. his TPTK). Up to 260,000 in less than one level. Another bad betting pattern from an opponent allowed me to catch my flush and I reached my high of 299,000 in level 2 of the day.

Then it happened: QQ in the big blind. An early position raiser made it 7k (at 1200/2400-300) and I re-rasied him to 21k. He called after a short hesitation. I ruled out AA and KK due to the call and put JJ on the not probable list with the J-J-2 flop. With expecting him playing something like TT or 99 I challenged him with a 28k bet. He went all in for 40k more and I had to call due to the pot odds (even if I was running into quads). He didn't have JJ but had played J9s which was still enough to take down the pot. Calling a 21k reraise preflop for 20% of his stack with J9s? Well played ;-)

I still had about 200k left so there was no reason to change into panic mode. Unfortunately I was out of playing mode too! For the next hours I was abolutely card dead and my stack went down to 93k with the average at 230k. I was able to recover to 150k again but it never went further. Finally I went in cheap with A8 against the big-blind and we saw a flop that gave me a gut-shot straight(-flush) draw. It was checked and the turn gave me a double gut-shot. I ruled out the possible straight as it was to weak with the 8 and decided to put my stack all-in. 94k went into a 100k pot. My opponent thought for a very long time and finally decided to call. And again I was surprised. He had called for more then half of his stack with just two high cards (AJ) and a possible nut-flush. The river blanked for both of us and I was out in 140th of 737.

Went to the sporting emporium that night for a small freezeout tournament but busted shortly before the money. On the last night I came back to the Jackpot Club (which was the place I visited first on my initial trip to Dublin). I was quite surprised. They had changed the positions of the tables (making it look like more space) and changed the old tables and put in very comfortable chairs. The place is much nicer now then it was in the past. I played my last tournament of the trip there and it ended in an awful way: Was able to get all the chips in with a made straight on the flop, got called by a set of eights and the board paired on turn and river ... ouch!

The good part of the AerLingus strike was that I was able to rebook my return flight free of charge too. So I went back home one night earlier and was able to watch the Superbowl at the comfort of my home.

Although I didn't make it to the money this time ... this was definately one of my best tournaments I had ever played. And only two bad plays by opponents that got rewarded had been able to stop me to making it into the money, So yes, I really liked that days in Dublin regardless of the results!

Going to Dublin earlier than expected

2011-02-01T11:32:00.002+01:00

Yesterday evening I got a SMS from AerLingus telling me that my flight to Dublin was canceled due to "industrial actions". Honestly I had no idea what "industrial actions" meant but I understood that I wouldn't fly to Dublin on Wednesday morning as expected.

AerLingus then told me that I was free to re-book my flight at no cost. They reccomended a flight on Wednesday evening but I decided that this was too late as I wanted to play a warm-up tournament and also taking pictures from Day 1A. So I tried to book for the Tuesday evening flight and it went through without problems. Also this one would have cost about €120 more than my original flight it was indeed not charged in any way and rebooking was easily done via the AerLingus webpage. Very good job by AerLingus!

The website also stated more clearly what the problem was. As far as I understand there is a strike of cabin crew members causing them to cancel some flights. So my only problem left was to find a hotel room for that additional night and I am happy to be back at the Albany House. This was the place I stayed on my first visit to Dublin and I really liked it. Unfortunately never got a good rate since then (and never was back)... but got a very good one for tonight.

So after the first panic has settled everything seems to be fine now with my trip. As with Nottingham two weeks ago you will get live updates via Twitter. You'll find only a few updates on Facebook and of course you will get a wrap up here in the blog.

Oh, btw. I got a nice email from a guy called Michael Duchesne. He had compiled a very interesting list called Top 100 Poker Blogs and told me that I made it into that list (you can find me on place 59 there). I'm of course very honoured but also like to direct you to his list as you will find some very interesting blogs here. He put them in several categories so it should be easy to find the most interesting stuff very fast.

Back from Nottingham and planning for Dublin

2011-01-29T16:45:00.000+01:00

Just back from Nottingham and already planning for Dublin ... I love this time of the year :-)

Also I didn't win I still had a good time in Nottingham. While it was cold and snowy at home it was not so cold and sunny in Nottingham. I found a nice room right in the center of the city (which only lacked good mobile and wireless connection). But for just €49 (including full english breakfast) there wasn't much to complain. This time I flew directly to East Midlands Airport with bmi baby. Although the trip to Birmingham as I usually do isn't too bad either this was much more convenient. Just outside the terminal there's a bus that drives you directly to the center of Nottingham in about 30 minutes. And the flight was just €30 for the single trip.

Poker could have been better that weekend at Dusk Till Dawn. While I don't complain about my warm-up I do about the other two events. In the warm-up I took my chances with a good draw when it was appropriate and missed. I knew the risk and I took it.

But in the main-event as well as in the Super 50 I got beaten almost the same cruel way. In the main I had hit a set with 77 and bet every street till the end just to get beaten by a guy who called his straight draw as long as he hit the river at the end with his 68s. Way too early end about 2 hours into the first day. So no chance to get a part of the €81,100 prizepool (created by 811 players).

The Super 50 was a little different. With 270 total they paid 27 spots. Down to 28 players I found AQ one from the button and put in a standard raise. I could have moved in but unfortunately this would have looked a little too agressive with my stack. The button and the small blind folded as expected but the big blind hesitated and then just called. I wasn't at that table for too long but from what I've seen from him I had the impression he wasn't on anything strong. The flop came 458 and he checked. I moved in to challenge his stack (he had only a few chips more). Although I didn't hit anything I was still the original raiser and he was now the one to decide if his hand was still good enough.

He decided instantly ... to call! Well, I was right. His hand wasn't strong pre-flop but it became a monster with that flop. He in fact had committed 20% of his stack pre-flop with 67o! I was out on the bubble and still stunned how much bad play get's rewarded some times.

But there are two other things that I didn't liked that day. Usually the Dusk Till Dawn floor and dealers are very good ... but this time two bad things happened to me due to dealer and floor mistakes: First I got shorted 5,000 chips on a 55,000 chips pot. As I stacked my chips I felt that something was wrong. I counted them once. Still thinking something was wrong and telling the dealer to wait because I had to confirm this. Unfortunately this moron didn't even react (although he realized what I said to him) and started to deal the next round. If I would have been compeletely sure about the mistake I would have called the floor immediately. Unfortunately at the time I had verified I was indeed shorted one 5k Chip it was way too late. Next time I call the floor first even if I look like a complete idiot if I am wrong. But what makes me angry most is the fact that this dealer absolutely ignored everything and even didn't apologize for his mistake.

The second thing was very bad clock management by the DTD floor. When I played my AQ hand the clock showed still 29 players and it wasn't played hand for hand. Not sure how and if I played the hand differently but still a thing that shouldn't happen.

Beside this two instances (from which I believe they are single instances and I was just unlucky) playing at the Dusk Till Dawn was still as nice as ever. And after that bad experience in Salzburg I was delighted to see that you in fact can create structures that allow a 270 player tournament play out in a decent way. Remember this was only a €50+8 side event but it took eight hours to reach the bubble ... did I mention I was the bubble-boy? ;-) And at this time the average M was still around 10. Sure 10 is push & fold for many but it still is a huge difference to a M at 3 shortly before the bubble! And comparing travel costs the cost per day between Salzburg and Nottingham wasn't that different. Just try to shop for good rates and plan early enough in advance.

My trip back was a little more complicated as I had to travel down to Stansted and then fly to Memmingen with RyanAir. But this was just to a personal appointment I had that evening. Otherwise I would have had another easy travel via East Midlands Airport for another €30.

On Wednesday I travel to Dublin for the EDPC IV and hope to run better than last weekend!

Grand Prix at Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham

2011-01-21T10:57:00.000+01:00

A great poker weekend in Nottingham ist coming up. The Dusk Till Dawn is running the DTD Grand Prix and some side events. The main event is a sell-out since yesterday and now 810 players are competing for a total prize pool of €81,000 with the first paid an estimated 19k+. I will play Day 1b on Saturday.

Tonight there's a small warm-up tournament and on sunday they have another great structured side event - of course only in the unlikely case I don't make it into the final day ;-)

As I won't scatter facebook and/or my blog with too many messages I suggest you follow me at my twitter account if you're interested in most up-to-date informations on my trip.

Epiphany Tournament at CCC Salzburg - a monster crapshot!

2011-01-06T03:40:00.003+01:00

Before travelling to Nottingham and Dublin I wanted to kick off the poker year 2011 with something in my area. The Epiphany tournament at the Concord Card Casino, Salzburg looked very interesting: 12K startchips for €58 with one €25 rebuy for another 12k chips. As usually the CCC Salzburg didn't answer to questions regarding the structure but I expected at least something decent.

I was wrong ... as wrong as somebody could be. The least problem was that the tournament wasn't a rebuy- but a second-chance-tournament (so you could do the rebuy anytime regardless of your stack). But making this an 11-handed tournament from 128 players down to 20 players is a real shame. Could it get any worse? Of course it could! While the first levels of 30 min. with 50/100, 100/200(25), 200/400(50) weren't that bad (in regards of the startstack) it started to get really ugly from level 6-7. Not only did they go down to 20 min. after level 3 but going from level 6 at 500/1,000(100) to level 7 at 1,000/2,000(200) made this a real crapshot.

Imagine with half of the field left the average M was 10. With 40 left the average M went down to 5 and with 20 players it was as low as 3! Can't tell how it was at the final table as I busted in 18th position (with 15 getting paid) but you may imagine how it went there.

Of course with a total buy in of €83 I didn't expect a super deep-stack structure but getting a structure like this in a CCC card-room is really awful. The CCC's isn't known for the best structures in general but at least they usually had something playable (especially for their "events"). In my opinion the CCC Salzburg really ruins the good name of the Concord Card Casino group offering this kind of tournaments.

Looks like I won't be back anytime soon to this place!

Happy New Year!

2010-12-31T15:53:00.002+01:00

I wish you all a Happy New Year with the final scene from the most wonderful movie I've ever seen. And with "Auld Lang Syne". While playing "Auld Lang Syne" on New Years Eve might be a mostly American tradition it more then anything else represents THE new years eve song for me since I have seen "It's a Wonderful Life" for the first time ever. And yes, I 've seen it many, many times since then ;-)

Merry Christmas Everyone

2010-12-23T23:58:00.001+01:00

O.K. folks, this is not at all poker related but I just have to share this with you. It's just hilarious.

Merry Christmas 2.0 ;-)

Next year will be better ... at least I hope so!

2010-12-19T14:11:00.003+01:00

It's again that time of the year ... were you start to look back and forward. Evaluating what has happened and planning what to do or to change for the coming year.

I must admit that 2010 wasn't a bad year in general. There had been a lot of good things - like finding a new and bigger home - but in regards of poker this year unfornuately started like 2009 ended. And to make things worse I had to skip my annual trip to Vegas in 2010. I really missed that week during the WSOP. I also missed all stops of the Pokertour.at due to schedule problems with my dancing. So in general (and not only due to the lack of good results) I played much less poker that year then I hoped to do.

So it probably isn't a big surprise that I hit another low in blog posts this year (just 27 ... 28 with that one). But no fear ... I plan to continue with my blog. If I can realize a trip to WSOP 2011 (which is planned of course) you may expect a lot interesting blog entries again (despite other trips to be planned)!

And I am quite optimistic in any way for 2011. The year had a bad start but it started to went better in the second half. I had some nice cashes and wins (especially in Kufstein) but also had a quite good run at the Deepstack at the Montesino in Vienna. Yes, I missed a cash but making my first Day 2 in a bigger event after about 18 months was indeed some kind of success. If you didn't went to that bad times you can't imagine how good it feels that just a few things start to fit together again.

Therefore I got some of my optimism back. And I realized again how important it is to be in a good mood and fully focused on your game. So I have some plans to secure that I am perfectly conditioned for every tournament I play in 2011. This includes good body condition as well as the right mindset.

And there are already two nice events fully booked for early 2011. From January 21st to 24th I will be back to Nottingham for the Dusk Till Dawn Grand Prix. It's only a €100+15 Buy-In but they expect about 800 players (creating an 80k prizepool). And as to be expected from the Dusk Till Dawn the blind schedule looks very good including 10k starting chips and 40 min. levels.

And just to weeks later (Feb 2nd to 8th) I will be in Dublin. The European Deepstack Poker Championship IV will be the biggest EDPC ever held. They have space for around 1,000 players and over 350 seats are sold already! The location will be again the Ballsbridge Inn.

Beside that I am already planning for a possible Las Vegas trip. Due to my other scheduled events it looks like I will go more close to the end of the WSOP this year instead of the beginning weeks. But I am sure there are more interesting events coming up between February and summer. So stay tuned for more events to be added ... and of course reports from my two trips in early 2011.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year ... and as always many good cards - as long as you are not sitting at my table ;-))

"Poker City Masters Munich" ... I mean Kufstein

2010-11-29T21:17:00.005+01:00

There are occasions were you may think that something is really doomed. Moving the "Poker City Masters" to Kufstein was a good idea in general but nobody expected that the weather goods also dislike the game of Poker.

144 players (mostly from Munich) made it to Kufstein despite the icy roads and a 20 km traffic jam. Good move by the Poker Royale to push the starting time another hour to 9pm.

It was a great tournament and I had a very good start. Several small to medium pots pushed my stack from 15k to about 30k. But then I missed a big pot when my smallstack opponent called my all-in on the turn with his two pair vs. my nut-flush draw. Back down to were I had started.

Unfortunately I was card dead from there for a long time and finally pushed with AJs against a bet and a call. It was a good move as I made a pair of Tens fold ... but it wasn't good enough as AK called and finally got the rest of my stack.

Went back the next day for the big stack tournament but didn't make it very far there. After being up somewhat I lost a big pot with my Full House vs. Quads. While it is unfortunate to lose that way it was avoidable re-thinking the texture of the board and the betting patterns.

Looking forward to the "Poker King Week" were I will play the Udo Gartenback Bounty event on Thursday as well as the main event Day 1B on Saturday. See you there!

Legal issues about Poker in Germany

2010-11-25T20:48:00.001+01:00

Wow, what a week ... difficult times for poker players and tournament organizers in Germany!

The coming weekend should have seen two great poker tournaments in Germany. Both had been designed for the average player allowing them to win some great and valuable prices. One was the "Royal Flush Masters" in Dortmund and the other the "Poker City Masters" in Munich. Both events aren't connected and play out individually organised by different organisations.

A lot of tickets had been played out in satellites and around 600 players in Dortmund and 200 players in Munich had been looking forward to play their events.

But then early this week somebody hit the doomswitch and the "Royal Flush Masters" was declared illegal. The organisers tried to move it to the Casino Hohensyburg but it didn't work out due to schedule conflicts.

Of course a lot of players were really unhappy about the situation. But it isn't acceptable that some started to blame the Royal Flush Magazine for being dumb or even more or less accused them for cheating. There's no reason that a well known magazine like the Royal Flush Magazine would be involved in any scheme to cheat on the players. Hopefully the heated discussion calms down and the players will be able to enjoy their event at a later time.

But of course after the cancellation dark clouds started to gather over Munich. They bavarian authorities advised some changes but it still seemed that the event will go through ... until this afternoon. At the end another doomswitch was hit and they declared this event illegal too.

Good thing is that the Poker Royale Kufstein which was one of the partners of the organisers (The Gastro Poker Tour) decided to step in and move the whole event to their casino. Again there will be a lot of players that won't be happy to travel about 90 km to Kufstein. But this is a better solution then cancelling it at all or risking to get raided by the police. And I am sure that those who haven't been in Kufstein before will love the fairly new great tournament room. So let's enjoy a great tournament!

Next stop: "Poker City Masters Munich"

2010-11-12T15:33:00.006+01:00

The WSOP is finally over and I was able to enjoy every hour of the final table live stream on ESPN3. Well almost! I have to deduct some time were I went to hibernation during the 14 hour marathon ;-)

After watching the hole cards yesterday at the ESPN broadcast I'm finally sure about a few things:

While Jonathan Duhamel has vastely improved in the last three months he was still very lucky not to give it all away
Michael Mizrachi lost a crucial (and in my opinion unneccesary) coin flip vs. Duhamel which finally was the turning point. Until then he had it in his own hands to take the whole thing down.
Matt Jarvis blew it away very early with his awful AJ bluff vs. Cheong
Cheong blew it away late with his awful bluff vs. Duhamel
ESPN will never learn it ... again only two hands from a two hour heads up that doesn't really give an impression of how much pressure Racener was able to put on Duhamel

Duhamel was of course lucky that his sometimes random style (calling all-ins with low pairs but folding aces to raises) didn't ruin his whole tournament. But almost like the year when Jerry Yang won it was mainly the mistakes of his hunters that made it possible for him to win. The Grinder, Jarvis and Cheong had every option to take it down. At least John Racener's patience brought him into the heads-up and there he showed that he was (even with that short-stack) a difficult opponent. But finally he made two bad plays and that was it. With that marginal stack you can't make any mistakes. So we now have the first Canadian champion. At least better then Gold and Yang and hopefully more visible then Eastgate and Cada. Still waiting for a new Ambassador of Poker like Raymer or Hachem ... or at least a new Moneymaker that gives Poker another boost!

Now the circle starts again ... we are waiting for the WSOP 2011 to be announced (still not convinced it will happen at the Rio again). If possible in any way I will make it to Vegas again in 2011 - preferable at WSOP time. But until then there are other things to come.

Next stop is a local tournament in Munich. The Poker City Masters is a nice Deepstack tournament were you can win a car, an EPT package or a Vegas package and more stuff ... sounds all like things that I could really need. So of course I'll try my best.

In general I'm running quite good in tournaments recently. I cashed in all of my last three tournaments (one at the CCC Vienna and two at the Poker Royale Kufstein) and even won the last one. Unfortunately all smaller tournaments ... still waiting for my first high 4-digit or maybe 5-digit win. But anyway it feels good to know what you can reach if you are just not unlucky.

And for the big money win there's the Deepstack Open Dublin in early February. Flight and Hotel are booked and seat is reserved :-) Oh, and not to forget the Poker King Week at the Poker Royale Kufstein in early December. Count me in there too!

It's not over before it's really over - a last tale from Vienna

2010-10-19T18:30:00.003+02:00

While I am finally back home, there is a little piece from my trip that I still want to share with you. You followed me through the not so good times that weekend ... so you deserve the good times too. Even so it's just a small success.

As I told you in my last blog I went to a last tournament on Sunday evening to the CCC. It was only a €20 Buy-In and the 124 players barely covered the €2,000 guarantee. But it was a good one for me!

Of course I got a major hit quite early with AA busted but was able to recover and not only make it into the money but to the final table too. With 5 players left I then ran into the chipleader's KK. My AKs got no help but I got my first and only cash of that trip. Of course the €129 just covered the flight to Vienna but there's so much more about this as it just feels good to have some success again.

This result together with reaching Day 2 in the DSO and just being a bit unlucky after playing a almost perfect 13 hour Day 1b gives back some confidence. Especially the DSO was a good experience even without the cash. For 13 hours I followed my game plan to control the pots I played and only to allow big pots when I felt very confident with my hand.Only one single time I broke my own rules here and it cost me more then a third of my stack ... while having reached 100k shortly before. It was that dreaded hand were I was holding A8s and my opponent shoved on me on a 8-4-6-K board. It doesn't matter that I folded to his bluff (he showed AJ). What matters is the fact that I had allowed a pot to grow big when I should have tried to keep it low or pass after I realised that I can't keep it low.

This is the point when chess can be a real good example for how to play poker. It's often said that chess has one thing that poker doesn't have: The fact that you have to think ahead for the next moves. Of course you can't really think ahead of the next hand being dealt. But you can think ahead of the hand itself! And that's exactly were I made my mistake. Playing that hand like a chess player would do I would have looked at the several options how this hand may play out (especially after the flop was dealt). And if I had done so I would have realized that most of those options are beyond my comfort level at this point. Knowing that early enough I would have left this hand with at least a 90k stack instead of just a 70k stack. At this time of the game having 20k more or less was a very valuable cushion especially with the way I played that tournament.

So I blew a part of my cushion with a bad move and therefore blew the chance to end that day with 100k+ instead of 76k. No big deal with blinds starting 1,500/3,000 (400) the next day?

Then look again how my aces hand played out on Day 2: with 70k left I made it 7,500 and was called. On the all spade flop I got my 10k bet check raised to 20k. At this point I had about 53k left. So it was very hard to let the Aces go with "just" 10k to bet. On the other hand had I started my day with 100k I still would have had almost 80k. I am sure it would have been much easier for me to let the hand go at that point - also I still would have hated that option. With 80k left (or even with 70k if I had played the hand the same way) I would have had much more time to wait for a decent hand. I would have not being forced to take my chances on 79 and losing there to AK.

I don't think anybody plays without mistakes in a tournament that long. And I wouldn't say it was a big mistake in itself. I had made worse moves in other tournaments before. But looking back it turned out to be a very costly mistake and I am now sure it had cost me a very good shot on an "In-The-Money" result. And it was an avoidable mistake! Hopefully next time I start to get too much drawn into the action of a hand I start to remember the chess comparison and think ahead early enough!

Chilipoker Deepstack Open, Vienna - Short Day 2

2010-10-17T12:41:00.000+02:00

Unfortunately my Day 2 was much shorter then expected. I was placed on the exact same table as the day before (Table 32) but now in seat 9. On my former seat 1 there was now Ivo Donev who was quite short with about 49k. Too sad that I wasn't able to play a hand with him due to my short day. Didn't know the other players ... but not surprisingly some of them had a lot more chips then I had ;-)

My turn came about 30 minutes into the level when I received AA in first position. Raised it to 7,500 at 1,500/3,000 (400) blinds hoping somebody tries a move on me. The usual raise at this table was 12-16k at this time!

Unfortunately all folded to the big blind who just called my bet. The flop was a disastrous all spades. My opponent checked, I bet 10k and he then re-raised me to 20k. I decided to see on the turn if he was making a move on me or not and just called. The dealer turned a red Queen and my opponent immediatly went all-in with about the same chips I had. Time to say goodbye to my rockets.

Now with just 37k my action was limited to push or fold. Actually I was limited to just fold as I didn't get anything even remotely playable for one and a half orbits. With just two more two the blinds I decided that 79 is my all-in. Everybody folded to the small-blind who went all-in instantly. I was up against AK. Could have been worse. Flop was great: 6-8-4 ... but no further help and I was out in 167th of 505.

Decided to play the East Masters at the CCC that night. It's a nice structured 10k chips, 25 min. levels tournament. Yesterday it looked a little like the DSO losers lounge ;-) And losing was ecaxtly what I did in the first three levels. I can't remember a tournament were I received more bad beats per minute then in this one! It was a wonder that I survived that long anyway.

So for tonight I will most probably play another small tournament at the CCC and that will conclude a weekend that started in a great way but didn't get the expected results.

Not sure about my next plans. Of course the DSO Marrakesh (which is directly before the WPT Marrakesh) sounds very interesting ... but I think I need a good win before or satellite my way into it to make this happen. Most probably will skip DSO Paris.

Looks like there are not many other bigger events left until the end of the year. Of course you can find me in Kufstein at some of their regular or sepcial events. The next event I am definately aiming for is of course the DSO Dublin in early February 2011!

Chilipoker Deepstack Open, Vienna - Survived Day 1b

2010-10-16T11:42:00.007+02:00

After a very long time of failed attemps I made it again into a Day2 of a bigger event. Actually the DSO Sideevent in Dublin in 2009 was my last Day 2 if I remember correctly!

And it was a good day in general. It started with a little mess as I lost a pot that should have been a split ... but the dealer had announced it as a flush for my opponent. Not a big thing because it wasn't a big pot. And it was my mistake not to check accurately enough.

But from there things went very well. It was a good table with a nice mix of decent and not so decent players and the action was hard but it was always possible to control the potsizes. Therefore I never became involved in pots that grew bigger then I wanted them to be and was able to play may way up to 88k in a slow and steady way.

We had a total of 292 player on Day 1b and the number of participant of both days combined was a good 505 total.

Unfortunately 88k was my high point for most of the eveneing hours as I first missed to participate in an important pot and then lost a good bunch in one of the not so many hands that went the wrong way.

In the first occurance (which happend a little bit before the high with about 70k), a small stack went all-in for 12k when I woke up with JJ in the BB. I was eager to call this all-in but another stack with 35k moved in too. After tanking some time I discarded my Jacks as being against two opponents didn't look right here. I was wrong as the smallstack showed KJ and the other guy showed 99. No help for either of them and what could have been my pot went to somebody else :-(

The next all-in was easier to call. Patrick Hirtzer went all-in on an 7xx A board with about 12k. I called with AK and he showed me 77. Ouch, well trapped!

I now was down to 60k and to add insult to injury I was card dead for the next few hours. But then came the time of the 9's. With just 30k left I moved all-in with 9's and my opponent called with AQ. The coin fell on my side and I was back in the game. I then had to discard 9's against the same opponent somewhat later when he went all-in on me but got a third try (this time against another opponent). He was holding AK got no help (while my 9's improved to a set on the turn). I busted him and finally broke the 100k mark for the first time.

While I was very satisfied with my game in general I then played one hand very badly. Not only because I got bluffed from the hand. That's something that will happen to anybody from time to time, but because I allowed the pot to grow bigger then I wanted it to be. That brought me back down to 70k and from there even further down to 50k.

At the end I was able to revover a bit and packed 76,000 chips at the end of level 12. Still an o.k. result but I know it could have been more. Average should be around 130k in the combined field of 192 players. I am curently on 139th position in the chipcount and the blinds will be 1,500/3,000 (400). I expect 50-52 places to be paid.

Now sitting here at the Montesino, enjoying breakfast and writing this blog. Beeing in the hotel next door has advantages and disadvantages: It gives you a lot of flexibility but you start to realize that you don't get to see many different things. Same places, same people , same routine all the time. And your outside time is limited too. But for now I very much enjoy the flexibility ;-)

Start of Day 2 is at 1pm this afternoon. Live reports for Day 2 and the combined chipcount can be found here: Pokerfirma Live Reporting

Chilipoker Deepstack Open - the day before

2010-10-15T00:52:00.002+02:00

I finally arrived in Vienna for the DSO. Day 1a is already running. They had 213 players and most probably will be down to around 100 by the end of the day. Day 1b, which will be my starting day, will most probably have more players. They expect around 350+ ... looks like a decent prizepool.

Today I went to the Concord Card Casino for a "Deep and Turbo" tournament but only lasted about 2 hours when my A's got busted by a flopped set of 4's. Went over to the Montesino to watch some of the Day 1a action and talk to some friends.

Already got my seat assignment and I will be on table 32 seat 1. Of course I will try to Twitter as much as possible - but if you want to follow the whole action I suggest you look at the Pokerfirma.de Live Updates which are really good and acurate.

Lots of well known names in the field tomorrow (including Andreas Krause and Liz Lieu). So time to go to bed to be fresh for a 12 level, 60 minute / level day that starts at 1pm.

Time for a small update

2010-10-02T16:16:00.006+02:00

Unfortunately there wasn't much poker for me in the last days and weeks since I was busy with a lot of other things. So here's a small update for those who are interested.

After being back home from the UK the only bigger event I had played in so far was the grand opening of the new tournament area at the Poker Royale in Kufstein. It was a great success and both of their celebration tournaments had been a sell out. The room is wonderful and I enjoyed to see so many familiar faces (several of them being there for the first time).

I had a decent run in the first tournament but was stopped by some bad beats somewere with a third of the field left. In the second torunament I didn't ever made it above my starting stack and went out after a few hours.

For a full gallery of pictures from the Poker Royale grand opening stage 2 check at the end of this blog entry.

Since then I was very busy with training for our dance competitions. We already had the "Southern German Championship" (were we placed 5th) and our own club competition (were we became club champion the third time in a row) but there are more competitions to come. Fall is always a busy time here. Next are the German Championship in Rosenheim and the World Championship in Schaffhausen. For those who are interested I added a video form our last competition. Enjoy!

In addition to this already time consuming action the American Football season is in full swing too. Of course I am not playing myself ;-)) but do some betting analysis for Wettfirma.com and posting my picks there (german text only). I love to be back into sportsbetting but even with my improved charts it still takes a lot of time to prepare my picks every week.

This week was mainly devoted to some computer stuff as I went on a Linux course for system administrators. I was always interested in Linux but after that five days I really fell in love with Linux. Honestly considering moving to Linux compeletely and dumping that crappy windows entirely (although Windows 7 is much more decent then Vista). Only thing I have to figure out is what to do with iTunes :-(

So this was a lot of non poker stuff but no fear ... there will be more poker soon. My next big event will be the Chilipoker Deepstack Open Championship in Vienna (October 14th - 17th). Really looking forward to this: A great tournament in a wonderful card casino which is located in a very nice city ... life can be sooo good :-)

Poker Royale Card Casino, Kufstein - Grand Openeing Stage 2

London - Nottingham - APAT WCOAP

2010-08-31T22:13:00.006+02:00

Writing this while in the train to London on the way back home from Nottingham. Went there for the APAT WCOAP (World Championship Of Amateur Poker). Including a trip to London with my girlfirend - this was a very exciting, interesting and partially dissapointing trip.

As I read some time ago that the APAT will be back to the Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham it was clear that I wanted to be there too. I love the Dusk Till Dawn and all APAT events I attended so far had been well organised. To add some value they offered some cool side events this year (e.g. heads-up and six-max).

As it turned out my girlfriend has a former schoolmate living not far from Nottingham. So we decided to vist her and add some days in London as well (which allowed me to visit a very good friend I hadn't seen for many years too). London was great (also it was raining a few times). The city changed a lot since I was there about nine years ago. Lot's of construction work and in general the city looks much cleaner. We missed to get on the "London Eye" due the long lines there but had a nice sightseeing tour and a cool boat trip on the river Thames. Beside that we also went to see "Wicked" which turned out to be one of the most wonderful musicals I've ever seen. If you liked "The Wizard of Oz" you will most certainly love the twist that the original movie gets by the musical ;-)

My first poker event in Nottingham was the heads-up which started quite well. I had control over my first opponent and was never in real danger to lose that match. My second opponent was much tougher. At the end it all came down to a coinflip. I went in as a favorite but lost. The guy later made 4th place in that event, cashed deep in another one and won a WSOPE side event entry as best player of the weekend. Sometimes a flip can become a very important flip!

It was nice to meet Stephan Kalhamer, Jürgen Bachmann, Mike König and some other germans from Berlin here. Mike made 2nd place in the heads-up shortly after.

The next day I had no APAT tournament scheduled and decided to play a small regular DTD tournament. Bad idea! I never really came into the game and finally lost with a small boat vs. a bigger boat. While this can happen and is most often just unfortunate I can't claim that here. I really should have seen this coming. There was enough time to stop the hand early enough and get out with little damage. I just played this really bad and deserved to bust here!

So I tried to be more focused as the next day was day 1A of the main-event. And indeed I was much more pleased with my game on that day. Unfortunately the result wasn't much better and I went out shortly after the dinner break. If people call down or bet every small hit it's quite tough if you get good starting hands (and raise a lot) but miss almost all boards.

The 6-max (my favorite event) went a lot better. Right in the beginning I was able to leave a mark with a set of 7s against an overaggressive opponent that allowed for a lot of strong raises afterwards. It was amazing that almost all players at my table weren't able to see the differences between a 6-max. and a 9-handed tournament. Unfortunately our table was broken and I was moved to a seat with one of the chipleaders to my direct left. Didn't get ahead from there and finally choose the wrong spot to push - out in 24th of 86.

That evening I watched Casino Royle on TV (first time I saw it in english). While there's really nothing to learn from the poker game there was a line from Eva Greene that came to my mind the very next day when playing the "25XXL" DTD tournament: When playing poker "you better leave your ego at home".

The "25XXL" was a strange event. 10k startchips, 30 min. levels sounded good, but due to the fact that it was a Bank Holiday Monday and it was only a £25+7 Buy-in this one really assembled some of the worst poker players on earth in a single room.

Imagine this: I was about 5 minutes little late (but had a reserved seat) and approached my table just in time to still play my cards from that round. While sorting my stuff I peeked under the cards and found JJ. Of course I raised and (of course) got callers. Flop was all low cards with no flushdraw and no real straight danger. Still betting a bit more than half the pot (just to see how the table reacts). One caller left. Turn comes a 10. Betting again and he calls. River is a 9. I'm betting again, he calls and shows T9o.

"Leaving your ego at home" - quite hard if you know you are by far the best player on that table. But you have to realize that playing in a traditional way will be the road to desaster as eight bad players combined have by far better odds to bust a single good player.

Fortunately I was able to adapt my game very fast and took a good portion of pots from them. For them I must have looked like a complete donkey - but in fact I just took advantage of a lot of weak betting that allowed for chasing draws. Unfortunately I got rivered in three of the most important pots and finally lost a coinflip with 55 vs AJo. In that type of game you are chipeader very fast or you are out even faster. Unfortunately it was the later for me.

So I am coming back from a great week in London, some wonderfull organised tournaments by APAT & Dusk Till Dawn and no In-the-Money result. Happy or sad? Hard to tell. Of course I wished to cash that weekend. But in general (with one exception) I was very satisfied with my game and in addition had a great holiday. Oh, and by the way: "Leaving your ego at home" certainly eases the pain of getting rivered, trust me!

More poker to come at the upcoming weekend with the grand opening of the new tournament space at the Poker Royale in Kufstein. If you haven't reserved your seat for the tournaments there you better do so either by phone or online as I expect it to be very crowded! If you need a ride from Munich I also suggest you check out their new implemented shuttle service.

Here's the full gallery of my Dusk Till Dawn pictures:

Pictures from DSO Namur

2010-08-03T16:14:00.003+02:00

Here is a selection of my pictures taken during the weekend at the DSO Namur. Resolution lowered for web presentation. High-Quality versions available on request.

Download for private use o.k. if leaving the watermark intact. Any other use only on request. Please contact hgaerttner@googlemail.com

No side event fo me ... major failure by the casino

2010-08-01T12:12:00.004+02:00

As you have already read in my last post I wasn't very exited how the casino in Namur treated the players. But it even got worse!

"Zille die Brille" last german standing

For the side event they just provided 7 tables! They had more tables available but it seems they didn't had enough dealers. What? They host an international event with over 500 players in the main-event and don't keep enough dealers for the side action? You think that is awful? Well, there is more to come: 11-handed tables (horrible for a structure wise good event). The waiting list (about 100 people long) was opened after the first level (with already 40 minutes into the game) and just a few more went in then. The responsible floormen didn't care at all. No official announcements - not even in french.

I am feeling very sorry for Michael, Brian and the team from Chili Poker. There's now a lot of players that are angry on them (because they are the official organisers) but you could see that there wasn't much they could do about it (except skipping Namur for the future). I am really looking forward to Vienna. I'm absolute sure that the Montesino will be a much better and appropriate host for this event!

On the good side I had time to support the last germans in the field. Two of them made it into the money. Heinz Traut went out in 36th place for €1,450 but Rainer "Zille die Brille" Ziermann survived Day 2 and played with the last 24 on Day 3. Unfortunately he was quite shortstacked and went out early on Day 3 in 19th position with 99 vs. QJ.

Too sad ... no Day 2 for me again

2010-07-31T17:23:00.000+02:00

Cologne in the early morning

In the beginning all looked perfect. I had a nice trip to Namur with an ovenight stay in Cologne. Arrived on time and even got my hotel room before the 2:30pm start.

Then I got the first cooler: The table draw put me into the 10-seat. Not only do I dislike that seat (as probably most people do) but it got me limited view to two key players on my table. In seat 1 there was a guy who later went on tilt after a bad beat and started to over-raise and over-reraise a lot. To make it worse in seat 2 was the table chipleader who also liked to re-raise a lot with his big stack.

So from the beginning this was a tough table and I never was able to get a decent stack together. I went down to 40k in the first few hours. Then back to 48k hitting my set of Kings on the flop. My opponenent had raised pre-flop and then just called my re-raise. He then bet the flop again with 4k. I reraised him to 15k assuming that he had aces. As he only had about 10k left after calling my bet this would have been a good spot for him to push. Unfortunately he folded after a long time in the tank.

Namur Main Station

Then I went into a hand with a female asian player. I tried to bluff her from the hand but unfotunately she had flopped a baby straight. Well played by her. Bad mistake by me. That hand brought me back down to 40k.

From there nothing went right anymore. I got nice (but not very good starting hands) but either didn't connect to the board at all or hit what was most probably only second best hand.

So without losing any big pots my stack dwindled down to about 18k after 7 hours of play. In the 300/600 (75) level I finally picked up AK in the big blind and got presented a great opportunity: Mr. Tilt again raised to 2.5k (a very decent raise for him btw.). Seat 3 re-raised to 4.5k. Everybody folded to me. Mr. Tilt wasn't the problem. He could have had anyting. But Seat 3 had a hand for sure. But as he has acted against Mr. Tilt it was a wide range of possible hands and I figured that I am 50:50 against him here. So I pushed all-in and Mr. Tilt immediately folded. Seat 3 thought for a long time but finally decided he couldn't fold his Q's. Bordeline decision in my opinion as this was my first all-in move and he put half of his stack on risk. I was fine with the coinflip as a win would have brought me back to over 40k.

One half of the tournament room on Day 1b

Well, let's put it that way: There was indeed an "Ace on the River" ... but it didn't help me as the guy already had hit his set on the flop. Too sad :-(

So I may play the first side event tonight but it depends on how many players will bust out. At this time only 60 seats are assigned and I am number 46 on the waiting list. So let's hope they bust out quickly ;-)

Namur Old Town

Namur seems to be a nice old city but the Casino has seen better days for sure (as well as the hotel). But you can always present things in the right light to let them shine (see below).

While the structure of the event is absolut great the local organisation has some real loopholes. Having dealers on an international event that don't even understand english spoken numbers or the word "call" is an absolute "No-Go". The registration for the side-event is nearly impossible as the local people from the casino (who manage the registration) seem to be absolut uninterested. I think you can't blame the people from Chili Poker and D4Events for that. They are doing a great job. But it seems they had to give up a lot of the "daily business" to the local casino for some reason. And that's exactly were the organisation gets worse compared to Dublin.

Still enjoying my time and hoping to get into tonights event...

Casino de Namur at night

DSO Namur Weekend ahead

2010-07-29T16:34:00.004+02:00

Now it's there! The Deepstack Poker Open Namur started today at 2:30pm. Well, in reality they started yesterday with a supersatellite but today is Day 1A.

I will play Day 1B ... flying to Cologne this evening and continuing by train tomorrow morning. Really looking forward to that event. Especially after my two final tables in the last two weeks. As expected the event was sold out days before the start and I am happy that I secured my seat early enough to participate in my first 50,000 startstack / 1h level tournament.

With that huge number of chips I am thankful for a recent blog post from a friend of my old Black Jack days that reminded me that these kind of tournaments are won the "Beppo Way". If you already know what I mean you are most probably my age and have read Momo in your youth. If not, just read Bellatrix's post here.

Of course I will keep you updated via Twitter (or just see the twitter box on the left). There won't be wireless coverage in the casino but in the adjecent hotel. So expect updates mostly during breaks. Follow if you like or just look for the hashtag #dsonamur. I'll try to add that to all DSO related tweets. Hopefully other will follow so you may find tweets from others playing at the DSO Namur. But be warned ... most of those tweets will be in french for obvious reasons ;-)

Will be an interesting tournament with the huge number of french players. Most of them aren't neccesarily good but as usual very agressiv. In addition many of them are playing a rather uncommon style (good or bad ... no judgement).

According to Roy Decker from the Royal Flush Magazine (who's playing Day 1A) there will be a good number of german players arriving for Day 1B. Starting time will be 2:30pm (not 1pm as original posted) and we have to play 12 levels on Day 1. Including breaks don't expect play to end before 4am in the morning!

Back to winning at poker ... and it feels good!

2010-07-24T15:06:00.001+02:00

Maybe it's just an interruption of my dry run or I finally can be successfull at tournament poker again ... no matter what - it feels good! Try to imagine that: I had three almost back-to-back final tables in 2008. Two times at the Pokertour.at and one time at Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham. I then missed the money at the EDPCII in Dublin (by my own mistake mostly) in early 2009 and cashed a third time at the Pokertour.at.

From there until now I virtually achieved nothing ... 15 month of pure frustration. There was a very small win (3rd place) in a €10 tournament upon my first visit at the Poker Royale Kufstein and a final table (without cashing) somewhat later. Every other tournament was just a big fail.

Most of it can be blamed on a very dry run and being a sure loser on any 90%+ situation but it wouldn't be fair to blame only (bad) luck. Of course it's hard to win a tournament if you don't get anything. Of course you are out if your best hand gets rivered on an all-in. But there are options to avoid getting in that situation at all.

Last week and this week I final tabled two in a row by making 3rd and 2nd in the Poker Royale Survival Tournament. This isn't a big win ... it's only a 30 people €50+7 tournament. But what counts most is the confidence boost that you get from this. You now know again how it has to feel if it's "just right". I didn't play bad in the last 15 months but looking back and comparing it to the last two tournaments - I didn't play great either. And "just not playing bad" isn't good enough at poker. "Making a move" or "living the move" are two completely different things. "Trying to trap with a good hand" or "designing a trap with a good hand" falls into the same category.

I think you got the picture. Of course I was again lucky some times (as are others) but in general I felt like being "in the zone" all the time in that two tournaments. Funny part is that both ran absolutely different. Last week a busted bluff (due to a borderline hero call from my opponent) saw me struggling early and fighting my way back until the final table were I still was the shortstack. Yesterday I was chipleader for about the first third of the tournament. My stack never took a deep dive until the final table and I arrived there with an average stack.

Two different runs but both can end successful - that's what poker is about. Can you imagine how good I feel now? Of course nobody can tell if my run continues. But I know that I still can do it. All the negative feelings are blown away. What better timing could this be with the coming events:

My little Dinosaur from Nottingham

EDPC Namur (seeking consolation for my missed final table in Dublin 2009)
Pokertour.at at Lake Woerth (my most successful series so far)
APAT World Championship at Dusk Till Dawn ... back to Nottingham the place were I had one of my best results. Oh, and btw. the Dinosaur is coming home to his birthplace again ;-)

Whatever happens in the next six weeks ... cashing or not, final tabling or not ... I will enjoy what I do and I will do my very best to make it happen again ... "because it feels so good!!!!"

Oh, and if you think my run will continue ... there is an option to jump on that train while it's still gaining speed: ChipMeUp - Namur Event ;-)

But Poker is not all what's happening. Some of my german readers may have already seen my article at wettfirma.com. So I am back into sportsbetting and trying to give you some interesting views into the world of betting the NFL.

Tweet no. 1,000

Last week I also had my 1,000th tweet at Twitter. When I started with Twitter about two years ago (ironically it was a tweet about the APAT) I wasn't really sure about that twitter thing. But now I really love it. Not only for tweeting myself but also for reading tweets from a lot of interesting people (not only poker related). Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare ... three tools have that I with me all the time. So if you are still interested in my adventures ... you know were to find me!

Soccer half-finals Germany vs. Spain (no poker content)

2010-07-07T01:08:00.006+02:00

Honestly, I'm not a very big soccer fan but worldcup is always something special. Even more at times were Germany gets a deep run. And much more when they play some of the best soccer ever seen.

We had seen the game against England in Berlin. Great game and great place to watch. When they destroyed Argentina we were together at the Boogie Baeren Clubhouse. The german team can be really proud about what they achieved so far (and especially the last two games). Still feeling somewhat sorry for Argentina. They are a great team and it's tough to get beaten that badly. Sad to hear that Maradonna resigned from his job ... a personality really to be missed at the 2014 worldcup on the south american continent.

Siemens Soccer City, Munich

Not sure were to watch the game this time but I'm thinking about "Siemens Soccer City" in Munich. The place reminds me about my first public viewing. Guess what - it was the euro 2008 finals Germany vs. Spain (in front of the Vienna city hall). Spain still owes me a big afterparty since then ... so this would be a good time to pay back.

We got our revenge for the Wembley goal, so why not just add revenge for the lost euro 2008? ;-))) After Brazil was kicked out of the worldcup I thought that Netherlands vs. Germany would be a fun finale. The Netherlands already did their part for it ... now it's our turn!

Octopus Paul decided for Spain ... must be a good sign! Why? Well, he was almost perfect in 2008 predictions. Except for the Germany vs. Spain finale (he predicted a german win). He's perfect until now in 2010. So it's time for his usual one time error ;-)

It's done ... I'm registered for Namur

2010-06-18T16:28:00.016+02:00

All is set and I will play the Deepstack Open Main-Event in Namur Belgium on Day 1b (July 30th). It's all planned to make it an enjoyable weekend. I was lucky to reserve a room at the Beauregard Hotel (which is located in the same building as Casino Namur) early enough at a rate of €60 / night.

The event will have a maxiumum of 250 players per starting day and I would wonder if they don't sell out. 50,000 Chips is a lot of starting stack to play with. But don't get fooled - you have to play and increase your stack otherwise you might be the shorty when you play for the money.

The biggest challenge will be the balance between increasing your stack and not getting drawn into too expensive adventures on Day1. With the 50k stack and 1h levels your startingstack is worth a M>20 till the 10th hour of the tournament. That's a lot of time!

On the other hand: looking at the result from Dublin the money was reached during the 20th hour of play but with an average M=12.92. Hard to say but I excpect the last 3 levels before the bubble to be the most crucial point of the game.

Casino Namur & Hotel Beauregard

Anyway ... I'm looking forward to that event and hopefully there will be W-LAN reception to keep you updated via Twitter. For those who want to get more excitement you can buy some shares for this event on ChipMeUp. A share of $16 is worth 2% of my action. With a $62,000+ first prize your share could be worth over $1,200.

Of course I will try to write a report about that event on Pokerfirma.de. So if you are a player from Germany, Austria or Switzerland attending the event please let me know.

This will be a tough week for me!

2010-06-14T20:13:00.001+02:00

No, not because of too much work but simply because I am here and not in Vegas.

Last weekend we had our Boogie-Worldcup in Winterthur (Switzerland) which is traditionally the last one before the summer break. And traditionally I travel to Vegas for at least a week directly after. I did this for the last few years and enjoyed the WSOP and other tournaments very much (Venetian Deepstack Extravaganza or Caesars Mega Stacks).

Unfortunately not this year. Our move to the new home was much more expensive then expected (including a new kitchen). In addition I am still running bad a tournaments and medicore at cash games. So I made the heartbreaking decision to stay at home this year. The door isn't closed completely - if I make a (really) good cash in a tournament before the series is over then I will try to make a last minute trip. Otherwise there is still the November Nine ;-)

But to go over to the good news: It's now 90% sure that I will play the Chilipoker Deepstack in Namur end of July (and most probably it will be the main-event). It's 100% sure that I play the APAT Worldchampionship and two great side events (6-max and Heads-Up) at the Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham (late August). For the Namur event I am selling shares at CmU ($16 get you 2% of my action)

Until the then there's not too much live events planned so far. For tonight I get some WSOP feeling at home playing the $25 Mini-WSOP 6-max at FullTilt ... I love the comfortable leg space you get in a 6-max ;-) Start is at 9:20pm CET.

So wish me luck and see you at some live or virtuell tables.

"Survival Deepstack" in Kufstein

2010-05-16T16:18:00.005+02:00

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.

Still on a semi-break but at least some poker and more plans

2010-05-10T13:49:00.001+02:00

Looks like I'm still on some kind of a break. It's a mix of too much work as well as still running bad in Poker.

Last Monday I went back to the Poker Royale in Kufstein after some time and played the Deep&Turbo. Had a good start but finally missed out on a key hand with AK (flop AKx) in a 3-way all-in pot. Against 66 and KJ another 6 on the turn sealed my fate in that tournament.

Even worse I lost a key hand in the following cashgame under similar circumstances. Again it was AK (this time suited) and again a 3-way pot of almost €120 (in a 0.50/0.50 game!). I had hit my nut flush-draw on the flop but failed to improve.

Played the PokerStars SCOOP 19-L last night and was running quite good for the first few hours. Unfortunately one "not so good" played hand and one really bad played hand pushed my stack below average. At the end an AJs nut-flush draw couldn't improve against AQo and I failed to double my shortstack. Went out after 4.5 hours around 5,400st place of over 16,000 total.

So what are the next plans? Of course I will play both Hold'em events next weekend during the "Survival Festival" at the Poker Royale. So great they picked up the idea I brought back from Ireland some time ago. Will be fun to see how their variation of the increasing blinds plays out.

It still seems that I will miss out on the WSOP this year. Running bad in poker and having an expensive move isn't helpful for expensive travel plans. So I either have to win some decent money soon or find a faithful sponsor ;-)

Not sure how many events of the Pokertour.at I may be able to play this year but if possible in any way I plan to go to the event in Pörtschach at the nice Lake Woerth.

But for sure I will be back to Nottingham and the Dusk Till Dawn in August. The APAT (Amateur Poker Association & Tour) is back to Nottingham with the World Championship Of Amateur Poker in Nottingham (WCOAP). Not only I am now registered for the main-event but also take part in two great side events. The first one is my favorite game ... the 6-max. Good thing the Poker Royale has a 6-max running in their weekly schedule. So I get an option for some practice. The other side-event won't be less fun ... the heads-up. I played heads-up online for some time and of course during some final tables - in ancient times ;-) but I never played a live heads-up tournament before. Really looking forward to that trip!

Maybe I will play some more SCOOP and/or MiniFTOPS but will decide usually only shortly before the event starts.

Thanks to all who are still reading my blog. But I think you all can understand that there are times were it might be better go a bit slower than usual.

Deepstack in Kufstein tonight

2010-04-04T11:19:00.002+02:00

Sandra Naujoks at the Montesino

There wasn't anything to win for me in Vienna at the Montesino two weeks ago. Two guys chasing their draws until they hit on the river and one bad call of my own made me last not too long. Sandra Naujoks lasted about an hour longer but wasn't able to follow the success of Erich Kollmann (the first who won his own bounty at the Montesino).

It was a strange weekend anyway. Our car made troubles on the trip to Vienna and we used a good portion of our time there to find out what the problem was. At the end we left the car in Vienna and changed to a rental car. Our car was sent back to Erding three days later then.

The only thing that went quite decent was our dance competition. We had a good first round but gave away some spots again in the second round. But it was a good start in the new season if you consider that we had no time for practicing our stuff.

Tonight I'm finally back to Kufstein. I had to miss the last Deepstack as it happened on the weekend of our move but I will enjoy tonights event. Again 20k Chips and 40 min. levels will make up for an interesting evening. I know some good friends are there - so it will be fun anyway.

Will try to do live updates again via twitter. So check out @ShadowBJ21 beginning 7pm CET tonight if you like.

If you can read german you might have a look at another site until then. A friend of mine started his own project called Pokerkalender.at. His page offers a lot of information about upcoming tournaments (live and online) as well as live reporting from big events and many more stuff. Still a page in development but already worth to check out.

Still alive and back online

2010-03-19T11:13:00.000+01:00

Yes, I'm still here! :-) We finally moved in our new place and then I had to mess with the telco company for four days until they finally managed to get us back online. "Please Wait.... No, I can't do anything for you..., That's the way it works - there are no exceptions... No, I can't connect you to the other departement or my boss... No, it isn't our fault"- Ah, I really hate that!

But now we are back online and I am currently in Vienna. As we have a dance competition tomorrow I had planned for some time already to play the €50+7 one rebuy tournament at the Montesino today. So it was a nice twist that I read this week that Sandra Naujoks will be there too and that there's a €500 bounty on her. Should be an interesting evening.

Beside that I am still very vague with my plans at the moment. I definately won't make it to the EPT Snowfest also it's very close to were I live, I definately will miss the Chili Deepstack in France due to other appointments, I most probably skip the UKIPT Nottingham (also I would love to come back to the Dusk Till Dawn) and I really hope the Poker Royale Kufstein will get their troubles fixed soon as I want to play the Deepstack main-event on easter sunday.

So keep the fingers crossed that I still know how to play poker ;-)

Finally found our new home (less poker content)

2010-02-28T12:43:00.004+01:00

Center of Erding - "Lange Zeile"

It's done ... we signed the contract yesterday and will move from the south of Munich to the wonderful city of Erding (northeast of munich) in just two weeks. After having so much trouble with our first choice - that was taken away in such a bad way - we now found something almost equal. I'm especially happy that this is the first time I am living in a home with a nice garden. In addition you may find us from time to time at another great place that's almost in walking distance of our home: The Therme Erding.

Therme Erding

Unfortunately our new home causes us some extra costs that weren't planned so it looks like I have to skip the trip to the WSOP this year. That's the sad part of the move. Oh, and the fact that we now have to downgrade from 16,000 DSL to 6,000 DSL :-(

So I am currently planning to make either the UKIPT in Nottingham or one of the next Chilipoker Deepstacks my next big event. If I make a good cash there I will add the WSOP 2010 to my travel plans. Otherwise I have to wait for 2011.

In addition it will be now a little more difficult to come to the Poker Royale in Kufstein. Instead of a 50 minute ride it's now about 90 minutes. But that won't keep me away from that great place. Hope I can make it on a Monday soon to check out the new short-handed tournament they are offering.

Another Deepstack and the search for a new home

2010-02-21T18:19:00.000+01:00

Just a week after the Dublin event there was the next Deepstack tournament around the corner. This time at the Poker Royale in Kufstein. 10k startchips and 40 min. levels allowed for a lot of play but again I didn't get many playable hands. It's really jinxed! At least I got a lot more playing time then usually as I busted out at around 2am in the night with 27 of 99 left on day 1A.

Unfortunately the main reason was that I gave a number of bad suckouts this time. I really can't tell how often I was all-in very short and survived. At my lowest point I was down to 2k. I killed KK, QQ and hands like AQ with Q8s. But you can't survive forever if you have to rely on suckouts all the time.

Finally our table was broken and I was still short with 12k (average was 33k) but now had some fold equity. At least that's what I thought. But my 12k all-in at 500/1,000 (100) with 99 wasn't even worth thinking about for a big stack who called with KJo immediately. A nine on the flop made me my set and gave my opponent two hearts. Another heart on the turn gave him the draw and finally a fourth heart on the river ended my tournament.

I really can't complain after surviving with so many suckouts but at least I didn't bust anybody due to that ;-) But nevertheless I enjoyed the tournament because our startingtable had some nice people and I had a good time there.

I told you in my last blog that we soon move to a new home. Unfortunately our original plans had been destroyed by a real bad real-estate agent. He had verbally promissed us our new appartement and just two days before we wanted to sign the contract he told us that they decided to give it to someone else. So we are now still searching and have some time restraints as we have to leave our old place on April 1st ... which unfortunately also makes it difficult for me to plan for the next poker events I want to attend. But we have some new appointments early next week so I hope we can solve this problem soon.

My trip to the EDPC III in Dublin

2010-02-08T11:25:00.008+01:00

Finally it was there! And I was there - back to Dublin again. There are two events every year I try not to miss if possible in any way. One is of course a trip to Vegas during the WSOP and the other one is this event. This year as well as last year this was a very difficult task as I was away on my girlfriends birthday for that event. But even so she isn't into poker she knows how much I love this event. Thanks a lot for that to her.

Very nice hotel room
very close to the tournament

The good news: the weather is much better here in Dublin than in Munich. About 7 degrees celcius and partly cloudy compared to 0 degrees celcius and snow. And I got a nice and cheap room very close to the venue. The bad news: well, that was it basically with the good news :-(

The event itself was great again. Some minor kinks (like technical difficulties with the second tournament clock) but in general it was well organised. Due to the lowered buy-in of the main-event the number of players was much higher. 465 in the main event, 294 in the €300 side-event and 200 in the €200 side-event.

I had played the €300 side-event and was once again very much card dead. At the highpoint I brought my starting stack of 20k to 21k but from there it went all the way down to 9k. There may be one or two hands that could have been played better but in general I can't blame bad play for the decrease. I got a short break in between were I was able to get back to 19k but then started to go down for a second time.

The tournament area

I had to pass on a great opportunity were I held KQs but was faced with an all-in. I passed here but would have won that huge three-way pot against two weak aces and a middle pair (as I would have hit my king). Right play but wrong outcome. As somebody said: "If you justify your play just by the result you should seriously think about your game plan"

Unfortunately KQs remained one of my best hands and finally my stack hit the bottom at 9k again. But now the blinds had reached 400/800 (75). I decided to push all-in with KT of spades and got a caller from the big blind. Unbelievable. Not that his AJo is a bad hand, but I never went all-in before in that game ... so why does he think he could be way ahead with that hand. He called for a third of his stack for something that was just a coinflip.

The board was as cruel as it could be. Of course an Ace hit immediately, but also two spades for the flushdraw. The turn was another Ace for his set ... but it was the ace of spades for my nut-flush. Sweet! Then the river brought the last Ace to make him quads. Ouch!

Sandra Naujoks with no (good) cards and no luck
at the EDPC

Went out in 170th place after about 8 hours of play. That wasn't they way I wanted it to end but there's not much anybody can do than trying to play good poker. So no cash for the third time at the EDPC ... but I'll be back! And with the deepstack series starting to arrive in other places of Europe too, there should be plenty of occasions.

It was nice to meet EPT Dortmund winner Sandra Naujoks, who played the main-event, for the first time and I had a nice talk with her during a break. Unfortunately she was card-dead too and at the end went out about 100th of 465. But obviously she knows how to fight those long and grueling marathons. Even after a 14 hour day one and another 7 hours in day two she was in a friendly and good mood. It was her first visit to Dublin and like the most firsttimers she immediately liked the city. So I am sure she still enjoyed the rest of her trip after she busted.

Next stop will be the Deepstack at the PokerRoyale in Kufstein. Trying to run better there. Not sure how much poker I will play the next 1-2 months beside that. We just sold our appartement and will move in mid of march from the south of Munich into the outback in the northeast (close to the airport). There's a lot of stuff to do. So I might play less and update less in the meantime.

ChiliPoker Deepstack Open (DSO) Dublin 2010

Exciting News regarding the European Deepstack Poker Championships

2010-01-23T23:32:00.002+01:00

Just two weeks before the start of the European Deepstack Poker Championships in Dublin there are exciting news in regards of the event. It all started with two tweets from Liz Lieu that appeared in my twitter stream:

The EDPC will be renamed Chilipoker Deepstack Open? Wow, what has happend here? Anything wrong with the event? Of course I immediately contacted the EDPC organiser Mike Lacey and got in contact with Alexandre Dreyfus, the CEO from Chilipoker. And what I heard were really great news as obviously Mike made a very good three-year sponsoring contract with Chilipoker.

Now the EDPC becomes part of something new and much bigger. Chillipoker plans to run a new tour called Chilipoker Deepstack Open with tourstops in France, Hungary, Morroco and Germany in addition to the Dublin event.

No exact dates and locations so far but the plan seems to be to offer tournaments in the same style and buy-in as the EDPC does. That means this will become a high-quality series with a medium-sized buy-in (most probably they keep the €500 buy-in for the main event). They also announced that the Dublin event will be getting much bigger in 2011. Most probably about 1,000 players instead of todays 400.

But I am most excited about the fact that they will have a tourstop in Germany. I'm curious how they will overcome the burocracy here but I am sure they have plans how this can be done.

So the main-event of the EDPC III is now called Chilipoker Deepstack Open Dublin to reflect the fact that it is the first leg of this great new series.

It seems that this will be a very interesting trip to Ireland this year. Despite the fact that I am happy to play in Dublin again I'm also curious to meet Mike and the folks of Chilipoker in Dublin to hear more about their great new plans.

Please donate for Haiti earthquake victims

2010-01-15T13:20:00.002+01:00

If you don't live under a rock you have surely heard about the big earthquake that happened in Haiti. Lot of destruction has been happened in one of the poorest countries in the world. Ten thousends of people have been killed by this 7.0 earthquake and even more have been injured. The infrastructure is severly damaged and even hospitals are destroyed.

Help is needed and those who can't help on site can still help with a donation. Again PokerStars is one of those who not only calls for help but still does so on their own.

First they offer two easy ways to donate money from your PokerStars account (this is not a referral link, just a link to the official PokerStars information page!). You can transfer money to the account "Haiti Fund" or you can use one of the dummy tournaments in the "Specials" section to donate by registering for $1 up to $1,000. Please be aware that these aren't actual tournaments and they are just used to collect the money.

But PokerStars doesn't stop here! All money donated will be matched by PokerStars and then be transferred to the RedCross. So any dollar donated is actually worth two dollars.

Everybody should help. If you play poker there's almost no excuse not to donate - even if it's just as little as $1. If enough people donate small money it will still add up to big money. Donations can be done until January 31st.

Edit: Just have made been aware that FullTilt is going the same route. For donations via FullTilt you can also do a transfer ("Aid for Haiti") or donate in one of their "No Play Tournaments". In addition they have some special tournaments were they donate the fee. FullTilt is also matching all donations.

Q9 is the new nuts

2010-01-09T15:55:00.002+01:00

It's 2010 and in some ways it feels still like 2009 ... and that isn't good.

For my first online tournaments I ran a set into a straight and was dominated by 4's (holding A9 and A7 but losing them both times vs. A4).

Last night was my first live tournament in 2010 at the CCC in Innsbruck. The first hand was quite good as a loose guy paid me off with my straight. Up 1k from 12k startingstack in the first hand. Nice! Then again card dead for about 3 levels. Down to 10k and back up to 15k.

Then I got Aces. I had raised them preflop and had bet every street with at least three quarters of the pot on a 9-7-4-Q-2 board (no flushdraw). No, my Aces weren't good here. He had called my initial raise and the flop bet with Q9 off-suit. Even if he had a read on me for a high pair (which I doubt) he only had 20% odds to improve to two pair after the flop. What are those people thinking? I assume if I ever figure it out and understand it I will be either a non-beatable poker player or my brain explodes ;-)

Still 5k left (with blinds shortly going up to 200/400 Ante 50) I got 99 in the very next hand. Just raised, got a re-raise to 1.5k and of course pushed all-in. The same guy woke up with AK and hit his Ace on the Flop and a King on the River. Still nothing done wrong and a nice tournament anyway (just would have preferred to play longer).

Since two of our group still played (and it looked as they wouldn't bust soon) I decided to play the €1/2 game. That was a crazy table. The usual pre-flop raise was something between €12-24 and in most cases there even was a re-raise to at least €40. Was able to get my money in on two great spots: First one was a flopped Full House with A4. That was an easy bet ... still wondering that I got paid off from A9.

The second was tougher but quite typical for the way the game was running: I had AK and raised to €16. I don't usually raise to €16 in a €1/2 game but you have to adapt to the "standard" bet on some times ;-) Of course I got a re-raise to 40. Being known as a tight player who often folds to big bets this was either a bluff or a coinflip. But there was no way I fold to that pot here. Went in with my remaining €90 and got called by QQ. One time! And yes, this time I was betting on the right side of the flip with an AKx board. Cashed out a nice €139 win after 90 minutes.

Back home I was curious the find out if Daniel Felten the winner of our Xing-Tournament series had made it Into-The-Money at the PCA Bahamas. And yes, he did. Barely for the first price level ($15k) but still a great success. Congrats! Then I read that sad story about Nasr who busted with AA in a very similar way then I did (he was "dominated" from K9). Remember the WSOP 2009? Poor guy. It seems that it's always AA that keeps him away from making the big shot. If somebody is "due" to make it someday soon he's definately on top of the list.

Tonight I will enjoy the live stream from the PCA TV-Table (http://tinopolis-pokerstarlive-ger-500k.wm.llnwd.net/tinopolis_PokerStarLive_Ger_500k) and hopefully will make it to Kufstein at least once next week.

Dublin is booked. Unfortunately I won't make it to the main-event due my time schedule but I will play the first side event which is still a great structure with 20k chips and 40 min. levels (2 day event). Just a week later the Poker Royale in Kufstein offers another deepstack event. This time the buy-in is only €100+15 and they have two starting days. The websites says that they will use the structure from the Poker-Kings Weekend (which would make it again a great event). Really looking forward to that one too.

That's it for 2009 ... waiting for 2010

2009-12-20T19:43:00.000+01:00

Back from the Poker-King Weekend at the PokerRoyale in Kufstein. Unfortunately no big paycheck but still successfull in some way.

Most important: It was a wonderful tournament. That was exactly the kind of structure I like. I was able to get my stack up to 24k from the 20k start but also went down all the way to 8k. Some really heartbraking hands - like having to fold a pair of Aces on a very dangerous flop. But still I managed to get my way back to 17k at one point again. That's real Poker! No need to get desperate after you lost just one important hand. A two hour dry streak? Can be survived. But at some point you have to make your stand even in a great structure like that. With about 40 left I brought my hand to war against Kurt Haindl (one of the two PokerRoyale managers). While I had hit my King with KT on a K67 board he had found two great draws with 89s. Unfortunately it wasn't just us two. While I would have won my hand against him (despite his huge number of outs) we both had been taken out by another guy with AK instead.

The 94 participants played down till 3:30am to the final table and returned today. With an avarage stack that represented an M of just little less then 20 and stacks between 60k and 300,000k there was much play left at the Final Table.

I can't say it often enough: Thanks to Daniel Dawid the tournament director who was brave enough to offer this kind of event in the small city of Kufstein. I'm really happy that this was obviously a great success and hope they will bring back this event in 2010 again.

Beside the tournament there was of course a lot of cashgame action going. After I busted I decided to play some cash too. Didn't know at this time that I was starting an over nine hour cashgame session that ended at 8am in the morning. This was a tough one: long dry streaks, some great hits and a lot of funny happenings. My stack bounced from the original €50 up to €70 and all the way down to €18. Almost dead I recovered and ended the session with a cute €135 win. Not a huge amount of money but a decent result for €0.50/0.50 No-Limit.

So my year 2009 ended somewhat friendly and I am looking forward to 2010. Next goal: getting together the bankroll to play the European Deepstacks Pokerchampionships in February in Dublin, Ireland.

Wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Hope you still enjoy reading my blog and follow my here and/or on Twitter in 2010 again.

2009 is coming to an end ... but there's still something left

2009-12-18T01:35:00.002+01:00

My poker year 2009 is almost over ... just the big finale that weekend is still around the corner. Good time for a short look back to the last 12 months.

This is by the way my 400th blog post. This year wasn't my heaviest year in blogging. In fact it was my lowest with only 65 entries. My top year was 2007 with 102 blog posts. Maybe I blogged less because I was less successfull...?

Pokerwise this was a horrible year so far. In 2008 I had a huge race in the last quarter with three big finishes. But I wasn't able to keep the pace in 2009. With some small and only two big cashes (St. Poelten and Rozvadov) this was a very dissapointing year. Especially my trip to the WSOP and play at the Venetian had much space for improvement. Unfortunately in most cases there wasn't much I could have done different ... I just was running super dry on cards for a very very long time this year.

There's only one outcome in 2009 tournament that I really regret and that still creeps through my head from time to time. That's the "just-shy-of-the-money" finish in February at the Deepstack Event in Dublin. In three crucial decisions I made one (laying down AK vs. an all-in) which I still would play the same way in a similar situation followed by two more hands which I had played absolutely horrible. Those two finally resultet in my too early exit. After coming back from a short-stack early on Day 2 I had blown a huge opportunity just a few hours later.

I had started again with cash games on a very low level during the WSOP 2009 and was running quite good in the beginning. Unfortunately my dry ran swept over to the cashgames too - resulting in some heartbreaking losses recently.

But there's always hope. And although I didn't cash in my last tournaments either - they ran so much better than all the tournaments before in the last 6 months. Hope for the coming weekend. I'm really looking forward to that: The Poker-King Weekend with a slow 40 min. structure and 20k startingstack. So far 85 are registered but they will without doubt sell out at 100 players plus waitlist. A 20k prizepool for the best 12% sound very good just before christmas.

For 2010 there's so much more poker to play. Not sure about my whole schedule but there are two trips that I want to do if possible in any way. The first is another trip to the Deepstacks Championships to Dublin (February). Not only because this is an event with an extraordinay great structure but also because it's time to end my nightmare from 2009. The other trip is of course a vacation with much poker in Las Vegas during the WSOP. Not necessarily for a WSOP event but for the atmosphere and more Venetian Deepstacks. If I had to choose ... those would be the two I would take over anything else. And if I would have to miss one of those two I would be very sad.

There are other options that might show up which I can't talk about right now. But as soon I can tell someting about that you will read it here first.

Mike Matusow writes in his book "Check-Raising the Devil" that real poker players don't make "New Years Resolutions" ... they make "End of World Series Resolutions". I really like that idea. But still this is the time to reflect the year and it's time to make peace with the year. So my resolution is not to look back in anger at 2009. I stil had a lot of fun and learned a lot things. It wasn't a winning year but it wasn't a lost year either.

What ever happens this coming weekend I will enjoy my last big tournament of 2009 as long as it lasts. Hope you join me on that last trip too.

Back from a weird weekend in Vienna

2009-12-07T20:39:00.001+01:00

That weekend went a little unexpected but it's one I will remember for a long time. After busting out from the Staatsmeisterschaft I was of course dissapointed. But there's not much I could have done different so no regrets.

It still amazes me how often people like to take coinflips very easily. I know myself that AK is a tough hand to fold. Especially from the blind. But it still isn't a made hand and most times it's a coinflip at best. So in a deepstack tournament (fast structures are a different animal) what sense does it make to commit 5,400 chips more (to the 600 from the BB) in exchange for a coinflip and giving up the right to act depending on the texture of the board? To be honest I was delighted to see that I had live cards, a flush draw and wasn't running into a made hand. Losing that hand sucked but that was the best possible spot for me to come back.

The next morning I looked out of the window and it was a grey, foggy and cold day in Vienna. But I wasn't really unhappy that this wasn't a day for sightseeing because I had an appointment with a book. A book I had started on my train ride to Vienna and that caught my attention so much that I was kind of happy to have the time to continue. So I went to Starbucks and continued reading Mike Matusows "Check-Raising The Devil". If you haven't read it until now I suggest you do. It's not the usual poker book and if you are an emotional person it will go deep under your skin. Of course it teaches you that you should avoid drugs (and it does it the hard way) but between the lines there's are so many lessons about poker and live it's unbelievable. But you have to be open minded to find that little gems between all the darkness in Mike's soul.

It may sound very strange but as depressing the book is in general it is indeed a great motivator too. I went to the Montesino for the 7pm tournament (which was played in the not so cosy 3rd level room due to the Poker Grand Slam running upstairs) and was really pumped to play. I was already well motivated before the Staatsmeisterschaft but I was even more that evening. And amazingly I had a great run until the first break. Unfortunately that run ended after the break and I wasn't able to keep up with the fast structure. At the end my timing was way off when I went in with AQ and was called from AK and QQ. I had even outs for a lucky straight before the River but a third King sealed my fate.

61st out of 158 wasn't a great result but there was more for me about that tournament. The great feeling about a rush at the table was back. The enjoyment when you are able to push people around. Of course good cards and good hits help a lot. But even more does help the right attitude and the passion of trying to take another one down. It didn't work out that weekend but it's just a matter of time until the next big hit. I had a horrible year so far but that doesn't matter anymore as I am now looking just forward again.

The next morning I almost missed my plane as I got a wrong schedule about the first subway leaving at my hotel for some reason. But again things turned out the right way as I reached the nightbus stop right on time to make my flight back to Munich.

I didn't cash that weekend but I won back a lot of confidence. And confidence can be worth a lot. So I don't count this as a losing weekend ... in some way ;-)

No luck again at the Staatsmeisterschaft

2009-12-06T02:39:00.005+01:00

Upon my arrival I met Jessy, a good friend from the dance competition scene. We had some nice talk about our last dance competitions and of course poker too. At the end she and her dad were so kind to give me a ride to my hotel. Unfortunately the hotel was a real dissapointment. I know you can't expect much if you look for a cheap place to stay but that one is very basic. At least it includes free internet access.

I was really motivated for the event but again I couldn't make it to Day 2 of the Staatsmeisterschaft. A total of 211 players were registered (194 showed up) to create a prizepool of €42.200. Among those trying to survive until the last 21 will make the money were some friends that I met at the IPO (Reinhard Schneiber from Austria and Thomas S. from Munich) as well as Peter Haszjan from the PokerRoyale.

I started at the same table with Reinhard and Peter and it was a decent start. The 45 min. levels and the 10k startstack were tailored for quality poker play. Although I didn't get too many playable hands I was able to pumped up my stack to almost 13k in the first two levels. Despite the fact that the CCC Prater is very smokey, the aircondition is very bad and I had a light headache this seemed to become a good tournament day. Until ...

... the "call of doom" from tournament director Jonathan Luetkenhorst that forced me to change tables. The new table was a tough one as they already lost four players. I was seated left of the chipleader with almost 40k in chips. But to make things worse I went on a dry run of cards. It doesn't get worse? It does! On the seldom occasions were I found a hand I wasn't able to connect to the flop at all. My once decent stack went down to 8k until the first break.

After the break things didn't ran better and I reached my low at 5k. With blinds already 150/300 (25) I went into push and fold mode and was able to get my stack back to 10k. Unfortunately this was only a short intermezzo. The dry run went on and with blinds 300/600 (75) I was down to 6k again. Finally I took a shot from the button with two suited live cards and ran into AKo from the big blind. With a flop containing two hearts I was in a decent position to more then double up but turn and river bricked and I went out in 127th.

That's poker. I didn't make any stupid mistakes during my play. I never missed a golden opportunity and at the end I was just on the wrong end of a coinflip. I definately had worse tournaments. Still dissapointing that I couldn't make a decent result for such a long time now.

But there's still another big one around the corner for this year with the Poker King main-event in Kufstein on Dec. 19th & 20th. It's not over till it's over... ;-)

Tomorrow evening I will play the €20+5 1RB at the Montesino to end my short Vienna weekend.

Staatsmeisterschaft at the CCC in Vienna tomorrow

2009-12-04T18:23:00.002+01:00

This will be a very short trip to Vienna but I'm still looking forward to it because I'm quite proud of making it to the finals two years in a row.

This year was even harder as I had only two shots. I really love the Pokertour.at series as they still offer great structures for a decent price. So I originally aimed to play as much of the events as possible. Unfortunately it turned out that most of the events happend the same time I had a dance competition. Therefore I skipped every event except of two (St. Poelten and Lake Woerth).

The good thing was that I made the final table already on the first one in St. Poelten and received the ticket for the final. Even better: the buy-in was a birthday present from my girlfriend. It was a really nice present as she isn't into poker at all.

Unfortunately this present turned out to force a tough decision from both of us. Later the year the date for the german boogie-woogie championship in Augsburg was announced and it fell right on the same day as the pokertour grand finale. Usually we have an agreement that dancing competitions have priority (that's why I missed the 2008 IPO) but this time it was different as I had won that ticket already. It was still a heartbreaking decision for both of us but we finally decided that I will play the Staatsmeisterschaft in Vienna.

Unfortunately my schedule doesn't allow for an extended trip to Vienna. So I will take the train tomorrow morning. Thanks to a "Bahncard" I received from my company I can travel 1st class for the same price as 2nd class :-) So expect me to arrive at the tables well rested and refreshed! Of course I hope to play on Day2, too ... but if not I might play a smaller event at the Montesino on Sunday evening. I will be back early Monday morning. Got a cheap flight with AirBerlin that allows me to be in Munich on time for my computer training at 10am.

I don't know if I can provide live twitter updates this time. They moved the event to the Concord Card Casino Prater and I don't know yet if they have W-LAN there too. But anyway I will find a way to keep you updated about my Vienna weekend.

New Blog Design is up

2009-12-01T02:54:00.000+01:00

No, don't go away ;-) This is still Shadow's Poker Blog!

Just thought that it might be time for some change. So I gave the blog a much more modern look. In addition I changed the layout to give all the widget a better position on the page. Of course I hope you will enjoy the new design. But anyway let me know if you like it or not. There's still some fine tuning left but in general this is what it will be from now on.

The next post will be again poker related because next weekend the great Pokertour.at finale happens at the CCC Vienna Prater. So stay tuned for more poker stories.

You have to see this hand ... unbelievable!

2009-11-22T23:21:00.003+01:00

I am not very often posting hand histories in that blog and I don't like to moan about a bad beat but this one is really sick:

And right in the next hand against the same opponent:

I'm still speechless...! Well, not really. I am well aware that I am currently in a real "bad streak". I don't get any hands either live or online and if I get one it doesn't connect in any way. Oh, and in case it connects I am rivered for sure.

I know this can happen and I know this can last longer than one might think. I had this during my Black Jack times too (and not only once). It seems that the bad luck follows you everywere. Change the Casino - doesn't matter. Change the city - doesn't matter. Change the country - doesn't help either. These are the worst times a Poker or Black Jack player can have. But standing on the very dark side of variance doesn't last forever. It's just hard to stand up long enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

This tournament (only a $3 rebuy on Stars with a 90K prizepool) seemed like that light. In fact I got not many but some very interesting hands and options to make it to a quite decent chip position (around 779th of 2,936 left from the 8,873 total). Still a long way to go but this finally felt like a tournament were you can achieve something ... until those two hands. That's what hurts most: show you the light and then brutally switch it off. Seems I have to wander a little longer in the darkness of negative variance.

Freerolling into December

2009-11-14T15:36:00.005+01:00

A lot has happened in the last few days in poker so it's definately time for a new blog entry. Let's start with my personal things:

Went back to Kufstein again and went card dead in the tournament again. There was only one remarkable hand: A pair of 3's that improved to quads right on the flop. I didn't get a big payoff in the tournament but one beside the table! The Poker Royale in Kufstein is having a big €200+20 Deepstack Event on Dec. 19th/20th and currently quads or better get you a draw on the lucky wheel. You can win satellite entries und up to an entry to the event itself. Guess what ... I hit the main prize. So on two weekends in December I will play two deepstack tournaments for free: First the Pokertour.at finale in Vienna (at the CCC Prater) on Dec. 5th and then the Poker-Kings Mainevent in Kufstein two weeks later.

On the other hand cashgame is still running rough for me. After losing a big pot last week with a set vs. a guy who couldn't be departed from two pair (that improved to a full house on the river) I had two similar occurences this time: KQ hit a set of Queens on the flop and my opponent pays all streets down two the river just to hit another eight to his two pockets and make the full house. A little later A9 hit a set of 9's and it was paid all the way down until he hit his gutshot straight on the river. Of course all those hands involved big pots. Hard to be ahead if you lose those hands.

Anyway it's part of the game of poker and after reviewing the ESPN broadcast of the final table I again realized how lucky (or unlucky) some players had been there. Just two decisions (Ivey's JJ vs. Saout's 77 and one hand were Begleiter mucked the winner after a river bet) could have had changed the whole outcome of the final table. But again poker is so much easier with visible hole-cards ;-)

BTW, I really like how Ivey looks back at his infamous mucking of the winning flush on Day 8. Of course it was a mistake but he's still not regreting anything after he made it to the final table. He just says that "all things would have changed and nobody can tell if for better or worse". I love this attitude! You don't know what he's talking about? Then you should definately google the phrase "butterfly effect".

The WSOP is just over and there is already big news again: Jeffrey Pollack is leaving his position as the WSOP commissioner. That's really sad to hear. In his 4.5 years on board he truly became the public face of the WSOP and turned many things to the better. The WSOP wouldn't be so strong and popular as it is today without him. It will be hard to fill his shoes here. Especially as he always was a great middleman between the players and the "greedy" corporation. Rumors are that Mitch Garber will take this position in the future and I really doubt that he is that player friendly. But it's to early to say anyway.

Below there are Parts I-III of Jeffrey's exit interview he had with WickedChopsPoker. At the beginning he doesn't deny a rumor that the huge Pavillion (were the interview is held) maybe the new main space for the WSOP. That would mean on the other hand that at least for 2010 the WSOP wouldn't move to the Caesars as expected. As always the WSOP is over but the tension for the next WSOP is already rising.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Some thoughts about the 2009 WSOP Final Table

2009-11-08T23:05:00.005+01:00

Spoiler Alert! - Don't read if you are waiting for the ESPN broadcast!

Again I spent the whole night to follow the Final Table audio broadcast and I don't regret any minute. Not as exciting as the 2005 Final Table with Hachem, Black, Matusow but still very interesting.

I feel very sorry for Phil Ivey and his bad beat. It would have been much fun to see him playing a big stack at the Final Table. This year obviously was the year of the bad beats. One of the toughest was the exit of my personal favorite Kevin Schaffel on 8th place (AA vs. KK with Kings improving to Quads). After seeing his exit interview I am even more sorry that he had to go so fast ... this guy would have been a great ambassodor for poker because he has just the right perspective about the game! Still happy that he was my number one pick.

From what I saw during the Final Table Steven Begleiter had improved his game a lot. Another guy I would have loved to see ending in a better position. Jeff Shulmann played a good game too but although he somewhat apologized for his bad comments I am relieved that he didn't win the bracelet.

So it's now Cada vs. Moon and you get the impression that the luckiest players made it into the heads-up. Both obviously didn't show the best poker play in the universe but nobody should call them donks. Nobody who survived over 6,500 opponents should be called a donk. But I have to retract my previous support for Moon. After getting to know more about him I think he wouldn't be great for poker. Not only will he most probably never be back on the big poker stages but he although showed some very bad moves. As said before Cada was very lucky too but I would say he's definately the more skilled player and can be marketed much better.

I will be routing for Cada on Monday and hoping for a long and exiting heads-up (but honestly I doubt it will take very long).

Can't wait to see the ESPN broadcast. Even after knowing the results this will be fun to watch.

Back home in Munich

2009-10-26T19:18:00.005+01:00

Sorry for not posting directly after my return but there was a lot to do in the last days.

Unfortunately my last two small tournaments in Dublin hadn't been a success either. I booked a small win during a cashgame session at the Sporting Emporium ... but of course not enough to break even for the trip.

But nevertheless this was a wonderful weekend. I really enjoyed meeting Silke and Thomas as well as Benny and his brothers again. We had a good time at and away from the tables. Congrats again to Cat O'Neill for her 4th place finish at the IPO. I had played at the same table with here for some time during the Deepstack Championships in February and she well deserved that final table appeareance!

Not sure about my next plans. Of course I will play the Pokertour.at final on Dec. 5th at the CCC in Vienna. I would love to play the Poker Royal Masters Main-Event in Wiener Neustadt end of November but decided that I need either have a good run in smaller events until then and/or get a good number of shares sold at ChipMeUp for that one.

Currently I try to be at the Poker Royale Kufstein once a week. Starting with the tournament of the day and continue with some cash game if I bust early. Last Thursday I had a good run early on but then ran a good portion of my stack into a flopped straight. Never really recovered from that. The following cashgame session was fun but ended only with a tiny win.

In addition I will again hit the online tables trying for some good step-results on pokerstars. I have accumulated some FPP's and now use them to get as many step-tickets as possible. As soon as all FPP's are used I will start trying to "step-up".

Sightseeing & Poker at the Sporting Emporium

2009-10-18T04:45:00.006+02:00

My sightseeing trip through Dublin led me this time to the area between the Dublin castle and the Guinness brewery. Lot's of old buildings and churches around. Just have a look at the pictures at the end of this entry.

The tournament at the Sporting Emporium had a great structure. They start with a 9k stack and 10 min. levels. Doesn't sound great? Well, the catch is that they add another 2.5 minutes to each new level. With the structure running 25/50, 50/100, 75/150, 150/300, 200/400, 300/600 and so on they reached 40 min. blinds al level 12. With 25 players that night it took almost 7 hours until the last five decided for a deal. In my opinion this is the perfect structure for a tournament with a decent starting stack that still allows a lot of play in the later stages.

I had a good start an brought my stack up to 16k. Unfortunately from there I went again totally card dead and at the 500/1,000 level I had to push with AT and 5,900 chips left. Got called by 77 and went out in 14th position.

Another try tomorrow at the IPO side event #3.

IPO Day 2 ... some photo impressions

2009-10-17T15:07:00.015+02:00

Day two has started about an hour ago and I took some photo impressions from the start.

We have at least two poker couples in todays field:

Silke & Thomas from Munich, Germany

Cat O'Neil & Rob Taylor from Ireland

Other known players in todays field include:

Maria Demetriou from Nottingham, England (left)
Andy Black from Ireland (right)

Noel Furlong, Ireland, WSOP Main Event Champion 1999 (left)
Jesse May, The Poker Show (right)

I am now on my way into the city of Dublin for some sightseeing and on to the tournament at the Sporting Emporium at 8:30pm. Hopefully I haven't used up all my luck today as I just escaped a heavy traffic accident on a crossroad that I passed just seconds before while being on my way back to the hotel!

Day 1 ... and final day of the IPO (at least for me)

2009-10-16T23:11:00.008+02:00

That wasn't like expected although the day started very well. I was well rested and in a good mood when I arrived at the Regency. I was able to take a short peek into the main room while it was still empty and then waited with the others outside until the doors opened at around 12:45pm.

Stephen and his team did a great job. That place looks really great. Feels like you're playing in a much more expensive torunament. Today's poker celebs included Padraig Parkinson and Surinder Sundar. Those two and several others had a bounty on their head (that's why the were wearing those football T-Shirts).

Didn't know anybody at my table. From the beginning I got a lot of good starting hands but couldn't catch any decent flop. Then I got bluffed off a turned straight on a JJT-A-J board. Awful Jack at the end. My opponent bet out and all I could beat was a bluff. And exactly that's what he showed me after I folded.

My stack went all the way down to 6k from 10k start when I finally caught a break with KK. Back to 10k and from there even up tp 15k. Now the world looked so much better until I ran my TPTK (AK) in a shortstack's set of fives. Down to 10k again. And back to being flop-dead. The blinds had already reached 150/300 (25) and my stack was down to around 7k.

Close to the end of that level I got AK and a guy in front of me who raised to 1,200. I weighed my options (all-in or call as raise or fold weren't possible options here) and decided for a call. With a call I could see if I get a piece of the flop ... or still opt out with enough left for an all-in on another hand. I missed totally in regards of Aces and Kings but the low flop was all diamonds and I was holding the Ace of diamonds. My opponent bet 1,500 and in this situation there was no way I would have folded that hand now. I didn't give him either the made flush or a set. So I figured that I was maybe even holding two overs to my nut-flushdraw. I went all in for 5,000 more to his bet and he called with QQ. Unfortunately 60:40 wasn't enough here and I was out at around 540's of 720 after four hours of play.

There wasn't much I could have done different so no hard feelings. Just sadness that it was over so fast. Went into the city for someting to eat and stumbled across the red carpet premiere of "Couples Retreat" at the Savoy cinema on O'Connell Street. Right in time to see Vince Vaughn (the main actor of the movie) hitting the red carpet. At least that was a nice distraction.

Will take some more photos tomorrow on Day 2 and playing a smaller event at the Sporting Emporium by night. Hopfully I can report better results then.

The day before the IPO

2009-10-15T23:08:00.007+02:00

This will be just a short update as I am very tired and need some sleep.

The trip to Dublin was uneventful except for the fact that I arrived with 12kg in handluggage. Ryanair only allows 10kg and in Memmingen they forced every piece to be put on the scale. So I started to pack the most heavy pieces into my pockets ... just to put everything back into my handluggage once I had passed that control point. So ridiculous! On the plane I fell asleep immediately and even overslept the landing. I told you ... I am tired ;-)

The Skylon Hotel is a nice place. Rooms are small but clean in general. And if everything works out correctly I won't be in the room for long anyway. They have free W-LAN in the lobby but unfortunately not in the rooms.

Before I went to the get-together at Cassidy's I took a short look at the Regency. The Regency is just a seven minute walk away from the Skylon and fortunately the weather is much nicer and warmer than in Germany. Stephen and his team were already working hard to get the room(s) setup for tomorrow. In the meantime they also published the seat drawing and I will be sitting on table 30 seat 6. Don't recognize any of my tablemates.

Wish you all a good night!

Next stop Dublin

2009-10-14T18:28:00.004+02:00

Just a few more hours till the next highlight of the 2009 poker year. The IPO is around the corner and tomorrow I am on my way to Dublin.

First of all I have to thank all my backers at ChipMeUp! Both events - the main event as well as my side event at the Sporting Emporium - are completely sold out. That is terrific and I will try my absolute best to make this a winning trip for all of us.

Although the main event is sold out registration will officially close tomorrow at noon. But so far it seems that we have 1,419 players that will create a prizepool well above $300,000. There are several pros in the field including names like Andy Black, Surinder Sunar, Padraig Parkinson, Fintan Gavin, Noel Furlong, Jesse May, Maria Demetriou and many others.

I got confirmation from the organiser that there should be WLAN access in the tournament area or at least close to it. So look out for some heavy twittering the next days ;-) In addition Irishpokerrankings.com has promised to put me on their homepage (together with other twittering participants). They will also broadcast live radio reports onsite. If you are interested in more then just my updates this page might be the best source for information around.

Almost everything is set so far (I only have to pack my suitcase) and at 10am I'm on the way to Memmingen Allgäu Airport for my Ryanair flight to Dublin.

As said, there will be lots of twittering and blogging in the next 5 days ... so enjoy :-))

My first ever Royal Flush

2009-10-13T00:46:00.005+02:00

It took me almost five years and three straight flushes until the first one ... but now I got it: my first ever Royal Flush. It was only a small tournament and it was created with just one hole card. But nevertheless it was this one and only absolute unbeatable hand. And I even got a decent payout for it.

The whole tournament went very good for me until I ran my JJ into AK of a very aggressive big stack to my left. All the money went in preflop, he spiked an Ace immediately on the flop and I was crippled never recovering. Of course at the end my AJs ran into the same guys pair of sixes. Guess what? A six on the turn and a meaningless Jack on the river sealed my fate.

Just two more days until Dublin. This will be a great weekend. Hopefully I can make a lot of people very happy as I sold most of my shares for the events I play in Dublin. So far there are only four shares left for the main-event at ChipMeUp.

Wasn't able to go to Kufstein for some time due to time restrictions but hope to do so next week as they are still running hot.

The un-official german players get-together in Dublin will happen on Thursday at 6:30pm at Cassidys Bar, 27 Westmoreland Street, Dublin 2, Ireland. I reserved some extra seats so just come over if you like to meet us.

Today I got the printed Pokerfirma Magazine that they created due to their one year annniversary. They produced a real nice piece here. I've contributed a long article about Twitter and the WSOP and it's much fun to see my first ever printed article in a magazine.

So this day gave me two nice "first ones". I take this as a good sign for the upcoming trip ;-) Will try to twitter from that trip as much as possible but can't guarantee if the local condition will allow this or not. We will see!

Looking back to the beginning

2009-09-29T02:00:00.006+02:00

For those who can read german you may probably have already read my article about the new Poker Royale Cardroom in Kufstein, Austria at Pokerfirma.de.

For those who haven't: A new and wonderful pokerroomm has opened in Kufstein (less then 100 km away from Munich). In addition Kufstein is the place were I started my live game experiences five years ago. Funnily the guy running the cardroom in that time is now part of the team running the new pokerroom.

The room is great: 10 tables with a wide selection of tournaments all week round and cashgames down to €0,50/0,50. This is definately my new homeplace for poker. I can't think of a room closer to Munich as long as the german laws won't change.

My first visit was a great success already as I made a third place for €220 in the €10 rebuy-tournament. My second visit wasn't as successfull. I was really carddead in the beginning and finally ran my top-pair top-kicker (AT) into a pair of 8's that hit his set on the river.

The following eight hours of cash game had been great fun but ended break even straight on the Euro. Really looking forward to come back to this place!

Writing that article for Pokerfirma and remembering the "old times" made me re-reading some of my old blog entries again. Amazing how much I have changed and how much my thinking has changed. Today it's too easy to laugh about those who think they are sooo good but are just "fish" (of course calling all others "fish"). Imagine, five years ago I wasn't any better. Anybody who didn't play by the book was a moron for me. Today I seldom play by the book because that doesn't win you enough. You have to be creative ... and obviously I wasn't able to make differences between the real morons and those who just showed a creative game (which I didn't understand at this time).

Just one quote from that old times:
"Got some nice hands (and a big stake) to the break after the first hour. Decided to cool down after the break and play only premium hands. Guess - I got QQ a little later. Raised it - everyone folded and the button went all-in. As I had covered her but had to invest a decent amount of my stake (about 2/3) I thought about it but finally decided that you have to call this with 3rd best hand pre-flop. Unfortunatly I ran into the best hand - AA that improved to a set on the turn."

In that time I was sure that this was the absolute right play ... today I would say this was a horrible, horrible mistake! BTW, there is of course no "absolute right play" ;-)

Oh, and I mostly like that quote from December 2005: "I'm not made for the crazy style of a Daniel Negreanu". Guess which kind of style I am playing now!

Just barely a year after I started with poker I played a WSOP Cicuit event in Tunica. Looking back this was a big mistake. Of course I enjoyed my trip ... but I was less able to enjoy the tournament as I would do today. Just think about that one: "I love this 'who can I recognize'-game [after seeing Andy Black at a table] but I pray that I won't recognize anybody at my table in a few hours!". Today I would love to have those guys and girls at my table as it would be much fun to watch them playing.

On February 16th 2006 I made my first live final table with a decent cash at the CCC in Vienna ... but still lacking much of todays experience at that time. Ah, time to stop now with those memories!

All that reminds me so much about my second passion: dancing! It's so easy to laugh about the clumpsy movements of those who are still learning but it's so hard to remember that not long ago you most probably looked the same. Having a blog like this helps a lot to take a look back from time-to-time ... realizing how far I came already but how far I still have to go to become really good!

Nowadays, if I see unusual plays I don't put them away as a donk play immediately. I always give them a second look to be sure there isn't a "wolf in a sheepskin".

IPO Dublin - unofficial "come together" on Oct. 15th

2009-09-17T17:09:00.010+02:00

As Benny is already advertising our "come together" for german speaking players in Dublin:

If you play the IPO - International Poker Open and like to attend our "come together" please contact me at shadowbj21@googlemail.com so I can calculate how many seats we have to reserve at the pub on Thursday evening (Oct. 15th). I will then tell you the exact time and location.

This is a special un-official "come together" of all german speaking players attending the IPO!

In case you plan to play the IPO but haven't registered so far I reccommend you do so as soon as possible. Day 1B is already sold out and Day 1A has only a few seats left. There will be absolute no possibilty to buy-in on-site! Also there's only a few days left (till end of the month) to earn 1,000 extra chips by playing at Boyle and accumulating 250 player points.

If you didn't know already: I offer some shares for the IPO at ChipMeUp. So feel free to lower your variance ;-)

Trip to the APAT Amateur Worldchampionships - Day 3&4

2009-08-31T18:50:00.004+02:00

Unfortunately there's not so much to talk about on my last two days. The saturday tournament saw me absolut card dead from the start. I never caught a break and finally ran my short stack with AJs into AK ... resulting in a very early exit.

The Sunday tournament was somewhat better. Didn't get many decent cards there too in the beginning but due to the better structure (5k startingchips and 30 min. levels) I was able to hang in longer to finally take down a decent pot with a set of aces. In addition I won a weired hand with KQ (hitting my Q) that got more expensive then I wanted. When my opponent called my last bet I was sure that I was beat but the guy folded after I revealed my hand and I took down a rather big pot.

Too bad this was the last good hand for me in that tournament. I got 9's once but had to let them go against a Lady's all-in. She was short since I came to the table and folded her way through the game. Quite sure my hand wasn't good against here at that time. So with just 11k left in chips (my highpoint was at 15k) and blinds at 300/600 (50) I got JJ in first position. I shortly considered going all-in directly but decided then to just bet 1,500. We had a lot of medium- to short-stacks at our table and I hoped for one of them trying to go all-in and getting me off the hand. I got my all-in from a stack just a little bigger then mine, I called and it was again a race vs. AK. So going all-in directly most probably wouldn't have made a difference here anyway. I think you already know what happend then? After losing an importent race with AK at the main-event I now lost it against AK. Seems I just was mostly on the wrong side of the coinflips that weekend.

So I went out in 23rd of 65 players (7 got paid) but wasn't unhappy with my play in general that weekend. I'm still ahead at the Dusk Till Dawn due to my third place finish last December but of course I would have loved to cash this time again. I was close two times and was also close to make Day 2 in the main-event.

I played a few hands with Maria Demetriou on my first tournament (even got her off a nice pot). Unfortunately I played with her only for a short time as our table was broken early but she seems to be a very nice person. In my last tournament I missed to play with 2007 EPT Baden winner Julian Thew as he busted right before I was moved to his table.

Now I'm heading back to Munich playing our Xing tournament tonight. Doesn't look if I will make it to win the Bahamas trip (too much points needed) but it's still fun to play with those people.

Trip to the APAT Amateur Worldchampionships - Day 2

2009-08-29T19:30:00.010+02:00

Warning: This is a very long entry. If you are just interested in the poker content you can stop after the first half. If you like to know more about Nottingham then you should read the second part too!

The day of the main-event turned into real desaster for me. I had a decent start when I trapped a flush with J's that improved to a full house. But from there I went really card dead for a long time. I even went below my 10K starting stack down to 8.5K for some time. Finally I got a break as I won a classic AA vs. KK all-in situation. Now at sitting 16K our table was broken and at the new table already the first hand defined my game. With TT I made a standard raise to 1,500 at the 300/600 (50) level and got a re-raise to 3k. I decided to make a stand at least pre-flop and called. The flop was a horrible K-K-x but it obviously wasn't better for my opponent as we checked it down to the river. He showed 66 and I scooped the pot.

From there I got respect for my raises except for one guy who decided to re-raise me everytime he was in a hand with me. Fortunately I had someting everytime that justified to call the re-raise and even better I always hit or was able to represent a hit. I finally made my way up to 24k as the following hand (the last before the break) happened: I raised with KQs and my nemesis re-raised again. I called and the flop was K-9-x. He bet again and I called. I noticed that he didn't seem too happy about the call but for some reason didn't think about it any more at this time. The Turn was a Ten and I expected him to slow down now as this was a table chipleaders fight at this time. But he bet again and now it got very expensive for me if I decided to call again. So calling didn't make sense at all. It was either fold or re-raise. As he had folded to my bets so often I really was in doubt that my kicker was good in that hand. He had played the hand from the big blind so he had a wide range of possible hands. Beside AA, KK or AK even KT or K9 was a possibilty. I finally folded, showing my King to induce a reaction. He did indeed react by showing me Q8 for just a gutshot straightdraw. This was the first borderline decision that went wrong and lead into the final desaster.

I had missed on a huge hand against him with JT before that would have probably killed him as I would have hit my two pair and the only card that would have made his straight would have made me the house. Unfortunately there was a re-raise from another guy pre-flop in front of me so I (correctly) discarded that hand.

After that loss to the bluff of my nemesis I was down to 20k but still 25th in the chipcount with around 100 of 157 players left on Day 1. After the break it took me less then a full level of 45 minutes to run that decent stack into nothing and bust out in 96th position. How did that happen? Well, I first had to fold to two raises (1,500 each) vs. all-in plays. While the first one was easy, the second one was tough. After my raise I had about 15k left and the all-in demanded to put in another 5,000. With AJs I wasn't happy at all to put in a third of my stack into what would be a coinflip at best but easily could be a doomed hand too. This was one of the longest times I ever took for a decision and it was the first time somebody called the clock on me (which was o.k. as I took my time here). I finally folded but looking back I think (even so it was borderline again) I should have called here. He didn't show so nobody will ever know if it was correct or not.

Of course at my next raise another player tried to get me off the hand with a 6k all-in. But with AKo there was no way anybody would have gotten me away from that hand (in that particular situation). It was a race against 66 ... and I lost the race. Too bad as winning this hand would have put me well back into the competition. No regrets, right decision but wrong outcome ;-) Being card dead again I ran my last 6k into the K's of the guy who just a few hands before won the race and my KTs was doomed...

What a desaster! There wasn't too much I could have done different. Two hands were borderline but in both cases it was a 50/50 decision to be on the right or the wrong site. Unfortunate but not a real mistake. But I was still devasteted. Running so good and giving it all away so fast hurts very much. So I went to a bar around the corner of my hotel and had some beer. Unfortunately (or luckily) all bars close at 2am. Not enough time for me to really get drunk ;-)

The next morning it didn't hurt so much anymore. Even better my head didn't hurt (so I would say it was indeed lucky that the bars closed early) and I went on to some sightseeing today. Most people connect Nottingham immediately with Robin Hood. Nothing wrong with that ... but there's much more to know about that area. Unfortunately Sherwood-Forrest itself is about 20 miles north so this wasn't an option for me without a car. But Nottingham castle was close. I could even see it from my hotel window.

Nowadays it isn't a real castle anymore. The structure that was there during the days of Robin Hood was replaced by a mansion in the 16th century as the original castle was more or less destroyed during the civil war. But there is a nice museum in teh mansion that gives you an insight of what it has looked that days. And with a little imagination you can still "see" the original castle structure. The following pictures show: The gate of the former outer walls, the bridge (former drawbridge) of the inner wall, the mansion (were once the main part of the castle was located) and some parts of the original outer wall.

As said beside Robin Hood, Nottingham was an important city in ancient times as it was the place to be for many Kings and the area of fights that decided about the history of England. Of course Nottingham fell to the "black death" as well as many other english cities but managed to stay alive and become a nice market city in the 17th and 18th century. Unfortunately the 19th century should mark the "destruction" of the once flourishing city. The beginning industrialisation increased the citizenship by five times from 10,000 to over 50,000 in less then a century. But the company owners didn't allow to build homes on the outer fields so Nottingham became one of the worst slums in England. Unfortunately the city never really recovered from that decsion. Although there are nice buildings everywere in the city (see below) many parts still look really cramped and not very inviting.

But even without a bright skyline Nottingham is an intersting place to visit. And there are obviously a lot of great places outside of the city in Notthingamshire county. But Nottingham wouldn't be Nottingham if it still wouldn't be on top of something. The city is a very young city (citizenwise) because of the great number of students. And were students come together there are clubs and bars not far. But Nottingham put it to the extreme with the most bars per squaremile in whole Europe ... definately a good place to recover from a bad beat in poker ;-)

Hope you enjoyed that little walk through Nottingham history. I'm now off to more poker at the Dusk Till Dawn.

Trip to the APAT Amateur Worldchampionships - Day 1

2009-08-28T13:06:00.006+02:00

Finally the weekend I was looking forward for such a long time arrived. Back to Nottingham and one of the nicest Pokerclubs in Europe - the Dusk Till Dawn. But due to my incompetent travel agency I almost had to miss out on that trip. When I tried to check-in online I found out that my original flights had been cancelled and I was re-booked. Unfortunately nobody cared to tell me! Even worse: I wasn't booked on the new flights, it was just a suggestion that I had to confirm. So I was lucky that there still were free seats available. The good side was that I had to rise later in the morning, the bad side was a three hour stay in Frankfurt which made it a fairly long trip at all.

While enjoying breakfast at Starbucks at the airport in Frankfurt a guy on the other table asked me about poker (I was wearing a WSOP T-Shirt). It was kind of interesting as he was one of those people who watches poker on TV but beyond that has no clue at all. His favorite story was when he saw to guys clash in an all-in with QQ vs. JJ. Then another Queen appeared on the flop ... and two Jacks on Turn and River. He then said to me: "Can you believe that? I almost fell out of my chair as I saw that!". And my answer to that was a simple "Yeah, seen that before, shit happens" ;-) But talking to him and explaining the simplest things (from a poker players standpoint) raised the question for me how hard it really is to convince non-poker players (e.g. politicians) that poker isn't a game of chance. Too often we take things as they are without accepting that others without our background (and bad-beat experience) might look at it from a very different perspective.

I arrived in Nottingham on late afternoon and went to the Dusk Till Dawn for the regular GBP 50 tournament (24 min. blinds & 4,000 startchips). Before I was able to find Des Duffy from the APAT and say hello. Without him I wouldn't have been able to register for the main-event (due to technical difficulties) and wouldn't be here for that weekend at all.

The tournament had 100 runners creating a nice prizepool that paid ten spots and over GBP 1,700 for the winner. My start was quite rusty. With KQ I hit two Kings on the board but was faced with a very aggresive opponent who finally went all-in when the second King appeared on the board. Hard to say if I had a kicker problem, if he just overplayed his hand or just didn't believe me that I had the King. Not enough information at this stage of the tournament. So I decided to stay on the save side and folded. But my stack was now cut into half.

Just a few hands later I was back to my original stack when my suited one gapper turned to a straight and I was able to outplay a guy with QQ. Somewhat later another suited one-gapper turned into a monster when I flopped a straight flush! I got a full payout as this guy kept betting (I just reluctantly called each street) with a flopped Q-high flush. Hi finally went all-in and then went out of the game ;-)

We already reached the end of the 200/400 level and I was sitting on 10,000 chips now when my raise to 1,000 (with AKs) faced an all-in of 7,000. Wow, that was a tough decision but I descided that in a tournament with this structure I couldn't back off here. Fortunately it was a race against TT ... which I (even more fortunately) won with the classic "Ace on the River".

Now at 17k and up to my highest point of 20K as the blinds went to 600/1,200 (100) a few levels later. But from there nothing should went right anymore. First my button raise faced two all-ins from the big-blind and small-blind. I folded and KK battled against AT. A little later my one-off-the-button raise to 3,000 was faced with a sneaky raise to 7,000 from the guy who had the KK before. I decided to fold here as my hand wasn't strong enough for a call and an all-in seemed to dangerous. But with that two hands and some blinds and antes my stack was now down to 10k and I was in push-or-fold mode. I got no customers with my first all-in, just got the antes and the small-blind while holding TT in the big blind and finally ran my 55 into TT. Out in 21st position after 4 hours.

Of course it would have been great to immediately cash on arrival but again I was very happy with my overall play. No significant mistakes, care were care was needed and aggressiveness were aggressiveness was demanded.

Todays Day 1A of the APAT Amateur World Championships is my starting day. The tournament will begin at 4:30pm UK time. We will play 45 min. levels with 10,000 startingchips and 100 runners per day (Day 2B is tomorrow and the final is on Sunday).

While it is raining heavily at the moment the weather forecast for tomorrow is quite good. So I might be able to do some sightseeing on my free day. Stay tuned for more poker stories and some pictures from Nottingham.

Summerfeeling and Poker at Lake Woerth

2009-08-18T23:51:00.010+02:00

My trip to Lake Woerth, Austria started with a real good beat. Although I had reserved the smallest rental car category I got a brand new BMW 120d with a mileage count of just 100 miles. So I had a nice, relaxing and enjoyable three hour trip across Austria.

My hotel was located directly at the highway rest stop "Lake Woerth". A hotel in that location doesn't sound too inviting but don't get fooled. For a decent price they offer small but nice and clean rooms. And all of them are lakeview rooms! The Marché restaurant next door offered good food and an outside terrace with a magnificant view over the lake. So I was well rested, well prepared and in a good mood at the start of the tournament.

158 players created a nice pricepool with 18 paid spots and a first prize of almost €8,000. Our table was quite friendly and mostly filled with educated amateurs. Most of them seemed to have played in the team event the day before.

Very often it appears in a tournament that the same opponents get heads-up again and again. In my case it was the young girl on seat 8. I lost our first confrontation but got enough information to value her as decent but tight. Shortly after I got most of what I lost to her back again. And then during level 3 we got into a real big hand. She made a huge raise from MP that cried for AA or KK. Everybody folded to me on the button. I decided that the blinds were still low enough and the stacks deep enough for a call with JT here. In addition this was the first time I got the opportunity to have position on her on the remaining streets.

The flop came 789 rainbow. What a monster. She made a decent bet, I shortly hesitated and then called. Turn was a 3 but now put two hearts on the board. She checked and I made a half pot size bet. She called immediately. The river was a meaningless 6 of clubs and I was still holding the nuts. She did bet again and of course I re-raised her. She open folded AA with a big sigh and I showed her my hand. Why did I do that? First because I wanted her to know that I had a real hand here and second playing the hand the way I played it gained me a lot of respect from the other players after they realized what I had behind. From now they were more carefully when I checked to them ;-) I tried a simmilar stunt against another player who appeared to have AA (and later showed them to me) but missed that time and was able to let my hand go with not much invested in the pot. Small-Ball at it's finest.

Jonathan Luetkenhorst the tournament director then added even more to that respect I already got. As always he does some interviews for the promotional video they create for every event. This time he decided to interview me again and he started with "2 final tables last year, another one this year ... it seems you are our inofficial highest ranked pokertour player". While this of course is a nice accomplishment (although I think Jan Schwarz from the PokerBlatt is equal successfull) I expected my image being totally ruined now. But the opposite was the case. From there I got a whole lot of respect from the table and I was able to take down a good number of blinds and antes without much resistance. This raises a good question: Is it better to appear as a fish or a professional? As always the answer is: It depends. In that case with "educated amateurs" getting respected was the much more valuable option.

Until level 4 (45 min. each) I was able to run my stack up to almost 15k and felt very good. Bustouts came fast and at that time we dropped below 100 remaining players. With table balance needed everywere I was forced to change tables and I was jinxed. In a big hand my TT ran into AA. That hand could have been even more expensive but I was able to resist trying to bluff here on the river. A little later my raise with AJ was faced with an all-in from a short stack. I was more or less commited to call here but doubled my opponent who was holding KK.

We already had reached level 5 with 300/600 (50) blinds now. So losing those two hands became expensive even in a deepstack event that had started with 10k chips ... and I was officially shortstacked now.

I waited for my spot and it came with JJ. The chipleader on my right had raised to 1,500. I went all-in for about 6k and then the second chipleader on my left made one of the dumbest possible moves. He went all-in for about 40k chips. Why was it a dumb move? Because he was holding just AQ! Calling my all-in was o.k. even though he still had to invest more than 10% of his stack ... but raising all-in after the chipleader had raised in front didn't make much sense with that hand.

But he got rewarded twice: First the chipleader folded and then he hit his Queen on the flop. I was out in 92nd position but not unhappy about my play. No big mistakes, no plays to regret, taking calculated risks. Just a bit unlucky at the end.

With no day two for me I decided that I still wanted to enjoy my Sunday here. Especially as the weather was georgeous. So I took an extended breakfast at the hotel terrace and then started for some sightseeing. Drove around Lake Worthersee, enjoyed the scenic view over the lake from the "Pyramidkogel" and relaxed lakeside before I started to drive home.

So I am feeling very good for the upcoming APAT Amateur World Championship in Nottingham - which has a similar deepstack structure. On a funny side note I just saw the odds on the players in the APAT event and my odds are among the top 20 players. Best ten odds are 66/1 and I am ranked 80/1 with another nine players. All others are ranked 100/1 to 200/1. Getting ranked that high really surprised me. Hopefully the results will reflect that ranking ;-)

Next stop Pokertour.at at Lake Woerth (Austria)

2009-08-10T00:00:00.009+02:00

Just came back from a great but mentaly exhausting non-poker weekend. We had a very motivating training with the national Boogie-Woogie team and are now even more hyped to dance the World Championships in two weeks in Stuttgart (which are part of the GOC - German Open Championships).

But before that I will come back to my most successfull tournament series so far - the Pokertour.at. This time the event will take place near the scenic Lake Woerth in Kärnten, Austria. Good to be back as I missed some of the other events this year due to conflicting appointments. I'm already qualified for the finals in December (which unfortunately forces me to miss a very important dance competition) but those events are still valuable in structure and prize money.

But that's not all for August. In three weeks I will be back to Nottingham for the APAT - WCOAP World Amateur Poker Championship at the Dusk Till Dawn. I'm really looking forward to this too. Not only is it again a great structured event but the DTD is a great place that saw one of my best performances at the end of last year.

Much more events to come in the next months but I will keep that for later posts.

Just to remember that if you want to play the IPO - International Poker Open in Dublin you should act soon. Although this one happens in October seats sell fast. For Day 1B (Saturday) there are now only 32 seats left. For Day 1A (Friday) there are 338 left. Expect it to sell out completely in the next 2-3 weeks. Another 300 seats are currently reserved for satellite winners and most probably won't be publicly available at any time. And don't forget that the german speaking players want to meet Thursday evening at a pub in Dublin. So if you go to the IPO let me know!

Just a short look back: Last weekend I made a visit to the CCC in Salzburg which had a Deepstack tournament. They got 146 players and paid 15 spots with first getting about €8.000.

I had a good start there busting an overly aggressive player with my JJ who decided that he had to bring his almost equal stack to war with AK. The action was three limpers in front, I then flat called my JJ and he raised it to 10x big blind (3k at this time). Everybody folded to me. He had made this over-raising move several times before and I assumed that this was again just a steal attempt.

Usually I would have re-raised him to 9k here but with a 20k stack that didn't make sense. So I moved all-in on him directly (putting his tournament life on risk ... as well as mine). And he immediately called. Ouch! That wasn't the reaction I had expected. But to my delight he showed a much overplayed AK. Don't get me wrong: His raise was a decent move with that hand (he was indeed much stronger then I had expected) but calling my all-in with just AK was a horrible move with his stack at 150/300 blinds and 45 min. levels. The board was meaningless for both of us and I was up to 38k.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to make much out of this stack. Another guy busted two players in one hand shortly after and now had almost the same stack size. He was picking on me as I had forced him earlier to fold the low full house on an 8866x board. Everytime I raised he was in the hand ... and everytime I missed the board completely. After a time this got very expensive and my stack finally went down to 15k (while the average was up to 25k).

Then I found a spot were I was able to fight back because I had a strong draw. Unfortunately this spot was badly chosen as he had a monster this time and I was drawing dead when the money went in. Went out in 67th place satisfied with my game in general but unhappy about the way I played my exit hand. This exit was avoidable!

Went on the the cash game and doubled my stack after about three hours. Still not enough to make up for the investment but at least a positive ending of the weekend.

Bleeding chips in the big one but taking down the side event

2009-07-23T01:32:00.004+02:00

Last weekend I checked out the Kings Pokerroom in Rozvadov, CZ (close to Waidhaus). They have started a series with a €250+25 buy-in on Saturdays during July/August. The tournament sounded very promissing as they offered 10,000 startchips and 45 min. levels (Level 1-3 were 30 min.). In addition they have a guaranteed prizepool of €50,000 ... a huge overlay as they got between 100 - 150 players during the first tournaments. This weekend they had 112 players. A decent tournout as there was another big tournament in Cheb (which is not far away) running at the same time. They gave a €275-Buy-In-Ticket to players placing 16th - 30th. This ticket is non-transferable and has to be used in about 4 weeks. In addition every of the 15 paid spots gets the ticket too as part of their payout.

Unfortunately my tournament day was over after just four levels and I was really bleeding chips this time. I never lost a huge pot or made a major mistake. I even had a monster laydown with AK were I had hit TPTK and was up agains a rivered straight. But I should have known that I was doomed when I realized that I forgot my lucky dinosaur (my card protector) in the hotel room. And I was indeed jinxed. When I was holding red cards the board came all black. When I played unpaired facecards the board was all small cards. I had pairs ... there were at least two overs on the board. And of course with suited connectors the board was all face cards.

No wonder I went out in 92nd position of 112. But the same continued then in the cashgame too. It just wasn't meant to be and I went back in my hotel at 4 in the morning really unsure what to do. The options were: driving home after breakfast, playing some more cash on sunday afternoon or playing the One Rebuy + Add-On tournament at 6pm. Still unsure I arrived at the Kings around noon hoping to find Thomas & Silke who had made it into day 2. We talked for some time and then I railed them as no cash game went through this afternoon.

Silke busted before the paid spots (but got a ticket again). Thomas eventually won the tournament (at the end they split the prize money 4-way). At this time I was already sitting in the rebuy-event which had a decent structure for a €60 buy-in. The levels lasted 20 minutes with a moderate increase (no antes). With 3,000 chips + 3,000 rebuy and 6,000 add-on you got plenty of play. I was running much better here then the day before but during the middle stages my stack shrinked from 19,000 to 9,000 very fast as the blinds now started to get expensive and I had to give up some good opportunities.

I managed to reach the final table but did it as the absolute shortstack. There I got my daily lucky hand as I was all-in with A5 vs A6 hitting my 5. Still short with 18,000 chips I was now at least in the position to put selective pressure on several people and raised my stack to 38.000 with 7 players left. Now came the hand that turned everything around: I was holding AK when a decent player went all-in for almost 50,000 and I was sure that he didn't have AA or KK as he seemed to be very unhappy as soon as I asked for a count. So I expected that the worse I could get was a coinflip. With just four spots paid and the fact that everybody was shortstacked already this was a decent opportunity to call. You may imagine how delighted I was to see that I was up against AQ.

With now around 80,000 chips I was chipleader and everything had changed. Somewhat later I got a real present from the second in chips. At this time we were already down to six players. I had AJs and called a raise from this guy. Flop was 2-K-7. I checked and he checked too. Turn was a Jack. I checked again and he bet. For some reason I was sure he didn't have the King. So I re-raised him all-in and he called with A9s. Wow! The river blanked and he was out (of the money) while I was now sitting on 140,000 chips. Remember: about an hour and five eliminations before I had barely 9,000 chips!

But there was another guy who had a great run at the final table. The one who ran his AQ into my AK. He was down to 8,000 chips after that hand but managed to accumulate chips and finally we both went into heads-up almost equal in chips. It was a great heads-up as nobody of us was short at this time and we both liked to play post-flop poker. Eventually I managed to win the tournament for €1,355.

This put a great ending to a rather tough weekend. But despite my bad run on Saturday this place is a real reccomendation! It's a nice and clean place that offers very good tournaments and a wild but profitable cash game (at least in the €1/3 level that I played). On Saturday they had also games at €2/5, €5/10 and even on game at €20/40 running.

Almost all kind of drinks are free and there is a very tasty buffet almost all-day around. The service personal is among the friendliest I've ever experienced (even compared to very good american standards). The only real downside are some of the german guests that still seem to think they are superior and treat the czech people in a way that isn't appropriate in my opinion. Although you may still feel like being in Germany in that place you are not! We should always remember that we are just guests and should behave that way. I am happy to be a guest in a country so close to Germany that allows me to play my favorite game legally.

In general the tournaments are run in a decent way but the floor has to get a little bit more experienced. Especially the rebuy-event went a little hectic at one point. But I have no doubt they will get this sorted out very soon. This is really a place and tournament I can reccommend for everybody who loves to play good poker and wants to enjoy their time in addition. If my schedule would allow it I would be back in the next weeks for sure.

Their series ends with a €750 main event on August 22nd/23rd (if I remember the date correctly) ... I really hope they add a little for the higher buy-in by making the main event 60 min. levels and offering maybe 12K or 15k starting chips. But so far no details are published about the main event yet as far as I know.

I really wish them success with their series and I would be happy if they decide to either extend it or run it again in fall. In that case I would quote Arnold "Terminator" Schwarzenegger: "I'll be back!" :-)

WSOP 2009: The good guys and the bad guy of the November Nine

2009-07-16T21:52:00.020+02:00

The WSOP is over and I am back to Germany for several weeks now. But of course I followed the action closely. The WSOP main event was and is still one of the most impressive things in the world of poker. And this year everything was even better.

Compared to the last years there had been less problems then ever and almost everything went the right way. The only "glitch" was the sell-out at Day 1D ... but I think Harrah's made the right decision. It was and is my opinion that everyone who got shut out can blame nobody then himself!

The main event saw a lot of interesting names lately including Dennis Philips, Joe Sebok, Peter Eastgate, Antonio Esfandiary, Ludovic Lacay, Tom Schneider, Blair Rodman and many others. In addition the german Marco Mattes had a great run and ended 23rd out of 6,494.

Joe Sebok (the inventor of Pokerroad Nation) as well as Dennis Phillips (a great guy who showed an incredible performance again and was only stopped by a rather bad beat) clearly belonged to the favorites of the masses. It was a sad moment to see both getting busted in the 2009 main event.

Only one guy was able to go ahead of those two! Not only regarding fans but also regarding result. ESPN and Harrah's will obviously thank the poker gods that one of the best players alive made it to the "November Nine" in the 40th anniversary year of the WSOP. Although Phil Ivey is on the lower end of the chipcount he will be good for great TV and I assume that except for his eight tablemates and fans almost all people in the poker world would love to see him take down this event.

"Ivey is Jordan, Einstein, Picasso, and Mozart all rolled into a one professional gambler"
from Tao of Poker

Every year again there is the question "will a well known pro ever win the main event again"? Every year the answer was "No way, won't happen anymore". This year can be the year. It already was the year of the pros: Three bracelets for Jeffrey Lissandro and two for Phil Ivey, many cashes for Daniel Negreanu and final tables for many other well known names.

But Ivey has to face a stack more then six time bigger then his own. This stack belongs to Darvin Moon. The difference couldn't be bigger. Moon doesn't have any big results in the books so far. But from what I heard he got great cards and made the best of it. It will be hard to overcome this monster stack. Moon reminds me in many ways of Dennis Phillips. He's not a professional but the nice guy from your neighborhood. So different and down to earth compared to some other crazy guys in the pokerworld. To play good poker you don't have to enter the Amazon room as Julius Caesar ;-) Also I am rooting for Ivey to take it down I think I wouldn't mind if Darvin Moon would make it instead. Oh, and isn't it funny that today is the 40th anniversary of the first men landing on the moon. It's the "day of the Moon" ;-)

Enter the bad guy! Beside Ivey there is another well known name at the final table. If you had asked me a few days ago I would have loved to see Jeff Shulmann from Cardplayer Magazine at the final table. But since yesterday I lost every respect for this guy. Imagine there are thousands of players that have a dream - the dream of winning the main event one day. There are people like me that stay up all night to catch the action there because this is the event for almost all poker players.

And now this guy says that he will "throw the bracelet into the garbage" if he would take down the event! Isn't that horrible? I wouldn't mind if he said that he won't ever wear it because it doesn't look nice. But what he said lacked every possible respect against a great event and is a slap in the face of every poker player. Even worse is his reasoning. He thinks that Harrah's treated him and Cardplayer Magazine unfair by selling the media rights to Bluff Magazine. So why play here at all? This guy has a passion for business but no passion for poker.

Ivey winning the main event - great for poker. Moon winning the main event - good for poker. Anybody else except "Garbage Jeff" - probably good too. "Garbage Jeff" winning - horrible for poker.

I never ever did this before (not even for Jerry Yang) but this November I am rooting for Jeff Shulmann getting busted as soon as possible!

Isn't that great? A guy like Phil Ivey who already achieved so many things in poker still has a dream - the dream to reach a main event final table. This dream has now come true for the one and only Phil Ivey!

My coming events in summer and early fall

2009-07-09T23:43:00.007+02:00

It's some time since the last update so here comes a little wrap up and a list of my coming events for the next months.

Hadn't played much since Salzburg but last weekend I went back to Ceska Kubice in the Czech Republic. The Casino Savoy now has a weekly €50+7 DeepStack tournament. Well, personally I wouldn't call it "DeepStack" as it has a PF=12.56. But still for that buy-in it is a very good structure (and has a lot of weak players).

I started off very well by doubling up with AA vs. QQ but again lacked playable cards in the middle section of the tournament. Finally my chips went in with JJ and I was called by A9c on a two clubs flop. Of course a club hit on the river. :-(

So I went on with my cashgame experiment and again left with a nice €186 win at €1/2 after 4 hours. Most remarkable hands: Getting QQ and KK in a row and hitting my set both times on the turn. Got a decent payout on both hands. Another huge hand was QQ vs TT with Full House over Full House.

Looks like I'm still running better in cash then in tournaments. But I love playing tournaments so much more. Let's see how this develops in the future...

On July 18th I will travel to the Czech Republic again. The Kings Pokerroom in Rozvadov now offers a PF=18.67 two-day DeepStack event. Again this is a weekly tournament during the summer.

Mid of August I finally will be able to play the Pokertour.at again (LM Kärnten). Had to miss some events due to other appointments. End of August will see a trip to Nottingham for the APAT World Amateur Poker Championship at the Dusk Till Dawn. The Pokertour.at has a close stop in early September in Innsbruck. Of course a thing I don't want to miss.

And then there is October and I am really happy that this years International Poker Open in Dublin doesn't conflict with my other appointments. Was really sad that I had to miss this great event last year. I was able to catch a flight for this with Ryanair from Memmingen for just €18! Adding another €40 for the train ticket makes it still less than €60 for a return flight to Dublin. Wow! I expect my gas bill to Rozvadov next week will be about the same amount ;-)

It's a kind of tradition that the german speaking people who travel to the IPO make a little meet-up before the event. This year we will meet in a pub in the center of Dublin on Thursday Oct. 15th at 7pm. So if you play that event too please contact me and I will give you the exact location.

So as you can see there is a lot of poker planned already. And there are several other plans that are not fixed at this time. I will let you know a soon as I know more ;-)

Promise that the next blog entry will be much more interesting ... just trying to keep the tension up with that one. Next destination: Rozvadov, Czech Republic and another one of the deepstacks I love so much!

Nice cash in Salzburg (but not in the tournament)

2009-06-21T16:10:00.004+02:00

As we danced a Boogie-Woogie competition on Saturday near Salzburg this was a good opportunity for a visit to the Concord Card Casino in Salzburg. Unfortunately the summer took a break and it was a horrible weekend in regards of the weather with a lot of rain.

My tournament started very good. Special thanks to two awful players who donated most of their stacks to me. During the first two 25 min. levels I went from a 5k startingstack to 11k. But in level 3 (50/100) this hand broke my tournament:

I got AA in early position and raised it to 250. This was my standard raise and I had shown a lot of decent hands already with that raise during that tournament. Three callers. The flop came 5-2-7 with two hearts. The pot was 1k and I bet 700. First player folded. Second went all-in for 5,700 and third one called all-in for 2,800.

Uuups, that wasn't like expected. I had already seen a lot weired play at this table. But 5,700 at this level into a 1,700 pot was a huge overbet and usually desigend to take the pot down right now. What could he have? Most probably a big pair. Flushdraw was possible but for some reason I gave the flushdraw to the smaller stack. I ruled out a set as I don't think he would have played it that way. Maybe the smaller stack could have the set but I was of course focused on the bigger stack here anyway.

It was a borderline decision for me. In a deep-stack my aces may have gone into the muck as I wouldn't have been interested in a gamble in that early stage. In this format, with 25 min. levels and the next blinds being 100/200 (25) and 200/400 (50) there was no way I discard this hand on that flop.

But the showdown was a desaster: The smaller stack showed 48s for a baby-flushdraw (as expected) while the big stack showed a surprising 52s for two pair. That indeed was the only hand I really had feared in that setup. No help and I was down to 5.5k. Didn't get many cards in the next level and went out in level 5 with TT versus QQ.

Shortly after my exit they opened a new €1/2 NL casgame table and I decided to jump into that game. As always patience pays off in a cash game. The table had 3 decent players and 3 who splashed around with chips. They loved to do straddles and showing big bluffs. Unfortunately I didn't get the right cards for a long time and my stacked dipped heavily. But finally I started to hit and it was amazing that even after I had shown several times that I have a hand when I play it strong I got customers all the time. Left the game after 4 hours with a €322 net-win. So far I am up in 4 of my 6 sessions I played since I started playing live cashgame again.

Not sure what and how much I can play in June and July but I have fixed plans for the Pokertour.at in Kärnten and the APAT - World Amateur Poker Championship in Nottingham in August.

Back home again

2009-06-18T00:21:00.008+02:00

So I am back home from Vegas and it's time to look back. As always going to Vegas is very nice and being there during WSOP is even nicer. This time it was a special experience as media access allowed to do and see a lot more then the usual visitor. It was also nice to meet some people in person like BJNemeth (@BJNemeth), Joe Seebok (@joesebok) and many others. It was also nice to meet Jessica Welman (@jesswelman) from PocketFives Live again.

But the face of Las Vegas is changing. I'm a child of "Disneyland for adults". When I came to Vegas first the Bellagio, NYNY, Venetian and Excalibur had just opened. It was the time of the "Themed Hotels". I have spoken to people who knew Las Vegas before that times and they told me that they got tears in their eyes when places like the Sands and Dunes were imploded. At this time I couldn't understand why they didn't like the new Las Vegas.

Now I start to understand ... because as always Las Vegas is inventing itself again in very short time. The time of the themed resorts is long over. Old icons like the Stardust have followed the Sands and Dunes. Now it's the time of the glass palaces.

The Wynn & Encore started this trend. The Palazzo was the last place not following this trend (but I assume mainly because it wouldn't have fit to the Venetian otherwise). And now there is city center. A huge monster of several casinos with no real identity. City center doesn't look like Vegas - it could be anywere in any big city of the United States.

And that's the worst part. This wonderful clear line of casinos on the strip that you could see upon landing (or from far away) is now gone. Several condo builings at or near the strip make it even worse. Now I am the one to be sad about the new Las Vegas and I start to understand how the old-timers must have felt. It's like they start to take "my" Vegas away from me. And also it will take a few more years it's just a matter of time and those places that made it "my" Las Vegas will start to vanish...

Not that I don't like Las Vegas anymore. It's still a great place but some of the buzz I always felt during my stays is just gone. But for everyone comes once a day were he becomes the old-timer. And in Las Vegas this will usually happen sooner than later...

As you have read in my last entries I wasn't successfull in tournaments - again! I can't blame it to bad beats in general. The first time I was perfectly outplayed. At least two times it was my own fault ... and yes, I somewhat missed the lucky end on important occasions. On the other hand I was running very good in cash games. I hadn't played cash games for a long time now and it was a great learning experience. I still make mistakes here that I shouldn't do but it seems I found a good mix between my own style of play (action oriented) and the needed patience. I will try to keep up with the cash games but will do so very carefully for now.

Another thing I wished I had done different would have been to take a few days more and use those for resting in between. Especially after this horrible last Venetian tournament I would have loved to have the opportunity for just taking a day off.

Anyway, I am back home and next play will be on Friday at the CCC in Salzburg. No deepstack of course but still an o.k. structure.

My last big tournament in Vegas is over with no cash again

2009-06-13T19:33:00.003+02:00

So that's it. No more of the big ones (two day events) as I have to leave on Sunday. As intended I played the Caesars and I am happy with my choice ... even without a cash. At least it was a decent ending for a tournament week.

Even after changing the structures a little and getting rid of the main-event seat the Caesars struggles in numbers of participants. 154 showed up that day and made it 18 paid spots. Still a nice 9k payday for first place. In general I like their payout structure more. 18th place here got around $700 while the Venetian just paid $450 (a next to nothing win).

As always this week I was running hot early with great cards but then struggled again for some time. But this time I hit really hard two times in the middle of the tournament and made my way up to 46k. One was a KJ that I had raised and got a reraise from my neighbor. He did this quite often so I decided to call here and see the flop. Flop comes J-J-x and the hand cost him almost all of his stack with pocket kings. The next one was really nasty. I made a raise with 23s and got one caller. Flop come 2-3-8 and the pot starts to grow. I assume that he has a pocket pair Ten to Queen. Turn is a 7. Don't think that hit him. River is another 7. Damn, my great two pair are counterfeit and I am most probably behind. Let it go or push it? My remaining stack was still big enough to push and the pot was already huge ... so I pushed and continued to make an impression that I have a monster. He finally folded ... phew!

Some time later I was involved in a big pot were my flush didn't materialize and I had to let my hand go on the river. Down to 33k. Overplayed that hand somewhat. But still over the average of 25k.

Blinds were now at 400/800 (100) and I got some hands but missed every flop. Down to 23k but still o.k. Then I received AK in MP. Guy in early position makes a huge overbet to 4k and I assume he has either AK or a middle pair. So I try to get him off his hand by pushing all-in for my remaining 23k. Taking down a 6,200 chips pot would have been more then fine for me here.

Then something strange happens. He looks at his cards and almost mucks them as the next dealer approaches the table. So he asks the current dealer "you are leaving now? Then I call because you have given me good cards so far". Indeed he got good hands from that dealer as he came short at the table and had been doubled up at least twice since then. So he calls with 66 for his remaining 18k and doubles up again. :-(

Now I have just 4,500 left and find a decent spot to get them in with J9o. I get callers and a shot to qadruple up but fail to hit the board. Out in 70th after 6 hours of play. Had a real shot to make it here but there wasn't too much I could have done different. Not the best game I ever played but very decent.

Later that night I went back to the MGM for some cash game and made another nices win. Could have been even more if my straight wouldn't have been run into a baby flush.

So for today there's most probably no more tournaments. I checked the regular events and their structures aren't good but the payouts are even worse. Most have a fee of 25-35%! So I most probably play a little more cashgame and check out the action at the WSOP again for the last time.

My most ugly day in tournament poker this week

2009-06-12T17:38:00.004+02:00

The Venetian tournament again started very well for me but then turned into my most ugly tournament experience I ever had. But in the beginning I was absolutely owning the table.

First hand AK on the button, raising, it's folded and I show that I am not stealing. From the next 30 hands I play about 20 (all with decent hands) and win 16 ... mostly the blinds but some small pots too. The table starts to hate me. Finally we go to a showdown and my opponent falls almost from his chair as he sees that I checked the nutflush with a double pair on the board. He couldn't understand but I earned a lot respect from some other players. Which saved me from starting them picking on me harder.

During the first two levels my stack went from 15k to 22k and I even was the guy who now was defining the standard betsize ;-) Then again one hand pushed me back down. But this time it wasn't a bad played hand but rather a bit unfortunate gathering. With Q9s I hit a set on a 99x board. I was ahead at that time but a Ten on the Turn turned the worse kicker into a Full House. Good thing I didn't push here to much ... that hand could have been even more expensive. In a weired Déjà-vu I saw Matusow's exit from the 2008 WSOP Main-Event later that evening again. His AJ vs A9 almost developed the same way but cost him the whole tournament.

From there it was an up and down. Down to almost 5k and recovery to 18k. The on to a new table. But before that I had my first ugly experience of the tournament. There was a raise from EP and then an all-in for about 8k from the short-stack next to me. This happend just shortly after I made my way back up to 18k and I had lost big with QQ vs AA not long ago against a n "any-two-can be raised" jerk. Again I found QQ and thought for a long time. With action pending behind me (one hasn't acted so far and the original raiser) I decided to let my Q's go. this time The other guy then pushed all-in and the original raiser folded. Guess what: 78s vs. AK ... and a Queen hits on the flop. That would have been a huge pot!

Looking back I think that was a borderline decision and I most probably should have went all-in against the all-in player to isolate. Not sure if the other guy would have called then with his AK (I had him slightly covered).

The new table was very entertaining but the blinds started to hurt my 18k stack now. Finally I got my money in with KK vs. AK and made it up to 30k. Then an even worse situation came up: I have TT and make a standard raise from the small blind. Big blind calls. The Flop is Q-8-3. I check and the other guy checks too. Turn is a 5. I check again almost being sure he will now make a bet to take the pot down. He bets 3k into a 6k pot. Blinds at this time were 500/1.000 (100). I don't think he is very strong here and make a re-raise to 10k. He asks what I have left and makes it 30k to put me all-in. Wow! I so much wanted to call him but I finally let my hand go. He takes the pot and showes JT for complete air!

I I had called that would have been a pot of 70k total ... but even now hours and a whole night later I can't find a good reason that would have satisfied a call here. Of course I would have been sitting on a huge stack then but this isn't poker anymore. That's rolling dice then. I think my re-raise for one third of my stack (with a pocket pair) was a decent move. But re-raising with nothing for half of his stack is just crazy. The worst thing is that I would have played a super-strong hand (like a set) the same way and he would have fallen into that trap (which he will most probably against somebody else).

The Queen was a very unfortunate hit on the flop here. As this was a battle of the blinds he still could have had many other parts of the board (e.g. set with a low pair). But even being sure I did the right thing it is still so devastating to know that I was fallen into his trap and passed on the biggest tournament pot of this week.

My stack went downhill to 11k and my money went in with KK again. Guess who called? The guy who had trapped me. Guess what he had? AK. Guess what happened? An Ace hit on the turn. Out in 239th of 660 after almost 6 hours of play.

I then decided to alter my plans and not play the Venetian on Friday. Although I love to play there and they have great tournaments I really need a change of venue. So I play the Caesars Mega-Stack instead today. In addition that one has a little smaller buy-in then todays event at the Venetian. And I definately didn't feel for investing into my biggest tournament of the week at the moment. The prize pool will be lower as they get only around 200 players but thy skipped the main-event seat - so the prize pool is all cash now.

But I am in Vegas and I am here to play poker. So for the evening I went to the new "M" Hotel & Casino. This one just opened in March and is the southern most strip casino. It's about 3 miles south of my hotel but (as well as my hotel) still located on Las Vegas Blvd. aka "The Strip". It's a nice little casino with a small but wonderfull pokerroom. Played there for about 2.5 hours and went home with another nice win. Not as big as the day before but still worth the time invested.

So now it's time for my last big tournament of the trip. To be honest I am already biased to go back to the Venetian. Poker players are crazy, aren't they? But I will stay with my decision here. At least I don't have to regret anything if this doesn't go the right way - but I would bugg myself if I go to the Venetian and something weired happens today.

So wish me luck ... this is my last chance for a big win and a possible extension of my trip ;-)

Fun and dissapointment in Vegas

2009-06-11T18:50:00.002+02:00

Sorry that this will be only a short update with no pictures. Internet is down at the whole property I am staying in. So I am now at Starbucks to make some updates before heading to the Venetian again.

Yesterdays tournament started on a table with a broken autoshuffler. But the Venetian staff was fast to re-seat us inside the poker room. Unfortunately this meant that the table would be broken first. This turned out to be a very unlucky happening as we had a real "donator" at our table. I was able to abuse this "ATM" two times myself and was on a good run when the table was broken. At the new table I could continue for a while and reached my highpoint of 22k. Startingstack was 15k. At this time close to 500 people had bought into the tournament.

Unfortunately from then nothing worked right anymore and my stack went down to 16k again (not losing a big hand or making huge mistakes but losing a good number of small hands). Nothing to worry about at 100/200 (25). The thing to worry about is the fact that again I played one hand very badly. My JJ ran into two pair of a shortstack (AT). As the final money went in on the river I think even against the shorty there was still a way to let this hand go either on the turn or the river (and save some important chips).

With the increased blinds and my smaller stack I now entered push-and-fold time. Pushed two times with no customers and then went on a one level (40 min.) dry run. I hadn't played a single hand for a whole level (!) when I finally got AJ of clubs. There was an UTG raise to 2k with blinds now 300/600 (50). I pushed for 7,200 total in LP and he almost immediately called. What the hell did he think I might have? At least he thought that KQ (clubs too!) was good here. He had a healthy but not huge stack. So why risk a quarter of it on anything that is a coinflip at best?

Anyway, I was delighted to be faced with a 40:60 setup. The flop came AKx putting me ahead even more at 80:20 ... until another King hit the turn :-(( The Jack on the river was meaningless.

Out somewere around 350th place after 4 hours. Spotted Roy von der Locht (a player from Munich) at one of the tables and said hello. At this time he had a 33k stack so hopefully he made it deep into the tournament. Other notables: Tiffany Michelle (still in after busting out of the WSOP Shootout early) and former World Champion Jerry Yang. Yang had a fast exit and it was reported that he played like crazy: raising every hand, pumping his stack up to 30k, down to 20k, up again and then blowing it all away by calling an all-in with Ace-high (that all happend during the first two levels). At least he made someone very happy at his table ;-)

I was very dissapointed the way my exit went. I don't mind to bust the way I did on Monday ... but this was cruel! So I went to the "Tacone Grill" at the Planet Hollywood and eat some delicious 4-chese quesadillas. After that I felt much better ;-)

Just to find the next dissapointment. PH used to have very good low buy-in tournaments and a nice poker-room. Both is gone now. The room is now cramped on the other end of the floor between some slot machines and the decent tournament structure of the past is gone too.

Over to the HardRock Casino that also got some good reports in the past. And yes, they have a good structured low buy-in tournament (6k chips and 30 min. levels) and a nice room. But again this one has two downsides: It seems that with the age of 42 I am getting to old for the loud rock music that is played in the casino (including the poker room). Other may like it but for me it is just annyoing and causes me headache after some time. But I know that I am not their preferred customer anyway as they try to cater for the under 30 crowd. But the worst thing is that regulars get 500 additional chips per hour of live play (up to 2k). That puts every visitor into a bad position. No play for me here.

Dissapointed with the options to play a smaller tournament but wanting to play a little that evening I decided to give cash game another chance again and hit the MGM poker-room. This was a long and interesting evening. It lasted over 5 hours with a lot of ups and downs but at the end I went out ahead with exactly the amount to buy-in for todays tournament at the Venetian :-)

An older guy at hour table who obviously thought from himself as "the-guy-who-invented-poker" was a real ATM for most of us. Especially after a female gave him a cruel bad beat. Nobody felt sorry for him as he had bad-beaten everyone at the table already before. But after that he really went on tilt and drowned several grand in a short time.

In the biggest hand of the day I could hit him very hard: as often it was only called around (he was the most aggressive anyway) and I called with K6o on the button to see a flop. Don't tell me that this is a bad play ... if you played there for five hours already you would have made it that way too ;-)

The flop comes K-6-3 with two diamonds. It was checked around to me, I bet my two pair and everybody except "Mr. Poker" (as usual) went out of the way. The turn was an Ace. Didn't like that card too much but didn't give him an Ace as he most probably would have raised with it pre-flop. He checked, I bet and then hell break loose. He re-raised me and I assumed now that he was on a flush-draw. I took him all-in and he called quickly. River was a diamond and I felt doomed. But I wasn't ... he had hit two pair either with K3. Ship It!

On of the most remarkable laydowns I saw at that table was from a middle aged asian lady. On a 6-8-9 flop she flashed AA to me and mucked after her bet got a raise and re-raise. She was dead right as she was up against a set of 8s and another set of 9s!

So I went over to the Venetian to buy into todays event with my fresh money and went back to the hotel for some sleep.

A Day at the Rio

2009-06-10T17:14:00.007+02:00

Yesterday I didn't play a tournament but took my day to follow the action at the Rio. Obviously I choose a very interesting day with several german players, Daniel Negreanu, Annie Duke and some real drama.

If you like to read about it you can find the whole article (unfortunately available only in german) with some pictures here at Pokerfirma.de.

For those who can't read german her are at least some nice pictures from yesterday:

WSOP Reporter BJNemeth (@BJNemeth) capturing the Bracelet.
His georgeous pictures can be found here!

Daniel (@RealKidPoker) at the Omaha H/L.
Figuring out if he got the High, Low or the whole enchilada

Joe Sebok (@joesebok), Amanda Leatherman (@MandaLeatherman)
and the Pokerroad-Team who provide us Pokerroad-Nation

And finally: The hallway...

... and the Amazon Room waiting for the players

I'm now heading to the Venetian were my next Deepstack Event will take place at noon (9pm CET). As always you can follow the action on Twitter and buy some shares on ChipMeUp until the start of the event.

My first Venetian DSE and stories from the Rio

2009-06-09T18:28:00.011+02:00

I was in a good mood entering the Venetian and got a very good start: Tight table and decent cards in the beginning including AA, KK, QQ and a set of sixes. During the first level (50/100) I was able to pump my stack from 12k to 13k already.

Then during Level 2 (75/150) I made a horribly bad play. I had hit my straight but the board showed a possible flush too when my opponent made a 6,000 chips bet into a 3,000 chips pot on the river. This smelled so wrong. Why would he bet so high if he had hit his flush? Did he really want to chase me away? I finally called and it cost me half of my stack as he indeed had the nut-flush.

The call was a huge mistake on my part (regardless if I was ahead or not). At this stage of the tournament there was no need to play a hand as big as that with anything less then the nuts.

Down to 7k I tried to calm down and decided that I still had way enough chips for playing good poker. And that's what I did. My stack went up to 9k very soon.

In the meantime a "famous guy" came to our table: You may remember the guy who was sitting there in his under-shirt while hitting a Royal Flush at the 2008 Main-Event? Well he still looked the same and I really hoped it wasn't the same undershirt anymore :-/

But to be honest, I liked this guy. He was a very bad poker player but nice at the table. Courtesy to him I made it back to 15k (and he soon left after that) in a hand that he played absoluty awful. Any decent player would have been able to get me off that hand and scoop the pot.

From there I made it to my highest point of 18k when we reached the blinds and antes. With about 3,5 hours of play the level was now at 200/400 (25) when the final hand appeared.

The setup: An asian guy - very aggressive. Had played several pots with him and lost most. Think that he was a good bluffer but didn't had the hand to proof so far. An older Lady - decent player. Had accumulated many chips since she came on our table (and busted one guy). And me of course - the victim.

Asian guy raises to 1,275 from UTG. I find AKo in MP and decide just to call his raise. Split decision here. In many cases I would re-raise with the antes already kicked in but I wanted to see a flop before inversting more (and tried to avoid him re-raising me pre-flop). The Lady just called from the blinds.

Flop comes K-7-5 and the Lady checks. So most probably she had missed the flop completely. Asian guy bets out 3k (as expected). I didn't give him AA here. Maybe AK too or a high pair. Maybe he has just nothing. So a re-raise may take down the pot directly. I make it 11k and the Lady ... calls! What? That was very surprising as I didn't had her on the radar at all anymore. At least for the Asian my plan had worked. He folded. Now I was in deep trouble. With over 25k in the pot and less then 5k behind I was committed anyway to go all-in on the turn. Turn was a 5. She checks again and I go all-in. She calls and I know I am doomed: The Lady shows 77 for a flopped set and turned full house. No help on the river and I am out in the high 600s of 840 players.

Wow, that was a perfect play on her part. Obviously she knew that those two aggressive players will battle on the flop and she could sit back and enjoy. Of course I was unhappy to leave the tournament but I prefer to bust like that against an opponent who played it well rather then against a luckbox.

I don't know if this play has a name but I would call it "reverse sandwich". By just checking the turn and knowing the Asian will bet out anyway she put me in a real bad position. Had she raised I never would have re-raised. I may have called but there was a slight possibility I would have at least survived the hand. She had shown "weakness" and I fell into her trap.

Over to the Rio to check out the action there. Right in time to see Jeff Lissandro winning his bracelet in the Stud-Game. Then looking for Cort in the 2,5k six-handend event (as I have 1% on him). He had little over average and was sitting at the table with Eric Froehlich and later the former Main-Event winner Jerry Yang.

A good number of german speaking players reached the end of Day 1 in this one: Daniel Zink, Lennart Konst, Johannes Strassmann, Thorsten Schuler, Claudio Rinaldi, Hanno Offen and Rob Sterken. But at the top of the list and second in chipcount there was Nasr El Nasr (7th EPT - Prague).

Over to the Omaha High-Low which had at least one poker star on any table. Annie Duke, Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Barry Greenstein, Phil Gordon and many others. Even Phil Hellmuth who made it deep into the event but again missed a good result in a non-hold'em event.

And finally there was the final table of the 5k-No-Limit with the german Fabian Quoss. Fabian went in as the chipleader and rolled over the final table. One of his victims was Ivan Demidov's girl friend Lika Gerasimova. Then he went into the heads-up with a 4:1 chiplead against Brian Lemke. And Brian was the only one to stopp him. He shortened the difference piece by piece and finally turned it around and took down the bracelet. Still a great success for Fabian Quoss who earned $427,911 for his efforts.

So today I wont play a big tournament. Maybe a smaller one but mainly will check out how the action evolves in the Rio.

WSOP 2009 - First day in Vegas

2009-06-08T17:04:00.011+02:00

So I finally arrived after 18 hours of travel. It started 6:50am in the morning with a semi-cooler as KLM couldn't find my booking for some reason. Now I understand why the online check-in didn't work. But they were very friendly and helpful and finally managed to get everything straight.

The stop in Amsterdam was rather short and I was able to sleep most of the 8-hour flight time as I had enough legspace with a free seat next to me. I wasn't to happy to fly via Detroit. I went through Detroit some years ago and I remember it as a very ugly airport. So I was really surprised that all is very modern and nice her now. And the way through Immigration was the fastest I ever had ... only took me 15 minutes (including the usual "pick-up your luggage and release it again" process). Never seen an "Indoor-Tram" at an airport. But here they have it.

The plane from Detroit to Las Vegas was very crowded but even those 4 hours were over sometime and I finally reached Sin City. At this time (4pm local time) I felt very awake and refreshed.

So I went to the Rio first to pick up my media badge (as you only get this until 7pm) and then checked into my hotel. Some unpacking and then over to the Venetian to buy-in for Monday's Deepstack event and having a first look at the tournament area. They have indeed addded a lot of tables and they now reach far into the casino floor. Very noisy environment.

At this time I felt a little tired for the first time but went back to the Rio for some pictures. Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker) was at the final table (and heads-up at this time) in Event #14 ($2,500 Six-handed Limit Hold'em). He went into the heads-up as the favorite but unfortunately had a bad run there and ended up to miss his next bracelet. Congratulations to Brock Parker but I was rooting for Daniel and feel very sorry for him.

Took some more photos at the Ladies event. Many had already left but Maria Ho (@MariaHo) was still in and managed to end the day around average. At the 5k No-Limit I got a shot of Erik Seidel (@Erik_Seidel) who shortly after busted in 22nd place for a $21,026 win. David Pham ended the day second in chips and returns tomorrow for the final 17 of 655 players.

Although I would have enjoyed to stay longer my body then told me that it was time for rest. I managed to get back to my hotel without falling asleep early and the rested for 8 hours straight.

Now it's time for me to pick up some breakfast and prepare for my event today. Seems that I don't have internet access at the Venetian but at least will be able to twitter my results via SMS.

Excitement is growing

2009-06-05T23:29:00.002+02:00

Finally I am on vacation. And the excitement is growing. I am following the WSOP online and enjoyed Twitter, PokerRoad Nation, the live stream and many other options to stay up-to-date with the action. Without question Twitter totally changed the way the WSOP is covered. Beside the usual (good) coverage from PokerNews there's now a lot of "noise" that will give you an up-to-the-minute impression of what's going on inside and outside the Amazon-Room.

I will have another Boogie-Woogie competition near Passau on Saturday. My trip then starts early Sunday morning via Amsterdam and Detroit to end in Vegas about 18 hours later. Of course I will try to update my blog on a frequent base (hopefully daily) but if I have enough wireless coverage I will tweet from my whole trip on a regular base.

Due to the current attendence numbers I decided to skip the Caesars Mega-Stacks (only around 200 players) and play the Venetian DeepStacks (700+ players). If you want to have some action there are still shares available at ChipMeUp! To make the whole thing even more exciting I have a 1% share in Cort's play at the $2,500 6-max (event #19) and a 5% swap with another player in Mondays Venetian DSE event.

That's it for now. Expect my next blog entry coming directly from Sin City :-)

Structure comparison of Vegas summer tournaments

2009-05-24T14:34:00.003+02:00

Some may know that I am a big fan of Snyders' Patience Factor as it is a very good tool to compare the quality of tournament structures. But I am aware that this tool only gives "correct" results for the early stages of a tournament. In general this is a minor problem as the later stages reflect the earlier stages anyway.

But you have to be more careful with your results in deepstacks tournaments and/or those that differ significantly in how flat or steep the blindlevels are. Which is definately the case in the summer Vegas events.

So for my upcoming tournaments in Vegas I added two columns to Snyders' PF-Calculator to get the numbers for Harrington's M=20 and M=10. While Snyder uses the blind-off time for his calculations I now use the starting stack for my considerations. The basic idea is to say "if I can maintain my startingstack how long will I be in the comfortzone and when will I reach push-and-fold mode". This defines the critical area of the tournament and usually the one were bust outs start to come faster (before slowing down again).

In addition I then checked the jumps needed to maintain M=20. Usually you should expect to increase your stack (at least that is the goal of a tournament). So with lower jumps from level to level this goal can be achieved much easier then with big jumps. Again you can find a critical area with a lot of busts combined with those big jumps as the majority can't keep up with the pace of the blinds. For my calculations I only look at the values after M=20 has reached the startingstack as it is usual and neglectible that there are up to 100% jumps in the very early stages.

While this method is not so intuitive like calculating the PF it may help to define the overall quality. So let's have a look at the Vegas events in June:

I looked always at the lowest buy-In events which is the $340 for Venetian and Caesars, $235 for the Golden Nugget.

Venetian DSE III (12,000 startchips & 40 min. levels)
PF=23.23
M=20 reached at level 4
M=10 reached at level 6

Blind-Off Time (Snyder) = 289.20 min.
Critical time frame = 160 – 240 min.
Critical jumpfactor = 75% to level 4 & 63.64% to level 6 (160 min. & 240 min.)

Remark: The blind jumps at the DSE are surprisingly wild. Between 33-50% in the early stages and then 75% and 63% during the critical time frame. From there they almost never go above 39% and even go as low as 11%.

Caesars Mega-Stacks (15,000 startchips & 50 min. levels)
PF=28.22
M=20 reached at level 3
M=10 reached at level 5

Blind-Off Time (Snyder) = 318.75 min.
Critical time frame = 150 – 250 min.
Critical jumpfactor = 55.56% to level 8 (420 min.)

Remark: The Mega-Stacks never jump more then 55% (even with the antes kicking in) and stay quite constant. Jumps in later stages go as low as 29%

Golden Nugget Grand Series (12,000 startchips & 40 min. levels)
PF=27.17
M=20 reached at level 5
M=10 reached at level 7

Blind-Off Time (Snyder) = 312.73 min.
Critical time frame = 200 – 280 min.
Critical jumpfactor = 55.56% to level 6 & to level 8 (240 min. & 320 min.)

Remark: Although not counting this for the evaluation it should be noted that there is a 133% jump to level 4 (just before the critical time is reached)! Later stages show everything from 15% to 71% in a wild mix.

Conclusion
Taking all into account it looks like the Venetian is slightly ahead in terms of structure this year. With critical time frame and critical jumpfactor almost identical you have to survice just one steep cliff (lasting 1h 20min). From there it's an much easier sail then.

For Caesars you have to survive another critical time after 240 min and even from there have to deal with higher jumps then the Venetian in general.

The Nugget has the weirdest structure of all. With the critical time frame and the critical jumpfactor overlapping there is a extended critical period from 200 min. till 320 min (2h!). The big jump before that isn't helpful either.

Any feedback on this approach is welcome. I also posted this on 2+2 in the "structure comparison" thread (page 2) if you prefer to respond there.

Addition (on May 25th, 00:47am):
Thanks to "dcarp" for making me aware of an important fact by sending me a private note on 2+2.

I talked about the difference in the jumps from level to level which are 11-39% (Venetian) and 29-55% (Caesars) as shown above. Please don't forget that this accumulates over a longer time. So with the Venetian having overall slower jumps Caesars starts to run away much faster the longer the tournament lasts.

E.g. during level 13 a M=20 is 162k @ Venetian but a whooping 420k @ Caesars. After re-reading my posting I think "...and even from there have to deal with higher jumps then the Venetian in general" doesn't emphasize this fact enough.

But then, I still think that the early stages are very important. If you have to get lucky early to reach the later stages I never call a tournament deepstack. To close out the luck factor you need a sufficient amount of time to accumulate chips. What I tried was to extent the reach of the PF (which doesn't go very deep into a tournament) to a somewhat thorough consideration.

Sometimes you just can't win

2009-05-22T19:18:00.003+02:00

Went to the Masters Warmup tournament at the Oceanscard Casino near Passau. Not too bad of a structure with 10k chips and 30 min. levels. Unfortunately they still have the awful jump from 100/200 to 200/400(25) ... hope they fix this some day to make it a real good tournament. 38 players created a prizepool of €3,800 awarding six paid spots with about 1.2k for the winner.

This was a strange tournament for me. I got a lot of playable cards but beside AK two times there were no premium hands during the first levels. My highest pair was a pair of 8's. I connected to the flop sometimes but never good enough to face a strong competition. So my stack went back and forth between 8k and 13k for a long time. Already in the awful 200/400(25) level I managed to get a break. Raised it to 1,000 with KK and got an all-in from a guy with 12k. Of course he could have had aces but based on his previous plays I estimated that he was trying to protect a vulnerable hand. So I called and he showed AKo. No further help for him and I was up to 24k.

From there I took down some nice pots and peeked at 32k. In the following two levels I was rather card dead so my stack went down to 24k. Still nothing to panic about. Average at this time was 20k. Then during the 800/1,600(200) level I picked up QQ and was faced with a 9k all-in from a short-stack. Of course I called and was delighted to see his TT ... until another Ten hit on the river. Down to 16k. Now it was time to panic. No, not really ;-) But this was a real cooler. Still managed to bring my stack back to 24k again.

Finally I received AA in first position. Raised it to 4k and got a re-raise all-in from the button who had about the same amount of chips then me (24k). Of course I called and he showed QQ. Nice! Until a Queen appeared on the flop. Out in 18th position instead of being among the chipleaders with 52k. What the hell do people think I may have when I raise from UTG? Sure he couldn't re-raise with a 24k stack but he also should have put into account that I may have a real strong hand. To be honest, I loved his call ;-) only didn't like the result.

As said in the title "sometimes you just can't win". Today I played a good game with no major mistakes. There was nothing I could have made different to alter the outcome. Still it was a good training for Vegas and I am more and more comfortable with the way I play. My current style allows for a lot of play with less risk even when I don't get premium cards. Can you believe that none of my pairs improved to a set on that day? In addition this style allows to trap people easily. Unfortunately traps can fire back some times.

Most probably this was my last live game before Vegas ... just 16 more days. Starting to get excited. Don't forget that there are still shares available on Chip Me Up. Altered my plans a little. Now the final schedule includes tournaments at Caesars, Venetian and Golden Nugget.

Although I love the Caesars poker room I don't play the Mega-Stacks exclusively this year for some reasons: First is the fact that I don't like that Harrahs takes away 10k from the prizepool for a main-event seat. I would prefer that this money is distributed between those ITM. Second is that the Venetian really has improved their structure in the middle stages. It's time to test them again. In addition I found it somewhat exhausting to go to the same place over and over every day during last years trip. A change of venue is always refreshing. I also added the Golden Nugget as they offer a very good structure in relation to the buy-in.

Playing at the Golden Nugget is somewhat like coming back home for me. The Golden Nugget was the place were I played my first ever hand of poker in 2004. Being a cardcounter at that time I never expected that the game of Poker could influence my live so much. Now I only need a major cash in Las Vegas. I had some nice final tables and cashes in other places but in Vegas I still miss a big hit. Maybe this year! ;-)

Some random stuff

2009-05-15T00:42:00.005+02:00

Not much has happend in the last weeks so this is just a little wrap up and some funny stuff to read.

Of course I now get more and more excited about my upcoming Vegas trip. All is set and booked. The plans for my tournaments are made and staking offers are set up on CmU ;-))

In addition I am now officially approved to get media credentials for the WSOP during my stay. Not sure what kind of stories I will/can deliver but I try to do my best to find some good stuff. This will be especially interesting for my readers who can read german as I will write some stuff for Pokerfirma.de.

Last night I really owned our homegame. Took out the first guy after three hands and then all of the others except of two. Of course I won that tournament ;-) Sure it's helpful to get good hands and in addition hit on the flop heavily. In the second tournament my cards weren't that good anymore but still good enough to make second here. Nice addition to my Vegas bankroll ... thanks guys!

You may remember that I talked about Twitter and twittering poker pros not long ago. Twitter still rocks and more and more join Twitterverse. One of the newest additions is @DocPoker (Michael Keiner) who hasn't twittered yet but will do during the WSOP.

Like a funny Twitter story? O.K here it is! This one has happend just a few minutes ago between @allenkessler (Allen Kessler) who is playing in a tournament and @savagepoker (Matt Savage) who is the tournament director in that event:

@allenkessler on Thu 14 May 23:53
What was @savagepoker thinking when he scheduled both 8 or better tourneys on the same day a few hours apart?

@savagepoker on Fri 15 May 00:07
@allenkessler I was hoping you bust out so you can play them both!

shortly after:

@allenkessler on Fri 15 May 00:24
@savagepoker why are tourneys set up to give more play in nolimit than limit events...

@savagepoker on Fri 15 May 00:30
@allenkessler why don't you walk 50 feet over here and ask me :-)

@allenkessler on Fri 15 May 00:33
@savagepoker afraid to miss a hand

...this is more entertaining then any live reporting can be! Unfortunately the twitter rules at the WSOP are more strict but you can still expect many interesting and funny stories in the Twitterverse during the WSOP.

WSOP Media Conference Call Breakdown

2009-04-29T01:00:00.004+02:00

With just 4 weeks to go until the start of the 2009 WSOP there was the annual media conference held by Jeffrey Pollack, Seth Plansky, Jack Effel and one guy from ESPN. Beside a lot of already known stuff (for those who read the news) there were still some interesting and new announcements:

The capacity of tables has been expanded again. The total is now at 306 tables. Again the majority of these will be in the Amazon-Room. In addition Harrahs is now using the full Brasilia-Room (95 tables) and the Miranda-Room with 56 tables.

Sit&Go's are now moved to Brasilia and there will be up to 48 tables for SnG's starting at $120. Cash game capacity has been expanded by 10 to 75 tables total.

For the $1,000 event Harrahs expects something between 5,000 to 6,000 players. In general it was said the the pre-registration numbers are up from last year. So this is a first indicator that we might get a real good number of participants again.

As already made public players get now 3x the buy-in as their starting-stack. This is valid for all events including the main-event and the 50K H.O.R.S.E. Harrahs also tries to improve the payout structure but this is not completely finalized yet. But there will be still least 10% in the money with a minimum payout between 1.75-2x of the buy-in.

The Champions Invitational (of former main-event winners) will be held on May 31st and June 1st. The winner will receive the newly created Binion Cup ... which will be presented by Jack Binion himself. No decision yet if this is a one time event or will be part of future WSOP years.

Regarding the TOC (Tournament of Champions) that was canceled by Harrahs some years ago there will be an announcement for a new kind of "All-Star-Event" quite soon.

To honor the bracelet winners better then in the last years there will be now a bracelet ceremony in the Amazon-Room at 2pm on every day.

As already known the delayed final table is back and will be held from Nov. 7th to 10th at the Penn & Teller Theater. Some more informations about the particular timetable will be released once the WSOP has been started.

The announcement of the TV coverage feels a bit like a dissapointment. While the general number of hours remains the same the selection is somewhat poor. Only the Champions Invitational, the 40K event, Ante-Up for Africa and the Main-Event will be televised. Seems that ESPN goes the save route to ensure to have televised events with a lot of "known names". In light of the improved structure this may be a short-sighted decision as we may see the Pro's rising again this year...

The good news on the other hand is that live streaming (via ESPN360 and other sources) will be back. No more details yet and most probably not free of charge.

Another point that may raise eyebrows is the way the WSOP handles penalties. Keeping a detailed log about all penalties given to certain players is a very good thing (and allows for escalating penalties). The new "one hand penalty" is good too. Before there was either a warning or a "one round penalty" but nothing in between. But saying that a Pro (who should know better) may be punished different then a first-timer sounds somewhat strange. In an example Jack Effel said that "acting out-of-turn by a first timer maybe worth just a warning while a pro or regular WSOP player may receive a one hand penalty". While I can see the idea behind it, it opens the door for a huge grey area and many people who may feel getting treated worse then others.

Rooms are still available at the Rio and current rates are told to be between $69 midweek and $109 on weekends. But due to the weak economy cheap rooms can be found everywere in Las Vegas!

And of course the "Twitternation" has reached the WSOP. There will be an official Twitter account (@WSOPliveupdates) reporting from the felt as well as @JeffreyPollack himself (who stopped blogging and is now twittering). But the device rules for the WSOP are still remaining. Therefore absolutely no twittering is allowed while at the table!

Hope you enjoyed that little breakdown from the media conference and see you in Vegas in about 4 weeks.