Wasn't my day

Everybody had fun at the tournament. 29 players showed up. I of course busted out first just before the first break. The starting tables played 6-handed.

First major comfortation ended badly for me when an opponent (with K9s) who probably thought I was on a total bluff called both my bets on the flop (7 3 2 rainbow) and on the turn (J and brought my opponent a flush-draw) putting him almost all-in. On river he paired his nines to beat my flopped top pair (I had A7). I made a rebuy after that.

I lost most of my rebuy chips trying to bluff out a two pair. The funny thing was that I after I got reraised on the river I analyzed based on the betting of the hand (speaking alound) and came up to the conclusion that my opponent had possibly spiked a King on the turn (however in fact that had made him top two pair :). Then I reraised all in (raised 4000 to a pot of ~5000) trying to fold a flopped top pair or maybe even the king, but alas my opponent pondered a while and called. I had my opponent covered and was left with 500 chips or so.

Almost immediately I pushed with King-rag in mid position and doubled up to 1000. Then I found myself with 88 in the big blinds (blinds were 100/200) and the button raised to 750. Of course I pushed all in. My opponent had K9 and spiked that nine on the river.

So no heads-up yesterday.

Live tournament

I'm organizing a live tournament for tonight at work. This is the 7th tournament I am organizing and we're expecting around 35 people to show up. A lot of more would want to come, but unfortunately we currently have room for only 5 tables. We could have more than 7 people per table, but having more people per table would bog the tables down.

I like live tournaments but these work tournaments are a bit more like crap shoots because the number of hands one gets to play is quite low. Rotating dealer and shuffling cards takes a lot of time from playing. Loose play is almost a prerequsite because you can't wait for premium hands. Of course people are mostly there to have fun and loose play fits this goal quite well.

Last 5 HU sessions

Went well. I won 4 out of 5. So my totals are now 12 wins to 9 loses.

I wonder what would be the best format to post the hand histories ?

Should I just upload the histories as files to this site and reference from posts with links or post them fully as separate blog posts here ? Any good suggestions are welcome.

My Poker History & HU

I've been playing Poker for a year and half now, spending quite a lot of my free time with it. I first played small stake (2-10$) 1-5 table NL SNGs @ PokerStars with some success, but then switched to FullTilt.

I've built my roll playing limit holdem (3/6) and lost most of it in short-handed NL games :). I've been using PokerTracker to track my play and I my results say that I am definately not very good at shorthanded NL play.

A couple of weeks ago I talked with a friend of mine who has been playing NL a lot and suggested that I try HU NL SNGs to improve my game reading skills in NL one to ones. I've been quite interested in NL games (even though I've lost a bunch :) so I was intrigued.

So, last weekend I started playing HU NL SNGs to hone my skills in one-to-one battles.

I experimented first with Poker Academy, against the 'better' computer opponents, but found out quite quickly their patterns and how to beat them. (I won 16/20 of the matches I played). So it seems that as HU the computer oppontents are really bad.

Then I switched to NL HU SNGs on FullTilt where I've played 17 HU's from which I have won 8. I've found HU to be quite enjoyable even though I have played not too many matches, so I'll think I'll stick to it for a while. Also I started this blog to maybe share my experiences about HU (as there was some talk at 2+2 about starting a 'peer review' blogroll about HU poker) and maybe poker in general.