Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Schedule and Esplanade
Went to Hamburg this past weekend to play at the Esplanade or potentially the Schenefeld tourney series. More below.
Schedule for the next few weeks (work in progress) :
March 30 through April 1st I'm going to try to go to Hamburg again, since I had more fun than I can remember having in a long time.
I am spending the easter weekend in Bad Zwischenahn with my family, and might try to get in a game there. Just looked on their website, apparently they now spread 2/4 NL instead of the 5/10PL mixed game that also featured 2-ante-PLStud. That can't be a good thing but with poker's rising popularity I guess it can't be helped.
Also in Bad Zwischenahn, on April 28/29 they have a Spring Poker Festival or something. It is a 500 buy-in, 200 rebuy (wtf?) tourney. Sounds awesome.
So yea, I arrived in Hamburg at 9pm on friday, just in time to miss the start of the cash game at the Esplanade. There was only one table going since most people were in Schenefeld for the 800 EUR tournament, and I got a seat after a short wait while Marco was still watching on the sidelines. I only played one noteworthy hand :
It's 2/4 NL and I limp Kh2h after 4 limpers, the button and the blinds limp as well. The flop comes Th 7h 7c and is checked around. The turn card is the Qh giving me the second-best flush, and I bet 30. The button calls as does one of the early limpers. The river is the 3s, the board is now T77Q3 with 3 hearts, and the early limper suddenly pushes 130 Euros into the 120 Euro pot. I pause for a moment and then call. Suddenly, the button instantly goes all-in for 300 more! I think for a while and fold - obviously he is representing a hand that is better than mine, and he can't even buy the pot since there is a player all-in. Obviously, he shows 9h5h while the limper has AhAs and I make a laydown that costs me 700 Euros. In retrospect, I should have realized that while he could well have had any number of strong hands like 77 or AXhh or 33 I should have included all weaker flushes and probably a slowrolled flopped trips as well, meaning I should have called considering I was getting 2-1. Oh well.
I played many more hands poorly, see below.
After about an hour of play it became obvious that there wasn't going to be a seat for Marco, so we left to go to Schenefeld since after the tournament there were obviously going to be cash games. We managed to get into a 2.5/5NL game within thirty minutes, but nothing too eventful happened. I got a few medium-strength hands to hold, probably lost some value here and there, and went home early at about two, a 45 Euro winner. Yeehaw.
On saturday we both got a seat at the Esplanade and again played until about two in the morning, and the game got to be really fun. It develops into a deepstack low-blind game with at least five or six people at the table playing wild games forcing you into lots of post-flop decisions. Like most 'young' (yeayea shutit), 'internet' (again), players, I'm not really used to that kind of thing, but it makes it a really fun game to play in. I was involved in lots of hands, of course, but one that I remember particularly and messed up big (i think) went as follows :
I limp 77 utg (yea tight-aggressive at its best), almost the whole table follows suit, and the button raises to 16. Everyone calls, and the flop is 6 or 7 handed. The flop is 6c7c7d. Yea, nh. I check, everyone checks to the raiser, who bets 80. This is an unusually large bet, I just call but to my dismay everyone else folds. The turn is a bad card for me, the 5c. I check again, he bets 150, another large bet. I consider minraising but don't think I will get him to continue the hand, so I call again. The river is another terrible card, the 8h. I don't think there's any way he will bet unless he has the straight or the flush, so I bet into him and he open folds KK (KcKh). Yikes.
As the hand played out, I played it as poorly as possible on all streets (except preflop). On the flop I wasn't expecting a big bet like 80 since he hadn't done that before, so I figured I could call a bet like 30 or 40 and would get at least a couple more callers. I could have bet out something between 10 and 20 and probably got everyone to call, and THEN called the raise from the initial raiser.
Then, when we were heads-up on the turn and he made the large bet -I would have checkraised a smaller bet-, I figured I would lose him with a check-raise (as I was later told, this was probably also wrong), but could get him to call a river bet if the river wasn't scary or even check-raise on the river. Sadly, that 8 was hardly a non-scary card, so I ended up winning the absolute nut-low-minimum. Great.
Schedule for the next few weeks (work in progress) :
March 30 through April 1st I'm going to try to go to Hamburg again, since I had more fun than I can remember having in a long time.
I am spending the easter weekend in Bad Zwischenahn with my family, and might try to get in a game there. Just looked on their website, apparently they now spread 2/4 NL instead of the 5/10PL mixed game that also featured 2-ante-PLStud. That can't be a good thing but with poker's rising popularity I guess it can't be helped.
Also in Bad Zwischenahn, on April 28/29 they have a Spring Poker Festival or something. It is a 500 buy-in, 200 rebuy (wtf?) tourney. Sounds awesome.
So yea, I arrived in Hamburg at 9pm on friday, just in time to miss the start of the cash game at the Esplanade. There was only one table going since most people were in Schenefeld for the 800 EUR tournament, and I got a seat after a short wait while Marco was still watching on the sidelines. I only played one noteworthy hand :
It's 2/4 NL and I limp Kh2h after 4 limpers, the button and the blinds limp as well. The flop comes Th 7h 7c and is checked around. The turn card is the Qh giving me the second-best flush, and I bet 30. The button calls as does one of the early limpers. The river is the 3s, the board is now T77Q3 with 3 hearts, and the early limper suddenly pushes 130 Euros into the 120 Euro pot. I pause for a moment and then call. Suddenly, the button instantly goes all-in for 300 more! I think for a while and fold - obviously he is representing a hand that is better than mine, and he can't even buy the pot since there is a player all-in. Obviously, he shows 9h5h while the limper has AhAs and I make a laydown that costs me 700 Euros. In retrospect, I should have realized that while he could well have had any number of strong hands like 77 or AXhh or 33 I should have included all weaker flushes and probably a slowrolled flopped trips as well, meaning I should have called considering I was getting 2-1. Oh well.
I played many more hands poorly, see below.
After about an hour of play it became obvious that there wasn't going to be a seat for Marco, so we left to go to Schenefeld since after the tournament there were obviously going to be cash games. We managed to get into a 2.5/5NL game within thirty minutes, but nothing too eventful happened. I got a few medium-strength hands to hold, probably lost some value here and there, and went home early at about two, a 45 Euro winner. Yeehaw.
On saturday we both got a seat at the Esplanade and again played until about two in the morning, and the game got to be really fun. It develops into a deepstack low-blind game with at least five or six people at the table playing wild games forcing you into lots of post-flop decisions. Like most 'young' (yeayea shutit), 'internet' (again), players, I'm not really used to that kind of thing, but it makes it a really fun game to play in. I was involved in lots of hands, of course, but one that I remember particularly and messed up big (i think) went as follows :
I limp 77 utg (yea tight-aggressive at its best), almost the whole table follows suit, and the button raises to 16. Everyone calls, and the flop is 6 or 7 handed. The flop is 6c7c7d. Yea, nh. I check, everyone checks to the raiser, who bets 80. This is an unusually large bet, I just call but to my dismay everyone else folds. The turn is a bad card for me, the 5c. I check again, he bets 150, another large bet. I consider minraising but don't think I will get him to continue the hand, so I call again. The river is another terrible card, the 8h. I don't think there's any way he will bet unless he has the straight or the flush, so I bet into him and he open folds KK (KcKh). Yikes.
As the hand played out, I played it as poorly as possible on all streets (except preflop). On the flop I wasn't expecting a big bet like 80 since he hadn't done that before, so I figured I could call a bet like 30 or 40 and would get at least a couple more callers. I could have bet out something between 10 and 20 and probably got everyone to call, and THEN called the raise from the initial raiser.
Then, when we were heads-up on the turn and he made the large bet -I would have checkraised a smaller bet-, I figured I would lose him with a check-raise (as I was later told, this was probably also wrong), but could get him to call a river bet if the river wasn't scary or even check-raise on the river. Sadly, that 8 was hardly a non-scary card, so I ended up winning the absolute nut-low-minimum. Great.
Monday, March 12, 2007
March Madness......NOOOOT
March has so far been incredibly uneventful poker-wise. I played live once, in a 2-4 NL game in Bad Harzburg. It was the nittiest live game I had ever seen in Germany, but fortunately the one idiot managed to spill some his money my way so at least I made 350 Euros there in a few hours.
Online I have mostly been playing about 100 hands of 5/10 limit hold'em every other morning waiting for my turn to use the bathroom and am up about $1k with that. Sadly, I'm down about $900 playing 400SHNL one day when I got stacked FIVE times by my foes hitting their two-outers on the turn.
Not anything special, just harsh when it happens a lot. Guess I should be happy only losing $900 that day.
Went to play in a Magic Grand Prix in Amsterdam last weekend, too. It was twoheaded giant sealed/draft, which sounds like fun in theory but is actually just a terrible format. We dropped at 1-1 after round 2 because even if we won out we would have had to play until 3 in the morning and had no desire to do so without having eaten. Of course, after we did, they changed the structure from 9 rounds to 7 rounds so that no one would have to do just that. Thanks.
Online I have mostly been playing about 100 hands of 5/10 limit hold'em every other morning waiting for my turn to use the bathroom and am up about $1k with that. Sadly, I'm down about $900 playing 400SHNL one day when I got stacked FIVE times by my foes hitting their two-outers on the turn.
Not anything special, just harsh when it happens a lot. Guess I should be happy only losing $900 that day.
Went to play in a Magic Grand Prix in Amsterdam last weekend, too. It was twoheaded giant sealed/draft, which sounds like fun in theory but is actually just a terrible format. We dropped at 1-1 after round 2 because even if we won out we would have had to play until 3 in the morning and had no desire to do so without having eaten. Of course, after we did, they changed the structure from 9 rounds to 7 rounds so that no one would have to do just that. Thanks.
