Hello my name is dirkb. Yakshemash !

My god. How is it possible that there are infinite sports writers in Germany, and ALL of them are clueless. Both the analysis leading up to and the coverage of the finals are so pathetic I find it infuriating that they are being paid to do this.
On the largest sports website www.sport1.de, for example, I found the following information :
"The finals is also a matchup of the two inspirational team leaders Gerrard and Kaka" ! How interesting. So the leader on Milan is neither Maldini (who had won 2 Champions League titels before adding the third last night), nor Seedorf who just won a record 4th, or maybe Nesta, Pirlo, Gattuso, but instead 25-year-old Kaka. Heh.
Or how about a commentary on Spiegel Online by their best soccer writer Christoph Biermann today suggesting that the Milan midfield of Pirlo, Ambrosini, Seedorf and Gattuso suffered a sudden collective loss of form, which turned the game into a boring affair. Yes, (Liverpool coach) Rafa Benitez sacrificed a second striker just to let both Mascherano and Xabi Alonso tighten up the middle, and OBVIOUSLY when there are two crowded five-player midfields including combat players like Mascherano and Gattuso there's not going to be free-flowing attack soccer. This doesn't mean it's not a good game. The really pitiful part of the statement, however, is that it suggests that Gattuso had a bad game, along with the rest of the Milan midfield. How ridiculous. Few players have ever dominated games more than he dominated this one, it's just not quite as visible when you do it on defense. Poor Harry Kewell. Recover from injury, get brought in when your team is down a goal, then find out your left wing is covered by Gattuso. After losing his first three balls he didn't seem to even want to be on the pitch any more.
Aaaaaaaaanyway, I enjoyed the game. I thought Liverpool did really well to make a game of it, and looked more likely to score until Xabi Alonso made that one small error in fouling Kaka in that position, which is more than many suggested they would be able to do. I thought Benitez' setup was brilliant too, having Gerrard in a deep striking role. Sadly, it just wasn't enough.

I really should play more poker. I'm barely doing well enough to get by, when by all means I should be a gazillionaire. For the last two weeks, I have intended to make my way to Hannover casino to play in an incredibly soft 5/10 NL game. Somehow there have always been other options - playing soccer, playing modo, meeting friends for coffee, meeting friends for beer, or just any of the thousands of things that I enjoy more than poker, although none of them pay me hundreds of Euros an evening. Wish i was greedier ! I need greed coaching !
Anyway, I stopped playing 1knl too, partially because I started losing sometimes, partially because I couldn't play 'tight' enough anymore like i had when I first started playing that game. I'm still up about 5k in that game and maybe I'll get excited abobut playing that again sometime soon.
Last weekend I played some 5/10 SH limit on stars to work off their new bonus and an old bonus I had (yes, I know that's kinda silly). Randomly won about $1500. I think that will be a good enough excuse to not play again for the rest of the month, especially considering there's a soccer field trip coming up next weekend :)
'Til next month...

So last friday I was bored at work and decided I would play some online poker. Since there isn't a 2/4 or 3/6 full ring game, I had to play 5/10. Since then, I'm up around $7k in about 4500 hands. It actually was $8500 before I had a semi-annoying losing session last night. Can't really say what went wrong - I somehow got stuck playing a few drawing hands like : early raiser, three (!) callers (this is very unusual since it is a tight game), I have QJs in the blind, raiser bets less than half the pot and theres a caller, I have to call but never find a spot to make a play at the pot, yadda yadda yadda. So anyway, lost one and a half stacks last night. Guess that's not a big deal.

I have a bunch of hands that I will post below later, since I am clueless how they should be played correctly.

I still can't seem to play AA - this time I'm not losing with them but I can never ever EVER get any action. When I reraise, they fold. When I make a standard open raise (and I am a fairly active raiser), they fold and if not they fold to the continuation bet. When I tried limping utg, once a big stack raised behind me and I felt I needed to reraise against this particular player/stack and he folded, and the other time it got folded around to the BB (!). Won $13.75 there.

Time to look at just poor my performance has been this year so far.
I've played what I consider a good bit of online poker. I don't know how many hands I played, but it wasn't even enough to make the first VIP level on Party, since that requires earning 10,000 party points and I collected about 9,600. I played almost exclusively on Party and currently have $1400 more in that account than I did on January 1st. That's not including bonus money and whatever I used to purchase modo product, so I think I've won about $2500. Not exciting but at least not losing.

I didn't play live poker at all in January, only a few sessions in February, but picked it up a bit in March, going to Harzburg twice and to Hamburg twice. In total I won 2100 Euros in seven sessions (although most of them were only a few hours), minus whatever I spent on gas and such. So, in total I'm only up about €4k, but again, at least not losing.

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.

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.

I'm sick. At home. Not sick enough to be in bed, just a sore throat and some coughing and that stuff.
So i want to play some poker, but party for SOME reason doesn't work for me, so I play on Stars and UB, knowing that I've done nothing but lose there recently... Obviously, I lose. Not terribly much, maybe $300 altogether, but still annoying. On top of that, I kept timing out during Magic Online drafts and lost like four of them today, and now that I want to play more they've been updating for the last eighthundred hours. Bleh.

Oh yea, saturday : we ended up going for a nice dinner first and then headed to the casino at ten. There were still seats so we played for a while (and got to laugh at the embarrassingly poor dealers). Won like €400.