Taking John out by the ROOTS

In my heat the pros were my good self and someone named John O'Shea, (we'll come to him later...) the celebrities were the Tip hurler Pat Kerwick, and John Kenny the well-known sports presenter. To be honest with I didn't really have much of a strategy going into the tournament; I knew the structure was fast so I was just approaching it the same way I would a Turbo Sit 'n' Go by playing pretty snug early on and then just try and play optimal push/fold stuff (and take advantage of those who weren't) later when we're short-handed and the blinds are bigger.

As is the case in most Sit 'n' Gos there weren't too many interesting hands to speak of, this is just basically because the structure too shallow to facilitate complex hands developing. As I said, I was just playing tight enough and picked up a few small pots early which was a nice cushion.

John went the other way and quickly went to work on bluffing off half his stack against one of the internet qualifiers. While later I opened UTG with JJ and John quickly jammed in his stack. I made the routine call (fully knowing I had him crushed) and he flips his 1010 over with a big smile on his face...proud as punch.

Amazingly I held on to knock him out, then took John Kenny out in 4th; my A9 holding against his KJ, and I found myself three-handed with the internet qualifiers. Both of their names elude me unfortunately but I think they both played very well in the heat; with the younger one playing more of an MTT style - which was a bit too tight for this structure of poker, and the older one playing very loose, and as it turned out bluffing me numerous times.

With the average stack being about 10bb's I had to make quite a few all-in pushes with very speculative hands to keep me building, and I felt at that point I definitely was playing the most aggressively and felt I had a decent edge. I lost a big pot with KJ to A8 which would've seen me go HU with a huge chip-lead, but then pushed my way back in and eventually won a big pot with 1010 vs. QJ. This left me HU with the tighter player and with an almost 3-1 chip advantage. After a few un-called all-ins back and forth I finally snapped his off with K10 and held against his Q7.

All in all I think I played fine in this heat. There were certainly no heroics or anything but I feel I played well three-handed pushing quite a few hands others wouldn't have. Clearly it didn't hurt that I won all my all-ins bar one, but to be fair I did have the best of it every time bar once. Anyways, it was a fun tourney and I'm looking forward to the final heat which I think is on the 23rd of Oct but I'm not sure. Also I know Andy Black, Roy Brindley and Bernard Dunne will be joining me in the final. Should be Fun!

In other news online PLO still going very well and I'm going to Morocco on Sunday for the WPT over there and maybe an hour or two at the pool.

Reesy