Andy Ward Archives

John Fox said something about how the best time to play was 3am on the last Friday of the month, and that playing just that hour every month wouldn't necessarily be what you wanted to do, but it would still be profitable!

I'm quite enjoying this series of The Poker Show, but if Jesse makes one more comment about how it's a "disgrace" that there are no UK players in the Caesars Cup team, then I'll have to phone up and give him some GBH to the ear hole.

My online effort over the last two months can best be described as "half-hearted". Still, if you put the two months together it pretty much amounts to one decent month, in terms of volume anyway. Nothing much happened in the way of results and I ended up making about $3K. It's funny how that's pretty much an after-tax wage for a lot of people, but in our world it's just a bit of random noise.

My game has felt out of synch since coming back from Vegas - it's hard to explain but it's just a sense that I'm doing things that worked (enough of the time) a year ago, but now they don't. Too often I make a play, then when it's on my opponent I immediately think "this isn't going to work", and it doesn't.

I enjoyed this documentary which someone linked to in a thread on 2+2. It's one of those "pick 4 people and follow them through the WSOP" jobs, in this case Isabelle Mercier, Fabrice Soulier, Luca Pagano and (somewhat incongruously) Joe Hachem. This takes place in 2006 when Hachem was the "defending champ".

If it's not too late, anyway :-). I've seen them (semi-final and final) and they both make me look like a dork. Partly because I have this habit of swaying back and forward in my chair like a 6-year-old, but mostly because of the way the poker hands look.

On reflection, I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over a tournament in which the following happened:

- I lost 45K "Sklansky Chips" in preflop all-in situations.
- I flopped one set in 22 hours and didn't get on.
- I had a net chip loss with AA over the tournament.
- I had a ridiculously tough table on Day 1.

Sigh. Frustrating but there wasn't much I could do really. Briefly and without trying to spin anything :

I had a great day 1 and finished with 96K even though this looked very unlikely at one point. To start with, Phil Galfond sat down 2 to my left, probably one of the 10 players in the entire event I least want to be on my left playing 300BBs. On his left was a player he obviously knew, who turned out to be Shannon Shorr. Two to my right was a player who entered a ton of pots; initially I thought he might be the value but on the first break I found out it was Scott Seiver. Seat 1 was playing really well too (as Shannon says in his blog).

[x] Gus Hansen haircut
[ ] $130K (can't get it off Stars in time, which is probably for the best)
[x] $25K
[x] Matches
[x] T-shirts with "LDO", "FML" and "ZOMG" written on them
[x] 7-disc Tarantino box set
[ ] Noise reducing headphones, can't find them skjdfbnskjfbdbd
[x] Liqourice comforts and Silk Cut for beleagured front-line troops

Let us gogogogo.

So yeah, shipped the Warm Up on Sunday for $130k which was great. It was a strange one, for most of the night I had a better shot on Party and I was focusing more on that. When I busted Party in 18th there were still 80 players left in the Warm Up; the Party tournament only had 1,200 runners compared to 4,000 in the WU so it ran much quicker. From that point I grinded along until I suddenly won two flips to take me from 23/26 to 2/26 in five minutes.

My interview with Jesse and Matt on the Poker Show is now online, go to The Poker Show Archives, Show 20 Part 4, starting around 19:20. It was a fun interview to do because it was live and unedited so I could say some stuff that would usually be edited out in for example a TV format, so I was able to say that 10-handed live NL tournaments suck, and so on.

Meanwhile massive congrats to JP Kelly who scooped a bracelet in the $1500 PL. I remember JP turning up at Luton aged 18 and just tearing the tournaments up from Day 1, really pleased to see him take this one down!

In case anyone is on tenterhooks waiting to find out whether I cashed in on the ECOOP $400 PLO, you can relax - I didn't. I had another good run, but fell short in 37th.

The overall standard was a lot less strong than in the $1000 event; I saw more than one player ship the lot in with unimproved AA in the first level or two. I doubled up with two and bottom pair, nut flush draw and an over card vs top two pair - standard Omaha 55-45, I have to mention the over card because that's what got there on the river! I also hit a 12-outer on the river, after getting it in against a disguised set on the turn and reached a high point of 42K chips.

As you can probably guess by the fact that this post didn't appear first thing on Monday morning, sadly I didn't win the $1000 PLO at the weekend. I had a good crack at it, but busted out in standard PLO 52-48 fashion.

The tournament was incredibly deep to start with, 10k stacks and 10-20 blinds, so moving up to 12k within the first couple of levels was a decent effort. Unfortunately, from there it was a steady drain of death by missed flops and I have to admit, a few loose pre-flop calls when the blinds kicked up to around 75-150.

In the last hand we're going to look at this week, we're down to 20BBs when we find a playable hand in a raised pot and have to choose between calling and re-raising to commit. With a 12.5k stack and 300-600 blinds, I picked up 9s 8d 6h 5h in third position.

UTG, who started the hand with 10K, opened the pot to 2100. I decided to re-raise the pot, a 7k stack behind me called the re-raise and the original raiser also called, leaving only 3k behind. The flop came 9h 6c 5c so the rest went in. UTG had A532 with hearts, the caller behind had AKKT with clubs, and I filled up on the river to triple up.

As we get deeper into the tournament and the blinds go up, there's less room for multi-street play and, like in any poker tournament really, hand selection and being the aggressor becomes more important.

The next hand we're looking at, the blinds were 80-160 and I picked up Kd Ts 7d 6s third to speak. UTG limped, pot raised to 720, and it was folded around to the limper who called. The flop came Td 8c 2h, he checked, I bet the pot and he folded.

Today we're going to look at two hands, there wasn't much action in either, but I think both could have been troublesome had I over-played them.

The first was fairly straightforward, but it's such a common situation, that it's well worth hearing what the pros think. A little later in the tournament, I had 7500 chips, blinds were 60-120 when I picked up As Ah 7d 2d UTG. I open-limped, there was no raise, and six players took the flop Jc 3d 2c. I check-folded my hand.

With the ECOOP $1000 (One Rebuy) PLO coming up on Saturday, it's time for me to get some much-needed advice and tips from Pot Limit Omaha World Champion Marty Smyth (not a bad start!) and high-stakes PLO cash player Dave Callaghan.

Every day this week I'm going to put forward a hand I played in a PLO tournament recently for the guys to dissect. The first hand is the one I mentioned in my last post.

To quickly recap, it was a full 9-handed table, playing 15-30 with 5000 chips. There was a limper, a pot raise and then two callers to me in the big blind with 8s 7d 6d 5d. I called and we took the flop five ways. The flop came 9d 7c 3d, I led out pot and the second player (who originally limped pre-flop) called. The turn was the Ad, making the flush, I checked and he checked. The river was a blank 8h, I bet 1000, he raised all-in to 4000 and I called. He showed 77 for a flopped set and I doubled up.

.. or I should probably rephrase that, can a NL donk learn to play Omaha at least as well as most people who play Omaha tournaments, which is a much more achievable goal. We'll be testing this out over the next few weeks as Boyle's top Omaha pros are saddled with the thankless task of trying to educate me in the finer aspects of the game.

I posted a hand on my blog a couple of days ago and I think it's worth talking about on here as well. I was playing the $100 rebuy on Pokerstars, which I must stress first of all is kind of a law onto itself in online poker tournaments. There's usually quite a mix of good and bad players in this tournament, but they almost all play aggressively. Month by month the aggression has been ramped up as egos collide until now I think it's pretty profitable to play this tournament as a nit and take advantage of all this testosterone-fuelled play - which is good for me because I'm the king of the nits :-)

By the sounds of it I was pretty close to being Boylepoker's standout performer in the Irish Open... I made Day 2. Only for about an hour mind you, when I re-jammed on a late position raiser with Q6s. He made a good call with A9 and somehow I didn't get there. WTF? I always get there on the internet. Live poker is rigged!

With 5 players left in the European Poker Open V, everything was running to plan. I had 40% of the chips in play, at least double the amount of each of the other players. Then everything went wrong and I finished 3rd. So what happened?

I'm playing in the European Poker Open V this weekend and once again I'm happy to be sporting the Boylepoker colours for this event. I enjoy these TV tournaments; I have a very low patience threshold in live poker. So if you sit me down with a deep stack and a 12 hour session in front of me, then odds are I'm going to do something donktastic out of sheer boredom/impatience before the day is out. In the TV six-max games though, I only need to keep a lid on it for 3 or 4 hours and then come back again after a few days break, if I'm lucky!

You might have read Marty Smyth's recent blog from the 888.com UK Poker Open. I also played this event in the Boylepoker.com colours and while I didn't win the $250k first prize on offer, I did manage to make the semi-final and scrape back a few dollars!