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The Aussie Millions officially finished a week and a half ago, although I'd given up before it got to the end. There was no improvement on the tournament front for me or any of the other Irish guys, although we only played another few between us.
I actually only played one more tournament and despite not actually getting knocked out, I still didn't manage to make the money, although I did lose more chips than I actually started with... confused?
As I said in my last blog, I had decided not to play any more tourneys as I seemed to be bang out of form, but I decided to come out of retirement for one last one. I didn't know anything about this tournament, but when Neil Channing phoned me and asked me if I'd like to be his partner in the team event the next day, how could I refuse? It was a $2,200 buy in (per team) with half hour levels and we took it in turns playing one level each.
We had a brief discussion about who would go first. Neil wanted me to start things off as he said that he could not stop himself from playing too many hands at the start and usually ended up with half his starting stack by the end of the first level. That story sounded pretty familiar to me (apart from the odd time when someone doubles me up on the first hand). Under normal circumstances however, I usually manage to end up with about 3/4 of my starting stack after level one so I agreed I was the obvious choice to play first.
I don't know why neither of us thought of it at the time, but I can see now, that the obvious choice was for neither of us to play the first level. obviously we didn't think of that though, so off I went with my 5k starting stack and managed to nurse it through the first half hour only losing 20% of it so we were ahead of schedule.
After the first level your partner gets to take the reigns and also bring an extra 5k to the table, so Neil took over with a total stack of 9k and valiantly managed to make it through the second level with 6k of joint stack still intact.
I started the recovery in the 3rd level getting us back up to 7k, then Neil took over again, and by the time I got back to the table for level five we had 16k. Not being used to such a big stack, I quickly put a dent in it.
When Neil returned he had about 9k to work with which was verging on being short stacked. I thought it should have went without saying that Neil was in charge of 'squeeze plays' and generally out-playing people, whereas I was in charge of winning '50-50s'.
Obviously, I should have mentioned this in the pre-match team talk as Neil thought it would be a good idea to try a 50-50 himself and that was the last hand we played. In his defence, I think he had K9 or something, so maybe he thought he was a 40% chance or something, which apparently he's much better at winning.
I ended up playing another couple of short cash sessions and winning a little bit overall, which was ok after a bad start. Since then we've just been in holiday mode really. We went to the Nadal v Verdasco tennis semi final and apparently we picked a good one - it was the longest ever match in Australian open history, going to five sets, three of them being tie breaks. It was the first tennis match I've ever been to and it was surprisingly good - probably the best live sporting event I've ever been to.
We've since left Melbourne and driven to a couple of towns down the coast, just as the weather turned bad obviously. It did pick up a bit for the last couple of days though, which I used to do a snorkelling trip off a town called Sorento, where I got to swim with seals and (briefly) wild dolphins.
I also played golf with Dave Callaghan on a really good course which had previously hosted the Australian open. Needless to say, it was a bit too much for golfers of our standard. I wasn't doing too bad until the 12th, when I stopped keeping score on account of not having enough fingers to count my score on that hole.
We've just arrived in Brisbane now and our intentions are to stay around here for a week or so and then make our way up to Cairns over the next month. That's if the thunderstorms ever stop up there. Apparently, there's severe flooding and people have been airlifted out of some parts. Although now that I think about it, I suppose I shouldn't really risk the wrath of people back home by complaining about the bad weather over here.
Comments (2)
pity no irish made it in the aussie millions but wp anyway