GUKPT and ECOOP misery - Boylepoker Blog

I've had quite an uneventful couple of weeks since Poland. I've been playing a lot of cash and some sit and go tournaments online. I'm ahead a little bit for the month after having about nine small winning sessions and wiping most of it out in one large losing one (a pattern which is becoming a bit too familiar for my liking).

I also made the trip to London for the GUKPT £3,000 grand final. I wish I hadn't bothered. A few hours into the tournament everything was going swimmingly - I only had a starting stack of around 15k, but I felt ok about that since I'd come back from only having 9k, and the average stack wasn't much higher than 15. More importantly though, I'd swapped small %'s with Dave Callaghan who had around 25k, and Padraig and Liam Flood, who were both among the chip leaders with huge stacks.

At that point my own chip stack was worth about the same as it had been at the start, but I reckoned the value of the 17% that I had invested in those three, was worth more than the 3k buy in - I really couldn't see how I could fail to get some sort of return from the tournament. But as I should know by now, it's not a good idea to get over-excited. One hour later, my chip stack was worth precisely zero, and one hour into the next day that's what all my shares were worth too.

My own exit was fairly uneventful - I didn't really need to go out on the hand that I did, and it was quite a marginal situation, but by that time I'd taken a series of small setbacks, and while I wasn't exactly short-stacked, I was certainly heading in that direction. Padraig had a much better excuse for his exit, and while technically it was a 50-50 hand, it certainly doesn't seem like that when you hear the way the action took place (see Padraig's Dwarfs and a ghost blog), as most people would make the other guy a 5/1 shot to even be in the hand by the time it got to the 50-50 part.

And speaking of guys who probably shouldn't be in the hand and then go on to win it... I'm going to surpass Padraig's bad beat story with an absolute belter of my own from the $2,500 ECOOP tournament that I played on Boylepoker.com on Monday night. As you know, $2,500 is quite a big buy in for an online tourney, so I was expecting the general standard in the tournament to be quite high along with hopefully a few soft entries that came through small satellites. I can only assume this guy belonged to the second group.

You get a 5k starting stack, and the blinds start at 10-20, so really there's no excuse for busting in the first level. And I didn't. However a couple of hands into the second level this happened...

With the blinds at 20-40, I raised to 120 with 88 in mid position and the big blind re-raised to 280. Given the size of the buy in and the fact that it was so early, I assumed that this guy probably had AK or QQ upwards so I called thinking that if I could flop a set then I might have been able to win a really big pot. I'll tell you his hand now so you can try to follow his thinking throughout the rest of the hand (because I couldn't) - he had Kc Qd.

To my delight the flop came 873 with two diamonds, although, not to my delight, he checked. At that point I think that the only hand he could have that I wouldn't be a huge favourite against was Ad Kd, but I thought it was probably more likely that he was trap checking with AA KK as I would have expected him to continuation bet on that sort of flop even if he missed it. So I bet 300 hoping that he was indeed trap checking, but also so that if he had AK then he thought this bet looked weak and thought about bluffing me.

Strangely he min-raised me to 600 which I wasn't expecting at all. At that point I decided to cross my fingers and hope that he had AA or something and I tried to commit him to the whole pot on the flop in case a scare card came on the turn and I lost my customer, so I re-raised him to 1400 and happily for me he called after thinking for a few seconds (in case you are thinking I made a mistake when I told you his hand earlier, I didn't - he didn't have Qd Kd, just 2 overcards with no draw).

The turn however, did bring the Kd which from his point of view must have looked like a godsend as he went from drawing dead to having a few outs (unless I had a nut flush draw). He then decided to move all in and although I wasn't nearly as happy as I'd been, I decided to call as I thought I was still winning. You can guess the rest.

A couple of days earlier I'd had John O'Shea on MSN informing me of how well he'd been doing with his Omaha Hi-Lo ECOOP victory and his 5th place finish a couple of nights after that, so rather than congratulate him I tried to needle him a bit and said "Jesus - those ECOOPs must be very soft... I might have to play a couple myself". I can only imagine how much pleasure he got from coming on MSN again late on Monday night to congratulate me on my 198th place finish out of 200 in a "very soft" field.

Incidentally I also played the $1,000 PLO ECOOP on Saturday night and managed to bust out around the 60 player mark when I got it all in with a set, and was up against a pair and an inside straight draw, so I'm starting to get a bit worried about my form going into next week's Poker Million semi. I suppose another way of looking at it is that I'm getting the bad luck out of the way now. Hopefully the latter is the case anyway.