Monday, June 26, 2006

Big Downswing, Huge Recovery

It turned out that last Sunday was just the beginning of a nice downswing for me. By Saturday night I was down over 5 grand from where my bankroll had peaked 2 weeks earlier. I was running pretty brutal, my hands never holding, losing the key coinflips, running big hands into bigger hands etc.... The usual stuff. I was actually considering switching to 2/4 NL as my primary game for a while because I've been killing those games over a completely insignificant number of hands where I'm running good, and I want the deepstack practice for the main event anyways. I mean, when you're on a 5K downswing and you're biggest score ever (other than the WSOP seat) is only 4K it's a bit depressing.

6/24/2006 11:49:32 PM Watts if I"m still terrible after tomorrow then maybe I'll switch
6/24/2006 11:49:53 PM Brad good plan...you know you're going to win one tonight now right :P

The Pinhead (Brad) is a smart man, though he was slightly off on this one. I final tabled the $10 rebuy 55K guaranteed on Stars and after winning all-in with the worst hand like 4 times (I'd been saving them up for the last week or 2) I was chipleader 3 handed. Then I proceeded to get screwed over 3 times by the cards and I managed to bustout 3rd losing to two fairly weak players (one was sorta ok and the other was awful). I did cash for $5400 which basically took care of my donswing, but I was so close to that 14K first prize. Anyways, I went to bed after that at 7am and got up at 2 with a more positive outlook on tournament poker, ready to do some damage in the big Sunday tournaments.

With Stars running it's quarterly $1000 tournament this week, the lineup consisted of the usual $200 buy-ins on Dise and Party, the $200 2nd chance on Stars, and I also decided to play the $650 WSOP sat again at the last minute, along with a couple other smaller tourneys. I busted out of the WSOP sat early due to set over set but I was on fire from the beginning in the $200 buy-ins. I had a monster stack on Party before my AA lost to JJ AIPF when he flopped quads. This brought me back to average but I recovered from there and made another good run before eventually going cold and busting 138/5021 for $1305. On Stars I also had a huge stack at one point but I went pretty card dead there as well and just treaded water until the blinds caught up to me and I was forced to make a move, which ran into a real hand. I finished 61/954 for $420. However, Paradise has been my best server lately and it didn't let me down today.

I built a big stack there early as well before losing a big pot with a set against a flopped straight that I probably played too aggressively. The flop was all spades and I pushed the turn trying to price him off his flush draw. Oops. But I bounced back and won several huge pots, usually getting paid off by hands that should never have paid me off. The funniest was when I saw a free flop in the BB with 83 and it came J83 rainbow. I meant to bet 3600 into the 5000 chip pot but I accidentally bet 13600 instead. The limper on the button still managed to get broke with his JT. Soon enough I had a monster stack but stopped picking up hands and was treading water for a long time. I managed to win 2 key coinflips on the final table bubble to get back into contention. I survived down to 7 players before pushing 55 all-in as the shortstack. It was folded to the BB who instacalled.

"Please have AK, please have AK."

Sadly he flipped QQ and my day was done. 7th paid $5400 for the 2nd consecutive day, putting me up over 10K in a 24 hour period. Like I keep telling you guys, tournament poker is just crazy. I'm happy to be writing this on the happy side of variance again, it's amazing how quickly things change sometimes. I might post some of these hand histories on pokerxfactor if anyone is interested in looking at them. I respond well to peer pressure so let me know. Guess I'd better go do some real world stuff for a bit. Later on,

Mike

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