WPBT WSOP Satellite Recap

First off I just want to thank Iggy for putting this whole thing together, it really was quite the experience. And an incredibly classy move of him to reach into his own pocket and find the money to send an extra blogger to the WSOP. Thank you Iggy!

The tournament was awesome. It was my first deep stack tournament ever and man was I stoked. I love it when you can actually wait and play a tight solid game early and switch gears at ease when the format allows it. I was pretty much card dead for the first 90 minutes combined with the fact that I was at a table full of maniacs meant that no chips were going my way. My stack was pretty much going one way, down, while my cards kept missing flops and my bluffs kept getting busted. I was down to 1800 chips at the two hour mark.

That’s when I started getting cards and playing smarter. I doubled up with pocket 10's against Gcox’s pocket 8's. I then won a huge pot when I limped KK UTG and got it all in the middle against the big blind’s 6-5 offsuit (don’t know what the hell he was thinking). I picked up some nice pots here and there and suddenly found myself as tournament chip leader with about 30 people left.

Again, all this is possible thanks to the structure. In a regular 12 minute blind level tourney, all my chips would have ended up in the middle at the beginning of level 4 with K-10o or some other marginal holding since I couldn’t catch any cards to save my life in the earlier levels.

The turning point of the tourney, at least for me, happened at the 100/200 level with a 25 ante while holding KK in the big blind. It folds all around to Garth on the button who makes it 500 to go, the small blind calls and I pop it to 1500. Garth folds and the small blind calls. Flop comes 10-J-6. The small blinds immediately goes all-in. What could he have here? Pocket jacks or pocket 10 would not have gone all-in, J-10 would not be involved in this pot. A-J? Perhaps but that should also have been folded preflop. I put him on Queens, it’s the only hand that made sense in this situation. What does he have? Pocket 3's. I shit you not. He claimed he was tired and wanted to go to bed. Guess what happens next? He rivers a 3. That one pretty much took the wind out of my sails and made me play like a steaming idiot. If I win that hand, I’m way ahead of the field with a 40 000 stack instead of middle of the pack with 25 000 chips. It also infuriates me that someone who has pretty much quit sticks in the game and messes it up for people who actually want to compete. Why don’t you just turn off the computer and check/fold for the rest of the tournament?

The rest was pretty much uneventful. I was trying to steal raise my stack back and was pretty much spewing chips all over the place. I doubled up a shortstack Gcox by putting him all-in with top pair top kicker on a one suit board (while holding no card of that suit mind you) when he was clearly representing pocket aces (What can I say? I was steaming ) He went on to ride that momentum all the way to third place and I was later bounced by going all-in prematurely with pocket 7's only to run into pocket 9's.

I’ve learned a LOT about my game during this thing. I really need to tamper my aggression and not just do it for the sake of doing it. When I raise it up preflop, don’t automatically go into Harrington on Hold’em mode and blindly throw a continuation bet out there. It’s ok to be weak-tight sometimes, you just need to know when to shed that image, etc.

There’s another one of these things in a few weeks and I’ll be there for sure. I’ll be ready and focussed to take it to the next level then.

On tap for tonight, WWDN and my HUC3 match so that should keep me fairly busy.

Later