Selling my Soul to the Devil

Well I had to do it. Following Wes’s recent advice on how to datamine the living shit out of Party Poker, I’ve had my desktop running 24/7 picking up info on all the idiots, tourists and donkeys slinging chips at the 3/6 game. It seems to be going good so far, I already have more than 5000 hands in my database and it’s still picking up some as we speak.

Why the change of heart? My sites full of weak-tight rakeback collecting donks are just a pain in the arse more than anything else. You can hardly find a good game anywhere and what you do end up finding is full of the above mentioned weak tight donks. With at least 20 full ring 3/6 tables running at Party, I should have my hands full for awhile. Looking at some of the numbers of the donks in there, I’m salivating already. Should be fun!

Ran the Mookie last night. Don’t know what it his exactly about this tourney but for my money, it’s easily the best tournament in the blogpshere. I like it’s starting time, the play is somewhat loose and the players are always chatting and seem to really enjoy being there.

I started up well. I mostly hung around the top 10 chip-stacks for most of the first hour. I donked off 500 chips trying to get cute with the hammer but I recuperated those fairly quickly. The turning point of my tourney occurred in a hand that happened 5 minutes after the break. Iak had just been moved to our table and he was pretty much doing what I wanted to do at this stage of the tourney: Open raise lots of pots and steal some blinds. Since he was seated immediately to my right, this obviously created some problems for me. I was pretty much waiting for a decent hand to trap him with and go from there.

The perfect situation seemed to present itself when I picked up KQo on the button and all folded to Iak in the cut-off. Fully expecting him to raise it up as he had been doing since he came to our table, I was COMPLETELY thrown off when he decided to open limp from his position. I decided to call right behind.

Mistake #1.

It didn’t take long for me to realise the gravity of my error when I saw Jules complete from the SB and the BB checking his option. I pretty much hated my hand right away. KQo is a bona-fide top pair hand, not really the kind of hand you’re really willing to go to war with, especially in a multiway pot unless the flop pummels you over the head. I was a bit relieved to see all check to me the 4s-Kh-7s flop. Not wanting to give any free cards to any draw out there I led out for 2/3 of the pot. Jules in the SB insta-pushed and I called.

Mistake #2.

I didn’t call right away. I actually used a huge chunk of that 60 seconds timer. Unfortunately, I used it for all the wrong reasons.

Every single fibre in my body was screaming to fold this hand. The only possible hand that she could be holding that I was beating was a flush draw. Yet for some strange reasons, watching that counter ticking down, I was convincing myself that she was indeed holding the draw and I should call. She obviously wasn’t on a draw, but her bottom two pair made short work of my TPSK and I was crippled all the way down to 750$.

I didn’t quit. I stuck in there, fought for every single possible chip that I could get and found myself back up to 1500$ without ever seeing a flop. Unfortunately for me, after pushing and stealing blinds with marginal crap, I ended up picking up my first truly Push-worthy hand, AK, when someone else was holding 10-10. Since I expired all my race winning karma in my 3rd place finish in the WWDN earlier this month, it was quite obvious I would end up getting dumped on that hand. C’est la vie!

Had a blast, did some good things, especially in the first hour when I small balled my way near the top of the chip leader board, and I did some dumb things, as usual, but I’m definitely hoping to be back next week to avenge myself.

Later...