This Year’s Girl and WWDN Thoughts

Poker Beauty Joanna Krupa

This young woman is pretty much what the WSOP 2006 ME is all about. The 25 year old Polish beauty who has graced the covers of Playboy, GQ and Maxim seems to have survived day 2B of the event (That Cardplayer coverage is quite shyte, so I can’t really be sure). Quite a refreshing change of pace from the middle aged fat arse white dudes that are usually showcased in these events. So who was the star of ESPN’s feature table yesterday?

Daniel Negreanu.

Yup, the most annoying dork in the Poker industry. I guess we needed MORE footage of Mr. Daniel coaching the table on why such and such play was wrong while being ‘entertained’ by his terrible jokes in between.

For fuck sakes...

THE POKER GODS HANDED OVER A HOT BIKINI MODEL WHO CAN SLING SOME FUCKING CHIPS, STICK THE CAMERA ON HER AND LET US WATCH!!!

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5 months ago, I final tabled the WWDN in my first ever appearance. Haven’t had a sniff since. Until this week when I finally managed to snatch third place to put a end to this endless drought.

I changed some things in my game lately and it seems some positive results are starting to appear. I played a big total of ZERO hands outside of my blinds until they were up to 25/50. That was part strategy, part I was dealt absolute crap for the first hour of the tourney. I really focussed more on my table though, paying close attention to whom would raise from where with what, etc. Crazy how easier it is when you’re not running three cash game tables on one side and downloading porn on the other. I might be up to something here.

I didn’t see a single decent hand until the 90 minute mark. I mostly picked up chips on blind steals and re-steals. I got extremely fortunate when I re-raised what I felt was a positional blind steal with a lowly Q4s and I was insta-called by said raiser. I say fortunate since I flopped trip queens and won a decent sized pot.

What also really helped was that I managed to get paid off with by big hands. You know that awesome feeling you get when you pick up aces after folding crap for 1 hour and manage to only win the blinds with your 2.5x blinds raise? Well that wasn’t me last night. My pocket aces allowed me to bust Weak Player, who was one of the bigger stacks of the tourney, when I flopped a set and induced him to push his whole stack on a bluff when I showed weakness throughout the hand.

It was pretty much smooth sailing after that. Busted some more players with AK and KK, doubled up some short stacks here and there, suck out on some people, etc. I was pretty much on autopilot until we were down to three handed where we moved chips around until I busted when I jammed with TP+Flush draw but lost out to Aquavere’s TP higher kicker.

While making it deep in a blogger event is quite the anomaly for me, I must say that I was incredibly surprised at the passivity of the players with the blinds so high. Players would auto-fold the button on so many occasions that I was literally dumbfounded. I remember open raising 6 of the 9 pots in one orbit and never meeting resistance once. Quite interesting to say the least.

Following that, I now crave playing tournaments again. I obviously won’t quit my LHE cash games, but I definitely want to splurge more in the 10$ MTT’S that are out there. I really want to make it deep in one of those for a sweet payday, perhaps I’ll add it as one of my goals before the end of 2006.

Later!