By Adanthar on April 29th, 2008 (more posts by author)

Since my last entry, I've played 2 full tournament days (by "full", I mean "very little", because I suck at volume) and a half day on Sunday. The Sunday was a complete bust, but last Wednesday included an FT bubble on UB and tonight had a 9'th place finish in the Cake 30r. That's the good news; the bad is that I think I played the UB tourney mediocre and probably did something wrong in the Cake tourney, too - I had a 270K (1st) to 110K (2nd) CL with 15 left, lost it on a pretty mediocre PF call, got most of it back with 12 left and then proceeded to bluff a good chunk of it off/not win another pot for half an hour. It doesn't help when people decide to defend their blind with 92s and get there, but that wasn't the entire story; once I got that lead, I just should have done more with it than I did.

It's been a long time since I've been final tabling this consistently, but now that I'm doing it, I need to top 3 and/or win these things, and that's just not happening so far. It feels like a combination of being rusty shorthanded and (still) just running bad in critical spots late, but I can't really complain about that tonight. Regardless, losing money ($100, but still) when you FT something is yucky. Ah well - with the low volume I play, 3 FT's and a bubble over a week is a big deal regardless/being up five figures is nice.

I should also say that I've partly dropped down in stakes. I always enjoyed playing well overrolled for almost everything I've ever decided to try and that still holds - theoretically, I have well over what I need - but with an investment I have going and this summer's likely WSOP spending extravaganza, a lot of my money has been transferred offline. Between that and the Intrade account, I don't really have enough online on every site to play $1K a day worth of buyins (BTW, the fact that I say "1K" should tip you off as to how little I actually play, sigh), and the variance in the larger tourney fields also works against that BR requirement. One of the reasons I was getting really sick of tournaments prior to recent events was simply not going deep enough often enough, which is entirely normal when everything you play has 1K people in it. Because of that, rather than spend a bunch of time on tilt from playing $150's I'm kinda shortrolled for (again, I could afford it, but it's hard enough to transfer money between the usual 4-6 sites these days that it's a pain in the ass for a tourney regular), my weekday schedule now has a bunch of $20-30 rebuys and $50-100 FO's with 200-400 people. The BR requirement is theoretically only slightly lower, but with 5-10K for 1'st, the field is much worse and has a lot more really terrible fish instead of mediocre regs. That, in turn, makes it easier to go deep and harder to get frustrated with poker, so except for Sundays, I think I'm gonna be playing that kind of sched a lot from now until at least the end of the summer.

I'll be leaving for Vegas again in about 4 weeks. It's hard to say whether I'm looking forward to it or not; I like the poker boot camp environment, but leaving my wife and comfortable apartment behind every year is hard. With that said, I think I can use the boot camp thing right now, so at worst, it'll be good to be around a bunch of people and thinking about the game again.

Also, I'm rooming with Bond...so the blog updates ought to be interesting :)