By SirWatts on January 28th, 2008 (more posts by author)

Hey everyone, I'm back safely in Toronto just chilling. Really it was a super lazy week. Anyways my plan for the next couple months is to really get back to griding online and putting in some hands. I've had a lot of fun lately travelling around, and while I play a lot of poker on those trips, if I really want to make some money I'm much more profitable online. Even though the games are tougher on average, being able to play 4-8 tables at once just lets me play so many more hands that live can't really compete. Also, being able to table select across multiple sites allows me to find the best games to help offset the generally tougher opponents. Also, it's important for me to play a lot more cash game hands since my hourly rate is much higher in those than in almost any tournament assuming I can find good games.

This week I put in a decent number of hours playing both tournaments and cash games, and was lucky to run pretty well so I turned a nice profit. I've been playing 10/20 and 25/50 on mostly some of the smaller sites, and the games have been pretty good. I've also been playing the usual evening and weekend tournaments, and after a ton of close calls and a lot of frustration I finally broke through for a nice score in a major Sunday tournament, the new "Sunday Brawl" on Full Tilt. It's a $240 buy-in where $200 goes to the prize pool like usual and $40 goes towards your bounty, meaning whoever busts you gets your $40. Of course whenever you bust anyone you get their $40 bounty, so it's a nice little twist added to the usual tournament format. It certainly adds a little incentive to go out of your way to try to bust people, though the strategic adjustments required are nothing major as the bounties are not too big compared to the prize pool. This week's tournament had almost 1600 runners.

I managed to finish 5th for $19K, plus I believe 8 bounties ($320) to top it off. The final table was both lucky and unlucky for me. I picked up more premium hands than I ever have in such a short period at a final table, but unfortunately they did not hold up in some key pots. I lost a big coinflip with TT vs AKs, and then on the very next hand I slowplayed KK by just calling a raise. A shortstack moved in behind me with AK, the raiser folded and I called, but an ace flopped for the 2nd hand in a row. Fortunately as I'd been picking up so many hands I still had some chips left and managed to double up and hang around for a while, but eventually I lost another all-in preflop as a decent favourite (KQs vs JTo) on the shortstack to bust 5th. Still, it was nice to make a major final table and book a nice win for the weekend. The 1600ish players was the biggest field I've ever gotten through to the final table since my $10 freezeout days. Like I mentioned I had close calls in several other tournaments, in particular the late $100 rebuy where I finished 16th for $2K.

So the plan for coming weeks is to keep putting in a lot of hands and get myself nicely into the black on the year. There's a small chance I may decide to go to the LA Poker Classic for the main event and the legendarily soft cash games at the Commerce towards the end of February, but most likely I won't be playing any more live events until EPT Monte Carlo (the one in Europe not the one that was on fire in Vegas) in April, and possibly the EPT in Italy just before Monte Carlo. I'm out, take it easy,

Mike