Tournie time

Tournaments are sooo frustrating. I'm planning to spend one day playing tournaments per week, and that day was last night. Entered about 15 tournaments all in all, some $4/180s and the rest larger Mtts. I cashed in a few, played pretty well in most of them too - i was happy with my play anyway.

I played in the $3 re-buy and came 17th. It took over 8 hours, so the hourly is pretty poor :P, but i played pretty near perfect poker for most of it. I got from 30k in chips to 1.3 million over the course of a few hours. At no point did i have all my chips in without having the other guy drawing dead. With 19 left i ran my QQ into a guy's AA, he'd been three betting a lot and i was to his left so 4bet him from the BB when he'd 3bet the button. Sucks, because the tournament is so top heavy in the payout structure.

Never mind, I'm sure i'll make another large final table soon.

Cash is on the up slightly. I've changed the times i play to early mornings and i've found a different player base to the one i've usually played against. I'm still down over $800 in all in EV, but i know its not going to suddenly close the gap. Unfortunately I'm going to be away this sunday and then all of the weekend after, so that will reduce the profitable time that i have to play in for the rest of the month. Thankfully though, I'm now up for the month across the two sites with tournies included, and am soon going to be able to buy the $800 SN bonus.

Steve

Running good? I think not

Here are the first 6 days of my month. Not a happy picture, the big downswing was mostly just one day's worth of play. I've moved back down to 50NL to just grind away. I'll probably stay there for a week, and hopefully have caught back all the difference.

As a side point, i'm playing on Mansion poker at the same time. Its a with a staking consortium called Bank Roll Supply. They stake me to play cash games on mansion up to 100NL at the moment. I'm using it to try out 6max and also hopefully shots at 200NL if i can show them i'm a winning player at Mansion. Its not that i can't bankroll myself across two sites but the three benifits i think it gives me are
1) They are all UK based players who will be having monthly, or so, meetups. It will give me a chance to join a group of players if i ever move into live play seriously.
2) It will give me chance to take shots at 200NL and also at 6 max without being as nitty as i usually am.
3) They give coaching session to their players (me!), so i get free coaching which i've not really had much of.
Added in to the fact that i'm a high volume player, so they've offered me rakeback which they wouldn't normally do. I'll keep you posted on how this goes, but i've been doing it fo just over a month now. The requirements are that i have to play 3k hands a week, which i can do in a few hours if i need to.

So aside from my bad start on stars, i'm up $200 ish on Mansion, and also $70 ish from donkaments. Donkaments are something i'm going to try my hand at again, maybe one day a week, as an effort to break up the grind. I came 4th in a $5 freezeout at the end of last month for $1019 which has sparked my interest again.

Finally my rough plans for going to America at the end of Novemeber to play in the nationals (bridge) at San Diego have fallen through, due to a clash with a County bridge tournament that i've got to play in over here. I will look to go abroad soon though, maybe for either the PCA (poker) or the spring nationals (bridge). Failing that i will almost certainly go during the 2010 WSOP.

Steve