The 2006 Austrian Classics Part 1 of 3

I'm going to break down the blogs into three sections and try to throw in a couple pictures in each entry as well.

Wednesday: Our flight from Berlin to Vienna landed in the late afternoon, Sickandrich was kind enough to pick us up from the airport. It didn’t take us long to get to the CCC and within minutes I was already sitting at a 1-2 EUR cash game. I donked off a whole buy-in pretty quickly when I was unable to lay down KT on a AKT board. I lost the pot to QJ obviously. Luckily it didn’t take me too long to get unstuck and eventually get ahead of the game a couple Euros.

SickandRich picking us up at the airport. I snapped the picture very fast, which is very noticeable.

Fast forward 8 hours and the table broke up with me ahead 500 Euros. I played at another table for a couple hours with minor fluctuations to my stack and at 7am we stopped playing in order to get some rest for the tournament the following day.

Our taxi ride back to the hotel was pretty funny. It was shortly past 7am and our taxi driver began telling us about all the “sick” people that go into CCC during the afternoon and play there until the next day. I’m pretty sure he was slighly embarassed when we told him that we had been there for playing for a good 14 hours straight. Little did he know, he was driving two “sick” guys back to their hotel. That just really got me thinking how unique poker players truly are. Not many sports/hobbies/jobs have people put in such long and crazy sessions as poker players do, and I must admit, I kinda like it!

Thursday: The 200+20 EUR PL Hold’em tournament started at 5pm. Fellow Poker-Tester players were gerlihard, bla, Shadow, and gistroy. We began with 3500 chips and 25 minute blind levels, which left a little room for some play. About an hour into it I made a pretty tough laydown: Blinds 25/50, I have AsKh and raise it up to 200 from MP. Both blinds call. The flop comes down 8s6s2s. Both players check it to me and I bet out 400, trying to take down the pot right there. The SB raises to 1800 and I regrettably lay my hand down after some hard consideration. Basically, I didn’t want to put my tournament life at risk so early on with an unmade hand, but the more I thought about it afterwards, the more I realized I should have shoved all-in. Oh well, I still had around 2500 chips at this point.

I got moved to another table and seated next to a very good player named Marco. As the blinds went up I was forced to go into shortstack survival mode, and luckily I didn’t get any callers when I didn’t want them. I remained shortstacked for quite some time before finally getting my breakthrough with QQ, when I doubled up to 14k in chips. By now the payouts were announced: 18 places paid, 11.000 EUR for 1^st place, 5.500 EUR for 2^nd place, and the rest was a normal payscale.

At this point there were around 30 players left with the top 18 getting paid. I built up my chips by taking down some pots preflop and before I knew it we were in the money. I then managed to double up again with TT vs 66 and found myself with 65k in chips at the 3k-6k blind level. I lost a couple of my attempted steals and with only 11 players left I had around 50k in chips, blinds 4k-8k. There were only 5 players at my table and I was dealt A8o UTG. I raised it pot-size and was re-raised all-in for 36k by a pretty tight woman sitting next to me. I only had to pay 8k more, which I did without any hesitation. She showed AK and I was in some serious shit. She flopped her king and I was left with 17k going into the final table.

Me at the final two tables staring at my stack and wishing it were larger.

Because I only had two big blinds, I knew that my chips would be getting in there pretty fast. The first hand I was dealt T3o and folded UTG+2. The very next hand I got AQ, which I gladly shoved all-in UTG+1. To my surprise, no one called and I won the 12k in the pot. Now sitting on 29k I was dealt AK the very next hand, which I once again shoved all-in UTG. I got an isolation re-raise from an MP player and as it turns out, he had AQ. I had him totally dominated until the flop came down QJ7. I didn’t get any more help and was eliminated in 10^th place for 490 EUR. That left a bad taste in my mouth because I was so close to making something happen, but oh well, my time will come. Thanks to everyone there for the support! The results of the tournament can be found here.

A quick cash game session brought me an additional +100 EUR after the tournament. So so far so good, but plenty more to play!