thecortster's Poker Blog: Deutsche Pokermeisterschaften "Das Finale"

I started Day 2 with 25,300 chips and blinds of only 100/200. The blind levels were now 30 minutes long, but were still missing some critical blind intervals that most other (especially internationally recognized) tournaments have.

The first hand I remember playing was QQ. A loose guy UTG limped, I raised it up to 800 (4xBB) in MP and everyone folded it back to him. He called and we both saw a flop of AJ3 with two spades. He checked it to me and I fired a bet of 1200 in the 1900 pot, which he called. The turn came 7, no spade. At this point I was really unsure what he had. I did not think the 7 could have helped him very much, but I did need to be concerned about the ace obviously. I thought it was most likely for him to have something like KJ or even perhaps a spade draw. He checked and I checked behind. The river came down another 7, no spade. Almost immediately he fired out a bet of 4000. I went into the tank to see if I could justify a call. The problem was that his play did not really fit to an ace, unless it was a really weak ace like AT, A9 etc. The other problem was that he made it really expensive for me to find out if I'm good or not. After a couple minutes of deliberation, I made the hero call only to see him flip over A7o for a full house.

With blinds of 200/400, a very weak player raised it to 1200 from MP, leaving himself just over 10k behind. Everyone folded to me in the BB, when I looked down at AQs. I opted to call and see a flop, taking into consideration that I did not really want to be playing this out of position. The flop came down AT7, I checked. He immediately went all-in for over 10k. It's like a 2500 pot, so it's an extreme overbet. It could be a disguised AK, but I thought it was much more likely that he had some kind of underpair (maybe even KK) and was frustrated with an ace coming. Rather than playing the pot in steps, he went for the now-or-never approach I see so often online. I called, he had AJ and my hand held.

Me nursing my stack

Another QQ a few rounds later brought me an additional few thousand to my stack and I hit my peak at around 38k. A lot of time passed with me being carddead and eventually the blinds were at 1k/2k. I still had around 30k. Florian Langmann had the biggest stack by far at my table, he had well over 100k at this point. He raised it up to 6k from EP and I looked down at JJ. With just under 30k in my stack, I did not want to give him a chance to get a free overcard on the flop, so I went directly all-in. He thought for a few moments and folded. There were approximately 20 people left in the tournament, the top 10 got money.

I now had 37k. One round later he did the same 6k raise from EP and I looked down at AK. Little Miss Kournikova, how are you going to do it to me now? I rushed my decision and went all-in again for 37k. You have no idea how fast his call came. After all, making the call with AA is not a very difficult thing to do. His hand held up and I was eliminated from the tournament in 20th place. Obviously I was pretty disappointed in myself, because this was a good chance to make something big happen. Unfortunately I blew it.

After discussing the final hand through from A to Z with players like Benjamin Kang and Tim Gillig, we came to the conclusion that the better play would have been to just call his 6k raise, which would leave me a good 31k to play the flop and/or escape from my hand. With so many weak players still left in the tournament, there was really no reason for me to risk my tournament life against the chipleader after I may have even provoked him the last time I reraised him all-in. I guess you could say lesson learned, but this one was a tough chew.

Afterwards, hochgepokert.de had a VIP corner in the Felix am Hotel Adlon. Obviously we didn't want to miss out on the party, especially when they were kind enough to invite us. We were told to order anything we want and it would be taken care of. That's quite an offer when you take the prices of that club into consideration. All in all we ended up staying until 6am and had a great time! Here are some pictures from the party: