London Shmondon

I headed to the casino on Tuesday to check out Day 1A and see if I could spot any friendly faces. Eventually I ran into Seb so we went back to his hotel room to play some chinese poker to pass the time. We also played 9 Card Omaha, which is a game that consists of 97% luck and maybe 3% skill, but somehow I still managed to lose like every single hand. Niki Jedlicka and Florian Langmann joined us as well, we probably played for about 7 hours. Obviously the swings in those luck games are huge, as were mine, but I managed to end the night just about even after winning the final hand :)

Some people ask "How can you gamble around so much, I thought you were a poker player?" Well, I am a poker player and it's not like I'm gambling against the house. Playing games like that are pretty much neutral EV, so it's basically passing money around back and forth. At the end of the day, it's a fun way to pass time with friends, just like any other games that people play.

I then spontaneously decided to buy myself into EPT London to play Day 1B with part of my buy-in being staked. Little did I know, I would only last just over an hour in the tournament! I made a questionable laydown early on with TPTK and had 6k left when I was dealt QQ in MP. I raised it to 300, the button repopped me to 900, I considered my options:

a) Fold. Mega weak, without reads this would make me the King of all Nits.
b) Call. Not a terrible choice, but tough to play OOP when an A or K flops. I can checkraise a ton of flops all-in, though, squeezing an extra bet out of him from his contibets.
c) Shove. I get him to fold a lot of his range here and take down the pot (1350 chips) without a battle very often. When called, I am rarely in all too great of shape, as I would usually get called by AA, KK, AK or JJ.

After pondering for a few moments I decided to shove all-in and he instacalled with AA. The board came down 679T2 and I was toast. As of right now, Sebastian and Florian are both still in the tournament, so I'll be cheering for them from now on.

I wish this could have happened to me in Barcelona, where I could have at least enjoyed the nice sun and beach. Instead I get cold temperatures and plenty of rain to deal with. I'll probably go out partying with some friends tomorrow night and then fly to Vienna on Friday or Saturday. Expect my next blog entry to be from Austria!