They see me grindin'

I'm pretty proud of myself for finally getting a backup internet connection last week. Every once in a while my DSL goes out and I am immediately disconnected from all my tables with no chance of reconnection. Apparently BossMedia are too incompetent to program a reconnection function that actually works. Anyway, those issues should be solved now as I have two connections running simultaneously. For anyone interested, this is what I got.

Grinding itself has been going surprisingly well and I tried to save some interesting HHs from the past days. In no particular order:

My line looks like it doesn't have an ace in it so I can understand why he changed his hand into a bluff, because he certainly could not have been expecting to be called by worse

His turn donkbet confused me but I went with my gut here. I guess he had some kind of diamond draw, but I was not anticipating to win the pot when I saw the river

I was pretty sure he didn't want to play for stacks (200bb) with most of his range here, and I can easily have a random 5 in my 4bet bluffing range so I thought there was a good chance I could push him off his hand

You didn't think I was only going to post winners, did you? :)

I throw a good beat on someone after playing my draw pretty aggro here. He was not thrilled with me after this hand.

This opponent seemed somewhat tilted at the time after I just stacked him at another table. I really dislike his play for 150bb here because he is never ahead and could easily be drawing dead.

Strange line for queens but whatever floats your boat

Time for another good beat, this time I hit one of my 9 outs and dodge a heart for the win. My opponent apparently "thought I was solid but was mistaken"

Nuts no good. Can't blame him for his play, though

I wouldn't advocate 3betting 93s but if you do I would recommend flopping like this

Pretty nasty river but a pretty good situation for me if I can get him stacking with 44 here

Alright that's enough hands for now. Because Hans Martin Vogl was here over the weekend I now have the new weight loss updates for all 3 of my horses:
Hans - currently 85kg, needs to hit 80kg by July. I'd estimate an 80% chance he makes it, though he did scarf down 5 Dunkin Donuts in one sitting while he was here
Stefan - currently 99kg, needs to hit 90kg by July. 50% chance
Seb - currently 95kg, needs to hit 85.5kg by July. 10% chance

1 week until the cruise, woohoo!

Booyakasha

I was happy to leave Monte Carlo, though I definitely had a great time while I was there. Luck games treated me well for the most part, though I did donk off €3k in a 1-2nl home game we started with Max, Chris, Flo, Seb and myself. Other than that, I went 1 for 2 in food eating prop bets because Tobi thought he could 3 meals in 30 minutes (he finished 1 and a half meals). The other one was when Seb, Max and I went out eating and we were all stuffed after a full 3 course meal. We challenged Max to finish all 3 desserts (3/4 banana split, 1/2 fruit bowl and the other half of his banana split) and to my surprise he came through like a champion. Needless to say, he wasn't feeling too well afterwards.

I now have two weeks before I fly to Venice on the 2nd of May. The PartyPoker cruise sets sail in Venice and will make stops in Bari, Olympia/Katakolon, Izmir, Istanbul and Dubronik. I'm especially looking forward to the stops in Greece and Croatia, hopefully they'll allow us enough time to do some exploring. I'm pretty sure the cruise is going to be an amazing time to say the least.

Until then I'm just going to grind. I've decided to leave NL5k out of my routine until I recover fully from the €30k I lost in March, so until then I'm sticking with NL1k and NL2k. Hopefully it won't take me too long because it really hurts to see how soft 5k games can be at times, but I really want to stay strong about this.

I don't have too many interesting hands (I've only played 12k hands so far in April) but I'll try and save some over the next few days and get them posted. This one was my own fault for slowplaying, but I was still pretty shocked when the cards were flipped :)

My camera died in MC and I forgot to take many pictures in San Remo, so I'll just post the views I had from each of the hotel rooms.

San Remo

Monte Carlo

Update from Monte Carlo

I spent Saturday (Day 1a) hanging out doing nothing except playing Fifa 08 on the PS3 that Pokerstars had set up in their players lounge. The first game I played against an American who wanted to play me for money, so I beat him 3-0 and the second game he preferred to play for no money :) Then Chris Moneymaker came over and wanted to play me so I gave him a 2-0 beating with him having 0 shots the whole game. Ship it.

Day 1b was yesterday and I busted out in level 5 (150/300) after getting it all in with AK vs 88 in a button vs big-blind situation for 11.5k. The road up to that point was a wild up-and-down as always. I had a really sick table after the 1st hour, as I was sandwiched inbetween Dario Alioto two seats to my right, Max Pescatori to my immediate right, Marc Goodwin to my immediate left, Gus Hansen two to my left and Antonio Esfandiari three to my left. The last thing I wanted to do was get into too many pots with these guys, especially against Gus or Antonio when I was out of position, but because we played so long some situations were inevitable.

I made a nice fold against Gus after I raised QQ UTG and he 3bet me, which I called. I check/called the 943 flop and check/folded the 6 on the turn. He had a set, which he didn't show but I later read in his blog ;) In a later hand I flopped a flush against Esfandiari after defending my BB with 76s. I got two streets of value from him after he called the flop & turn but folded the river.

I escaped that table and was moved to a new table with Isaac "WestmenloAA" Baron to my immediate left. I had around 20k at this point but lost 8k after firing a couple barrels with AK on a missed flop. Then came the aforementioned hand with AK vs 88 where I got it all-in preflop and lost the flip.

And so ends a very disappointing EPT season for me. I played 7 tournaments and cashed only once for slightly over €10k. I'm not disappointed with the way I played, though, as I feel I made pretty good decisions throughout most tournaments. The large field tournaments are really high-variance so not much can be said after just 7 tournaments, so that's not really what I'm worried about. The fact of the matter is that I had a lot of fun, got to travel to a ton of cities and will certainly be back next season with better results.

I'm now going to forget my troubles and devour a €25 cheeseburger from room service. I'll add a €10 chocolate mousse to that and wash it down with an €8 bottle of Evian. This place is a pretty big ripoff, but food options are limited so I have no choice.

Monte Carlo baby

My few days off in Berlin were nice, believe it or not I actually won online! Yesterday we flew from Berlin -> Zurich and then Zurich -> Monte Carlo. Originally it was just me, Chris Niesert, Tobi Reinkemeier and Flo Langmann but at Tegel we ended up bumping into Johannes Strassmann and Freddy Keitel. Unfortunately our seats were spread all throughout the airplane so we couldn't get any group chinese game going. I played Chris HU and won a little bit, which certainly made the flight go by faster.

After arriving in Monte Carlo we all went out to eat at a local Italian restaurant "Gianni." Katja Thater, Jan von Halle, Sebastian Ruthenberg, Benjamin Kang, Max Bracht and Daniel Zink joined us so we were a pretty big group! The food was excellent, the coversation was all about poker (what else?).

After I registered for the Main Event (playing Day 1b) a few of us decided to join a €1090 SNG, where there are 10 players and winner takes all (Main Event seat or cash). To make a long story short: After capturing the early chip lead, I then lost everything except 1BB only to make a full recovery and then chop 50/50 with a pretty weak Italian player when the chipcount was 13.5k for him and 11.5k for me HU. I got €5300 for my efforts, not a bad start.

Today's plan is basically to chill (remind me to post pictures of the hotel/view/Monte Carlo when I'm back in Berlin) and get my head clear for a long day tomorrow. One time Monte Carlo!!!

EPT San Remo Day 2

I pushed my 8.9k chips all-in the very first hand of Day 2 with K4o on the button and gathered the blinds + antes. A few hands later I did it again with A9o and gathered them again. Now I had 13.3k and someone in EP raised to 3k. I shoved on him with QQ and he tanked before finally calling with 77. The board came down 56842 and I was kicked out, which is a shame because that was a 30k pot and I would have had a playable stack had I won it.

I fly back home on Saturday, so I have today and tomorrow to just hang around San Remo. Then I need to take care of some things in Berlin before flying to Monte Carlo on April 11th. It's about time that I cash in one of these things again...

EPT San Remo

I played Day 1A today and I'll start with the good news: I'm still in. The bad news: I have 8.9k with blinds of 500/1k. Before I get into the rollercoaster of today, I'll start off with what happened yesterday.

I ended up meeting Moritz and Nico in Zurich as we all had the same flight to Nice together. Chinese poker on the plane didn't run quite as planned but I managed to win back my losses later in the hotel. At night, Nico and I went to the Pokerstars Welcome Party, but because it was a boring sausage fest as usual, I ended up leaving pretty quickly.

The tournament started today at 3pm and throughout the whole 9 levels of play I was pretty shortstacked. My strategy was to tighten up a bit as opposed to the last EPTs I played. I had JJ 3 times and AA once during the day but could never really build a significant pot. I tried to focus a lot on pot control in most of my semi-strong hands, something that ended up saving me a lot of money. I also made some pretty big laydowns (with the exception of one hero call that left me crippled) which is something I'm proud of.

Once I was short I had several auto-push situations where I was flipping:
79 vs K8 - I win after a 7 hits the turn
JTs vs A6 - flop QTQ and I double, though this push was questionable
AK vs AQ - the board double pairs and we split :(
Q5 vs 22 - flop QKQ, easy money
AKs vs Q4 - river 4, this was one of the last hands of the day

So as I mentioned, I now have 8.9k but anything can happen really. I'll definitely be pushing so hopefully I can find a nice situation and double/triple up to get a playable stack.

Other than that, San Remo is beautiful. Italy is a wonderful place to be in April as the weather is very pleasant. I'm also a big fan of Italian food and so far everything I've tried (spaghetti, lasagne, cappucino, red wine) has all been fabulous. The only thing that bothers me is that most Italians seem to show absolutely no interest in even attempting to speak English. I guess you can't have it all.