Yip ... winning feels good!

So my friend and I entered the ANZPT Teams Event on Sunday. The entry was a modest $550 per team and my partner was all psyched up. I on the other hand must confess that I was a little blasé about the whole thing. After a couple of hours of treading water from our 6k starting stack, I'd played 1 hand in almost 3 blind levels and my partner had played about 8, up and down. Luckily a few spots came up to steal a few pots near the end of an orbit and we had scraped together 7100 when the blinds hit 200/400. Then everything came together ...

Jim was on the button mid-level with about 4BBs left and shoved on an unraised pot with QTo. BB wakes up with an A and calls. T hits on the river and we aren't out! A couple of hands later, he doubles up. His JJ survived an inocuous looking flop of 227r. Only problem was that opponent had 23o. Thankfully justice prevailed when the J fell on the Turn which he flat-called and then called the river AI.

Then a couple more hands and UTG he puts in a min-raise. UTG+1 goes AI with a short stack only to be followed by UTG+2 with an AI to isolate with his AK. Folds around to Jim who thinks for a nano-second before shoving with his AA. His little tap to break the inertia had set off a very lucrative snowball effect and we tripled up! Happy days, we're suddenly well above average with 30 something left out of a field of 96, I think.

Breathe deeply and go back to solid play. A few spots came up and to be honest for the rest of the evening almost all of our hands held up AK vs AJ, JJ vs TT etc. We were getting our money in good and the hands were holding. We sat on 57k for the longest time as the field went from 18 to 12 ever so slowly, maybe 2 hours. Then on my break I went for a stroll to keep fresh when I receive a Text "Better come back, sry". I then tried to practice my best false smile and trite "Don't worry about it" lines. Sure enough the final table was forming and Jim was standing up. Then I noticed, cradled securely was the 57k intact. With 600k in circulation, we were average stacked going into the final table with blinds of 2k/4k.

We were happy with our guaranteed $1k payout and then just looked to climb the ladder a couple of rungs or get lucky. Well lady luck was shining and a couple of runners fell by the wayside. With $500 increments we were up to a massive (for us) $2k payout. Now we were freerolling. The final table played out 1 orbit each. I sat down one time and shoved KQs from MP, no callers. Partner believes that wasn't in the script. Very next hand, the most active annoying stealer leads out with 17k. I look down at A9o and decided to 3-bet as he can't always have the goods, everyone folds and suddenly we're running level 2nd in chips. Then a couple more drop out and we find ourselves 4-way. As the others had doubled up, we're now shortstacked again.

With 3 equal stacks, surprisingly, we wielded the biggest threat for a couple of orbits with our potentially damaging AIs. Then before we know it, we're up in the running again without a showdown. Our hands continued to hold up until we were Heads Up with last year's ANZPT Player of the Year Runner Up, Chris Levick and his wife Danette (the TV dealer). They were undoubtedly the best team in the Event and I'll be honest, very intimidating. Chris was raising nearly every hand from the SB to 55k with 4k/8k blinds. I decided to do the same as did our partners. I was surprised at not facing a small ball approach because I thought that a coinflip suited us. Then came the crucial hand, Chris raises AI from the SB, clearly a hand that he's happy to get it in the middle with. I look at the first card, Kc. I comment "halfway there". Then squeeze out a delightful 2nd K. I CALL! Board runs out something, who cares. A $6k blank, blank, blank. And then the very surreal moment of realising that we were indeed ANZPT Teams Event Champions.

It's still a little surreal. So much so that it was almost 12 hours later that I even realised the value of the blank board. From 4th place, they were just chips, pot sized bets and a desire to come first. Even drinking beers with our friends at 3am on Monday morning in Star City, the money jumps in the top 3 places weren't considered or discussed. We had the title, the trophy and of course 75 pristine unused $100 notes each. The $40 extra was already converted into Stella Artois.

Winning feels good and tastes good!

PS Star City did an excellent job of running the entire series extremely well despite the above gorund dungeon that is the poker room these days. And a big shoutout to Pokerstars who sponser these affordable poker tours. This amateur got to play heads up with a formidable foe - thank you Pokerstars. Maybe now I can learn How to Play 8 Game Mix and How to Play Badugi too.

My final shoutout may sound corny but Mike and Adam at the 2+2 Pokercast deserve a lot of the credit for our win. We've listened to every episode including the original BigPoker.ca ones and had visualised being at a final table many times. We'd heard so many pros describe the experience of every stage so often, its like we had been there. When we got there we'd already rehearsed the future. especially the heads up combat. Thanks guys ... you're the nutz.

Confidence is a wonderful thing

My father once asked me "What is the most important shot in golf?". My answer was "The first one", but he had a better one "the next one". That didn't make my answer wrong. If I don't get off that first tee well, I rarely have a great round. And so it is with poker. This hand came up last night. Just like AK v QQ is a classic holdem race, flopping the nut set v a big draw is a classic PLO race. Up against 2 opponents though, it's a nerve wrecking feeling when holding on.



This was only a couple of hands into a session where I was well aware that I was taking another shot that I wasn't necessarily bankrolled for and my intention was to play tight. Just too good a spot to miss out on. If you can't play right at a level, then don't play. This is close to my biggest PLO pot ever and thankfully it went my way. Consulting CardPlayer, my equity at the time of the shove was a generous 57% the way things fell.

From here, I found myself big stack and went from strength to strength as I ran hot. Left a couple of hours later with my biggest ever haul from a single PLO session, a profit of 5.5BIs, or $550 (and USD at that) - woo hoo! Had the 43% come in, it would have been a very different Post. I think we under-estimate confidence and the absence of it. In SuperSystem, Brunson states that regardless of what the maths guys say, "rushes" do occur and you should go with them. That that is where your profit comes from.

I'm a math guy and I can't put my finger on it but last night was a rush and I seemed to sense it as it was unfolding. Bed o'clock was when the big hand hit twelve and the little hand one. Do you believe in rushes?

Gotta give action to get action.

I think that I first read something similar to "Gotta give action to get action" in Super/System and again from Mike Caro. My propensity is toward TAG, so I struggle to get action fast playing trips, etc.

Now to the quiz (see last post), my SMS big winner friend sent me an email identifying himself. His poker history is literally no online poker, uses a poker program in MSFT Windows, watches it on TV and read one poker book on a business trip to Perth. He hasn't even played pub poker. At Perth casino, we played his only other live game and he exited early, probably TPTK loss, or similar.

On that night, my advice was to play tight just to rack up table time and experience. Needless to say, he bluffed me out of the 3rd or 4th hand we played. I recall laying down a good hand assuming he had the nutz. I was way off and he thought it was funny - I wasn't so sure.

Anyway, I have confirmed that there were many furious losers. At 2am he responded to one self-proclaimed English pro who was verballing him that he should consider another profession. At 4:00am, when cashing out, he asked if he could be watched to the cab rank by security. He was the last man standing having cleaned out both tables at that level.

Apparently, he rivered trips with 55 twice and another pair once more. He only lost a couple of hands all night and was a massive bully toward the end when he lost all track of chip to dollar values (a big advantage when it happens). The ultimate was a $1500 pot where he had KJ against AJ and got AI on a KKJ flop.

I can only imagine the scene as his chip stack grew. The regulars salivating when this recreational player sucked out on someone else knowing that the chips would eventually be redistributed. It just never happened.

I know it was a freak session, never to be repeated, but there is a lesson there with respect to speculating to prosper. May you have a quarter of my friends luck at least once in your poker career!

Community Quiz - Pick player type

I got the following SMS from an unknown number "Turned $100 into $3475 last night @ conrads. $2.50 - $5 no limit :-) 5 hours".

I set about trying to think who might have sent it. I have met quite a few people through poker. Conrads is a Casino on the Gold Coast in Australia which is a vacation destination.

My immediate candidates were a rich aggressive ex-semi-pro who played in the WSOP 15 years ago, an FX Trader who bluffs a lot and is loaded so doesn't give a sh**, a solid female who plays marginal hands fast and gets action because she's a female ... and then I ran out of likely candidates.

This is an incredible result. It was a 40BB $200 max buy-in table so that is 15+ BIs. I can't recall ever seeing a stack like this online. I'll be interested in guesses on playing style. Answer to follow when the regulars have had a guess.