Hi guys, this is gonna be a long one so get your coffee cups/popcorn/TLDR rants.
We are back on the interwebs after living it up in the real world for a couple of weeks. We first travelled to Oslo to play the Norwegian Championship of Poker. Was planning to play a couple of tournaments there, the deepstack 6max and the main event. Ended up un-regging the deepstack to go out for some beers with some friends in Oslo. Not the most +ev decision but definitely the best +happiness decision. We went to this retro gaming /craft beer bar in city centre called Tilt (legit name aswell). They have an amazing craft beer selection, and tooons of arcade games. They have old school flipper games, street fighter arcades, shooters etc. Also got quite a few shuffle board tables and a really cool atmosphere. ANYWAYS, we played the main event a couple of days later. The main event of this event is huge, and had over 2000 entrants, which is amazing since it's for norwegians only. Had an OK table and was building a decent stack early on. Then in the middle of day 1 we got into a huuge pot holding AKo. UTG shoves for like 13 bigs utg and we flatcall utg+1. Folds around to the bigblind who shoves for like 35 bigs or so after tanking for a long time. We call and he shows JJ. The guy who shoved UTG had KTo, which is obv way to weak to be jamming in this spot. Anyways, JJ holds up and we lose a pretty substantial pot. We struggle to regain momentum and a couple of levels later we reshove AKo over a raise, the guy makes a marginal call with 55 and the board runs out all bricks. GG us. Big congrats to my mate Preben Stokkan who took down the event for $173k. Just a week later he also placed 6th in the WPT Prague main event for $25k. Bosses gonna boss.
Next event was Unibet Open Bucharest. Was stoked to play this event, and to get to meet alot of the people from the community, alot of them who also frequents the stream. We managed to draw a pretty rough table. I was chatting it up with the two people to my direct right, and they told me they were NL400 and NL200 regs from Sweden and Romania. Not what I wanted to hear. After a couple of hours of play we also got placed on the feature table, which was fun. I always enjoy playing feature tables, just cause it doesn't bother me while it might bother others (in terms of making suboptimal plays because they don't wanna look stupid etc). Played some interesting hands, first one being AJo on the btn at blinds 150/300/25. Swedish reg opens the HJ for 700 and the Romanian reg 3bets him to 2k from the CO. I think we had approx 26k-27k effective with both players. The Romanian guy had been playing a 3b or fold preflop strategy, so we expected him to be pretty wide in this spot. We had seen him 3betting suited connectors etc earlier. The Swedish guy is also gonna be fairly wide opening it up from the HJ with two unknowns in the blinds. So we decide to pump it up a bit, 4betting to 5125. In retrospect this 4bet is too big IMO. We could have accomplished pretty much the same thing 4betting to 4500-4600. Anyways the Swedish guy jams on us and we have to fold. Meh. Checking the stream later the Swede had KK and the Romanian 3better had A6s, so we were correct about him being wide atleast. We played another interesting hand where we open 96s in the CO, into 3 fairly straight forward players. BB defends and we see a flop of K43sxx. He checks and I cbet small for 525 into 1700 ish. He checkraises to 1600. In this spot his valuerange is sooo narrow, and I felt he was the type of player to give up on the turn if he got called on the flop. So I take a few seconds, before hitting the imaginary call-button. Turn brings the 5x, which is interesting. First off it gives us an open ended straight draw, second it also helps his range quite a bit, as I imagine alot of his bluffs on the flop will be A2/A5/56/67 variations. He keeps betting, which leads me to believe he caught a piece, or that he actually had something on the flop (since from his perspective we are not bet-calling alot of hands on the flop that we are folding on this turn). However, he bets small enough that we have to call with our openender, so we call. River is a 6, so now we got a pair, but the board is quite scary being K3456. He makes a very value-looking bet for 30-35% of the pot. I think for a while and pitch my hand into the muck. In retrospect this might be a call, seeing how this guy kept playing. He was making some very unorthodox bluffs/plays later in the tournament, and was not as straight forward as we thought. He is also the player who ends up busting us from the tournament in the end. We open KK utg to 1675, he 3bets to 4000 straight, we jam for 14k or something like that and he calls with TT. Flop QT5ccc and we hold the Kc. Turn J so we pick up additional outs, holding a flushdraw and open ender. River brings another Q however and GG. Fun tournament though, and there was alot of interesting spots. Also surprised how good the players at my table was playing. From what I heard there was some tables where people basically needed hand strenght charts to play. Meh, in London I am getting one of those tables for sure, I can feel it! All in all a very enjoyable experience though. Was fun to put some faces to many of the people from twitchchat / unibetforums.
SO, what's up next? I spent some time yesterday editing my twitch layout, to fit the new Unibet tables. So we are all ready to get back on the twitchgrind today. The stream will commence around 16.30, and I think 16.00 will be my new standard starting time going forward. As many people pointed out, there is more people playing from 16.00 and forward, and also more people have time to watch, after school/work/whatever. So we'll see how that works out. Excluding this first saturday and sunday I will stream every day until I go back to Norway for christmas (19th of December). So, alot of grinding and streaming the next couple of weeks. Let's get a hold of some golden tickets! Would not mind winning a 28 day trip around the world with business class airfare and 5 star hotels tbh. Would not mind at all actually. So LET'S DO THIS! (Also I will be hosting a twitch-viewer freeroll in a few days, with some cool prizes and bounties. So stay tuned for that!)
TL;DR: Lost money in Oslo, but had a lot of fun. Lost money in Bucharest, but had a lot of fun. #Worthit. #Whoneedsmoneyanyways? Gonna be grinding it up hard next 2 weeks. Back on the twitch streets today at 16.30. Viewer freeroll coming up, stay tuned!