So after going back and forth in my head as to what my game plan would be for tournaments for the rest of the series, I ended up playing the 4pm mega satellite today. It got 96 players and I made it just past the dinner break, out in 30th-ish. I am happy with how I played it, though I did get fairly lucky in a couple all-ins after getting extremely short stacked due to other hands. The hand I busted out in I squeezed a fairly loose player and two callers with K
2
from the sb with about 17 big blinds. The blinds were at 100-200 with a 25 ante. He opened for 450, two callers and I shoved. The original raiser called with 44, the rest of the table folded and I lost. I'm pretty surprised he called with 4's there as he is usually either flipping or crushed and I just happened to have one of the few hands he's doing well against there, though I still have just over 30% equity
When I say squeeze it means when you re-raise, often all-in, when someone open raises and gets a caller (or two in this case). The play works best against players that open raise fairly loosely. The idea is that they don't often have a good hand since they open a lot of hands and the callers are still left to act behind them so they will be hard pressed to call. Furthermore, the players that just called are unlikely to have good hands and will likely fold. So I'm not making the play purely because K2 is a great hand, I'm doing it knowing that often I will pick up the pot pre-flop and even when called I will often have decent equity against all but KK, AA, or better Kx hands.
When I busted it was about 6:30 so it was a good time to break for dinner. When I came back I got on the list for PLO and within 20 minutes or so had a seat. Ran into Bart Hanson while I was waiting and talked to him for a couple minutes, seemed like a pretty nice dude. I'm sure most of the 2+2ers know who he is but for everyone else he does a live poker training podcast that I've listened to for the last few years and he does some of the broadcasting for the WSOP tournaments.
Anyways only played for 2 hours. Made a few good plays early in the session and was up a bit when I misread the board and it cost me. I raised preflop with T987 and flopped top two pair with an open-ended straight draw on a 974 rainbow flop
(rainbow means there is no flush draw). I bet the flop and got called by two guys one behind me and one in front. The turn was a 3, putting 2 diamonds of the board and completing the 56 straight, though at the time I missed this part. Well the first guy bet the pot and I figured I had top two so it was hard for him to have top or middle set and I still have an open ender, so I went all in, which was just a bit more than his bet. Unfortunately for me he had 4567 and I felt pretty dumb for not realizing the turn completed a straight. These are mistakes I can't afford to make. Even though I have his bottom two pair and open-ender crushed on the flop I probably need to fold this turn. Although after running it through an equity simulator, I have either 28% or 21.5% depending on whether or not he had diamonds, which I didn't notice. Effectively I was getting 11:4 pot odds, which means I need to have 36% to break even, so it wasn't as huge a mistake and I thought at first, but its still a mistake.
Since I basically misread the board I figured it was time to call it a night.
Since the Main Event starts in a week the satellites have started to get more players. Because of this I think my focus this week is going to be on playing tournaments, mostly that 4pm mega satellite and the 2pm deep stack. There are also some satellites the 3 days before the Main that I heard are really good because pretty much everyone that doesn't have a seat yet plays in them so I might play a couple of those even though they are a bit above what I want to pay for tourney buy-ins.
Thanks for reading.
Last edited by cushlash; 06-30-2012 at 02:55 AM.