Gutshot Hotshot

I've only played two games of poker in the last four days, good god man... what's wrong with you. Whats more they have both been multi table tournaments, not my usual tipple. But if you've read my previous post you'll see that I have been swatting up on MTT's recently.

I was down in London for a couple of days this week and I wanted to get a live game in while I was in London, so I spent some time online trying to work out where to play. There was quite a lot of choice but I didn't want to play in a cash game and I didn't want to have to travel too far out from the city centre so it looked like the £50 Freezeout at the Gutshot was the best choice.

I arrived at the Gutshot and was immediately impressed by the scale, busyness and friendlyness. Excellent venue highyl recommended, make sure you give it a try and support this club.

Well I had been a bit aprehensive about the game and in all honesty I had been swithering all week about it. £50 is a bit rich for me and I thought I was probably just throwing my money away, but in the end I decided to go for it as it would be an experience and its not like I am going to be going back and playing at that level very often.

I spent a couple of hours researching the game (no players, starting chips, blind structure etc..) and planning my strategy. By the time I headed out for the Gutshot my nerves were tingling and my mind was racing.

I sat down to play along with 86 other players and just played to my strategy. I was a bit nervous at first and every time I tried to riffle my chips they just ended up in a pile all over the place. I gradually started to relax and get a bit more comfortable though and just kept plugging away. With 87 player in the field and me playing at a significantly higher level than usual I didn't have very high expectations, but I had a plan it seemed to be working.

I'm not going to give you a hand by hand break down but suffice to say that after about four hours of play I made it to the final table with a pretty respectable chip stack. The blinds were getting pretty big by this stage and I was delighted to get this far, but I wasn't going to tighten up and get blinded away, hell no... now that I was at least guarenteed my buy in back I was going for first place, whohaa!.

A few hands in I shoved from late position with A-Jo and got a caller, he had A-Qo but luckily a Jack arrived to save me and boost my stack as my horrified opponent left the table. I kept plugging away and stealing a few pots and gradually worked my way up to about 60,000 chips, there were about 215,000 in play. I think I was chip leader at this point, but not by very much.

The next significant hand was against a friendly big chap called Cal, we had been sitting next to each other at the previous table and he had been playing pretty tight the whole time. The blinds were 2,000 / 4,000 and I raised the blinds up to 10,000 with A-Ko I got a caller, Cal shoved all in for about another 30K. Did he really have something or was he just making a stand thinking that I was stealing the blinds, again.... Well he had been playing tight so he probably had something. A-K is a drawing hand, but it's a good one, at worst it would be alomst a coin flip. With the amount of chips I had I could have tightened up and got another couple of places higher, but if this coin flip came off I would be significant chip leader, and hell I was playing to win, and it was 1:00 am and I had meetings early the next morning and still had to get online and finish off my presentations for them... Hey Ho...let's gamble.

Cal flipped his cards over to reveal a pair of Ladies. He was 57% to my A-Ko 43%. The cards cam down and I didn't catch an Ace or King. That little encounter crippled me and I was all in a couple of hands later with K-Qo and heading home a few minutes after that.

I've been going over and over that play in mind since Thursday and I guess I shouldn't have played it knowing that Cal was tight and I still had a big stack even if I folded my A-K and 10K raise. But then again, that coin flip could have boosted my finish position from 6th up to 1st. I'm undecided, I still think it was a good strong play and would probably do it again.

I ended up finishing 6th and turning my £50 Buy in into £218 and far exceeding my expectations. I'll definately be back.

The only game I've played since then is a 50 player $5.00 MTT on Party Poker, finished 3rd.

So is MTT the way forward, well let's say I'll be studying my books, refining my strategy and playing a few more in the coming weeks. :-) wish me luck

Return of the Maniac

I can't believe its 2 months since I last posted here but there you go, what a lazy sob. Must try harder, sounds like my poker philosophy.

A lot has happened in the last 2 months, things have been pretty hectic at work and I've been up and down to London quite a lot but I have still found the time for poker and have as usual been reading as much as I can to try and improve my play.

I've been reading:

The Professor, The Banker and the Suicide King its great read and gives an amazing insight into the lives and mentality of the top high stakes pros.

Killer Poker Online 2 by John Vorhaus. Easy to read and very good. The section on heads up play is brilliant and has improved my regular and heads up play greatly.

The Poker Tournament Formula by Arnold Snyder. Oh my god... what a revalation. A lot of poker books are quite similair and give pretty much the same info regarding hand selection, pre and post flop play but many of them are written by pros who play bug live tournament, which tend to have deeper stacks and slower blinds than online tournaments. This book is specifically about playing in faster tournaments and the strategy you should adopt. Wow... it's very different and I can't recommmend it highly enough. Go buy it, but make sure you let me know which tournaments you will be playing in as I don't want to run into you in an MTT if you've read this. Check out my next post about my recent results and see if you think this book might be worth a read.