On Sunday most of the Bathurst poker players drove up to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains to take part in the Poker Challenge teams event. We fielded around ten teams including:
Me (Styles) and Benny
Matty P and Sarah
Tamim and Vicky
Mark and Jenny Cowie
Teddy and Jarron
Casper and Jodie
Other locals we play with from Lithgow included Brent and Paz, Di and Kerry (sp), Spyros and Scuba, amongst others. There were 67 teams and every team was allowed a rebuy and add-on. Players started with 4000 in chips, played for 1 hr, then combined stacks and took it round-for-round.
As soon as I'd played 2 hands on my first table, I became aware that the competition was very very soft. Except for a few players I could see, my whole table was full of absolute donks, to put it nicely. I didn't berate them or try to argue with them, but they were saying some of the dumbest poker advice I'd ever heard so I just tried to keep my mouth shut. Some memorable examples:
"Small pockets win a lot more than big pockets."
"I knew he was barkin!" (When I got called down with pocket deuces on an A9496 board and I showed Ks7s for a busted flush)
"I won't call all ins without a good hand." (After calling 2 people's shoves preflop with pocket fives)
"I had to call." (With two red Tens on a QJ4 two spade board.)
But I just sat down and watched. I learned pretty early not to bluff because these guys were playing fucking so terribly and calling so lightly it made my brain bleed. I took a fairly decent sized pot early on when I raised a naked Ace in late position and spiked an Ace on the river after C-betting the K-high flop. I couldn't value bet the river since it brought AKJTx on the board and I figured the Queen could potentially be check raising. However, it was K2 (nice preflop call) who I sucked out on and I ended the first level with around 5250, and Benny had around 6750 giving us the nice neat 12k stack plus we took the addon for 5k and started after the break with blinds 100-200.
After that... it pretty much went quite well. Benny and I had a lot of faith in each other's plays and I saw Benny play the best aggressive poker I've seen out of him (though I've not seen him play tourneys too much). I found it to be very intense to play in the teams-swap structure and I was more nervous watching Benny play than when I played myself. When I was playing I just tuned everything out and listened to the iPod but when I watched Benny play my stack I got more nervous as we got closer to the money.
At one point I caught up to our table and Benny was in a hand against Jodie and the pot was pretty sizeable on the flop. The flop was along the lines of T64 rainbow and Ben bet half our stack into Jodie. I stood behind Jodie and she picked up her cards. I nearly shat myself when I saw she had QQ! I was praying Benny wasn't going to get too attached to JJ or whatever (or that he had KK+), but as I expected her to reraise and Benny to be in a tough spot, she folded? I couldn't wait to ask Benny what he had in that hand because I wanted to tell him he made her lay down the big overpair. He later told me that he put her on QQ and he did in fact have KK.
When I got back in the blinds were fairly big, 500/1000 and the average stack had to be close to 16-17k. We had a good stack of around 28.5k that I built up into 35k just through basic preflop aggression. There were not too many hands of note except a few races we took (mainly 60/40s where we were the 60, our Ax vs KJ etc.) and we definitely won more than our fair share.
Tamim took a big hit with a dominated Ace on an A high flop and he and Vicky were out in 10th. The final table had two Bathurst teams, Jarron and Teddy and Benny and I. There were a tonne of short stacks at the final table with blinds 10k/20k, and Benny had first Final Table shift. He disposed of the shortstacks pretty well, even calling like 3 all ins with Ts4s (a move I wholeheartedly agree with, he had 2 live cards and a chance to bust 3 of the 9 players without risking more than 10% of our stack). When it came my turn to play, we were 5 handed and on the bubble. Teddy was on the shortstack after Jarron's buttonsteal with Kc4c ran into the 77 of the bigblind, but he ground his way back by shoving A9 and beating KQ.
Ted was the bubble boy however, when he shoved QJ and lost to the (new) bigstack's AK. I played about 4 uninteresting hands 4-handed before passing the baton over to Benny who knocked out the lady in 4th. I was disgusted when Benny called her all in and she did the dramatic slowroll, showing one J and peeling the cards to see JJ. My annoyance was abated however when Benny re-slow rolled her showing QQ. We held and moved to 3 handed play. By now the blinds were excruciating and Benny shoved on the button with Q7 and ran into Di's AJ. The 7 hit on a miracle river and we were down to HU.
This is when we offered not a chop; but a payout restructure. The pay was extremely top heavy to meet the $2000 g'teed first prize, so I simply suggested we change the payouts from:
1st: $2000
2nd: $800
to
1st: $1800
2nd: $1000
which IMO is still a little too much for first. However our opponents thought we were trying to chop 50/50 and kept rejecting the deal before we got a chance to explain. So I shrugged and Benny began the HU match with around 300k in chips to their 550k.
Benny played solidly and we saw very few flops. The time for me to tag in came and I was really pumped because Benny was playing by far the better of the two opponents and I figured if I got just a little lucky I could beat this lady heads up. Benny gave me around 380k to work with and before long I had busted it up to 450k without showdown.
On one hand, my opponent limped HU and I checked 78os in the BB. The flop came AK4 rainbow and she immediately led 40k. Easiest spot to raise in the world since an A or a King always raises there, and I made it 120k quickly and confidently, and she folded and I showed my 8 high. This seemed to annoy her, which was of course my objective. I took the chiplead that hand, moving up to 550k.
A few hands later, my biggest mistake of the day came. We had folded blinds back and forth for a while and I decided to open Q6os for a raise to 80k. She said, "ten" and I looked up confused. The lady fumbled with her chips and I asked "Ten what". She looked extremely nervous and couldn't seem to articulate exactly how much she wanted to raise it to. Eventually the dealer claimed it to be a re-raise of 60k. So given that this woman was clearly very nervous I called with the intention to take it away on most flops.
The flop was Jc9s4s. She was first to act and said "ten" again and put in ten 10k chips worth 100,000. I thought for a moment and saw she had left her self with 240,000 behind, and went with my read that she was incredibly weak preflop. I moved all in without hesitating. As I did it, she slumped in her chair and I figured I had the hand worked out fine. After a bit she goes, "OK, I call", and I must have done the exact same slump. I show my pathetic Q6 and she shows the worst possible hand I could see, QsJs, for top pair, flush draw, and dominating kicker. I don't think she realised exactly how strong her hand was here, which is why she played the hand in that fashion, or maybe my reads of weakness just came from the fact that this lady was clearly very nervous playing for this amount of money.
I wrote that hand trying to think of how spewy it must have looked to all my friends (in particularly Benny) but I still stand behind my reasoning. I'm not saying I played the hand well or badly, but I usually trust my instinct and it was just kind of unlucky that my opponent got slapped in the face by the flop. Benny said afterwards that he was fine with how I played it (even though I'm sure he wouldn't have made this move) and although I'm disappointed we didn't win the $2k, I liked how I played overall during the day, a very patient solid game and I was equally impressed with Benny, and also Jarron, Teddy, Tamim and Vicky's performances, all top ten finishers which is a good result for us Bathurst players.
I'm back on my Online grind as well, just a quick update, my $500 roll is down to $430 after around 1.3k hands of 20nl, but I plan to play a lot more than that, plus I have around $25 of rakeback to collect so hopefully when I get in some time I can put in some decent multitabling hours.
I'm also thinking of starting another blog, a personal one that's not related to poker, because I feel I've kind of inundated the Hats blog with too much of my own stuff, when the Hats need to be represented equally in this blog, poker-wise.
I'll link my new blog soon this week, I'm going to be absolutely fucking swamped with uni work but hopefully I can update it in my spare time.
Peace out
Styles
PS! Congratulations to both LaLa (blog link on the right) who went deep in the APL TOC, and of course to Luckyshades (ditto) who came 9th in the Vic Champs main event for $17k!
Me (Styles) and Benny
Matty P and Sarah
Tamim and Vicky
Mark and Jenny Cowie
Teddy and Jarron
Casper and Jodie
Other locals we play with from Lithgow included Brent and Paz, Di and Kerry (sp), Spyros and Scuba, amongst others. There were 67 teams and every team was allowed a rebuy and add-on. Players started with 4000 in chips, played for 1 hr, then combined stacks and took it round-for-round.
As soon as I'd played 2 hands on my first table, I became aware that the competition was very very soft. Except for a few players I could see, my whole table was full of absolute donks, to put it nicely. I didn't berate them or try to argue with them, but they were saying some of the dumbest poker advice I'd ever heard so I just tried to keep my mouth shut. Some memorable examples:
"Small pockets win a lot more than big pockets."
"I knew he was barkin!" (When I got called down with pocket deuces on an A9496 board and I showed Ks7s for a busted flush)
"I won't call all ins without a good hand." (After calling 2 people's shoves preflop with pocket fives)
"I had to call." (With two red Tens on a QJ4 two spade board.)
But I just sat down and watched. I learned pretty early not to bluff because these guys were playing fucking so terribly and calling so lightly it made my brain bleed. I took a fairly decent sized pot early on when I raised a naked Ace in late position and spiked an Ace on the river after C-betting the K-high flop. I couldn't value bet the river since it brought AKJTx on the board and I figured the Queen could potentially be check raising. However, it was K2 (nice preflop call) who I sucked out on and I ended the first level with around 5250, and Benny had around 6750 giving us the nice neat 12k stack plus we took the addon for 5k and started after the break with blinds 100-200.
After that... it pretty much went quite well. Benny and I had a lot of faith in each other's plays and I saw Benny play the best aggressive poker I've seen out of him (though I've not seen him play tourneys too much). I found it to be very intense to play in the teams-swap structure and I was more nervous watching Benny play than when I played myself. When I was playing I just tuned everything out and listened to the iPod but when I watched Benny play my stack I got more nervous as we got closer to the money.
At one point I caught up to our table and Benny was in a hand against Jodie and the pot was pretty sizeable on the flop. The flop was along the lines of T64 rainbow and Ben bet half our stack into Jodie. I stood behind Jodie and she picked up her cards. I nearly shat myself when I saw she had QQ! I was praying Benny wasn't going to get too attached to JJ or whatever (or that he had KK+), but as I expected her to reraise and Benny to be in a tough spot, she folded? I couldn't wait to ask Benny what he had in that hand because I wanted to tell him he made her lay down the big overpair. He later told me that he put her on QQ and he did in fact have KK.
When I got back in the blinds were fairly big, 500/1000 and the average stack had to be close to 16-17k. We had a good stack of around 28.5k that I built up into 35k just through basic preflop aggression. There were not too many hands of note except a few races we took (mainly 60/40s where we were the 60, our Ax vs KJ etc.) and we definitely won more than our fair share.
Tamim took a big hit with a dominated Ace on an A high flop and he and Vicky were out in 10th. The final table had two Bathurst teams, Jarron and Teddy and Benny and I. There were a tonne of short stacks at the final table with blinds 10k/20k, and Benny had first Final Table shift. He disposed of the shortstacks pretty well, even calling like 3 all ins with Ts4s (a move I wholeheartedly agree with, he had 2 live cards and a chance to bust 3 of the 9 players without risking more than 10% of our stack). When it came my turn to play, we were 5 handed and on the bubble. Teddy was on the shortstack after Jarron's buttonsteal with Kc4c ran into the 77 of the bigblind, but he ground his way back by shoving A9 and beating KQ.
Ted was the bubble boy however, when he shoved QJ and lost to the (new) bigstack's AK. I played about 4 uninteresting hands 4-handed before passing the baton over to Benny who knocked out the lady in 4th. I was disgusted when Benny called her all in and she did the dramatic slowroll, showing one J and peeling the cards to see JJ. My annoyance was abated however when Benny re-slow rolled her showing QQ. We held and moved to 3 handed play. By now the blinds were excruciating and Benny shoved on the button with Q7 and ran into Di's AJ. The 7 hit on a miracle river and we were down to HU.
This is when we offered not a chop; but a payout restructure. The pay was extremely top heavy to meet the $2000 g'teed first prize, so I simply suggested we change the payouts from:
1st: $2000
2nd: $800
to
1st: $1800
2nd: $1000
which IMO is still a little too much for first. However our opponents thought we were trying to chop 50/50 and kept rejecting the deal before we got a chance to explain. So I shrugged and Benny began the HU match with around 300k in chips to their 550k.
Benny played solidly and we saw very few flops. The time for me to tag in came and I was really pumped because Benny was playing by far the better of the two opponents and I figured if I got just a little lucky I could beat this lady heads up. Benny gave me around 380k to work with and before long I had busted it up to 450k without showdown.
On one hand, my opponent limped HU and I checked 78os in the BB. The flop came AK4 rainbow and she immediately led 40k. Easiest spot to raise in the world since an A or a King always raises there, and I made it 120k quickly and confidently, and she folded and I showed my 8 high. This seemed to annoy her, which was of course my objective. I took the chiplead that hand, moving up to 550k.
A few hands later, my biggest mistake of the day came. We had folded blinds back and forth for a while and I decided to open Q6os for a raise to 80k. She said, "ten" and I looked up confused. The lady fumbled with her chips and I asked "Ten what". She looked extremely nervous and couldn't seem to articulate exactly how much she wanted to raise it to. Eventually the dealer claimed it to be a re-raise of 60k. So given that this woman was clearly very nervous I called with the intention to take it away on most flops.
The flop was Jc9s4s. She was first to act and said "ten" again and put in ten 10k chips worth 100,000. I thought for a moment and saw she had left her self with 240,000 behind, and went with my read that she was incredibly weak preflop. I moved all in without hesitating. As I did it, she slumped in her chair and I figured I had the hand worked out fine. After a bit she goes, "OK, I call", and I must have done the exact same slump. I show my pathetic Q6 and she shows the worst possible hand I could see, QsJs, for top pair, flush draw, and dominating kicker. I don't think she realised exactly how strong her hand was here, which is why she played the hand in that fashion, or maybe my reads of weakness just came from the fact that this lady was clearly very nervous playing for this amount of money.
I wrote that hand trying to think of how spewy it must have looked to all my friends (in particularly Benny) but I still stand behind my reasoning. I'm not saying I played the hand well or badly, but I usually trust my instinct and it was just kind of unlucky that my opponent got slapped in the face by the flop. Benny said afterwards that he was fine with how I played it (even though I'm sure he wouldn't have made this move) and although I'm disappointed we didn't win the $2k, I liked how I played overall during the day, a very patient solid game and I was equally impressed with Benny, and also Jarron, Teddy, Tamim and Vicky's performances, all top ten finishers which is a good result for us Bathurst players.
I'm back on my Online grind as well, just a quick update, my $500 roll is down to $430 after around 1.3k hands of 20nl, but I plan to play a lot more than that, plus I have around $25 of rakeback to collect so hopefully when I get in some time I can put in some decent multitabling hours.
I'm also thinking of starting another blog, a personal one that's not related to poker, because I feel I've kind of inundated the Hats blog with too much of my own stuff, when the Hats need to be represented equally in this blog, poker-wise.
I'll link my new blog soon this week, I'm going to be absolutely fucking swamped with uni work but hopefully I can update it in my spare time.
Peace out
Styles
PS! Congratulations to both LaLa (blog link on the right) who went deep in the APL TOC, and of course to Luckyshades (ditto) who came 9th in the Vic Champs main event for $17k!
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