Get It Quietly

Football, bollocks and a bit of poker if you're lucky.

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Location: Enfield, London, United Kingdom

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Shootout Day One

This was written on the morning of Day 2. I can't be bothered rewriting it with dramatic foreshadowing and stuff so pretend it's then.

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I don't know when I'm going to post this but I like writing these up while they're fresh. I won my table in the Limit Shooutout today. Woo hoo cash !!

I didn't know anyone on my table, it was a reasonable mix, a couple of weak spots, one very good player on my immediate left and the rest fair to moderate. I made QQ hold up against 4 opponents, somehow, and that moved me up to 5500 (3K start). Then everything went pear-shaped as usual and I dropped to a low of about 1200. Fortunately I found AQ and QQ just in time to double up twice. Then I won the key hand against the good player, a Dutch guy, who I gave the blog address to so if you're reading this dude, sorry about this hand ... I complete the SB with A5, he raises I call. Flop K3d2d check-bet-raise-call, I check-raise with the gutshot. Turn 9d I bet to follow it up, he raises. I go in the tank and nearly fold. But I have the 5d so I reckon 4s are good, Aces are probably good, and a diamond is enough to check-call and see. But if I miss these I'm going to fold the river. It comes a diamond, check-bet-call, and he has A5 no diamonds ! Sick.

So I was pleased to take a good chunk out of the best player at the table, who had position on me, and even more so when he lost a couple more hands and busted 4th. We jockey for a bit 3-handed, then this Scottish guy in a Ladbrokes shirt (about 100 "Team Ladbrokes" oiks have just arrived, 90 of them with a constant fag on the go) decides I'm bluffing all the time, I realise this and take him all the way to valuetown, with a decent amount of help from the deck to be fair. I started heads up with a small chip lead and went on a massive tear, two straights and a two pair all paid off, rarely in doubt, that one was just meant to be, even though the guy was playing just as well as I was.

We were the third table to finish out of 72, so I have a good 2-3 hours before we sit down again for round 2. I probably need to finish 5th in this to get out of it on the trip ... but on the upside I reckon I'm about 50-1 to win a bracelet right now. Bring it on !

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Fun table the second one, and a good job too as headphones are now banned. Apparently it's OK to receive secret CIA messages on the bubble, but not once you're in the money. In the house, Noah Boeken, Bill Chen, Matt Matros and Jean "The Prince" Gaspard who regular visitors to Vegas will know. I had the usual ups and downs, but won a couple of big pots with KK (one against Chen and one against Matros). I lost a sick pot against Boeken with Q9 on a board of T87x6 when he had J9. That sucked. However I raised the last 3 pots of the night, and in the last one The Prince called me all-in with A5 v my AQ which I won to return to my high-water mark of 43K. That's almost dead on average playing 6-handed tomorrow. Matt is out, there are two Scandies left, one's quite tight and the other is a bit "how the hell did he win his first round ?". Then there's Chen, Boeken and another American who's pretty good. I didn't catch his name but we were talking about money and I said how strange I thought it was that American bills were all the same size, what if you were blind ? And he said that his girlfriend was working on a case that's going through the Supreme Court to get that changed. I always did wonder about that.

Anyway, for some reason the second round is literally half the speed of the first, in terms of blinds vs stacks, so they decided to stop it at 2am. Although there are at least 40 people left, I can't see many faces about. Ram's still in, Terrence Chan, Victor Ramdin, I think Isabelle Mercier, that's about it.

It was quite friendly as I said, there was a funny pot early on where Chen flopped a set and Boeken turned a bigger set. I couldn't resist pointing out that they were wearing Pokerstars shirts, what did they expect. Plus it was funny when Chen tried to 3-bet it to 3200 instead of 2400. Math, as he said, is hard. Matt pointed out that there were 4 Europeans at the table in what was supposed to be the American game. If I can take it down tomorrow on the 4th of July, that will show the fuckers and no mistake.

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