Mad Man Poker

Hey guys, I know it’s been a while, here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to:

I’ve cashed out my account at pokerstars and am currently not funded on any poker website. I decided to do this because a) I had a huge blow after some pretty good weeks and I feel like tilting, b) I’m having examinations over the coming 3 weeks, C) I’m pretty tired of the hours of grinding. I’m a person that really gets sick of things fast and so did I with internet poker. Expect no graphs or screenshots from me in the following 2 months at least. Whatever happens next, I’ve got no idea.

This doesn’t mean I’ll play less poker though. Once my examinations are over I am leaving for Dublin and looking to hit some casinos there. Come find me at the Fitzwilliam Card Club. Possibly I’ll keep a blog with my day-to-day adventures, but I’m not sure about that yet. Should I decide to do so, you’ll be able to find updates here.

I did play some live poker over the past few weeks, including TPC VII. I played great, got bored, took unnecessary risks, busted and played even better in some side games. So all in all I’m pretty happy about that day, but I’ll need to work on focus. Our home games have been rather great for me as well lately, I do think this has a lot to do with the different way I handle them, after my last losing session. It won’t work forever, but as long as it does I’m perfectly happy with it!

I found myself having a lot more spare time since I quit playing poker on the internet, which I filled up mainly by reading more books. A suggestion for all of you is the Tommy Angelo book, Elements of Poker. It’s a great work on tilt and how to avoid it, but it goes further than that. Just look into it.

The WSOP has kicked off and what a start it was. I was really looking forward to the 40K no limit hold ‘em event and so far I’ve read some amazing stuff about it. The event will be aired on ESPN the 16th of July. I can’t wait.
My fantasy wsop team has been doing ok, with Justin Bonomo at the final table in the 40K. I need him to cash big, because he is one of the few guys that no one else has in his team. I’m pretty confident though.

Next time I write, I’ll make sure to have some concrete topics to talk about, but don’t expect anything too soon.

Last sunday was our 7th edition of “Togenblik Poker Championship”.

It had been a while since I ran deep, or at least deep enough to my satisfaction in a TPC.
That had several reasons.
First of all, surprisingly enough, I was losing interest in the tournament. There was a time when I went from TPC to TPC, almost running up the walls when the next one was due.
Not so this time. The tournament is still very nice, and has some good players, but it just doesn’t have the swing to it anymore as it used to have.

Secondly, tournaments are not my cup of tea. Give me a ring game and a chipstack I can decide for myself and I’m a happy camper, but the whole idea of gathering chips, only to see your relative stacksize take a downswing because of the running blinds, just is a cooler for me. I understand why, but I don’t like it.

Nonetheless, I started out with the intention to go deep again, and so started out playing the ABC poker I learned from our tournament guys (Mickey, Thomas V, Michiel), playing only up standard hands, only good positions, taking advantage of weaker players, which is, by the way, still very much against my bashing nature. After a while I decided that A7 of diamonds on the button with only Dennis Van Hove to worry about should be worth it to try and loosen up a bit. The suited ace was worth a raise from the button to Dennis’ limp and 2 small stacks to my right in the blinds. I was counting on isolating one player and seeing what the flop gave me, and would have prefered one of the blinds to the stronger Dennis, but the exact opposite happened, and I found myself going toe to toe with Van Hove.

The flop brought me a very, very drawy board. With 2 diamonds and the inside straight draw (needing an 8 ) I also had to take into account that the 569 board might have missed Dennis. In that case, my ace high could be good as well.
Dennis checked and I bet out. Van Hove knows I’m an agressor and this might have been a play to check raise me, but you never know unless you test the waters, so …

Only a flatcall and a meaningless turn came out.
Damn, the small bet from Dennis was worth drawing on the river and so I called.
The river brought me … squadoosh, nothing, zippo, rien! Nothing left, but an ace high bluff for me and Dennis is first to move.
Luckily he checked and for a half second I was wondering about the check behind and just be done with it. But taking a stand against Dennis here could mean the difference between having to trail a now much stronger Dennis or taking control of the table myself.
I bluffed, I bluffed and saw Dennis go pale, because he knew. He knew he had a fair chance of having the best hand, and he knew that my bet was too big for him to risk a serious chunck of his chips on what turned out to be a pair of sixes. And he knew that I knew. But he folded, and I mucked, so this post (or the forum, check our site) is the first time he can know for sure that he was bluffed.

I went back into my more standard mode, picking up on pots nobody else wanted or taking a stand to one of the more confused oponnents when we reached the point where our table broke up. I got transfered to table 2 with Jeroen Van Acker to my left (2 seats away), never a gift. The player to my direct left probably never realised he now was in the middle of the thunderstorm. Jeroen would be attacking him to get to left, I would avoid him to keep him alive in order to not get Van Acker to my left. We played no decent hand against each other, so that was a bit of a bummer. Jeroen is developing a nice read on me and that is becoming a problem. Luckily I didn’t need to do anything fancy against him. I did however ended up in middle position against Thijs Bosmans. In my hand I held A9os and once again decided it was time to shake it up a little. I flopped 992. Jackpot! On moments like this I have a (doubtful) talent to make people steam and decided to try it on Thijs, who had no idea what to do with his hand. I started to ask him to leave the hand, telling him he would hurt himself in playing it. I told him that it wasn’t time to go home just yet, this was too dangerous for him. It all worked. Bosmans started to steam like an African lake during the hot summers. He was not willing to lay it down. Unfortunately his temper and brain were not coöperating and he took for ever to decide. I called a clock, but it was already too late. He folded a pocket pair and I had to be content with the reasonable pot that had built up on the flop. Afterwards, a magnificent hand played by Thijs.

When we got down to only 16 players, it was time for our first redraft.
I ended up with another good friend in Michiel Maes.
Michiel and me had a crossbooking bet going on and were both pretty healthy stacked. With the bubble coming closer, it could go either way and I even promised a bounty on Michiel’s head if Thijs Bosman would take him out. I offered a pint of beer, he settled for a Leffe.

Eventually Michiel was put out of the tournament in a very sad way, but that’s a story that he himself has to tell on occasion.

Time for another hand, time for another weaker ace.
In between all my wired pairs and big picture cards that I standardly played troughout the day, I’ve noticed that holding an ace is always a good thing in this tournament. People are not very willing to believe you have it, and even weak aces can sometimes make a lot of chips.
So when the stars are right, and I don’t get pushed out of the pot, I tend to play my weak aces a bit faster than I should.
The idea here is isolating one oponnent and hoping for the flop, when it comes, you test and assess right there what your hand is worth.
I threw away about 6 or 7 of these on the flop, but as you already might have noticed, the three that did pay me off, are worth the small losses. Of course, in order to do this, big stacks only kids!

This time it was A5 suited and I raised to 2,5 big blinds. We were very close to the final table bubble and people wanted to get there. A moment I like to steal on, as any good player should. Unfortunately the only player between me and the shortstacked button decided it was time to call me.

The flop came with both an ace and a 5, and I had no reason to whine about the call now.
Especially since this guy was obviously not willing to lay his hand down. Wow, did he make a bigger two pair on me? Could this be a set?
Now we get arrogant. If this guy was flatcalling me with a higher hand, in this stage of the tournament, I was paying him off. I could not afford to let a chance like this go, and decided to go hyper agressive. Time for a move I already talked about in a previous post. The “delayed all in”, I picked up from Jessica De Roeck (Look mommy, I have an atomic bomb!). Meaning, by the end of the hand, my chips are in.
My oponnent either didn’t see it, or didn’t want to see it and doubled my stack. It turned out, the 5 was only the motor I needed to make this move. The ace would have been enough. He carried pocket Kings and I still wonder why in this stage of a tournament, he didn’t choose to pump before the flop.

Well, the 10 player point was then reached, and we again redrafted. Only one to go before the final table.
The 10 players left were all pretty aggressive down to complete maniacs and this promised to give some fire works.
It did, on a stack of 4000 + with about 25 big blinds left Gert Van Osselaer decided the blinds and antes were juicy enough to bully everyone out. I had pocket 4’s and about 6500 in front of me. It was not worth it.
After that, Maarten Jacobs lived by example and did the same thing, this time with little under my stack. I had wired ducks and once again decided it was not worth it.

Afterwards, I should have downcalled one of these hands, especially the 4’s against “Gurtmans”.

In the end (we were already down to 9) I catched nothing or got pushed out before the flop and choose my moment against Dennis Hermans with (once again) pocket deuces. Dennis gave off a tell that he didn’t have a pocket pair and at this point my stack had dwindled to 7 big blinds. I gambled, and saw my deuces cracked.
If I had to go, I’d rather against Dennis. He played magnificently and deserved to win. There I said it! Dennis Hermans -once again- deserved to win!

In the end, young gun Maarten Jacobs took it down.
Agressive, fearless, young player who is definately an asset on our champions wall.
Welcome to the club, Maarten!

So far for my TPC VII adventure. Next one will be in september.

The Mad Man