Crawling into Day 3
Just an all around struggle man. I don’t have any quit in me when it comes to the big tournaments and I am certainly not out of it, but I’m going to need to get on a rush sooner rather than later. The last six months or so I’m consistently deep in basically every tournament I play, but I’m just not getting lucky in the right spots that would propel me to a big stack. The rush is there, I just have to hope it comes before time runs out.
Can’t blame the structure, that’s for sure. I only have 35,200 of my original 100,000 stack but the blinds are just going to be 1200-2400 which means I have some time before panic mode. I was down to 22,000 at one point and pressed the panic button, moving all in with A-7 off and getting called by Eric Liu in the BB with KQ. Won that race and have hovered around 40k for the last few hours.
I was impressed with two players at my table. Number one, Boris Becker. I remember when he first started playing about a year ago at the EPT Grand Final he had a long way to go. Played with him all day, and while he doesn’t exactly strike fear into your heart, he played solid, and didn’t do anything stupid the whole day long. He was creative and had people fooled in a few spots for sure.
The other guy who I thought played well was Eric Liu. I used to play online with him on PokerStars in the limit hold’em game and some NL also, but this was the first time I’d ever played live with him. He has a great table presence, good flow, good timing, and just all around I think he played very well. Not sure how many chips he ended the day with, but that’s hardly relevant anyway. He has more than me, lol, that’s for sure.
I had one decision that took me a long time to make and I ended up confusing myself: Blinds at 800-1600 I raise on the button to 3600. Barney Boatman re-raises me to 10,000 for about the fourth time in that exact same spot. I have A-10 off and call. I could easily have went all in for my last 38,000 but I thought he may feel priced in and call. I didn’t want to race like that.
The flop came K-10-7 rainbow. I’m committed to this call the whole time in my head. My instincts tell me, “It’s Barney, he plays a bit nutty and doesn’t have to have anything at all.” Then I eventually talked myself out of it. Or better yet, I should say HE talked me out of it with his comments pre-flop and on the flop. I’m not going to repeat what he said, but ultimately I worried that I was up against JJ or QQ. Either that or AJ or AQ, but the raise size made me feel like it wasn’t either AJ or AQ. I ended up folding… and he showed me a 5! I would have been at 100,000, he probably had A-5, maybe 5-5 at best. He out talked me on that hand for sure. Well played Barney.
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I got home, chipped for about 10 minutes, did a three song Rockband duel against Patty who dropped off Mushu for me, and then I did my workout that I was supposed to do in the morning.
Tonight I’ll probably watch some TV and talk some trash with the kids in the forums. I’m really having fun with the smack talk! It reminds me of that scene in Jay and Silent Bob where they read all the bad things people say about their movies online. They freak out, and in the end of the movie, they go door to door and beat the crap out of every 14 year old who was smack talking them. Classic scene.
I’m going to keep talking the smack and playing these guys online at PokerStars after the WPT event is over. It’s not about the money, I just enjoy and really love the challenge. Some of these guys come up with some serious smack so winning is all the more fun if I can do that. If not, I’ll bow my head, say gg, and try again.
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