A great weekend of poker

(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

Loading ...

Mark | Poker Articles, Poker Tournament

So my girlfriend was out of town visiting some of her friends for a birthday party. Having the place to myself I invited one of my good friends over for a weekend of poker. He arrived Friday evening at around quarter to nine and by nine o’ clock we were playing in 4 big tournaments on two laptops:

A 150000$ Guaranteed 75$ rebuy on Titan Poker
A 35000$ Guaranteed 10$ rebuy on Titan Poker
A 10000£ Guaranteed 50£ buyin on Inter Poker
A 7000£ Guranteed 30£ buyin on Inter Poker

My friend also opened some cash tables on Inter Poker so everything was set for a hopefully profitable night. We exited the two Inter Poker tourneys within an hour or so. In the 10000£ tourney we raised preflop with AK and got a A9x flop. Unfortunately our opponent called our preflop raise with A9 (bad call) and we could not throw our hand. In the 7000£ tourney we busted out with KK against 1010, all in preflop.

At the same time my friend had lost his initial 100$ buyin on Inter Poker plus another 300$. Needless to say spirits were low and so were our chip stacks in the the Titan Poker tournaments. However after the first break things started to look up. We became chipleaders in the 150000$ tournament and kept our lead for several hours. In the 35000$ tournament we climbed to the 5th largest stack and remained in the top 10 almost until the very end.

After 5-6 hours of play we finally busted out as number 15 in both tournaments (what are the odds of that happening:-)). At the time the blinds were stellar and our M’s were below 5. We pushed with 88 in the 35000$ tournament but got called by QQ. In the 150000$ tournament we pushed with A5 suited and got called by AJ.

All in all we played very conservative…waiting for the good hands and making good decisions all the way. It really helped to be two persons playing. I am more conservative than my friend so I saved us from throwing our chips away on silly calls. On the other hand my friends looser approach won us some nice pots with well timed bluffs and marginal hands.

If I should point out one negative part of our play it would probably be that we were to passive as chipleaders. We hit a cooler with no playable hands for two hours which meant that we were shortstacked entering the final battle to reach the final table. We should have used our stack more to steal blinds, playing our opponents and not our cards. I find that this is the hardest part of playing poker tournaments and I will definitely work on this part of my game. As a final note we opted to fold 99 preflop to a large raise with 25 players remaining. Looking back I think we should have taken a stand here.

Unfortunately my friend lost another 400$ on Inter Poker before we stopped playing so he did not come out of the weekend with a profit like we. He lightened up Saturday where we went to see a “shake that booty” competition in a Salsa club:-)

Special promotions

Poker Pro Bankroll Series

Latest Poker Strategy Articles

Contact PokerBankrollBlog

Questions? Concerns? Comments? Contact us! We'll return your email within 12 hours.