Different Cities, Same Story

I’ve been fairly busy since my last update, but still not much success on the tournament front. I travelled to Galway to play a bounty tournament and cash game in the 4 Aces Club, then stopped off in Dublin on my way home for a charity tournament, before flying over to Nottingham the next day for the $1 million guaranteed English Poker Open. From Nottingham, I got the train to London for the WSOPE and now I’m at home for a few days rest before I go back to London for another two week stint for the EPT.

You’d think with all these tournaments I might have won something? Unfortunately not, although I have made a few grand in the cash games over the course of my travels. I actually only played six tournaments and two of them were small ones that I was really just playing for fun, so it’s not quite as bad as it sounds, although this bad run is definitely getting a bit annoying now.

My most creditable performance was in the EPO in Nottingham, where I struggled through with very few decent hands until my AK got cracked by AT around about the 30 player mark (with 18 getting paid). I busted early in the £500 side event there, semi-bluffing with a straight draw, and also in the £1k WSOPE NLH tournament where I got involved in a few pots early on, losing them all, and then busted with AT v QQ on a T-high flop when I’d become short-stacked.

The last tournament I played was the one I’d been most looking forward to, the £2,500 pot-limit omaha/holdem. I got off to a good start in it, and worked my stack from 7.5k up to around 13k at one point, but crippled myself in a pot against Karl Mahrenholz where I flopped second set against his top set.

I could leave it at that and not tell you what happened, and it would sound like a very bad beat that I couldn’t have done anything about, but the truth is I could have done plenty about it and I was annoyed with myself for a long time afterwards.

We were playing omaha and Karl, having just doubled up the previous hand, raised the maximum preflop. There was another caller and I called from the BB with KKxx, and the flop came AKx rainbow. I checked and Karl bet the pot (3.5k).

Karl’s a very good player and I knew that having just doubled up and got himself back into it he wasn’t going to do anything rash in the very next hand. He was only ever going to bet the pot on the flop with a set or possibly top two or TJQx, and given that he’d just doubled up and I felt that he wouldn’t have raised without an absolutely premium hand preflop, I should have known that it was much more likely to be AA.

It might sound pretty tight, and I’m not in the habit of passing second set even in omaha, but that is definitely what I should have done here. Instead, I raised him all-in (he had another 4k or so behind). I was initially in two minds about playing the £5k PLO on Wednesday, and was probably leaning towards playing it, however the way that I played that hand made my mind up for me. I decided just to play some small cash games for the last couple of days then go home for a bit of a break and hopefully come back and play better over the EPT schedule.

I’m not going to be too hard on myself. I know it’s inevitable that I’ll make some mistakes and I’ve played worse pots, but my head wasn’t right to be playing after that and I think I needed a bit of a break. I’m still pretty happy about the way that I’ve been playing overall lately though, and I’m looking forward to getting back over for a busy couple of weeks which will involve me defending the World Open and Poker Million titles that I won last year, as well as the London EPT and some side events.

Hopefully, I’ll have better news next time.