EPT London -- Part Two

After the early action in the first half hour of day 2, the rest of the day went fairly smoothly for me. I got up to 115,000, which was ahead of the average, with my Q-Q v K-K double up. I was reasonably comfortable for the rest of the day, eventually finishing on around 180,000.

I got very few good hands during the course of the day, but got a bit of action with the few good hands that I did find and never had to play any huge pots. So, I was able to make steady progress without having to do anything fancy.

I came back on day 3 only a few places away from the bubble. Different people employ different strategies around the bubble, and it seems to be the consensus that you should get more aggressive and put pressure on the small stacks. Personally, I only do that if the table is playing very tight, and with so many young aggressive players on my table, that was never going to be the case here.

I would never be bullied into passing a big hand on the bubble that I believe I’m winning, just so I can sneak into the money. But generally in a situation like this, I like to just sit tight and wait for the bubble to burst, unless I do happen to pick up a genuine hand.

As it happened, I only had to wait until the third hand to find a genuinely big starting hand. A guy called Benny Spindler raised from early position, for the second hand running, and I looked down to find Unknown suit A-A on the small blind. I reraised and he set me all in with A-Q and I had a nice double up to start the day.

I didn’t know much about this guy when I sat down, but I later found out he has a few big results and is a very good player. He is without doubt the most aggressive player I’ve ever played against, and probably raised (or reraised) about 50% percent of all pots while I was at the table.

On reflection, I’m not sure what to make of his play. There were definitely a few pots that I felt he made really bad calls when he got reraised, but I guess there are long term benefits from people knowing that he’s not going to back off once he enters a pot. He picks up so many pots uncontested, which off-sets the times that he gets it in behind. It was certainly very hard to play against and I’d hate to be at a short-handed table with him.

I got another double up with A-A a few hours later, and finished day three on around 500,000. I got a few decent starting hands on day 4 and continued to run my stack up to close to around 900,000, without playing any all-in pots. I got lucky in a big pot when I flopped a straight draw and a flush draw, against a guy with a higher flush draw. I was in pretty bad shape with nine outs on the flop, then improved to 12 outs on the turn and nailed one of them on the river to move me to 1.8million in chips.

We were now playing two tables of five on the final table bubble. I’d been playing really tight up to this point and made a conscious decision to get stuck in and get really aggressive, hoping that my tight image might pay off. 10th place was £39k and eighth was only £51k, so I decided rather than play conservatively and try to work my way a few paces up the ladder, it made sense to gamble and try to get a big stack together to have a go at the £850,000 first prize. My plan had an early setback when I lost a big 50-50 and then came unstuck altogether when I raised all in from the big blind with A-4 after the small blind had raised with 7-7.

I know A-4 is not the best hand in the world to go broke with, but the small blind had been very aggressive and I was fairly sure he would have raised with pretty much anything to try to steal the blinds and antes, given that I’d been playing so tight all day. I didn’t want to pass a hand that I believed was likely to be ahead, and I didn’t have enough chips to reraise a little bit to find out where I was. His hand held up and I was out in 10th place, more relieved to have put in a good performance after such a bad run, than disappointed at missing out on the top few places.

I’ve since had another couple of near misses, but I’m feeling good about things and I think I’ve been playing pretty well lately. I’ll go over my Poker Million and World Open heats next time, as well as my double-bubbles in the IPO and Irish Winter Festival.