No big score this weekend

Well I had high hopes for this weekends trips to NH to play cards, unfortunately you can not schedule run-good and things didn't fall my way. It started with the usual Friday night routine of getting out of class, getting picked up by Finches dad, and heading up to Seabrook to play the $90 6:30 tournament. I think that this is the best weekly tournament offered and I used to consider skipping it to play the 8:00 $30 re-buy because there are a lot more novice players in it, but the structure and field size of the 6:30 makes up for it in my opinion. On a side note, it still kind of boggles my mind how players play the 1:00 $100 tournament which has very deep stacks and longer blind levels but the field size is never anything impressive, to the extent that 1st place is usually slightly bigger in both the 6:30 and the 8:00. I mean, I enjoy playing and grinding all day in a slow structured tournament as much as the next guy but the prize pool has to be substantial for it to really be worth the time investment.

Think about it if the payouts are roughly the same, but you think your ROI going up 50% playing in a slow structured tournament (which it almost certainly doesn't BTW) then instead of having a 100% ROI, in a $90 tournament (which is obviously $90 worth of equity), you have a 150% ROI in a $100 tournament ($150 in equity). Now we factor in the time it takes. A slow structured 1pm tournament will take about 8-9 hours to complete, the 6:30 HAS to be done by 1am, meaning it is structured to never last longer than 6 1/2 hours. I would estimate that i personally (it will vary by playing style) last on average roughly 5 hours in the 1pm and about 2 1/2 hours in the 6:30. So you can see that my win rate per hour in the 1pm is $30 per hour and in the 6:30 it is $36per hour. That is under absolutely perfect circumstances and honestly I can't see anyone's ROI increasing that much from longer levels so the 1pm is likely closer to $22-$23 per hour.

Well after that little elementary math lesson I'll get into how the weekend went and go over a hand that I don't love how I played. I never got much going in the 6:30 and was forced to play much tighter than I usually do by a mix of having a very calling station-esk table and being relatively card dead. After the first break I go to do something that I very rarely get a chance to do, use my tight image! So blinds are 100/200 and it folds to me on the HJ, I have13,200 in my stack. I look down at a Kd4d and make it 600 (normally my raise size in this spot is 500, but since I had been so inactive they would not know that and going a full 3X sells the story of me being a huge nit) and I get called from the button. So we go to the flop with 1500 in the pot and I see a beautiful K 4 9 rainbow flop. I bet 700 he makes it 1600 and I call, turn comes an 8c, putting 2 clubs on board, I check he bets 3,000 into the pot of 4,700 and I call and the river is the Qc, I check and he again bets 3,000 and I pay it off and get shown the Ac10c.

The button was a middle aged man who I wasn't sure if I had played with before but, despite him playing pretty normal thus far I had a feeling that he was capable of some serious spewage, I don't know if I saw him play spewy and just didn't consciously remember or if he just had that look about him. Anyway the flop spot is just weird, I mean I would have known if he was a big enough station pre flop to call a raise from a tight player with 9-4, and I think it is unlikely that he chooses to slow play AA pre, especially since I have been tight and may have just finally woken u with a hand so I can only really beat a hand he is value-raising with if it is a misplayed AK. That being said, I am not folding the flop ever since everyone can just spaz once in a while and as I said before I had a read before this hand that he could be spewy. He also may be thinking that my tight preflop stats will lead me folding a lot to raises on the flop which is not the greatest logic ever, but if the players at Seabrook were typically capable of great logic I would not play there as often as I do. After that I just bluff catch and though I am not certain it is the best way to play my hand I don't have any major problems with any of my decisions, and it works out nicely if he was intending to bluff shove all non clubs on the river. Maybe I should be willing to raise and get it in on the flop but I just cant see me being in good shape against a range that puts in 12,600 into a 1500 pot, but maybe I am giving people too much credit. I do think it is worth mentioning that I don't think the other player played the hand poorly, if I am in this annoying of a spot with two pair than it really can't be that bad, and continuing to barrel when you pick up significant equity on the turn is def a play that I use often (it should go with out saying that him betting 3,000 when he makes the nuts is pretty dumb but w/e)

After that I push-botted correctly for a while until running my AQss into AK for 12 BBs, the time I spent push-botting was good though because Finches little brother was able to sit behind me and hopefully get a feel for how profitable push-botting is in tournament poker. Not for nothing, he did go on to win a SnG later that night. This was his 2nd time at Seabrook and he played atrociously the first time and made more improvement than I have ever seen someone make without actually playing a lot of poker in between. I mean the real reason for his is that he did a much better job at taking the advice that Finch and I was giving him. He still isn't ready to go Pro just yet, but I would bet that he is a winning Seabrook SnG player just by playing the way he played on Friday and if he can fix a few more leaks in his game there will be very little difference in his win-rate and Finch or my win-rate as it pertains specifically to SnG poker at Seabrook. Maybe I should consider coaching other beginners how to beat Seabrook SnGs, I think I could feasibly charge $40-$50 an hour and still have it be worth it for the players if they were planning on playing a large enough sample size of SnGs up there. JUst something to consider.

I also went up to Rockingham Park for their 2-day $250 event on Saturday and never got much going there was only 1 or 2 semi interesting spots and I did not record the details in my phone so I don't even remember all the crucial aspects to the hands. Overall I was very card-dead and didn't have a great table draw, in fact I only lasted as long as I did (maybe 6-7 hours) because I continued to play pots with the 2 certified fishy players that were at my table and that allowed me to chip up and at least maintain a stack for most of the day. I went broke attempting a re-steal for 20 BBs with A6 and got "tank called" by a player I thought was really good who had a bunch of chips and AK! That was pretty surprising. I will likely go play again soon and will probably blog more like this since Finch thinks that he can write a blog with as much nerdy poker content as I can which is pretty absurd.