A little poker

The weather in Nebraska is as unpredictable as ever. Last week the temperature got up into the lower 60's and it looked like spring was just around the corner. Today, there is over 2 feet of snow on the ground and we had classes canceled earlier this week. Bizarre? Maybe.... Annoying? Extremely.

I finally made time this weekend to play the big tourneys on Stars and Party even though I was also having my fantasy baseball draft at the same time. A group of my college friends and I have been playing Fantasy Baseball and Football together for the last 3-4 years and finally this year decided to start a keeper league for fantasy baseball. For those of you who don't know, a keeper league is different in the fact that you will get to retain 6 of your players from this year and have them on your team next year. This is a great idea for us because most of the guys in the league have already graduate and are spread out all over the country. These leagues give us the chance to stay in touch on almost a day to day basis and keep us from drifting apart. I figured that doing the draft and playing a couple tourneys would be no big deal since I can usually play 4 tables, check my e-mail and IM several friends at the same time with no sweat. Unfortunately this just wasn't the case. Doing a fantasy draft is a very time consuming and intense process and it became harder than I was ready for as I was playing the two biggest tourneys of the week, so halfway through the draft I dropped out and let my friend Alex pretty much tell me who I needed to pick with every spot left.

The tournaments went surprisingly well. I haven't had a lot of luck in these large field big buy-in tourneys on-line lately, but I felt like things went a little better this week. I was playing in both of the tournaments with my friend Mats and about two hours into the tourneys we agreed to swap 20% of each others action in both of them. It was actually a fairly good deal for both of us because I had a fairly good sized stack (18k) on the Party tournament, and he had a good stack on the Stars tourney. It turns out that in the next hour after the deal I run my stack up to almost 50k on Party and am sitting in very good position to make a run when we hit the money. I get broke on Stars but don't worry about it too much because I took a pretty rough beat that crippled me. Mats hangs around for a while on Stars as well but eventually has his AQ run into AK and gets bumped. Not long after he gets his money in on party in a good spot but doesn't hit his two overs and is bounced from that one too. So it's just me in the Party tourney and by the time we hit the bubble I am at 42k. Mats stays up to watch me even though it's like 3:00 a.m. at the time in Sweden and he gives me his insight on some of the hands I play. Things really didn't go that great in the next couple hours. I get AK once in the BB and re-raise the guy who opened front he cut-off, but didn't get any action. I also had AA once and got no action. I play several key small pots in race situations against short stacks and lose three and win two. With these kind of results it is hard to accumulate many chips and I slowly hung around 30k - 40k until we got around 180 people left and I was 1/2 the size of the average stack. It just so happens that I have about 28k left and get K9 off on the button when it folds around to me. The blinds are 2k -4k with about 1k in antes in the pot so if I push and they fold, I have around 35k, it's a pretty obvious play in a steal position. So I push and the BB with has around 16K calls with A 10. He hits and Ace and I am down to about 12k and in emergency mode. I fold several hands and then get dealt K7 suited in 3rd position and am about ready to click the "all-in" button when the guy in 2nd position raises. This play takes away all of my fold equity and I am forced to lay the hand down. Unbelievably the flop comes 776 and I would have flopped trips. Well, that makes me plenty mad and even though I made the right move, things like that have a way of making you second guess yourself. I fold the next hand and then push all in UTG with Q9 offsuit. The BB calls with 33 and it holds up for him and I get busted in like 160th place. Not terribly close to the final table, but if a couple hands go my way..... Anyways I get paid like $300 and some odd dollars for the showing and transfer $67 to Mats which leaves me with about a $50 profit from the 5 hours of playing. Not the results you hope for but the only places that really matter and 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. Alright. This may be my longest blog yet so I had better wrap it up, you'll hear more from me soon.