A Barren Week

Anyway Terry seemed a nice fellah and I have named him ‘Terry the Anecdote’, because he never gave a straightforward answer to any casual question I put to him, at one point he quoted a biblical parable to make his point, when he could have just said “yes”. Thoroughly entertaining stuff for a drunk Brit sitting on the other side of the pond at 4am.

So anyhow back to poker stuff. Is my new strategy working?

Sort of, I think. Certainly opening up my starting book to include more hands offers me more chances, but adversely it also offers me more chances to lose chips. There is certainly a balancing act required here, it isn’t as black and white as just opening the starting book.

For example I played a 90 seat tournament yesterday and if I had employed the new strategy I would not have made the first break let alone the final table. It wasn’t until the final table that I started to experiment a little. I went from 8th stack to 2nd in about 30 minutes of play. Then changed gears down again as people were getting dangerous with their over-betting as they started to get real concerned about bubbling out of the big money and because the BB’s were getting real hurtful.

Ended up 4 handed and lost half my stack to a guy that made a most unusual call;

Me KK in the pocket on the SB raised 5xbb to the BB

BB calls my raise, the other two fold.

Flop comes rag, rag, rag..

I raise hefty again and the BB pushes it all in, I call and he has A2 off, he has nothing but an Ace high no connectors, nothing? And he hits an Ace on the river. I tried to ask him what the heck was that call, but he told me to not be so silly for asking such a question? Dumbfounded I asked again and then one of the other players pipes up “Don’t worry (name of BB) I got yah back, that was a class move”.. hmm?

End up all in with QQ after the flop comes rag, rag, rag again, and lose to AQ who again hits an Ace on the River. This was deep into the 3rd session and it does make one slightly suspicious of the system software.

Two things I noted about this tournament, the first was, must play league style for the first 85% of the game. The second thing I noted was there was very obvious collusion happening on the tables. At least three or four times I noticed chip dumping happening and it wasn’t very subtle. Amazingly on the final table three of the players obviously knew each other and again there was very unsubtle chip dumping happening, it only happened twice on the final table between the same two players.

If anyone else noticed it I don’t know, no one said anything and I kept quiet also.

Now this was not a big money tourney, only about 500 hundred bucks in the prize pool, yet there was obviously small schools of colluders prowling the game. You have to ask yourself if people are making the concerted effort at this level then surely there will be even greater concerted effort by people at the bigger money games?

It really concerns me about moving up the stake money tables. I want to play larger stakes tables yet at the same time I am convinced that collusion by organised schools will be more prevalent as I move up.

I am so convinced of this, that I am seriously thinking of stopping online poker other than playing for sport in my league games. There are enough local land games around me to satisfy my poker greedy eyes and it may well be that I shift my focus to playing those instead.

Anyhow we will see eh..;)

Sorry for such a barren week in the blog folks, but there wasn’t much to write about concerning poker and I am sure no one wanted to read about my Christmas shopping expeditions.

Good luck on the felt.. till next time