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brystmar's Poker Blog

Hey blog, it's been awhile.  A really long while.  Hope you're all doing well out there flowing through the tubes in the land of the internets.  Here's what I've been up to lately:



Those of you who know me know that I don't play tournaments very often, and when I do I generally end the day asking myself why I decided to waste a full day of my life grinding MTTs.  I've watched most of the MTT videos on CR multiple times, and I've worked on my tournament game a good amount in the past, so I do consider myself a to be reasonably solid tourney player overall.  But there's just sooooo much variance in tourneys which leads to inevitable frustration unless you end up winning the whole thing.  Grinding tournaments really takes a toll on your mental health, and I simply cannot understand how the MTT regulars do this for a living.

So I started the day off playing some low-stakes PLO on UB (trying to run up a small deposit) while boring myself with a few tournaments in the background.  I ended up doing pretty well in the PokerStars Sunday Warmup, getting into the money with a decent stack but ultimately busting in a bit of bad luck when my opponent turned a set vs my TPGK.

I also did pretty well in a random mid-day $109 freezeout on FTP, eventually reaching the Final Table with a manageable stack and relatively good table position.  I ended up busting 5th for ~$2k in that one, losing a big flip to the huge donk sitting two to my left.  Meh, whatever.

After busting from that FT, I was pretty tired from playing ~6hrs of poker straight and was looking to take a break.  But as soon as my roommate Ryan got off the phone with a chinese delivery place, the PS Sunday Million popped up (which I forgot I registered in earlier), and I was back on the grind.  I then grinded more PLO in the background and registered late for the FTP 750k at the very last second.  This turned out to be a very good decision :)

I never really god much going in the Million and busted in the 2nd hour, but my second helping of the chicken fried rice helped re-energize my mental facilities and allowed me to focus on the FTP 750k tournament after I built up some chips early on.  I did suck out pretty huge really early on to stay alive, but I was pretty unfortunate to run into the only hand that had me crushed; besides, I think I played really well for most of the tourney.

Building a stack up early helps sooooo much in getting through the middle stages of the tournament, and my strategy after getting chips centered around consciously avoiding tough / dangerous situations that would put my growing chip stack at risk.  Aggression is certainly important, but I think many people get far too overly aggro and force themselves into high-variance spots without a good reason for doing so.  Maybe I'm wrong, but relying on this concept worked out well for me on Sunday.  I picked my spots well (+ ran pretty well) and managed to lock up a great seat at the Final Table with the second largest stack!

When we got down to 3-handed play, I assumed the others would be happy to see the potential chop numbers (or at least put a bunch of money aside and play winner-take-all for ~$15k instead of >$50k).  The chipleader (wasaki coke) and I both had decent stacks and were pressuring the shortstack well, so I decided to wait until HU to talk deals.  What I didn't know was that Full Tilt doesn't facilitate deals -- even at major Final Tables -- and I didn't learn this until after the tournament was over.

After waiting 3-4min for support to come (which never happened), we eventually decided to just play it out.  I came into HU at a pretty sizeable chip disadvantage of nearly 4.5:1, but luckily I still had ~25bb to play with.  I managed to figure out wasaki's style and deploy a solid counter-strategy fairly quickly, and I was fortunate enough to win my two allins (my KQ > his QT, then my 99 held vs his AJ) before regaining the chiplead.  After that, we both had pretty decent stacks relative to the blinds, so this allowed for a good amount of play.  The momentum had shifted to me, and I finally felt like I had the control over the match I needed to put him away for good.

Wasaki continued to try and out-aggress me, which I glady let him do in the small pots.  I picked my spots well, though, and focused on played big pots with my big hands.  This is a pretty important concept which many people overlook, and it's actually not as easy to do as it sounds.  I managed to get 3 streets of value from him with my flopped toppair in a limped pot shortly thereafter, which left him with only an 11bb stack.  My experience playing SNGs in the past kicked in from here, and I push/folded him down even more.  Wasaki ended up open-shoving his remaining ~8bb from the button, and I snapped him off with K8.  I was unfortunate to run into his dominating hand of K9, but the poker gods smiled upon me and banged out an 8-ball on the turn to ship me the tournament and $132k!

There's no feeling in poker quite like winning a tournament, but this one was extra special for a few reasons.  Obviously the size of the payouts and of the field I had to plow through to win added to my satisfaction, but the most special thing to me about this win was its timeliness.  I've been working hard to recover from the worst two months of my career (Sept & Oct) for the past few weeks, and this win brought me the sweet, sweet redemption I sought.  And, man, it sure feels good!

I took a few screenshots from the final stages of the tourney:
11-handed play
FT is set!
3-handed
Start of HU
More HU
The final hand
I won!
Final tournament lobby

Whenever I go deep in big tournaments, I like to record my play in the mid & late stages for review later, and Sunday was no exception.  I started recording myself in the tournament from about 4hrs into the tournament (~300 people left) through the end, and this is going to make a great video series for you CR members.

Unfortunately, my Camtasia recorder has been having some problems lately and all of the recordings were corrupted in some way (sick beat?).  There's some skipping of a few seconds here and there, but it's pretty minimal in most cases and doesn't affect watchability very much -- esp since I'm planning to re-dub the audio next week (hopefully with guest commentary from Menlo).  Luckily, there was only one section of the video that is completely unwatchable, consisting of maybe 30 hands with ~150 people left, so I'm editing it out and we'll use a replayer for those few hands.  Expect the final videos to be posted sometime in December.

Thanks for listening to me ramble through this blog entry, and have a great Thanksgiving guys!

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• brystmar's Poker Blog
  

  brystmar
  Chicago, IL
  

  
  

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