Double FPP Recap

Day 6 of the Pokerstars double point promotion was a total disaster. I ended up losing about $2,600 and I didn’t make it to my daily goal of 10,000 points.

The day started off poorly, but it was a slow drain. I found myself down $1,000 after a few hours, but wasn’t feeling too bad about it. I was losing, but it was a combination of not much in the way of good cards for me and plenty of good cards for my opponents. That kind of losing is easy for me to handle.

The type of losing that I have trouble with is when I’m getting great cards, making big hands and losing to garbage hands that miraculously connect with the board cards. Or when people are bluffing on flop and the turn and I’ve decided to call them down with a marginal hand and then they improve just enough to beat me on the end.

For example there was a hand where I raised with 88 and got called by the big blind who had 97. The flop was K 5 3, he checked I bet and he called with no pair and no draw. The turn was a 2 and he check raised me with no pair and no draw and then the river came a 9 and he bet and I called. There were plenty of other hands in a short span that had a similar script.

As a result I went from irritated to angry to super duper mega pissed off over the course of about 20 minutes. During that span I played about 250 hands, took 26 to the showdown and lost 20 of them (normally I’d expect to win about 15 of those hands instead of 5). The thing that’s critical about pots at showdown is they are almost never small pots. In the games I’m playing in you can just about always expect a raise before the flop and at least one bet on every betting round. So in a $10/$20 game that’s a pot size of at least $140. If I win 15 of those pots instead of 5 I’ve got at least another $1,400. Smartly I decided in a fairly reasonable amount of time that I was in no state of mind to keep playing and quit for the day.

While the day was a real disaster, the week was a moderate success. Luckily since I’d overshot in point production on the early days of the week even though I didn’t make it to 10,000 on the last day I did manage to surpass my goal of 60,000 points in the 6days. And although I lost about $600 in the actual play I still made a few grand as a result of the insane number of points I earned. I took the past two days off and I'm ready to get back on the horse tomorrow.

In other news my good friend Matt Lessinger has made it through day 1 at the WSOP main event! There were a total of 6,844 entrants at this years main event who all in one way or another put up $10,000 to play. Given the massive number of players the first day of play was split into four groups who played on four different days. Matt played on Day 1D (which was Sunday, with Saturday being 1C, Friday being 1B and Thursday being 1A) and of the 2,461 players who started that day 1352 made it through. After starting with 20,000 chips Matt was up to about 45,000 at the end of his first day of play. Today was day 2A where everyone who survived on day 1A and 1B came back for their second day of action. Matt's second day will be tomorrow (Wednesday). Anyone who makes it through day 2A and 2B will be back on Thursday and the players who make it about half way through that day will be in the money. Good luck Matt!