Yesterday I played another evening in the $ .10 /.25 livegame. After what happened I can only conclude one thing: that table is cursed.

On my way to the place of evil I enjoyed the paradisiacal sounds of Guns ‘n Roses’ Use Your Illusion II on my headphone. In my opinion this is one of the best albums of all time and certainly of the nineties. Therefore and because my special fan Carl missed some music in the last contribution , I’ll tell something more about it. Use Your Illusion II is sometimes seen as the second part of the double-album Use You Illusion, but is in fact a separate album. I very much prefer this album to the other work of GNR because it contains a lot more than the simple straight-away rock they made before: it also integrates blues and classical music. Moreover there’s much more space for Axl playing the piano on this album which transforms GNR more or less from a hard rock band to a progressive rock band.

Besides the beautiful artwork, which is ofcourse a detail from the very famous painting The School of Athens (Raphael), the albums contains pieces of art like Civil War, 14 Years and especially the magnum opus of GNR: Estranged. This song lacks every aspect of the traditional verse-chorus-verse structure and its video (seen as the final part of a trilogy, after Don”t Cry and November Rain (both on Use Your Illusion I)) costed about eight million dollars.

After enjoying listening this, I arrived at the table (9-handed). The evening started terrific, as I picked up KK on the first hand. Altough the flop paired two aces, it was quickly clear my only remaining opponent didn’t have one of those other two babies in his hand and I took down a nice pot. Then began the horror. I picked up TT in middle position and the person UTG raised to € 1.10. The following two players also called and I also just called, as my hand had now become a drawing hand. Another two players behind me called, as they had good pot odds now. The flop came Js Td 8d. The preflop raiser checked and the next player betted €3. After a fold I made it €8 to call. One player behind me (chipleader) did so and the initial €3-raiser now shoved all-in for about €5 more. I shoved all-in over the top for about €4 more and was called by the opponent behind me. The clown in front of me showed 8c9c and the player behind me, who was gradually sucked into this pot, showed 8h9d. So I certainly wasn’t in bad shape with my set for a €60 pot, against two OESD’s. The turn came 4d and then…the river: Ad. The one with the 9 of diamonds took the pot which was made enormous by the other ”89 player”, what was he thinking with only bottom pair and the OESD? Well he sure used his illusion…

Playing a hand on the button is one of the most comfortable things in poker; before you even have to make a move yourself you already received a lot of information from your opponents (deriving from their action). Being the first to act is something more complicated.

In those situations, you sometimes need to control an important competence: check-raising. As you can deduct from the word itself, it is the act of checking in early position, meanwhile hoping somebody behind you bets so you can make a (re)raise. In this manner, you can gain some extra bets from your opponents, because they maybe won’t call a bet from you at all when you lead out right away (because you show strength in front of them). Besides, you will have more information about your opponent’s hand when he calls a check-raise from you instead of a standard bet.

Below is a little example of a check-raise situation:

As you can see I have snowmen in the small blind and one player in early position makes a preflop raise. Because of his position I give him credit for a good hand and decides just to call and so does the big blind. I subsequently check the flop, planning a check-raise. The preflop raiser most likely has two high cards (probably something with an ace), so I expect him to make a continuation bet, convinced that his hand is still the best. Instead the BB leads out and the other player flat calls. So now I’m almost sure he has two high cards and wants to see if he can pair something on the turn, but an extra reason to raise here is to see if the BB has something like A5s/56s or just a duck/2 spades. So I raise the total pot (pot+bets) and they both fold. Another situation where you might use a check-raise a lot is when you’re in the blinds and the cutoff or button makes a standard continuation bet on the flop after trying to steal the blinds preflop.

Ultimately, I didn’t finish in the money in that $5 sit ‘n go on Pokerstars, but luckily my good run on Full Tilt continued. To conclude I show you the prettiest pot I won today on the $.10/.25 games:

Life is good when you flop a set .

An important mistake made by a lot of beginning poker players: not making enough profit with their good hand by bad play on the river. This occurs in two important ways: they are scared that their hand isn’t the best (anymore) and want to control the damage with a check or they have obviously the best hand but miss a lot of value by making a way too large bet (causing a fold of the opponent).

The last few days I ended up a couple of times in such situations. I’ll show you how I played it and didn’t make the mistake I would have made in my period as a beginning player. The first example comes from a six-handed $5 sit ‘n go on Titan. Let’s have a look on how the hand was played:

As you can see, I raised 3BB’s (blinds were 10-20) preflop with QT offsuit, a decent hand playing five-handed. The player on the button called me and I flopped top two pair. I made a standard continuation bet and was called again (so I knew he probably didn’t have a queen, but a ten or a draw). The turn came a seven. This card most likely didn’t help my opponent, as it wasn’t a diamond and his possible straightdraw was more likely the one with KJ than J9 or 69 thanks to the raise preflop. So I fired again and was again called. The river came the beautiful 5 of spades. I was almost certain I had the best hand now but how many more chips could I steal from my opponent? Well, probably not much if he missed his draw(s). But absolutely some more if he had a (good) ten, which still was the second best pair. So I gave him the right price to call me and he indeed did so with AT (with a bet on the river that small, you can also induce him to bluff you with his missed draws; in most cases you have to call him then ofcourse, depending on your read (could he have slowplayed a flopped set?)).

The second example comes from a cashgame ($.10/.25) on Full Tilt. Because FTP does not have a really clarifying hand history-option, I converted the hand history to the replay as you can watch below:

As you can see, I have the absolute nuts on the river and I want at least one opponent to pay me, in which I succeed.

While I was making some nice profit thanks to this kind of plays, I discovered that Elephant from the White Stripes really is one of the greatest albums of the past five years and therefore it’s just they won a Grammy with it in 2004 for Best Alternative Music Album. Ofcourse you can easily skip the opening track as you have probably heard it already like a 1000 times, and then listen to pearls like ‘Black Math’, ‘In the Cold, Cold Night’ and especially ‘The Air Near My Fingers’. By the way, would it be coincedence that the artwork of this album as well that of The Man Machine use the same colors as this wonderful blog?

Hi everybody. Today I saw a famous poker phenomenon during an episode of High Stakes Poker. It appeared on episode 1 of season 2 of this well known TV-show and it showed how you can fail in making the maximum profit with a very good hand by using your mouth too much.

The reason I immediately recognized it, I have to admit, is because I still make the same mistake a little too much in live games. The situation involved one my favourite poker players, Daniel Negreanu, and probably my least favourite professional player, Phil Laak. Daniel made a pre-flop raise with QJ suited and Laak calls with AQ offsuit. Oh yeah, as a big suprise Sammy Farha was also in the hand with (a decent!) hand: 67 suited (spades). The flop came QdJd8h and Daniel made a continuation bet with top two pair. Sammy folded and Laak raised with his top pair top kicker. Then the bad actor in Negreanu came to live. He mumbled something like “Oh boy” and subsequently started an elucidation about ‘the brutality of this game’. While Gabe Kaplan amused himself with this bad acting of Daniel, mister Negreanu made a big reraise. Phil folded the hand after some consideration, clearly not happy with what he had heard. Negreanu missed a lot of extra money by this way.

By the way, if you watch some High Stakes Poker soon, remember this little trick to amuse yourself: when Kaplan and his co-host AJ Benza show up for their introduction or conclusions, hold your hand in front of Kaplan so you can only see Benza. What you’ll see next is some excellent fake laughs by Benza, acting on such a bad level Negreanu can’t even dream about .

The last couple of days I had some very profitable sessions. Those sessions more or less followed the same procedure: first I played a sit ‘n go (2-3 $) on Pokerstars or FTP and after that I played about 100 hands on the .05/.10$ cashgame on Titan. This went well on both fronts, since I was saved from huge bad beats most of the time.

Typical about the Titan game is the presence of many so called ‘SSS-players’: Short Stack Strategy-players. They buy in for the minimum (20 BB’s) and if they pick up a premium hand, they’ll open with a big raise or reraise all-in when they are behind a raise. If they upgrade their stack to 30 BB’s, they leave and pick out another table. It is believed to be an effective way to build up your bankroll and I can confirm that as I once successfully did so. Anyway, as a deep stack player, you have to take account of this sort of players. As you will rarely get the right implied odds for a drawing hand, it makes less sense to play them a lot.

Because I was in a really good mood, I decided to take a shot on a cheap sattelite, maybe I could profit a little extra from this good run . So I subscribed to a 50 FTP Sat where the top two finishers would be granted acces to the 2500 FTP Sat to the 750.000 $ Guarantee on Full Tilt Poker (where I play under the name ‘RBuffalo76′). Things were running smooth again, among others illustrated by this wonderfull hand:

As you can see, I built up an enormous stack early on in the tournament. That was the main reason I was able to finish second and get me a ticket for the next satellite. Unfortunately, I didn’t succeed to make my way into the big tournament there, but that couldn’t take away my joy .

Today I played some 3$ sit & go’s on Pokerstars. I’m playing there under the name of ‘RBuffaloQJ’ and you can further recognize me by my qofdiamonds-avatar (the beautiful face of the queen from the header of this blog, which is artwork of the figurative artist Annabel de Vetten), which is a nice feature that’s available on Pokerstars.

Altough this is helpful to recognize players you played against before, this is not the main reason to play tournaments in this cardroom. More important is the excellent blind structure that is used, which can only be matched by the one Full Tilt Poker uses. With the blinds going up much slower than on other sites, those rooms are better suited for the more advanced poker players, who don’t like the continuous pressure of being shortstacked.

I want to use this opportunity to discuss a typical tournament situation, which I experienced today. It was still early in the tournament and I woke up with 7s6s on the button with a lot of limpers in front of me. As this multi-pot was an excellent situation for my suited connectors, I limped too. Then the BB raised four times the BB and there still remained two callers in front of me. I decided I got the right price and also called. Subsequently the flop came as showed in the picture below and the BB made the same bet as preflop and the other players called towards me. I was a little bit confused and doubted whether to raise (to get some info on the BB: did he show weakness because his AK didn’t hit of was he slowplaying his overpair on this harmless flop) or check.

Checking seemed like the best option to me and as you saw a great card came for me on the turn. Now the BB suddenly made a way bigger bet and the other opponents folded. I decided for myself he had indeed an overpair (QQ,KK,AA) and was scared by this second spade with so many players involved. Meanwhile I had upgraded my hand with a flushdraw, gutshot straightdraw and my 6 and 7 were also still alive because my seven already paired. So I had exactly a 1 to 3 (18/46) chance to win this pot against his overpair. I decided not to call but to shove all-in and redirect the decision towards him (now I could win by my opponent folding right here as well as by hitting the river after a call).

He called and showed me indeed KK, but as you can see

a 6 came on the river and I made my two pair.

I enjoyed this double-up on the music of the historic Kraftwerk album The Man Machine from 1978. This album from the pioneers of the electronic music contains most of my favorite Kraftwerk songs, as you can deduct from my personal top-5 of this German heroes:

1. The Man Machine
2. The Model
3. Radio-activity
4. The Robots
5. Computer World

You’ll probably know them. It’s a very special sort of people. They fill their wallets with a lot of ammo before they go to war. When they arrive at the frontline they load their guns with a first buy-in. From then on, you can observe their greedy eyes from a distance, waiting for two random cards to shoot at a pot.

Me and another seven players had the honour of having two members of this race on our table at a weekly homegame (cashgame, €.10/.25). I was playing a very solid game and was able to upgrade my stack from a €15 buy-in to an amount of approximately €28, basiccaly by just overplaying most of the other seven opponents. Luckily for those poor guys they were restacked now and then by the brilliant play of our two heroes.

Unfortunately for the game, the first clown had to leave after he lost his last ammo on an all-in preflop call (€30, 120 big blinds that is) with the legendary Q3 offsuit against the other one (how could we, anxious and tight as we are, know that he made a fabulous call after reading his retarded opponent and knowing he was against 22 and thus had two overcards). We praised ourselves lucky for the fact that his partner in crime couldn’t get enough of showing us his absolute brilliance in the following hours.

After I enjoyed watching the miserable play for about an hour, I woke up with two kings in early position. I raised to €1.25 and the table folded to my great hero with his big stack. When he announced a reraise there started one big awesome party inside my head. Finally it was my time to get paid off. He reraised €5 and I came over the top with €15, knowing this was the only way to double my whole stack in case an ace didn’t appear on the flop. He called, the flop came T 7 2 rainbow and he betted my stack. After a quick call he showed me an ace without showing me the other card (he probably thinks he’’s a genius by making this terrific move). Turn and river came 9 8. His other card was a lousy offsuit Jack. An enormous desire to throw up on the table made itself master of me.