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Tournament shoving
Published 6 oktober 2008 09:47Today 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
Posted in Online Poker, Poker Music | 
annabel de vetten, blind structure, kraftwerk, sit & go | 1 CommentRamble Gamble
Published 29 september 2008 15:29Today I had a nice run at the low-stakes cashgames at Titan. Because it’s sometimes very boring to wait on a playable hand (even if you play deepstack) after which you make a marginal profit with it, I decided to play on two .05/.10 $ tables.
I never play more than two tables simultaneously though, because I want to have a good read (as far as possible in online poker) on my opponents. That’s why I always start at one table and when I have a decent read on my opponents there, I open another table where I try to apply the same procedure. If there might occur a lot of mutations on one of the tables, I’ll sit out on the other table and reorganize my reads. This tactic has approved to be very succesful to me in the past. By playing this way for about 2 hours, I made a profit of 13 $. This might seem a little but you may not forget this is actually an amount of 130 big blinds, which would be a nice profit on a .50/1 $ game 
.
During this hours I enjoyed listening to, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest albums of all time: Cosmo’s Factory by Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR) from California, USA. This album dates from 1970, a time where great bands still made five albums in a time span of two years (this was the fifth and most successful). Even if you don’t know the album or the band, you’ll probably recognize a song like Lookin’ out my backdoor, which can make you extremely happy if it plays when you make a great call 
. Personally I prefer the opening track Ramble Tamble and especially the brilliant Who’ll stop the rain. Singer John Fogerty plays the acoustic guitar on this song which he wrote after returning home from Woodstock ’69 where he saw the crowd collectively throw off their clothes after it started raining.
At last I would like to show you a hand that appeared during a 5$ buy-in sit&go tournament I played after the cashgames. I had about 1300 chips with the blinds already being 100/200 when I woke up with 77. Ofcourse I immediately shoved all-in and was called by one player. When he showed TT I already stood up to get a cold beer from the fridge, having played enough poker for this day. Then came the following flop…
… and I finished second in the tournament 
.