July 2007 Poker Streak Finally Ends

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Oh well, it had to happen. I went a week without playing any poker while we were down at Zope. Then we had an unscheduled business meeting in NYC that was too important to miss, so we cut our trip to Zope short by a week. The side benefit was that I got to play poker this past week when I didn’t expect to.

In any event, I still didn’t expect to play in the big one yesterday, because our friends were going to stay with us over the weekend. In case you haven’t been paying attention to the news, there was a big steam pipe explosion in NYC last week, right near our apartment, so our friends wisely canceled their trip to NYC. That put us up at the house for the weekend, with poker on the agenda.

The day we found out that our friends weren’t coming, I played in a qualifier for the big one, and won a seat! It seemed like destiny that I would extend my 2 for 2 streak of cashing to 3 for 3.

I’ll just paste my notes in from the tourney and summarize at the bottom…

965 entrants, top 100 paid.

I was in 3rd after the first hand.

Had some extremely tough laydowns after that, which cost me some significant chips. In one hand, I know for sure I would have won. In the others, I don’t know, but I suspect that in at least one, I would have won.

So, in the meantime, I’m now not doing so hot, but it’s early.

Before this one started, I entered a $15 tourney at 3:30 that had 364 entrants, top 40 paid.

I had some horrid luck and with 290 left, I was something like 280th (or worse). I fought back tooth and nail, and just lost (at 6pm, an hour into the big tourney!), and came in 27th. It was only worth $30 back for my $15, but was very satisfying!

Now I can concentrate fully on the big one…

726 left I am in 624th
690 left I am in 598th
676 left I am in 646th (oops!)
670 left I am in 468th (better!) 🙂

Just went out in 589th, so finally, no money in the big one… There had to be a first one.

I was a very short stack. I had JcQs in the small blind. There were two limpers and I limped, and the big blind checked, so there were 4 of us. The flop came Qc8c4c. I had top pair and a decent flush draw, and I had only 900 chips left. I went all-in. I got called by a guy with Ac4c, so he flopped the nut flush. Oops for me. The next card was a club, so if someone else had called, with anything other than the Kc, I would have won, so it was a good calculated play, but it didn’t work this time. Oh well.

So here’s the bottom line on July. After the cash in the big one two weeks ago, I was ahead $1907. I had some interim successes during the past week, and while dipping below that number a few times, at one point I peaked at up $1983. After the disaster this weekend (meaning, not just losing the big one, but a number of other heart breakers), I am now only up $1685 for the month. Boo hoo. 🙂

Obviously, still a fantastic month. Of course, since I won my entry into the big one (value: $215), and won a number of other qualifiers as well (which I’ve since lost as well), the real value of my winnings is higher, it’s just that I’ve already lost back some of those winnings in the tournaments that I qualified for.

I’ll report again at the end of the month, with an analysis of my play, which is definitely changing in a material way (we’ll see whether for the better or not!).