Just busted late on day 1. I know I'm prone to be a bit results oriented now, but in retrospect I do think the spot was marginal. It's a cash game habit to auto-push small edges, but then when you look back under MTT circumstances you hadn't needed to.
Anyway on to the hand, it's pretty straigh forward. A guy just busted so we are 9 handed. blinds are 200/400 w/50 ante. I have 14k in chips. My largest was about 30k, but since I had moved to my current table I'd not been making hands and making moves at the wrong time. By this point I had 19k and decided to tune it down a bit so I guess I had been blinding down some. Anywho, a new guy to the table raised utg+2 to 3x. He raised the previous hand before and called a shove from a shorter stack and won at showdown with a premium (sorry can't recall the exact had, but it was standard premium). I know this guy is very likely to be a reasonable MTT reg, he had sponsorship badges and a poker school badge.
It's folded to me and I look down at red jacks and decide to 3-bet. Now this is the spot where I think my play became marginal. I saw a premium hand and auto raised after having a longish dry spell (about 3 hours). I think my plan to 3-bet call is generally +ev, but I think it's fairly high variance, because I'm about 40-60 vs his shoving range due to his position and my peceived table image by him (he hadn't seen all the bets I had been making where I had been folding).
So we get it in and he shows AK and wins the flip and I bust. I definetly prefer flatting given my post-analysis, but will try not to beat myself up too much because of it.
All in all I'm glad I made the experience. The field was definetly softer than I had expected. I saw a lot of the better players 4-bet and then tank for a long time w/50bb effective stack sizes and there were a bunch of recreational players that were amusing to listen to.
The hotel is ridiculous, likely the most balla I've stayed in in Europe (Mariott Docklands might be the best, but it's close).
I guess I'm just gonna sleep over it and then get back into the cash game grind. Obviously I'll also do a bunch of sight seeing from tomorrow onwards. I'll be staying here till Sunday and on Saturday there will be a player party at a local night club.

Daniell

I just got into Budapest in about the same time it would've taken me to get to New York :S.
The flight time from where I live to Budapest is 1h20mins, but you need to stop in Vienna.
Basically what happend was that my flight was delayed by an hour and so I ended up missing my 30 minute connection flight to Budapest. This lead to me having to wait an additional 6 hours in Vienna.
It get's funnier though. When I arrive in Budapest they tell me they've lost my baggage. So I started filling out forms and all, but then half an hour later they miraculously reappear!
Anywho I used the time I had spare to read Mike Caro's Book of Tells. I actually think It's an interesting read, though I definetly don't put as much stake in tells as the author of the book does.
Mike Caro is a known draw poker player though and it makes a lot more sense coming from that background to put a lot of stakes in physical tells, because there is a lot less information readily available than in say for example hold'em or seven-card-stud.
The main reason I wanted to read his book is just so I could avoid silly mistakes in form of very obvious live tells. For example guarding hands you want to play and not guarding hands you don't want to play.
I think just being aware of these things is sufficient if your an internet player playing live.
Just ordered some food so I'm gonna eat that and then try an get some sleep so I'm well rested for tomorrow. I'm interested how the field with be, I think they're a reasonable amount of solid players, but we'll see, maybe some locals will join in the action.

Daniell

"Mads Mikkelsen, known to cinema-goers as Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, is set to play poker without the cinematic cold deck (unless the live stream has some surprises in store) in Budapest this week at Unibet Open."

Source: http://www.unibetopen.com/news/golde...lays-budapest/

So I google "CTS poker setup" the other day in Google pictures, because I want to a show a friend that CTS plays on two 50" monitors and to my surprise the second picture in google is actually a picture of my own poker setup and by own setup I mean this is literally a picture I took for an old blog (CTS's actual setup is the 4th picture with two 53" screens).
So I click on the link and it's a link to this guys blog and this guy is literally claiming that my setup is his setup. I lol'd pretty hard when I read that.

Daniell

I too played the Sunday Million! It actually wasn't as bad as I thought. I thought that given the 36000 man player pool it would take a very long time and be a massive crap shoot. Obviously it was a crap shoot, but since the playing field was so soft there were a lot of good spots early on in the tourney to amass chips.
My stack was up to 400bb pretty early due to some poor postflop play by my opponents. For example this hand:



I think I played reasonably well for the most part, but was pretty card dead when I needed hands. I got lucky to quadrouple near the bubble with 88 on a short stack, but with the quickly rising blinds I saw myself being forced to ship in the money light w/t8s and got snapped off by KQ and didn't make my hand (actually I made a flush, but he one carded me on the river for an overflush).
I think my big stack game is pretty reasonable and so is my short stack, but I'm a little bit hesitant sometimes to make correct ships with less than 10bbs and that's something I need to work on (mainly from a disciplinary stand point). I ended up finishing 3700th just in the money and short of the second bubble for 289$.
I'm definetly gonna check out the tourney section in Mathematics of Poker that Isura suggested and watch some videos on MTTs. After that I should be set for my first larger live tournament. I also picked up a copy of Mike Caro's Book of Tells. Phil Hellmuth's book on tells actually had better reviews across the field, but I'm not a big Hellmuth fan .
I don't think tells are as huge in live poker as some may think, but you definetly need to atleast be aware of them and conciously watch yourself when your playing as not to give away free information.

Daniell

Just finished reading Harrington on Hold'em Volume I and I'm a little bit disapointed about some of his statements in the book. Overall I'm glad that I've finally read it, as I've had it lying around here for a while now. Maybe I was expecting a little bit too much from it as I think it is intentionally designed to be more on the basic side.
I barely picked up any new information for my tournament game, but it was interesting to get inside a tournament players head and see what they're thinking.
Before I go on to the points that I found disapointing I should mention that I don't think Harrington is a bad player, in fact he has a very interesting resumé as he's from a chess and backgammon playing background. He also has some pretty good tournament scores.
Here are some things that I can come up with off the top of my head:

- He will say things like raising 99 UTG (9 handed) early in a tournament is bad. You should limp.
Now Harrington advocates a somewhat balanced open limping strategy and that is not what I question. I question the fact that he claims that good players should be limping there. I think this could be misleading to new players.
- In my opinion Mr. Harrington doesn't differentiate between showdown equity and ex-showdown equity. For those of you who are not familiar with those terms, showdown equity is practically your all-in equity. And ex-showdown equity is basically your ev from playing postflop poker. I say this because in some spots he will just look at his preflop odds and decide whether the hand is callable or not based off of his showdown equity when there is still postflop play to come. Naturally the better a player you are the higher your ex-showdown equity will be and the more hands become playable, in particular speculative hands.
- Raise sizing. Again he goes to an extreme and claims that a 5x raise to an open limper in an online tournament is too small as it will not get any folds, because nobody ever folds online. I should add that the hand he's referring to is QJo to an early limper in MP which is a hand that you probably shouldn't be raising anyway, but he says that raising 5x with it is bad and you should make it either 10x or 20x so you can steal the pot. 20x people! Risk-reward-ratio just commited suicide XD. Now I have a feeling he probably wouldn't make that play, but I don't know why he even brings it up. Just say fold QJo in that spot full stop.
- Postflop play. There was a hand where he said that a good player would never just call the flop with a weak top pair, he would raise for information and then fold to a reraise.
This is obviously pretty terrible advice for cash games, and maybe I'm too novice a tournament player to see that it's obviously a bad play to just call w/qt on q73r when bet into... but I definetly think referring to players that just call the flop bad a bit borderline.
I do think there are some spots in tournaments where you should try to push winning pots quickly a little harder than in cash games, but I'm not sure this is the best example. Spots I could think of would be fast playing and never slowplaying unless you flopped huge or giving up a little ev to take down a pot with lower variance, but I don't think this is a spot I would see this way.

All in all Volume II sounds more interesting to me and I'm gonna see if I can dig it up out of one of my moving boxes. Please let me know what you think about Harrington on Hold'em Volume I if you've read it. If your also interested in expanding your NL Hold'em game to tournaments, i definetly think Tournament Poker for Advanced Players by Sklansky is a reasonable read as he does a good job of explaining adjustments that should be made from cash games to tournaments.

Daniell

...is something I should cut back on. I haven't been doing too bad when I've played, because I've been tableselecting, but I find that I have troubles reading the game well and I'm clearly not on my A-game. Even though I still had an edge in the games I was playing with my B-game (or god forbid C-game), I find it very frustrating when I make poor plays against the better players and bleed money to them.
I'm gonna take a couple days off to recover and then refocus and get back into the game. I have exams coming up anyways so it's probably generally a good idea.

Peace

I've been catching up on my tournament game lately. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, because I want to be able to take shots at live tournaments as opportunities arise.
One of the reasons I didn't get round to learning tournaments earlier was that I rarely play them and my time is limited due to Uni so I just focused on my cash game primarily, but since I'm on holidays I finally got round to reading Tournament Poker for Advanced players by Sklansky. It's a book geared towards players like myself (experienced cash game players trying to learn what adjustments to make in tournaments).
Reading tournament literature was actually kinda eye opening to me as I think I've been a little bit ignorant towards certain tournament situations in the past in terms of pushing small ev edges and thus variance a little bit too hard in an attempt not to be like other people nitting it up trying to make the money. While I'm definetly +ev in the tournaments I participate in, I probably have limited myself ROI wise.
Anyways I'll also definetly take a look at the first two Harrington books before I go to Budapest in March aswell. I must have had them lying around my appartment for almost 4 years now, lol.

This coming week will be a week of hardcore Uni grinding for me. I have to take two exams the following week and I've put myself on a tighter time schedule so I could find time to play them pokers. While this surely makes me a more efficient student, it definetly is intense. But hey I'm still youthful so bring it!

On a side note I took some shots at 10/20 the other day, because the games were pretty good. I had the "jesus seat" 150bb deep, but couldn't really catch a big hand. I ended up winning 90€.
For some reason I feel a lot more comfortable with my bankroll nowadays. I guess being more financially secure and with little responsibilites plays a big roll. I also barely tilt. I used to say I never tilt, but this can never really be the case if your human imo. I just think I tilt far less than most.
I'm sure a lot of people say this, but being able to detatch yourself emotionally from situations is super important.
I used to get the most frustrated when I felt I made a poor decision and never really when my opponents made a poor decision and it lead them to winning the hand. I guess that kinda reaction might come from me playing a lot of sports when I was younger. I would allaways be mad at myself for messing up and never mad at others. I allways took full responsibilty. Which is a good thing to a certain degree, but I think in poker you need to take it one step further and realize that you are putting yourself in a situation where you are going to make mistakes and aknowledge before hand that all you can do is be confident in your decision making and never regret your decisions, but instead constantly learn and reevaluate. I hope that makes sense.
Also check out this post by Comanchie from the Leggo forums: http://www.leggopoker.com/forums/psy...102-page7.html I think this is a pretty cool post on the topic.

Finally I've been watching a lot of the videos on the College Humor channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alw5hs0chj0&feature=fvst . I think this is pretty funny and worth checking out if you haven't seen it already. Fwiw it still made me laugh the second time around.

All the best,

Daniell

Hey guys. I've decided to play the Unibet Open in Budapest on the 4th-7th of March. Last year my plan was not to play online MTTs and live cash, but I didn't really stick to it so this year I'm gonna give it another shot.
The Unibet Open circuit looks pretty nice and includes some places that I haven't been to (Hungary, Bulgaria, Czech Republic). You can check out the entire list on their website: http://www.unibetopen.com/
I just booked my flights and I'm feeling kinda psyched about going there, also my Holdem game is feeling strong. The hotel Unibet booked with the tournament is pretty sick: http://www.sofitel.com/gb/hotel-3229...ge/index.shtml
I'm gonna use my VIP points to try and get a place in the main satelites, if I can't get the buy-in that way I'll just buy-in directly. I only have to make sure the event isn't sold out by then.