Steve’s Terrible Table

Poker can be a brutal game sometimes. Variance is not our friend, just a mistress that rips our hearts out with a two outer on the river deep in one of your nightlies. Weeks and weeks of work can produce little more than a few hours pay at the local McDonald’s and leave you questioning why exactly it is you enjoy this stupid fucking game. Then when you finally break the streak, the stars align, the doom switch is turned off, you have no idea what to do with yourself. When that score is a massive increase in your BR, it’s very easy to get lazy and just not play cards at all. Well, it happened to me, and to break out of my funk I found myself in the audience of the WPT $10K TV FT at Foxwoods.

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After planning out my new schedule I realized that I’ve been very nitty with my BR to date. This is at least partly because I haven’t really been paying attention. I’ve just played MTTs and cash games based on how a I feel and where I think my edge lies. I have no problem taking a few bigger shots now and then, so long as it was in something I felt I had an edge in. The other part has just been sheer laziness. I’ve been so comfortable with the stakes I’ve been playing in for so long that I never saw the need to changethings up. All that is going to change a little over the next few weeks.

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It’s a bit strange to think that at the beginning of this year I had a BR of only $65 bucks. Grinding out $2.25 9 man turbo and 180 man SNGs on FTP to build myself up while using up my FPPs on Stars to win enough $T to take a few shots in some $4.40s. To go from that to finally breaking through and getting my first $1K+ score, then doing it two more times in a 6 week period, coupled with my first ever live FT and first major cash for $50K at Foxwoods, let’s just say it’s been a pretty good year. That being said we’re now into November and 2009 has nearly come to a close. In the next 8 weeks I will have 3 full weeks off from school as well so I plan on going out strong in 2009.

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As cool as it was to win the $50K at the World Poker Finals, in the grand scheme of the poker world I have achieved very little. I have only play 3 live MTTs lifetime, I have one WPT prelim FT, and my biggest online score is $1500. What the $50K really does is allow me to play in some bigger stakes games. I now have a proper BR to handle the swings of everyday life as a small stakes poker pro. Now with this start up money the question becomes, how do I put it to use?

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We came back from day 2 with 12 players remaining. After I drilled the “sexy 2-outer” as Brandon was telling me the day before, I had 329K when we returned. It became clear right from the start that Ryan, who was 2nd in chips at the time, was planning on avoiding people and that Brandon our chip leader was going to be the table bully. One hand I might have wanted to play differently was in the SB with AhTc. Brandon raised from the button to 25K (blinds still at 1K/5K/10K). I reraised to 70K to try and get him to stop raising my SB every time, he shipped all in on me and I was forced to fold. I understand that the fold there is not spectacular but at this stage Brandon has been the table bully, but he’s also been showing down big hands when 3-bet pre, so it’s not likely the AT is ahead here.

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