Saar-Lor-Lux Poker-Festival hosted by Christophe “Crazysheep” Gross – Day 1

Saarland Spielbanken joined forces with Christophe “Crazysheep” Gross to host the Saar-Lor-Lux Poker-Festival 2012 with day 1 played in Saarbrücken and day 2 played in Neunkirchen. A few more than the originally announced 80 players started heat 1a @ 1pm, at least another 80 players are still playing heat 1b, that started @ 8pm. Both heats have 10 blind levels, each 30 minutes, with a starting stack of 30,000 and blinds starting as low as 20/40. First things first: thanks a lot to Crazysheep, his fanclub and the team of Saarland Spielbanken for the organisation – keep up the alliance, the players enjoy it!

I played heat 1a and had to work my way back up from 13,000 chips after losing with a, frankly speaking, very bad call holding AK to a rivered flush. Taking quite many small pots, I managed to move back up to 33,000 after six levels, already trailing the average, but still in very good shape looking at my stack in terms of BB left. Level 7, 8 and 9 gave me no playable hands at all – no pockets, no suited connectors, not even limpable one-gapper, not even talking about AK, AQ or something like that. Therefore at blinds of 1000/2000 in level 10, the last of the day, it was time to switch to push-or-fold. First chance to gather some chips was with 66 from the button only against SB and BB (= chipleader). I decided to push instead of raise and commit myself and the BB called after tanking for a while with J10. The board blanked out and I was back up to 44k.

Since there was only one more orbit to be played after this hand, I bagged 41,800 chips for day 2 – actuallly not that bad of a stack since blinds will be dropped back to 500/1000 with a 100 ante to start the second day. 42 players survived heat 1a and I expect at least the same amount of players from heat 1b to make 85-90 players starting @ 6pm in Neunkirchen. The average stack at the end of heat 1a was just below 58,000. Most likely 25 players will make the money and that is goal number one for tomorrow. Good luck to myself!