Starting off bad…

Sitting in a Czech casino my first evening at King’s Casino in Rozvadov went kind of like the European Championship’s game for the Czech national team vs. Portugal: the start was OK, but then it went downhill. My play started with Thursday’s 66 € Route 66 Freezeout tourney. Actually a fine tourney for only 66 € with a starting stack of 12,000 and blind levels of 25 minutes and 25/50 to start with. Even though I never fell below my starting stack in the first two and a half hours, I never was able to really gather chips either. Pocket sixes and AQ (right away in my 2^nd hand) were my best hands for the first six levels. After the break I dropped from 11,200 to just above 5k until I was allin for the first time with AQ vs. K10 –> back up to 11k. Just one orbiit later my second re-raise allin was called and I moved up to 22k with AK vs. K10 busting a smaller stack at blinds of 600/1,200/100 and an average of 25,000. I ended my short tourney upwsing another orbit later re-raise pushing the flop in a battle of blinds with Q10 on a A105-board – unfortunately small blind’s small reraise preflop was not just puttiing pressure on me, but representing his Ax –> out in 48^th of 111 players.

After busting out of the tourney, I hit the cashgame tables to play the very soft 1/3 € games with either a bunch load of limpers or relatively large raises preflop with mediocre crap. There the story repeated itself somehow and I simply did not get the hands to become active enough myself to win the moneys that was thrown into pots which were won with middle pair or worse. Nevertheless I built my 250 € up to almost 450 € in the first 90 minutes. As mentioned in the very beginning, my stack went downwards though the same way as the Czech game and I finished the night with another loss in cashgames of 250 € – QQ was beat by 99 (straight) for a 500+ € pot against one of the worse player at the table obviously –> Why is it not possible for me to start a trip with a positive night to get some sort of a head-start instead of trailing right from the beginning?

The King’s Casino offers free beer for tonite’s game of Germany vs. Greece, which is one of the reasons why I will not be playing day 1a of the main event tonite, but (only) the satellite starting in three hours at 5pm and the first side event of the DPT – tonite’s schedule:

Start of the DPT tonite!

…tonite is actually not correct, since I am sitting in a poker buddy’s car just about 100km away from Rozvadov – the trip has already started! Similar to my last trip to Barcelona, where we were four poker buddies playing the Paradise Poker Tour, we are three guys going to Rozvadov mainly to play the tourneys there. It might as well happen that I will be hitting the cash tables as well – it all depends on what blinds are offered and obviously how successful I am in the 3-4 tourneys I plan to play. All in all, my complete poker action in Rozvadov will count towards the project.

I might change my own tourney schedule a little bit, but these tourneys are planed for now:

Upcoming trip: DPT in Rozvadov, June 21-24

As announced in my last blog post, I have planned another small poker trip since Las Vegas is not going to happen for me this year – at least not during WSOP… TryABluffPLS (a poker enthusiast I got to know trough two different poker communities, e.g. AndyRA’s community), a friend of his and me will be going to the Czech Republic to play some tourneys.

Lets be more precise: our goal is Rozvadov, a little town with 700 people, located directly at the Czech-German border. Its size probably more than doubles every time the King’s Casino invites all poker players to their special events. Due to the strict governmental regulation the casino is well-known to the German poker community since there are no (legal) privately-owned poker clubs in Germany – not at all comparable to Austria for example. Previously hosted GCOP’s (German Championship of Poker) in Rozvadov attracted hundreds of players and will do so again in July with tournaments ranging from ~100 € up to the 1,100 € Main-Event with a 200,000 € guaranteed prize pool.

Our goal though will be the Deutsche Poker Tour (DPT), a rather small tourney weekend with deep and fast structures. Still, its Main-Event guarantees a prize pool of 44,444 €, which is calculated on a basis of more than 300 players paying the buyin of 144 €. Obviously I am not counting on huge cashes within this trip – the overall amount of buyins will be less than 500 € for 3-4 tourneys – but I love the structures and want to aim for multiple cashes to make it worth the 700km trip.

About the structures: there is nothing more fitting than the subtitle “Deep & Fast” for the DPT. Even though the Main Event only has blind levels of 25 minutes, a starting stack of 800x big blinds should keep everyone out of deeper trouble if no bad beats or sick setups occure. The side events all have stacks between 12,000 and 20,000 and blind levels of 20 or 25 minutes. Up to 400 big blinds to start with is also worth the fun and the low buyins.

I have not been to Rozvadov yet, but I am really looking forward to the casino and another 4-day trip full of tourney poker, maybe served with a little cashgame as a side-dish – talking about cashgame reminds of my promise to give you an update on the current bankroll (all played events are within the tables of “Played so far… –> Live Overview & Online Overview“): 3,396.50 € with 990.50 € losses coming from online qualifiers and 613 € from all other live events including cashgames.