Focussing the Belgian Poker Series today

Just about three weeks to go until I will leave for the Paradise Poker Tour and Spain. Having a full schedule for the 4-5 days in Barcelona does not mean, that I am not checking other qualifiers and tourneys in the meantime. Since I have another two days off of work (vacation on Monday and holiday on Tuesday), I have checked the qualifiers on Pokerstars and decided to play every sub-qualifier for the daily finales for the Belgian Poker Series Finale in Namur:

All together that means I will be investing 104 € plus rebuys and addon in the 3.30 € and the 2.20 € sub-qualifiers, the 500 FPP sub-qualifier will be played as a little add-on to the project. Rebuys and/or addon in the finales will be only used if I win multiple seats to the finale and/or out of my own pocket.

Besides these qualifiers I will have a look on other qualifiers, such as the ones on Paradise Poker. I cashed in as little as 100 € to play tonite’s qualifiers for packages for the tour and I will be playing both, sub-qualifiers and the direct buyin qualifier, since there are three packages guaranteed in the qualifier:

Having a short review on last week’s happenings it all started good with the succesful cashgame session in Saarbrücken. Trying to use the momentum of Sunday, I went to Casino Trier on Monday and played another NL400 session, but that time again with no good ending. I used and lost three bullets of 200 €, but will only calculate two of them to the project since using 600 € on one nite is definately not what was intended by my own rules. Still, the loss of 400 € combined with online winnings of $75 by not winning a seat a finale on 888poker and the winnings on Sunday, leaves me almost break-even for the week. Lets see if today will be +ROI!

WaSOP dissapointment, internet downtime, birthday & more…

It has been over a week since I created the last blog post and this means the longest time of inactivity since starting the project – inactivity even in terms of playing, blogging & being online!

My last post was about the biggest tourney coming up for the project so far: the WaSOP Main Event with a buyin of 525 €. I took half a day off work to drive to Namur and start day 1a on Thursday last week. Some of you might have already checked the results section or the final table or facebook or… No, I was not playing the final table, nor did I make the money, nor did I play on day 2… sad, but true. I could start writing about how unlucky I was, losing parts of my stack with flopped set vs. flopped flush early on or giving away half of my stack against someone chasing his open-ended straight-draw and catching it on the river, but I will not. Losing is part of the game, even though this part of the game seems to occur to me more often in the past two months than before and than I wanted it to occur in general.

After that dissapointment I took a couple of days of Poker & Internet to just relax and think about what to write and what to play. When I finally wanted to create my blog post, I realized that my internet provider tried to be funny and cut me off the internet (I am writing this at my girlfriend’s house) – reason: none! They will be re-installing the internet at my place with full-speed (right now it is down to anno 1990 speed) on Wednesday. *sigh*

Life went on, even without internet and poker, and suddenly the 3^rd of August appeared on my calender. Hmmm, 3^rd of August meant I just turned 30… oh well… Life goes on… Just kidding, not the part with my life but just in general. Thanks a lot to everyone that noticed and sent their wishes to me. I am still the same guy I was a week ago, but maybe some young guns look at me now as if I was half-dead or close to my retirement or something like that…

Looking at my plans for the upcoming week(s): I will be going to Amnéville today to play the 150 € Deepstack tourney I have already played once before. Also, I will be starting to play some online qualifiers again, but will let you know next week with more details on what will be played as well as a better overview of what the bankroll looks like.

What’s new?! Nothing (yet)…

Nothing much to blog about for the past days since I played the 100 € Freezeout in Nennig with only 26 runners and ended up busting early and yet again could not end up cashing to finally bring the first cash to the event. Since a friend of mine was joining the action, I was not able to take notes as I did in the past live events. The two most memorable hands were 55 hitting my set on the flop, but losing to the also flopped -flush (half of my stack gone) and 99 allin with 6-7 big blinds left vs. 1010 to bust.

As already mentioned before, I will be starting in WaSOP’s 525 € Main Event on Thursday (Day 1a), which I am looking forward to really a lot. This is going to be the best structured tourney in terms of big blinds to start with + duration of blinds by far: 500 BB to start with and 60 minute blind levels are deeper than deep. To give you a good comparison, the structure of the European Poker Tour (EPT) is 30,000 chips to start (300 BB) with almost the same blinds levels in duration and raises.

Besides that I have been checking the net back and forth to find more interesting online qualifiers I could play for the project and ended up finding two: ChiliPoker is offering the so-called “DSO à la carte” qualifiers, which are 11 € + R every Tuesday. Winners of the often small field receive a 525 € ticket to play one of the upcoming Deepstack Open of ChiliPoker – the next one is taking place in Malta in October, followed by Vienna and Marrakech later this year. Marrakech would be my first choice – I love the town and maybe Kévin “kgoule” Durand (CMU-Member and Investor; met him earlier this summer in Marrakech) would be a host to me. Even if I win a ticket and do not manage to play in 2011, the tour already announced its continuation in 2012. I will start playing the “DSO à la carte” from now on for a total of not more than 200 € (trying to play it as a 1R1A).

The other series of events is Pokerstar’s Eureka Poker Tour. Especially its upcoming stop in Zagreb/Croatia sounds very yummy, but unfortunately (once again) I need to be checking my working schedule before planning to play the qualifiers. All the tourneys have a 525 € buyin with both, seat only and packages awarded through qualifiers. Drop me a line, if you are planning to play the qualifiers to one of the tour’s stops – I will be keeping the Eureka Poker Tour in my focus…