No WSOP for me this year!

Well, it was rather a small try to make it to Vegas this year and play the WSOP through a won package. Busting in 118th place was way too early to make it anywhere close to one of the 15 packages that were given away to the best players of iPoker’s Warrior League 2012. It is quite remarkable though, that it was possible to win the whole league even with the minimum of points making it to the finale. If I had taken down the finale, I would have been the winner of the leaderboard by exactly one single point! 4th place would have been good to win a side event package and 8th place was needed to at least get a $55 token for any $55 iPoker online tourney. I doubt that I will play any other satellite or qualifier for this year’s WSOP and will focus on the regional direct live buyins, but have also started to make plans for a poker weekend abroad. More about the planned trip as soon as details are fixed!

Warrior League 2012 Finale on Monday!

Surprisingly but true, I made it to the Grand Finale of the Warrior League 2012 this upcoming Monday.

To qualify for the 7^th and last tourney of this league, I had to be among the top 50 % of the preliminary tourneys, which took place the past three weeks. Missing the first one was not the biggest deal since only your best five out of six tourneys were taken to calculate your overall points. But after a 10^th place in tourney # 4, I had major problems with Titan Poker’s software and I could not log into it anymore until last nite. Tourneys # 5 and 6 could therefore not be played, even though I re-installed the software on two different computers numerous times, tried to play with the flash browser version and so on – none worked!

Helpless and completely frustrated I was forced to wait until early Thursday morning to see, if my before won points and the points won as a sitout were enough to make the top 50 %. With 253 players the goal was to be among the top 126, maybe 127 players:

Damn, 143^rd place was obviously not good enough to be among the top 50 %,… until a buddy of mine congratulated me to making it to the finale. Huh?!  What he noticed (and I did not) was that players placing from 123^rd to 143^rd had the same amount of points and therefore 143 players were moved to the finale. Instantly I re-started the Titan Poker software and all of a sudden it worked again, even though I did not change anything since the last time it did not work – strange stuff! Enough said, this Monday, 10pm German time, the finale will decide if this project will get an easy entry to this year’s WSOP or not! Wish me all the best of luck!!!

Since it is a public holiday on Monday here in Germany, I will be staying one day longer at my girlfriend’s place. That is the reason why I will not be going to Wiesbaden to play the 75 € Rookie Tourney tonite, but might be going to Casino Baden-Baden instead to play a 110 € tourney with a rather quick structure of 20min blind levels and 100BB as a starting stack.

I have not played in Baden-Baden yet, but have been there before since my girlfriend and her friends wanted to go to a casino to play blackjack and roulette. The casino must be one of the nicest casinos in Germany – even a lot nicer than the one in Wiesbaden – but they are only having few (cash) poker tables running simultaneously. Still, it is only a 30 minutes car ride and therefore the closest casino to my girlfriend’s place. I’ll update my status on Facebook to tell you if I am there!

Saar-Lor-Lux Poker-Festival – Final Day

After my mediocre start into the Saar-Lor-Lux Poker-Festival on Thursday, it was time to get a good run going and at least survive another 50 players to make the money and play on from there. The day in Neunkirchen’s Spielbank “Lucky Jungle” started with blinds of 500/1000/100, which was good enough for 41xBB, respectively almost 17M*. History repeated itself, because it took only three hands to cut my stack down to less than 30,000 chips and yet again it was a misplayed hand – not the best start I suppose…

Time went by and after the first three levels of the second day my stack shrunk to 22,000, even though I did not play many more hands nor made any mistakes. However, it was the fourth level I believe, when my tourney live was on the line for the very first time: I used my BB to push KQ with only button and SB calling the big blind of 3,000 before my action. The button called instantly and the SB folded and the 60/40-race was on vs. AJo: blanks on flop and river, but a queen on the turn doubled me back up to slightly more than the stack I started the day with. From that point on, I never fell significantly lower than my starting stack of day 2.

During the same orbit I won a large pot with a full house, my pocket aces were paid out completely and with a stack of 140,000 I called a shorty’s re-raise allin and busted him AQ vs. AJ to move up to 180,000. I just notice, that I should not have started to write this post on Saturday and then waited until late Sunday to finish it, because I have probably forgotten half of the hands I wanted to write about. Well, somehow I managed to make the money with well-timed aggression against short stacks and/or in good positions.

With 15 players left I maybe started to play not aggressive enough to gather the chips I would have needed to have a better position at the final table, That was one of the reasons, why I joined the final table as a shorty after the 10^th and 11^th place busted simlutaneously. I started the final table with 290,000 at blinds of 20,000/40,000/3,000 – an M of just above 3. After paying the blinds and antes for two orbits and only winning blinds and antes with QQ, I was forced to push allin with basically any two cards from the button – it was 64 – but ran into SB’s 66. My bust in 9^th place gave me a payout of 570 € (550 € after tip), which is about 25 € winnings per hour – that number really bugs me, but it was a cash and that is what counts!

Tomorrow will be the 5^th tourney of iPoker’s Warrior League 2012, a Turbo Deepstack Freezeout, the second last tourney before the finale! I am going to try to achieve a better result than last Wednesday, when I just missed the final table with a 10^th spot for 14 points.

*: ‘M’ in its simplest form is simply the ratio of the blinds (and antes if applicable) to your current chip stack. At a full table you add both blinds together and divide your chips by this number to give you an ‘M’ number. For example if you have 3000 chips and the total blinds are equal to 600 then your ‘M’ is 5. What this number tells you is how many more ‘orbits’ of the table you can survive without being blinded away. In the above example, assuming you played no hands, you can last for 5 orbits.