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.