My New Year goals

Here are my poker goals for 2009 in no particular order:

1) Win 3 satellite entries to the WSOP main event for less than the cost of 1 main event buyin
2) Win at least 1 live event with a buyin over $100 and with at least 140 entrants
3) Work on my reads harder than all of the last 3 years put together
4) Develop a workable cash game to effectively freeroll tourney buyins
5) Have at least 10 4 figure scores and at least 2 5 figure scores
6) Play less poker while attempting all of this so I can spend more time with my family and keep my wife from killing me (or worse divorcing me).
7) Respect every person I come accross playing poker. I am getting sick of the elite top lambasting others horrid play when they lose a pot. That is bad enough, but then they go on to worship their cronies plays when they do the exact same thing. You will see, "sick read" or "pwned" or similar verbage. I respect a lot of their games, but if some were as good as they thought they were..they would never lose despite having runs of bad luck. Maybe this is why I always wish Loretta8 and twoblackaces such luck in their felt endeavors. They win with class and they lose with class. They actually seem thankful when they have a good run instead of arrogant. Twoblackaces seems to get past 95% of the field over 40% of the time he enters. Seems like he doesn't get 1st 2nd or 3rd often enough for how many times he is able to get to the final 2 or 3 tables. I would definnitely like to incorporate more of both of these bloggers games in to my own game. I hope twoblackaces has a PXF subscription and watches a lot of the final table segments from past recordings (especially Pearljammer and Apestyles) as I think their play is similar. Best of luck.
Take care.
JD

Finally

Finally something happened blogworthy. Played a few superturbos, a few mtts, and a $69 qualifier to the 750k yesterday. Only had 1 second place in the supers and 0 other cashes there. In the 750K qualifier, I doubled up the 2nd hand cracking utg's AA with a flopped set of nines (which turned in to quads on the turn). That left me 1st with 16 left (6 get a seat and 7th=$160). I typed in chat "uh oh..card rack early usually means bubble boy late." Guess I am prophetic as I bust 8th for $0. CMitch played and successfully milked a shortstack throughout all the way to a successful $215 entry. He seems to own these qualifiers. I played the 10am $26 buyin guarantee and made it fairly deep before succombing short of a payday. Now the good news...I won a $26 90man knockout tourney for approx $550 incuding bounties. I also played the $10 1 rebuy 1 addon 6.5K guarantee. I worked my way up to a top ten stack about 1/4 of the way in to the tourney and was able to stay top 10 pretty much the rest of the way. Chatted back and forth frequently with fellow blogger Jestocost who was coasting to the final table as well. He ended up busting 8th when his AK got allin to villian's 10 10. Jestocost flopped and ace but villian rivered a 10 for the win. This pot was fairly large and would have put him in 3rd I think. Anyway, he played great and will take it next time. I was hoping we'd finish 1st and 2nd (respectively lol). Anyway, after what seemed like a 2hr final table...I was able to lucksack my way to the win for about $2,100. I am going to upload the tourney to PXF as I am interested in seeing what my puff (i.e. PXF stats for how lucky you get with great/good/moderate/borderline/crap hands). I suspect it will be around 90 (which is very high). This usually means you were lucky enough to get a lot of premium hands and less garbage hands. I have found this to be somewhat misleading though as you are more likely to be able to easily get away from garbage hands when you get a lot of them and are more likely to get cracked for large pot losses when you catch a lot of monsters. Oddly enough, I had a ton of monsters in this tourney preflop but rarely got anything more than the blinds. I used this info (noone defending or playing back) to rape and pillage. One guy played back at me quite a bit so I waited for a good trap opportunity...and it paid off. See you at the tables!!!
JD

Hoe Hoe Hoe

Well I tried to sign up for the Pokerstars blogger championship...and they said no post...no dice. Figured I might as well try to get back on the horse. Haven't had much to blog about since I have been running (I mean playing) bad. I did go to Turning Stone in NY over Thanksgiving to play a couple of live deep stack tourneys. I preregistered via phone with credit card and it was still a 45 minute process to get my seat assignment. It was a great structure. My first table I got seated 3 seats left of Irongirl. We had never met, but it soon became apparent she was a blogger from the table conversation. Play at my first table was the usual mixture of TAG LAG with a couple of rocks. I built a decent stack and our table finally broke about 4 hours or so in. This entire time we may have had 6 allins at that table (not totally unusual given ratio of the blinds to the depth of stacks). Any way, I get moved to a new table and there are 3 allins in my first 2 orbits there. Completely different atmosphere. Saw crazy shoves and crazy calls. There were 387 runners and the payouts started at the top 40 people. The tournament director announced that play would stop at 3am and resume the next day at 1pm. I had already registered for the 11am tourney the next morning and asked how that would work. He said I could play in both at the same time. I didn't see how that was going to work but figured i would see how things went. When they called time, I was 3rd in chips and there was 28 of us left... In the money, but we were all still deep stacked relative to the blinds. The next day, I started the 11am tourney with the hope of building a decent stack that could withstand me sitting out through blinds once the other tourney resumed. I managed to chip up to 32k from the 16.5k starting stack by the time it was 12:50 (10 minutes before the other tourney resumed) when my do or die hand came up. I am dealt JJ utg+3 and raise 4xbb. I had been very active and got called by both the cutoff and the small blind. Flop comes QJ9 rainbow. SB checks, I lead for 2/3 pot, cutoff calls, sb shoves allin and has me barely covered. I call hoping he has the slow played overpair KK or AA and was trapping me since I had been so aggressive trying to build my stack. The cutoff folds and the small blind shows K 10 off. His flopped straight holds vs. my flopped middle set and I am off to resume the tourney from the night before. My stack wavers back and forth between 660K and 410K. My critical hand comes when we are down to 19 players left and I am at 642K. Guy to my left has 390K. UTG is a short stack and limps for 20k (current blinds ante were 10k/20k 2k ante). I am 3rd to act and raise to 80K with AKsooted. Next player to act had 3 bet 3 of my last 4 raises and shoves allin for his 390K. Then a guy 6th to act that has me covered goes in the tank. He eventually folds his pocket jacks and everyone else included the shorty limper from utg folds. Action is back to me and I am looking at calling off 318k of my remaining 560k to win a pot of 816k. I tank and decide to call given his frequency 3 betting me as this would make me chipleader by a significant amount with 18 people left if I win. I figured that I could battle my way back if I lost with 240K. He had KK and held and I ended up going cardead thereafter. I took 14th for $757 (buyin was $260 i think) after my A9sooted shove (once down to 6bb) over a button raise couldn't get there vs. his JJ. First place would have paid $17K. I could have folded and stolen my way up the payboard when I had the $642k stack...but went for king of the mountain status by calling off with a drawing hand. I would probably do it again though...so lesson not learned. Till next time, don't get them allin drawing dead!
JD