Aussie Millions update

Result: 33rd

So to the good news - I came 33rd in event 1 and made the money. I won $2165 which was a nice little profit on my $1100 entry.

And the not so good news - my daft schedule meant I was up at 4am on Jan 5th to get to Adelaide airport for the 6am flight to Melbourne. I played poker from 12.30pm to 1.30am almost non-stop. I was soooo tired at the end of the day. Note to msyself - next time I must fly in the night before or earlier.

I played for about 6 hours against a good young player called Yevgeniy Timochenko and took a lot of his chips. After the money bubble came and went he got extremely aggressive in his play raising all-in almost every hand. I waited until I had some cards and tried to trap him - unfortunately my A-10s did not match up to his K-K and I lost the race and went bust. Just my luck to take him on when he had a hand but to be fair to me I was on the button, he was small blind, there were no other betters and I only had 20k of chips left and the big blind was about to go up to 4k so I thought it was a good time to make my move.

So I went out and have thought about how I played the hand for ages. Our table was aggressive and any small raise was immediately met with an all-in by one of the players. Plus Yev had pocket kings so even if I had small-raised him he probably would have gone over the top. I would be all-in no matter what unless I folded the hand but that would not make sense as I had position and reasonably good cards and he had a history of large all-in raises with a wide range of average starting hands.

I found out after the event that Yev is quite a successful online player called JovialGent (on pokerstars) and known to the online community as Atimos. Some sites say he is ranked 9th best poker player in the world!

So I will not beat myself up. I did OK in the Aussie Millions and am encouraged to enter some more large tournaments this year. Hopefully I can win some of them!!

Poker training phase 1 completed

I set myself a goal for the remainder of 2007 to learn how to become a decent poker player. This would allow me to enter some tournaments in 2008 and maybe win some money.

In October I played extensively on Full Tilt and lost a whack of money. In November I played extensively on Pokerstars and also lost a whack of money but eventually started to win occasional tournaments and small SnGs. In December I read a number of books and played a lot of cash games. My real-life tournament positions in San Diego improved to 20th, 13th and then 7th in consecutive weeks (the final position being in the money). I went on vacation to Australia and played in a small real-person tournament in Adelaide where I came 3rd (in the money).

Over the last 3 months I have spent a fair amount of time watching successful poker players playing online and also watched NBCs "Poker after dark" program. In December my online performance has improved to the extent where I expect to be in the money for 2 out of every 3 small tournaments.

So now we are in January 2008 and it is time to play on a bigger scale to see how I compare to the real "Professional Poker Players". This will involve entering some bigger online and real tournaments.

To start the year off, I am going to Melbourne to play in the first event of the Aussie Millions!! Wish me luck!