Live cash at Oceans 11

I came 4th in todays Oceans 11 tournament. Cost $60, win $360, about 95 runners. If I could have convinced the other guys to chop 4 handed I would have got $600 or so... Truth be told we all had similar stacks and I got undone when I pushed my small blind K-5 against the big blinds A-9. Oh well.

I then played some live no limit poker low-stakes for fun and managed to lose $80 in a pot where I held 7-6 and the flop came 5-4-3 rainbow. My "friend" held 8-6 and his open-ender turned to gold when the turn was a blank but the river was a 7 giving him the 8 high straight and me to 7 high straight.

Now I'm online playing some Omaha 8 hi/lo and neither winning or losing. Just waiting until I can scoop a couple of pots.

Lack of poker in August

So it was my wedding anniversary and my wife took 4 weeks off from work so we could have some time together travelling and having fun.

Of course this has somewhat eaten into my poker time so I have not played any large tournaments online and only 1 tournament live (one of the Legends of Poker events at The Bike). Needless to say the live tournament did not go too well.

I am trying to fit in some 45 player sitngos and read a few poker books during the downtime. I have been picking up old books from the library and browsing through them looking for any gems of knowledge that I may have missed from the recently published books in my own collection. Its interesting reading advice and stories from Amirillo Slim, TJ Cloutier etc. even if some of it is not so relevant nowadays.

Hopefully I will get back into the swing of things next week and play a few decent tournaments.

Brothers visit was a poker success

So my brother left after 4 weeks of poker playing which can only be considered a success. While he was here we had several results:

Week 1 - 3 days in Vegas
- he won an Planet Hollywood chopping 2 ways (approx $600)
- I won the Sahara the next day chopping 4 ways (approx $1100)

Week 2 - California
- I won the Bike tournament chopping 5 ways

Week 3 - 5 days in Vegas
- he won the Venetian tournament chopping 5 ways (approx $1300)

Week 4 - California
- I won an Oceans 11 tournament chopping 2 ways for $1200

The week 4 result just before he left to fly back to England was a lot of fun because while I was winning the tournament my brother was doing a number on the cash tables taking 300-400 profit from a $100 buying playing $4/$8. When we left a couple of the guys accused us of being a professional hustling team - it was quite flattering and very funny.

Overall we played 16 tournaments each and cashed in 5 total with each cash being a final chop of the prize pool - this is right in line with my target of cashing in 20% of all tournaments played but above the target because I assume we will cash in 5 out of 25 and will win 1 of those. In this case all of our cashes were wins which was pretty amazing.

The cash games were interesting because we won consistently in Las Vegas but were very inconsistent in the California card rooms posting both some losses and some wins.