Saturday, October 22, 2005

Super Tuesday and Super Thursday

The supers in PartyPoker are the biggest online tournaments between Monday and Thursday. They are a $150+12 tournaments, NL Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and LH on Wednesdays. This is the one tournament I usually play every day, with the exception maybe of the Super Wednesday, since it's a limit tournament and I usually play the $150 NL in Stars at the same time. I don't like to play different types of tournaments at the same time, since the pace is different, but sometines I do it; the last time I did it, I won :) .
The prize pools in the Supers are pretty good, I played on Monday and finished 761 out of 1036, on Tuesday I made it deep, until the last 2 tables, I finished 15 out of 1080; at the end selective agression was just agression, since I could not select anything to play, and I was out when my A6h run into AK. For wednesday I decided to take the day off, no poker at all, besides I have to apply exams to 2 of my classes on Thursday, so I needed to work designing the exams for my Calculus II and Math for Social Sciences II classes. Well as usual, I started to work in the exams until about 2AM Thursday, and doing all sort of things, I didn't sleep at all. I took my Modafinil to prepare for a long day, my first class at UTEP was at 9AM, a nice class called Properties of the Real Numbers, then at 10:30AM I give the Math 2301 class an exam, at 3PM I give my Calculus II an exam, and from 4:30PM to 6PM I taught my last class of the day. I was really tired. My wife Diana even drove from UTEP to home, and most probably I was not going to play any tournament. But since I didn't play on Wednesday, and why not, I can do no wrong these days. So I opened the PartyPoker client and waited to register until there were only 6 seconds left to do it, at the end I decided to play and click the register button. Six hours later I was playing in the final table. With about 3 tables left, I was the chip leader in the tournament, basically product of my skillful way to win coinflips. But then I started to have internet disconnections problems, I couldn't connect to Party, it was weird because I was talking by Messenger with Colson10 and P5s Adam and they both were connected to Party, I went nuts, my internet connection was working but not Party. I have Cable and a wireless connection at home, and always you can use the same old dialup, but neither was working. I called then Jose, a poker friend here who lives near my house, he could connect and started to play with me at the phone driving toward his place. We won a nice pot with AQ-AJ during that lapse. I arrived to his place and resume playing with a computer screen in front of you. I was still the chip leader, I raised with 87s and the 2nd in chips in the table called from the BB. The flop gave me a monster draw, he check and I made a weak bet in the flop, if he raises, I was going all in, but he just called. The turn was a blank, he checked again, I knew the guy and I knew the exact amount I needed to bet so he could fold. I was going to do exactly that, but then the damm disconnection again and I lost the pot because I couldn't bet !!!. I started to suspect then that maybe it was a general problem in El Paso, maybe even in all the southwest. We decided to go to UTEP to try the computers over there, in the midtime I called Enrique, a friend in Mexico and he had no problems to connect, so I was playing by phone one more time. The funny thing was after he reconnected my account I have like AA,AK,TT,AA,AK in 5 consecutive hands. Lost all ins with AK vs JJ and TT vs J7, with the AA hands I should have won more, but it was hard to tell him the right amounts to bet since I could not see the stack sizes of my opponents. After a while Jose and I made it to UTEP and the computers were fine, so I could resume playing by myself. By then I was not the chip leader anymore. But I had a decent stack going to the final table. In the final table I started playing well, but with 5 people left there was this guy with a huge stack to my left and maybe I played a little too carefully, and for sure with the lack of sleep and all the internet problems I was not in the best mode. At the end, I finished 3rd when my AT run into AJ. It was still a nice payday with $11,304, making October now the best month of 2005.

1 comment:

ghamal said...

haha. Que dia y noche! Felicidades por el win. Lo mas chistoso es que la parte de estar de lugar a lugar buscando una buena coneccion de internet mientras le decias a tus amigos que jugar pues me ha pasado a mi tambien.