NO SOUP FOR U-E: The Kid Gets Turned Away From The Final Table... Twice... Not Nice

Remember when you were a kid and during family get-together dinners, you thought you were old enough to be at the adult's table, but alas, you were turned away? That's what I feel like right now playing poker. Stuck eating Spaghetti-O's while the adults have turkey and stuffing.

Now that I've won money on Full Tilt in the Canada Free Roll, I've been able to play in the money tournaments. In my last two tournaments, I've had respectable finishes: I finished 11th (out of 206) in a $2.25 tournament and 10th (out of 231) in a $5.50 tournament. But in multi-table tournaments, top 9 = the final table = way more money to be won. Sorry kid, you're not invited... :(

The 10th place finish got me $14.44 my biggest money finish. In the $2.25 tournament, I was above the tournament average and was 4th out of 11 at the time. But I didn't have the self discipline to fold to the super tight short stack (took on his A-A with my 8-8) and to not challenge the big stack in a tossup (My A-J vs his K-Q). Needless to say, I lost both confrontations and was eliminated way too suddenly for my liking. In the $5.50 tournament, I played way too tight at the end and ended up going all-in before I got blinded out (My A-K lost to A-A). Two different approaches, same result: no final table, no soup for me.

After the fact, I couldn't help but wonder how much more money I could have won. The jumps in prize money from 9th place to top spot are quite significant. I got around $5 for 11th place, but 1st prize was over $100. I won $14.44 for 10th place, but 1st was over $300... All I could do was watch the other surviving players play it out, wishing MY tournament was still going. Oh well, at least I know I'm within striking distance of bigger money. Now I just have to make better decisions at the end and actually WIN the bigger money!

So now, taking into account some other $1.25 tournaments I care not to mention, my current bank roll stands at $21.59, up from $12 last week. Onward and upward!

THE COMEBACK KID: A Runner-Up Finish On Full Tilt

Hey all! It's been a while since my last post. My apologies. I've been busy with a new job and trying to get back into shape after the nasty appendix surgery. Not too much online poker happening.

Since my last entry, my Pokerstars bank roll sank down to a single penny. I had previously cashed out my $50 in winnings, leaving me with a little less than $8, so I could start from true zero building my bank roll (I deposited $50 initially, then lost it all, then got back up to $50 through free rolls). Unfortunately, I lost 7 straight $1.25 one table Sit & Go's, leaving me with the penny. The most I'd lost in a row before that was 4 and I had placed in 15 of my last 20 one table sit & go's. I didn't think it was possible for me to lose SEVEN in a row anymore! But alas, that's Poker.

Pokerstars doesn't have any free rolls where you can win money right away, you have to win a weekday qualifier to get to a weekend money tournament. But with my new job, I'm not available for weekend poker anymore, so bye bye Pokerstars! ... For now...

So, I've turned my attention to Full Tilt Poker, which has $100 free rolls 3-4 times a day, including a strictly Canadian Free Roll. Since I haven't been playing that often, I've been making a lot of impatient donkey moves and as I make them and lose, I ask myself "Why the hell did I just do that?!?" But finally, I got back to solid poker and managed to finish in second place out of 2674!!!! That was my best finish of any multi-table tournament I've played in and I won $12, my best cash finish!!!!

I came soooooooo close to finishing first, with my stack 3 times the size of my opponent head to head. I pushed the other guy all-in with my pocket 8's vs his A-Q and he hit the ace on the river to give him new life. After that, the action was fast and furious and we were both going all-in on tossups. The tournament was over 6 hours at that point and I'm guessing we were both really tired, battling for only an extra $3 (First place: $15, Second place $12). As you can tell by all the exclamation points, I'm pretty jacked about winning $12 in 6 hrs, but hey, it's all about breaking new ground, reaching new milestones.

Speaking of milestones, my big win came on this day, Dec 12, 2008 exactly 5 months after playing in my first online tournament on Pokerstars (which was pretty much the first time I played poker - Thanks for the lessons, Dan Harrington!).

So now, I have $12, this time on Full Tilt Poker, trying to build my bank roll from nothing. Same story as before, different online poker site. The beat goes on!

BUILDING THE BANK ROLL: Take It From The Top!

Hey everyone, it's been awhile. November's right around the corner for the "November Nine" World Series Of Poker final table! I'm excited to watch.

So here's my situation: not too long ago, I started winning in free rolls and weekly round 2's here and there and managed to win $5. But next week I'm starting an office job where I have to work weekends, so I won't be able to play in round 2's anymore.

So now, I'm turning my attention to single table Sit & Go tournaments. Pokerstars has lots of good promotions for Sit & Go's and right now, I'm finding they are the best place to work on my game. There's no crazy all-in people, and if there are, at least you get to stay at the same table and get a shot at them later. It's also a good place to study your opponents and use what you know about them throughout the single table tournament. You can also work on your end game and head to head skills if you get that far.

So after a couple weeks of single table Sit & Go's at $1.20 apiece, I managed to turn $5 into $57! BUT, I have to confess, I originally deposited $50 into my Pokerstars account from my credit card at the beginning in July, when I really didn't have the money! So really, getting to $57 is essentially just recouping my initial investment. So on that note, I cashed out $50 from my account, and now the $7 I have is house money and I'm basically building my bank roll from 0.

So now, here I am, with a $7 bank roll and stars in my eyes. Chris Ferguson was able to turn $0 into $10,000 online starting with free rolls and working his way up and I aspire to do the same thing. Wish me luck and I'll keep you updated!

THE KID’S GOT GUTS: And then the surgeon removed his guts.

So it’s been a little over two weeks since my last entry. Is that me being a blogging slacker? Nope, I have a legitimate excuse and no, my dog did not eat my blog entry. Here’s the story:

The night of my last blog entry (Wed Aug 27 evening/Thu Aug 28 morning), I started having severe stomach pains to the point where I was puking my guts out for 8 hrs straight. I chalked it up to some kind of food poisoning or stomach flu and remained bed-ridden and eating soup.

That weekend (Aug 30/31), I was still in pretty rough shape but I sucked it up and played in the round 2 tournaments I qualified for. The first round 2 on Saturday, I ended up winning 1 dollar! That one dollar let me enter in a few 10 cent tournaments and 50 cent tournaments where I was able to earn a few more cents.

The second round 2 tournament, I played really well. Despite horrible stomach cramps and fever and chills, I managed to finish 20 out of almost 7000 entrants! I played for 6.5 hrs and I won $3.40. Had I managed to survive for another hour of play, I could’ve won a first prize of around $270. So close, yet so far. Not bad for someone who’s been playing poker for less than 2 months, but I was a little sore, knowing how close I was to much bigger money than I finished with, and because I lost on a bad beat.

At that point, I could have chosen to call it a day, take the small victory. But no. Still smarting from my loss, I decide to take my $5.15 of weekend earnings to a 2cent / 5cent cash game pot limit hold’ em table.…. After playing 6 and a half hours of mistake-free poker, I make one big mistake in about 2 minutes. I put essentially my whole stack on the line with top pair and lose to trips from a big stack. With about 35 cents left and looking like a complete idiot at this point, another dude at the table notices that I obviously made a mistake and asks if I’m a “noob”. I wanted to say hell no and get into it with him verbally. Instead, I kept my cool and started building my stack up again. I got back up to around a dollar, then went all-in with pocket tens and lost to someone’s King-Queen who ended up hitting the straight (the second card that came down was a ten, so for a split second, I was sitting pretty with trip 10’s). Despite all my hard work, I ended up with zero in prize money. Ouch. Poker pain and physical pain, all coming together.

Throughout the next week, the “stomach flu” continued until one night, I felt like I was shot in the stomach and went to the hospital emergency room at 4am in the morning. It turns out, the first night I had stomach pain, I actually ruptured my appendix. My surgery ended up being a full week AFTER my appendix ruptured. Because of that, I had to spend the next week in the hospital hooked up to an I.V with 3 different types of antibiotics, only able to eat ice chips the whole time. THAT was the worst pain of my life. But, on the bright side, I managed to come out of it alive and on the road to recovery, feeling grateful to be alive.

It also means I played 6.5 hours of tournament poker with a ruptured appendix! Had I finished first in the tournament, that would’ve went down as a classic wounded performance, like Ali fighting through a broken jaw or Jordan playing an NBA Finals game with the flu!

And the legend of U-E the kid continue...

RAISING THE BAR: My first final table!!!!

A couple days after my first qualifying finish in a Pokerstars free roll tournament, I've done it again! This time in the Copernicus Limit Omaha Hi/Lo free roll. BUT not only did I qualify (you have to make it to the final 11 tables, ie top 99), I made it to the FINAL table, finishing 6th overall out of 8545! All quite a big jump for someone who's never made it to the top 11 tables before 2 days ago.

Granted, once you get to the top 11 tables, a good portion of the players start eliminating themselves on purpose because everyone who places gets a ticket into the weekly round 2 tournament anyway. At that point, the only thing on the line is pride and Tournament Leader Board points. But I wanted to see how well I could do and managed to battle it out to a 6th place finish. I made quite a few mistakes at that final table against solid opponents, but hey, it was late at night, it was a long tournament, and frankly, I was just happy to be there :)

But am I satisfied? Hell no! Happy with the progress, yes, but now it's time to raise the bar. Time to make it all the way to top prize. My new main goal will be to crack the Daily Eighty Grand free roll satellite. Top 5 finishers in that tournament qualify for an 80 grand prize pool tournament. Take notice people, the kid is movin' on up!!!!

POKERSTARS WARS - EPISODE 44: A NEW HOPE

44 days... FORTY-FOUR DAYS since setting forth on this Poker journey and FINALLY, U-E the Kid has cracked the Pokerstars Hubble Free Roll!!!! Cue "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey and don't hold back applause on this momentous occasion that deserves multiple exclamation points at the end of every sentence!!!!

Last night, all the pieces fell into place as I applied quite a few of the techniques I learned in Dan Harrington's poker book and BAM!!!! I placed in the top 99 (65th, to be exact) out of 12,000 players in the Hubble. The top 99 win a ticket into a money tournament.

Over the past 23 days of no blog posts, there have been sooooo many bad beats, gunshy moments where I could have doubled up, card dead moments, "I think I'll try being a hyper agressive player" moments and "I want to throw my laptop across the room" moments that I was beginning to think it was impossible for me to break through. Hence, the no blog posts. Believe me, had I made a blog post during that time, there would have been a frikkin' $#!+load of cursing!!!! But I did it!!!! I was actually playing 2 Hubbles at the same time and almost placed in the other one as well. I finished 141 out of 12,000 in the other Hubble, which was my second best finish in these free rolls to date.

So now, this coming Saturday, I get to play in a round 2 tournament with a $2000 prize pool. Still a pretty modest prize pool for the time I've put in, but hey, it's worth it for the experience and NOT losing any money while doing it. YEEEHHHHAAAAWWWW!!!! One small step for the kid in the direction of Future Poker Legend!

CHALK ONE UP FOR FOREVER FISH: Lack of focus, lack of results.

Playing these free-rolls are annoying as hell. On 90% of the tables, the beginning stages are all about filtering out those crazy people who do nothing but go all-in all the time. It's a crapshoot for who capitalizes on them, but whoever does can then use their big stack to bully everyone else. I say I've only had the opportunity to be the bully one out of 20 times so far. No fair!

So alas, my results in these free rolls have fallen off with the frustration of trying to distinguish the idiots from the ones who actually have game (to call or not to call... that is the question). And since I can't seem to figure that out, I have become one of those idiots who doesn't get very far. Bah! Frustration. I am on tilt.

But really, it's my own fault. These tournaments have gotten so boring for me because of those annoying early stages that instead of really paying attention and observing opponent betting patterns, I've just been taking my own hands into account and watching T.V and movies while I play. I'm not even going to post my results here, it's really embarassing. I'll get back to you once things start improving. Until then...