My First Poker Victory in Two Years Part II

The main event at Macau is a great tournament, with a pretty good value field and a great structure. I was intending to take it a bit more seriously than I did the PLO.

I was pretty comfortable the whole way through it and, after picking up some good hands, managed to finish the day on a very healthy chip stack. I then got the dream start on day 2 when I flopped set over set against some poor guy to get up to almost 70k, but things went sharply downhill from there.

I lost a few medium pots in hands that I feel I played okay, but on reflection, I don’t think I should have bust in the hand that I did. A tight player on the cut-off raised to 2.5k and I called on the button with 10-10. Both blinds called too and we saw a rainbow flop of 6-3-2. The blinds checked to the raiser and he bet 10k. I had 34k left at this stage so if I decided to raise then I was pot committed. I felt that he had a hand that he thought was winning, but just wanted to take down the pot on the flop with a big bet because his hand was pretty vulnerable. I figured he had something similar to me like 8-8/9-9/J-J, and I was leaning more towards 8-8/9-9.

It’s a pretty difficult spot to play 10-10 here, and I’m not too annoyed that I went broke in the hand, but looking back I think the correct move was to re-raise preflop and pass if he raised again. He was pretty tight and I didn’t think he was the sort of player to play a big pot without a very big hand. Even after choosing to call preflop, I still think I maybe could have gotten away from the hand, though I felt I was probably in front. It was a very marginal call and I should probably have erred on the side of caution since I had a fairly good table.

As always, Cork was great craic and I really enjoyed the week there with a couple of good meals and good nights out. The only downside was the hotel. It wasn’t that bad, but there was a nearby church which insisted on sounding out their bells every half hour through the day when poker players tend to sleep. There was also the rather decrepit graveyard just outside my window. Some of the graves must have been 200 years old and it looked like the graveyard was currently being developed, with all the headstones propped up against the far wall and a few holes dug up around the place.

We managed to get a few rounds of golf in over the week too. Nicky Power doesn’t have any children, but if he ever decides to have some, then playing golf with me will surely figure heavily in his plans for putting them through college. I played one of my best ever rounds at Castlemartyr, shooting 88, a very respectable score by my standards, and still managed to lose €450 to him. I’m playing with him again this weekend up in Donegal along with Julian Gardner and Paul Spillane (for some reason these guys will drive hundreds of miles to play golf with me), and then I’m heading to London for the WPT and the World Open.

I’m starting to think that updating via twitter might be bad luck. I haven’t cashed in any tournament since I started doing it and then when I didn’t bother with it in Castlebar I ended up splitting the tourney (see part I). Regardless, I’m going to persevere with it for another while and as always you can follow my progress (or lack thereof) here, at Boylepoker, or on martysmyth.net.