Soul crushing weekend, but certainly taking positives

I'm blogging at 3:50 GMT, which means I've abandoned hope of Favre and his Vikings making a comeback and giving me 5 correct Sunday Night Football picks in a row, I suppose the run had to end at some point. I've also drunk quite a lot of beer in the last 90 minutes so forgive me if my blog isn't up to it's usual grammatical standards.

Basically this weekend reminded me why I quit playing tournament poker for a living and moved towards cash games, on each day I had a sick deep run in two huge field tournaments; on Saturday the $11/30 Guaranteed (with 6000 players) and on Sunday the $215 Sunday Warmup (with 4700 players) coming 18th and 25th respectively. Although retrospectively I can't really fault the way I played it's is extremely hard to go so deep in these tournaments and live with winning a few buyins.

Saturday's deep run was a bit of a joke (as you'd expect with such a low buyin), as the chipleader was a complete maniac (and not the good kind), the first spot I realised this was when he 3b/called my 30bb shove with 35 left HJ vs btn with K9s (and luckily my 77 held) but my AQo was not so lucky vs his K6s when I r/shipped UTG vs UTG+1 with 18 left 50bb deep. Having such a novice in the tournament really creates a strange dynamic, and I thought AQo was basically good to go with considering he'd 3b 7/8 of my opens since he'd been on my left and there was a decent chance I was at least a 70% favourite (with a small chance he may fold).

The Warm Up was effectively decided by one; what I think is a very marginal spot with JJ in MP2;

Poker Stars $200+$15 No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t20000/t40000 Blinds + t4000 - 8 players
The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked.com

BB: t1553562 M = 16.89
UTG: t1105280 M = 12.01
UTG+1: t769303 M = 8.36
MP1: t1717114 M = 18.66
Hero (MP2): t1761736 M = 19.15
CO: t701846 M = 7.63
BTN: t1523630 M = 16.56
SB: t1285372 M = 13.97

Pre Flop: (t92000) Hero is MP2 with J J
1 fold, UTG+1 raises to t99779, MP1 raises to t560000, Hero???

I had no specific reads, but the table had been fairly active and there had been a decent amount of 3betting going on (even if most of it was from me and one other player). It's a fairly complicated hand just to 'run' on stove because of the possible side pots and overlays created, but it seems that if MP1 is raising a hand he's willing to go with for 19bb but folding all but AK, QQ+ then we're making a decent profit, but if he's not 3betting much more than AK and QQ+ then it's kind of spewy. Retrospectively it seems to be somewhere exactly in the middle of those two, probably folding out AQ (which is awesome) and TT/99 (which is to be expected). It still seems really close and i'll run the numbers properly tomrorow.

Despite the feeling of shock directly after busting both tourneys, I'm feeling pretty awesome now. I've made money in the last month or so away from tourneys so it seems that every time I get deep in a tournament it's some kind of a bonus. I'm really happy I decided to focus on cash games, and as well as improving my game it's generally just made me a happier person.

I'm thinking I'm going to put a ton of cash game volume in over the next few weeks, up until my birthday weekend, where I'll go out with my family on the Saturday, maybe play MTTs on the sunday and hopefully do something in Cambridge on the monday. I love you all lots for following my blog and the constant support you all give me.

Loves and hugs xx