poker goals and thoughts for the winter and 250k garunteed tourney results

the title of the post sums up what i want to talk about. also the hustler casino is running a short tournament series so i found an event that i liked and took a shot at it so I'll recap that event as well. for now I'll start with my goals and thoughts on poker for the winter.

well its been about a week now since i started grinding here in L.A. and im having some mixed feelings about it. at the beginning of the summer i had the thought of moving to florida for the winter and grinding 5/10 there. about half way through the summer I think i came across a thread about california poker and my views changed. i read more threads on LA poker and how profitable it was and i got even more excited to move so i changed my destination to LA instead of florida.

when i got here and started grinding the 5/10 tables weren't how everyone had described them and there wasnt 6-10 of them running there was 2. i found out that a month before i got there they moved the games over to the  "high" limit area of the casino where the 10/20 plays and since then the action for the 5/10 has started to drizzle away. although its lame that the games aren't as juicy as i read about and in fact are pretty solid i still have a little faith. the lapc will be running in about a month and it lasts for 2 months which should bring some action to the 5/10 games. im not so concerned about having to play against tougher opponents its just id rather play against worse opponents :) plus my win rate is going to suffer. i checked out a few other casinos in the past couple of days but the highest game that was being spread was 5/5 with a 1000 buyin which was actually a decent game (although i lost 1400 :/ ) its pretty much a 2/5 nl game just with a 5 sb. if the 5/10 game dies out this winter than i will have to play that game but again my winrate will suffer.

i gave myself pretty reasonable goals this winter based on the information that i found. from everything that i read it sounded like making 60-80$ an hour was totally reasonable at the 5/10 games and the top players were even making close to 100/hr. at the 2/5 in washington last year i was averaging 32/hr so this year i gave myself a goal to atleast make 40-50/hr and try to make 35k. i found that goal totally reasonable and if anything it was even easily achievable. well now that the games are getting so bad it might even be difficult to make those goals. only time will really tell so we'll find out in the end. i'm still going to put loads of effort into my game and really try to improve, win, and be consistent with my game this winter. so yes i am still going to shoot for the 35k but if i dont get there but i feel like i played really well at the end of my stay and things just didnt work out then i will settle for that. im still going to try my damdist to make that 35k though.

like i mentioned the lapc event is going to start in about a month. i do actually plan on playing in a few events. they've got a few deepstacked events with pretty good structures that i am going to shoot for. a 340$ event, a 550$ event and a 1100$ event. i know ill play the first 2 but if im running bad or im on a dowswing or somthing ill probably skip the 1100$ event and since we're on the topic of tourneys i should talk about the tourney i played at the hustler casino.

so i found out that the hustler casino was running a short 3 week series and a few of the tourneys actually had decent structures. an event was coming up the next day so i decided to go play. it was a 210$ event with a 16k starting stack. blinds start at 50/100 and the first two levels were an hour long. every level after that was 30minutes. so it was an ok structure. 1st place was garunteed 40k which was sweet. it had like 8 day 1 events and then like the 9th day the field from each day comes back to play the last bit of the tourney. they payed 12% of the field from each day and 6% of the field from each day would go onto the final day. the day i played it got 265 players. so 32 got payed and the last 16 players moved onto the final day.

in the early rounds i picked up KK and was able to get all my money in on the river and almost doubled up so i was sitting with like 30k and was able to pick my spots for a good few hours after that. i made a couple 3 bet squeezes from people that i felt were opening a little wide in late position  and was able to take the pots down preflop holding things like 96 suited and 78 off suit. when the antes kicked in i already had views on how i was going to play the table. i started to attack the spots i wanted to and everytime i did i got resistance so it wasnt really working out for me. by this time almost the whole table were different players from the start of the tourney so i adjusted to how the table dynamics were and tightened up a bit. i was about 15bbs when a guy from mp opened and there was a call. and it came to me on the button. he had opened wide a couple times before in that spot and showed down one being 89 suited. i had enough chips that i felt like if i shoved than he would fold and i would pick up the pot. i had 10 4 of diamonds and shoved. he took a long time before saying. "well lets gamble then" ....FUCK.. he flips over 9 10 of hearts. the board brings a 4 and the turn is a blank and the river is another 4 and i double up.  THE CROWD GOES WILD AS THE DONK DOUBLES UP WOOOOOOO!@!!!

haha. so after that i still didnt have a huge stack just sat around 35bb i tried taking stabs at a couple pots and never got anything going i did get a couple premium pairs but didnt get past the flop with them. our table broke and i was sitting with like 12-15bbs again i was at a point that i couldnt really make any big moves and watched my stack dwindle down to about 7bbs with huge stacks all around me. i picked up AA and shoved pre and got called. by K6 of diamonds flop was 4 9 Q one diamond. turn was a 2 of diamonds. river was a 5 of diamonds and i was out. i did cash for 350$ for a profit of 140$ wooooo!! although my aces got cracked and i was actually about 10 players away from making it to day 2 i feel really good about my play and im actually really pleased with how it went especially since i havnt played a tourney in about a year. so ill be looking foreward to the LApc events for sure.

as of now ive had a couple bad days at the casino mostly from just playing bad which i absoloutely hate doing. im still up for the month but hopefully i can make these last 2 days count and get some winning scores. so untill next time cosmonauts. stay tuned :)