Chris Halverson’s Blog

WPBT Satellite Review

Now that I’ve had some time to digest the tourney a bit and looking at the hand histories, I’ve come to like my play from last night. I had decided earlier that I was going to be more aggressive and actually try to win. I was not going to play my normal weak/tight game. I wanted to win this and did not want to limp into the later rounds with a small stack. MTTs are not my strong suit at all. I’m much more of a cash game player and a smallish SNG player. The only MTTs I play are the blogger ones.

I stole a decent number of blinds early. Now these aren’t huge pots, but I was setting up a different image than I normally have. I’ve played with a lot of you before (most notably, I seem to always have Bob at my table and he has a propensity to bust me), and my writing shows that I’m a fairly weak/tight player. I was aiming to change that this game and it more or less worked.

This, of course, bit me on the ass on one hand and I got knocked way down. I was down to T160 at one point. I doubled up twice in a row and another time a couple hands later which put me in a position where I had room to breathe and get back to playing real poker instead of Poker Superstars II “push or fold” poker.

I did less calling and more raising, which is a change for me, but seemed to work. I was able to buy a couple pots where I am pretty sure I didn’t have the best hand. Some of these weren’t huge either, but helped keep me afloat and had me at about an average stack for most of the time.

The hand I busted out on was a weak play. I raised pre-flop and then checked the flop to give a free card. A bet on the flop could have represented strength due to the pre-flop raise which may have driven the other guy out. Instead, I reverted back to weak/tight Chris and checked my missed flop. When I caught my card on the turn, I was beat due to being in what we call in the business, a dominated position.

My lack of MTT experience definitely shows through in these tournaments. I generally last to around the break, but usually have a small stack. This time I was about average (a bit below, but not bad), and felt I was playing well. I just picked the wrong time to play weak.

Big congrats to Bob, nice job, especially making a comeback after I pw0ned you early on I’m glad the hand made you pay attention.

BTW, sorry for not being on IM. Like I said, I was having dinner with my family and it was tough enough to pay attention to the game without having to deal with IM.

Party Reload

Last night I finally desposited to take advantage of the Party reload. I then proceeded to lose $150 at the tables. In 175 hands. At least I’m off to a great start.

GamesGrid

I’ve only checked a couple of times, but I have not found an open seat at a game I want to play in, so I haven’t actually played there yet (get waiting lists and I’ll give it a try). That being said, I did cash out my $500 last night and the money hit Neteller in 20 minutes.

20 minutes.

Full Tilt, you could learn something from that. That’s even faster than Party does it. Now maybe it’s because I haven’t played yet, after all they didn’t have to do anything to determine if I was cheating or anything, but even so it was pretty impressive.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 at 8:42 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.