Poker: BBP London Live update

The fact that I’m writing my blog from home at 6pm maybe indicates I didn’t do as well in London Live II as I’d hoped!

The day started with a bit of a shock when I found out that Jake Cody was seated to my immediate right !   Could’ve been worse, I suppose, he could’ve been on my immediate left

We started just after 12pm with 5 players on my table.  With so many missing players there was lots of limping and raising when the missing players were in the blinds, but I kept out of it mostly.    I did decide to limp T-5s in one case and got four saw the flop, which came 8-6-3 (or something like) with two spades.    Three limped to late position player who bet,  two called.  The turn brought 7 giving me a few more outs, we checked to late position who bet and two of us called.  The river brought my ideal card 4 to give me the straight, but we all checked this time.  Won a nice pot though and showed I wasn’t afraid to play rubbish

The table was joined by a couple of other players, then Tom Drew also joined the table.   He looked a bit tilted already when he sat down, and his mood didn’t improve when he seemed to be calling down pots and lost a fair bit of his stack pretty quickly.

I played a couple of other hands which were insignificant, then woke up with A-Ko and called tight player raise pre-flop.    The K-7-2 flop looked good to me, but decided to flat call the pre-flop raiser’s cBet.   The K on the turn looked like Xmas for me, so bet out when checked to and got called.  The Q on the river looked harmless, but didn’t feel all that comfortable for some reason with the pre-flop raisers check, so checked behind and he showed K-Q to take a sizeable pot!   

Played another couple of small hands by which time it was 1st break

There were 212 runners of which 193 were still going.   Average stack was 22’000 and I was on 20’600  At this stage I am pretty content with my play so far and chip stack.

On the restart, blinds were 200/100.   A few hands in, I got 9-9 on the big blind.   A loose aggro player raised from early position and it folded to me.  I wasn’t worried by the raise as he’d done this quite a bit to date with some weird holdings… so my decision was call or raise…. duly deciding to call.   The flop came J-7-2 with 2 hearts.  I was expecting a cBet 100% of the time, so check/called the expected bet, waiting for the hand to develop.   The 9 on the turn looked good for me, so check/raised this time.   The pot was around 2700 and the villain bet around 1000, so I raised to 4000 which he called.  The pot was now 10’700 and another J came on the river.    I knew the villain was aggro and not afraid to escalate the pot, so bet out small at 1500 thinking he might call with one pair type hands, but he re-raised all-in.  He had me covered, so it was my remaining 15’000 odd to call which was just under 2:1 (but my tournament life if I lost).    I guessed he saw me as tight/weak and I was concerned he may have had J-7 or J-2 but more likely a busted flush or A-J perhaps…. it was definitely my perception of his table image that made me decide to call (more or less anyone else on the table I likely would’ve folded!)… and he show’s J-9 !!    To be honest I had discounted that specific hand from my calculations so he had to have it obv….

So it’s all over for me and am very disappointed not to have got further.   Having thought the hand through (over and over and over ), I am actually still happy with my river call against that particular player so fairly content with my game… just the result is the disappointment.

Decided to go straight home rather than hit the cash tables (I’m certain that decision was the right one!) and got back in time to go to Tesco’s (lucky me ) but at least I didn’t have any problems getting home that time of day on public transport.