No Days Off - Day 6

No Days Off Day 6 Saturday 4-23-11

Poker -

I traveled to Hollywood, Florida to the Hard Rock casino last night on a redeye flight. The World Poker Tour is up here for the first time ever and the excitement here is great. I got in at about 7:30am this morning and unfortunately my room was not ready here (the casino is about 25 min north of Miami, right outside of Fort Lauderdale). Today poker was not great. I played day 1b of the $3200 main event at the Isle Casino. We started off with 30,000 chips at 25/50 blinds and it was super fun to play 600bb deep tournament poker. I feel that way to many tournament pros underestimate these levels as I feel extremely comfortable playing early on deep stack poker. I feel there are tons of chips to be gained early. I believe I won 7 or 8 of the first 10 hands at the table and was quickly up to about 38,000 and feeling really good. That was the extent of my good fortune though as bad play coupled with bad timing lead to my demise. A few missed draws / bad bluffs/ call downs and I quickly was down to 25,000. The biggest pot of the day was as followed and im still not sure if it was good or bad.

BB Ac7h approx 20,000 chips

CO 600 - the co was open extremely wide and even showed down J5o raising from the CO and just seemed like a tricky spazz happy player.

Button calls- tighter player who seemed somewhat competent from what I had seen

BB I raise to 2000

I could certainly fold here or flat, although I like folding a lot more than flatting. By 3 bet squeezing I give my self the opportunity to win the pot preflop, gain control of the flop betting, just overall I think I will show a decent profit squeezing here based on how wide the CO was opening and the button's flatting range (I was more scared of the button in this hand than the CO).

The button snap called the 3 bet and the button came along so there was about 6000 in the pot.

FLOP Ah Kh 5s pot 6000

I bet 2500

About the best flop I could have. I most likely here have the best hand. I think the key part here is my Cbet sizing. With a A hi board here I feel my continuation bet with my whole range should be very small because A ) if im bluffing I don’t need to bluff much to get them to fold 77 88 etc... and it leaves me more room to barrel the turn if they do call. Here my Cbet is for value yet I don’t want to bloat the pot to much but I still decide to cbet because I think it is just better than check calling here cause I don’t induce many bluffs.

CO folds

Button tanks and moves all in for 11,900 total

Bleh this spot sucks and is one of the disadvantages of squeezing preflop here with a marginal hand like A7o. My first though is what price im getting. There is 6000 + 2500 + 11900 so about 20,500 and I have to call 10,000 about. So im getting about 2-1 so I only need to be right once out of every 3 times to break even so I need about 25% equity to break even. The button never has AA KK or AK here cause he 3 bets those pre or back raises after I squeeze. So his value hands are AQ, AJ and 55. Since the A and K of hearts are out there it makes it tough for him to have a pair + FD other than like 56hh. I ended up making the call here based on POT odds and I think he has 56hh enough and if he does have a hand such as AJ or AQ I have some chop equity and a back door FD. I also think a small % of the time he could have the random T8hh or something which I am in great shape against. He had 55 and I was drawing slim and lost. This though is the worst case and I still have like 10% equity.

I bled down my short stack in some unfortunate situations Before jamming 13 justin beibers (ya I said it) with Jtss after 2 limps and getting called by AQ.

Overall not that happy with my performance but after writing about that hand I don’t feel as bad about it as I did before as I am getting a very good price to call on the flop vs his range and it is hard to make sets / I have an A blocker to AQ and AJ.

Im to tired to play cash tonight I think so just gonna wait till tomorrow and play the $1500 prelim at the Rock which I expect to be small prob less than 60 players.

Nutrition-

My first day traveling on my no days off was pretty good food wise. While my diet is never “perfect” and I don’t expect it to be, I am making every good food decisions when I can.

Breakfast – 3 egg white omelet w/ ham, jalapenos, tomatoes , peppers, salsa

small portion of fruit salad

Snack / lunch -

Beef Jerky

protein bar

protein shake

Dinner -

I ate at a buffet for the first time of this series and I should probably get used to it with how much I travel. I felt I did alright considering some of the options. I was very good about skipping the obvious bad stuff

• 2 portions of lobster
• Salad (don’t know what kind of dressing so could have been bad?)
• Steak – was a very lean cut of some kind of roast not sure what
• dinner roll (don’t know why I ate this.... grr)
• Ahi Tuna (had a decent amount of this and I assume it is very healthy)

Snack – Protein bar

Overall a very clean day for being on the road! I am making sure I pack plenty of bars / shakes when I go to play so I don’t eat bad at the table.

Fitness

I did not workout today unfortunately. I just didn’t have the energy after playing the tournament an traveling. So for my first week as long as I work out tomorrow I will be at 5 days in the gym, while below my goal of 6 is still a good start.

Just going to chill for the remainer of the night. Its 10pm here and its weird being on the east coast and just having sporting events start on the west coast. Gonna head down to the bar (only a couple light beers :D) and watch the San Jose Sharks game with Matt Savage and sort of see where the night takes me, but I plan on taking it ez.