Thursday, April 17, 2008

Knockout Duck Broken at Last!

April has been pretty good so far. Having knocked my Full Tilt account down to $100 or so earlier in the year, it is now up to over $500 and I am well on the way to recovering all the losses from January (without a reload before you ask).

Highlights so far this month have been a 4th place in a Betfair holdem rebuy, a win on a PLO rebuy on Full Tilt, followed by a near miss the next night in the same tourney, and yesterday I won my first knockout tournament. This was a $11 PLO satellite to FTOPS #2 event in May, a buy-in worth $250, for a $200k gtd tourney where everyone has $40 on their heads too. Including the 6 heads I took out in the process, I am now $1 up and am totally free rolling into the $200k tourney.

Some of the comments from the regulars at this level on FT make about my play are interesting to say the least. Have been accused of being spiteful and a fish in the same breath. Best was when I read a guy stone cold on the final table and took him out in 4th. I knew I was ahead on the flop, so I called his all in push (he started with 45-50% of my stack) and he had a pair of 6s and a J flush draw! This proved not good enough to beat my A flush draw and no pair on the flop, which was resolved by the A on the turn - Omaha calculator after the fact said I was 58% to win compared to his 38%. Deeply satisfying to see that I was instinctively right and it gave me the stack to take down the tourney quickly thereafter.

Playing on Full Tilt means I can use some of the poker ranking sites now. Sharkscope is showing me $36 down in total, after a couple of mistimed STT exits tonight. More pleasing is officialpokerrankings.com, which says I am 9,822 of 265,533 on Full Tilt for MTTs. In the money 8 times in the last 120 days, I have converted 4 of them into wins and made the final 10% of the runners 15% of the time. ROI something like 77%, which would have been much better if I had cracked the style needed for knockout MTTs earlier.

Have also played a few Omaha double your money tourneys on Ladbrokes. These are so dull it is not funny, but you can keep them running in the background while you play another game until about level 7 or 8 when the bubble is usually approaching.

Have done a bit of spring cleaning on the blog links for those that have been removed or not updated in ages.