At the end of every tournament series you will see the exact same thing every time: 95% of people will be tired, burnt out, frustrated, and will have lost money. The other 5% will range from being fairly happy to utterly ecstatic over their results. Unfortunately this WCOOP saw me fall into the former category, so let me say for myself and my fellow tourney-hating comrades: MTTs are silly.
I stuck to my schedule religiously and I believe I played every event I intended to with a couple more mixed in for good measure, and a handful of 2nd chance events too. Coming into my last event (the $530 PLO HU) I was yet to cash. I did manage to amass a ludicrous amount of T$ playing the hyper-turbo 6max SNGs to the $320r 6max PLO event. The structure was that top 2 finishes got a seat. I must have played 30 of them and had a winrate of close to 70%. Good times. Outside of that though things were bleak.
The HU event started at midnight on a Saturday night here in Sydney. This meant either sleeping during the day and waking up early, or just staying awake for a really long time. I elected to stay awake. I sit in front of my computer at 11:59pm pumped and ready to go, load up the lobby, wait for my table and.. first round: Bye. This is good. I get a free pass on to round two but far more importantly I can sneak in a cheeky lil nap. I set my alarm for 1.5hrs which I think should give me enough time, but as a safeguard I turn my laptop sound up to full and turn the PokerStars “sound alerts” on. Needless to say neither worked very well in terms of waking me up. I can’t recall if it was the incessant beep beep beep from the Stars client or whether my alarm finally chimed away but I awoke to see my timebank down to its final seconds. Fortunately this meant that I woke up in time for the first hand, had lost no chips, and could get cracking. The downside was that for this match and all future matches I had no timebank. It felt like a disability at the time but the decisions I made were quicker and more “gut-instincty” than I may have made with more time to mull things over, and that appeared to be working out quite well.
I was down to being a decent dog very quickly in the first match, 12k to 3k chips or something to that effect. A couple of lucky double ups saw me in great position and I finished the match off shortly after. My next match was against someone whose name I can’t recall but was outrageously easy to play against. He would fold to almost all my bets, hardly ever 3bet me preflop, and overall play very very straightforward and face-up. I ended up chipping away at him and the match was over in no time. You know what this means right.. another nap! I set my alarm for 15 minutes this time, and kept checking the lobby and re-setting my alarm and getting short stints of sleep in. This was a much better idea.
The next round saw me pitted against the HU PLO Behemoth LuckyGump. I knew he would have an edge on me but with the structure of the tournament I was confident it would be small enough that lady variance need only give me the slightest nudge in order for me to break through. And that’s exactly what happened. I had him all-in twice and both times the money went in with me being a considerable favourite. Once I had him all-in on the turn with 20% and he sucked out (to chop or win, I can’t recall) but the next time the cards fell my way and I held to clinch the match.
We were now down to the final 32 and had made it into the money with one more round to go to make day 2. My opponent this time was someone I hadn’t heard of but some quick PTRing showed he was a slight loser over several hundred thousand hands at PLO 0.50/1, so I was feeling pretty good. To his credit, he played well, and aggressive, and the match was the closest of them all. It lasted over an hour and we were one of the last two remaining games to be played before the day ended. We each had the other down to 2-3k chips at one point or another and both managed to crawl back and then it flipped back again and again. I had him all-in 3 or 4 times to win the game and each time he binked it on the river to survive (though admittedly one of the times was a suckout-re-suckout situation, still icky though). Finally he had me down to 1.8k or so and it wasn’t looking good. Then I doubled up. Then I doubled up the very next hand again. We’re back to almost even stacks. I was feeling good. The blinds were huge. I pick up AQT9ds and open, he 3bets as he has been doing a lot and I make the standard 4bet essentially all-in. The money goes in and he turns over AA83ds, close to one of the worst hands I could see. I still had close to 40% equity though. The flop was about as bad as it gets: AT8 w/ his flush draw and he had me dead on the turn. Oh well, gg wp hf dd. It was close to 10am when all was said and done. I was happy to be able to sleep the rest of day away.
And on that highly anticlimactic note the WCOOP was over. I’m looking forward to going back to a more cash-game intensive schedule over the next couple of months. I’ve been downswinging a bit for the last few days but am feeling good about my game which is all that matters at the end of the day. Now it’s simply a matter about continuing to put in the volume required and outrun the devil that is variance. Hope someone out there had a better WCOOP – a big congrats goes out to the midstakes PLO reg MiPwnYa who came away with two PLO bracelets. Until next time..
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