Well I’ve been delinquent in my posting again, have been keeping busy playing and watching the OIL play some great hockey. Huge game tonight, they can put the Sharks away and move on to the next round … GO OIL GO!!!

So this posting will mostly be a recap of the last couple of weeks – I’ll try and keep it brief! I’m still planning to write a few posts about my play and observations over the last three months, hopefully I’ll get to one of them later this week (but don’t hold your breath!).

First off I finished the Party reload and believe it or not, I was up a few BB over about 1800 hands – whew. I still felt like it was a grind and couldn’t put together a couple of winning sessions. I just keep telling myself to stay patient and it will come.

Next up was the PR reload, $50 bonus for 500 raked hands – shouldn’t be to hard to clear. First night out I get totally creamed, down about 25BB and I’m feeling like I need to change things up a bit. So … the next night I decide to buy into a 6-max $20 NL table – WHAT? Yes, that’s right, a 6 max NL game, talk about changing things up! First two sessions I’m killing, up like $40 and thinking this is the best thing since sliced bread. I stayed patient and picked up some premium hands and got paid. But like always, things aren’t that easy and after a few more sessions I not only loose my $40 that I was up, I loose another $40. Time for me to move back to what I’m a little more comfortable playing.

It was an interesting experiment – most of the time I didn’t even know what to do or how to bet or if I should even play my two starting cards. It may sound odd to hear that but I found the game (6-max NL) to be soooooo different then limit hold’em. (and that may be stating the obvious).

So in the end I wrapped up the PR reload the other day and had a net lost $0.37 trying to make $50 in bonus – not very good.

I’ve now started the latest Party reload – put in a couple of hours last night and was up about 16 BB – so a good start to that one. Now we’ll have to see if I can put together a few sessions of positive results (but not holding my breath just yet!).

That pretty much sums up my ring games for the last few weeks, now on to the fun stuff, freeroll tournaments.

About a week an half ago I was able to play in a new player freeroll at RB - $1000 tourney with a short field, I think about 200 people. This was an interesting tourney as I would only be able to play for about an hour before having to do some other things. So the plan was to try and build a bit of a stack so that I could leave and coast into the money. Well let me tell you, build a stack is what I did, I had such a run of cards that at the first break I was chip leader and had more than double that of second place. As I left the table there was no issue with coasting into the money. I left the game, which was too bad because I think I could have owned this tourney, but oh well. As chance would have it I was able to return an hour later and believe it or not, I was still chip leader – but only by a few K at that point. It took about another hour and a bit to finish and after leading the way for most of the tourney I busted out in 3rd place and $100 in my pocked – neat stuff.

And then came this past Sunday, it has been marked on my calendar for a while – the PSO 10k freerol at PR. Finally a tournament that starts a decent time for me, 9 PM. When we (the geek and quadman) first heard about this tourney I thought there would at least a 1000 people – PSO has many thousands of members. As we got closer to the start time it was evident that there wouldn’t be 1000 people and may not even reach 100 (which was amazing to me). The payouts for this freeroll were huge compared to what we’ve been playing, almost 2k for first, the final table all making at least $300 and 30th gets $50. In the end we had 75 people. The plan was to stay patient early on wait for a few decent hands to come my way – it was likely there would be few if any auto folds and we would have to play through everybody to get into the money.

Early on I flopped top pair while in the BB and bet it out and got raised by a limper, I called that raise and ended up folding on the turn because I had no kicker – damm, right out of the gate I’m near the bottom of the leader board. I stayed patient and picked up a few blind steals and few other small pots and by the first break was in OK shape with about the same chips as I started with. As expected, people were slow to bust out with only 15 gone after one hour – this may take a while!

After the break I picked up a few hands and managed to get a slightly above chip stack and really just waited for some cards. After donking a few chips away here and there I started to get a bit short stacked. I managed again to pick up some chips and really positioned myself to coast into the money – but not really in great shape to do anything once I got there. Just after we made the money I picked up QQ and pushed all in and got called by AK – hmm coin flip, need to hope for the best. The flop comes with an A ….. and Q and I double up … cool. Not in perfect shape just yet but now I have some breathing room. A few hands later I picked up AK and end up all in and double up again. Just like that, I’m chip leader … wow. How quick things can turn around. I managed to hold the chip lead for a while and enter the final table at or near the chip lead. At this point I think I could have loosened up a little and maybe used my stack to my advantage rather than wait for some big hands. Anyway, in the end I get all my chips in the middle with TT and get called by 99 – nice, he only has 2 outs – and hits one of them on the flop. I’m done in 6th place and pick up a whopping $525. Awesome, what a feeling! You can bet I’ll be entered into the next PSO freeroll.

OK, long enough post for today, I’m gonna pull some HH from some of my NL games and the big tourney and post some of the key hands in the next couple of days.

In closing, my BR is now a very healthy $1400 :)

Until next time, AA up.