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Hey TPE Nation,

 

It’s been a while since my first blog so I thought I’d post an update now that WCOOP is over. It’s been a pretty hectic few weeks, as would perhaps be expected, since pretty much every online poker reg has been grinding almost every day for most of September. It was an okay series for me – I made a few final tables and did decently well in general throughout the month – but I didn’t cash any WCOOP events specifically, except for a 26th place finish in a $109 2nd chance event early on in the series, and I think I probably had a losing month overall.

 

I’m in some makeup right now and I plan to grind pretty hard and lower my ABI a little in October just to make sure I don’t get too deep. I’ll probably cut out a lot of the stuff I play that’s $109 and higher and has a lot of regs in it – maybe drop the Big $162 for a couple of weeks, some of the early $109s on Stars that I play every so often, and maybe the Benjamin and the T-Rex on FTP as well. Add in a few lower-variance tourneys or softer tourneys that I don’t always play – some more of the $55fos on 888, a few low-stakes capped-field or cubed/quad tourneys on Stars, and maybe even the occasional 180-man SNG. I never have a problem with dropping my ABI a little, since I’d much rather that than get into an amount of makeup that’s more than one big score away.

 

It’s so much tougher from a mental perspective when you know that even if you make a score that is sizeable by your standards – whatever they may be – you won’t be out of makeup. I can live without that hassle, since I don’t really place any value on my ability to continue playing higher stakes and battle against tougher players. Ultimately, especially in tournaments where the variance is so high, you should always be looking to play against players worse than you. Seeking out higher stakes and better players is okay from time to time because it improves your game, and I’m certainly not saying you should be afraid of playing against better players, but stretching your bankroll to its limits and overestimating your edge in an effort to ‘prove yourself’ is just a recipe for going broke.

 

Anyway, mini-rant over. I guess the above is the reason why I didn’t play too many WCOOPs. It’s just so easy to lose a bunch of money doing so. They’re huge fields, high buyins, and you basically have to win one in order to make any money if you want to play more than half of the events, as I pointed out on the TPE podcast recently. In future SCOOPs and WCOOPs I might try to satellite into some bigger events, sure, but I wasn’t interested in being $50k in makeup 80% of the time.

 

The other big thing for me this month besides WCOOP was the France Poker Series event in Cannes, that I won a seat to by winning the Saturday Night Live tournament on PokerStars.fr a few months ago. Incidentally, I’m thinking of reviewing the SNL for my next video series, so do let me know in the comments whether you guys think that’s a good idea. I flew out to Marseille last Wednesday, when WCOOP was still going on, and hopped on a train across to Cannes. I would later find out that this was a really inefficient way to travel to Cannes from Southampton, which was pretty tilting – apparently flying to Nice would have been much easier. Sigh.

 

Anyway, I played a 220euro turbo side event on my first day there, which went decently well for a while but ended with me finishing 44th out of a 100-strong field when (bad beat alert) I lost KK<T3s blind vs blind for my last 9bbs. Obviously the small blind shoved the T3s and I snapped with the KK – the other way round would have been even worse. The fun part of the weekend came when I peeled my first hand in the first event, and was confused to discover the 6 of spades and…the V of spades! After a few seconds of thought, I realised that the ‘V’ stood for ‘valet’, the French word for ‘Jack’, so my hand was J6ss. We were playing with a French-language deck, and we would continue to do so in all the events during the week. It took me a while to get used to – when I woke up with pocket Ds, I kept having to reassure myself that it was in fact Queens (Queen in French is ‘dame’, and King is ‘roi’), and I hadn’t got something horribly wrong. Thankfully the rest of the deck was as normal, and I didn’t make any horrible misclicks as a result of misreading my hand.

 

The next night brought the 250euro Knockout tournament, which should have been great fun since there was a 100euro bounty and I was pretty sure a lot of players would play that kind of format really badly. Turned out this was true, but I was card dead basically the entire tournament. The best part of that one was chatting to an American guy two seats to my left – I had a card protector with a Legend of Zelda logo on it, and he had a Super Mario one, so we got talking pretty quickly. I actually started the conversation in French, and then midway through he realised I was English and switched around, confusing the hell out of me when I heard his American accent. I busted this one fairly quickly, however, as the structure was pretty fast – I got my last 10bb in with Ace-Queen and lost a flip against TT.

 

The main event was the one I was waiting for – 1k euros buyin (which obviously I had already paid via winning a seat on Stars.fr), 559 players across two starting days, 120k euros for the winner. I sat down to a pretty good starting table on Day 1B, and things were very smooth for the early part of the day. I got berated pretty hardcore by a young lady who’s apparently somewhat well-known in French poker but wasn’t very good (apparently I was a huge fish for not 3betting Ace-King preflop 200bb deep), and I stacked a couple of guys with some strong flopped hands. I had 65k at the 150/300/25 level, and things couldn’t have been going much better.

 

Fast-forward a few levels later, and I still had 65k after a couple of ups and downs, but we were now at 300/600/50. No big deal, still in great shape. After that point, however, I started to get ridiculously card dead. I couldn’t pick up a hand any better than an Ace-four offsuit or a Queen-eight suited. I made a couple of moderately risky plays after I chipped down somewhat, squeezing in good spots with J7s and J5s, and managed to keep myself plodding along until I had around 50k in chips at the 600/1200/100 level. At that point I moved tables to a slightly tougher table, and within 20 minutes of moving, I was out. All it took was one cooler – JJ to QQ, or rather VV to DD in French – and then a 15bb shove of QJ into AQ, and that was me busto.

 

I wasn’t tilted or disappointed or anything – at least, no more than people usually are when they bust a live tournament – and I just went and chilled in my hotel room for the rest of the night. Playing 9-10 hours of live poker is surprisingly tiring, so I was in bed pretty quickly. The day after, I was planning to explore the city a little, but I ended up taking the lazy route and just sleeping for half the day, and then spending the evening watching football on TV and reading the ‘Death of Spider-Man’ graphic novel. It was a good day.

 

I got an early train back to the airport on the Sunday, and raced back in time for a Sunday evening poker session – I needed a nap when I got home, and it turned into a three-hour one, otherwise I would have played the WCOOP 8-max version of the Sunday Warmup that day. Bricked all my semi-deep runs that I made that evening, and that was that for September’s poker.

 

One other quick note – I spent Monday evening checking out the finale of Breaking Bad, and I couldn’t be happier with the way the show finished. A perfect ending to one of the greatest television shows of all time. Next Tuesday, the 8th October, I start my 10-week course in TV Drama Writing – with Breaking Bad having left such an indelible mark on my brain, it seems the perfect time to start.

 

That’s about all I have to say for now – I hope everyone runs good in October, and I’ll post another update when I have some more news. GL all!

 

Matt



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