I'll often wake Rachael up accidentally if I go to be after her, and despite her undeniable intellectual prowess (she’s a few weeks away from being a doctor), she is reduced to a massively, gibbering mess during the first 2 minutes of consciousness. Most of the time this results in a harmless zombie-like groan as she falls straight back to sleep, but sometimes I'm blessed with involuntary comic genius as she makes some illogical remark about a pantry or a unicorn! This month I caught the end of a dream, and still half asleep, and with the hugest smile on her face, she mumbled that she was swimming with Skye (her horse), wearing a snorkel... I'm not exactly sure which one of them was wearing the snorkel, because she fell asleep during cross examination, but at least I know her unconscious self is getting enough exercise, even if it does seem a tad dangerous. Undoubtedly though, my favourite part of her sleepy stupor is on the occasions she'll venture out of bed to grab a drink, because without fail, she'll stagger a few steps sideways for each of her first couple forward. She basically moves like a knight across a chessboard, but with the elegance of a drunk..This month I was lucky enough to make it to the final day of PKR Live in London, which consisted of a series of heads up matches. Head's up poker is basically a one-on-one dual, and it’s far more taxing than playing poker against a full table of players, simply because you play the entirety of every hand. Most of my games were marathons and as I played around 15 hours of heads-up poker, it's safe to say I was pooped (the late nights and hammering we gave the bar each night probably didn’t help!)..
Anyway, fatigue definitely showed and during my semi-final game I kept doing rally dumb stuff like posting the big blind and instantly mucking my hand, litterally passing my opponent free chips. Many coaches stress the importance of not playing out of position, but I don’t recommend actually giving you big blind away as a strategy. My biggest blooper came when I got it all-in with A4s vs. 99 and lost on 4KJ23. There was a huge crowd of people eagerly leaning in to watch the action and after the river I got up shook my opponents hand and left the table. He must have thought that this was a huge needle on my part, as I’d misread his hand, he actually had 96 off-suit, and I’d won. That was an embarrassingly delightful walk back to my seat..
I played seasoned pro Jeff Kimber heads up in the final. Re-charged after a Redbull and some food, I felt like I had an edge early on and got off to a great start making a couple of good reads and over-bet bluffs. Within an hour I got it all in for the win with TT vs AJ and unfortunately for me Jeff flopped and won doubled up. After this Jeff made some good adjustments and I think fatigue got both of us during our 7 hour battle! Unfortunately, it came down to winning coin flips, and I lost 3 out of 3 all-in confrontations. It’s impossible to win if you can’t win your all-ins. Wp Jeff. Fortunately we did a deal before heads up started and so I took home around $16,000 for my second place. This softened the blow (thought not as much as getting in to bed that night did!)! .
I also had another two-part article published which seems to have been well received. Here’s a link for it:
http://www.pkr.com/en/raise-your-game/multi-table-tournaments/monkey-see-monkey-do-1/ .
This is my favourite Video this month. Love it:
Video of the Month
Gee Gee, Danshreddies
No comments:
Post a Comment