Bubbly bubbly bubbly
Thursday, September 17, 2009 - Liv Boeree
This week’s been one of my hardest ever in poker. As you can probably tell from the title of this blog, I experienced the agony of the bubble. Now obviously this is something none of us who have ever played more than a few tournaments have not experienced, but my encounters with it over the past few days have been none other than exemplary. It all started on Sunday, where you UB regulars may have been aware of, or indeed playing in, the 50 seat Aruba guarantee. This was UB’s $500 buy in massive giveaway of fifty $8,500 golden tickets to their annual Aruba Classic tourney (and if you don’t know what that is I dunno what planet you’ve been living on). Now I’m already going to Aruba either way, but I won a step into this 50 seat mega to try and win another seat which baEnsically equals a bucketload of cash. Anyway, I played pretty near perfect all tournament until we got to just 70 players, and then combination of factors allowed me to get short but then I did the inexcusable thing of miss a couple of vital blind stealing opportunities to get myself back to healthy. Next thing I knew there were just 55 left and I was looking like it’d all be ok with me sat in 48th. However lady luck seemed to favour a number of these shorterstacks and before I knew what was happening there were 51 left, and only 1 person shorter than me and he was at my table. By this stage neither of us had any fold equity whatsoever so I tried to play the waiting game. He decided to play it even more and left himself with basically two hands left (the antes were huge) knowing the blinds were about to go up and eat my stack completely. And they did. And I finished stone cold bubble for 51st out of nearly 800 for 50 seats after sitting up til 5am UK time and ready to throw myself out a window.
However, Monday morning made me suck it all up as I had to head up to Nottingham to play the first ever English Poker Open, a $5k buy in tourney featuring pros such as Phil Hellmuth and Doyle Brunson so I was pretty excited to be playing it. Things started slowly for me but then I got moved to the feature table with James Akenhead and Devilfish. Devilfish pretty promptly doubled me up in a really interesting hand that I’ll write about next week, and then I cruised from there til the end of day 1 with about 60 of the 213 entries remaining.
Day 2 started a bit rocky with me getting short at one point but then getting it up to about 50k average with around 35 left and rapidly approaching the bubble. I then proceeded to run big hand into bigger hand in quick succession leaving me with a short shovable stack and doing the shovey thing at what seemed like an appropriate moment to get called off by yet another monster busting me again close to the money. Anyway, starting just as I busted was a super deep structure $750 event so I jumped straight back into the saddle to play that. This one went really well and before I knew it I’d played 10 hours and we were seven from the money and I had a healthy stack and picked up those darling little weapons (the AA) and got it all in versus the big stack with 44s. Can you guess happened? Where’s the rope…
Tags: Aruba, aruba classic, Devilfish, doyle brunson, English Poker Open, James Akenhead, Phil Hellmuth, Poker Poker Poker, ub
