There were only four tourneys to go and I’m not running that good in my series of ‘deepstack’ tournaments. So from that point of view, I was happy to at least cash in tourney 15 ($2+.2), but my prize had to be much bigger, if it wasn’t for the joking PokerStars dealer. I finished 12th, winning $4.41 .

After all, I played a véry solid tournament. I won my first big pot with A8 suited, which I played reasonably good I think:

I really like these kinda hands so I decide to let my opponents pay some limper’s tax. They do and I hit the flop very well with the nut flushdraw and a gutshot straightdraw. But I don’t bet the flop because you can easily be reraised on such mediocre boards against some original limpers. My free card gives me the nuts and when laguna 856 reraises the 60 bet, I suspect him of also holding a flush and decide to keep slowplaying my hand. Board pairs, but I’m not really scared of this and place a value bet, not too big because he might suspect me of slowplaying JJ: excellent result. Then I missed some flops completely with premiums like TT and AK before the next important hand was played:

I flop a set in a limper’s pot and I bet because at least one player must have picked something up on this board. My only caller leads out on the river (which happens to be a great blocking bet) and I only call here for two reasons. First one is that my opponent can easily have TQ in this hand and I don’t want to make a very big pot against the other big stack of the table. Secundo, if he was as weak as he happened to be, he wouldn’t have called a bigger bet anyway.

In the period that followed I even became chipleader, but I lost a big pot with JJ which brought me at fifth place during the period towards the bubble. It took a VERY long time before the bubbleboy was eliminated and I’d become a shortstack. However, if everything would have gone normal, I would have doubled up in this hand:

Instead, I got eliminated…

My fourteenth tournament ($2+.2) was in fact one big joke. This experience really showed me the aspects of low stakes poker and made clear once more how difficult it is to make profit by playing those tournaments.

It was already during the very first hand of the tournament that I noticed the particular ‘low stakes phenomenon’: there are a lot of loonatics in this tourneys (maybe just searching for some cheap tournament to steam at after a bad beat in a bigger tournament) who just push during the first hands. That makes my knock-out hand a little ironic, as some of my opponents really had a quality hand and it was just time for a little ‘jokerstars’. Watch:

Now WHAT THE F*CK IS HAPPENING HERE? OK, of course this AA vs KK vs QQ thing is a big joke already in the first place. And the fact that the Queens take this pot down is an extra joke. But above all, how bad do those morons play those hands?? Pocket fives minraises an early position raise and calls for whole his stack when it’s reraised two times, pocket Kings just call a reraise preflop and Pocket Queens (which makes a good play when just calling the 200 raise) thinks he’s not against Aces or Kings when three players go all-in preflop… I get so tired of these jokes, when my series are over I will definitely not play those $2 tourneys anymore.