Yesterday I played my 1st live event organized by bavarianpokertour.de. It was a €15-buyin 33 player freeze-out tourney with 10,000 starting chips and 15 minute blind levels starting at 100/200. The prizes were: A €100 buyin for a tournament plus accomodation for two people for 1st place, a €100 buyin for the same tourney for 2nd place and a free ticket for a BavarianPokerTour-tourney for 3rd.
I got really lucky cards, including AA, KK, QQ, JJ and TT once respectively and played a very solid tight-aggressive game. For the first hour I played only 3 hands, and was able to steal some blinds later on due to my extremely tight table image. It’s amazing what people call with in those kinds of fun live events. I took down one or two remarkable pots, one being a pre-flop all-in with my AA against QQ which I won.
After about two hours, we started the final table with me being the chipleader with 77k in chips. The blinds were 8k/16k at this point, so I decided to continue my TAG game because I really wanted to come in 3rd at the least. As the blinds grew to 16k/32k, the table became horribly maniacal. There was an all-in situation every hand and about ten hands later, we were only five players with me not having played a single hand. My stack was down to 50k because of the blinds when I got AhJh and went all-in pre-flop. One player called with his last 25k and won with 77. The very next hand three players saw the flop with two all-ins and both went bust, leaving only three players. So I had reached my goal to make it “ITM”, but I only had 25k left (less than one BB). Luckily I was on the button when the BB had to go all-in and busted, so I had made it into heads-up.
Of course I was a huge underdog, the chipleader put me all-in the on first hand. I had 89 offsuit and called (with less than one BB I would have called any hand at this point). He showed 77 and none of my two overcards were paired. So I came out 2nd for a tourney voucher, which I’m really satisfied with.
After all, what I’m even more proud of is the solid game I played. I admit that I had some very nice cards in this tourney, but there were some hands where I made some really good reads, forced my opponents to fold or caught them cold bluffing. Additionally, I think I have solid over-all tournameny strategy by now which will hopefully help me in my future games. Playing live is so much more fun than online, it’s just sad that the legal situation in Germany is so bad.
The tourney entry I won is for the weekly €100 freeze-out tournament at the Pokerclub Salzburg which usually has about 60 players. I’ll play it on August 10th, one day before my big $500,000 MTT on CDPoker. I’m really looking forward to playing these two events and hope I can continue my good run.
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