I had a later night than usual for a Sunday this week, usually I get to bed by around 9 or 9:30pm to get a decent sleep before the massive grind that is the Monday majors. The Monday majors are the biggest and best day to play online poker for the week and the day usually starts from about 4am and goes through until about 5pm on average (depending on how I go for the day). On an average Monday I play roughly 25-35 tournaments throughout the day and am usually in for an average of about $6k-$8k depending on how the rebuy tourneys go, etc. So you can understand why I try and get a really decent sleep to be well prepared. The reason I was up so late was because I was over at the casino railing Jono take down the biggest and best score of his career to date. There was a lot of hype going on over there and it was something I definitely wasn’t going to miss witnessing. I stayed there until about 10:30pm cheered him on and gave him a congratulatory hug and so on then got home by about 11pm or so.
I contemplated not playing majors this week only because I had had such an exhausting week with the APPT tournaments. I knew I needed a break but I had decided that it would be better to tough it out and play this Monday but have the rest of the week off and possibly the next few weeks off to enjoy Christmas and New Years. My year has been a massive year with the most exciting upswing and one of the most gruelling downswings too; I need to relax the mind, body and soul.
It is now Monday morning at about 4am; I woke up and had a shower to wake me up fully. I log on to my computer only to realise that I had misread my schedule for the day and that I didn’t actually need to start playing till 5am. That’s a pretty sick way to start a day but that wasn’t the only annoying thing to start the day with, I also had a splitting headache and nose blocking hay fever. I took a few meds to try and decrease my sickness and increase my focus and stamina levels, and no guys I know what you’re thinking but these meds are fully legal! I’m not into that sort of stuff. I got my head stuck down and got my grind on!
The day was going ok for the first 3-4 hrs or so and before I knew it I was on a final table of a $530 buy-in “high rollers” Party Poker tournament that I upsettingly finished 5th in for about $7k. Don’t get me wrong, this is an amazing way to begin the day because now I am effectively free rolling the whole day so any money I cash for is profit! That definitely fills me with confidence and encouragement to play really well and hungrier to glide through the day hunting for any profits I could make.
The rest of the day was going ok and I had made a couple of min cashes but it was the $55 daily ninety grand that I was looking sexy in. By this point it was about 3pm and I was sitting in the top 5 chip leads with only about 100 players to go out of a tournament with 7000 players. First prize is worth a whopping $42,500.. for a $55 buy in that ROI (return on investment) is ridiculous! My equity is also so great because the field is full of much softer players than any other tournament worth that much money. I was keen to lock down and destroy this thing and make it really worth while me toughing out that day while being sick and exhausted.
I was clutching it out really well and before I knew it I was on the final table and sitting up the top coming 2nd out of the 9 left. I had noticed a lot of players playing very aggressively and to my knowledge it looked like a very bad kind of aggressive. It’s like a lot of them didn’t really know how to play a final table or that a few of them really didn’t understand optimal winning strategy. If anyone knows me as a player then they will know that this is not good for me. I play really well against tight conservative players and so for these players to be playing back at me so often I knew I needed to adjust my game. I will admit that for about an hour of the final table I was picking a lot of spots that usually work for me but wasn’t working for me and I knew I needed to shift my game just slightly and accordingly. There was a 5 min break and I took it as an opportunity to calm down and refresh, so I took a quick shower.
Coming back from the shower there were 3 of us left and I had my game on. I was forcing others to play a lot of post flop play because obviously applying pressure to them to play pre-flop was not working. And it worked great for the remaining of the tourney and after a struggle of about another hour and a half I had taken it down!
It is a massive achievement for me to be able to have the rebound skills of busting out short of a final table worth $470k for first in the APPT main event and then only 2 days later get my act back together and play a full day online (whilst sick) and take down a really decent payday. I am super content with that and now I’d decided to only play each Monday up until I head to Melbourne for the Aussie Millions.
I am currently working on my own fully self-maintained website www.brendooor.com and I am hoping to have it launched by the New Year! On the web site you will find all sorts of things including a bio, training videos, fun videos of stuff I am doing outside of poker, blogs, video blogs, etc. I am really excited about this and when I get the website up and going I hope to hear a lot of positive feedback. So if you have anything to suggest or ask me then you can find me on facebook or email (b_rubie@hotmail.com).
Ciao for now!!
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