Dec 8th - £100+£10 NL Hold'Em - Cavendish Club (Belfast)

Fifty seven runners in tonights event and I got off to a very nice start when I got a player to put all his chips into a pot when I'd made Aces & Nines on the river. To be fair he held A-K and on a board of A-J-6-10-9 he couldn't get away from his top pair - top kicker holding.

We started with 5k in chips and a twenty minute clock so withion 10 mins I had 10k and was looking forward to a good night.

Got moved tables and things didn't happen. I got Q-Q, in LP, and called an EP raise to 600 (blinds were 100/200). A flop of 10-6-4 and the EP bet out 1k. I went all-in and he called with a holding of A-A. Urgh!! My 10k was back down to 5k!

Time ticked by and at the break I was back to 7k in chips!

Blinds started back at 300/600 and with only 11 BB's in my stack I had to start looking for opportunities to build a stack or get out of there.

Holding Kc-Qc on the button I flat called a raise from another EP player. The SB and BB came in also (mistake allowing this!!). The flop came J-J-6 and once it was checked around to me I went all-in (5k). Unfortunately for me the SB had J-10 so called for his last 1600. Oh well!

The last hand of the level brought my downfall although I was outdrawn so it was a bit pissy.

I held the Jd-9d and decided that with the blinds in there (300+600) + some young fellas raise to 1800 then it offered me great value on what I thought were 'live' cards so I pushed my 3400 into the middle and awaited developments.

The young fella shrugged as he felt he had to call with Kc-Jc and we saw an exiting flop of Qd-10d-Qc. Massive flop for me! The turn card was the 8c, giving me the straight but suddenly my opponent had more outs to beat me and when the As fell on the river, giving my opponent a higher straight, I was done!

Undoubtedly the fact that my chip stack couldn't cope too well with the escalating blinds contributed to my downfall but you have to get lucky in the 'all-in' situations as well. Tonight I lost them 3-1!

57 Entries - 26th - Loss $187 (£110) - Acc. Total +$4476