Mar 1st - £50+£5 NL Hold'Em (Loose Cannons - EC4)

Things are starting to liven up a bit down the Loose Cannons club with 23 runners for tonights 6pm (6.50pm) £50 NL Hold'Em league event!

Tonight was week 9, of 13, and as it now stands I'm still in 2nd place 20 points behind the leader...Mr Prazi...who somehow manages to do very well in these events!

Anyway with the majority of new players drifting from the Gutshot (can't think why??) the standard of play hasn't got any more difficult but of course the increase in numbers and the luck factor needed to progress through an ever larger crowd of players getting increasingly difficult I'll be very happy indeed to hit 200 points come the end of the 13 weeks. (Currently on 138)

Ok so off we go...

First hand I get dealt the Ac-Qc on the SB and raise it upto 300 after the button did an initial raise to 150. Just me and him then to see the flop of Q-9-7 and I immediately led out for 600.

The button flat called. Next card out was an 8. Again I led out, this time to 1500, and after a few moments though the button folded like a cheap newspaper and I was off & running.

Throughout the first level I steadily increased my opening stack upto 5k (from 3.5k start) before getting moved tables to the immediate left of J.J Hazan who seems to have already been on a streak and has got around 8 or 9k in chips.

For those of you who don't know JJ won over 300,000 euros at last years Amsterdam Masters Classic event so others now see him as a bit of a celebrity. To me he's just another player but the mere fact I'm mentioning him by name here in my blog recognises his face as Mr Lucky! :)

Second level then (50-100) and I'm dealing holding 6s-8s. There's a small raise from the player UTG, to 300, and remarkably everyone at the table, including myself, calls.

Flop is 4s-7h-10s. Well thats nice, I think. Its checked around to JJ who fires out 2k.

To be fair I had no intention of EVER folding here. With a gutshot draw and a flush draw giving me a potential 12 outs twice (to the river) I would have been happy enough to put in the 2k bet myself but as JJ had asked the question I felt compelled to answer.

'I'm all in', I exclaimed, and so the 2k went first followed by another 2375!

Now of course the whole field folded back to JJ who confessed to being behind but called anyway with his set of 4's!

As I was dealing I felt confident in my ability to deal myself a 5 or a spade card that didn't pair the board...instead I dealt myself the Qc followed by the Ac!!

Much whooping & hollering from JJ, as is the norm, but looking back on it I was always going to be there so early in the tournament and with a chance to get to 11k so quickly. As Dave Ulliot once said...'its better to have lived one day as a lion than a lifetime as a lamb!'.

Entries -> 23 - Place -> 20th - Loss -> £55 Profit/Loss for 2007 -> +£247

(As from 1st Jan 2007 rate of exchange is calculated at £1 = $1.90)