UBOC event #10 and #12

Event #10: $300+20 PLO8 100k guaranteed, 3k starting stack.

Not so good. I finished 147/294. I played pretty poorly.

Ok, I didn't play that poorly early. I got lucky one hand and doubled through my opponent to get to 7.5k. I worked it up to almost 10k, then I got sticky fingers. I couldn't let go of second best hands. It shouldn't be too hard to let got of a decent hand when you are 3-bet PF in these tournaments. Most of these players will not 3-bet light. However, I was still in my 400PLO8 cash game mentality, where a 3-bet PF is a lot wider and I was calling their raises with mediocre hands. As is with PLO8, the flop invariably gives you some sort of a draw, and usually after the opponent has 3-bet PF, you are getting the right odds to call his all-in on the flop. So I found myself in 2 such hands within the same orbit and my 10k stack was drubbed back down to 3k. From there, I just tried to find a good spot to get my chips in, but ended up second best again.

Event #12 $200+15 HORSE 50k guaranteed, 3k starting stack.

I finished 68/227.

I played very well for the first 2 1/2 hours. I was folding tough hands, knowing that I was going to find spots later which would be more advantageous. For as little as I play these games, I think I'm a pretty good stud player. I used to play the occasional .10/.25 Stud8 game on UB, back when I was grinding 50PLO8, so it's not like I have no experience. The irony is that I lost most of my cash in the LO8 portion of the game.

I worked my stack up to 11k at one point, and was the chip leader, but that's quite deceiving. There were still 200 players left after 2 hours (avg stack 3405) but the level was 300/600 LHE. It wasn't taking a lot of bets for players to end up all in. Therefore, 11k wasn't going to do me much good if I sat on it. I had to stay in there and keep playing. The hand that crippled me the most was at 400/800 LO8, late in the 3rd hour of play. I had A39K run into A346 to a 45927 board to get quartered severely.

Another hand that sucked was: I raise first in from the CO with AAA2 and get called in 2 places. Flop comes 764, check, check, I bet, call call. The turn is the fucking 2. I mean seriously? I'm pretty fucking sure that the last A is out, so that's a 3 outer to counterfit. There goes 1200 chips as I have to fold to the bet.

After that, I had few chips, so I waited for the razz game to try and pick some hands that I was going to play for my stack. Since PT3 doesn't track the stud game hands, I don't remember, but I believe I had a 9 low get beat by an 8 low.

I might start looking for more of those tourneys online as they were fun. They forced me to concentrate and not go on auto-pilot, and I really like the way I play when I'm truly focused. However, it took 3.5 hours to get down to 68, and although eliminations were coming fast, I'm sure it was another 1.5 hours to the money. That's a pretty long time. ROI not looking so good there.

That's the end of UBOC for me. None of the other events interest me. I'd like to play in the main event (#20) but it's at 4PM on a Sunday, and I can't do that to the family. Poker, for the most part, is on my own time.

I'll publish a UBOC summary in my next post