Poker Words - A Poker Blog: WSPL Goes To Vegas Episodes, 3/2 and 3/3 Plus live Poker

I've been slacking on my WSPL-GtV updates. I'm not sure how interesting summaries of small tournies actual are, especially when I'm not to happy with my performance. So lets talk about my play overall.

In season one I was pretty successful playing a fairly conservative game. I knew that I could run up a bunch of middle of the road performances, plus a win here and there to advance to the WSOP. And it worked for me.

In the second season I decided to play more aggressively. I tried to get involved in more hands and to push my advantage in the early stages. I did OK, but often found myself in trouble, losing critical points in the standings with early exists. I ultimately finished in third place. The top two consisted of a fairly loose aggressive player and a very measured conservative player.

This year my goal was to play simple, smart, conservative poker, a revival of my season one strategy. My goal was to not put chips at risk unless absolutely necessary. It the first two matches that led to a boring game where I couldn't get enough chips to stick around very long. It also lead me to fold a fair number of hands that I think I could/should have won because I was playing scared.

The same thing happened in the live game. A friend started hosting what is turning out to be a pretty large monthly game. I'm not a huge fan of the blind structure, and he makes one person be permanent dealer, which I don't like, but other than that, its a good tournament. I played pretty solid for the first hour, chipping up slowly. I lost couple pots when I couldn't chase some less than stellar players off of their garbage hands, but I was still in good shape at the break.

Then the blind schedule got aggressive, and it was getting close to all in or fold mode. I got my aces cracked by the aggressive guy at the table when he flopped two pair. And while that was annoying it wasn't what angered me about the game. Looking back at the first hour, while I did have more chips than I started with, I left many opportunities to have even more chips by being overly conservative pre-flop, and not being willing to take a chance with anything other than super premium hands. Had I played better early on I wouldn't have been in a situation where I had to get all-in and I could have escaped that hand with at least a chip or two.

Back to the only other thing worth noting is that Aaron has gotten super tilty, despite winning the first game. Its one of the small joys of playing with him, seeing how angry he gets after losing. Twice when he was in the BB I was dealt 27o. I raised pre-flop hoping everyone would fold so I could show my hand and tilt him more. Both times though I was called before it got to him, then hit either trips or two pair on the flop and went on to win big hands. Good times.

Here are the results from the last two weeks and the overall standings. We took a break for the Superbowl, but we will be back on this Sunday and every Sunday for the next nine weeks.

Week 2: