Only half an hour into tonight’s Midnight Madness and I haven’t had anything in thirty hands. A big stack at the table has more than three times the starting stack and is throwing his weight around with a VPIP of over 70%. In the small blind I pick up 
and raise to 200 with two limps ahead of me. The big blind drops out but both of the limpers match the bet. The flop comes out 
and I check. The big stack drops a bet of 420 and I figure it’s time to put up or shut up with my nut flush draw, pushing in my remaining 985 chips. The third guy folds but the big stack stays in, flipping over 
for a flopped straight from a hand in the 15th percentile. I still had about a 35% chance but the turn and the river didn’t bring me another heart.
Daily Archives: Tuesday, 4 January 2011
Special KK
Ten hands into a Full Tilt $10K Guarantee turbo tournament and I pick up 
on the small blind (40/80). UTG with nearly three times my chips raises to 200 and is called by UTG+2 who has a little less than I do. I push all-in and the big stack drops out. UTG+2 has KhKc. The cards come out 
and the kings take me down to 95 chips.
on the button, I’m all-in before the flop with the big blind putting in the extra 15 chips to call. The flop misses us both, he’s got an 8 instead of a 9 to go with his ace, and I’m up to 230.
isn’t the best hand in this situation, but my chips go all in again. With three folds ahead of me, perhaps I should have been thinking that the hands on the other side were all potential greats, but the small bling raises, forcing out any other players. A 
on the flop and on the turn give me a gut-shot straight draw. Or it would if the guy I was up against didn’t have two of the kings I need on the table in front of him.
#12
Tomer Berda is #12* on Bluff Magazine‘s 2010 Player of the Year list. CardPlayer has him at #22.
UPDATE: Tomer says Bluff is missing a second-place finish in a side event at EPT London, and the extra points would put him in 6th place.
Leave Well Enough Alone
It was a mixed bag of a night.
The evening started off with the sixteenth tournament in my local series. The hands I was dealt were not particularly good and my stack was eaten slowly away. The second hand after I was moved to the other table to replace a bust-out I was felted when my AK was outdrawn by a KQ. I went through those chips as well, forcing a second re-buy before we consolidated to the final table. After that, though, I started to pick up some hands and accumulate chips, knocking out five of the original eleven players. Came up in second place, which meant that not only did I win enough to cover my buy-ins and add-on but I actually extended my point lead for the Player of the Year somewhat (though the second of the quarterly double-point events coming up may eradicate that). I’ve been in the lead (or tied for it) for seven events now, since the middle of October.
Then I messed up in a PokerStars Aussie Millions satellite. I was doing far better than I expected; the satellites have unlimited re-buys for an hour and I not only didn’t re-buy but at the add-on time I maintained a position about 23rd in the field without that, either. As the field narrowed down to about 30 remaining entries (133 originally, with 201 re-buys and 85 add-ons), I was in 2nd position with about 40K in chips. The prize pool was large enough that the top eleven spots were going to get tickets to the $530 qualifier tournament and 12th place would get $455. I was sitting pretty. Except that I refused to sit and soon I was bleeding chips. The blinds, admittedly, were taking chunks out of my stack at 400/800/75, and with more than an hour to go I couldn’t just sit there and glide into the money, but I played it poorly after the having worked my way up from a 1.5K starting stack.