I jumped into day 2 of the Stud event and the table was as great as it will ever get. I will never get a better shot at stud then this game provided; it had some loose players and everyone appeared to be playing for fun and so L-O-O-O-O-S-E.
But in stud you still need to hang on and play good. All hands are marginal. I was doing lots of stealing in good position situations and this was working out very well. I got my stack to near average – about 8k – with 100 players left and I was feeling really good about going further. Then a series of hands happened that changed everything. I held pocket A-A,. K-K, and Q-Q with a blank door card and lost all three of these pots; falling behind on the board by 6th street, on all three occasions, and folding every time. It was pretty sick.
On the last hand I got it all-in with A-K-Q vs. A-Q-9 and I was in good shape to triple up with the antes, etc. But again no luck. I got rivered again and out I went on my bike to the tent to play the $2.5k HORSE buy in. 400 folks rolled out to play also; although I heard that they wanted about 800.
I went for a big dinner and missed the first two hours. No problems with that though, I lost less than 10% of my stack. The structure is so slow that early on, it’s ridiculous in my book. All top players complained because we waste five hours of our time & life in the first five levels until the levels get up high enough for a pressure game to develop.
I didn’t do any good in the HORSE either. I played ok but got busted as a player wanted to take me on and close to 3am, I was done and off to bed, today I am playing the $5K LH which I enjoy very much, but again I have to miss the first two hours as it’s B-O-R-I-N-G. Why couldn’t they make longer levels once it gets up higher and shorter when it has no meaning at all on the game? It might just be me but surely in poker you need pressure levels for as long as possible where you can do some damage to your stack and not go from no damage at all, for bad play, to huge damage in later rounds for getting lucky.
