March/April and Irish Open

March was a fantastic month for me in poker. I had my biggest winning month by far in cash games winning over $9k but lost about €1k in tournaments trying to qualify for the Irish Open. I went deep in a few satellites for it but in the end I bought in and sold off some % to a few different people through IrishPokerBoards.com. In March I showed a lot of discipline in game selection and playing at times when I was really focused and determined to play.

April of course was the downfall of me, I was pretty cocky and confident that I was beating the games really well and not paying much attention to good games and generally squeezing poker in when I didn't really have time to play. Like maybe I had planned to go to the cinema at 8pm and I would sit down at 7pm and say I can fit 30mins in here now and would end up losing a $1k and going off to the cinema then in a rush and down a nice bit of money which ain't great for your humor but loses like this don't affect me too much but in cases like this they are avoidable which is probably what makes them more annoying.

So as I said before I played the Irish Open. I was really looking forward to playing this from the minute I had decided to buyin as I have been dreaming of playing this tournament for the last 4 years and especically after being conned out of a ticket last year. The tournament itself was a €3.5k buying with 10k starting chips which to be honest is not good enough for the buyin. I've played much better structured tournaments before with buyins of about a 1/4 of the Irish Open and considering I am much better at playing with deep stacks in these games I was a bit disappointed and even more so when I had only a 1/4 of my starting stack by the first break after having to fold top house which was basically AA in my hand on a QQ8KQ board. This hand has probably bugged me since but after chatting to a few different people I think I played the hand optimally.

During the game this hand kinda had me on tilt as I didn't get to see his cards and it was bugging the hell out of me whether this guy was capable of pulling off an outrageous bluff there. After the break I nitted it up so much and managed to get my stack back up to about 8.5k for the dinner break. I then managed to get my stack up to about 16k and with half an hour to go I see AK in early position and get 3bet by an young active foreign player and we get it allin and I lose to his JJ. Afterwards I wasn't too disappointed as I felt I played really well over the day and after making a mistake or 2 before the first break I recovered pretty well to give my chance of having an average stack going into Day 2 but I lost the race and that was that.

Last Sunday I played a few online tournaments as I was doing really terrible at cash games and just losing $500+ every session I played so decided that I would try some tournaments instead which turned out to be a great move. I entered the $100 buyin $30k guaranteed on ipoker and beat 302 players after a gruelling 8 hours play to finish first for a cool $7878 which put the month back on track.

During the week I seen an offer Paddy Power have of sending players to the WSOP when you rake a certain amount (~$9k) so I am going to give that a go. It's going to be extremely tough for me to manage this as I don't usually play more than 20-25k hands in a month and this requires about 90k hands in 2months so I will have to up the number of tables and hours this month if I am to succeed. Hopefully I will get a chance to update on my progress on this more often as its a pretty big challenge for me to play that amount of hands but its probably my best chance of going over for the WSOP, bare in mind its only a $1k entry but it also covers an hotel for a week and flights and I would try a few super sats for the main event while I am there unless I win the bracelet in the side event.