Tourneys for a Month

I recently spend six weeks in Colombia with my wife's family. We had an absolute blast. Joshua, who is 5, was speaking fluently by the end of the trip. Zachary, who is 3, has started saying some 3-4 word phrases in Spanish. They both understand Spanish completely. I also took them to swimming lessons every day for a month and Joshua was attempting all four strokes by the end of the month.

The great thing about Colombia, besides seeing my wonderful family, is that I get a ton of work done there and get to play a lot of poker. With so many people able to help out with the kids, I work a lot and play a lot of online poker at night. I played about 130 to 140 tournaments while I was there.

I am very happy with my results. All of these were fairly large tournaments, with the minimum number of entrants at about 180 all the way up to 10,000 entrants. The good news is that I won two tourneys and had two 2nd place finishes. If there is bad news, it is that my good places were in the lower buyin tourneys I played.

I finished first in the FTP 100K Holiday freeroll with 10,000 entrants (see my previous blog post). I finished 2nd to SBRounder in a tournament which won me 8K. I had a 2nd place finish in a $50 PokerStars deepstack tourney. I won a $50 tourney at Cake. I also went deep in several other tournaments so was really pleased with my overall results.

I also played a decent amount of PLO. I was editing Jeff Hwang's new book which we will be publishing this summer so spent some time at the tables. His book is fantastic. With practically zero PLO experience, his book made me feel comfortable immediately. I started at .25-50 limits and played up to $2-$4, with success at every limit. Unfortunately, I got a little bored one day and tried the $5-$10 tables only to lose everything I had won at PLO in one hour! lol. I lost several big pots for a total loss of $2,500. Of course, I only played one hour at that limit so I can't comment on my results, but i will say for the limited time that I played up to $2-$4 I felt very comfortable and saw my opponents make a lot of mistakes. I felt like with 1-2 months of experience I would be easily be a consistent winning player at PLO. His book is very easy to read and the concepts easy to understand, especially for an experienced Hold'em player. I'm pretty convinced that my cash game of choice going forward will be PLO.

As an aside, Jeff has finished the first draft of the manuscript which I have read in its entirety. he is wrapping up some edits and then we'll be sending to some experienced players to read for their feedback. It should come out in the summer, hopefully in the earlier part.

Future plans - Tunica tourney in mid-March, and the New Championships in early April (quite a trip!).