lord oh lord

Hi :)

it's been such a while, and actually I have quite a few stories to tell, since my last blog post.. so I guess I'll start out with my trip to Macau. I went there with a friend from Singapore (Jason) and to be honest it was superfun :)

Macau has 3 venues now where you can play almost 24/24 live NL holdem poker. Two casino's have live card tables, and one is where you sort of sit behind a computer and see your hole cards on the screen, it's like playing online basically, but you can wave to your friend across the table lol :)

Anyways, I started some 10$/20$ at the Grand Lisboa casino and I managed to be amazed about the play. First of all you have to know that it's totally limping heaven.. and if you decide to raise a hand, be assured that definitely 5 or so will call your raise.. so I needed some time to adjust myself to the play. Also my friend said in chinese to the players at the table that I was some rich japanese kid who didn't know how to play poker and that they should be gentle with me. haha.. funny! :) Although I think by saying that they called me even more preflop :)

I managed to grind it up to about 3700$ (buy-in was 2000$ max) and then the keyhand came, one guy raised preflop, a caller between me and him, I 3-betted him with my AA and then he 4-bets me and I shoved all in preflop. He had KK and spikes an K immediately on the flop. It was my welcome to Macau bad beat I guess for the day -_-' . I tried to cool myself a bit, because I worked hard to grind it up and then lose it all in one hand where I had what I wanted.. but that's poker. I rebuyed immediately and at the end of the night, I somehow managed to get about 4500$, which made my day, since I still ended with some profit.. but how sweet would it have been if my aces would have held :p

Second day, I decided to move it up a little notch and played at the 25$/50$ table, there was only was 1 table, so I sat down with 5000$ (max buy-in) and checked out the competition. On my left side there were some americans who knew what they were doing and played pretty solid and some korean guy that was a terrible luckbox fish on the right side and also some tight/solid swedes in the middle. I played an awesome hand, where I had Qs7h and the flop goes Qd2d4h. I bet out, and the two americans called, and the korean guy. The turn came a 6d. so obviously the flush was there. I decided to check, the first american bet out, the second one called, and the korean folded. I looked at my hole cards again.. and slowly called. The river came a Td. I checked, and the first american betted again and the second one called. I slowly looked at my hole cards, putting on some act. Everyone on the table was looking.. I took my time and looked again and then reraised the pot size. The swede was already saying.. 'oh really???' 'flush for sure' Good comments, that helped :) so the first american was thinking and his fellow friend looked at him, no man he has it for sure... and they both mucked their hand, both had baby flush cards. Proudly I flipped over my top pair bluff cards and everybody on the table was laughing :)

I also hit a full house on that table, but then I was afraid of a higher full on the river, so I played it badly, so scared.. but I ended up almost doubling my buy in after that session.

The next day we decided to go to the newly opened pokerstars pokerroom in the Grand Waldo. The rake was almost half of what the lisboa was taking! It was awesome.. but the max buy in was only 1000$ on 10/20 so that kind of sucked. I ended up on a huge fish table, with a girl, some holland guy and two guys that could have been in an asian maffia movie. The game was super, they were playing all very bad and I ended up with a 4.5K stack in about 2 hours. I played a tournament 1000$ buy in donkament and ended on 6th position... which is the bubbleboy spot :D

After that I played some 20$/40$ at the Waldo and sitting on a shark table with two pro's. I somehow managed to get called 'fish' by them (I agreed) and won like half a buy in. So all in all good days and great fun in Macau.

I'm definitely going to be back, and hopefully be able to hit something big at the APPT Macau and if not, try to grind some side cashgames again for sure. Lately I've been totally back in the grind and making some good money on the tables, so I'm definitely not complaining. I also started making some videos from my play and shared it with my friends as some form of 'test', and it's quite fun to see and hear yourself play, I don't think I'll share it online though. Anyways, I'll better try to keep my blog more up to date, so I'll try to post more stuff and more hands in the near future.

Ryu