Letter from Doke (23rd Aug 2011)

Hi
Doke here again. This week, I headed to Cork to play the Macau Classic. I don't recall ever cashing in a tournament in Cork and I didn't break my duck this time either. Highlight on day 1 of the main event was knocking out November Niner Eoghan O'Dea in an interesting hand. It started with Richie Lawlor (one of the best tourney players on the scene at the moment who came within a hair's breath of the remarkable and unprecedented achievement of cashing in 4 UKIPTs on the trot) opening to 750 utg at 150/300. I flatted with ATs two behind, as did Eoghan O'Dea two behind me. The flop came 764 with two of my suit, Richie led for 1050, I called, Eoghan raised to 3800 with 10k behind. Richie tank folded (queens according to his Twitter) and I had to think now too. Folding didn't seem great when you play ATs and hit a two overs and a nut flush draw flop, calling seemed unpalatable too, so I ran through the math quickly to see if shoving was ok. I figured Eoghan's range as 44+ (that is, sets, overpairs and pairs with a straight draw). I have about 42-43% equity against that range so even if he never folds the shove is plus Ev. If he ever does fold it's even better for me. Also, if I widen his range to include worse flush draws like KQs, my equity gets closer to 50%. As it happened, he had a hand I'd never even considered (76o for top two) but even if I include 2 pair hands (I excluded them because Eoghan was playing very tight and didn't think he'd play something like 76o from mid position with less than 50 bigs) I'm basically a 5/4 dog against the range so the shove's ok with the dead money. And there's always Plan B, hit the flush,
which I duly did. Hopefully Eoghan's getting his run bad out of the way before November.

I ran bad on day 2 though, losing a bunch of races to decimate my stack down to 4K (4 big blinds). I did rally back up to 50k but in the end went out about 20 from the money. The side event was one of my shortest journeys ever: I managed to get over 100 big blinds in second hand with aces against AJs, and lost to a flush. That's poker as they say: the job is to get the money in as good as possible, whatever happens happens after that.

My travelling companion Mick Mccloskey cashed in the side event. His continued involvement meant we didn't get back to Dublin in time for me to play the 35K on Irish Eyes or most of the other Sunday majors.

Instead I signed up for later stuff including the €10 rebuy on Eyes which I ended up winning. There's a few of these on every night and I'm enjoying a bit of success in them (I also won again the following night). They're nice fast tournaments (turbos are still my bread and butter online), you can win a decent pot for a €10 outlay, or if you're in a gambling mood you can treat it as a €40 or €50 game and gamble to get a stack early on.

My next live outing is the Fitzwilliam End of Month on Thursday, followed by the Unibet Open in Citywest at the weekend.

Good luck at the tables - unless I'm at the same table :)

Doke