Wild start to Feb and Estonia here we come!!

Well Feb has been a little crazy so far. I got off to the worst possible start as I managed to drop 2.5K on the 1st! This was swiftly followed by more losses on the 2nd , 3rd and 4th!! The month had hardly started and I was already staring a 5k negative in the face, the bank roll was flashing amber and it was time to sit down take stock and see how the month could be rescued.

I decided to take a day off and have a look back at how I had been playing… the answer came back- not very well. I managed to get my head straight and for the next week played some great cash poker, making great laydowns and some good calls. Hey presto 4 days later and I’m back in the black and showing a 2k plus for the month to date.

Now, obviously I’m really happy with the recovery. It just shows what you can achieve if you really put your mind to it and your back is against the wall. But it would have been very nice to win 7K in 4 days without having lost 5K beforehand. All I need to do now is more of the same and make sure I post a bumper month.

On Sunday evening I spotted the Hills Baltic Open Super Satellite about to start. It was great value, only 36 runners at 220euros each playing for 4 x 3.2k packages which included the buyin to the 2000+200 main event.

The game was also a 6 seater which suits me just fine. It was one of those tournies where I ducked and dived without putting my stack in jeopardy and before you know it I was chip leader with about 15 runners left. I managed to blow half my stack when my flopped set ran into a made flush on the turn, but the table was fairly passive and I managed to grab most of it back fairly quickly. The chip leader status was maintained more or less until the last six. The final table started fairly even in chips… three players between 11k and 16k and the other three around the 8k mark. The other big stacks wasted no time in paying off the short stacks and everyone played tight for a long time on similar stacks until we lost the 6th player.

Here was where my stack started to dwindle, I had trouble finding a decent spot and had to lay down a half decent hand on the SB after I’d raised the BB and he pushed for all my chips. Patience was the order of the day! But I was looking increasingly like the table short stack on 8k with the others between 12k and 20k. With the blinds at 300/600 with rolling antes the pressure was starting to mount playing 5 handed on the bubble at 1200 a round.

I managed to nick a few pots to maintain my chip stack around the 8k mark when two similar sized stacks got into a preflop raising war and ended up all in, this obviously was great for me as the loser would either be out or down to just a few hundred chips.

Mateyboy #1 flips AcKs and my heart sinks as mateyboy#2 flips AdKd, a split pot looms and it looks like I’m going to have to gamble to survive…. that is until no less than four diamonds hit the community!! Mateyboy #1 curses his luck and is out the next hand as 3 players check him down for his last 800 chips.

I’M OFF TO ESTONIA!!!! :o)

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not the biggest win ever at a 3.2k package but I’m really, really chuffed.

I’ve often looked across with green eyes at friends winning these sats and jetting off to the far flung corners of the world. But playing 99% cash games I was never going to join them was I? One of my goals for 2006 was to enter some satellites and qualify for a few bigger buy-in events. Well get that box ticked!

The only downside is that Shell is well into her 3rd trimester (everything going well so far) and she can’t fly. So it looks like I’m going on my tod!