After four unsuccesful attempts I finally managed to win money on a Sunday this year. It was nothing big, I think I ended up netting like $4k for my efforts. All of that basically came from binking a Party $120 turbo for a little over $10k. It was pretty close though, I got 20th in the Entraction major after losing two flips, 19th in Party $109 out of 580 players (basically a major hence the 58k prize pool), 22nd in Stars.fr highroller after losing the crucial flip AKvsQQ for double average, and lost KKvsQQ for 4,5x average and massive chiplead in the .fr major getting 40th/1500 or something. Had I won that I would've had over final table average in a tournament with a $200k prizepool :(

Enough whining. In all honesty I think I played pretty poorly for at least half of my sessions this month. I'm still happy with my progress, since this was a month of big chance schedules-wise. For the first time after two years of having next to no clue about pushbotting I studied turbos on a daily basis, going through spots and doing HH reviews with people who do well in them. I'm still not a master, but I think I've got a lot better with my turbo game already, and I'm going to keep studying them next month no matter how tedious I find them.

Being able to add turbos to my schedule means that I'll get to play less random smaller scheduled tournaments and get to focus more on the bigger ones. I've been toying around with my schedule, trying to find a perfect balance, failing miserably on some days. I played at least four sessions this month when I drastically underestimated the amount of tables I'd have popping, resulting in me playing like a massive nit in all of my 35 tables since I didn't have time to press buttons and was sitting out everywhere.

In the end I think I got pretty close to coming up with a near-perfect weekday schedule with about 80% freezeouts and 20% turbos, but I feel like it still has too many tourneys overall and I'm going to have to get rid of a couple of tournaments. I just love them all so I have no idea what I could actually drop. Oh, the heartbreak.

My biggest scores for the month were today's $10,2k from the Party $120 turbo, $8k on both occasions for winning the Microgaming weekday rebuy twice and $5k for getting second in it once (all within like a week, pretty decent run there), $6,5k for winning the Stars daily $75 turbo, 4,2k for winning the Party 22r and $3,6k for losing HU in the Stars $33r.

It's pretty sick to think that I bought in for over $100k this month, when about a year ago I probably bought in for maybe $20k. I'm now officially aiming to buy in for $1M this year. If I could even get a 30% ROI doing that... I definitely got volume covered, but honestly I played way too much meaningless shit that took focus from more important stuff, and I feel like I (almost) deserve these results. To be honest, sharkscope is even screwing up something since I think I actually didn't even win $9k but got closer to breakeven. I don't have exact statistics anywhere but I think my actual result for the month was like +$4k.





So on the plus side, I think my game kept getting leaps forward, I both got some smallish post-flop leaks plugged and improved my turbo game. If I hadn't scheduled so poorly all the time I think I would easily have made at least $20k. That's what I'm aiming for next month.

If anything good came out of the month it's two new CardRunners videos. The two-part series should be out very soon and concentrates on LAG play. Enjoy!

I'm heading to Deauville tomorrow for the EPT, planning to play everything but the highroller and the 5k turbo 6max. Last year I played the same schedule and didn't cash a single tournament, so at least it can't go any worse. Wish me luck.

I didn't really know where to put this, so let's try out this blog.

I've been a very succesful poker player for quite a while and I'm going to keep pursuing it full time, and plan to have poker as my profession until the foreseeable future. However, I'd like to have a back-up plan and pretty much the only work in life I enjoy outside poker is writing, so I'm seeking for any kind of part-time work in that area.

I am Finnish but I speak English fluently (I lived in Australia for two years and have studied English for 12 years). I worked as a full time writer for a Finnish newspaper publisher for about a year before I started playing poker full time. During this time I wrote for 9 different magazines, including 12-page cover stories.

I've blogged on a couple of poker forums since 2007 and my blogs have got about 5 million views combined. My Finnish blog was the most read poker blog in Finland for the entire time I blogged in Finnish (three years). I've blogged in English for a couple of years as well now. I currently write strategy articles for a Finnish poker magazine, random ramblings for CardPlayer magazine in English, and have my ongoing life story thread on 2+2 that has received a lot of positive feedback.

I'm interested in all kinds of entertainment, sports, psychology and people in general, and I feel that these would be the areas I'd have a lot to say about outside poker. I'm a pretty critical human being (or maybe just an angry cunt), and I believe I excel in criticism.

The medias outside the poker world I read the most are Esquire and GQ magazines, The Onion and Pitchforkmedia.

You can read my CardPlayer blogs here: http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-blogs/70-miikka-anttonen
My 2+2 thread here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54/poker-beats-brags-variance/my-somewhat-different-poker-story-extremely-tl-dr-1085130/
A sample strategy article about floating in tournaments here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/183/midstakes-mtt/scandinavian-float-974896/

Just to point out, I've made over $300k playing tournaments in two years and I'm fairly sure my long term hourly rate playing poker is over $100/hour. However, I'm not looking to be paid anywhere near that much, since I know it isn't realistic. My motivation for doing this isn't money at all (althought I'd like to be paid whatever writers make), but to keep my writing skills sharp and to fill a gap in my cv in case I ever need one.

I'd like to work between 2 and 20 hours per month, although I'm sure this can be negotiated. I'm also interested in random one-time gigs, and I'd be happy to provide samples for free before getting paid.

You can contact me by email at chuckbassldo(at)gmail.com. Alternatively, if you're reading this and think you know someone who might be able to help me out, feel free to pass me his details or point him to this ad.

Thanks for reading!

It's been a pretty slow month for me so far. I've played most days this year but had just two winning sessions. On both of them I won the MicroGaming 16,50 rebuy for $8k. Every other day I've lost pretty heavily and thanks to those two big scores I still think I'm only breakeven for the year. I've had quite a few deep runs, including some Sunday majors where I've got 6th, 11th, 15th, 21st, 22nd and 24h so far this year out of huge fields. So close but yet so far :(

I've been studying a lot lately, doing hh review sessions via TeamViewer and Skype with good players and discussing hands a lot in general. I've significantly toned down my 2+2 posting and selected a tiny group of very smart people to talk to instead, it's both more effective and they understand my spewing better than the good old HSMTT nits. (Sorry.)

As a result of studying I feel like my game has continued to take big leaps forward in recent weeks, and I have every reason to believe this is going to be a good year. I should still try to cut down the spewing slightly, for example I could maybe not do this the next time when I'm 2/17 in $22 rebuy: http://weaktight.com/4267182 how come they always have AA?

My next grudge tournament I really want to win is the 109r. So far I've got 11th AAvsAK and 12th AK
vsA4. Today I got 15th or 16th losing JJvsK8o and A5vsK5o in two almost consecutive hands. It's the one tournament where I always seem to run awful, and I have yet to final table it despite having a go at it every day and statistically I should have ft'd it ages ago even if I was a massive fish. I'm pretty sure that the one time all my bad run in that gets counterfeited and I hit the ft I'm going to bink. Fingers crossed!

I finally got HEM2 installed properly and I've spent quite some time exploring it. It's such an amazing program, although it's still full of bugs and always freezes my computer. The features and especially the hud are just amazing. For the first time I've built myself a really massive hud for an MTT player with close to 20 stats displayed all the time, and after getting some help from guys who use HEM a lot playing MTTs I've added some stats to my arsenal that I don't think many regs use. You don't usually ever get much of a sample of people's post-flop play in tournaments and I've always been really skeptical about the usefulness and accuracy of post-flop stats (apart from really simple ones like c-bet% or AF), but it's been working amazingly. I still need to get used to everything, but I have a really good feeling about my new-found HEM obsession and I think my custom hud will help me significantly in the future.

I've found it a bit hard to find stability in my grinding all year for some reason. Either my mind isn't there and I'm playing like a nit, or then my mind is all over the place and I play like a super LAG idiot (see the HH above). I guess it's good in a way to have two personas so my opponents won't be able to read me easily, but I'd like to be able to have a more solid standard of play that I wouldn't deviate from that much in both the good and the bad. I feel like I'm only truly unleashing my potential in maybe 30-40% of my sessions, and in the rest I just click buttons. I've been trying to figure out what it could be about but I haven't found any explanations so far. I did buy a cool numpad (like a keyboard without letters) and I'm going to have only that and my mouse available during sessions from now on, so I won't be able to use MSN/Skype/Facebook/Youporn while I play. I'll also try to take a walk before each session to get air, since way too often I've started playing almost immediately after eating breakfast (at 6PM). When I think of it, most of the days when I've had good results I've actually been doing something in the daytime and I might even have been a bit tired from waking up early. I don't know, maybe it's a some kind of hyper-activation mode that I get from concentrating too much on poker only that stops me from just chilling and playing my A+ game every day.

If anything's got better for me recently it's definitely Sundays. If it wasn't for Seabeast I still wouldn't have understood the importance of the Sunday grind and how profilically it's different from any other day's grinding. For example, I always used to fire all kinds of random tournaments at the same time with the early majors to have enough action on the screen. I've only recently realized that it's actually important to have a slow, chilled start where you have just a few tables and who cares maybe even surf online while playing. Brain power is an asset that you run out of quickly if you overload your brain all day long, and to be sharp in the endgame you need to use as little brain power as possible early. It's simple really, but it took me almost two years into my MTT career to realize that and even then I needed someone else to almost force me to skip the 5rs and whatever I used to play on the side early on Sundays.

It's those kinds of small changes I've made in recent months - dropping most 6max tourneys, dropping smaller tourneys, scheduling better with less tourneys at the beginning of the session and loading it up towards the end, customizing my hud, looking up people on OPR, talking to people on Skype - that aren't worth much on paper but combined have had a really good effect on me. Now I'm just waiting/hoping to get more results.

I must say that for the first time I've also really, really enjoyed online grinding in almost the same way in which I enjoy live tournaments in the past couple of months. Everyone who knows me knows how I always go on about how online is shit and live is the real thing. I guess I still feel like that at heart, but making my sessions both more enjoyable and interesting by cutting off tables and so on I've come to realize that online is pretty damn awesome too. There aren't many better feelings in everyday life than the one when you're about to start a session, you're brewing green tea, you know you've got all the 60 tournaments of the night ahead of you and that you'll be having fun playing poker AND making heaps of money for the next 12 hours or so. Damn I love my job.

PS. I finally managed to record a new video series that should be coming out soon. The first part is called "Sunday LAG". I 3-bet 63o in the first hand it keeps going on like that throughout the video where I'm 4-tabling. It was definitely fun recording it, I hope you guys get something out of it. The next part is going to be called "Weekday LAG", concentrating on the slight differences in aggroing it up on weekdays as opposed to weekends (random Sunday fish vs. weekday regs). At the very least neither of them will lack in action :)

I've received quite a few comments in my first two videos recently, asking for more videos (including from the CR execs, duh). I've been working on it since I got back from Prague three weeks ago. The first two weeks went to tits when I bought HEM2 and tried to move my database from HEM1 to HEM2. As a result I lost all of my hands, a solid 2 million+. I spent two weeks going back and forth trying to get it to work. Eventually I got the hands to my database so that I have hud stats for most of the hands, which is the most important thing, but the hands couldn't be saved so that they'd be viewable in the reports/sessions section = I can't replay any of those hands. There goes all of my video material.

Well, no biggie, I got a permission to do a session video instead. I've tried to tape myself in my last six or seven sessions now trying to get good material. And what a jinx that is, every single time I start taping I get insta bad beated out of everything. I don't want to publish anything that's not super interesting so I'll keep trying until I eventually get there. Best jinx so far was a couple of days ago when I was in top three in FOUR different big tournaments, I think 33r, 55r, 109fo and 22 6max rebuy or something like that with 18 or less players left. Stacks were pretty deep in all of those so great video material right? I started recording on sync break, carefully went through my notes, stats and reads etc. Then the play resumed... fast forward 10 minutes and I was out of everything in ~15th. SIGHHHHH. So yeah I definitely haven't forgot about you guys, I just don't want to make videos where it's just my randomly clicking buttons in the middle of a session, I only want to start when I'm deep in some shit and I'll only use it if I manage to get things done instead of getting busted instantly.

I actually love making videos so I'm definitely giving it my best every single day, but lately the deck hasn't been my friend. I've got one decent cash for 2012 when I won the Microgaming 16,50r for about $8k two days ago. Everything else has gone terribad and I'm probably down over five figures for the first week of the year.

I'll be back with videos soon I hope!

I just finished my last session of 2011. What a year it's been for me - I won my first major live tournament, got my first six-figure score, won a world championship title, got made a CardRunners coach and a blogger for CardPlayer, won my first Sunday major online, made it number one of my country at the P5s tournament rankings for the first time, managed to keep my dreamy girlfriend for another year and met tons and tons of awesome new people. It couldn't have been much better.

Here are my stats for the year for all of the 6117 tournaments I played online:




...and live:



According to my accounting I spent about $90k on live buy-ins this year, so I ended up at approximately +$80k live and +$110k online for a total of +$190k. That's just counting me as a player, excluding all shares sold, swaps etc. And that brings us to the sad fact that I didn't get particularly rich this year either. I had 50% or more sold for my three biggest live scores and three biggest online scores this year. I don't want to go into more detail since it isn't really anyone's business, but the point is that despite making about $300k playing tournament poker in two years I'm still not as wealthy as I'd like. I've made serious money to some people but nicely managed to avoid pocketing significant amounts myself. And then when I've tried to buy shares of other people it's all gone to tits and after dropping $20k buying pieces this summer I decided to quit it completely. Oh well, live and learn. I'm quite a recognition whore and results have always meant much more to me than money, and looking back at the year makes me immensely happy and proud, but secretly I'm still a bit pissed about my finances. I'm going to try to be smarter financially in 2012 and actually make myself some money.

I wasn't that far away from potentially getting filthy rich. Had that QQ held against JJ for over a final table average stack with 16 left at the EPT Barcelona in a soft table, I could easily have gone all the way to scoop the $1,2 million first price. That was a solid $200k beat ICM-wise, and it took quite a while to recover from. It's sickening to think how much your life can change from winning just one flip, in this skill game we all play. I'm not complaining, after catching up with variance in the last two months of the year I think I got quite close to what I deserved results-wise in 2011. But still, it would've been nice to win that one.

Regarding the PocketFives OPOY thing I've been going on about for some time now, I came across a pretty big bad beat accidentally when I went through the rankings. Their system is confusing as hell and it seems they actually have two different rankings for each country. The first one, and the one I've been counting on, is the sliding point ranking which I definitely think is the one that *should* count. The way it works is that it only counts each player's 100 (or was it 200?) best scores within the year. So after you've got 100 scores tracked, the next score isn't going to affect your ranking at all unless it's bigger than the 100th, and when you get a new score the last one also gets reducted than your points. This basically ensures that it only counts your best performances and you can't just mincash every tournament to get heaps of points and rape people who play lower volume. This is the ranking I ended up winning for the year with quite a huge margin (of known players Tomi "emeriaa" Brouk finished 2nd and Jami "ylad" Juutila 4th).

But then apparently there's also another ranking you can see at the country rankings section, which simply counts every single score you make and points wont get deducted. Because of the way the points are being counted (no matter how huge you win you never get massive amounts of points, and ten mincashes pay approximately the same amount of points as one win in a 300 player field), pretty much the one who plays the biggest volume is going to win that one, since you can just mincash infinite times to win it. Unsurprisingly emeriaa has so many points in this category that he probably beats my last two years combined.

It shows me as the #1 player for the year on front page and in the country rankings here: http://www.pocketfives.com/country-rankings/ so that shall be good enough, but because of this extremely confusing overall system I guess it doesn't count as an "official" accomplishment. It's kind of stupid since that was pretty much the only reason why I grinded like a madman for the last two months, but whatever, I'm pretty happy with the money I made during that time anyway. Man, if there's anything I'd like to change about myself as a poker player it'd be being less interested in all kinds of glory-hunting and learning to love money.

Anyway, enough about that ramble. As a player I definitely feel this was another year of improvement. From one point of view this was a year of massive spewing, since I wasted more tournament opportunities than I can count with more or less spewy plays, including some pretty big live tournaments. However, on the whole I think I made great progress as a player specifically because of a slight style change. For most of 2010 I still played relatively robotic most of the time. This year, and especially after getting my self confidence back towards the end of it, I changed my strategies quite a bit and started experiencing with new tricks. I was never a nit, but I used to play too many tables for sure and missed out on spots. Only until very recently I played close to 30 tables all the time, and usually decided to skip most of the opportunities to do random weird but effective stuff, since I knew I wouldn't have enough time to fully concentrate on later street decisions because of the other 29 tables popping.

I still close to 30-table at peak hours, but I've learnt to schedule better, and I've dropped most of the draining things that take a lot of concentration like 6-max tournaments with a couple of expections. I've also dropped almost all $22 freezeouts and $5 rebuys. Sure it adds variance quite a bit as my average buy-in is now close to $100 when it used to be $35 at the start of the year, but what the hell, I still table select quite a bit (meaning choosing what tourneys to play) and overall I feel I have a great enough edge in most of the stuff I play to not worry too much.

This brings us to 2012. Setting goals has never worked for me very well, as they always become a bit of a burden, so these are not that serious this time. If I manage to reach these, great, but if I miss out on a couple I'm not going to be crushed. But anyway, semi-serious 2012 goals:

-5k+ MTTs
-200k profits
-bink another sunday major
-100+ heavy exercise sessions of at least 30 minutes over the year (I'm going to start keeping an exercise diary)
-cut my alcohol usage in half from 2011
-8 hendon mob flags
-finally cash at the WSOP
-somehow manage to hold on to the girlfriend for another year
-make it to the top 100 of the worldwide PocketFives rankings and maintain that position throughout the year
-finally get some kind of success in the big online tournament serieses (wcoop/ecoop/scoop/ftops/gsop/whatever...)


2012 is going to start with a bang since all the big monthly tourneys are on January 1st with half the field hungover. Can't wait (to possibly drop $10k on the first day of the year)!

Best of luck in 2012 to all of my readers.

[It's already been a couple of weeks and chances are I've forgotten some of the details, so I'll keep this short.]

On the morning after my 2k bounty score I was feeling better. My fever had gone down, my throat wasn't sore anymore, I even managed to eat before hitting the felt. My upbeat mood was history as soon as I saw my table draw for day two of the main, though. I found my table extremely tough, especially for such a soft field - David Sonelin, Michael Tureniec, some Hungarian guy who had a WPT runner-up finish and a CAPT title from this year alone, pokerccini and some other guy with merits I've forgotten about. I had 55BB going into the day, but sadly I only lasted two hands.

In the first hand I played I opened AQo for 1800 at 400/800/100 from EP and only Michael Tureniec called from the small blind. The flop came A95 with a flush draw, I c-bet something around 2k and he called. The turn paired the bottom card for A955, I bet again for around 4500 and he tank folded. After this hand I didn't manage to find any spots at all in a hyper-aggressive table, and managed to play the next one hour and 15 minutes without playing a single hand. Must have been a record. In my next hand I busted extremely questionably:

The Hungarian guy opens from middle position to 2200 at 500/1000/100. I make it 4600 with Q5o from the CO, the button who's an aggro player clicks it back to something like 7000 and it gets folded around to me. I'd have to call approximately 2400 into 19k, so getting the ridiculous odds I call. In hindsight I think this call is fine if you don't spazz post flop and are capable of getting rid of top pair... which I'm not.

The flop comes Q94 with a flush draw. When I look at this afterwards, I have no idea what I was doing, but for some reason I decided that there's a good chance my opponent was 4-bet bluffing so I decided to induce him. I donkbet 5500 with the intention of shoving over a raise or check-raising most turns, he makes it 13k or something and I shove. He calls instantly and - surprise, surprise! - has aces. I think this hand is a fine example of two different plans that can be fine on their own but don't work together at all. Pre-flop is fine to mostly try to hit two pair plus, and possibly do post-flop stuff on some very certain textures (like check-call 876 so that you can try to hit and also bluff Ts and 5s). Post-flop *if* I know my opponent's 4-bet range is wide I think it's a fine plan to get it in given how shallow we are, and what I did is probably the best way to get it in to maximize profits from his bluffs and to get to commit first. However in this case I had no evidence of his 4-bet range being wide, and it's a pretty damn stupid idea to try to induce against a range that could potentially be KK+.

In a nutshell, this hand was one massive fuck-up, and I don't really have anything to say in my defence.

After busting the EPT I played the 2k buy-in side event just a few hours after. This tournament was a lot of fun, and again I got a relatively tough starting table featuring many top players, including TheCzar and Ch0ppy. I got a pretty good start to the tournament and ended up playing a ton of hands in the first level, grinding my 12k starting stack up to something like 18k. Then I lost a massive pot in a hilarious spot:

A Romanian HS reg who's been opening heaps opens from MP to 325 at 75/150 with a 10k stack. I flat KQo from the cutoff. I'd usually 3-bet, but I had been 3-betting a lot and I kind of had a game flow vibe that if I 3-bet here I'm going to get 4-bet, and I didn't want to 5-bet punt this many BBs this early (which I ended up doing anyway) so I thought a flat would be fine, especially as he generally wouldn't believe me on Kxx and Qxx boards given my flat.

Anyway, so I flat and the button who (as told to me by Gags30) is a cash reg from Borgata makes it 1025 with a 20k stack. This is such an obvious 3-bet spot and I'm sure the Romanian guy realizes this, so I'm not too surprised when he makes it 2300 or so. Since I think there's a very good chance that both of these villains are bluffing, I decide to click it back (repping slowplayed nuts somewhat well in my opinion) to 4550. This way the BTN will have to fold almost everything including a ton of his value range, and there's no way he can ever rebluff here, and since I'm pot committed against the Romanian guy he, too, can't ever bluff and will have to fold almost everything. The downside is that I really am pot committed against the 10k stack, and I have to call a shove from the him if it happens. The button folds, the Romanian guy shrugs and shoves, I say "I hope I have live cards" and show my hand. He has KK, so once again the hand didn't go as planned. I don't succeed in a miracle suckout, and soon after get the rest of my stack in in a standard spot with JJ against QQ and bust.

On the next day I played the $1650 GSOP. I got drawn to the left of my friend Antti Karkkainen who's a good Finnish tourney player. We were allowed to chat in Finnish the whole time (since the GSOP staff were drastically more incompetent than the EPT staff) and upon discussing the Finnish guys playing the tournament I said something along the lines of "we are some of the more patient Finnish guys, I don't think we are going anywhere with a structure this slow on day one. Just watch all the young guys bust early!". Sure enough I was probably around the second Finn out of the tournament.

I pretty much won just one hand in the tournament, where I doubled up with J8cc when I flopped a monster on Tc9c7x. against JTo. Every other pot I lost, including the big ones that cost me most of my chips. In the first one I ran a huge bluff with 8s5s on a board 9c7c4sJh3c. I raised the flop multi-way on the button and bet both the turn and the river heads-up. I think I would've given up on a brick river, but since I hit the sickest river card in the deck where absolutely everything gets there I think my near-pot sized bet was definitely justified. My opponent made a pretty sick/bad call (he just doesn't beat anything except an insane bluff) with K9. An hour or so after I finally busted when I 4-bet shoved KTo from CO against SB's AA. How come they always have KK+ when I get it in?

For the remainder of the events I ran really bad. I played two more 1ks, and in both of those I didn't manage to get anything going and never got above starting stack. I think I played fine in both of them and didn't spew, it was just the deck screwing me over. The only memorable bustouts were from the "Rivers" event where each player gets his own river, and from the mini EPT. They were both pretty sick.

First up was Rivers. I think one of my extremely limited talents when it comes to poker is learning new games and adapting to new rules / situations faster than most people - a skill much more valuable in tournament poker than in cash in general. In this case it was a pretty easy adaptation, since the value of pocket pairs in all-in situations went up a lot when each player got their own river (say it's a pre-flop all-in with 66 against AK, even if he hits his A/K you have all the board cards as outs as well to make two pair), but I don't think almost anyone noticed this. I owned both of my tables pretty hard and quadrupled my starting stack. Then I got it all in pre with AK against someone's QdJd for what must have been the chiplead pot at the time. The board ran 6789 with two diamonds. He was in position, so I got my river card first: a black deuce. I was already packing my stuff, as he had such a monster draw: any 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q or a diamond would beat my hand. It's just impossible to dodge that... right? I'm literally shocked when his river card comes the other black deuce. Did I just... dodge that? Really?

My opponent starts yelling something in the local language that I don't undestand, a heated argument with the dealer ensues, and as a result he gets dealt another river. A six. He scoops the pot. I ask what the hell just happened, and the dealer says that he accidentally burnt before dealing the river card (which I didn't notice happening), and the burn card was what was meant to be my opponent's river card (the six). I tried to argue but it was fruitless, as no one knew for sure what had happened and the dealer really wanted to give the pot to the local guy. GG.

In the mini EPT (30k start and EPT ME structure except with faster levels) I built my 30k stack into 60k in a table full of absolute donks. The most absurd of them was a Swedish guy to my right who played every hand, got incredibly lucky all the time and also had 60k at the start of the hand when the average was still 32k or something. I don't remember the exact details of the hand, but I got it in 150BB deep on a board of J528 with AA against his 72 which he had limp-called from UTG, and he rivered a 7 into a 300BB, 4x average pot.

I don't have any fun drunken stories from Prague since I still had my stomach condition on. I went to the players party on my second to last night as everyone was going, but only had a couple of drinks. I shared a mini-bus with Jungleman and shook hands with out newest world champ Pius, and did some bananas with p3rc4 and Halowax, but all in all it was a really slow night for me and I retreated to my hotel early. I started feeling drowzy at like 2 or 3 in the morning when everyone else seemed to be in a party mood, so I just decided it wasn't my night and took a cab. I haven't felt that boring in ages. That is the end of my Prague report, I'm glad to have it done finally.

I've started getting second thoughts about Aussie Millions, there's a decent chance I may not go. It's basically just that the scheduling of the series isn't very good when it comes to side events. It only has three good tourneys; the 10k main, 1k rebuy and 1k re-entry opening event, and then a couple of other random 1ks here and there. It's such a long travel and it'd take almost a month for the whole thing with through-the-roof expenses, I'd have to pay taxes since it's outside the EU, etc. I don't know, I might still go, but I kind of think that I might just stay in Finland and play the EPT Deauville and possibly the Merit Winterfest. I'm not going to defend my title at the Helsinki Freezeout no matter what happens though, since I'm boycotting it after a decision made by the casino to block media access. It's a long story that includes boring Finnish politics, so I'm not going to bore you with it. All I have to say is that I'm strongly advising everyone against playing live poker in Finland as long as the situation is what it is. Our only casino, owned by our greedy government and ran by corrupted officials, is trying its best to make life for poker players as hard as possibly in our country, and I'm not going to support any of that with a cent of rake. Same goes for our national online poker which is why you didn't see me participate at the Finnish Online Championships either.

In other news I had a gastroenterology done just before christmas because of my stomach problems. I'm never ever ever going to have that done again without anaesthesia. That was one of the nut worst experiences of my life. First they gagged me with a plastic thing with a hole in the middle, that reminded me slightly of the teeth guard that boxers use. Then I had to swallow a hose the size of a snake. They'd scan my entire stomach with it, and I'd feel the thing inside of me all the time. I'd also get a constant gagging reflex, since I had a snake in my throat. On the first attempt I panicked before they even got halfway and tore the hose out of my throat myself after almost knocking the doctor out (result: I also tore wounds to my throat and ended up spitting blood days after). On the second attempt I started gagging and vomiting when they were almost at the bottom and nearly choked in my own vomit. On the third and last attempt I did a meditation-like thing and tried to think about other things than the hose inside of me, and somehow managed to get through it, still gagging all the time and vomiting afterwards. And they didn't even find anything. What they basically told me that there's nothing wrong with my stomach and it may or may not heal on its own, but there's nothing they can do. I was even given permission to do alcohol again, but I'm still going to stay off it except for special occasions I think.

Happy Christmas.

And the good things just keep happening! My first blog for CardPlayer is out, and you can read it here: http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-blogs Joining their all-star cast, ranging from Doyle Brunson to Tony Dunst to Phil Hellmuth makes me immensely proud. I will continue blogging here with same pace I have been up until now, and I'll only be blogging for CardPlayer every three weeks or something, but make sure to check that out too :) Their magazine's February issue also features me as their cover boy, which is already making me both scared and proud. It'll be fun to pick that magazine up at some airport and see how they've made me look. Fingers crossedI don't come across as the idiot I am!

I had a day off on the day of the EPT 1B. I was still feeling pretty sick, but slightly better than the day before, and ended up playing two tournaments.

First up was a 1500EUR WPT side event. It was meant to be a 1000EUR + 500EUR bounty, but it got very few players and almost no one seemed to want to play with bounties, so they changed it to a normal freezeout. I don't remember many hands from the tournament. All I know is the sad fact that I stone bubbled it. First I missed an open ended straight flush draw and a pair against top pair no kicker with 9x8d on AxJdTd9d against A4o on the bubble. Had I won that I would've knocked the guy out and got my first Czech Hendon Mob flag right there. After that I still had about 13BB which I lost J7s

Next up was the EPT 2k turbo bounty, one of the most fun tournaments on the circuit. To those not familiar with the concept, it's an awesome tournament where 1k goes to the prize pool and the other 1k is a bounty. This leads to hilarious spots where it's sometimes correct to call massive shoves with 72o. I played well and quite standard all the way into the money. To be honest I can't recollect almost any hands before the money, except that I made two huge double-ups with ATs against JJ and with QQ against AQ. I ended up chopping one bounty later when I called a 3-way all-in with QJs against QJo and 44 with the biggest stack. I turned a flush draw to scoop it all and get a monster chip lead, but sadly dodged it.

The tourney paid 20 players, and I was one of the chipleaders on the bubble, but to my disappointment I got moved to the table that was by far the toughest in the room with two stacks bigger than me who knew what they were doing. I made a kamikaze ICM disaster 4-bet bluff on the stone bubble when I opened A4o from the hijack with a minraise, SB with a bigger stack 3-bet and I jammed my 23BB stack in. It's been a while since I last 4-bet bluffed with 23BBs, but it was such an obvious spot for him to do it with any two cards. The downside is that because of the bounty, he could be planning to call lighter because of the extra value. The bounty doesn't matter much late in the tournament in reality, but most people don't realize that, so it was a bit of a guessing game if my move was awful or not. Luckily he folded.

The bubble burst soon after, I lost a small flip and was about 3/18 when a nightmare of a hand happened. When I think of all the hands I've butchered during my career, this goes to the top three for sure. I can't remember playing a hand in a live tournament this bad in a long, long time.

So: 18 players left, the average is about 15-16BB, I've got 26BB and the big blind who is the chipleader has about 40BB. He's a young Russian guy I've seen around, someone who I can for a fact tell is very good at poker. I'm pretty sure he remembers me too, and gives me credit for being a good player. The winner gets $70k but there's no real money to be made before the final table.

I'm on the button and find myself with A9o. The SB has 15BB or so, and the BB is our Russian. It's folded around to me and I make the standard min-raise to 40k at 10k/20k. I'm obviously snap calling a shove from either. SB folds and the Russian calls. The flop comes A66 rainbow, and I bet 30k into 100k. The Russian minraises to 60k.

I found this spot to be extremely hairy. Against a random Russian I'm obviously doing my best to make it look like I have a hard decision and just call call call every street, secretly fistpumping inside. This would also be true against almost any random player under 60 years of age. However, I knew that the guy was good, and that he almost certainly thought that I was good. I also look like a young scandi, and no hand reading capable young scandi is ever going to fold to that line since it doesn't represent shit. Basically, I felt like we were on the level where he was definitely not trying to get me to fold. On something like J22 or 664 or whatever I would have had a hard time letting my hand go. But on this flop he's just not trying to pull such an amateur bluff basically ever.

So, where does this leave us? He can well have a six, I'm not sure how wide he defends but definitely at least something like 65s, 76s, and maybe stuff like K6s or 86s? He's getting 5:1 and Russians like to play hands, so that could be a lot of stuff in my opinion. The key part about the hand is the amount of aces he can have. At the time I was pretty sure he'd shove all suited aces and something like A9o+ pre-flop. That's what I would do, and especially with the bounty it'd be a very profitable shove. However - and this is a problem I seem to have a lot - not everyone plays poker the same and I guess it's easily possible he'd flat weak suited aces as well. I still can't ever see him not shoving AT+ pre-flop, but the rest is up for guessing.

Anyway. So he raises the minimum. At this point I have basically no idea what I'm going to do. I end up calling because it seems like it's the only thing I can really do, but I already have the sick feeling in my stomach where I just know this isn't going to end well. Turn is a brick and he bets something like 90k setting himself up for a river shove.

My logic at the time of the hand was played was that he just shouldn't have an ace, and I basically put him on an extremely narrow and idiotic range of 6x. This is the kind of ranging gone bad that hasn't happened to me in a long time. I talked the hand over with Seabeast afterwards and I realized that something I hadn't at all accounted for is that he could have been check-raising the flop with a weak(er) ace to induce me and that was actually his most likely holding. It makes perfect sense - I look like a scandi who's never going to believe that check-raise so I'm going to be running spewy bluffs. It's the best possible way for him to get value with top pair when my range is extremely wide - to rep shit. Since we are 25BB deep BTN vs BB, if I happen to have a six or a stronger ace it's a cooler for him. And he can't have a stronger ace, so my hand is the nuts. What he's usually expecting to happen is that I'm either going to float or click it back, and he'll get to win a sizeable pot or possibly even to stack me with his disguised top pair that I'm not going to believe he has.

When the hand was played, I was entirely incapable of even giving a thought to this happening. I was totally blinded by my fear of him having a six, and my idea of how he'd play an ace (check-call x3). I ended up folding. He didn't show, and I guess there's still a decent chance he had a six, but against his overall range I definitely should have stacked off by either click it back/snap calling the flop or calling turn and river. I can't stress enough how badly I played this hand and how crushed I still am by it. I mean come on, top pair against an aggro young Russian 25BB deep Button vs BB? How hard can it be??? To my credit, at least I wouldn't have pulled a bluff here if I didn't have it, I would've just shrugged and folded to the check-raise.

Soon after I got what I deserved when I got it in with AT against A3 for a pot that would've made me 2/15 or possibly even the chipleader. The flop came a hilarious 333, so I didn't have to sweat it, and I busted in 15th cashing for 5200a‚¬.

Okay, after this I don't think anyone's gonna knock me off from the first place in the Finnish OPOY race... have fun trying though! I got 5th earlier in the iPoker 33r, ran horrible at the final table and found myself 1-tabling the PokerStars 55r at about 2AM with over 100 players left. It's been such a cursed tournament for me, I'm not sure if I've even cashed it before. Since I was monotabling so early I decided to make the best out of it. Results:





Such an epic ft with so many strong players. I think I did pretty well though, I screwed up a couple of hands for sure but on the flip side here are a couple of pretty sick plays that worked out perfectly.

1) 10 players left at this point, for once this actually worked. Everyone involved was a reg. That's obviously a dream cold 4bet spot for the SB, and the opener knows this, so it's quite likely no one actually has anything and if I get called I usually have 35% anyway. http://weaktight.com/4200166

2) This was against my buddy tollgate. He's hyper aggressive and in general it's impossible to almost ever fold two pair against him. However in this exact spot it's pretty easy to eliminate almost all worse value hands from his range, and there was almost a 0% chance this was a bluff, and he wouldn't play even a good draw this way given the icm implications. This was a really absurd fold, especially given how the hand played out, but he had flopped a straight so nice life me. Flame all you want! http://weaktight.com/4200168


Man, I heated my sauna about three hours ago, it's now 7.20 in the morning and I'm pretty sure it's gone all cold. Oh well.

It's been a week since I came back from Prague, but I haven't had time to write with Christmas coming up, my birthday and the online grind where I'm desperately trying secure winning the Finnish PocketFives OPOY race this year. It's pretty intense but I think my lead is enough with only one Sunday left this year, especially as it's Sunday the 25th of December and I don't think most guys will be playing that day. I'm not entirely sure how the formula works, but based on a gut feeling I think someone has to either grind like crazy or win something big to beat me. If I've managed to get a 250 point lead over 354 days, it shouldn't be easy to gain that many points in just 11 days left, right? And I'm going to grind probably about seven more days this year too. You can look at the rankings here by clicking at the Finnish sortable rankings on the right: http://www.pocketfives.com/sortable-rankings/

I had a pretty good shot at boosting my rankings yesterday when I was comfortably deep in many Sunday majors. I started to run bad at a pretty critical moment though. First I stone bubbled both of the 300EUR highrollers I played, getting 31st with 30 paid and 37th with 36 paid. The only really, really deep run I got was in the iPoker $215. I was in the top ten from 250 players left or something, and ended up being 13th out of 1100+ players. I got something stupid like $1700 when the winner, MTT legend Seabeast got $44k. I wouldn't mind it otherwise, but the way in which I busted what was basically a guaranteed final table and a LOT of much-needed OPOY points was pretty brutal.

First, I had been 3-betting some stupid Finnish player a couple of times with air and he had folded. I had been inducing him because I just knew he'd lose it the next time, so I was waiting for a hand I could 3bet/call against him. I finally got my spot when he opened UTG about 30BB deep (I covered) and I had AK UTG+1. It was a bit dumb, because I didn't think he could possibly stupid enough to spazz here in a 10-handed table with 20 players left in a major, but obviously I went for the 3-bet/call anyway. He snap jammed with deuces in what was one of the worst blow-ups I've seen in a long time. I was never ever bluffing there and my range for 3-betting was incredibly tight, so while that was a flip on paper it was godawful from him and it's so wrong he got rewarded when I lost the flip.

Then finally my exit hand with 13 players left. A player who was clearly scared money opened UTG+1 with a minraise, and I had 20BB on the big blind. Folded to me with pocket sevens, and I had to call 20k into over 100k, so it's a clear setmine against a super nitty range against which I'm always going to get value if I get it in. I flopped a set on 764, we got it in and he had pocket eights. Turn 3, river... 5. GG.

Anyway, I'm going to finish the Prague stuff now before I forget about it all. There aren't many positive things to tell, though.

I told about my awful hotel in the first entry and how the room was insanely cold, right? It turned out that my snap move to Hilton wasn't snappy enough, as I had still managed to catch a cold. I had a bit of a fever already on the WPT day 2, and it only got worse after that.

When I was playing the EPT satellite on the off day between my WPT bustout and EPT day one I was already really sick and dizzy. I wouldn't have played it at all had it not been at the Hilton so that I was able to simply take the elevator to the casino. The buy-in was 500 euros with one 500 euro rebuy and no add-on. I was so ill that I don't really remember much from the tournament, except for three things:

1) Everyone seemed insanely bad, and that was the easiest 5300EUR seat I've ever won anywhere.

2) I met 2+2er Gags30 for the first time, when he was on my left at my last table without me knowing it was him.

3) I got two silly spots near the bubble where I made nitty folds since it was a satellite. First I folded AQs in the BB to a 7BB shove when I had about 14BB and the bubble was two spots away. Then I open folded QQ with 13BB on the exact bubble from UTG.

I got a seat really easily and it only took me about four hours. Easy game. That was the first of my two scores of a similar amount I managed to get in Prague.

I played the EPT 5k on day 1A on the next day. I saw a lot high stakes players all around on that day and it seemed that the field wouldn't be anywhere near as soft as I thought it would be. And on top of that I was really, really sick now. I had 39,6c of fever when I walked down to the casino according to the Czech thermometer I had bought. I had hardly slept at all because I couldn't find a pharmacy on the night before and the feeling in my throat felt like I had swallowed a cactus. I definitely was not in a shape to play my A-, or even my B-game, but I didn't have a choice.

Luckily I got a really good table draw. Only a couple of young players, and they turned out to be nits too, and several 50-year old Greek and Italian players who were awful. I decided that since it's a long, deep tournament, I was feeling awful and I couldn't think clearly I'd save the big bluffs for later and play relatively solid.

This turned out to be a good plan, as I got a couple of massive donations from some Greek guy. In the first one I 3-bet him with AJo and fired three big barrels on Jxxxx and was good. In the second one I 3-bet again with AK with the king of hearts. He called and the flop came Ah3h8c. He donkbet big and I called. Turn 4h, he donkbet again and I called. River was the beautiful Th giving me the nuts, he check-called my almost pot-sized bet and didn't show.

I played a fun hand against one of the young nits soon after, copy-pasted from 2+2:

Villain is an online MTTer based on his appearance and what he's done at the table but I don't recognize him, 25 year oldish euro guy. He doesn't seem to be the type to 3-bet bluff air, but rather 3-bets light with playable hands like JTs type stuff, also flats them sometimes. I think his flatting range here contains most broadway combos, pairs, suited aces, possibly even AQ. He seems to be on the solid side and hasn't been out of line at all. We haven't been to big pots together, but I've managed to do pretty well in general and everything's gone my way so far so I think he probably gives me respect for knowing what I'm doing. BTN is a random live fish who loves to flat pre, almost never folds his button, but plays fit/fold post. He's fired huge bets with made hands and I doubt he ever has anything in this hand.

100/200/, I've got 60k+, both villains around 35k.

I open from MP to 500 with red 99, villain flats CO, the fish flats BTN, the rest fold.

Flop Ah2d2c (1800)
I elect to check, villain checks, fish checks

Turn 6d (1800)
I check, villain bets 1050, the fish folds, I call.

River Kd (3900)
I check, he bets 3500 which I'm sure he realizes is a big bet, I think about it for a bit and throw in 11k and change. He thinks for a while and folds.

In a perfect world I know my line kind of sucks, because I only rep KK (although I think I rep that really well), slowplayed aces, slowplayed quads, extremely oddly played 66 or AK or to some people maybe a good backdoor flush although I would never have played it this way. However in a big live tournament against someone who's clearly playing over his head and is scared BUT who also understands a thing or two about MTTs I think it's a pretty cool bluff. If I put myself in his shoes, I'd have a pretty hard time calling a 55BB river check-raise on a relatively bricky board for a third of my stack with a low backdoor flush and I'd snap fold an ace. I think he can reasonably have a lot of aces that he's trying to get me off a chop with. Melanie Weisner pointed out an interesting point though, when she said she'd like this more if villain had bet less or more. I wholeheartedly agree. Against a bet of over the pot this would be an absolutely genius bluff, and against a smaller bet it'd be a pretty standard one. Anyway, I still kind of like my play. Maybe it's a bit optimistic to think he'd ever fold a flush, but I'm pretty sure he had an ace and he folded pretty fast, so I'm happy with the results at the least.

After the hand it didn't go so well. I had got the aggressive image anyway, not that I would have really laggied it up that much, but more because I just had a good card run and didn't have show many hands. My pre-flop card run continued and I found playable hands every other hand, but I couldn't hit any flops and most of my bluff attempts didn't work. I went down from 70k (when the average was still just 30k) to about 50k without anything special, and my stack surfed between 40k and 70k for the remainder of the night. I played one more big hand before bagging the chips, again pasted from 2+2:

We are mid-way through day one. We started with 30k, I have almost 70k. Villain1 has 44k and Villain2 about 30k.

Villain1 is the guy from the previous hand. I know nothing about villain2, he sat down an orbit ago, hasn't played a hand, he looks like he's from Israel or maybe like Italy or Greece and is ~25 but he's got headphones and looks like someone who has a clue (no bling bling but instead a hoodie).

I have an ok image, I've played a pretty solid 16/14 or whatever, I have 3-bet/folded just a couple of times. I haven't been barreley at all either. Villain1 has showed absolutely no interest in playing back at me whenever I've opened, he hasn't 3-bet me once despite having had about 30 good spots to do so. Based on how he plays pre-flop I think he always flats pairs and KQs KJs type stuff, maybe/probably JTs QTs KTs, and would almost certainly fold the offsuit versions of those hands.

250/500/50. Folded to me in the CO, I make it my standard 1100 with PRAWNS!!!, in other words 3d 3h. Villain1 from SB calls, Villain2 from BB calls.

Flop Th5s3c (3700)
Checked to me, I make it 2250, Villain1 thinks about it for a bit and calls, Villain2 thinks about it for a bit also and calls. They both give the vibe where they are unsure what they should do here.

Turn Kd (8200)
Checked to me, I check back. Basically I'm sure that if I bet here, V1 will fold everything except precisely KT or 55 (or TT), and there are only 2 combos of KTs and he probably folds KTo pre-flop, and if he check-raises me I'm going hate my life and probably fold (?). Even that it's a classic bluff card he's just not going to call with a ten, as he's just such a nit/scared money. It also seems pretty unlikely to be able to take V2 to three streets of valuetown unless he has exactly KT. and neither of them seems capable of running a huge check-raise bluff, so I check back.

River comes 8d (8200) V1 checks, V2 bets 5500, V1 still seems interested in the hand and I have a very tough decision. I think this could very well be a bluff, as it seems both V1 and me have given up the hand. It's going to be hard for me to get value from either by raising. Basically I have to figure out whether it's more likely to get V1 to call too by calling or to get either of them to call if I raise. If I raise, V1 is never going to call with anything I can beat, and V2 would have to be quite a hero to do that. If I raised, I'd make it pretty much the minimum, say 6500 more. If I call here, I think V1 will call something like 30-35% of the time, so V2 would have to call my raise something like (I can't be arsed to do the exact math) something like 27-30% to make raising here more profitable than calling. I didn't think it would happen as he's bluffing so much, so I tried my best to look as uncomfortable as possible and called. V1 tanked for the longest time and finally folded something that was almost certainly a ten. V1 instantly mucked, and as per the EPT rules I didn't have to show either. I obviously showed just one of my treys, and neither of the villains looked happy.

For the last couple of levels I was starting to feel worse and worse and pretty much just blinded down being both card-dead and braindead. I bagged 55k chips which was slightly above average and a comfortable 55BB going into the day two.