WBCOOP Event #8 NLHE

Hi everyone!

I wasn't sure about how to make the updates on the WBCOOP tournaments, but I've decided to split them up into one post per tournament instead of doing collective ones. Knowing me and my love for loooooooong posts that could be disastrous so better stick to one at a time! 

So let's talk about WBCOOP event #8. It took place last Sunday and it was my first event of this series. Fortunately for me, I put the "Boom" hand replayer feature of Pokerstars to good use and kept all of the interesting hands I wanted to talk about, otherwise I wouldn't remember half of it! :P I'll be posting all the hands through links instead of putting the replayer here cause otherwise it's going to be a mess of chip sounds whenever you load my blog. For some reason the replayer starts automatically playing a hand when you load the page which is not so cool. From what I heard they're trying to fix this.

Anyway, back to the subject. This was your regular good old No Limit Hold'Em tourney. A starting stack of 200BB, 15 minutes blinds on the clock and we were set to start! Do I need to explain how lost I feel playing that deep? Jumping from my 10BB starting stack to 200BB I felt so filthy rich I didn't know what to do with all those chips! What do I have to say for the 15 minutes blinds? I guess that's the regular pace for a tournament of that kind but to me it looks like... Snail pace! I mean really, from my usual 3 minutes blinds I was now playing 15! 

Yet even though the structure of this event was not exactly my favorite, I was super excited to be playing my first WBCOOP tourney! When the registration period was over, there was a total of 570 players registered which made this event the biggest one of the WBCOOP 2013 so far. Not so easy to make it in the money considering these tournaments pay the top 100 players more or less and in less popular games like Badugi you only need to beat half the field to get a prize, but I guess that's a disadvantage of choosing the most popular game.

I found myself getting a lot of small-medium pairs and since I was getting the right odds for set-mining I called a lot of raises early on. Unfortunately I never seemed to be able to hit a set, which ended up in me slowly giving away some of my chips. You can find an example of that situation here.

The first interesting hand I got was AKo. The player UTG raised 3x and got called by the player after him. Holding such a nice hand, I was more than happy to call as well. Two more people got in the hand after me creating a nice pot of 2k chips when the blinds were 60/120. All the excitement for me ended on the flop that came 8s-8d-6s. Not the kind of flop I'd like to play against 4 players so I just folded. You can check out the hand here.

Next interesting moment was shortly after, with AJo on the SB. There was a min-raise from the cut-off which I called. The board came 8h-6s-7s so I basically chickened out and decided to check/fold. Since my opponent had similar views about the hand, we checked down until the river that was an ace. I decided to bet and he folded. Chips coming my way!

After the blinds went up one level, I found myself holding pocket Kings. This time it was the button raising. The 8c-Ks-Js flop was definitively favorable giving me a set. I checked, my opponent c-bet and I just called. The turn was the 8 of hearts, giving me a full house! The other player bet again, half of the pot and I called. The river was Jack of hearts improving my full house from Kings full of eights to Kings full of Jacks. This time I was the first one betting, but I bet small comparing to the size of the pot. I was afraid he wouldn't pay me if I bet big. He ended up having a pair of pocket threes, which I think was quite optimistic on his behalf. Still, I can't help but feel that I misplayed the hand, possibly not getting as much profit out of it as I should have.

The final hand of the tournament for me came during the 8th level. At that point I had 36 big blinds and was UTG+1. Pair of Kings again! I decided to min-raise and got re-raised by a guy two seats to my left. Then, the player at the SB decided to shove (he had more or less my stack)! Okay, I'm not much of an expert here and 36BB is a respectable stack but if there's a hand you want to end up all-in with preflop that's aces and kings. The guy on my left did worry me a bit cause he was still left to act after me, but I figured, he's going to chicken out after seeing two people all-in. I called. To my surprise, the player on my left also called! Guess what he was holding... Aces! The small blind revealed a pair of eights, which was kind of irrelevant. The aces held up and I was eliminated from the tournament.

I finished 297th, far from the money. But didn't really worry about it, that was only my first tourney of the WBCOOP series so I had plenty of time to win an entry to the main event!

Yesterday I wanted to play event #11, a mix of NLHE and PLO. I thought it was a very interesting kind of tournament, unlike anything I've played before and it seemed like fun. Unfortunately, Monday is my only free day of the week and other things came up so I didn't make it. That means that I'll play all the other tournaments left in the list I posted in my previous post, cause they match exactly the number of tickets I have left.

Since this is not my regular kind of post, I'd appreciate any feedback about it. I'm not sure if you guys like this presentation of hands and tournament review, but if you have any suggestions please leave it in the comments below. Also, since I'm not an expert on flops any advice on how I played the above hands is welcome.

See you at the next WBCOOP event!