I've had a couple of live trips in May already, first GUKPT Walsall and then the Oxford Cup
GUKPT Walsall was pretty huge for The Firm - Ben Jenkins finalled the Main but ran horrible on the final table and came 6th, Mark McClusly chopped the £200 6max and cashed the £250 re-entry and I won the £100 bounty event for a nice 1st on the old Hendon Mob. The final table of the bounty was pretty funny, 7 paid so everyone was playing ridic tight but I couldn't find many spots because the two guys on my left were limping in ~75% of hands and they were both showing down top 10% hands every time. I was pretty card dead too, probably got 3 jam spots in about 40 hands when average stack was only ~15bbs.
A couple of guys let themselves blind down to <5bbs so I was kinda handcuffed by ICM but once the bubble burst and guys on my right tightened up a bit or their run of cards dried up and in the last 50 hands of the final I was probably all in pre a good 60% of the time. I picked up a few hands but that didn't really matter. There were just so many any 2 jam spots because they were calling so tight so it was pretty much a case of hoovering up all the chips pre.
I was pretty fortunate heads up to get 99 vs 77 20bbs deep and held so took it down for £1700. Nice to finally win one after a couple of seconds in UKIPT and GUKPT sides.
That put me into the Walsall Champion of Champions online £10k freeroll which was pretty strange. We were all supposed to start with different stacks (10k for the main event winner, 4k for side event winners and 2k for some other qualifiers) but we all started with 4k stacks and they cancelled the tournament just after we got in the money with 4 left. Grosvenor ended up doing the right thing though and paying out anyway. I was 2/4 when they pulled the plug so £2.5k I think was a fair payout.
This weekend was the Oxford Cup, the biggest student tournament in the country that The Firm sent a few coaches to since the student market seems pretty lucrative and a good one to get into. It was a £20R that got ~250 runners and generated a £15k prize pool which was a lot more than I was expecting. There was a £50 bounty on all of The Firm coaches so everyone was gunning for me which actually made for some really interesting situations. Gus Hansen was also there - he gave a speech on the Saturday night mainly because he is a huge fan of Richard Dawkins, a pretty well known Atheist and lecturer at Oxford. The talk mainly centred around what in his opinion it takes to be a professional poker player and was pretty interesting although not much of it was new to anyone who reads about the game a fair amount but was worth a listen nonetheless.
The tournament structure was pretty shallow and once it got down to the last 3 tables average was 10bbs. There were quite a few young guys that were competant with shoving ranges etc so I got into a couple of tricky spots but won some flips when I needed to and had JJ vs 77 with 12 left to get a big double up. From then on it was foot on the gas and I never lost a big pot.
Heads up was pretty interesting, we started pretty even with about 18bbs each. I ran pretty well and picked up some hands, jamming lots as expected and eventually got it in with AJ vs QT for the win and obv I'm golden enough to just flop JJx and have him dead on the turn so won that for £3600 and two trophies in two weekends! Congrats to Kate Langshaw who came third too. To have 4 players in and two final table is pretty big for The Firm so keep crushing.
I'm in Leeds at the moment grinding SCOOPs with Jamie Sykes and lil Dave - had a decent run in the $55R last night but couldn't win the flip for twice average with ~200 left.
Heads Up SCOOP tonight thought which should be fun. The structure is excellent with 100bb starting stacks and 10 minute levels. I've always done pretty well in the WCOOP heads up events and this will hopefully be no different
Happy SCOOPing
Dan
