Focus on the last game as if it was the first...

Well, lots of fun in real life since the previous update. A couple weeks back was the Lewisham league AGM in the evening; I spent all of Thursday in the pub with H2, and got nicely tipsy on several pints of a lovely real ale before we went to the meeting, generally haranguing anyone within earshot. Then that Saturday was Tim's 30th drinkies, so that was good. Crashed at theirs overnight and watched the Merseyside derby on the Sunday afternoon, which Everton won 2-0 and should have won by more. In twenty-five plus years I don't recall watching a more awful performance by a Liverpool team; it was pretty sad to watch really.

Then last Thursday H2 and I shared a free lunch at the new Giraffe in Blackheath, and for the second week in a row we spent the afternoon in a pub in Blackheath, before turning up late to bowl slightly tipsy; H1 was not amused at our drunkaments when we lost the over all by just a single pin for a 10-7 loss. We thought it was pretty funny as we stumbled home though :-)

Last weekend was pretty good too, went up to Liverpool for the weekend, avoided the mice at Tina's parents' house, had a nice meal and a couple of drinkies in Gusto at Albert Dock on Saturday night, then on Sunday was the visit to Anfield for the Liverpool-Blackburn game. That was great, I'd always wanted to go to Anfield, and it was pretty awesome listening to Kop in full voice for "You'll Never Walk Alone".

So anyway, what about the pokers? Well, like always I've been pretty lazy throughout the month with regard to volume, and having made a sort of goal of making Platinum in October, six days before the end of the month I found myself over 1,650 VPP short of even retaining Gold. So I decided that enough was enough and I'd make Gold come what may.

So on Tuesday I sat myself down and, full of good intentions and mixing 2/180s and 12/180s with a handful of scheduled MTTs, I ground out a shade over 400 VPP for the day, but lost over $200 in the process, most of that from a tough day in the 12s – only 4 cashes in 59 games. The day was only just about saved from disaster thanks to a pretty deep run in an $11 turboament from the schedule, getting to 25th out of over 3500 runners, which was worth about $90. I've had a few "nearly" runs in scheduled tourneys lately, I think it's about time I FT'd another one or two of those and made a decent score. I think that's gonna be one of my November goals, fighting my way through thousands for an FT appearance in an MTT from the schedule.

So anyway, that was that day done. I found a whole bunch of useless excuses not to play at all on Wednesday, and Thursday I justified to myself that I was bowling in the evening so I wouldn't have enough time to make it worth while starting a session that I'd have to cut short, so no games that day either. Well, turns out I should probably have played poker anyway, because the bowling was an absolute disaster – a hopelessly pathetic 436 set; even if the lanes were atrocious that's still not even close to good enough. I probably should have got drunk beforehand for the third week in a row instead of bowling sober!

So Friday comes round and once again I decide that, three days left, 1250 VPP needed, and I'm gonna go for it. So I fire up the games and play moderately decent poker, again mixing 2s, 12s and scheduled; as I go through the session I realise that I'm not playing great, more like I'm just going through the motions, so I really try to tighten up my game. I remember shipping a 12 somewhere in the middle of it all, but wasn't really paying attention to how I was running over all, and it was only as I wound down my last couple of games and checked the cashier that I realised that I was actually up over a grand in profit for the day!!! I was like "Holy F***, how did that happen?" If someone had asked me to hazard a guess without checking my balance, I might have gone for maybe up a couple of hundred because of shipping one, but somewhere in the middle of all that I must have been running pretty decent without noticing. I reviewed a few of my games after the session and I really did get some great cards in some crucial spots, QQ+/AK all over the place just when I needed them. Hey, I'll take it while it lasts, I have to put up with some pretty horrendous runs of bad cards and bad beats too, so it all evens out in the end. So I had $1,179 profit from 12s, but with 2s and scheduled that dropped down to about $1,127 total profit for the day. Pretty nice!!! I also got in another 370-odd VPP, leaving me around 880 short of Gold with two days left to go.

And so on to today. I decided that as I'm gonna get this Gold, I'd like to break the back of it today. So I started and kept on through all the bad beats, and after 4 hours or so I stopped regging for 2s to focus exclusively on the 12s. I figured that on a Saturday, going into evening, there would be enough games going off to keep a full load of tables. But despite regging for every single one which started I struggled to keep more than ten tables going, and quite a lot of the time I didn't have any games above BB250. I was playing a lot better than much of yesterday yet I really was running heroically bad, about as bad as during the games when I was selling action late last month. I finally reached a point, after 7 hours, where I had simply had enough of it. It had been two hours since I'd even had a cash. Somewhere I'd had a 35k stack in one, with only 25 left and yet thanks to some retarded pots I didn't even make cash, bubbling in 19th. Bah! By this point I was down a shade over $600, and I stopped regging, vowing to play out the last few tables to the best of my ability and then call it a day.

I had eight games left, either just started or not in great shape, and I calculated that I needed to ship one and cash another to beat breakeven for the day. One by one the tables disappeared in a frustrating string of retarded bad beats, until I was left with just three. So I was like, it's OK, if I can fashion two 2nds, or a win and a cash, then I'm OK; but I didn't really believe it was gonna happen. And then, slowly but surely, I started to build stacks in two of them just before the blinds started to go up near the bubble, and suddenly I had stacks which I could use to bully and intimidate people. I lost the third game somewhere, but because I was so keen to focus on the two with stacks I didn't even notice it until some time after I must have bust. So I used my stack to bully my way to two FTs as decent chip leader in both. Suddenly, it was on. Suddenly I could still make a profit on the day. Although both FTs formed within a minute or two of each other, I pretty much steamrollered one of the FTs for the win there, although the last hand was a bit of a sweat, ATvJ9 aipf for about 90% of the chips and he flopped an open-ender. But thankfully blanks on turn and river and I was home and dry. And given I was already on the other FT, I had guaranteed profit for the day. Now to see how the other table went. Well, players suddenly dropped out quickly to others and I was now longer chip leader. Because of the other clashes I suddenly found myself 3/3 with about 10BB and then in a BvB spot we both had pairs but he had the bigger pair (55 vs JJ iirc) and it all went in pre and I didn't bink the set so I was out in 3rd for $235.

Magically, almost out of nowhere, I'd gone from what seemed like an almost certain huge losing day into a day where I actually made a decent $217 profit. All because I kept my focus right to the very end, kept making the plays which I know are profitable over the long term despite the recent bad beats, and it all paid off. Funny thing is, I'd only been chatting about this in our skype group a day or two before, the fact that, in MTTs, profit and loss for a session is decided not by how you start, but by how you finish. After hours of grinding, the last few games running will (hopefully) be the ones you are deep in, where all the money is, and that's when your concentration levels have to be at their peak; you can't allow fatigue to get in the way. So that's the moral of the story... Focus on the last game as if it was the first!