Whaaaat’s happening everyone?!?! I hope everyone has been having much poker success and that they are enjoying everything they’ve come across on this site over the past couple of weeks. I thought I’d share a little bit about my weekend of a nice “up” and a frustrating “down” two weekends ago. <READMORE>

It started late Friday night when I decided to play a $10 NL tournament that started at 2am. After getting up at 6am that morning I have no idea what I was still doing up 20 hours later with the intentions of playing good poker. But I played anyway and was effortlessly mowing people down left and right – not with superior play at all, I’d maybe have a straight or top two and someone would go all in with bottom pair on me and just write me a check. It was like the first two hours of that tournament were “donations to Hogan24 time.” I was sitting on about 35k in chips looking down at 2nd place holding about 19k. I ended up making the final table in 3rd place and after a while of waiting for the short stacks to knock themselves out, I worked it down to heads up but was down a 3 to 1 chip lead. Well I eventually got it to where I was only down 2 to 1 and a key hand came up that my opponent misplayed and really ended up biting him in the butt.

I have T4 of spades and call a minimum raise. The flop comes QJ4 with the QJ of spades. I unknowingly start firing away into what turned out to be his pocket kings. I bet a decent amount on the flop and turn, both times with him just flat calling. Then the 5th spade hits on the river, I bet again and he then decides it’s time to push all his chips in the middle…it was a generous gift. He played so tight after that I squished him down with preflop raises and aggressive bets he wasn’t willing to call and took 1st place in that tourney out of 224 people…which paid a nice $672 bucks.

The following night after playing some cash games, I was up about $300 more bucks and was feeling pretty good, so I decided to use my last TEC + $115 to buy into the Saturday night Aruba $200 tournament. It was filled with all the regulars like P0kerH0, jcgoheels, browerkid, and several others. If you’re not familiar with the structure of the larger buy-in tournaments on UB, here’s the gist of it. You start with 2500 chips instead of the normal 1500, and the blinds go up every 15 minutes instead of the normal 12. After the first 20 minutes I was up to a solid 1200 in chips….oh wait, down to 1200. Then my 99 and JJ each managed to flop a set against pocket aces and I was up to around 4k in chips in no time. After the end of the first hour I had about 7k in chips and was in third place.

From that point until there were around 25 players left I had my stack up to about 10k but had fallen below the average until I held T3 of clubs in the BB. There were 4 limpers including MAGIC, (name has been changed to protect the identity of the mentally retarded) who was on the leader board with a very healthy stack at that point of the tournament. MAGIC however was the kind of player who pocketfives.com’s co-owner Adam deemed an idiot on a luck streak, which was becoming more apparent with every hand I watched him play. The flop came KcQc4c. Well I didn’t want to even try to trap someone because of the obvious draw if it were checked around, so I bet the pot which was around 2500. My new best friend MAGIC calls me which I didn’t really like but had decided to run with this hand no matter what. MAGIC was the first person that came in the pot in third position so I figured that he maybe had the ace and was hoping to catch up. The turn brings another 4 in which I go ahead and push in my last 7500, he calls and turns over K3 off suit with no clubs and doubles me up, putting me a little over 20k and back on the leader board for the time being.

After we got down to the final table, the only player with any kind of an edge was Feldliss, who was way ahead of the rest of the field with around 80k or 90k in chips; no other player came into the final table with more than 40k. This tournament paid 2 trips to Aruba along with 4 other spots cash, so with 7 players left I start picking up the pace as I know no one wants to finish in 7th place. This proved to be very successful as I was at 50k in chips and in 2nd place with 6 players left and we were in the money. The big mistake I managed to make was that after we were in the money and really playing for the big prize, I didn’t slow down as much as I should have and lost some big pots. I ended up blowing my stack and an absolutely phenomenal shot at punching my ticket to Aruba. I got 6th place and $440 bucks which helped ease the disappointment but, damnit it sucks getting that close and not cashing in. I’m not the player who has the bankroll to play in the $200 and $300 tourney every week until I win…but I’ll be back trying again here soon.

I did end up winning $1200 that weekend which is always nice and hopefully will have better results in the future. I’d like to take a quick second and say a HUGE thank you to all of my friends who were cheering me on that night. You guys really helped me with all of your support and I really appreciate it. Another thank you to those of you that have either sent me emails or chatted with me at the tables about the site and/or my blogs. I’ve had a good amount of people say how some of the things they have read on here have been of great personal help to them and that is always great to hear. Good luck to all of you out there and as always, if you see me out there feel free to say hi or send me an email at hogan24poker@hotmail.com. Seeeeee ya!!

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