Results of July, and a second place

In July I eventually made a net profit of $38. Nothing spectacular. It would have been a lot higher had I avoided playing at Party, PKR and especially of course, Titan.

However! The second half of the title is much more interesting, though it may seem mundane :-) This is because that second place was obtained in a $22 SNG! Yes, a new month, a new playing level (not that I expect to move up each month...). Thus I placed in the first such game that I finished - you may remember that I played one a couple of weeks ago, but got thrown out and had my money refunded.

After I had joined, when 6 players had joined, I looked in Sharkscope to see what I was getting into. It said there was "just" one shark, so that was not too bad. Anyway, by the time I got this result the game was already starting, so there was nothing I could have done about it had there been more sharks.

This game went quite nicely actually. At the beginning I got some nice cards and won a few small pots, bringing me up to 1915. (At this level, unlike lower levels at Pacific, you start with 1500 of chips.) Then I had some trouble and could not really get going, mostly due to the high aggression around the table (there were often two limpers before me, making steals difficult and limping often unwise). Eventually I was forced to go all-in against a player whom I had observed to call every single preflop all-in. Fortunately I held ATs at this point and he only had A6, and did not get lucky.

After this it was again relatively plain sailing until the bubble, which lasted a bit longer than I am used to. However, fortunately for the rest of us, my idiot opponent from above (A6) had managed to get lucky more than once and was still in the game. Over the course of a few rounds, he slowly bled off his chips to the rest of us, and though he once made a comeback from a stack of only 600, eventually it was not enough and he was eliminated.

Then, with only three players left (and a payout of $40 already assured!), I got extremely lucky. After an immediate all-in on 22 that was folded around, a few hands later I got KK. The player to my right minraised to 800 and I flat called, and the BB called as well. On a flop of low cards, I bet 1200, and OTB went all-in! I called of course and he in fact showed AA. I was thinking that at least I had managed to make it into the money, when the river came a beautiful King... I guess this was one of the 20% of cases that the guy with the lower pair wins (though my odds postflop were no doubt a lot worse than that).

This brought us heads-up, and I in fact had a small lead. My opponent played quite well however, and although I managed to stay close to him early on, I lost a lot of chips when I tried to slowplay two pair. I held A2, flop was A24! I just checked, he did as well and the turn was an 8. Then I started betting, but the harm was done as he held in fact A8 :-( It probably did not matter that much, he most likely would have called a flop bet as well. Anyway then the river even brought an additional 8, and this brought me down to about 3000. He called my next all-in bet holding QQ and his queens held up.

Still, I am obviously more than happy with this initial second place, which paid $60, so after subtracting the buyin it paid basically the same as a first place in a $10 game would.

Let's see how it goes from here... Hah, I just noticed that the net profit from this game was almost exactly the profit that I made in the entire month of July!