Sunday Heads-Up, Mondays at the Hoy, and Bloggers in the FTOPS

God do Mondays suck. Ever since my kids have begun to grow up just a little, I have noticed two significant changes in how I feel on Monday mornings. First and foremost, my weekends are awesome. Pretty much every one of them. Working the schedule that I do, I see my daughters more on each day of the weekend than I probably do during the entire work week. That's just the way it is. So we have a fucking blast together as a family on my weekends, one of the many reasons I have no interest in playing much poker during the daytimes on my precious weekends with my family. I've always been a nighttime-only online poker player, and as far as I'm concerned I always will be since it's not something that I secretly want to change. So #1, my Monday mornings always suck more these days because I have such a great, fun time with Hammer Wife and my kids on the weekends, much better than anything I used to do back before I had kids.

Secondly, I am tired as balls by the end of the weekend, pretty much without fail every single week. I roll out of bed after the 6am two-daughter ticklefest that wakes me up pretty much every morning these days, and dam if I am not literally sore every Monday morning in places on my body that I had completely forgot could even be sore. Now that the kids are fully mobile, a trip to the playground, a quick jaunt to the park, or even just playing tag around the house after a while can be draining as shit on a thirtysomething dad-type. Dam I have got to get into better shape.

So just about the only good thing about Mondays is this:



Mondays at the Hoy, 10pm ET tonight on full tilt as the BBT3 rolls on with I think just nine events left, which means nine chances to lock down your BBT3 Tournament of Champions seat. All you have to do is win one of the remaining nine events like I did a few weeks back and that's it, you're in. And with a maximum of 50 players now all playing for their share of 28k in prizes in a freeroll, this is sure to be the one of the biggest tournament attractions of the year among the world of poker bloggers. So with two full weeks left in the BBT3 challenge, I encourage everyone who is not yet in to the ToC to take whatever shots they can. Plus, I was looking the other day and had forgotten that there are decent cash prizes for I think the top five spots on the final BBT3 point leaderboard, with the players who finish in spots 6-20 will receive their very own full tilt jersey. And you won't even need to spend the 68,000 full tilt points or whatever it is to get it! So my point is, there is much to be played for here with a couple of weeks and nine events left in the BBT3, so I am expecting to see the crowds grow a little as the challenge runs to a close. Al has recently stated on his blog that he does not expect to run another BBT challenge for some time after the BBT3 is done, which I think is all goodness for a while, but again that just underscores the significance of playing to win for these last couple of weeks of May.

Speaking of blogger tournaments, this Sunday night saw the premiere of the newest weekly private tournament, one called the Sunday Heads-Up which is hosted by loretta8. In the end an awesome debut of 40 runners came out to play in the first regular heads-up blonkament, which as I mentioend last week I think has the perfect buyin of $26 a pop. This made for a fatty first prize of some $440 to the eventual winner, a player with whom I am not at all familiar, and nice payouts to the top 4 spots.

Despite having a real blast and becoming more sure than ever that this is a blonkament with staying power, my night in the inaugural Sunday Heads-Up kinda sucked in a way. Basically, I missed first the first 10 minutes or so of my first matchup, againts Vinnay, and was down already 2310 to 690 chips when I finally sat down. Grrrrrrreat! And all this while 2/3 of the field fucking sat out the first round. There has got to be a better system than this for heads-up tournaments, there just has to be. Making some people play an extra round -- in a tournament with only three wins to make the money for most of the players, mind you -- is simply far too much of a disadvantage to really be fair or right in terms of crowning a real winner. Plus, did full tilt adjust for this by starting those people who had to play an extra heads-up round early with 1500 more chips in all the other later matchups than those who sat out the first round? I did not sit and wait for all the matchups to start to sit and count, but just from looking at the total chips in play in the last few matchups of the tournament I think they might have done this all the way through. That also does not seem right to me at all, and if that's what these guys think is the "fair" and equal way of adjusting for the extra round of play, then I have to question these guys' sanity.

Anyways, so I sat down with Vinnay when I was already down 2310 to 690, and I started playing silly aggro as I figured was my only chance. I autofolded constantly whenever I had nothing and knew I was not going to make a play, but otherwise I was in there raising and moving allin every chance I thought I might have an edge. I managed to get it back pretty close to even after a nice showing of how aggro always beats tight in any heads-up matchup, but then I made the mistake of forgetting I was in a blonkament, albeit a brand new one. I reraised allin with my pocket 9s, and of course Vinnay instacalled and showed me Aces. 99 vs AA in heads-up play, right when I had brought it back to even from that huge early deficit. Awesome. But a great primer for me for another week of blonkaments for me to run bad in.

And speaking of running bad, that was me this entire weekend during the short couple of hours that I did sit down to play some poker. I did play FTOPS #20 in 6-max limit holdem on Friday night, determined to play tight as I had been writing about it the obvious required strategy early in this and any other limit tournament. I stuck well to the game plan all through the first hour, where I was slightly above my starting stack and around 35% of the way through the field on the leaderboard. Then 90 minutes in to the tournament, it all fell apart in a hurry for me. I chased a hand I shouldn't have, and at that point it cost me like a third of my stack to execute the chase and then fold the river with absolutely nothing. Then after chasing once, suddenly it was like the spigot was opened. I chased, was ahead and got outdrawn on the river twice in the span of three or four hands, and before I knew it I was out before the end of Hour 2. Very disappointing, and I would like to personally apologize to any of you out there fool enough to be railing me on any kind of a limit holdem event. That was a crash course in how not to play lhe right there in the second hour, make no mistake about it, and it cost me my buyin and a bustout nowhere near the cash in the second of only two FTOPS events I played in this time around due to having missed out on all the satelliting fun leading up to FTOPS VIII with mono.

I did manage to fit in a number of sngs and mtt sats for FTOPS events on Friday and Saturday, all for the $T really since I had no plans to play anything over the weekend due to the useless starting times other than perhaps the FTOPS Main Event if I had gotten in. But I couldn't win shit, in any format. I ran KK into AA in two of these from up front. Got sucked out on in solid position twice. Played over-LAGgy in a couple of spots early just because I was mini-tilting from my performance over the weekend in general, which is always the perfect complement to running bad in my game, I have found.

I would love to know if anyone knows of any deep blogger runs in any of the later FTOPS events this time around, but I'm ashamed to say that no one from our group seems to have recorded any sizeable cashes at all in this particular FTOPS series. Sucks. I remember Bayne and jec making huge 5-digit scores in final tables in I think O8 events in the FTOPS last year. I believe it was Iakaris who made the deep, deep run in the pot-limit holdem event probably four or five FTOPS's ago by this point. And I know a number of us have busted out with four-digit scores in FTOPS events over the past year or two. But none that I know of this time around. Like I said, that sucks.

With such an incredibly talented bunch of bloggers when it comes to skill poker, I normally expect half the final table in these things to be comprised of the same attendance list from last week's Mookie.

See you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt!