This morning I woke up at 7am to play in the 100k Guaranteed tournament at 888 Poker. This is a great tournament for a number of reasons and worth the pain of getting up early! Firstly it is a ridiculously soft field and there is always an overlay. Today there were 347 starters, with a buy in of $216, that’s well short of the guarantee. It’s a deepstacked event, with 10k start bank so there’s plenty of room to play, but the best reason is the promo we’re running at PokerNetwork. The highest finisher of the PNW forum members gets free entry into the following week’s event! Also if you play this event you get free entry into the 10k freeroll the following week which starts two hours prior. So there are heaps of reasons to get up early for this one!

This morning however I would’ve been better off staying in bed. I had hardly played a hand for the first hour and a half before this hand came up. The player UTG raised and I called in EP with pocket sixes. Two other players called and we saw a K44 flop. Nothing special there, and the action checked around. The turn was gin for me as a 6 peeled off. It was checked to be and I fired out about a one-third pot bet. One guy called, before the UTG check-raised me. We got it all in and I found I was up against pocket kings. Pretty brutal. I finally hit a two outer, and it sends me near-broke.

Down to about 2,000 in chips, I got them in holding A8 on a flop of A83 and looked set to double up through an opponent holding AQ. But wouldn’t you know it, another queen hit on the river, and the one-two blow had well and truly knocked me out of this one.

Today was also the highly anticipated final table of the 2008 World Series of Poker. Change and F-Train did a great job of blogging this one, and it seemed to be a table which although slow in parts, produced plenty of action and excitement which should make great viewing. After couple of really sick beats, some badly mis-timed bluffs and some big pots, it was Ivan Demidov and Peter Eastgate who were left standing. With the exception of Chino Rheem, I think these two were the best players at the table and it should be a high quality heads-up match. Demidov has the lead and will be hard to beat, while Eastgate is gunning for youngest WSOP Main Event Champion ever. Both are worthy world champions. Demidov FTW.

My bags are packed as I’m off to Manila tomorrow for the APPT Manila event which starts on Thursday, once again covering the event live for PokerNews. I expect a decent but smallish field for this one, as I suspect many of the usual Australian attendees might be skipping this one to concentrate on the local Perth Championships, followed by the APPT Grand Final which starts in Sydney a week later. It’s going to be a busy few weeks!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Poker, WSOP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.