Today I flew for the first time to Copenhagen. The best thing was that I qualified online for the seat and actually could participate for free. But the fact that the buy in was so high (about 7000€) caused an extremely strong field and made it pretty hard for me. It is well known that the Scandinavians are pretty good poker players and therefore it was not surprising, that the tournament was dominated by the Scandinavians.
Just before 2pm, I went to my table 23, seat 7. The selection of this table was very unfortunate for me – only aggressive Scandinavians and there you got no chance to win without really decent hands. The only good thing was that I had position on the 2 most known players on that table, Julian T. (winner of the EPT Baden) on seat 6 and J. Molander on seat 5. After I seen my opponents, I made up my mind and created the following plan:
I will be playing very tight in the first 2-3 blind levels for the following reasons:
a) the table is full with aggressive players and requires good starting hands to play
b) the blinds of the first 2 levels, 25-50 and 50-100, are relatively small compared with the starting stack of 10.000 Chips
c) due to the solid play, I will also get a tight and solid image on the table that I can take advantage later in the more important phases of the tournament
Unfortunately I missed a few opportunities and my stack started to shrink step by step. After level 1, I was down to 9000 and after level 3 down to 8000 … and after level 6 and 7 I was the absolute short stack on the table with approximately 6000 in chips.
Now I am going to talk about an interesting hand from level 3 (blinds 75-150). I was in the Big Blind and all folded to me until the button, the young RedKings Pro Jonas Molander that built up his chipstack to more than 18.000 in chips. He raised to 400. The Small Blind instantly folded and I looked down to 2 very likeable hearts, King Jack. The cards were not bad enough to fold, but in the same time also not that strong preflop to raise against the chipleader on the table. That’s why I decided to call and hoped for a bit of help on the flop. The flop came 2s 4h and 7s.
Alright, what to do now? There is an opportunity to place a small bet because this flop is more likely helping the player on the Big Blind and not the original aggressor from the Button, who is most of the times raising in such spots with 2 high cards. This move might be good against weak players, but not that smart and too risky against a decent player like J. Molander.
Therefore I decided to choose the most logical solution and checked against the raiser, as I missed the Flop.
He bet 400 into a pot of 875 and I got pretty good pot odds for 400 chips into a pot of 1275, which is actually 3 to 1. I did not know if that bet was supposed to be a continuation bet with nothing or a really strong hand. At the moment, I just had 2 Overcards and a backdoor flushdraw. I called reluctantly with a bad feeling, but with 2 hopes in mind:
a) I am improving my hand on the Turn
b) he also missed the flop and is going to check on the turn to give me another free card

The Turn delivered the 5 of spades. Now, that was a very risky card and a perfect spot to bluff him and take down the pot. There are 3 spades on the board and also a possible Straight. Now all I have to do is bet half the potsize and I will get the information, where I actually stand in that hand. But unfortunately I decided to check to him (huge mistake!) with the intention to fold if he is going to fire another bet. To my surprise, he also checked behind! Well, now I could be really sure that he might have a pretty strong hand like the Ace of Spades with a decent kicker. The river brought the 7d and this card is not likely to help my opponent and the time has come, to show some strength. I fired out a bet of 950 into the pot of 1675 to implicate a value bet! Unfortunately he called pretty fast and showed A4, so actually the pot has taken the wrong road and instead to me, the 3575 chips moved over to my opponent. I was impressed by that check on the turn by him, as it led me to the complete wrong interpretation and made me think that he was weak there and caused my Bluff on the River.
Thats how my unfortunate short stack situation started and I was never able to recover until my bust in level 7 (blinds 200/400) with Pocket 6s against AT.
Here are my results of the 5th EPT season so far:
- November 2008 EPT Budapest - 9th place = 33.000 Euro
- December 2008 EPT Prag – out in level 3
- January 2009 EPT Deauville – 28th place = 12.400 Euro
- February 2009 EPT Copenhagen – out in level 7
There are still 3 EPT Events remaining in this season: Dortmund, San Remo and Monte Carlo, which I am going to participate in all of them. I hope that the cards are on my side and I am also going to be in an excellent form.
Your Ivo Donev – The Chess Master

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 11:51 am and is filed under Ivo Donev Blog, Team RedKings playerblogs. 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.