Live games = limp games IMO

So I did play the donkament MTT last night as expected... it is run by a firm called Poker Results UK, and is part of a miniature "tour" of sorts around the North West of England. I would give more details for any Brits reading this, except that to be honest I wouldn't really recommend the games... buy-in is £15+2.5, starting stack is 2000 chips with 25/50 blinds, so stacks start shallow and shrink every 15 minutes after that. Typically, unless I find a big hand early, I will find myself down to ~10 big blinds within two orbits, so yes, the game structure pretty much sucks. I have taken a decent amount of money here in the past (my net profit for games run by this company is £395), but some bad running around March really tilted me at the structure and I have hardly played there since.

So anyway, I went back and nothing had changed. We had 26 runners, and I busted out in about 13th or 14th gambling for a HUGE stack. I had recently picked up some hands and played them very aggressively (AA doubled up when someone limped QJo pre-flop and called my shove, and KK shoved over a raise to take the pot down); this put me up among the bigger stacks left in the game with 7200 (200/400 level, so M is only 12 obv!). My constant shoving was tilting some of the players pretty hard, they all like to limp limp limp and see cheap flops, and the general consensus at the table was that my shoves, which were typically for 9 or 10 big blinds over a couple of limpers pre-flop, where excessive overbets!!! I didn't bother breaking the news to them that there IS no post-flop play in a game structured this badly, let's not disillusion them.

Onwards to my demise. There is a limp from UTG obviously, and I crank it up to 2400 with AK intending to call a shove. A short stack calls himself all-in, and the original limper umms and ahhs for a while, clearly frustrated at this donkey who just raises all the time when he limps. In the end he shoved, and I snap-called. It was unfortunate that he was the only stack at the table that had me covered, but so be it... if I win this pot I have around half the chips in play with 12 still remaining.

He showed down 88 (was hoping for a weaker ace, very much in his limping range, but oh well) and the shorty had K10s. All the overcards whiffed and the 88 held, gg me. That's poker I guess, I was happy with how I played the whole game. Overall, the standard was only moderately bad lolololol. Not sure I will be going back much, but might do from time to time - the buy-in is a little more than I would like to pay regularly for a glorified crapshoot though.

In other news, when browsing http://www.officialpokerrankings.com/ today I found I had achieved a minor goal of mine and broken into the top 5% of online MTT players according to their rating system (whatever that may be) -

Not really significant, but nice to know that if you sat me down with 19 other randomly selected online players the chances are I would be the best one there. Egos need stroking sometimes!