March Player of the Month ... One Year Old! ... A Good Run

Congrats to markesanmike, who is our March Player of the Month!

It was the tightest competition for monthly honors since ExtremeTilt began a year ago. Markesanmike had 187 points, miko77q (our overall leader) and yo 11 tied for second just one point back at 186, rizen had 185, chips1331 is 5th with 183, and finally feldliss was 6th with 179 points. Wow! Congrats to all ... very well done.

Miko77q continues his extremely hot run. Not only was he 2nd overall in March, he already has cashed five times in April. I haven't played much with markesanmike, but he certainly had a great March.

ExtremeTilt launched in early April 2005 and we're now one year old! Thank you all for your support, feedback, and friendship. Woot!

My good run continues ... maybe cutting back on tournament play is helping my game (and maybe listening to hours and hours of videos from Bax and Sheets again and again is helping a bit too).

In the UB Sunday $200 last week (March 26), I final tabled (ending up 9th), then cashed in a $100 and $40 (bubbling the final table) at UB last Friday. On Tuesday, I played in the $200 UB WSOP Satellite and finished 3rd for a nice cash. Then last night I final tabled the UB Wednesday $200 (ending up 8th). Fist pump, double woot. It's nice when cards hold up and you suck out from time to time.

The WSOP satellite was interesting. Only the winner paid the seat and the top 7 cashed. One player had an enormous lead and having already won a seat previously, he pretty much did what he wanted. Three handed, I went out with AQ vs JJ.

In the $200 last night I was happy with my play. For the first 1.5 hours I folded a lot with nothing much to do. My AK lost to a 66 small stack and that got me pretty low. Then I went on a great rush, lost a fairly big pot when KK couldn't beat a small stacks 99, then rushed again.

I was very happy with my board with 30 to go. A couple of very good players were on it but I was picking up a few pots per round. Then with 20 to go, I got moved to an extremely hard table that included several chip leaders plus DoubleLucky in a signifiicant but smaller stack to my left, and other ranked players like pokertrip, scgolfer, and several other strong players like -not-p-, steam boat, etc. Yikes.

DoubleLucky was simply all-in when he played a hand and he eventually moved up with a big suckout and some excellent play (finishing 4th). I went big-time card dead at this point as well, getting J4 over and over it seemed. But maybe it was good not to have cards because it was a nutty, tough table. I can't recall ever being on a table where it folds to someone in reasonable position, that person makes a very healthly raise, and then one of the blinds with a good to average stack went all-in and the original raiser folded. It happened over and over again. The only hand of note that I folded was AJ off to an all-in and a call before me.

I finally hit a rush that pushed me to the final table when I caught KK, AK, then KK. The final table wasn't much to talk about. With one very short stack all-in, I had called with 77. The flop was 2, 4, 5 and a big stack checked. It was a very strange play, because this big stack often bet out no matter what. It felt like a trap and I made the terrible play of checking. In the back of my mind, I kind of thought that we were going to check it down -- but really it was too early for that. The turn was a five and big stack bet $15,000, which would cripple me if I lost. I had him on 10 10 or JJ and painfully folded. He flips 66 and wins the pot when the all-in misses. Not good.

I finally got low and then my all-in AJ ran into AQ. There were a number of players I didn't have a lot of experience with who played well, plus I played with miko77q and could see why he is having such a great year.

Okay back to work on PokerXFactor.com (our "Match the Move" quizzes are going online soon).