back with some good news! :)

Hello!!!
Again long time without writing a post, I am getting really lazy keeping this blog going! For the past month I barely played any poker at all, I actually haven’t played online for four weeks, which is the longest break from poker for me for the past 3 years I believe. The main reason for this is that I have been on holidays for over two weeks (nice trip in Central America ) and have been really busy with other stuff. I actually don’t think I will be able to play more than 2-3 times a week this year, but for a GOOD reason, and this is great news for me!

Since the 1st of April I joined Pokerstrategy.com Team Pro, and therefore I will spend much of the coming year playing live tourneys, mainly EPTs and WSOP, but also a couple of WPTs if they come over to Europe again. I will also play the Irish Open (home game ) and a few other nice tourneys, so I am really looking forward to this. I always wanted to play these tourneys but they are –EV if you have to buy in yourself, first because they are on average 5k events with usually 500+ players, therefore to be well rolled for these tourneys around 300 buy ins are needed due to the high variance, which means 1.5M € ...and I am not there quiet yet . Secondly because to play these tournaments I will have to give up all the big Sunday’s ones online, and those are +++EV for winning players as full of fish. Overall though I am really delighted of this change and will do my very best to achieve good results in the live circuit. Even though I am an online player and like playing online more, I actually think to have a bigger edge in live events, as I can focus on a single table and live tournaments are usually filled with bad players.

I have actually just returned from Berlin where I played my first EPT and enjoyed it really much, the level of play was pretty high comparing to other tournaments but 2-3 fish at the table were never missing. I finished around 150th out of 733 players, with 120 going in the money. It’s a pity to bust just before the bubble, I usually don’t care about min-cashing but it would have been a really good start and nice for the morale. I met the other members of the Team and they all really cool guys, had the pleasure of playing with a couple of them at my table and I was very impressed with their play!
Next is the Irish Open, and living in Dublin this is going to be a really special tourney for me. Then off to San Remo for the EPT with the biggest field of them all (and home-country game) and straight after I am off to Madrid for the EPT Gran Final. After that Vegas and the WSOP. I won’t be flying out for the first couple of weeks as I don’t want to burn myself out, my plan as of today is to go to Vegas around the 18th of June, play few events for a couple of weeks, then take a week off and get ready for the Main Event. Plans can change though, so stay tuned.

I think this is all for today and hope to be more active updating my blog and not disappear for another few months. I am thinking about moving my blog to the Pokerstrategy.com website though, but I need to figure how to best to it, in that case it would be in Italian. I will keep you posted

Good luck at the tables.

Ivan aka TripleAceIRL