Busy blog today as this is going to be my last entry prior to heading down to Atlantic City tomorrow morning to play Event #1 and some cash. I am looking forward to meeting a bunch of the TPE members and hanging out. My brother is traveling with me so it will be cool to introduce him to the crowd as he is more of a cash player and is really just starting to play tourneys, but is still pretty dangerous in his own right at the tables. So other than laundry and packing (yeah I am that lazy, I always wait till the last minute to get ready for a trip no matter how small) what have I been up too? Well last night was another deep run in the 35k on FTP, finished 65th so I was pretty happy with the result, I am feeling pretty good and expecting to take something down soon. I finished 16th in a $3.30 non-gtd on FTP as well (179 runners) and I cashed a couple of 45mans just to keep things even. The BR is moving up nicely, I have doubled my roll in less than a week and am rapidly getting up to the $10 45mans to help balance things out. The weekend coming up looks like it will be pretty big. Mini FTOPs starts Sunday so of course I will be in Event #1 there as well trying to beat my standard min-cash for that event. On a side note this weekend is the 5th Anniversary of the Sunday Million and it is going to be a minimum $5,000,000 prize pool. This looks like it will be a huge fish filled event so I am thinking that I may break my Sunday swear off and get in on this one. Should be a softer than hell tourney so looking forward to it. Last thing for the blog today is some thoughts I have been having on isolation. We all like to pick on limpers. It is what defines the aggressive player. It will always define the aggressive player. But how do we effectively isolate and not spew chips. Well there are two types of players that we want to combat with isolation, one which is effective one not so much. How do we isolate effectively, well first we need the right fish. Who is this fish you ask? Weak-Tight. We need a guy who runs like 14/4, 16/2 that sort of thing. This character is someone we want to isolate provided the situation is right. What do I mean by that. Very important rule here…LOOK BOTH WAYS BEFORE YOU MAKE A MOVE AT THE TABLE. Stop and think about that for a second. When you are going to act at the table, remember to look both ways. You want to know what and who is on your right and what and who is on your left. If you have a squeeze happy character to your left, give up on the iso move unless you have a powerful hand and in that case you have a great situation for a trap (but that is a discussion for another day). So back to the point, we have a tight guy who likes to limp and no squeezers behind us (also note we really want to iso from LP as doing this earlier makes the road you have to look down a lot longer and the probability a truck is coming much higher). Anyhow, if these conditions are satisfied this is a great opportunity to try to make moves with any two cards. These guys basically play face up, will tend to like to call your isolation raise and fold post flop if they don't hit and go bat shit crazy if they do hit. Look for them, target them, beat them for value. What is the second side of isolation. Well this is the one that gets a lot of folks in trouble, I know it does to me. So the player we want to be careful with isolating is the weak-loose guy. The dude running 76/6, 82/14, 60/2 is this guy. The problem now is that when we isolate we are really looking to capitalize on dead money and these guys are in general calling stations, not big folders. So what do we do. Well the best way to proceed is to limp behind with your speculative hands and pump the pot with your monsters. They don't credit you for much, but because they don't know where the fold button is be very careful of how you proceed post flop.
Well that is enough from me today. Look for me on Twitter (@lespaulgmanTPE) for updates over the next couple of days from AC. I'll talk to everyone out there Saturday when I am back home with a full wrap up of my play. This is the Gman signing out!