DEAL ME IN.

Byline: MARTY SMYTH 

Marty talks about Late Night Poker in Cardiff and the WPT in Slovakia I STARTED writing this article with the intentions of detailing my Late Night Poker heat in Cardiff, but unfortunately there wasn't much of any interest to report.

It was a pretty tough heat with Tony G, Soren Kongsgaard, Andreas Hoivold, Joe Beevers, Roberto Romanello, and an internet qualifier from Slovenia who was a full time online pro.

Tony G is a very good player, but on this occasion that didn't matter much because whoever had drawn his seat would have won the tournament I think.

The deck seemed to hit him in the face from the off, and from the start I kind of had the feeling that the rest of us were playing for second place.

I was very card dead throughout and didn't get into any good pots that I can remember.

I was down to around 7,500 (from a 10k starting stack) when I was dealt my first premium hand - AK, which unfortunately for me happened to coincide with Soren Kongsgaard being dealt his biggest hand of the tournament - KK.

I hit the front briefly on the flop which brought an ace for me and a 4-flush for Soren, but he overtook me again on the turn and I exited in 6th place.

Soren went on to take second place after at one point holding a 2:1 chip lead over Tony G, so I'm sure he was pretty gutted to lose after going so close.

TRAVELLED From Cardiff I travelled to Slovakia for the WPT. I'd never played a WPT before but I'd heard that they were generally easier than EPT tournaments, and I thought this one would be especially soft as most of the big players seemed to be swerving it in favour of the Barcelona EPT.

Having played it, I think I read the situation correctly. There were a lot of local players and few faces that I recognised.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to convert value into profit though, and I was kind of shaking my head at how I'd managed to come home with less money than I'd gone with.

I played great the first day and got a decent stack together, but didn't see a single hand for the last four hours of day one and the whole of day two, and eventually went out close to the money, making a move with a short stack after recently decimating my stack by semi-bluffing with a flush draw.

EVENTS The password for this week's Daily Mirror freeroll at 8pm tonight is goodluck.

This is the last week of the Boylepoker Deal Me In column.

From next week on we will be having a Boylepoker Blog $250 freeroll every Friday night at 8pm.

Look out for the weekly password on Boylepokerblog.com.