Costa Rica PHT Tournament and monkey off back…

I just got back to Panama last night after 5 enjoyable days in Puntarenas, Costa Rica. The resort was fairly nice for being all inclusive and less than $100/day.

In the $1500 Main Event they got a respectable ~100 runners. It was a good mix of around 30 Swedish amateur poker club members and Latinos/Gringos from Costa Rica, Panama, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Dominican, etc. The first day I played very carefully and chipped up from $15K to $69K only showing down 3 hands (2 all in calls pre-flop of short stacks and 1 successful triple barrel call down of a crazy swede). So, I felt great about not ever being at risk for much of a % of my stack, not getting much for starting hands, and still ending the day with 1.75x the average. We started the 2nd day with 36 players left and 40K average stack. A few hours into the day, I lost a key pot getting c/r all in by the same crazy swede that tried to triple-barrel me the day before. I was trying to jedi-mind trick him into bluff shoving the flop, so obv. I called with my top pair. He had a gutshot and missed, but hit a runner runner flush:eek: From there i was a bit short stacked and picked my spots, until I got it all in with AJ vs 44 PF and lost the coin flip to go out 17th. A bit disappointing considering the field strength and decent structure. Burropoker.com (an up and coming Latin-targeted new site on the cake network) did sponsor me to "wear the donkey" so I suppose it was a freeroll.

There were also some juicilicious cash games. The first night I played in a great 5/10 PLO game. I ended up getting it all in 4x. Once with full wrap vs set and 3x with top pair + flush draw + some type of straight draw vs bare AAxx. I only won 1/4 and lost $1,400 on the night. The funny part was that I was berated for getting it in all 3 times vs AA as a favorite (in situations where i believe most good players would have pitched their AAxx, given the board and action)
The 2nd night they got a 25/25 PLO game going (these games are mostly straddled every hand and at least 2-5 buyins deep), but I arrived late and it was full, so I jumped into the 5/10 NLH game. I lost 3 $2,000 pots as a favorite, and still managed to win about $1,800 on the night, so it was a good game. I decided to pass on the 25/25 PLO game when a seat opened as I heard it was playing excruciatingly slow and there was a Colombian "gentleman" in the game that was either berating the dealers or trying to fight the other players every other hand. Sometimes you have to choose +life/happiness ev over +$ev.

Of course my highlight of the trip was playing a $70 drinking SNG and hanging for a little bit with DragTheBar PhilN:) I didn't win the SNG and had to pony up for the $500 2nd chance. I again went out around 17th and didn't make the money.

On Sunday, I decided to forego the live action and play a few sunday tournaments in the room. The internet connection was sketchy and I suck at laptop multi-tabling, so I only played 4 or 5 tournaments. I made a deepish run in the FT $750K but ended up going out 59th.

Although there are a lot of monkeys in Costa Rica, the monkey on my back was a proverbial monkey. It seems like i have been making quite a few final 2 tables but not taking any of them down. *note to self: watch some endlessJ and 7deluxe final table vids to see how the triple crown masters finish*. When I got back to Panama, I decided to play a few Monday night tournaments. Finally I won one last night - the nightly $50 rebuy on Full Tilt for about $11k.

Now, I'm going to heed the other side of the coin of my advice from the last blog. Don't get too down when you make a good showing but don't win it......AND
don't get too complacent when you do win one, because it could easily have gone the other way as well. I'm going to jump right back in it today and watch a video or two and try and put in a LeatherAss-like session.

-Brent