gutshotdonkey

Back in Paradise - success at last!! Yum Yum.

Paradise Poker has always been my favourite site (because I win there). The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act effectively crippled Paradise and in particular the games I played.

I was playing well had a large roll and then overnight, everything changed. My regular tournaments (or at least the players in them) disappeared. I started playing the $115 and $215 tournaments (because they were the only tournaments with prizes worth playing for), initially without success and ultimately in desperation, until eventually I moved away.

Since then I have had a bad run - leading to this blog.

On Thursday night I searched all of the sites for freerolls that might be worth playing and noticed that Paradise has a $1000 free roll every other night (pays 10, 1st prize $500) at a cost of 200 player points and a $2,500 free roll on Sundays (pays 20, 1st prize $1,000) at cost of 1000 player points.

There aren't many players left on Paradise. Player points are very hard to come by - I should know I've played there a lot and only have about 5,000. And since people racking up player points in the larger cash games aren't going to be interested in freerolls, it doesn't take a poker genius to realise there aren't going to be many people playing in these things.

There is no doubt these are the best value freerolls going. Compare and contrast with the prizes and entrants on Full Tilt, where you would probably have to beat off at least 3,600 people to win $100. If Chris "Jesus" Ferguson was doing his zero to $10,00o on Paradise, he'd be done in about 5 weeks, without investing a cent of his winnings at any stage.

Any way I had a crack at the $1,000 free-roll on Friday night (my third ever free-roll - I had a go at a couple of 1,000 point buy-ins for WSOP seats last year).

In common with most of my recent tournament attempts, I started well, built up a nice stack and then lost patience, donking off my chips having been in a very good 2nd position with about 50 left. Ended up about 38th out of 360.

I was unfortunately quite annoyed and stupidly logged on to Full Tilt where I immediately suffered two or three horrendous beats, leading to semi-tilt (and a stupid attempt at 1/2nl - lost $80 there). Ended the night with a balance of less than $300 but now back to $321.16 (not good).

Anyway today was the big day, the $2,500 free roll on Paradise. I had been looking forward to it all day, and for one reason, I knew I was going to win it. I had even planned what I was going to do with the money - I sat on the tube this afternoon debating whether to take out $600 or $500 to put on Full Tilt.

As expected a miserly 248 players (yes just 248 for $2,500 free roll!) stumped up the 1000 player points and, as expected, two hours 51 minutes later my Paradise balance increased from Zero to $1,000.

Get in there - its amazing how good it is to finally win again. Plus this is actually the biggest tournament I have won in terms of entrants (not cash). It is also the first MTT that I have won or even final tabled since September 2006 (although in fairness I have only played cash games and a couple of Sunday tournys since December).

Unfortunately this won't appear in my battered stats on officialpokerrankings.com, but who cares.

I got lucky twice on the way - fairly early on I got all my chip in with A Q against A K but two pair on the board and a split pot saved my skin.

I also got lucky in the all in phase with 3 tables left, when my A 7 on the button made a 9 high straight on the river to beat the big blinds A Q and to avoid losing about half my stack; and at

the same time this gave me a stack to really work with. Every other time I got my money in well ahead.

I made it to the final table in 2nd place with 90,000 chips (out of 372,00) and slowly nudged my way up to 180,000 by the time Bear497 and I went heads up (1st pays $1,000, second $500). Bear played almost perfect aggressive play at the final table (when one or two others contrived to cripple themselves against the shorter stacks).

I have never so far finished second in a MTT and as soon as we started playing I knew I was going to win. I have played a lot of heads up S&G's (in the past) and recognised his overly passive style straight away. I just chipped away at his stack without ever going all in and quickly had him down to about 80,000.

It took about 20 minutes to finish him off, ultimately knocking him out when my 9 6 hit trip nines to beat his 10 2 on a 10 high board.

Balances: