Buckle up kid!

With this post I would like to react to some of the things Mr. Thomas Vanbrabant posted in his last challenge post. I’ve won some nice titles and consider myself to be rather lucky to have done this all. But is it all luck?

I don’t think so. To have a shot at the title you’ll have to get heads up first! And that includes surviving the dangers of mid tournament play, something in which I consider myself rather good.

Thomas considers a lot of the end stages of the tournament to be flippaments and a lot of variance. And to a certain degree I agree with him. The blinds are becoming very big at the end of the tournaments we play and you’ll need to win certain flips to eventually take it down. And that requires some luck. I do agree with that. But to win a tournament you’ll have to struggle through the beginning and middle stages of a tournament. And that is where it most of the times goes wrong with my dear friend Thomas. I want to stress out that I consider him one of the best players in our regular group of players but usually he gets felted somewhere in the middle of the pack. And then all the comments about how much everybody sucks and how unlucky he is always boil up, which in fact is always kinda funny. When he does survive the middle stages of the tournament he is a real threat in the end. And normally it’s hard to bust him then. Most of his cashes are therefore also tournament wins, which in my opinion is rather nice. But on the other hand, he doesn’t get very deep in much of our tournaments.

I’ll just look at his numbers: 5 HSOP wins and 7 cashes in total. Compare it to my record in HSOP: 6 wins, 14 cashes. Thomas has 3 TPC cashes with zero wins. I have 7 TPC cashes with 2 wins. In the FCOOP series Thomas has 3 cashes with 2 wins, I have 6 cashes with 4 wins. I’m just stating some plain facts here. In his previous post Thomas has firmly stated that he hasn’t lost a heads up match in a tournament against me, and that’s just the plain truth. But on the other hand, Thomas always bust out in mid tournament. So there is not much opportunity for me to battle him heads up for the title. He just doesn’t get there often.

So that is why I’m happy with this new challenge. Now I have the opportunity to battle it out with him on the felt 3 times in 2012. We’ll just play straight No Limit Hold’em to even further reduce the variance. I don’t want any flippaments occurring in a random PLO showdown with each of us have multiple redraws and such. So straight No Limit Hold’em for a minimum of three hours straight and reload when you’re below 100bb’s. I’ll play you kid! You’d better buckle up!

Mickey C

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