Category Archives: poker

I played in both the The Mookie & second chance tournaments yesterday. Meh, I have done worse. I finished 16th of the 40something in the regular event, on a hand that I knew I shouldn’t be playing, and honestly only did play to finish myself off before the second event started. I was sitting on a very short stack anyway, and with the blinds at their current levels I was not long for the tournament. Although I had been managing to steal the blinds, even from the short stack, so maybe I could have picked a better spot. I ended up pushing from EP with an A-7o, and the next two guys immediately pushed their stacks in as well. Woo-Hoo, over 4:1 on my money, if no one has anything better than an A-7o, which everyone did. The second chance event is only a 5 dollar buy-in, and with only Continue reading D’oh!→

It seems that my online poker career has almost reached its end. Through an unfortunately timed funk in the hands I have been dealt of late, my bankroll on both of the poker sites that I regularly play has dwindled down to almost nothing. I had never bought into either of them for more than 50 dollars, so it’s no great loss, it just happened that after my last relative score on each of the sites, I have experienced the worst run of luck imaginable. I learned early on that you don’t actually need to be dealt premium cards to do well in Hold ‘Em, and that has worked to my advantage over the last month. During one stretch of my recent run, I was dealt two pocket pairs in 100 hands, and they were both under 9. I went for about three weeks without getting dealt a pair of Continue reading Did I accidentally kill the poker God’s son or something?→

I signed up for an account on Partypoker a long time ago. This was just before I actually started learning how to play hold ’em. Which is to say that I thought I knew exactly how to play every hand in every situation, based solely on the fact that I had caught a couple of old WSOP repeats on ESPN. It didn’t go well. A couple days ago I was cleaning the PC of unnecessary programs and Partypoker was on the chopping block. Partypoker just has the most counter-intuitive interface of any poker program I have ever played (this in my opinion, of course), and with Pokerstars, Full Tilt and Poker Room still on the PC, I see no reason to keep it. I logged into the party account to see if I had a balance, though I was relatively sure I had blanked it before I quit using it Continue reading Party, my ass!→

I played in the Mondays at the Hoy tournament last night, marking only my third poker tournament in the last month. I had made a decision to distance myself from the game a bit, because when I was playing several MTTs a day I found that I was making poor calls in an attempt to make something out of nothing. The only reason I could come up with as to why I was doing it was that I was making the cardinal mistake in a card game: letting the results of previous hands influence my decision making on future hands. That is, my A-8 diamonds missed the flop completely last time, therefore if I play the A-8 diamonds again it is likely to catch a piece of it. I wasn’t actually thinking that, but as I look at the hand histories leading up to my hiatus, it was pretty obvious Continue reading Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble→

The last three days, I have seen the final table in three blogger events. Though this is obviously a product of extreme luck, it still feels pretty good. The blogger events still always include at least a dozen people who I don’t have any business being at the same table with, let alone actually competing with. The Mookie went pretty well, and I think I actually played that one pretty solid. I didn’t make a lot of stupid mistakes and I was able to win a couple of races when I needed to. I did get my chips all in on a pretty questionable call against Drewspop when he pushed from the small blind: I haven’t ever read a poker book, and I let a lot of things influence why I make a call. The cards come into it a bit for sure, but usually only after a whole bunch Continue reading Sick suckouts galore!→

I was having a conversation the other day with slb about how we both play much better in the Tuesday night WWDN than any of the other blogger events. He is on the east coast, and he figures that the earlier start time just means that he is more patient since it isn’t so late. That is some pretty sound logic. I am in Arizona, so the majority of the blogger events start at 7:00 my time, which is hardly late -in fact that is the same time I take my nearly daily crack at the ftp 20k. The only reason I can come up with as to why I might do better in the Tuesday events is that they generally have a larger field (though not lately), and I ususally don’t end up at a table with 5 guys that I am terrified of. See, I don’t play well Continue reading Creamy WWDN goodness (Turkish and Domestic, baby!)→

I hadn’t been in an ftp 20k for a while, so last night I decided to go ahead and sign up for one. I didn’t have a decent hand to play for the first hour of the tournament, which has become the status quo around here, but thanks to playing with Guin quite a bit over the last week or so -and having him chatting at me on the girlie chat thing- I have gotten a lot better at using my tight play to steal enough blinds to keep me around. Why this newfound stealing has yet to work its way into my blogger tournament play, I may never know. Perhaps it is because the field there is so much better, and most of them are willing to call that huge preflop raise with crap cards since they figure you have crap cards too? I dunno. I was able to Continue reading Mother flubbing circuit breakers→

I sat down to a token game on FTP today, and the trash talk and name calling began right after the first hand. That is always fun. Of course both of the guys involved in the hand thought that they played a good, smart hand, yet only one of them won the hand, therefore either one of them didn’t make such a great play or one of them sucked out. Now, I sure know which guy I am agreeing with here, but since both of these guys are seasoned pros -the very best to ever play the game, just ask them- I don’t know for sure which one of them is the bigger donk. I didn’t do a screencap during the hand, but since the trash talk was still going on when we reached the final table (from a table of two, huge achievement), I went back in hand history Continue reading Donkey-liciousness→

Sometimes I start wondering if it is possible, however impossible it seems, that my thinking influences the cards that are dealt. When I first started playing, I would make an all-in call on the flop with nothing but a nut flush draw, and I would have every confidence that I was going to hit my outs and take down the pot. What’s more is that I generally always did. If I ended up in a pot with Kings where I had an ace kicker and the other guy had a queen kicker, I had every confidence that my hand would hold up until the river. It was good to be so naive. Since the horrible beat that I put on Hoy (who had a horrible beat recently in the WSOP, making my lost buy-ins look like so much chump change) in a blogger tournament a couple of weeks ago, things Continue reading The shitty icing on the crappy cake→

I started playing a token game on FTP yesterday at about 4:30. I had already won a token for the 20k that night, and I generally only play one token game a day, get the token and that’s it. Yesterday, I just jumped in another one ’cause I was bored, and I can now say that I totally agree that the game is rigged -in my favor this time-. I didn’t get any screenshots, but I did save the history of this one. First hand I got Queens, which ended up busting someone. Second had was 9’s that I layed down to an ugly flop. Third hand was garbage. Fourth hand was 8s. Fifth hand was 10s that turned into a boat to send someone else home. And it just kept going. By the time about 30 hands had been played, I only had about half a dozen hands that Continue reading Guarantee, my ass!→