mattandrhya.com

Playing poker is the worst when you get bad hand after bad hand, right? Constantly getting 10-4 offsuit, 83 suited, 75s, etc. makes for a brutal, boring experience that makes your stack slowly melt away. When you are playing $2/$4 and $3/$6 limit table, it is pretty painful to see $3 or $4 slide away every 10 hands.

Never fear, I’m here to tell you about a different situation. Imagine getting AKo (o means offsuit, s means suited), AJs, KK, AQs, etc. hand after hand after hand. It seems like every time you look at your hole cards you smile inside, and think about the raise you get to put into the pot. I had one of those nights on Wednesday night.

The Party Poker Bad Beat Jackpot (PPBBJ) was around $450,000, so there were a lot of gamblers and poor players playing the tables like they were slot machines. I haven’t been playing at Party much lately, but this is about the time that I like to venture over there.

So, as I mentioned before, I keep getting great starting hands. I’m raising and getting a bunch of callers, getting some truly enormous pots. Then….I’m constantly missing the flop, or making second best hands on the river. For instance, I would get AcQc (Ace of Clubs, Queen of Clubs), and would raise. I’d get 4 callers, and the flop would come AsQd3s. I would raise and reraise, building giant pots, just to lose to 8s5s, when a spade falls on the river. Now, I’m not trying to whine about all of the bad beats that I suffered, but I’m trying to illustrate how costly it is to play poker when you are constantly making second best hands.

Long story short, I lost about $300. Now, for higher limit players, this seems like chump change, but it translates into 75 big bets at a $2/$4 table, which is what I was playing. Not an earth-shattering downswing, but it was the worst that I’ve ever had in one night. I finally called it quits and went to bed, feeling absolutely dejected. I wasn’t so much upset with my play, but it hurts to lose that much money (considering it as a percentage of my bankroll) in one night.

Alone time. This is a thing that is in abundance when your wife has a little one growing inside her. Why? Because when the baby wants to sleep…the baby wants to sleep. And, I think the baby takes after Rhya because he/she presents a very persuasive argument and leaves Rhya no recourse.

This happened last night (in the smack-dab middle of Elf). Rhya’s out like trout. So, I played a game of NCAA 2005 (last game for Wesleyan’s 2006 season: IWU 20, Tenn. 0, and my CB got the Heisman…maybe time to bump up the AI). When that was all over, I tried to wake Rhya up (she usually only likes to take hour naps, so she can still try to sleep at night). Nothing doing last night.

So, I think, maybe I’ll jump on UB for a bit to play some penny poker. Then, I changed my mind and started playing the $.10-$.25 no-limit table. To put that in perspective, the average pot size is around $4.00 per hand. I played on a table for about 25 minutes, and was up $22. People started leaving the table, and I decided to take my winnings and play in a $10+1 sit-n-go tournament. The $10+1 refers to the amount paid to play…$10 goes to the pot, and $1 goes to the house. There are 10 players (at least at this sit-n-go..there are 6 person and 2 person sng’s also). So, that brings the prize pot up to $100. The distribution for winnings is as such: 3rd place gets $20, 2nd place gets $30, and 1st place gets $50.

I got 5th.

Boo. I was pretty upset with my play, but truth be told, I kept getting good cards, but really bad flops. That will eat away at your stack in a hurry.

So, I decided that I would use the remaining $11 of my winnings to see if I could get in the money again. Maybe it was a stupid idea, but there have been only a handfull of times that I have been shut out twice in a row.

So I played. You start out with 1000 chips, and the person with 10,000 at the end wins. I got hurt a couple times early, putting people on the wrong hands, and my stack whittled down to 483 chips, at a time when the table was 6 handed (which means that most people have over 4 times the number of chips that I do), and was in danger of going out on a hand that I held A3 as the dealer, and the BB held K8. Of course, I didn’t know what he had, and the flop came Q38. He bet small, I figured he had squat, and that I could make a move and take the pot. Unfortunately, when you are that short-stacked “making a move” means throwing all the chips in the pot. I blanched when I saw his pair. Then, the turn and the river came, making the board Q383A. My bottom pair turned into a full house. I quickly doubled up, and was able to build my chips up enough in the later rounds to bully a bit.

I won.

So, net winnings for the night: $50. Don’t think I’ll be quitting my day job soon. Unless someone wants to bankroll me

I played poker seriously for the first time on Friday night since I moved to Peoria from San Diego. As most of you know, I was playing upwards of 120hours/month the last few months back in CA. I basically couldn’t even watch TV without playing poker at the same time. Then, we moved, and I didn’t really have time. But, a bunch of my Dunlap buddies get together about once a month to play in a small $10 entry tournament, and I jumped in this last one. I’ll update this post with exactly what happened in the tournament (one of the organizers keeps a pretty detailed log of the evening), but in a nutshell…Erik Nelson picked up third place, and won back his entry fee, Chip took second and won $20, and I grabbed the top spot and netted $70. Probably not a strong indicator that I’ll be jumping back into playing a lot (don’t really have time), but it was a good way to come back.