…when someone is sitting with 90$ at a 0.05/0.10 NL HE table…

Hand that put me over the edge:

*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Ingoal [8h 8c] …
*** FLOP *** [8d 9h 6s]
Ingoal: checks
tulsabrian: bets $2
tulsabrian said, “uh oh”
tulsabrian said, “whatchu got meads”
Mieds: raises $4 to $6
tulsabrian said, “i smell something bad”
Ingoal: calls $3.70 and is all-in
tulsabrian said, “chit”
tulsabrian: raises $4 to $10
Mieds: calls $4
*** TURN *** [8d 9h 6s] [Ah]
tulsabrian said, “5 7”
tulsabrian: bets $80.05 and is all-in
Mieds: calls $1.60 and is all-in
*** RIVER *** [8d 9h 6s Ah] [5d]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
tulsabrian: shows [5h 7d] (a straight, Five to Nine)
Mieds: mucks hand
tulsabrian said, “ahahhaahha”
tulsabrian collected $15.05 from side pot-2
Ingoal: mucks hand
tulsabrian collected $10.55 from side pot-1
Ingoal said, “omg”
Nethor: shows [Ad Jd] (a pair of Aces)
tulsabrian collected $2.35 from main pot
Ingoal said, “trip 8s no good”
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $29.35 Main pot $2.35. Side pot-1 $10.55. Side pot-2 $15.05. | Rake $1.40
Board [8d 9h 6s Ah 5d]
Seat 1: Ingoal (big blind) mucked [8h 8c]
Seat 2: Nethor showed [Ad Jd] and lost with a pair of Aces
Seat 3: tulsabrian showed [5h 7d] and won ($27.95) with a straight, Five to Nine

Apart from that a little grind at some other tables and over at Absolute Poker, not much joy though…especially when you’re sitting at another donkey table with two players seeing the flop 75% and 78% of the time…and connecting time after time….even cracking your bullets…be damned! I guess playing with lots of cold medicine is really -ev for my game and costing me more nerves and money than usual…

Sidenote: bullets cracked by runner runner straights or flushes in the last few days: 3, I’m so All-In preflop the next few Aces I hold 😉

…sometimes isn’t such a good idea after all. I played a NL HE Heads Up match at Absolute Poker in preparation for tomorrow’s HUC3 match and I didn’t do all that good. Note to self: try to take your time and don’t let yourself be bullied around tomorrow. Trust your gut.

After that disappointment I went back to common grounds – to the low limit NL HE ring games at Full Tilt. I grinded out some bucks and cleared another bit of the bonus, so what do you do with the free money? Yup, play a SnG! Shorthanded NL HE sounded right so I gave it a shot. Bouncing up and down like a rubber ball for 45 minutes before Mr. Luckbox outflops me…out in 4th. Damn! Ah well, time to get some rest…I hope to see you all around at the HUC3 – Round 1 tomorrow…

As I’m in the midst of what I like to call “extreme exam preparation” (the last 1-2weeks leading up to a major uni exam) there’s not much going on at the poker front as I’m just too knackered to really focus on the game, which isn’t a good thing if you’re trying your “luck” at a new (higher) level. So no poker played on saturday and little today (sunday).

After sticking my nose into uni stuff (mostly web-based integration and architecture of application systems) all day I didn’t feel the urge to really play, but playing a little poker won’t hurt to get your thoughts of the stuff, so what the hell. Donked around at AbsolutePoker for a little, playing a low limit NL HE MTT…which was a quick one despite holding AA early on (which held up on a scary board) and KK which was busted by pocket sixes to cripple me…the end was rather entertaining too…AQo vs KQs vs KQo…sure enough the two outer King hit…after that I donked off some dough at the cash tables when my pocket kings were crushed again, the hiltons held up though so only down a half buyin for the night…at least something.

In other news: I’m going to play in the HeadsUp Challenge 3 (aka HUC3)…should be fun…if you’re interested in participating and/or in reading the latest news, head over to the HeadsUpChallenge Blog

After footie training I fired up PokerStars to pick up where I left yesterday evening – at the micro SnGs. Two junk kickings later and I’m frustrated (8th place finish in NL HE, which was okay, my play sucked as did my cards – I pot it up with 99, my first decent hand of the night, one guy reraises me to All-In, I ponder and suspect that he got me beat, but the “maybe not, just suckout”-monkey on my shoulder tells me to call…so I do and he shows his black Aces…IGHN; bring in the PLO8 and everything is looking better, until we’re down to 6 handed, this is where the story of the super-charge-luckbox-deluxe begins. This one player keeps raising every pot, which is legitimate if there are three shortstacks and you’re holding a decent amount of chips, but you’re not entitled to win every friggin pot, especially not in PLO8 and even more so if you’re pushing all the time with crap like 67KQ. As soon as we’re down to 5 handed I think “okay, time to get something going”, so I’m waiting for a decent hand and then it’s time to counterpunch…he pushes again, one of the remaining shortstacks calls and is All-In and I hold AK23, so I push, he calls…sure enough there’s no low in sight and he wins with his crap hand (I can’t even remember the exact hand, but it was something like KJ57 and he hit his 7 to J straight…way to go fool)…so we’re both out and the others are in the money. I wish the other two good luck and watch as they bust within 4 hands to the super-uber-charge-magic-deluxe-luckbox…unbelievable! I’ve never seen such a rush before…)

That’s enough PS for the night and I head over to FullTilt and play over an hour at the .10/.25 NL tables…win some, lose some…big hands don’t pay off…weak hands don’t cost me much and I call it a night slightly up…so, all in all a truly uneventful evening at the tables…

What can I say. I’m pretty much speechless. Dropped around 10$ playing .10/.25 in the first session, not much I could do, believed my hands were good and they mostly weren’t. Too bad…sometimes TPTK just isn’t enough. All good there.

Then I start to play the second session tonight and there’s nothing going my way: either I miss the flop (most of the times), or I hit the nuts (flopped boat with a nice flush draw on board) and don’t get payed off despite slowplaying. Just as I’m about to wrap things up I look down at AsAc – alrighty, one more orbit won’t hurt (how wrong you can be about a sentence like this follows)…the orbit is one hand in length…buyin goes in the middle and I get kicked in the nuts…once again. It’s tough to see Aces cracked yet again 🙁

I guess in the long run variance, the old beetch, will smoothen such nut-kickings, but in a situation like this it’s hard to believe (and looking back at my not so complete statistics – I guess I should get something like PokerTracker – I’m now officially something like 3/10 to win AA)…

So that’s the session on FTP for tonight, time to stop the bleeding (21% of the bankroll over the last four days) as nothing good will come off additional play on FTP tonight…maybe it’s time to play some on PokerStars to chill out…

Sticking to things that you’re accustomed to isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it can be a real PITA. My day in poker is told fairly quickly today. Started off with a token satellite. Bad idea, once again my strong Ace ran into Aces within the first orbit – I should start to keep track of such things, what are the odds of your opponent holding pocket Aces when you’re holding one? Whatever the odds are, it seems that it’s happening more often than you think, especially when I’m holding a big ace.

After that quick bustout I decided to cool things down with the 17ET 1$ tourney, always nice to try some new things for a buck. A standard play broke my back though. I find pocket Aces in EP within the first orbit and pop it up to 3xBB, 2 callers, this could be fun! Flop comes down 9-7-3 rainbow. Checked to me, I bet the pot, one fold, one reraise to 2x pot…I think about it and if he flopped a set, so be it…I push…he calls…sure enough my gut feeling was right and he doesn’t hold a set…he’s holding TPSK (yup, that’s top pair shit kicker) – 96s in this case. To make a long story short: 6 on the turn and IGHN. Way to go, cracked Aces with 96…argh!

After that I was a little frustrated – to say the least. I wanted to spend some time (and little money) playing a decent amount of poker. As this plan didn’t work out I decided to play some ring games. Everything fine at the .05/.10 NL HE front and I quintuple up in no time. Which makes me think: Maybe it’s time to move up in limits again. This time with a better bankroll behind me (after all I more than tripled up my deposit since starting to play at Full Tilt less than a month ago). So I head to the .10/.25 NL HE games and play around a dozen orbits. I leave down a little, but not much. To change things up a little bit more I play some limit Hold’em (.25/.50) too, with not much success as the draw donkeys just keep outdrawing me.

So, why the post title “change of plan”? Because I decided that I’ll quit playing SnGs and MTTs for a while. I mean it’s all good and I did fairly well in MTTs and some SnGs, but overall I just can’t get through. So the new plan is to spend the extra poker time grinding it out at the cash tables – at the new limit of .10/.25 – until my bankroll is a little bit bigger. Then I’ll try to hit some of the bigger buyin MTTs and/or SnGs (10$+) and maybe I’ll even try to win my way into the WSOP then – the whole 100 WSOP seat tourney (July 16th) is just too tempting, especially if you could achieve satelliting into the thing.

…playing at PokerStars. After busting out of my first deposit a while ago, I reloaded to play in Waffles’ tourney last night. I donated the first 11$ to a worthy cause, so I’m in need of some grinding to get myself into better shape again. So, I played a little low limit NL HE this afternoon (winning 5 buyins) and one session this evening (losing 1 buyin). I guess I’ll try to get some more afternoon sessions in at PokerStars and check if the results are really that much better compared to the evening/night sessions or maybe the results will tell me that today was just a glitch in the matrix 😉

Nothing spectacular at FullTilt either, grinded some bucks out of some poor souls’ back…would have been even more if my AQo wouldn’t have lost to AsKs on the river (Q on the flop, another Q on the turn, but unfortunately already two spades, river is another spade)…but overall a good day.

No poker yesterday due to exam preparation (exam was this morning, went well). Little poker today. I was grinding out some dough on the low limit NL HE tables. Not much profit, but at least I cleared another few bucks of the signup bonus – 40% cleared now.

Bounty Hunting: This sunday it’s Waffles’ birthday tourney and fellow bloggers/players are starting to offer bounties (see Waffles’ post about it)…I’m still trying to figure out what I will offer…maybe I’ll come up with a good idea tomorrow…enough brain-work for the day already…so this will have to wait until tomorrow.

Quick brainstorm left me with the following so far (not sure if it’s going to be something out of this list yet):

1. A poker book (i.e. Tales from the Tiltboys, Little Green Book, …)
2. A poker DVD (i.e. Rounders)
3. Something online related (then again Kat is already offering a custom banner/sidebar graphic)
4. Something personal (i.e. a special T-Shirt or something, I’ll have to come up with a practical solution though as shipping from Germany to the US (etc) would cost too much…maybe CafePress or similar will do..)
5. Something not related to poker at all

Not much time to play today as I’ve got a uni exam coming up on friday – so I better get my lazy behind into gear and away from the poker tables. After spending the day with the books it was time for a little poker tonight though….so I fired up FTP and play some NL HE ring game, got my hands on some bucks and went on to try to get my hands on another token. No joy there though as I busted out in 11th place. That officially makes me 1/6 now…I guess it’s time to reassess my SnG play, especially when it comes down to short handed play (either final table or final two tables).

After the disappointment I thought I’d give HORSE another try, but no joy there either. H: uneventful, O: nice, but only 1 pot and even lost a pot with AA double suited when my 78 was the idiot end of the straight on board, R: yuck…no..a King on 5th street doesn’t help me, S: good, but no big pots, E: IGHN…out 8th of 8. Hmm….
So I’m down some bucks again and it’s time to get some of that back, so NL HE ring games it is, again. Not much to report, got back to almost even for the day. Listened to the last Lord Admiral Card Club Podcast in the process – Dr. Pauly interviews Wil, Columbo’s one minute mystery and discussion about Zee Justin’s cheating…a nice episode! Go get it: Episode 64

A short summary of today’s play:

• Playing best hands hard on scary boards*: -5 Buyins
• Winning everything back with a single hand**, clearing another 5% of the signup bonus in the process and finishing the night slightly up: priceless 🙂

* (i.e. 10-10 on a 7d-10d-Qc board – flush draw, most certainly a 9 outer, at least it’s going to be a hard decision to draw with my All-In to call…)

** (beautiful when you smooth-call a preflop raise with 7-7 to see the flop come down Q-Q-7…even better if someone decides to reraise you All-In with A-7…)