4/27/09

Not a ton going on poker-wise, at least if you look at the end result.
Yesterday I 14 tabled the $400 and $600 nl games, and lost a grand. Then met up with Nica (my sister) and my friend John and headed out to watch the Redsox play the Yankees. We bought the seats ~2 hours before the game started, but somehow managed to find amazing seats in the pavilion behind third base off to the left.

The game itself was fairly standard, except for a few innings. In the fifth, however, magic happened. With the bases loaded, Ellsburry, who led the team last year in steals, took off from third base instants before Pettitte began throwing the ball. By the time it reached the catcher he was safe. It was the first time Boston had stolen home in a decade, and was amazing to watch. The entire audience (about 33k people) were on their feet applauding him.

I got home and won a grand. At the end of the night, I was down 9 dollars on the day after more than 5k hands. Crazy. Nica stayed at our house and skipped class today to hang out and get Thai food for lunch with Anna and I. It was really nice outside, so we went out to the porch and played cards for a while. It was nice to just hang out outside and do nothing in particular with my sister, rather than hang out inside and do nothing particular by myself, which has sadly become more and more a routine for me.

Tonight the games looked good, so during my session I took some shots at the 5/10 plo games. Plo is becoming more and more interesting I feel; it has much more fish than holdem games for the stakes, and the nature of the game allows for a lot more mistakes on the part of the fish. Its easy for a fishy player to play tight in holdem and be semi-tough, but in plo a fish can easily stack off with seemingly big hands (trip aces for example) in spots where they can never be good. I feel that, as holdem games get tougher and tougher, I will need to gradually make the move toward plo.

I played some pretty large pots today, at least relative the ones I have been playing lately.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4167517

Std super-wrap I guess. This one happened right after I had stacked a player (the guy with AA here) with middle set in a re-raised pot. I knew I had a lot of equity, but I looked it up after and I was actually close to 45% to scoop.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4167520

The flat call on the flop is prob not std, but I was pretty sure from his raise size that he had an overset. I just felt like a draw would raise more and try and get it in. I was trying to figure out how to play turn (or more like how to talk myself into a fold if a blank came) when I made the nuts.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4167524

I honestly don't know about the preflop play. On one hand, this guy was an over-aggressive regular who is forced to fold a large % of his holdings here. On the other hand, his range isn't THAT loose, and he is the kind of guy who doesn't just call with AA type of hands. The flop was just brutal, and, even though he didn't snap call, I was still feeling pretty bad when he hit the call button (I'm assuming he was dealing with other tables anyways). Also, I kind of hate pre because there can be a lot of akward flops if he flats, I just assumed he shoves of folds preflop %100 of the time. I kind of wonder if he folds whenever he misses his sets.

I lost some other huge ($3k+) pots where my opponents were pretty far behind, but they seem too standard to post. They do, however, reinforce the idea in my mind that plo is worth pursuing long term.