I am playing a small S&G ($5.50) 9 person. It is early and I get KJ offsuit under the gun. I raise a couple BB just to make sure everyone playing is serious (and I am under the gun after all). I get called by a couple people including the big stack (1.5 times the average). He is batting 100% VPIP so this is no surprise. The flop comes 3A4 and I do a continuation bet of a couple BB. Our new friend raises about 10BB and everyone (including me) folds. I figured he has an ace. He is generous to show us that he has 34 unsuited for 2 pair.
I am grateful he was willing to play with 34o in the presence of a 3BB raise under the gun. One of these times I will get his money (if someone doesn't beat me to it).
Friday, March 26, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Have you ever had this hand?
You know the hand. You finally get dealt some good cards - pocket Kings just when you need them. You are not yet down to the push it all in stage but it is getting close enough that you are thinking about it.
The pocket Kings come along so you make a big raise kind of hoping someone will call you - but scared that if they do they will still suck out. So you make your raise and someone comes over the top. You decide this is probably the best hand you are going to see anyway so you push all-in.
Of course they turn over pocket Aces.
Well tonight I was that guy. Not the one with the Kings - the one with the Aces. It was a nice feeling to see someone play into my Aces that way.
It was even a nicer feeling to see them actually stand up through the river and win the hand - that usually doesn't happen on Riverstars.
This was in one of the cheap ($2+0.20) tournaments - lots of players (>3000) and it is still going. If I go out now, I will win a grand total of $7.31.
The pocket Kings come along so you make a big raise kind of hoping someone will call you - but scared that if they do they will still suck out. So you make your raise and someone comes over the top. You decide this is probably the best hand you are going to see anyway so you push all-in.
Of course they turn over pocket Aces.
Well tonight I was that guy. Not the one with the Kings - the one with the Aces. It was a nice feeling to see someone play into my Aces that way.
It was even a nicer feeling to see them actually stand up through the river and win the hand - that usually doesn't happen on Riverstars.
This was in one of the cheap ($2+0.20) tournaments - lots of players (>3000) and it is still going. If I go out now, I will win a grand total of $7.31.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
When you really do't want to go all in
I haven't been playing that much - not like I used to but I wanted to post something about the hand I just played. I had to smile when it happened (because I have often been on the other side of this).
I am playing in a $10+1 180 person S&G at Pokerstars and getting some of the worse cards I have gotten in a while. I am usually a semi-loose fairly aggressive player but I was working on being the tightest player at the table. We were about 45 hands in and although our table had lost a couple players our table had been kept together since the start and I wasn't the only one playing tight.
Over a period of about 3 hands we lost a couple people and they were replaced with some fresh blood (I mean new players). Obviously they weren't used to such tight play because after about 4 hands one newbie complained "that this was the tightest table they had seen". I smiled.
The next hand I got dealt A10 suited. I was under the button and decided to min raise. As expected most folded but one of the short stacks pushed all-in. The guy in front of me decided to call and I, perhaps foolishly, decided to just call. The call was for just less than half my stack and since these were the best cards I had seen, I went with it.
It was clearly my hand as the flop came A10A. The guy in front of me decided it was his time to push. I smiled and called. The cards were revealed and the original all-in had pocket queens, the guy in front of me had pocket kings - they had me beat until the flop. The hand played out, I increased my stack by about 2.5 times and they broke our table up.
The last thing I saw in the chat box was the newbie saying "now that's more like it".
I smiled.
I am playing in a $10+1 180 person S&G at Pokerstars and getting some of the worse cards I have gotten in a while. I am usually a semi-loose fairly aggressive player but I was working on being the tightest player at the table. We were about 45 hands in and although our table had lost a couple players our table had been kept together since the start and I wasn't the only one playing tight.
Over a period of about 3 hands we lost a couple people and they were replaced with some fresh blood (I mean new players). Obviously they weren't used to such tight play because after about 4 hands one newbie complained "that this was the tightest table they had seen". I smiled.
The next hand I got dealt A10 suited. I was under the button and decided to min raise. As expected most folded but one of the short stacks pushed all-in. The guy in front of me decided to call and I, perhaps foolishly, decided to just call. The call was for just less than half my stack and since these were the best cards I had seen, I went with it.
It was clearly my hand as the flop came A10A. The guy in front of me decided it was his time to push. I smiled and called. The cards were revealed and the original all-in had pocket queens, the guy in front of me had pocket kings - they had me beat until the flop. The hand played out, I increased my stack by about 2.5 times and they broke our table up.
The last thing I saw in the chat box was the newbie saying "now that's more like it".
I smiled.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Time flys
It has been over 3 years since I posted here and I have to blame a lot of it on my sheer lack of poker playing. Although I had never really intended this blog to be only about poker, it appears that when the poker stopped, so did the blogging.
To drive the final nail in the coffin and all that, I decided to revisit online poker playing last week and sure enough the urge to blog about it came with - the proof being this entry right here.
Given the challenge of getting money into poker sites now days I finally figured out the trick and used the eCheck mechanism that Pokerstars supports. My original intent was to use a check from one of my Canadian accounts but I discovered that Pokerstars assumes that if you live in the US, you would only have checks from US accounts. They are wrong but after a conversation with support, I realized that this was too difficult a thing to ask of them. They do support checks from Canadian banks if you live in Canada tho. :P
So last week I managed to get $100 into my Pokerstars account (which is the max you can write your first eCheck for) and decided to get back into the game. I had always liked S&Gs, so I tried a couple of a format I hadn't seen before. They are called Double or Nothing - basically 10 person S&Gs where the top 5 win double the entry (minus the rake). I found I had mixed success with these - people actually played quite tight (which was surprising) and I lost more than I won.
I then moved on to cash games - given my big bankroll I decided 0.10/0.25 NL was a good place for me to start. I put a few hours into this over a couple days and managed to eek out about $7/hr which I guess is pretty good given the limits I was playing at. It was fun at any rate.
Yesterday I decided to try one of the larger tournaments. They didn't have addons or rebuys but they had what they called extended registration which is really just rebuys by another name. Registration stayed open for an hour and you could reenter as often as you wanted. This took us from about 2100 original players to a total of 4791 when the first hour was up. I don't remember the numbers after that but by the end of 3 hrs I was in the money with 720 people left. After 4 hours we were under 100 players and I had actually been as high as 12th place at one time. During that 5th hour it was obvious my luck was running cold at the wrong time. I couldn't get any cards and the blinds were now in the 3k/6k to the 5k/10k range. I went out in 51st place at about 4hrs 40mins.
It was kind of neat to play the bigger tournament, especially when you are winning. It turned out that 51st place was worth $8.86. The tournament after all had only cost $1.10 to play. ;-)
By the sounds of it I am back playing poker, slowly, and back writing my blog.. Slowly..
To drive the final nail in the coffin and all that, I decided to revisit online poker playing last week and sure enough the urge to blog about it came with - the proof being this entry right here.
Given the challenge of getting money into poker sites now days I finally figured out the trick and used the eCheck mechanism that Pokerstars supports. My original intent was to use a check from one of my Canadian accounts but I discovered that Pokerstars assumes that if you live in the US, you would only have checks from US accounts. They are wrong but after a conversation with support, I realized that this was too difficult a thing to ask of them. They do support checks from Canadian banks if you live in Canada tho. :P
So last week I managed to get $100 into my Pokerstars account (which is the max you can write your first eCheck for) and decided to get back into the game. I had always liked S&Gs, so I tried a couple of a format I hadn't seen before. They are called Double or Nothing - basically 10 person S&Gs where the top 5 win double the entry (minus the rake). I found I had mixed success with these - people actually played quite tight (which was surprising) and I lost more than I won.
I then moved on to cash games - given my big bankroll I decided 0.10/0.25 NL was a good place for me to start. I put a few hours into this over a couple days and managed to eek out about $7/hr which I guess is pretty good given the limits I was playing at. It was fun at any rate.
Yesterday I decided to try one of the larger tournaments. They didn't have addons or rebuys but they had what they called extended registration which is really just rebuys by another name. Registration stayed open for an hour and you could reenter as often as you wanted. This took us from about 2100 original players to a total of 4791 when the first hour was up. I don't remember the numbers after that but by the end of 3 hrs I was in the money with 720 people left. After 4 hours we were under 100 players and I had actually been as high as 12th place at one time. During that 5th hour it was obvious my luck was running cold at the wrong time. I couldn't get any cards and the blinds were now in the 3k/6k to the 5k/10k range. I went out in 51st place at about 4hrs 40mins.
It was kind of neat to play the bigger tournament, especially when you are winning. It turned out that 51st place was worth $8.86. The tournament after all had only cost $1.10 to play. ;-)
By the sounds of it I am back playing poker, slowly, and back writing my blog.. Slowly..
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