I had an interesting and nicely profitable weekend playing poker. I didn’t plan it this way–no way was I thinking I was ready–but I ended up tackling my first $15/$30 game, my first foray into the realm of middle-limit poker, and came out unscathed.
There’s no telling what the future might bring should I decide to remain in the realm, but that’s a future story.
I got to Artichoke Joe’s quite a bit earlier than usual, thanks to a work event that ended early, and found that while there was the usual wait for a $6/$12 seat, there were seat open at one of the three $15/$30 tables. Because I’d played so well the previous week at $6/$12 with a newly tightened game, I decided to risk $500 and see if I could swim with the higher-limit sharks.
The risk turned out to be rewarding, to the tune of more than $100 over about 7 hours. It was also my first experience in a must-move game.
Apparently, it’s unusual to get a 3rd table going at that limit, so we played shorthanded for awhile, and the game even stopped for a bit when we got down to 5 players and one player refused to play with just 5.
I was a bit nervous about having to move, and having to get used to a new set of players, but then I realized that I’d likely only have to get used to some players, because some of the players at the new table would have been moved before, and I would have played against them before.
The $15/$30 game was nearly as passive/loose as my favorite $6/$12 games. I ended up three seats to the right of a player who raised close to 50% of the time preflop. By staying with just premium hands almost all the time, I was able to successfully neutralize that tactic. And when I finally made it to the main table, he was on my immediate right, an even better situation.
I did so well Friday night that I went back on Saturday. Unfortunately, I was playing, I think, about my B+ game. I still won, but much less.
I should note here that my “A” game is probably about the equivalent of Chris Ferguson’s C- game….
I played one hand at the main table way too passively and paid for it. At this table, I was seated with a massive chip stack, about $3000, on my immediate right. It soon became obvious that this was a player who made a lot of loose calls and then picked up a lot of pots with some post-flop aggressions. He also raised with less-than-premium hands.
In this hand, he raised in early position. I found A-10 offsuit and cold called the raise. Another one or two callers, and then a blind hand re-raised, another player who tended to be over-aggressive with less-than-premium hands, especially small and middle pairs. Everyone called.
The flop came 10-high rainbow. The blind raiser led out. It was folded to me, and here’s where I made my mistake.
I had top pair, top kicker. I needed to find out where I really stood. But instead of raising, I just called. Everyone else folded and left us heads up. The turn and river brought blanks, and each time he bet and I called. He turned over pocket queens for a nice pot.
A raise on the turn bet likely would have brought a reraise but the blind hand, and I could have gotten off my TPTK cheaply. Or at least I’d like to think I could have read the situation correctly and mucked. But that fact was, I dorked off a bunch of money on this hand by failing to act properly on the flop.
Still, although I’ve seen some wildness at this level of games, they weren’t too wild for the most part while I was sitting it. The Friday night game began to get a bit wild late, and that’s when I decided to call it a night.
But I continue to find that the most profitable playing style seems to be tight-aggressive, and I’m looking forward to seeing if that continues to be a winning style at the $15/$30 level.