Poker is not a linear endeavor. Unlike building a house, you don’t pour a foundation, put up the frame, add the siding, and work the finishing touches until you get to the point where you have a finished product. It’s a lot more like a Sissyphean task, where you think you are making progress, only [...]
I had an interesting hand in my last $6/$12 session at Artichoke Joe’s. Before I can get to the hand, I have to set it up. It was a new table, and I was one of the last ones called. I was happy with the seat for one reason, because a layer I knew was [...]
The hand began innocently enough. After one weak player limped, a NL player who had come to our game raised. Two people cold-called, the player to my right went all-in for one bet, and I found pocket jacks on the button. With this action, I didn’t want to pump it preflop; with the players involved, [...]
I was playing the Thursday morning tournament at Artichoke Joe’s a roundup tournament where the object is not to accumulate the most chips, but the most roundup discs, each worth $40 when the tournament ends. It’s a limit tournament and it was getting to the middle rounds, when most people would be considered “short stacked.” [...]
It was an awful session. Just awful. No, I wasn’t suffering bad beats. I was just completely, utterly card dead. An hour went by and I’d done little more than post blinds. I’d seen one pocket pair (8s), and most of the rest was trash, trash, trash. I didn’t hit any of the random big [...]
Today’s roundup tournament was interesting, and not just because I finished in the money, with 5 roundup discs. No, it’s interesting because of three hands in which I got very, very lucky. I also made one bad decisions that cost me a better finish. I began the tournament completely card dead. The only hand I [...]
Poker players sometimes use the term “Hit & run” derisively to describe a player who comes in, hits big, and leaves. Such an event is more likely in no-limit, where it’s not hard to get all the money in quickly, but less common in limit, where betting is, well, limited. Yet it happened to me [...]
Last night was a good night, $170 in fewer than 3 hours. But it was made so primarily because of one hand where the pot I dragged was bigger than it probably should have been (not that I’m complaining, of course), where someone either was too stubborn, not paying attention, or just playing “pot odds.” [...]
The “experts” on poker will tell you to focus on the decision, not the result. In some forums, they take it to the extreme, mandating that posts inquiring about a play not add the results because they dont’ matter. Whil eI agree with the concept, I don’t buy this extremist view. I had a choice [...]
I’ve been reading a new book on no-limit and practicing in pot limit games, the latter both in a small, fun game on Friday evenings with co-workers and online at the micro-limit level, in part because I’d been taking a break from my “normal” cash game play after hitting a particularly bad stretch and deciding [...]