Res Ipsa Poker

Not a good weekend of pokering.

I can live with the out of the money finishes in the WPBT-related events. Poorly played. I got knocked out of the Shootout after getting my money in as a 70-30 favorite. I'm less happy with flaming out of a PLO tournament on Friday when things had been going well.

And I'm just plain ticked at limit poker. I decided to play a little LHE last night, and promptly managed to drop 25 BB in no time, bringing my current downswing at that game to something in the vicinity of minus 150 BBs.

{Rant Mode ON}

I'm mystified. In theory you should stand a reasonable chance of winning a hand when you raise preflop with a strong starter, narrowing the field to one opponent. And yet there those Party Poker whizzes go, calling the raise with QTo or 43o, calling down with a turned third pair, mediocre kicker or a rivered bottom 2 pair, which of course ends up being better than what I'm holding -- my representation of a monster hand means absolutely nothing. Call, call, catch. I may have been a sizable favorite preflop, but at these tables it's about catching cards, and I've been catching air. While my opponents make runner-runner straights and flushes, blah blah blah. You've heard it all before.

{Rant Mode OFF}

Just blowing off steam.

Anyway, I capped things off lsat night by donating a micro-NL buyin to Joanne at a blogger table. I decided to see if I could move her off her flopped baby set when a J hit the turn -- I'd raised preflop with KK, and was curious to see if representing JJJ might get her to lay down.

The answer: Nope!

Joanne > Me. (Duh.)

Hey, at least I had an accurate read on what she had.

The thing is, if I'm not on massive tilt -- this hand happened immediately after someone caught a gutshot (heads up, there were NO odds to draw to that) on the river to take the last of my limit buyin -- I probably don't event consider making this move. Oh well. I will say that it was interesting to try it.

Anyhow, that was an obvious sign that I needed to surrender to the poker gods and head off to bed. So I did, bringing to a close to a weekend of tilt.

****

I have no idea what the coming week holds. I'd been considering just taking a few days off and I may well end up doing that. Then again, there are a ton of bonus offers out there -- some reload bonuses (Party, Stars, maybe Full Tilt), and Titan has sent me a couple of invitations to sizable freerolls if I play enough raked ring game hands in November. I may take a shot at clearing the necessary play for all of these at low level NL, since I think with proper table selection I can survive.

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Congratulations to those bloggers who had a very nice weekend crushing the tournaments!