Sick Poker Here

I came down with a slight cold over the weekend. Nothing more than a mild sore throat and some headaches. Enough that I decided to stay home on Monday to rest up and recuperate.

And by “rest up and recuperate”, I mean “spend the day playing poker”.

With the whole day free, I was able to invest as much time as needed for MTTs. I haven’t played a lot of tournaments these days – mostly SNGs – since I can’t start them until almost 8pm on most nights, not to mention that my bankroll can’t really supports a whole lot of MTTs right now. But I found an early starting one that was right up my alley – a $10 superstack tournament.

I held my ground for a while, building my stack to somewhere around 16k a couple hours in, thanks to two hands in particular: catching my flush OOP and getting paid from a set that couldn’t fold & TP2K against AA that turned into quads by the river. However, I got too aggressive and lost a good portion of my chips on a resteal. Here’s where I welcome some comments.

Folds to CO who pops to 720 at 240/120/25. I didn’t have much of a read on him but didn’t think he was too strong – this was the 2nd straight time he’d open-raised from the CO. I try to resteal with J8c for 2300. He calls.

Flop is K43 rainbow. I c-bet for 3300 into a approximately 5k pot. He raises, I fold. He tells me AK; based on later play, I believe him.

I’m trying to improve my aggressiveness and steal more pots – was my mistake here in my read (or making a play without a stronger read) or was it in my execution of the resteal? If he truly did have AK, then obviously he wasn’t folding. However, I put him a range of AK-AT, and pairs JJ>. I fully expected a repop with AA or KK, maybe even AK, so I feel like my c-bet was good considering. Thoughts?

......

The day wasn’t entirely fruitless. I crashed and burned in an O8 MTT when I got moved to a table that decided to play 4-card bingo. Ended up going out when a bigstack felt a call was warranted with JT88 vs 2 all-ins. His straight got there on the river. Woot.

However, I decide to play a superturbo for entry into FTOPS #1 on a whim. Top 3 paid a $216 seat, and I outlasted 55 other pushmonkeys to win one of them. I’m in no shape to play an FTOPS event right now, so I immediately unregistered. The $216 in $T is almost double my bankroll right now, so that’s a nice little pick-me-up. I’ll continue to grind out some SNGs to see if I can turn that into real money without paying 5% commission.

......

I suppose I should join the bandwagon and comment on Rush Poker. It’s cool, but I suck at cash games right now anyways, and even at the lowest buyin, my bankroll only represents about 12-13 buyins. It’s not for me right now – maybe later.

‘til next time.