Thursday, January 26, 2006

Movin' On Up

You know, I gave a lot of thought to poker Tuesday night, and yesterday, and last night. So when my wife woke me up last night (pregnancy can be a real pain in the ass), I fired up Full Tilt and played some $50 NL. After playing almost 10000 hands of $25 NL, I'm only at a meager 1.47 BB/100. I know I'm a better player than that, so hey, let's move up a little and see if some of the problem is that I'm not taking the stakes seriously enough.

Many players will tell you that once you've been at a level, it's difficult to move down again significantly. If you're used to playing 10/20 LHE and playing for $300 pots, then believe me, a $20 pot at the 25s is like, well, (in the words of Josh Arieh) "tiddlywinks." Maybe some of the problem is that I've grown complacent with stakes, money, anything.

Well, on my seventh hand of $50 NL, I dropped a stack. I looked down at AK of hearts in the BB. My eventual opponent was in MP, and he min-raised to a dollar. Now, you all are well aware of how I feel about min-raises, so of course, I jack him up to $3. He re-raises me to $7.50, and I think. Hmmm. This guy is in my DB from $25 NL with a VP$IP of 72% and a PFR of 31%. His raise and re-raise means exactly what? To me, his raise and re-raise mean he has exactly two cards in front of him. So I bang him again, to $20. He then comes over the top and goes all-in for his $48 stack. Whoops. Phil Gordon says that the 4th raise means aces. What the hell does the 5th raise mean? I figure I'm only a significant dog to AA or KK, so I call. He flips over Aces. Whoops. To kick me in the junk one last time, he rivered a flush. Hey, he played a great hand.

RE-LOAD!

To make a long story short, that was by far the low point of my night. I finished up in excess of two buy-ins, once by cracking limp-called aces pre-flop with QT on an 8-9-J flop, and so-on...

It feels good to be on the plus side of the ledger again.

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