Brutalized last night!

Well I was pretty brutalized last night at the tables. I guess it was due to come since I had been running pretty good lately. It has been a long time since I ran up against such a string of beats though and by night's end I was pretty pissed off and on full tilt. You know me..I hate flipping and prefer to be way ahead when I push all in. In every case I was well ahead until either the turn or river card and all the chips were already in the pot at that point. I was also not short on chips and had a decently healthy stack in each case so my callers were not priced in.

$5 sng double with 4 left. I have AK versus AJ. I do healthy preflop raise he calls. Ace comes on flop. We had some back and forth raises and were all in before the turn. He gets his 2 outer on the turn and I am out on the bubble.

$5 sng double with 4 left. I have A7 versus A5. He min raised PF and I called from big blind. Ace comes on flop and I push and he calls. He gets his 2 outer on the river and I am out on the bubble.

MTT tourney with 14 left and 8 get paid (74 runners). I have a slightly above average stack but we are getting close to push or fold time due to the blinds. I get AA in big blind and cross fingers someone pushes. I get my wish from someone with a slightly smaller stack than me. I would have been well in chip lead with this hand and insta-call. I find I am up against 22 and the 2 comes on the river to cripple me down to less than 2 BB. I push the next hand with A5 and A3 is priced in to call me and gets the 3 to boot me from the tourney.

I also had 3 other SNG that I crashed on where I was ahead when the chips went in but they ran me down by the river. I only cashed in one SNG for the evening and by nights end I was full monkey tilt. It was late and I had just enough wits to sign off before I really did some damage. I reviewed the hands again today to see if I could have done anything differently to induce a fold and in the 3 cases above it was destined to happen with how the hands played. A few of my other SNG I contributed by stringing them along with smallish raises and allowed them to catch up. I was pretty tired and was getting too timid and didn't stay aggressive enough when I had a hand. My bad and I paid for it. The semi good news is that I went ahead and played today and went 4 out of 5 SNG and got back over 1/2 of what I lost last night.

I AM BACK!!!

Well did Black Friday suck as bad for everyone else as it did for me?? After about an hour of being stunned from staring at the screen I kind of shrugged and told my wife I guess I was done playing online poker. I eventually cashed out my money on Stars and quit doing anything with poker. After about a year I went back on Stars and started playing play chips just for fun from time to time. I built it up to several million but play chips just didn't give me the thrill of playing so I stopped again. Then last year I started browsing online to see if any options had opened up yet and saw that there were a few small sites accepting US players. I checked them out for a few months and used play chips to get a feel for the software while checking the money side for what type of games they offered and stakes. A couple of months ago I went ahead and dropped my usual minimum deposit of $50 onto one of them and started playing again in limited amounts. The forced hiatus allowed me to look at the time I had spent playing poker (and not being with my wife and kids) versus my minimal return on my time at the micro stakes. While I had some fun playing it definitely was not worth the time away from my family. I do not play much currently and might only sign on once or twice a week for a few hours. It is truly a hobby only and I do not plan on playing any more frequent than what I currently do. This new site (I will leave it not named) does offer my double or nothing type SNG that I used to enjoy so I have continued to play those once again with good success. The games are even easier to beat now than they used to be on Stars at the micro limits. I remember running into gold and platinum players in the micro limits that used tracking software & multi-tabled like crazy on Stars and on this site so far I have not really seen the same person on multiple days. Since the site is small they do not have very many SNG's launching so I have played anything from $.50 - $5.00 depending on what is filling up and my mood on the day. I have run at nearly 40% ROI so far on the $3.00 ones which the my highest volume SNG I play (70% of all my SNG I have run). I have been playing some MTT also the past few weeks though and have had a lot of success on those. All have been very small buy-ins of $1.50 or less but I have won or placed 2nd in 6 of the 13 I have entered. The most runners was 57 in any of them though (small site like I said). I have nearly tripled my initial deposit so far with only a total tournament count (both SNG & MTT) of around 60. I might start switching from the $3 SNG to the $5 SNG but as well I am running on the $3 I am not sure if I want to move up just yet. I reviewed the weekly MTT they offer and there are some nice guaranteed low buy-in ones I am going to start taking shots at. There are three in particular I am going to look at: $.50 R & A with $500 guaranteed, $1.00 R & A with $2,000 guaranteed & $3.00 R & A with $3,000 guaranteed. The previous fields in these run around 200-400 players so they are some of the larger tournaments on this site, but nothing nearly as big as some of the Stars tourney's. I will post from time to time progress along with any interesting situations that might occur. Anyone else out there still playing domestically??
Dave