Rebuilding

Hey Everyone. Thought I dropped off the face of the Earth, huh? Nope still here. I've been spending the last few weeks with my family. It's a big transition period for us. My brother just graduated high school, my sister and my mom are moving and my dad is getting shipped overseas. So a lot of changes.

I am in my heavy rebuilding phase right now. I have dropped down limits considerably just to fine tune my game and work on my leaks before I really jump back in. Trying to work on protecting myself from going broke. I am also really focusing on my tournament game. I want to be one of the best players out there so I am going to play almost every tournament I can, no matter how little the buyin is.

2 days ago, I went to this Indian Casino in Tuscon, AZ and checked out their poker room. I believe it was called Casino Del Sol. It was very nice. I signed up for the interest list for a 30/60 Mix and a 4-40 spread game. Since they don't (or can't) spread a NL game, the 4-40 was the best I was going to get. I ended up playing 3/6 while waiting. Man that was a crazy table. I took down 2 $100+ pots in a row and missed out of $50 when my Aces where cracked and I didn't know the cardroom gave $50 for that.

Once I got fed to the 4-40 table, I ended up having a great time. I had some tough hands cracked, but I was playing great and made some great reads to get max value out of my hand. But this hand is frustrating because I didn't trust my reads:

I pick up QQ UTG and I make a raise to $16. This table had been playing fairly tight and this was the kind of raise that would probably get my either heads up or in a 3 way pot. I was wrong. 3 people called and then the BB raised 40 more. I almost, ALMOST just tossed them right there. My instincts were screaming fold. Of course my stupid brain goes "You can't fold QQ" so I call.

Flop is KJx. I KNOW I'm beat. He checks and I quickly check behind him. Rag turn and he bets 20 into a 100ish pot. Instead of correctly folding I min-raise him, hoping for a cheap showdown. Of course he reraises me and I toss my hand away. He later told me he had KK and I had no reason to doubt him. That was a poorly played hand and at the very least I should have folded after that flop.

Overall, I was very hapy with my session and thought that I made some very good decisions. It's nice to get my confidence back.