How Many Roads Must a Man Walk Down?

So I go into some poker today, courtesy of Bob Dylan. Last month I bought tickets to see Bob Dylan near the Casino Del Sol in Tucson and tonight was the show. I've never listened to much Bob Dylan, but the show as pretty good. His set had a blues/rockabilly feel to it and I sure enjoyed it.

I got to the casino at 5PM and since I had two hours to kill, I played some poker. The biggest game they had going on was 2-20 spread limit, so I jumped into that. Spread limit works like this: at any time, you bet or raise anywhere between 2 and 20 dollars. So it plays a bit like a PL Game.

I played well and tripled my buy-in. There's one hand I wanted to share with you guys because I really liked my turn and river play.

There's a couple of limpers and I see TT on the button. I thought about raising, but there were a few tricky players, so I decided to limp and play it post-flop. My post-flop game is becoming really good and I actually feel better playing post-flop than preflop now, though my pre-flop game isn't bad. Usually I would raise TT in that spot almost 95% of the time, but my feel for the table just said that it felt right to limp here.

Anyways, the flop came K72. It's checked to me and I decide to check back as the SB likes make some daring moves and I want to see the turn before I make any real decisions. The turn is an off suit 9. It's checked around to be and I bet $6 into a $10 pot. The tricky small-blind makes it $16. I thought about this for a few seconds and I decided that my hand was good and I reraised the full amount, $20 more. He called that and my $20 bet on a river K. My Tens were good and I took down a nice pot. What liked about the hand was my turn thinking. I ran through my (limited) history with the player, analyzed his play and betting patterns, and made a good decision. One of the hard things to do is to get value out of mediocre hands. To do so requires some good decision making and fearlessness.

It's stuff like that that makes me like my post-flop play a lot. I'm starting to play the marginal situations really well. Say what you will about my pre-flop play with TT, but you've gotta like my turn and river play.