Worst(Best) Player Ever

So yesterday I had the unique pleasure of playing with the worst player ever. I mean a guy who would call large bets with any two cards, would call down with 9-high, and would make obvious small bluffs.

I wish I could say that I cleaned him out, but I didn't. I had an average night, which is fine. I'm shooting for being up 2 buy-ins a session overall, and so far I've been doing so. I made one real donkey call the whole night and I lost some making small adjustments (I was working on finding an optimal strat against this guy). I wasn't really getting any great starting hands (I think JJ was my highest pair) or suckouts. I just simply grinded it out. Not the most fun way, but it beats working. Which I have today.

Oy.

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.

Weekend Wrap-up

So I didn't play on Friday. I was feeling tired and out of it and after hanging around the house for a bit, I decided to not go. After the losing session I had the night before, I felt that I should play my next session with my A-game.

On Saturday, I got a good night's sleep, which is rare (even though I don't have anything to do every day until at least 3:30, I still get up early. It can be nice, but it's annoying when I'm only at 5 hours of sleep). I went off-roading and checked out a national park. I have some pictures (and the correct spelling of the park), so I'll post those later. One of them has to do with poker in an odd sort of way.

So I got home, got some dinner and I ended up watching the WPT. It was the Shooting Stars tournament from this year and Ted Forrest was at the table. He was masterful. When people call NL an art, you need to watch Ted play to know what they mean. It got me pumped up to play. It also helped that I was flipping though NL Holdem: Theory and Practice earlier, so my mind was in the game.

So I get to card club and I had a pretty good session. I'll admit that I got lucky a few times, but I really played well. I had AK twice and I played them both perfectly, moving in with the first one preflop and calling down with the 2nd one. My style worked well and I played the hands well. I manipulated my opponents and the pots. There was one hand I could have played for a much bigger pot, but I didn't expect the guy to check top set against my (hidden straight). I got some value on the river that brought a 3rd club, but I could have won a lot more.

So I'm +6 buyins for the night, which makes me +4 for the week. It's about what I want to average, especially since I don't play that long (my average session is around 5 hours). There's talk of having the club open for more days beyond Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I'm not sure about it because I would like to play more, but having this limit on my play is a nice little bit of artificial balance in my week.