Jay311md 4 - Donks 1

I've played in 5 home games now, over the past month and a half. I have won 4 of them, and lost 1 due to my own stupidity. If only I didn't push with AK against a really tight player. So, all is going great. The one I won last night was really great though.

So my sister in law calls me and asks if I want to play in a little home game they were getting together. So I decided that I needed to stretch my poker muscles and not just sit around and bitch about not playing. Things were going great for the first hour. I was slowly chipping up and had a little lead. Then I overplayed KK against a huge donkey. The table had been playing extremely weak-passive and very, very loose. They would limp just about every hand. Against players like that, you have to play position and wait for the right spots. They will call raises with all kinds of goofy hands and push with second or even third pair. SO I get KK and raise the 5 limpers. Sure enough, two of them call. The flop comes 8-4-4. Player out of position overbets the pot by 2X's. I call in position. The turn brings a 9. He bets even bigger, I shove in and he calls. He tables A4...GG me. So I had to rebuy.

From there, I just couldn't really pick up many hands, and went to my small ball approach. Basically, I would raise a lot of hands from the hijack, cutoff and button, and look to catch some reads. If I got any resistance, I would shut down. So I kept my chips around 20,000, but couldn't seem to get anything going. Long story short, we get down to 3 handed and I'm the super small stack. I still have about 20,000 and the other two each have about 90-100,000. The loose idiot makes a move with QJ off out of position in a raised pot and went broke to the nut flush. So I'm now heads up with an 11:1 chip deficit.

I had caught a few reads on my opponent, and had some good opportunities to double through. The first one came down like this. I only have about 10 BB's left. He flat calls, I check in the BB. The flop comes K-10-8, giving me a 10 with no kicker. I check it to him and I catch the read I had on him. He bets the flop, and I check raise him all in. He calls and tables J9 for the straight draw. He gets no help and I double through. We play a few hands and I take a few pots down. I'm now sitting at about 45,000. I get AK and he flat calls on the button. The blinds are 1,000-2,000 with a 300 ante. I raise OOP to 7,000. He flat calls. The flop comes 10-8-4 with two clubs. I bet about 2/3 the pot, he flat calls. The turn brings a Queen. I check with the intention of calling, depending on his bet. He checks behind, very interesting. He was an aggressive player and would have bet just about any hand, except for a draw. He would have bet any pair, but with one card to come I think my read and double would have made him check a draw and hope to get there. The river brings another 8. I check it to him and he shoves all in. Holy ape shit. Again I had caught a few reads on him and went through the hand in my head. There really wasn't any kind of hand that made sense. I decided to go with my read and my instincts and called. He showed A9 suited for just a flush draw, and I doubled through again with AK high.

So we play for another hour and a half, and I slowly chip him down. I knew once I doubled through the first time that I had the advantage. So I ended up pushing him with small raises and cbets. If he played back, I would re-evaluate and either fold or look to get good pot/implied odds. The final hand was pretty standard. Button shove with Q8 off, and I called with A3 suited. No pairs hit and Ace high was good. Not a bad result, so I need to keep it up.

I have been watching a lot of videos on Poker VT. Boosted J's videos were kind of boring and he played really poorly, I thought. Hopefully his next videos will be better, because he is a good player and I was not impressed with the sessions he was putting together. JC Alvarado is a great cash game player. His videos were quite informative and impressive. But the coup de grats was Negreanu's Small Ball videos. By far worth the price of admission. I am going to go through and review them one more time. They are so great.

There's a few players blogs that I wonder why they took them down. Goldseraph and Jimmythehat19 I'm looking in your directions. I looked forward to reading your musings, rants, and bragaments. Wonder what happened to the "great" Jimmy. He didn't lack for confidence, but for some reason he took his blog down....hmmm.

Getting Back on Track

I'm back, and ready to start playing again. I had Pokeroffice for a long time, and loved the program. I thought it was great and was very useful. That was until I found Hold'em Manager. Hold'em Manager is an unbelievable program. It has a much better interface and HUD. It has stats that PO didn't have, such as three bet/four bet percentage, and a lot of other ones to gauge how passive or aggressive your opponents are playing. So I decided to buy the new program, and now I just have to get it set up. I need to set up the HUD with the right stats and filters. So it may take a little while until everything is tweaked to my liking, but at least I'm getting back into the game.

I haven't played any poker since my last blog. It's been about 2+ months now. I didn't feel the urge or fire to play. But I'm getting back into the groove. I also joined Poker VT. Poker VT has been wonderful so far. I am a big advocate of small ball, and there is nothing better than learning how to play from some great players, like Daniel Negreanu, Paul Wasicka, and JC Alvarado. Boosted J and Adam Junglen, as well as the one and only Annette_15 are associated with the site. I have been going through some of the beginning strategy videos ad some of the thought analysis hands. So far it has been not only entertaining, but also very informative. I took the test of poker knowledge, and did worse than I thought I would do. SO I am going to take it again and start to focus on the areas that I didn't score very well in. So everything is coming together on the poker front.

Well, now that I think about it, I have played in a few home games over the past month. I played in four home games. I won the first three outright, then finished in fourth in the last one. The first three were cake walks. Not because my competition was totally useless, some of them were. But I was playing my A game. I was making timely bluffs and three bets, and didn't have to show down many hands. I knew I could make some moves and had some very solid reads on the players. However, I forgot that I was playing against some very rank amateurs. Here's a perfect example. Against loose passive players, who usually raise minimum or limp too much, I like to take suited connectors and small pairs to flops a lot more often even if I'm out of position. SO I limp 67 suited in second position. Sure enough, most of the table limps behind. The flop comes 66K. Great flop for my hand. But I got lost in the fact that the player in the squeeze could have had a bigger 6. We get it all in, three way, on the turn to see the following hands. I have 67, the player behind has 610, and the player on the button has K5??? I know. That's a lot of action for some crap hands. I wasn't too proud of the way I played that night and just wrote it off as a bad night and just plain poor play. I couldn't catch a hand to save my life, c'est la vie.

So I'll be getting back to the grindstone real soon. I'm almost done with Professional Hold'em. As soon as I finish that book, I'll be starting Harrington on Cash Games. I got both Volume I and II. So hopefully I can be done with those in no time.

I've been married for about 2 months now. It's been great. We are getting a couple of dogs in the not too distant future. She wants to get a golden retriever and I want to get another beagle. We already have the names picked out. She wants to name hers Molly, and I'm thinking about either Fred for a boy, or Aliza for a girl. I'm a big Audrey Hepburn fan, and my first beagle was named Audrey. SO I thought it would be kind of cool to either name the new one after another character of hers, Aliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady, or Fred, the name of her brother in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Holly Golightly also named George Pappard's character Fred. So that's about all that's new on this front. I have taken on a couple of students from work and am trying to get a regular game together.