Another Day, Another Dollar (I'm liking this semi-pro stuff)

              It is now 4:00am, and, whew! What a day! Lots of ups and downs. This morning started shaky, with a $5, 25K guarantee on Poker Stars. Horrible beat right on the bubble hand. I opened with KK from the highjack, got called by the BB. Flop came 8 4 10. Checked to me, I led out with a ½ pot bet. BB snap shoved. He’d been playing spewey and already made this move three times in the past three orbits, sucking out twice to amass a large stack. I thought for about .062 seconds, called and fist-pumped when I seen he was holding 55 (figured him for something low and crappy :) ). Unfortunately the river was unkind to me and brought out another 5 to end my tourney. It was at that point I remembered that I had not made my $100 monthly deposit @ Full TIlt, so I shut down PS, opened FUll TIlt, did that, and waited for my lovely wife to return home.

                I took a break, greeted my wife, made dinner and fired up Full Tilt. First game in was a $2, 27 player SNG. I’ve been playing a lot of these lately, mostly because the $2 MTT are such a long grind and the selection among them is slim midday. Having some decent results in the SNG’s, but I was getting tired of monkey’s re-popping me with any suited or any Ax hand, just bloating the pot and practically making it a BINGO game.  I played 4 before I had enough of that shit.

              Now that I have a large enough 'roll to comfortably mave up, I am. Good-bye $2 donkeys! I played the $5 games a year or two ago before I busted my ‘roll on MTT, so I was familiar with the type of play there. First game in I cashed for 4^th making up the losses I incurred in the $2 games.  I was then fired up enough to play 8 more, ending the night with a little over $40 profit. Not too bad, if I do say so myself. Would have been more, but myself and my opponent decided to chop the last one. We were heads up for a few hands, just trading blinds. We were both only 20BB deep at that point, it just turned 4am, and the 4 way battle lasted nearly an hour. We were both tired so we just chopped it up. I don’t mind chopping every now and then. Of course, I felt I was the better player, but at that point it was just a matter of who caught the cards and hit the flop.

                Remember how I said I was opening up my 3 and 4 bet ranges? Working like a charm. I have also been working on my blind defense skills, and have been paying a lot more attention to board conditions when faced with a blind on blind situation, and adjusting to a LP raiser’s range in correlation with my own hand when I am raised on in my BB. I was able to take down a few tasty pots early in my last game by doing so, and I like the feeling of not just folding my blinds if I don’t have a top 10% or mid suited connector hand. Like I said in an earlier post, my range was becoming to polarized in certain positions and I was hurting because of it. I’m not saying everything’s changed in just a few short days, but it is getting better.

                So, after a total of 14 hours of play in the last 24, I’m dog tired. Get my 8 hours sleep and it’s back at it again tomorrow. I'm only 6 playing days into the month (didn't play on the weekend) and I'm already up $71 this month.  Tomorrow is going to be a good day, I can feel it!