Simple Poker Logic

So Im on a business trip when I see a casino with a live donkament €100 in. I have never played live poker before (home games aside) so I figure I better get my feet wet sometime.

The donkament starts and it quickly becomes clear that this is a local reg fest and I’m struggling to learn how to play live (seriously). Thankfully the dealers are excellent (well they made zero mistakes and the game moved well) and the natives seem accustomed to noobish fish such as myself not knowing what to do.

In the first hour I manage to
(1) Limp UTG three times thinking I’m in the BB (the dealer says “100″ or whatever the bb is and I think he means for me to post the blind)
(2) Open fold KK in the SB, I thought I was the BB getting a walk. I was like WTF!! inside when the dealer moved the pot to the guy to my left but thankfully I realised what happened before I made a total fool of myself. Interestingly the BB flashed an Ace after I folded and I later thought if he had of showed AA that I could have showed my KK for the most awesome soul read ever.
(3) Blinds 150/300 and I repeatedly attempt to raise by putting 1k chip in without saying anything. Apparently this counts as a call, learned after the third time.
(4) Eventually give up trying when the chips/antes get messy and let the dealers do most of it (sorry dealers).

Thankfully everyone sucked balls and their main strategy seemed to consist of rolling their eyes and mucking in disgust quite often. Rawr FU I thought building a stack and settling nerves (I’m a very big introvert so I actually hate crowds and get weirded out sometimes). I got the feeling I was already getting the image of table monkey.

Halfway through a guy gets moved to the table and raises 5/6 hands, he and I are chip leaders and I decide to open a can of 3-bet on him with A9 about 40bb deep (lol donkaments) figuring… well **** figuring….. you work out the math.
So he tanks for ages and flats OOP flop A92, he donks into me and already I’m almost wetting myself in anticipation if this gets to showdown, I flat turn A and it goes c/c, river J he shoves I snap and he says “Sorry big lad…. JJ” I say nothing and turn over A9 and watched a cascade of jaws drop – I really think none of them had ever seen a light 3-bet before (this theory was re-inforced when I overheard a discussion of how me and some old guy overplayed JJ/AK AIPF for a whopping 30bb).

“Nice hand well played” as he walked away, I knew what he meant and it gave me a warm feeling inside.

So basically I run them over with my massive amount of tournament knowledge based on playing (not beating, playing) $5.50 SNGs 3 years ago – live players are no match for that level of know how.

Once in the money and down to avg stack of 14bb with antes I go into hyper mode but restrain myself by checking that I always have 1 card above 9 or a pair before I shove.
My favourite hand of the night was 4 handed when an otherwise pleasant young lady opened the button for 3bb and KQo was all I needed. She tanks for like 5 minutes and mutters about “moves” and eventually (lol) calls with AJ which is ahead of my range nevermind pot odds.
Of course I’m running hot and bink a QQx flop, I can honestly say I felt almost no emotion on the flop I’m very good about not sweating the board or caring about results. However when the young lady half shouts half cries (i.e. is nearly in tears)“I have been watching you all night and your the biggest ****ing donkey I have ever seen” I get a sudden swell of schadenfreude, which when mixed with copious amounts of alcohol and winning what’s now decent prize money is a fine cocktail of emotion if I’m honest.

So I shove and luck box my way to first place which is worth ~$3k.

Cliffs -
- Alcohol.
- Random Donkament.
- SS cant play live.
- All in.
- LOL live players.
- All in.
- LOL donkaments.

Poker has taken a back seat with some more important real life stuff to the fore. Preparing to settle back into the grind now – so I will be online a lot more . Volume remains the main problem poker-wise, I’m pretty happy with how I’m playing and the results, I’m enjoying my poker but I remain cautious about moving up. I’m 99% sure I can beat 400NL if I can find the grind (and not raid my roll so often) so the goal is for the end of September to top up my roll by 3k  and put myself in a position to steam ahead at midstakes for the rest of the year.

Also I’m trying my best to get something sorted so I can play on an iphone/blackberry while out and about. I spend way too much time waiting around for meetings and stuff that I could put to good use.

Recent Results: I have been probably over cautious by either not playing at all or not playing challanging stakes when I’m not feeling A+ (which was most of the past couple months) , nothing to shout about but something to build on.

My latest video is up over at DC, 200NL on the  ongame network.

The intention was for it to be a HH review of DCer’s hands from the forum but the schedule was changed leaving me one day to get something in the can. My next vid definitley will be a HH replayer so if you have any interesting hands and want some free analysis,  just email me the following:

- Full Raw HH

- Description of your image

- Stats/Reads on all the villians

- Table history/dynamic if relevant

- Your thought process at the time.

Send as many as you like and if you want to be kept anon just let me know. gogogogo. Email everything to soundedsimple@deucescracked.com

Volume sucked, partly due real life stuff and partly due to ongames software update (ugggh).

Hopefully I can find the grind in July.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quwebVjAEJA&annotation_id=annotation_367358&feature=iv

If it is then I’m supposed to write interesting stuff here right?

Well ongame have decided to unleash the only software bad enough to make me pine for the old one, if you ever played the old one you will know how bad this new one must be.

So no way of tiling tables, crappy graphics that you cant mod, cards and dealer buttons that you cant see, reloads that dont work and HEM hasn’t caught up making it impossible to multitable. So I’musing the time to work on the site and I may have to get stuck into some Heads Up grinding as thats the only game I think I could play on that dumb interface.

I’m not much of a blogger but I might post random poker musings here as well as anything interesting that might happen.

Yay, I’m only about 4 years behind but now I have my site up and running. The main goal is to allow easy access to information for my poker students in the “Student Resource” section, students can find poker articles, quizzes and homework assignments here.

Anyhow, bear with me while I get the hang of all this.