Monsters In The Closet

Not much poker news to report as I haven't been playing a lot lately. Work, wife, kids, et al have conspired to keep me from the virtual felt. The few times I have managed to play SnGs at lunch, I've had my ass handed to me in god-awful bad-beat fashion. Yesterday, for instance, I played two turbos at lunch. The first game I died three hands in when I pushed in with KK against an UTG raiser, who then called me with Q6o. Yikes! That is such horrible play on his part, but he was nonetheless rewarded for it when the Q and 6 hit on the board. The second game was similarly messed up when my flopped set was outdrawn by a runner-runner two-gapped gutshot straight. Similarly, today, I busted on the bubble when some bozo kept letting the short stack back into the game by calling shorty’s raises with hands like K2o and Q5s. Of course the shorty got there on a couple of his own garbage hands and I quickly found myself as the midget at the table. My own trash hands didn't hold up, however, and I was eliminated just out of the money.

Okay, that's the bad news. The good news is that I've continued crushing the $.25/.50 and $.50/1 limit 6max games I've been playing, which has allowed my bankroll to essentially remain unchanged day-to-day. The play down at these levels ranges from very good to truly awful. As I reported the other day, I'm finding that it really helps to just get the hell out of the tougher games after a lap or two and look for easier pickings elsewhere. Invariably, I find a game that has a fish or two donking off money and I just pick on them. Maximize your edge, or, as the old poker adage states: it doesn’t matter that you’re the tenth best player in the world if the other nine are sitting at your table.

The only other news of interest to report is that in the past three days of play I’ve picked up quad eights, quad tens, and a straight-flush. Only the eights paid me off with a significant amount of chips; the other two hands I simply couldn’t get anyone to play back at me. I have trouble with these kinds of hands. It innately feels like you should slow play and hope that the opp hits his hand big by the time you get to the river. Unfortunately, it also feels like the opp can sniff you out when you do this (especially if you’re like me and normally playing aggressively; i.e., suddenly I’m slowing down and the rest of the table has to notice this behavior change…). The alternative to slow play is to continue playing aggressively and simply hope that the opp plays back. This is probably the correct way to play a monster (the guru preaches it with his mantra: Action Begets Action), but it goes against my greedy nature. I flop Godzilla and all I can think about is trying to milk all the money I can out of the opp with it. But rarely does the opp cooperate. Sigh.

All-in for now…
-Bug