Studly Stud and Viral Videos

Well, time for a quick update on the week in poker…

First and foremost is the status of YIPES, which fared fairly well these past seven days. I’m up about $10 in total for the week, with only one significantly bad losing day. For each of the other six days I posted net daily gains, with the biggest score coming on Thursday, when I played two $1+.20 SnGs and won them both outright. Woo hoo! The next day, however, I tried the same feat, and quickly lost two games in a row, and then donked away another buck in a 2/4-cent cash game. Part of the problem was Success Syndrome, as I took some unnecessary gambles in both SnGs and paid dearly for them. The cash game loss was tilt, plain and simple; two quick knockouts in the SnGs should have sent me packing, instead I said “screw it” and chased all kinds of marginal hands in the limit game. Sigh.

Yesterday (Saturday) I didn’t have time to play very much, so finding 1.5 hours or so for a SnG was out. I was also a little burned out on Hold’em, so I answered the call of the Stud Siren and played maybe 40 hands in total of hi/lo. The second hand into the session I picked up (6-6)5 which isn’t a great starting hand, but with six limpers ahead of me I made the call. The next up card brought the third 6, and I raised my well-disguised set and got a couple of callers. It got much, much better when fifth street delivered the case 6 to my hand. The pot was huge, and with my quad sixes I just kept ramming and jamming. Unfortunately, holding quads forgoes the possibility of having a low hand, too, and I ended up splitting the $2.40 pot with another guy who rivered the low. Oh well, I wasn’t complaining too much, as my share of the booty was a tidy $1.20. Following that auspicious start, I then went into patient mode, waiting for solid starting hands…and it paid off almost immediately. I hit the wheel straight for a scooped pot, then hit a flush on the river a few hands later to scoop another pot (no low in that hand). A couple more wins and I exited the game a net winner of $2.30. Not too shabby. I felt pretty good about my play, although I realize that everyone feels like the best player in the world when they’re picking up good cards. Still, I am convinced that the micro-stakes stud games are very soft on PS, and as long as I Wait For Good Cards and I Get Off Losing Hands, I think there’s some decent money to be made there.

Which brings up the topic of hold’em on PS. I can’t seem to post a winning session in the 2/4-cent cash games lately to save my life. Dunno what the problem is, but I’m struggling. Maybe with my $50+ bankroll, my psyche just isn’t into playing those lower stakes anymore. Hard to say, but it does kinda feel like I have to move up to get my game back on track and force me to focus a bit more. I may start playing some 5/10-cent cash games this week and see how it goes. I will definitely hit the SnGs a few times, too, as I still feel that I play my best poker at NL single tables.

In other news, I only played a handful of times on FTP: two $2 SnG wins and one short $1/2 limit cash game session for a small win. Oh, I also got “volunteered” by the guru to play some $.50/1.0 limit in front of the Tuesday night poker class. Unfortunately, in thirty quick hands we (I) took a couple of beats and lost a fairly significant chunk of change. As a result, my net profit on FTP for the week was something like fifty cents total in the black. Sigh.

In non-play poker news, I discovered the game show network online has all the complete episodes of its popular High Stakes Poker series, where well-known players (Negreanu, Harmon, Deeb, Brunson, et al) play NL cash poker with their own money. Buy-ins are on the order of $500K or so, and the cool part is that they show all the hands played out (i.e., not just the “interesting” ones, like most poker shows on TV.) Anyway, it’s fun to watch $80K won or lost on a single hand, as these pros try to get into each others’ heads. It’s also scary/amazing to watch guys like Ted Forrest put people on exact hands, time after time. There are few rich amateurs in the game, too, and it’s a kick to watch them get eaten alive by the pro sharks. Good, sobering stuff, for a wannabe WSOP player like myself.

Finally, I watched the last episode of season one of the (now defunct) ESPN drama, Tilt. I’ve been renting these episodes sporadically over the past few months via Netflix just to see what they’re all about, and it’s been, well, a kind of guilty pleasure to watch. Pretty lame acting from the cast, and the plot is fairly cheesy, but the poker is realistic and there have been a few decent casino scenes and “WSOP” action depicted. It’s also fun to spot the real pros in the background, as there are a lot of cameos from guys like Chan, Seidel, Negreanu, etc. Anyway, I watched the finale last night and they actually did a decent job of wrapping up the plot lines and setting up the following season. I’m not sure how many more seasons the series lasted, but I’ll probably continue to rent them occasionally.

And that’s….All-in for now…
-Bug