2 Bad Days, 5 Good Days

The past week started out pretty dismally, as is evident in the graph of my last seven days of play, above. I got in a little over 1700 hands, which is slightly above my new year's resolution of 1500 per week (see my last post) and I also managed to add $42 to the bankroll, so what's the problem? Unfortunately, I dug myself into a pretty deep hole the first two days, and had to spend quite a bit of time grinding just to get back to a net gain of zero. On the other hand, I feel pretty good about how I've been playing these last few days, and the results show a steady climb out of the trenches. I played very positionally, folding lots of "shiny-shiny-bright" hands in all but the last three seats. In those seats, however, I played much looser and very aggressively, hammering the blinds with hands as weak as 76s and K9o. It seemed to work, but damn those first few days of freefall were painful.

In non-cash game news, I played my first single-table SnG in weeks. It was a $2 game, and I played a very patient and tight game. My VPIP when we hit the 50/100 blinds was still in single digits. I then opened up my game and made a number of bluff/steals against a couple of the tighter players. I also tried to pay close attention to how the other players were betting, especially the guys immediately to my right and left. After 50 hands or so, it was obvious that the guy to my right limped and completed with weak hands and raised with only very strong ones, with no deviation in his play whatsoever. So when the blinds started rising, I got busy restealing from him. I also got pretty frisky when we hit the bubble, especially given how tight my three other opponents were playing. By the time we got into the money, I had T7000 or so. Two hands later, I picked up AK and reraised the weak player to my right. The guy to my left, however, had other ideas and min-raised. The weak player completed (telling me he had a weak hand). I called the min raise and the flop have me two overs and a gutterball straight draw. I checked, got min-raised again, the weak player called, and I pushed. Both guys called me! The weak player had a pair of eights, and the other guy had a set of Jacks. A Queen spiked on the river, and I won the entire hand outright with the straight. In hindsight, I'm not sure if I like my play or not with the push, but the way the chip stacks were sorted, I had the weak player (with the second largest stack) easily covered, and I knew I had at least him beat. If the other guy had a better hand than me, so be it; he'd take the main pot, but I was pretty confident the weak guy would call my shove and, given his range of hands, I felt I had a good shot at winning his side pot at least. I need to rethink this hand a bit, but overall (of course) I'm pretty happy with the results.

In other news, the wife and I went to the local used bookstore today, where I purchased a couple of poker books. One is High-Low-Split Poker, by Ray Zee, and focuses on seven card stud hi/lo and Omaha eight or better. The second book is Seven Card Stud for Advanced Players, by Sklansky, Malmuth, and Zee. Given my current backlog of poker books to wade through, it might be a month or two before I get to reading them.

All-in for now...
-Bug