A Few Tourneys
My interest in tourneys continues to increase. I really need to order Pot-Limit & No-Limit Poker and Championship No Limit & Pot Limit Hold 'Em, mostly to improve my game but also to help me think and write more intelligibly about the subject. Right now I'm just going by experience and intuition, and don't have a solid handle on which of my plays have been smart and which have been dumb but lucky. I do feel that I'm getting better, though.

I've been playing the $5 SnGs at Absolute. Came in third in one one Thursday night, then finished out-da-money in one last night (having 2 guys on my left who seemed to enjoy reraising my blind steals kinda threw off my usual game plan), then came in second in another. I think I played really solidly in the 2nd place finish, but maybe I just had bad opponents. The heads-up play at the end went on longer than I'm used to, I think because it got down to 2 players when the blinds were still reasonable. I ended up going all in with 9s, and made my set on the flop, but my opponent's Q9 ended up becoming a straight. Oh well.

I also played in the daily $1 (+$111 added) 4pm multi-table tourney at Paradise. For the price, I think those tourneys are a great way to learn. Readers may remember that I lost my buy-in at Paradise, so where did the $1 come from? Well, B has been well doing at the Paradise ring games, and Paradise allows users to give money to other users, so she spotted me a few bucks for my $1 tourney fix. Yes, it was kind of emasculating to accept poker money from my wife after I had lost all my own on that site, thank you very much for asking.

Anyway, I finished 400-something out of 800-something, by far my worst finish yet at that tourney. Interestingly, I got KK on my very first hand and QQ on my third hand. Neither held up and together they cost me half my stack. Who really respects a big raise on the very first hand of a tourney? Nobody, that's who.
posted by James at 9:58 AM