The Bankroll - July 25, 2007

This blog is about full disclosure. I had a rough weekend at the poker table. Here's the ugly truth about my bankroll - It's back to where it was before the WSOP. About $1,500. Still up for the year, but lordy. Time to grind out a few wins.

Bellagio Bust

Unlike June's wsop weekend, this month's poker experiment went horribly wrong. First off, our flight into Vegas was delayed, so I wasn't able to play the Friday Bellagio tourney. No sweat, that just meant more time to get to know my new friends Drew and Suzie. Of course I'd enter the Saturday tourney. Still a $1,000 buyin, still filled with strong players.

After 2 hours of light sleep, I got into the Bellagio around 11:30 on Saturday. Just in time to sign up for a sit-and-go single table satellite tourney. All for the low low price of $240, I could win one of two entries into the $1,000 event, awarded to the 2 finalists. If I can outlast nearly 2,800 World Series of Poker players, I could certainly beat 8 or 9 guys, right? Nope. I sucked, and busted out in 7th place. Pfffffft. I'd be paying full price for the big tournament.

So 2pm comes around and I sit down for the main event. About 50 entrants total. Once again I didn't stick to my "tight is right" strategy for the first 2 rounds, and things went badly. Within the first 10 hands, I picked up AQ in early position and raised it up. One callers, an overly-aggressive postflop player. Flop comes Queen high and I get excited. Here's the plan: I check, he bets and I come over the top just enough to squeeze a reluctant call out of him. Then of course I bring down the hammer on the turn, unless it's a King.

I check, and as planned, Mr. Aggro bets about half the pot. There's now about $700 in the middle of the table, and instead of sticking a callable raise into the pot (a $400 bet for instance), my hand inexplicably throws in $600 in chips. It's now obvious that I'm holding AA, KK, AQ or QQ. Mr. Aggro thinks for 10 seconds and mucks. I shoulda made more with this hand, but maybe panicked at the last second. Uncool.

Anyway, that was the only notable hand of the tourney, except for my final hand. After mucking 1/2 hour's worth of crap hands preflop, I found QQ from early position. I raise 4 times the big blind and a big stack reraises from the button. Bad news. He knows I'm playing tight and raising out of position. He can only have AA, KK, QQ (highly unlikely) or maybe AK suited (also unlikely). But I'm feeling unloved by the poker gods and convince myself that I need this pot to be a contender. Besides, this guy has played about 12 hands in a row. He can't always have good cards, right? Anyway, I push all-in, he insta-calls, and flips over KK. Bam. My first Bellagio event and I'm out within an hour. Someday I'll be good enough to fold the QQ preflop. But not on this day.

More on the big weekend to come...

Bellagio, Here I Come

Just booked my flight back to Vegas. Leaving on the morning of Friday, July 20. Might catch the 2pm tourney at the Bellagio. It's a weekly $1,000 buyin event. They also have one on Saturday, so who knows. Anyway, hoping to have good news to report from Sin City in a coupla weeks.

Monday Night Hit and Run in Colma

Went to Lucky Chances after work on Monday. Actually signed up for the 1-1-2 No Limit game, but there was a waiting list and I ended up at a 3-6 table. So I sit down and there are two fun-loving knuckleheads there who are just learning how to play, probably from watching tourneys on TV. They're pretty much dead in the water, 'cuz the other players at the table are leatherfaced phillipino, russian and chinese men with little compassion for beer-buzzed 23-year-olds. You can almost see them lickin' their chops. I end up with a little over $100 in profit, most of it from knucklehead #1, and blow outta colma within 2 hours.

Omaha, somewhere in middle America...

Didn't play any poker this weekend, except for a few sit-and-go Omaha tourneys online. For play money. See, I'm tryin' to learn Omaha Eights Or Better. It's a split pot game, kinda like hold 'em but played with four hole cards. Didn't think I'd like it, but it's a lot of fun. O8B is also a relatively new game on the poker scene, which means even a serious beginner can probably make a few bucks armed with just a little knowledge. I'll let you know how things go.

July 2 in Colma

OK, I returned to Lucky Chances after work. Played 3 hours of Spread Limit Hold 'Em for a total profit of... $15 dollars. OK, I didn't quite make up for the $300 hit I took on my last visit to Colma, but I did reverse the trend. And boy, was that a trend that needed reversing.

On top of that, I learned a lot. About hand selection. About blind management. About position play. And about pulling off an occasional bluff when the situation warrants it. It's all about building confidence in my cash game play.

LESSONS LEARNED:
- There's no need to protect a $2 blind, yo. It's just the price of admission.
- Poker 101 principle. Don't play the 4-5 suited without multiple customers with big stacks. You're not gonna win often, and when you do, you won't win enough to justify the play.
- Another basic law of poker - Position is everything.