A Tale of Two Cities

It was the worst of times and the best of times... Ok.. I reversed it.. get over it..
Anyway, as previosuly mentioned, Mrs Wonka was out for the evening at some scrapbook convention and baby Wonka was with the grandparents....so I talked my brother into visiting our local Harrahs. Now, I know going in that this is pretty much No Fold'em poker.. especially at the 3/6 level. My brother was late arriving so I just dove in.

My first hand.. in the BB was 8h6h.. I think there were 57 callers... ok, not that many... we'll just say over half. I flopped an OESD and flush draw and bet out.. for whatever reason, I wanted to have a betting rep... well, I got raised... hmmm... pushing around the new guy.... reraise.... and he just called... turn... nothing... checked around to the button... will I get a free card... nope.. bet... I just called.. maybe raising is better.. I don't know.. anyway.. didn't hit and I'm down after one hand... The short of it was that after about 3 hours, I lost my buyin of $100. The big hand (and a very good lesson) was when I got AK on the button... flop... 8A8... everybody checks and I bet.. raise and a call... I just called.. turn brought no more help and EP led out and then gets raised by Mr 80% VPIPer. Yikes.. can one them possibly be holding an eight. I called and got no more help on river... I called down their raises and they both had an eight. A very good lesson on falling in love with hands when it is blatantly obvious that you are beat. I will attribute it being "out of my element" at live play. Now, back to Mr 80%. I would normally say that this is as fishy as it gets; but my read was that he was an excellent post flop player and drug a bunch of pots when he smelled weakness. I guess it helped that he was getting full houses with 62 (out of position), flushes with Q6 and J5, etc, etc. I drug 2 pots the entire evening.. Once my Aces held up.. and once my KQ wasn't called on the river... I had totally missed but didn't get called. I was 0-2 with Big Slick. I will say, however, that I did enjoy it.

Well, my brother finally did show up.. and proceeded to double his buyin within 15 minutes.. helped by a flopped full house with 6 people following along. I left by then.. and I hope he didn't give any or much of it back. We are playing in a home tourney in a couple weeks with a $100 buyin.. so he made his buyin.. so I hope he left shortly after I did.

So, I can home and fired up a couple of tables of Party... Ahhh... back to my safe haven of online poker... even better were the cards I was getting.. I played just under an hour... and was..

4-4 with AK
2-2 with KK
2 -2 with TT... now you know something is going right
2 -2 with 66... pinch me
2 - 2 with AQ... now, I know I am dreaming

I could go on... just one of those nights... to the positive.

Here are some of the stats:

VPIP - 27.63
PFR - 14.47
WSD - 31.91
W$SD - 86.67
bb/hr - 43.34
$ - +397.25

Boy, you have sessions like that and you just don't want to quit... but I don't want to get greedy.

I also finally fired up my IM and chatted with the SNG challenge folks for a while (GCox, Kipper and TripJax). Thanks for letting me into your world.. albeit just for a short time. I'm looking forward to the upcoming Heads Up Challenge.