Lots to discuss. I had a crazy week. I’ve played a ton of hands and moved up stakes. I am close to doing it again, as long as the Force stays with me. I had some losing sessions along with some winning sessions. I also got money from 3 different sources to keep me from dropping back down in stakes during these last 4 days off. I had some crazy swings.
Night 1 - I was at $800 the 1st night when I got off of work due to Bro’s HORSE win so I started at $100NL for the first time during this comeback. I really passed through the $50 stakes very quickly. Hopefully I never look back and see them again. I got a little help from my Bro’s Horse win that night to keep me art the $100 tables. I only ended up winning $37 instead of $167 due to a loss of $130 that night. But even though I was pissed about my shitty night’s work, overall I did make money that night.
Night 2 - I was going to have to start the next night on the $50 tables because I was so close to $700 again, but during the daytime my Bro played enough to get me my referral $100 bonus for bringing him over to Tilt. (I knocked out my whole 1000 points the night prior. He needed 500 to fulfill his part of the deal and had some computer issues and ended quitting at 99% complete with a mere 6 points left.) So while I was running around during the day, his single ass was playing and got me back up around $800, so I could continue at the $100 stakes for another night. I ended up making close to $200 that night, although I made a few bad plays and calls. For the most part I did play solid poker.
Night 3 - The next night I made over $100, bringing me to around $1100. I was up to $1275 at one point during that night’s session. I once again made a few iffy calls and bad plays. I starting tilting somewhat after these hands and lost more due to more bad calls and chasing with bad odds, seeking those lost profits back.
Night 4 – This night hurt horribly. I got smacked for my second worse night ever. If I keep moving up stakes, I will surely lose more in a session due to the buy-in, though it will be a smaller percentage of my BR at that point for the same reason. But at this point, it feels like an arm and a leg, when I was already a paraplegic. I lost $350 this night. I got a few bad beats, but this night was due more to second best hands were you pretty much are guaranteed to put in a big portion or all of your stack. I got smacked with a flush-over-flush. I took a set-over-set for a dry-humping that hurt deep inside, and I likely won’t shit right for a week. I also got a cracked set when the board brought a turn and river same-suit flush for a guy that couldn’t get away from TPSK. This all happened in the same night, so I can’t really be surprised that I took a beating here. I did some tilting and also won some big pots to stay close to even other than the aforementioned losing hands.
The one solace, although I’m in no way happy about, is that I didn’t totally tilt and lose as much as my bro. He fell into an almost bottomless trap of mostly his own making and trying to take me with him for the fall, to which I luckily am almost immune. We decided that day that we were going to do the ole split our winnings deal like before. (You know, where he ended up $750 for the session and I end up a mere $52. So I reaped the benefit lopsidedly that night getting $375 from him and making him a cool $26 LOL.) But really it is truly a win-win situation in a way. Yes you lose some earnings if you win more than the other guy, but you still have the extra security of gaining some money even if you have a bad session. But sometimes both lose and all the losses are of your own, which is the way this session ended for us.
He had a nice session going before I got on that night to play. He was already up $400 or so and on the previous few days while playing he had also added to the $600 that he had put on the site earlier in the week. So at the time we decided to consolidate our winnings from that time on, he had slightly over $1200 and I had around $1100.
He did his usual agro game – not as agro as he gets sometimes, but loose and aggressive overall, and chipped-up steadily. I blinded down about $60 and lived there for a while. He hit a few really nice big pot hands and was up close to $1500. At that point I had lost 1 big pot and a few mid-sized ones also, throw in a few medium wins I was sitting about $150 to $200 in the hole.
The big hand that I lost at this point in the evening was a total mistake on my part. The flop came 567, 2 of which were hearts. I had A8 of hearts. I misread the board thinking that I had not the nuts but the high-end straight plus the nut flush-draw. I thought that the only current hand that had me beat was 98. I would like to blame it on multi-tabling, but I won’t try to shirk responsibility. There were at least 3 of us to the flop. BB, which 1st to act over-bets the flop. Bro, who was the 3rd player in the hand with me, calls. Seeing this much action I decide there is little reason to smooth-call here and I make a substantial raise to see if I can get paid-off by UTG. He pushes. Bro asks what the hell I have. I tell him the high-end straight and the nut flush-draw. I obviously call and as I have alluded to, and lost the hand, by a measly low-end straight of 43o. I was sickened by my play here; I know that some of you don’t find this as a bad play on my part due to the OESD/nut flush-draw, but that isn’t a move that I would usually make. I am a little more conservative here. I usually would just call here with my draw had hope to hit instead of making the pot any bigger than I have to before I hit. Maybe it wasn’t a bad move because I either take it down right there or have 15 outs as back-up; that is if he isn’t holding 98, wherein I lose 3, because one 4 is a heart. I definitely did have the odds to make the call. But the play whether OK or not isn’t the real problem for me, it is that I misread my hand and IMO over-played it. OK, now my bitch. With a call of his over-bet and then a push for $50 or $60 more after 2 players before him, do you think the bottom end of the straight is good? I don’t, but that’s me.
I was feeling like shit, mad at my night’s luck so far as well as at my stupidity, but more so because I thought he was holding up his end of the bargain, and I once again wasn’t. With my share of his winnings I was about even. We joked about that fact. And then it happened: he lost 2 big hands within 30 min or so of each other. While he was obsessively bitching about the first one, wherein he got the infernal KK vs AA, he took a bad beat where the guy hit runner-runner after all the chips went in on the flop. He then really goes on a tirade, which didn’t end until he got off at 5 in the morning. And believe me when I say that I heard about it for the rest of the night. He is a lot like Hellmuth; we loving call him that at our Fam games when things don’t go as planned for him, especially if he has had a few too many hops. We were wearing our headsets and talking via MSN Messenger so the berating of players was constant. After awhile it gets old, even when his arguments have validity. Outs are there for a reason. I know that we all bitch and me quite often on this very blog when I get a few sessions of negative variance, but he can be up 8 buy-ins for the night and take one bad beat and harp on it the rest of the evening. That sadly of course isn’t how this night ended, but you get my point.
Real quick I have another point to throw your way while I’m thinking about it. Back to the MSN for a minute, because I know that a lot of you scoffed at the mention of Messenger. We don’t really cheat. We just talk to each other all night while we play to break up the monotony. We live 2 hrs apart and don’t get to see each other often. Plus we get along well and both have an insatiable appetite for poker. We spend a lot of time talking theory and showing each other different styles and discussing what we think about them. Often showing examples in our play at the table to try to prove our views. We are usually playing 6 tables together (because he isn’t currently used to Tilt’s interface yet and can’t do my normal 8) and obviously there isn’t much time for cheating when you are making decisions every few seconds. We do say when we are in a big hand and what table it is on so we and click our options on as many tables as possible so as to maybe have enough time to watch the hand progress to showdown. If we miss how the big hand ended we talk about it and what the guy had and if it is a bad beat or about anything else that happened. Once again not so we know how the guy plays, because with 6 tables going, you really are playing solely your cards and your reads on how the opponent is playing the hand. [If my damn PT wasn’t locking up I would have some nice statistics on the players at the table though.] The closest thing that we do to cheating and maybe it kind of is, we will tell the other what we folded if the other is getting involved in the hand. Often we don’t even have time to pop up the table and give that info anyways but we do try to see if we have lost an out or not. We will also ask what the other guy raised PF with and get out usually, but this is really no different than if anyone was at a table with a friend. If I go to a casino with a friend or 2, I try to get out of any hand that they get into because I don’t want their money. Shit, that is basically like 3 or 4 regulars at the table. They try to all feast on the fish that has haphazardly wadded into the pool and not mix it up with each other. OK, I’m done with this huge argument on how I’m not an online cheater. Make your own decision, which you already have anyways.
Now back to the rest of the night’s debacles and misfortunes. He starts tilting and fueled by, IMO, too many brews, begins loosening up even more. He starts calling a lot of hands even for goodly-sized bets, which in itself was a major reason that he continued to chip-down. He then made some bad calls and bad bluffs, to which he ranted to me his opponents’ calls of his raises, as I will admit that I had also earlier in the evening about the dude going all-in with the low-end. Usually he has an uncanny sense of when to slow his aggression or drop a hand while playing his agro-style. That is what makes a good lag: their ability to ram and jam and when to bale-out and start aggressively again the next opportune moment. He seemed to not have this radar working properly and continued to fall. He took some more bad beats, which added more fuel to his internal inferno as he began to spontaneous combust. All of a sudden he is down like $800. We are talking the nights $700 profits plus $100 of the last few day’s winnings.
He then says do me a favor and let’s try something. I ask what? He wants to close all of our tables and get on one $400NL 6-max table. I tell him absolutely not, that I won’t chase my money, and that way leads to the Dark Side. He keeps on about it. I ask him to give me a competent reason why it was a good idea, to which he could only say that that’s where the money is. I try my hardest to explain to him that we have good potential to win money with much less risk at 6 $100 tables than at 1 $400. I tell him that no matter what he decides to do he can count me out because I have my trusty BR management system that I won’t stray from. He is quiet for a while and the next thing I know, I notice that he is missing from my tables. I look him up in the find a player drop-box and lo and behold he is sitting on a $400 6-max table with 4/7 of his total BR. (Like a nice respectable gentleman like Dan Harrington would phrase it: Absolutely fucking crazy!)
I then get my normal 8 tables going, hoping for a nice late session rally, all the while checking up on his progression or more aptly put digression downward. He talks for a little while saying how he was going to thrive at $400 and get it all back and then he was dead quiet and the only time he said anything was when I told him about a few tough losses that I sustained. I also slowly kept swinging, yet always further down with each swing. Lots of 2nd best hands as I mentioned before. He lived between $200 and $300 for a while and then I checked and he was gone. I later find out that he dropped the remainder and ended his session down $1200 from his highest. If I’m right he now sets at around $300, which is half of what he bought in for the other day. Now that is one hell of a swing with his BR. He really on lost like $500 from the start of his session. He was so upset by the end of the night that he didn’t even say goodbye, he just logged off. He always does this when he has a bad night or leaves for the night because of a nasty bad beat that he can’t cope with. I won’t lie; this act does piss me off. I see it as common courtesy. I would never just get off without saying later or good night, but that is just me. I got off soon after and ended down $350 – down 3 ½ buy-ins. That is an ass-whooping, for sure. Not really a bad beat losing night, just a bad luck night. Plus I’m happy that I was strong enough to not chase my money.
Night – 5: 12th late/13th early – I was back slightly below $700 due to the previous night’s ass-whipping, plus I BR’d the other Bro again for $40 and also I paid the share I owed from the HORSE tourney, which I forgot until reminded the night before. So I was all prepared to start my last all-nighter before going back on shift on the $50 tables, but to my delight, opened the cashier screen and found that I was sitting pretty at slightly over $800. I figured what it was and checked my E-mail and found my guess was correct, that my Rakebreak had come in finally. It comes about 1/3 to ½ way through the subsequent month. So this is 3 times in just about as many days that a nicely timed $100 bonus of some sort has saved me from dropping in stakes down to $50 again: Referal bonus, HORSE winnings, and last month’s Rakebreak. This doesn’t bode well for my confidence about my ability to play at the $100 stakes. This night turned out great. I actually think it might be my greatest one-day win. I made almost 7 buy-ins and ended the session at $1485. This was an impressive night of poker, although I had a bumpy start. Right out the gate I raise PF with AK. I get bet into on the flop and I raise back at him with TPTK. He pushes. At his point I only have $20 or so invested, but I put my remaining chips in and get throttled by a set. I am on the verge of dropping back down with on $20 above my $700 cutoff. From here I shot for the stars. Every big hand that I got into the remainder of this all-nighter I put my money in with the best hand and my hands held up. Pure unadulterated positive variance. It was crazy. I got sucked-out in a few mid-sized pots, but that really didn’t have much of an impact on my roll. Must of my CB’s were taking down vulnerable pots on a consistent basis. The plants just seemed aligned. It was truly a was a fun night to be at the tables. I didn’t what to quit, but the sun came up, so I figured it was time to halt my super session.
I have been slowly creeping my way up this week. I couldn’t play much because I was working. I played around an hr to 1 ½ hrs a night, just enough to get my 200 points. Out of the last 5 sessions I have profited 4 times. Once was for $45 and the others were in the teens and 20’s. But I am getting my confidence back and that is always good. I didn’t play well overall, thus bringing in small wins. 
