Weekend Update

It was a pretty quiet weekend on the home front this weekend. No major poker tourneys to play in, or minor ones either. Was a little money tight so didn't want to spend a lot. I did play a fair amount online actually. Lately I have been playing this tourney that is half No Limit Holdem and half Pot Limit Omaha Hi/Lo. I'm a decent hold em player but I play a lot of Omaha and I think I have an advantage against most of the players when we play Omaha. Last 2 times I have played this tourney I have finished 4th and 3rd. I would have made the money time before that if the guy I had caught bluffing hadn't caught a runner runner straight to almost knock me out too.



So I have been slowly building a stack online now mostly playing low stakes Omaha Hi Lo ring games and these occasional tourney cashes and I have played enough to qualify for these bigger freerolls. Saturday there was a $1000 free roll that payed a top prize of $150 that I qualified for. I managed to last 4 whole hands in that one lol. I had AQ, called a raise to 80 and flopped 2 pair on A-Q-10 flop only to lose to the raiser with KJ who flopped the nut straight. Sucked to be me. I feared the straight but thats the way it goes. But I noticed I had almost qualified for a $10,000 free roll on Sunday so I played some Omaha and made a few bucks that night and played enough Sunday to qualify for the 10K tourney. That was fun I must admit. I managed to suck out a straight on the river with AK when a Jack fell. The guy I beat was PISSED. He was going off on me being a donkey, etc etc. And it was a slightly donkey play but he forgot one cardinal rule. Make sure you bet enough to not make it worth my while to stay in.



He raised to 150 over blinds of 25-50. I raised to 450 with Ace of hearts and King of Diamonds and he called along with 2 other guys. Flop came Q-10-8 with 2 diamonds. He bet 600 into a 2 thousand chip pot and I thought a second and called. I figured him for either a low pair or maybe AQ or QJ and he caught the queen. The way I watched him play, he was easily capable of raising on QJ and calling my reraise. But a king or jack wins it for me I figure. Next card is the 9 of diamonds. If he has something like QJ he has the straight already. But I have the king of diamonds along with 3 others on the board and a jack still makes my straight so at worst, unless he is holding the A of diamonds which I sincerely doubt, I have 3 jacks and 9 diamonds that will win for me, or maybe only 2 jacks if he has QJ. As it turns out, I was wrong and he had flopped a set (so he said, he never showed) and he bets 1200 on the turn. The pot had 3200 before he bet and so I figured my odds at 34-12 or a little under 3 to 1 to get a winner vs his bet of almost 4-1 pot odds and called him again. Next card is a lovely jack of clubs. He thinks a second and bets another 1200. I wait a second and raise him all in. He folds after thinking for a while and says AK so I decide to show I did have AK and that sets him off!!



He starts talking about what a donkey I am for calling, that I'm a calling station etc etc. And it was a little donkeyish as he pissed me off for calling my raise on inferior cards (I felt) and he had raised me off some other pots before when I didn't catch. But it all came down to money and odds. He gave me too good odds to stay in the pot. Yes he apparently flopped a monster, my guess is he had 8-8 or 10-10 preflop but maybe he had QQ. He wanted to keep me in the hand to suck out as much money as he could so he kept the bets reasonable but by the turn, I was getting decent odds to stay in with 3 diamonds and a gutshot straight draw. So it was proper for me to call him down. I mentioned to him that he bet 1200 into a 3200 pot and asked him what kind of odds he gave me. Well he didn't want to hear that now. Of course most players don't want to hear it when they have goofed and allowed someone to suck out on them. But unless you have quads or a straight flush, you are often times taking a chance on exactly that happening if you underbet a pot. He bets 2K on the turn and I have to let it go because I'm not getting good enough odds to call. I almost let it go anyway because the one thing about pot odds in tourneys is that you can play the pot odds perfectly right up till you go bust. Then you cannot reload and try again lol. It's not like playing in a ring game. Our table broke before I was able to watch him go bust which was too bad. What really pissed me off was someone else sucked out on him another time and he went off on that guy being a donkey etc. He may have been right as I don't remember if the guy played good odds or what, but take your beats like a man.



On Saturday night I also played some Omaha at the Dog track. I had some good luck on my first hand and won a decent pot so I was up all night while we played. I turned my $60 buyin to $160 but then went card dead. A lot of bad hands and the good hands caught crap. A-2-3-6 and the flop is JJ9 and crap like that. Twice the dealer flips one of my cards over while dealing to me and both times its a freaking Ace. When you aren't getting decent cards and the best card possible keeps getting burned it irritates you. The first time it happened I just laughed and then the very next hand I look at my cards and its A-J-A.................. and the last card is ANOTHER FREAKING ACE. If you don't play omaha, hands that contain 3 of a kind are really bad hands because you can only use 2 cards in any hand so it's hard to win with it. I was in the small blind so I called the $1 to see the flop but the last Ace didn't hit and neither did K-Q-10 to complete a straight for me so I immediately dumped to the first bet. But I stuck it out and stayed in with mostly solid hands and eventually turned it around. I did stay in on a hand that wasn't very good and got proved why you don't play crap. I ended up turning a full house 9's full of J's but lost to J's full of 9's and I had to call it down even though I figured him for that hand just because it was possible he had something else. There are some really loose players in Omaha who think any flush or full house is the nuts (it's that holdem background again, where full house over full house is nearly unheard of but in omaha you can see it quite often, especially if you play shit cards lol) and they win some big pots but if you watch, they lose it all back.



I was losing enough chips back that I was getting ready to quit if I lost enough to fall back to 60 again but the cards finally turned and I flopped a flush with an A-5 low. If someone had A-4 they had a better low because a 2-3 were on the board but the flush held up and I had a number of callers on the hand that it turned out was a winner for both ends. That pulled me from 80 to 130 bucks. I fell back a bit but hit a winner on my last hand to finish out at 130 when the table broke. So it was a successful stint on the tables even if it wasn't as successful as it could have been.