Results from Last Night
Had just enough time for three sit and gos last night. Lately, finding time for online poker has been a bit more difficult, and with the warm weather coming, this may increasingly be the case. Sit and gos are great because I can start three of them up, and be in and out in less than an hour. I had two 2nd place finishes and one 7th last night.
$55+5 turbo on Stars, down to three-handed, I’m the chip leader. One player is a little bit short-stacked and starts moving in on every hand. He still has enough of a stack to make calling him down difficult, and I just never have the goods to do so. He is on my left, and twice I try to complete the small blind after the third player limps UTG. He moves in behind us both times, and we both fold. I’m not wild about this happening, but I recognize it as a nice setup in the case that I DO get a big hand-I can limp and possibly induce him to move in behind me.
Anyway, he takes the third player out when he gets called down with garbage (and hits big), and we were heads up with about even stacks (I was slightly ahead). On the third hand, I get AA in the small blind. I complete, he immediately moves in, and I call, giggling just a little. He shows J7o, woohoo! Flop 3-7-9, turn K, river . . . an ugly, hateful, evil 7. I actually came back to almost even after that, and we played heads-up for quite a while, but ultimately I just didn’t catch the right cards, and the blinds got big enough where having the right cards was critical.
My other table, a $50+5 at Party, gets down to heads up at almost the same time. This is one of the drawbacks to playing multiple tables-you can’t give each table enough attention when they all get short-handed. I am WAY ahead, T8860 to T1140. Blinds are 200-400, and I am the big. He makes it 800, and I go ahead and take the 3-1 odds with 78s in hearts. This is a marginal call--I don’t want to double him up, but his stack is at the point where he has to make a move or he will get blinded off. Plus, why the heck didn’t he just move in pre-flop? Hard to know if that indicates weakness, desperation, or just plain stupidity.
Flop is like K-5-6, two diamonds. I say what the hell, and bet my straight draw, even though he only has 340 left and just about HAS to call all-in. To my profound amazement and delight, he folds! Now he is all-in on the big blind. I laugh long and hard.
Seven hands later, when I was collecting my second place money, it didn’t seem quite so funny. When people catch a good run of cards, they call it “Getting hit in the face by the deck”. For runs like I had heads-up last night, I’d like to coin a new phrase: “Getting kicked in the nuts by the deck.”
I’ve been doing well at the sit and gos lately; my money % is up well over 40% again, and my winnings are once again at a year high (if you remember, I had a bad run about a month ago). But there is one disturbing trend that I see on my spreadsheet. My 2nd and 3rd place finishes are MUCH higher than my wins, and that’s not good. You can’t really make money in sit and gos unless you book a decent percentage of 1st place finishes. I think it’s just a bad streak after getting into the money, but if it continues I am going to have to re-examine the way I play heads-up. I take pride in my shorthanded/heads-up play-I think it’s the strongest part of my game. But the last thing you want to do at the poker table is let your ego get in the way of making you money.
More on Vegas later today . . .
$55+5 turbo on Stars, down to three-handed, I’m the chip leader. One player is a little bit short-stacked and starts moving in on every hand. He still has enough of a stack to make calling him down difficult, and I just never have the goods to do so. He is on my left, and twice I try to complete the small blind after the third player limps UTG. He moves in behind us both times, and we both fold. I’m not wild about this happening, but I recognize it as a nice setup in the case that I DO get a big hand-I can limp and possibly induce him to move in behind me.
Anyway, he takes the third player out when he gets called down with garbage (and hits big), and we were heads up with about even stacks (I was slightly ahead). On the third hand, I get AA in the small blind. I complete, he immediately moves in, and I call, giggling just a little. He shows J7o, woohoo! Flop 3-7-9, turn K, river . . . an ugly, hateful, evil 7. I actually came back to almost even after that, and we played heads-up for quite a while, but ultimately I just didn’t catch the right cards, and the blinds got big enough where having the right cards was critical.
My other table, a $50+5 at Party, gets down to heads up at almost the same time. This is one of the drawbacks to playing multiple tables-you can’t give each table enough attention when they all get short-handed. I am WAY ahead, T8860 to T1140. Blinds are 200-400, and I am the big. He makes it 800, and I go ahead and take the 3-1 odds with 78s in hearts. This is a marginal call--I don’t want to double him up, but his stack is at the point where he has to make a move or he will get blinded off. Plus, why the heck didn’t he just move in pre-flop? Hard to know if that indicates weakness, desperation, or just plain stupidity.
Flop is like K-5-6, two diamonds. I say what the hell, and bet my straight draw, even though he only has 340 left and just about HAS to call all-in. To my profound amazement and delight, he folds! Now he is all-in on the big blind. I laugh long and hard.
Seven hands later, when I was collecting my second place money, it didn’t seem quite so funny. When people catch a good run of cards, they call it “Getting hit in the face by the deck”. For runs like I had heads-up last night, I’d like to coin a new phrase: “Getting kicked in the nuts by the deck.”
I’ve been doing well at the sit and gos lately; my money % is up well over 40% again, and my winnings are once again at a year high (if you remember, I had a bad run about a month ago). But there is one disturbing trend that I see on my spreadsheet. My 2nd and 3rd place finishes are MUCH higher than my wins, and that’s not good. You can’t really make money in sit and gos unless you book a decent percentage of 1st place finishes. I think it’s just a bad streak after getting into the money, but if it continues I am going to have to re-examine the way I play heads-up. I take pride in my shorthanded/heads-up play-I think it’s the strongest part of my game. But the last thing you want to do at the poker table is let your ego get in the way of making you money.
More on Vegas later today . . .