Hella Hold'em

Wow. That is all I can say about Party Poker.

OK - let me explain something. When I first started playing at Party, I played $.50/1.00 limit games. Same as I'm doing these last few days. But a year ago, I was sitting down to the lowest pot sized tables I could find. Anything above $6 I wouldn't touch. I didn't like aggressive players betting into me. I just wanted to play my top ten hands, and bet/call them down. I was easily intimidated, to say the least.

Six months ago or so, I started waffling between no-limit tournaments, some limit tables, and more recently, the NL ring games. I slowly got away from the limit tables altogether. Until this week, when I adopted my new "seek out the fish" approach (an approach which is, of course, not new to most people). The Poker Tracker Guide gave me an easy way to find the fishes, and once I made buddies of them, their table numbers were only a click away.

Tonight, I located a fishbowl that looked like a promising prospect. The 42% table average VP$IP made me a little nervous, but I sat down anyway. Even more appropriately, a seat next to the maniac-fish I'd found opened up, to his left. Fantastic! There were two other passive fish at the table as well. (I later discovered that the rest of my fellow tablemates were sharks - it was almost as if a secret pact had been formed to steal from the fishes. We rarely got involved with each other, but there was always one shark in every pot with the three 84% VP$IP fishes).

The maniac had a 43% pre-flop raise percentage. I had about 250 hands on him, so these were decently solid statistics. It turns out, his raises meant nothing, and his limps represented a top-30 hand. He showed down all kinds of garbage - ace high, no pair, busted runner-runner draws (do those even count as draws??) - and he gladly called re-raises left and right all the way to the river.

Most of my winnings tonight came from him. He dumped chips to quite a few people at the table. He had $75 when I sat down, and I saw him drop it to nothing, rebuy for $25, and lose that too. You might think I'd have been sitting for hours to see that much money disappear in a .50/1.00 limit game. Nope. 68 minutes.

I'm sure you're all saying, "I told you so!" but I feel like I've just struck gold! And the craziest thing is, right now, even with my limited Poker Tracker database, I have 100+ hands on 50 different players with over 60% VP$IP. Unbelievable.

Tonight, I wasn't even catching monster hands to win. I was taking crazy pots with top pair, decent kicker even.

I think limit is definitely the place for me right now.

After our maniac announced that he was leaving to go to bed, the funniest thing happened: the ENTIRE table wished him well, goodnight, etc. I've NEVER seen that before! It's like, everybody wanted to be nice to him so that he'd come back. I laughed out loud (literally).

After the maniac left, and one of the other fishes left, it was pretty much just a tight table. So, I decided to leave as well, up $27.50. Yes, you read correctly. I am going to sleep a SECOND night in a row, in the $100+ range with my online bankroll.

I can't believe it myself!

After logging off the fish table, I bantered with Glyphic while he snatched a few bucks here and there from the curiously still-fishy-even-at-50NL players. AK brought him a nice albeit scary pot from a couple of the crazies at his table, and the evening closed on an "up" note. Good game, Glyphic. (Try saying that ten times fast!)

One thing I discovered while chatting with Glyphic - my AA's don't get cracked nearly as often as I thought they did. The topic came up after American Airlines held up for him, and prompted me to investigate just how often I win with mine. Turns out, of the 3,524 ring hands I have logged on myself, I've seen Aces 18 times, and won with them 77% of the time. Statistically, if you can expect to see AA in the pocket once every 221 hands, I'm seeing them just about right on schedule. (I should have seen them 16 times). Even a little lucky with the couple extra Rockets. Nice.

(For those stat geeks out there, at a 10-handed table, you can expect to see someone holding Aces about once every 22 hands. Something to keep in mind...)

And now, since midnight has passed, I can with clear conscience say...

THREE DAYS TILL VEGAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!