Hella Hold'em

My apologies for the song lyrics posted the other day. I know - very 9th grade of me. The observant amongst you might have noticed Randy's removal from the sidebar of this blog, and the song lyrics were my announement to that effect. (We broke up). I don't plan to speak any more of it here, except to say that by the time I see you all in July, I will likely be embracing single-hood once again. For now, I'm in recovery mode. So - that's all I have to say about that!

I headed to Empress yesterday for the first time in a week, thinking that my emotional state was at least back to the point where I could focus on poker on not the other trials and tribulations of my life. Thankfully for my bankroll I consciously avoided poker all of last week. I signed on to Full Tilt last night to play a bit online, and it seems that I'm not as able to focus at home as I am at the casino right now. I think it's the combination of being at home (Randy is still living here while finding a new place to live) and the iTunes factor. I was definitely off my game, and took a couple dings to the online bankroll as a result.

Not much happened at Empress. I played for 4 hours until the poker room closed for the night, and ended up down $47 (-4.7 BB) at $5/10. Not once did I go to showdown with a losing hand, but I very rarely found myself at showdown. If you figure that I saw about 3 orbits of play per hour, that's at least $21/hour spent in blinds ($5 big+ $2 small = $7 x 3). So, at least I outran the blinds.

I won two nice pots that kept me afloat. The two times in the 4 hours that I saw pocket pairs, they flopped sets: 3's and 5's. With the 3's, I cold-called a preflop raise in position. Four people had already limped into the pot, and the button and blinds were still to act after me. The guy that raised was immediately to my right, and was a solid player. Not too many players at Empress earn that designation - at least not too many I've played with. So I knew this guy had a premium hand. He was very TAG. I figured, though, if I could flop my set, I could probably crack him off, and because it's a general rule that if you limp into a pot you HAVE to call the raise behind you, I knew all of the previous limpers would come along for the $10. The blinds were also likely to call, so I was looking at a pot of at least $80 preflop, including my reds. With odds of 7:1 against flopping my set, the pot looked about right.

Glory be, I flopped my set. I was calling down to keep as many of the other people in the pot as possible (risky with a low set, yes, but there were no straight or flush draws possible). On the turn, the last of the former limpers folded, so I was heads-up with the original raiser. I raised him on the river, and he knew he was beat. He sighed and broken-heartedly folded. I showed him my 3's, and he patted the felt. "Nice hand," he said. "You had me all the way." I think he had AK, and flopped a K. I don't normally show hands, but I appreciated his pain, and he wasn't the type of player that I felt bad about giving the info that he made a good laydown. He was getting cracked off all night, and I hoped he could at least go home thinking that he played well despite his bad luck. We've all had those days.

Believe it or not, I'm thinking of breaking my "no live poker on Saturdays" rule today. Empress is closed on Saturdays, but Resorts isn't.... We'll see what the day brings.