Hella Hold'em

Well, that was certainly a most unlucky trip to Vegas - for me, anyway. April did quite well, at least until we got to the airport. Her wallet may be fat but that burn is gonna hurt for a while! Let's hear it for idiotic coffee shop employees and ignorant airport security people!

Anyway...

A majority of my time was spent at MGM playing 1/2 NLHE...

Tuesday night, I was fairly unlucky but playing well. I was down a buy in after two ugly QQ beats. I made it out before the river, but the damage had been done. Lesson learned: 6x BB preflop raise, not enough at these tables.

Wednesday, I was getting killed. I found myself all-in early with KK vs KK, only to get flushed out by a 4-flush onboard. Sound familiar? Just like the QQ at Majestic a few weeks ago... there goes another buy-in.

Mind you - I don't push all-in preflop with these hands, but when someone comes over the top of me for all of it preflop, it's not likely that I'm going away... KK Quandry be damned.

By dinner, the donkeyfish were in my head. I was down 2 1/2 buy-ins on the trip, and having not been up for a single moment to that point, I was feeling run over. I'd succumbed to passive, scared play and I knew it.

April and I headed to dinner at the American place in NY NY, and between her and Randy on my texts, they screwed my head back on straight. My losses weren't unrecoverable, and tomorrow was another day. Wednesday night, I played 3/6 limit with April so I could have a few drinks and just chill. Straight-up math based decision making is actually relaxing to me :) That table was crazy too, and I was splashing around playing way too many hands - but I knew it couldn't ding me for any more than my $100 buy in, so I enjoyed myself a bit.

Thursday, I went back to NL ready to play my game - and play my game, I did. I made good reads on people and made some good plays. I felt good about my game on Thursday. Still, for the 11 or so hours I played, I still ended the day down 2 buy ins, finishing off the rest of my trip bankroll and leaving me fairly despondant over the whole ordeal.

While I would certainly change how I played for the last couple hours before dinner on Wednesday, it didn't cost me much more than walking away would have. I've soul searched for quite a few hours since Thursday night, and there isn't a whole lot I could have changed. I tried beating myself up over my play, but for the most part, I don't think I could have done much better. To illustrate my luck, the one set I flopped with a pocket pair (out of 17 pocket pairs held preflop), I got flushed out by a guy that had called my preflop raise with J4 and my flop bet with bottom pair, four's. That's just how it went. Too many calling stations and not enough players that played close enough to the rules to be "predictable."

I do have a few plays that I've stored in my memory banks as notches on my belt - good reads and good plays with good outcomes that I am proud of myself for. After spending hours dissecting the bad outcomes, I'm going to move forward focusing on the good.

Variance be damned, right?

April and I took a short break from the tables Thursday to check out the dolphins and baby cats over at Mirage. I forgot my good camera in the hotel room (I know, duh... the one thing I wanted to bring my camera for!) but took a couple pictures and videos with my camera phone. They will suck but I will post them anyway! I uploaded the video to YouTube yesterday and it's still not showing. Maybe it was too large. I'll have to check. Java, the baby leopard, is friggin adorable!

We also checked out Mirage's poker room (3/6 limit) and I was not impressed. The chairs were uncomfortable, and the tables were the old ones with no cup holders. Our particular table had been leaned on so many times on the player side that it was permanently slanted away from the dealer. I guess playing at MGM spoils a person... though I may need to find a different "nice" poker room, because I realized this week that as much as I love playing at MGM, I've had a grand total of one winning session there that I can remember. ONE. That's not a very good ratio. I've probably played there more than a dozen times.

Even more baffling is that I'm continuing to have really decent success at the online .50/1.00 NLHE tables. Yeah, me. How bizarre is that?

Ahh, well. And so it goes.

Oh - we didn't play at Excalibur's digital poker tables. We did stop and look at them and... well, it looked like playing online. After watching a few hands, I really had no desire to even try them. I don't go to the casino to stare at a computer screen. I go to play cards... with actual cards... and actual chips...

Another random note... I've been having so much friggin trouble with Postgres SQL and Poker Tracker that I think I'm going to give up on it and go buy Poker Copilot for the Mac. All I really want are basic stats and the HUD, and I can get that on the Mac. PT has better stats, but it runs dog slow for me, when it runs at all. So, back to Happy Land! Back to the Mac!

I'm off to concentrate on this 90-player SNG I have running on Full Tilt. I'm 3rd of 16 and top 9 places are dancing happy. I'm working on becoming a dancer.