Played another hundred hands at Paradise last night and made a decent number of big bets, despite losing a largish pot to a river flush at 2/4. I take back what I said earlier about Paradise being loose-passive. After 15 sessions and 700 hands (which is still far too few), it seems they skew more toward loose-aggressive. That said, I seem to see more people fold to turn and river bets than at the usual Party table. At any rate, I’m probably a bit more than halfway to clearing all the bonuses, so we’ll see if I decide to keep playing. I’m making 10BB/100 hands and have nearly doubled my initial buy-in (including bonuses), but the variance is pretty high and the games feel really slow. Two-tabling helps, but there really aren’t enough players to sustain much of that. I suspect I’ll cash out when I’ve cleared the bonuses and go hunt down the next bonus whoring opportunity.

The first weekly game after the election. ER missed out due to election-related issues.

    This week  Cumulative  Average
CR    -$1.00      +$5.05    +$0.36
EM    -$5.00     -$16.85    -$1.05
JB    +$4.95      -$6.20    -$0.41
JC    +$4.15     +$19.70    +$1.31
Me    -$3.10      +$2.70    +$0.17

JC sucked out two wins on me… one of them was pretty substantial: river boat against my nut flush. Ouch. That put me a little on tilt and made me call down JB and JC on two hands where they flopped the best hand. I also chopped two pots with CR after having the better hand until the river. Bah. Not a great night.

JB made an outstanding comeback after getting low on chips early on.

As for the rest, not much change in position from last week.

What is it about Market Analysis that makes me launch a poker game? I don’t do that in any other class… anyway, I tried out some more 1/2 at Paradise and found myself up against a lot more aggression than my earlier experience would indicate. One guy was seeing 70% of the flops and raising 40% of the time. Wow. Had a bad run early on in two separate sessions when the flop would just miss me completely. The nice thing about the loose aggressive types is that they don’t believe you, even when you check-raise them. So I had guys calling me all the way to the river when I had trips, the boat, quads, or whatever, making my good hands profitable enough to net gains in both sessions. Cleared another 10% of the bonus while I was at it. As for the Grublog Poker Classic, it’s not looking good for me. That Sunday’s the day I come back from Vegas, and a friend is throwing a birthday party. After 2.5 days of gambling and drinking, I’m not sure I’ll be up for doing anything when I return.