Author: glyphic

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.

Haven’t been able to play very much poker this weekend, but I did find some time to log a couple hundred hands at Paradise. The next poker blogger tournament will be the Grublog Poker Classic II on November 21 at Paradise Poker. Sign up today with the bonus code on Grubby’s page and get a 50% bonus up to $100. The bonuses are cleared $10 at a time for every 100 raked hands you play.

I’m not above doing a little bonus whoring, so I moved some money over to Paradise. There are some things about the interface I like very much. The whole package seems very well thought out and feels like a Windows application. Sure, Party does, too, but on Paradise the little things really make a difference. One thing that’s superior to Party is the notes function. A single right-click opens the notes window. Hovering over the player’s name shows much more of your note than on Party (haven’t run into a character limit yet). Unfortunately, the games are a little slow, moving at a rate of 50-55 hands per hour at a full table; the animation effects are probably partially responsible. Hand histories have to be requested the old-fashioned way.

Of course, the important thing is the quality and quantity of players. In my very limited experience, the games seemed rather loose-passive, with the exception of 2-3 loose-aggressive types at the table tonight. Once it became obvious they were raising pre-flop and betting the flop with crap, it was easy enough to call to the showdown or check-raise the flop or turn and make money with second pair or top pair, weak kicker. In the loose-passive games, I found I was able to take many pots without showing. Again, I should note that I’ve only played a couple hundred hands, but so far it’s been going well. If you’re planning to play the Grublog Classic anyway, you might as well get the bonus and make enough profit for some first level re-buy/add-on madness on the 21st. Unfortunately, it’s a much smaller “poker room” than Party, and you may find table selection somewhat difficult.

CR and ER took last week off, and JB vetoed the idea of playing short-handed, so we skipped a week. This week the regular group was back:

    This week  Cumulative  Average
	CR    +$6.05      +$6.05   +$0.47
	EM    -$1.40     -$11.85   -$0.79
	ER    -$2.95      +$6.35   +$0.49
	JB    -$5.00     -$11.15   -$0.80
	JC    -$1.55     +$15.55   +$1.11
	Me    +$4.85      +$5.80   +$0.39

My suggestion of doubling the buy-in this week was nixed; but as JB snidely pointed out, I had to do a double buy-in anyway less than two hours into the night. I was getting out-kicked, out-pocketed, and possibly out-played, especially by CR. It was brutal. My two best hands during this time were probably KK and AQs. I won with the first and chopped with the second, but that only prolonged my descent.

After the second buy-in, I started to do a little better. In the last 2-3 orbits, I hit a monster rush: 79s beat JJ with a runner-runner flush against a river straight, A8 beat 9T with a river boat against a turn straight, 89s won with a flopped straight against what I assume was a draw that never materialized. The 79s was a true suckout. I called a minimum raise in the BB pre-flop and flopped top pair. I called the bet and turned the straight and flush draws. I called the bet and riverred the flush. Felt bad about that one.

In those first two hours where I lost hand after hand to CR, other people were losing some decent pots to him as well. He took pot after pot and built up his stack to nearly 3 times his buy-in. Over the next hour and half he eventually lost a few bucks, but still made it out of here the big winner. He’s still third in cumulative winnings, but he’s definitely on a good trajectory.

EM put JC on the spot a couple times when a flush appeared on the board. It was clearly painful for him to fold, but fold he did. Overall, EM’s running bad. Her theory is that she needs to be pissed off to win. Possibly. Maybe if I had done that 79s runner-runner against her jacks early on it would have changed the game. Still, she’s not down to the depths that I hit after the first ten weeks of keeping records: -$13.

ER was pretty mad about my boat beating her straight. I don’t feel as bad about that one as I do the 79s. I had the best hand on the flop and when I raised her turn bet, she just called. A re-raise would have been grounds for thought. I may have called anyway, not believing that she’d made her straight. Another down week for ER, but her cumulative’s still good for second place.

Tonight was a lot like some of my NL forays. Down, down, down, then a rush to set things right, and I’m done. Which does wonders for my confidence in my abilities. That’s meant to be sarcastic. I’d rather be lucky than good, but I’d still like to be good.