Poker update
I have been playing $1/$2 6-max limit since breaking the $100 profit mark for $.50/$1. Sadly, two Friday’s ago, I lost $60 and last Friday I lost almost $90. I have made up a lot of ground on those losses, but I am still down about $30 from where I was when I broke the $100 mark.
Worse then the losses was my play last Friday night. No bad beats, I just played horrible poker. It is amazing how much difference just a little change in when you fold and when you bet makes. I played two sessions today, and the second session started off with several bad beats, but I followed that up with some seriously bad play. Once I was down over $50, I made some changes and managed to finish up for the session, but if it wasn’t for my poor play, I would have had a monster evening.
Now why am I playing two sessions of poker on a Tuesday? It’s bonus time at Party again. So I need 700 raked hands by sometime Saturday to clear my $100 bonus. I played 279 hands this evening which was a little over 3 hours of play and that puts me at over 600 rakes hands for the bonus. Making time to play 100 raked hands over the next 4 days and still make it to swimming shouldn’t be a problem. But it’t not likely that I will be getting up in 6 hours to go swim tomorrow.
Bonus time at Party changes the style of the play quite a bit. A lot of players drop down and play in the lower limits, either so they can increase the number of tables they are comfortable playing or decrease the risk. I am happy to say, that I have found I can play comfortably at almost any table now. Weak passive tables are still the best, but it really only takes one loose agressive player to make a table profitable. Even during this bonus time, I have not come across a table that was purely tight aggressive.
Focusing on minimizing risk is what turned my game around tonight. There was a guy two seats to my left for most of the night who would raise 1/6 hands. That changed how I played AJo, AT, KQ and KJ quite a bit. Pot size was also a real important consideration. If the pot was small and my hand was marginal, then I would fold a lot more hands than normal than normal. To give you an idea how how many hands I was taking too far, at one point early on I had a show downs won percentage of 10%. So 1/10 hands that I paid to see all the way to the end I would win. By the end of the night it was up to 60%.