I should be asleep. I should have been asleep hours ago. But I’m not.
A friend called around 6 to ask if I wanted to go to dinner and play poker afterwards. I finished steam cleaning my living room, took a shower, and went out to eat. Went to play poker for a bit, was planning on getting home around 9:30 for CAL practice. Ended up staying until 11. Played tight most of the time, though I made a few stupid moves when I just wanted to play after getting a bunch of crappy cards. Got in the action with bad hands that were hard to walk away from and lost a little bit of money, but that was after making a big hit on a 76s that ended in a flush on my first played hand (about the 12th hand we played…that’s how bad my cards were) and a stone cold bluff because everyone thought I was tight on the hand after that. I ended up rebuying once after about 2 hours of play. The next hand after my rebuy, I got AKs (spades). I doubled the blinds, got one caller (of four total). Flop came Qs Xs 9c. I had 4 to a flush, 3 to a straight, and two over cards. I put the other guy on middle pair or a straight draw, but figured the smaller pair because of the way he’d been playing all night. I bet $4 (4x the blind…or basically the pot). He called. Turn was a club. We both checked. River was another club. I stupidly bet my last $4. He called, as expected. He had a 9 for a pair, which beat my nothing. But it pissed me off. As I was getting ready to leave, my friend thought I had left and said “I like it when it gets down to the best players.” I was the best player in the room. These suckers were paying to see every flop…and raising/re-raising nearly every time to do it. If there had been even one other person playing with any bit of intelligence, we would have taken them all down. If I hadn’t played a few stupid hands, I would have taken them down. If I had gotten cards…well, anyone can win when they get the cards. But this is why poker pros get so tilted playing against amateurs in the WSOP. The amateurs play cards that no pro would ever try playing…like 8-3 offsuit…and they suck out. I was way ahead pre-flop. I was still ahead (I think) with something like 17 outs after the flop. I was still in very good shape going into the river. But I lost to a guy who put in $10 of his $16 stack for a pair of nines with a low kicker. I’m still on tilt.
Lesson to be learned: continue to play tight in home games. Stick to that strat, don’t deviate and play hands that you have no business being in just because you want to play a hand. Let the people who go in every hand do that and cut each other’s legs out. Try to get to heads-up, where you can switch gears and win it all.
