5 Buyin Swings

Made the most of my free 7 day Deuces Cracked trial which expired on Wednesday by downloading as many vids as I could find. Not sure if it was really ethical, but since I am almost certainly going to take out a paid subscription at some point, I'm sure the people at deucescracked.com wont mind. The training vids are highly recommended, I have only watched a couple so far, but they are definitely +EV. I always avoided cardrunners due to their high fees and lack of low stakes videos, but Deuces Cracked seems to cater for the low stakes player and so is perfect for me and anyone playing 50NL-200NL.

Have played 3700 hands of poker so far this week for a net loss of $16. Looks like there is still work to do at 25NL, and last night was no exception. Started playing at about 11pm and things quickly started to go downhill. Being Friday, the tables were full of fish, but I just couldn't hit a hand. I was getting c/r or 3-bet by 50/1/0.1 types, every KK brought an A on the flop, every AQ brought a K on the flop and every AK brought sod all.... It happens, nothing I could do about it but play solid poker and hope to power through the variance.

Then things got a lot worse. Called a CO raise OTB with 55, flop AT5r, CO c-bets and I decide just to call as there are no draws and he is likely to fire the turn with any A. Turn is a J, he bets again, I raise, he shoves, I call expecting to see AK/AQ/AJ but he shows TT for a higher set. I then loose another 2 BI with AA vs 97 on a Q97 flop and AA vs Q6 on a Qxx flop (river is a 6). I am not going to bore you with all my bad beats, but after 324 hands I was down just over 5BI and I was struggling not to tilt. It probably would not have been a bad idea to call it a night, but had only been playing for an hour and I was determined to get back some of my losses.

Over the next 400ish hands, I didn't do anything different from the first 324, I played my usual 22/20 style, but this time things started to go my way. Won 3 BI with KK vs AJ on Jxx, KK vs AQ on Qxx and managed to get a bloke to put all his chips in on the river with T7 on a QJ482r board (I had a note on him that he loved to bluff the river, so he c/c flop and turn, I checked to him on the river and he obligingly shoved all his chips in with T high). Finally, I stacked a slowplayed 88 with Q6 from the BB on a Q836Q board vs a 50/1/0.1 who c/c flop and turn and then c/r the river, and I was back to where I started.

So over 761 hands, I made a net profit of $1.55 (and probably a lot of RB). This might not seem like a lot, but when half an hour earlier you are staring -$128 in the face, $1.55 doesn't seem so bad. Here is my graph for the night:


Next stop on the poker road is the Saturday night live tourney, updates to follow...