Back from the abyss

So it has been awhile since I have posted and I have a few poker related tales to tell.

Inactivity is the bane of my poker game. I don't play often enough and I lose traction on my play, all the little things I remind myself about the style of poker I should play. I am a fitting example of the player who plays the style that fits his personality and often I need to mix things up to avoid the ruts of one style. However, I often realize that I'm mixing it up at the wrong moments and it's often losing some hands or laying down failed plays that remind me the importance of having a structure to your own poker game and that I must establish myself before mixing anything up. Duh.

Lay ground work.

Set up a play or an image.

Follow through with it.

At a key moment, play off that image or style to great benefit.

Simple, right?

But alas, it does not always work. I was recently in W. Palm Beach, FL and decided to make a stop over at the Palm Beach Kennel Club to check out the poker room there. Now, I had scouted the website and because it was not much to speak of, I wasn't expecting too much. Plus, it is the dog track, you know? An exacta on the 2,5 isn't the same when they're chasing a mechanical rabbit. But at the least I figured for some loose play, hopefully by some degenerates, that I could play a relatively tight game into and feed off of and hope for the big hands. After all, I was only heading there for a few hours, not a big session at all.

So my first surprise was finding that the max buy-in for the entire room, regardless of game, was $100. So I bought in for a hundo at a 1-2 table and was, not surprisingly, a short stack. However, there was not a ton in the big stacks so I felt room to make plays would be available.

And here, I went awry, as I tried to get involved with some decent, but not fantastic, holdings right away. And when the flops missed me and I was bet into, it was either put it all in with air or fold. So I folded twice and paid my blinds and waited. And I made another mistake, though not on purpose, but rather through inexperience. Having never been in a room with the buy in limit, I was not aware that I should have reloaded back to my initial $100 after each pot I lost. Instead, I chipped down by about half and when I looked down at A,A and made an all in re-raise and was snap-called by K,K, it meant a double up to my initial stack instead of a full double up of the buy in. And again, it showed me why fishing around with marginal holdings early on was a bad play. Had I been playing more often, the first hour would not have been merely a reminder of little things forgotten and opportunities missed.

One other note about the Kennel Club is that many of the players there are new to the game and like the low buy in stakes but make no-limit their first introduction to the game. So there is plenty of opportunity there, no doubt. Unfortunately, none of it was seized upon by me, as evidenced by the following:

At one point hours later at a new table when I had folded for literally hours and won pots without ever having shown down, a guy two to my right told a new player how loose I was playing even though he had never seen a single card of mine. No one had seen anything I had played since I had sat. I asked him if he really thought I was playing loosely and he nodded. I pointed out that he hadn't seen a single card yet, hoping that he would get the hint that I was only playing winning hands, so I could make a move on his chips at a later point. Well, he didn't get the point or perhaps it came too quickly because only a few hands later I flopped the nut flush draw, an open-ended straight and (as it turns out) one over card. So when I bet into my monster and basically pot-commit myself, he shoved with middle pair and NO DRAW. Of course I called, 18 outs twice for me and none came home. What I should have realized that he wanted to see my cards more than he thought I was playing winning hands and was willing to lose money in order to see. But he got both and that is why, on occasion, poker is a cruel, cruel game.