TUBTHUMPER

I get knocked down, but I get up again. I hadn't played a hand of poker for two days so I came into Thursday relaxed and ready to build a bankroll. I skipped the tourney circuit in favor of the ring games. I wanted to focus on making correct decisions while being rewarded in real time. Well, the decisions were fine but the river cards were ugly and before long, I was down $1500. Absolutely nothing was working yet since I was playing well, I kept rebuying and rebuying, but each new deposit wound up across the felt. I finally got fed up and looked for a sit-and-go. I bought into a $225 ten-handed table with my eyes towards the $1050 top prize to get me moving in the direction of getting my money back.

I was faced with a big decision on my first hand. It was a three-way pot in which I was playing from the button with AJ. I had called a late position raise and the big blind had called as well. The flop came jack high and the bb checked. The preflop raiser bet and I simply called since I didn't much wish to play a huge pot so early in the event. I figured I could slow him down if he doesn't have a pair and I can maybe get some value on later streets. Well, the bb comes back with guns a-blazin' and suddenly he is all in. The original raiser assumes he's up against a set and mucks. I consider mucking but I just don't think such an overbet is representative of a set. I consider it more likely that he has KJ and thinks it's good. Usually, when I put somebody on an exact hand that I can beat, it doesn't turn out well, but this time, I called and did see the KJ, giving me the early chip lead.

I parlayed the double up to a respectable march towards heads up play. I went in with a 3:1 chip lead and nearly took it down until my AT lost to A8 with all the money in preflop. This put us roughly even in chips, so after a few rounds of punch-counterpunch, we decided to call it a stalemate and split the purse. So I got $840 out of that table which took a nice chunk out of my earlier losses.

With renewed vigor, I went back into a ring game and found that my luck had turned around. The hands were not only holding up, but my draws were hitting and I made over $500 within about ninety minutes.

I was now only down a relatively modest amount and considered it a decent day all in all. With coffee in my system from dinner, I decided to play the Turbo Hundo at 11PM on Full Tilt while concurrently playing a 45-seat $69 sit-and-go. I've recently begun playing this particular tourney and I've had good success, with only one early exit, two bubbles in which I made the final table but missed the top six, and a couple of cashes for an overall profit. I fought connection problems throughout the night, but finished third in the SNG and 12th in the MTT to increase the day's take by over $600 and put me in the black for the day. It was a roller coaster ride, but I got off smiling.