Chris Halverson’s Blog

First off, I would like to thank everybody for the kind words regarding our cat’s death. I showed my wife (she knows I do this, but generally doesn’t care about the finer points of topping off in an NL game) and she was very touched by all of your kindness. She and I both thank all of you you expressed your condolences.

I finally got a chance to play some poker again on Tuesday night, so I pulled up a virtual chair at a couple of $100 buyin NL tables at one of my favorite sites and started playing. It was one of those nights that you like to have, the most I was down was $2.50. The tables were kind of tight, which meant that I had more stealing opportunities. I won quite a few small pots by making pre-flop raises or strong flop bets. Not a way to make a fast buck, but hey, a pot is a pot and any money is good money (maybe if I say “pot” more my Google hits will increase, pot, pot, pot).

I got cowboys 3 times either UTG or UTG+1, raised, and only got the blinds. You can see why some people would be tempted to limp or min-raise with aces or kings. Of course, then we’d have to hear some lame bad beat story about how their aces got cracked, and I hate bad beat stories…

The most satisfying hand of the night was when I got jacks in UTG+1. I raised it to $3 (I had about $120 at this point) and got two callers. One guy was one of those short stack, go all in all the time players. He had $50 at the start of this hand. Flop came down AJx rainbow and I check. He pushed for about $45 into a $5ish pot. I just called, hoping against hope to keep the other guy in, but of course he folds to the ridiculous overbet. He had Ax and MHIG. A couple other guys at the table said appreciated somebody finally calling and beating him.

Personally, that type of play kind of bugs me. Short stack no limit basically means push or fold post-flop, you just don’t have enough of a stack to do much else. At these lower level NL games, people will get into a push mode and do it all the time pre-flop or on the flop. The problem is that depending on the opponent’s stack size (say up to half of a max buyin), you still need a hand to make the call, even if you think he’s bluffing at it.

Anyway, my Internet connection mysteriously died for a bit after about 90 minutes of play. I ended the night +$140, which basically wiped out my losses from last week. What made it even more sweet was that I was, once again, playing in a fairly distracted manner. The Amazing Race and The Shield were on and were fighting for my attention. Thankfully at the 100NL you can do this.

Unfortunately, I don’t always feel like I’m playing poker. No, I don’t always win, but then again if I lose, I don’t lose much. Maybe moving up to the 200 level would make me pay attention. The average pots there are much bigger than I’m used to, and I’m pretty conservative, so I think it would force me to pay more attention. It appears that I’ll have to brush up on my short handed game though as there are many more 6max games available at the 200 level than full ring (both at Party and Crypto). I think I’m going to switch to 6max 100NL for a bit and see how that works out for me. Playing the shorthanded games would also make bonus clearing go faster. I’ll just need to turn up the aggression. I’ll keep you updated…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 at 7:42 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.