SwingSwingSwing's Poker Journey

A quick update on my shot at the $10s. I played 20 tournies over the weekend and I'm currently running at an ROI of 20%! I doubt that will last but we can always hope.

Play is definitely tougher than the $5 although there are plenty of fish. I played a series of three games against a guy who had a tendency for huge overbets at any stage of the hand. He was a definite fish but his overbets did cause me a bit of bother. He won the first match but I took down the next two.

The trickiest set of games were last night against a very aggressive player. I had just busted out of the weekly BritBloggerment and wasn't particularily happy, having run into big hands at the wrong times. I knew at the time that I should have just closed PokerStars down but it was still early so I went to the HU SNG lobby.

I found a player sitting who had a Spanish sounding screenname. And his screenname had a space in it. I've come to the conlusion over time that this can sometimes be an indicator of fishiness so I jumped in. Unfortunately, he was aggro to the extreme, raising nearly ever hand preflop and forcing me off hands with some unexpected and large check raises or river raises. Post flop he was absolutely owning me.

This got to me. The first two games he won easily. One of them was when he raised with 52o and I called. I think I had top pair on the flop and made a big bet. Unfortunately, as the board had brought two fives I was toast.

Now, at this point I should have walked away. But no, I rematched him again, which he was loving. "You are a loser" and "I like you" were a couple of his comments. For game three, I decided to make the game more of pre flop affair. I started pushing over the top of his raises with decent hands and he would fold. He then started limping, which suited me fine as long as I kept it very simple and didn't let myself get into any tricky situations. He got bored with taking these little pots that he went back to raising preflop. To which I responded to by pushing over the top. He was still in the lead when I picked up a pair of tens. He raised, I pushed, he called with A6s. And hit an Ace on the flop so it's now 3-0 to him.

Christ, was I angry and immediately rematched (which again was probably the wrong thing to do!). But I think I had a strategy that would be successful. Game four was over pretty quickly. I had pushed over the top of couple of raises to get a small chip lead then had Kings on the button. I just push it all in. He calls with king ten offsuit. Yip, KTo. Now it's 3-1.

Games five and six followed the same pattern. I just kept pushing over his raises with decent hands and when he called he had the inferior hand.

At 3-3, he left which I regarded as a moral victory for me! Yay.

Looking back, I got off lucky in that series. It could have been much worse had I not won my 60-40s.

So let that be a lesson to you all, never play when you're in the wrong mindset. Just don't do it. It will cost you money.