Weekend Update

First, a little overall status report. It seems that after playing regularly (daily) for a few months now, and keeping some basic spreadsheets, all the things I've heard about playing winning poker are being confirmed. I mean, someone says "it's all one big session", and you nod and think to yourself, "yeah that's obvious", but when you see this statement come alive through your own experiences, it takes on a whole new emphasis. I've been watching my bankroll shrink and grow over and over, and although I'm not going to become a rich man playing home games and Party's $10 SNGs, the peaks keep getting higher (as well as the valleys). It is all one big session. $106.49 from my year end goal now, which'll leave me with a nice $500 bankroll if I get there. Then what happens? The logical step is to move up to the $20 SNGs and maintain my modest ROI, but double the profit... but that's a move I'm wary of making for reasons which will likely be discussed here in due time. Plus, I have to get there first.

As for this past weekend's home game:

Most home games I've encountered are a social affair, where profit or loss is second to having a good time, and mine are no exception. Still, everyone was playing to win obviously, and it's interesting to see how people's goals for the evening play out with the hands... some people can lose a stack and still be having fun and making jokes, and other's amaze me with thier lack of class when losing or winning. Yeah, go ahead and bitch about not catching your Royal Flush as you rake the chips for the 6th hand in a row. Really.

With that said, we managed to get in one NLHE tourney, during which as fate would have it, I managed to bust out first and spent the next hour dealing. If I had to diagnose what happened, I'd have to say that I just plain pissed away a lot of my chips early, perhaps seeing too many flops or watching someone bluff often and wanting to nail them on it. I really don't know... but I also had a lot of decent starting hands (especially short handed as we were) and just couldn't hit a flop to save my life. We've made it an unofficial house rule that the last person who has been knocked out must deal until someone else goes broke and takes over... and it's also become the unofficial right of the dealer to look at (but in no way divulge) what people were holding during the hand. As dealer I watched an amazing amount of semi-bluffs and stone-colds, perhaps proving that my instinct to nail someone on a bluff was correct, but never getting the right cards on the right flops to do it.

As for the rest of the night, we played our old college dealer's choice games. I held my own in this wild card festival, but any winnings I might have been lucky enough to rake in were quickly taken back by the wild card whore on my right. Nearly every time I made a big hand, he somehow managed a bigger one, and it truly got old after a while. I've been trying to make some meaningful comparison between my online play and these crazy dealer's choice games, but I haven't come up with anything insightful, other than purpose which is rather obvious. You just don't play "Queen and What Follows, match the pot or drop on a Queen, best hand on 6th street decides whether to play out the hand or re-ante and reset" with any measure of seriousness. Yes we actually played that, and even managed a few games *ahem* without wild cards.

Overall, and as usual, I neither made nor lost any significant amount of money on the evening, quite in keeping with the purpose of simply having fun.