Part Duex

First off I’d like to thank those of you that stopped by and left a comment on the last post. April mentioned my post in her blog and my readership improved by over 100% because of it, so a special thanks to her for sending some people my way.

Now back to poker goodness. I left off with my tournament win and the mention that my bankroll was bolstered enough to head back to the 3/6 tables. In fact, I was bankrolled for 5/10 but I want to get a few months of proven 3/6 under my belt before venturing upward. That and I withdrew some money for a down payment on a car and to hit the casino for some live play.

My online play since the win has been above and beyond what is normal. In the last few weeks my win rate at 3/6 has been 6.35/100. That’s pretty high so I’m expecting variance to move back in at some point. I’ve been spreading my play around between Absolute, Poker Stars, and Full Tilt. I’m clearing bonuses at each place so I’m moving to each site every few days. Unfortunately Full Tilt was very slow on cashouts this week and I didn’t get enough money together to take advantage of Ultimate Bets reload bonus. I started my play there and I’m eager to see what the action is like nowadays. I’ve found that for play during the day and weekends Poker Stars has the better tables. On weeknights I like Absolute unless there aren’t enough players, then I head over to Full Tilt. The bonus is slow to clear at Full Tilt even at 3/6 so I’m not concentrating on that site right now even though I like the interface.

I tried to make the blogger HORSE tourney but my family and I went to Omaha to visit the zoo and I didn’t get back to the hotel in time. I thought the tournament started at 8:30 when it actually started at 8:00. DOH! It was the first blogger tournament I’ve missed since starting this blog almost a year ago. Aside from the Vegas tournament that is. I was rather distraught about missing it and it prompted some concern from my wife about my poker playing. (Will have to save that for another post.)

This past Friday night I did encounter a hiccup at the tables as I couldn’t get anything going and finished my limit play down $69. I was playing at Absolute and I like their tournament structure so I checked out what was coming up. They have a few tournaments each week that you can buy into using your player points and one such event was getting ready to start. I look at these as freerolls since you don’t have to use actual cash and I have so many points with nothing to spend them on. The play that is encountered is not like a typical freeroll where you have all-in fests. The other players usually take these seriously, even though the prize pools are small. For this tournament it was $250.

We had 301 entrants and after 5 hours of play I found myself with my second tournament win in as many weeks. The first place share of the prize was $70 and I had turned my loss into a $6 win by the end of the night. My win rate was abysmal though as I spent about 6.5 hours total at the site to get that $6. It’s better than a kick in the head though and I’ll take it.

With my online play on fire I was able to head to a local casino twice this week. The players at The Ameristar welcomed me with some of the worst play I’ve ever seen. I’ve come to some conclusions about how I’m going to incorporate live play into my rotation and since the “hammer” is so “in” right now, I even have an amazing live play hammer story that the entire table couldn’t believe. (and no, it wasn’t my play) All that and more in the next edition.