Drat

Well, Friday morning after I woke up with a thrilling ISU win hangover and looking forward to no work, I decided to give my "last hurrah" at FTP a go.

I ended up busting out in 12th out of 45, 6 short of the money. It was disappointing, but overall it was a pretty average tournament. There was a couple of hands I'd like to be sure to discuss.

After amassing a few chips fairly early in the tournament, I picked up pocket 9s in early position and limped. There was a min-raise in middle position, a call in the blinds, and I went ahead and called. The flop comes 6 9 J, rainbow. Blind checks, and figuring I'm in SOLID position here, I check, and preflop raiser bets. Calls all around. Then, wouldn't you know it, the turn is about the only *real* scare card in the deck, a 10. Check from the blinds, this time I bet, and then the preflop raiser raises me. Blind calls, and I end up throwing an internal tantrum before letting it go. With a huge bet on the end, the preflop raiser didn't even end up showing down.

Initially I figured this was a good laydown, but the more I think about it, the more I think the guy probably had AA or KK. The way to play rockets online, it seems, is to min-raise them preflop. That way you're still raising so you can complain when you get beat, but it also entices callers. It just makes sense the way the guy played it that he had bullets. If not, he was representing KQ, which he WAY overplayed preflop and on the flop. I probably should've gone to the end on this hand, but I'm so used to losing w/2 pair and trips that I just wanted to get away.

The other key hand that annoyed me was when I picked up QQ. I raised it up preflop, and got 1 caller. The board came K-high, and long story short I ended up going all the way to the river and doubling my opponent up, when he had tripped up his pocket kings on the flop. Usually I can get away from this hand, but for some reason I just played it like a complete moron. This hand was probably more pivotal than the other, because at that stage in the game if I hadn't lost 2k off my 6k stack, I could've had a little more to play with when I went card dead at that point.

Throughout the end of the tournament I hit a lot of Q-high hands and didn't see a lot of flops. I managed to keep my 7xBB for a little all-in vigorish/threat, but when I finally picked up an A4 in 12th out of 12, I was called by A9 and that was it. Things went well for me early. I don't remember specifics, but I pretty much hit a couple of pretty good hands that were routine wins, to amass up to a high of 6k in chips. Of course, because of my luck at FTP I had to sweat every single card on the board, but all went well.

So I am non-bankrolled again at FTP, and am relying on what I have left at Poker.com to build. I'm still confident I'll turn things around.

Today I'm hosting a home game with some friends. Instead of our typical Friday night $5, disgusting structured, "as much about the beer as it is about the poker" game, I've put together a much awaited higher stakes game, where its all about the poker. We'll play $20 tourneys, hopefully a couple, with a starting stack of $2500 and the standard online blind structure, raised every 15 mins. That should allow for a little bit of play, and hopefully have the better players coming out on top, unlike the $1500, blinds double every 15 "crapshoot" structure we play in our monthly game.

So, I'm REALLY looking forward to that, and could use the money, so I'm gonna try and pull out my "A" game. I've been running *pretty* well lately, so as long as that continues, hopefully I can add a little success at reading to that and pull down a chunk of the prize pool.

That's about it for now. GL All.