Non-Hammer Hammer Day?

So things continue to just go steadily well for me, which is honestly sorta weird. My poker equilibrium is much too balanced right now, and I'm not quite sure what to think of it. I'm getting sucked out on, but I'm sucking out. I'll bust early and not cash, but then I'll win. I'll lose a couple of tourney and SNG buy-ins, and make 'em back in .05/.10 NL.

Its just...freaky. And very very nice.

Not a whole lot of specifics to report, but I did make yet another deep non-cashing run in an MTT on Sunday. I played the same 7:00 $5.50 tourney and got 76th out of 403. I'm content with that for now. As is usually the case with such a finish, I was just a card or two away from making a serious run, and one of these times they're gonna fall my way. Until then I can be content with spending a majority of the tourney over the chip average and outlasting over 80% of the field with little to no effort. But my middle stages game definitely needs some work, so any general middle stages advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm able to mix it up and get chips early, but I have a tough time doing much more than maintaining while the big stacks are getting bigger and the small stacks are busting out. My over average stack all of the sudden turns into a below average stack, and just as quickly a all-in or fold stack, and I end up pushing some average ace into a bigger ace or a big pair and that's all she wrote. I feel like it really comes down to the cards (at least in the low levels), as about anything you limp with you have to be willing to call a push with in these middle stages because there's someone all-in almost every hand, but if there's something I'm missing, by all means let me know.

My hope for this weekend is to satellite into a $26 or possibly higher tourney. I know its still considered "low limit", but hopefully you can at least pull off a decent bluff here and there. You can't get anybody of of anything at $5 and $10.

After turning a small profit Sunday thanks to a super suckout w/KJ vs AA in a .05/.10 game and a couple of $2.25 SNG cashes, I decided I needed a little more of a fix and skipped my workout in favor of poker yesterday afternoon.

One thing I did was decided to see what all the hub-hub was about with the $8.80(?) 18 person token turbos. You people are right. These things are RIPE. With little to no effort I found myself at the final table in 6th with a stack of about $1875 having won one pot. Of course, a short time later I found myself on the bubble when my 44 didn't hold against AJ when I sat 7th out of 7. I dunno if its standard procedure, but we went from 18 down to 7 in just short of 30 mins. Then when I busted it was still probably just under 30 mins. That is an average of a player busting every 2 1/2 minutes! People were getting their chips in the middle with anything and everything, just to get them in. All you gotta do it pick an appropriate spot or two and you're cruising to the prize pool. I liked it a LOT, and will probably try at least one a day for the $26 token and a shot at a nice MTT instead of the $5 & $10s or, if I can snag more than one, the $26 token satellites of the same structure for a $75 token. GCox and everyone else aren't lying about getting a piece of these. There's really no reason not to!

In the interest of seeing if all turbos played like this, I entered a single table $6.60, which played a whole lot tighter and I think I went out like 6th. So I presume my token satellite was at least somewhat of an exception to the norm, but I'll stick in a turbo every now and then just to see if its something I feel like I can beat.

At this point, thanks to a couple of other $5.50 SNGs I played and didn't cash in, I was down a relatively ugly $30, and had one table remaining that I had started just after the $6.60 turbo to bail me out of being stuck. A $10 SNG. But it wasn't looking too promising either, as I was just hovering around my starting stack and 5th/6th place with 6-7 left. I managed to last to 5 players left, where I was a pretty significant dog, but I kept sticking in my chips and picking up blinds and before I knew it I was up in 3rd with 4 left, then when I took out 4th place I was 2nd with 3 left. Then when I took out 3rd place I was about dead even with my heads up opponenet. We stayed that way for quite a while passing blinds back and forth until I lost a few chips semi-bluffing/overbetting my 2nd pair. But a few blinds later we were back to even. This is when my big blind special 10 4 flopped two pair and filled up on the river. I feel like this is one of my most well played hands in a LONG time. I feel like I played it in such a way that he couldn't even put me on the 10, let alone the boat. I checked my 2 pair on the two-suited flop and called a 400 bet. The turn was an offsuit K, which I decided to bet to make it look like I had the K, in hopes that he had a better K. So I bet 400 here, and he called. So far, so good. The river was another 10, and I checked trying to look like I had a weak K and hoping like hell that he'd bet again. He fired out 400 again, and I raised him to 1200, giving him an attractive 4 to 1 price and he called. He says "I should have checked" and "I had a K" in the chat box. So now I have a chip advantage that gives me some comfort in getting a little aggressive. I haven't mastered the art of dropping the hammer as my blogger tourney experience is slim and none, but a short time later I had the blogosphere in mind when I called a min-raise in the BB w/72o. My dream flop of 877 fell, which I promptly checked, and he fired $400 at and I called. The turn was something like a Q. I checked again, he bet $400, and I raised to $1200 just to see where we were at. He called. The river was something like a 9, which filled up a straight possibility but I wasn't the least bit worried. I didn't wanna miss a bet here, so I went into the tank for a little bit to figure out how to get the best value. He had about 3k left, but I didn't know if he had a hand worthy of all of it. I knew he was at least good enough for $1200 on the turn, so I stayed with $1200 and he called. That was pretty much it as I called his push on the next hand w/something like J6o and 3 to 1, and sucked out on his QK to take it down.

This guy was no champion, but I was EXTREMELY proud of my heads up play, as with blinds starting at 150/300 and each of us w/6500ish stacks I was prepared to grind it out with this guy for as long as it took, and it turned out I made a couple hands and got damn good value out of them, so it didn't take a whole lot. I was also extremely proud of my play overall, as I came from about t850 w/5 players left to win the damn thing. I feel like my SNG bubble play has improved about 1000% in the past 3-6 months and that's *really* where the difference is in SNGs. Anybody can play *to* the bubble in a SNG. Hell, I lost a LOT of money in 2005 playing *to* the bubble. Bubbling is even named after me at our monthly game. Its working yourself from 4th or 5th to the money that I think makes a successful SNG player.

Anyway, just like that I went from $30 down to $15 up for the session, which really changes your outlook when you walk away.

In other news my brother-in-law has deposited his $25 FT gift certificate that we gave him for Christmas, and I've been playing some $2.25s with him and trying to help him fine tune his SNG game. Its strange how I see a lot of the same tendencies in him that lost me a lot of money pre-4/06. But hopefully I can break him of those habits and he can be profitable a little quicker than me. And in these UIGEA bankroll moving challenged days, I also transferred a buddy $11 on Friday for him to turn into a bankroll so we can play some together as well. He's already cranked it up over $50, so we're well on our way to $5.50 and beyond. No collusion, of course, but its fun to be at a table with someone you know.

So when I'm not playing $2.25s and $5.50s with them, I'm still plugging away at the $10s and .05/.10 NL tables and having pretty good success, and as I talked about before, taking shots w/the token races and an MTT or two a week. No more than 2 tables open at a time for now. Slow and steady is winning the race so far, and hopefully will produce big results before all is said and done.

That is all for now. Happy 2/20/07. The semi-sorta hammer day.