I'll be out of town until 2008, so that's it for this years' poker playings and musings. Have a great rest of the year. Good luck, and more importantly, play well.

So I played some poker last night at the San Francisco and San Jose Bay Area Poker Meetup Group (http://pokersoup.com/league/show/1). We had a holiday party with some tasty catered food. We sped up the blinds a little bit to make up for the eating and the white elephant gift exchange, since it was a Thursday night. I think best gift goes to Ken's talking Shrek "Donkey" stuffed animal, with honorable mention to the "Nun's Having Fun" calendar and, of course, Ed's fart machine.

The tournament started out poorly for me - I made some investments that didn't come to fruition and then I got all in with my AK against Brian's J8 and promptly did a rebuy. I've done it worse to him, though, so no hard feelings. I somehow managed to fold my bad hands and move all in with my good hands to take the blinds and occasionally double up until we were all in the money (top 5). At that point, the blinds were 4k/8k and the average chip stack was 24k - slot machine poker.... I had around 16k, but every time I got into a pot with a smaller stack, I couldn't pull off a win. I finally went in with A2 against Alan's KK and caught an Ace on the flop! K on the river, of course :p With 1k in chips, I actually quadrupled up when I was in the big blind, but lost with A4 when I was in for the small blind. 5th place got me my first buy-in back. Congrats to the winners and thanks to all for a great holiday party!

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to stay until 3am playing in the cash game. I left when there were 4 other people playing, which I hear went until 5am. We played Texas Hold'em, but we managed to coax Trish into letting us play a bit of Omaha Hi-Lo and Crazy Pineapple - we need to do that more! Maybe we should start two cash games: a lower-stakes HORSE and the normal Hold'em. Anybody?

Two hands of note:

Pot Limit Omaha Hi-Lo: I had A3T3 double-suited, which seemed pretty good 5-way. I come into the hand raising the maximum under the gun, and everybody called. I should have figured that would happen, and Brian convinced me that it seems like it would have been better to check the flop out first. The flop was Q89 rainbow. That was terrible for me, but with $10 in the pot, I decided to call Trish's $2 bet, as did most everybody else. The turn was a 5 (two diamonds now). Trish made another bet, Bert and I called (I had the next-to-nut low draw now and I wanted to get half the pot to get my money back!). The river was a 4 of diamonds, and Trish and Bert checked. I bet $10, since I was pretty sure I had half the pot locked up. Trish folded her trip-8s and Bert folded his hand - they both thought I was playing the high :)

Hold'em: As usual, this is a pretty loose game, so when Yannick makes it $2 to go under the gun and says he has a strong ace, we all call. I'm in SB with 33 and Brian is in the BB. The flop is 653 (two clubs), which seems good to me. I check, Brian bets $5, both Yannick and I call. The turn is a Q, and it seems that hit Yannick, so Brian and I check. Yannick bets $10, I decide to call, Brian makes it $30, Yannick calls, I call. I figure Yannick has AQ, and Brian is really worrying me with A4 or 74, but I do some math: $90 in the pot, $20 more for me to close the betting, so I have 4.5-1 pot odds and about 3-1 odds for making my full house - easy call. The river is an 8 (no flush) and Brian bets $25 to which Yannick folds. I stupidly and unhappily call to see Brian's 74 for a straight. I should have been able to save that $25, but I'm sure Brian new I had a set, so he bet the right amount to get me to call :/ I decided to pick up my profits at that point, because I know I have a tendency to give them away after losing a big hand like that.

If you actually made it this far, thanks :) See you in 2008!

I was hoping to follow up last week's big win at Lucky Chances with at least a good showing, but things didn't turn out as planned. The short version of story is there were a lot of good players at the table and I couldn't really do much against them. I didn't hit many flops, and they took advantage of that.

Here comes the expected whining: One time from the BB with T7o I connected with a KT7 rainbow flop. I had a premonition that I was not going to be happy (when does flopped bottom two-pair ever work out?) but I decided to bet the flop and turn anyway, and K9d turns over a runner-runner flush. He didn't bet on the river, which probably saved me some money.

Observation: It seems to me the regulars at the 1-1-2 game at Lucky Chances love to make continuation bets and just bluff in general. Last week I profited very well by just calling people down. I was able to take down multiple pots in the same way this time (i.e. check-calling out of position on the flop with middle pair against an over-bet pre-flop raise and continuation bet and checking it down to the river when over cards kept falling). It's not as glamorous as making raises, re-raises, and pushing people off of hands, but those types of plays lost me the money I made from the calling plays today :p

This is my first real post using our new blog entry interface. I've never blogged before and I haven't decided exactly what I'm going to blog about here, so I don't have much to say at this point. Hopefully I'll figure it out soon.

Hello, world!