Excessive Variance

Poker has been sort of slow the last two weeks, but here is a quick run down of what I’ve done.

Played in the $40 dollar buy in Sunday tournament on Stars for the 40 Billion hand promotion where first place was 125k.  The field was just over 41 thousand players, and I busted out in 202nd place running AK into AQ all in preflop.  Good cash, but very disappointing after 9 hours of play.

After running sort of bad in cash games during the week, I was excited to head to Council Bluffs/Omaha for the WSOP circuit event they had going just for a change of scenery.  I had last Friday off for my presidents day holiday, so I took off in the middle of a snow storm and drove to Omaha.  Normally its a 2 hour drive, but since I rarely ever exceeded 40mph on the way there it was closer to 4 hours.  Mother nature is a whore… I was worried this would affect the turnouts for the tournaments and cash games, but it appeared I was incorrect.  The place was packed.

Friday night I played in a 2/5 NL game with a 10 dollar mandatory straddle.  Great action in that game, and I booked a decent win after an 8 hour session.  Found a hotel, got some sleep as I planned on playing the HORSE event the next day.  Had an angry run in with housekeeping from the hotel as they were mad I wasn’t ready to leave at checkout time, but I didn’t really care.  Hit Ruby Tuesday for a decent brunch and headed back to the card room.  Got in a 10/20 O8 game and ran good in it for about a hour and 1/2 making back about 150% of what I bought in for.  At this point, the tournament was more than a freeroll for me.

The tournament area in the casino was horrible. They had the tables packed way to tightly, and didn’t have enough room for all the players so some of the tournament tables were spilling over into the live action area.  I got off to a decent start in the tournament, much like the one I played in Chicago I was chip leader of my table at the first break.  After that I just ran horribly, especially in Razz.  I lasted to just before the 3rd break before busting on a O8 hand where I flopped the nut flush draw and a wheel wrap and ended up making trips and losing to a full house and my low didn’t get there.  It would be nice to run good in one of these tournaments.

After the tournament I checked the cash game tables.  There was a 5/10 game, but I was around 13th on the list and they didn’t have room to start new games.  The 2/5 list was excessively long too so I just headed home.  The trip was worth while money wise, after entry fees and expenses I cleared about $1500 for a day and a half.

Sunday I played the Stars 4 Million guarantee.  Once again I ran AK into AQ all in preflop and lost, this time it wasn’t after 9 hours of play, but it also means I wasn’t in the money.

I had been enjoying Rush Poker on Full Tilt the last couple of weeks, until I took a brutal beat for a 250bb stack.  I opened with 77 in first position, only the big blind calls.  Flop was Ah, 7s, 5h, he checked I bet and he called.  Turn was a 6.  He checked, I bet, he raised, I pushed all in and he has a set of 5’s, drawing to 1 card left in the deck.  And he hits quads on the river… and my ass is still sore.  So I haven’t been playing Rush since then.  I’ve been playing around with some mix games and short handed limit games on Stars lately, and if it wasn’t for running horribly in 2-7 triple draw I would be doing fantastic.  I’m doing pretty well though, so I’ll just keep grinding and see how things go.