ILX Poker Players Unite

I was off sick yesterday and played a little bit of poker and managed to fluke my best day ever! Up $440 or so in under 600 hands, thanks to an SNG win and some good times at $50 and £50NL 6max.

Highlight was hitting the nut straight on the turn and pushing all-in over a guy re-raising with a set - hello $280 pot! What might have been the highlight, but for a tremendous laydown on the villain's part, was my last hand - AA, hit a set on the turn (which also brought three to the flush), bet 3/4 of what was already a massive pot and a guy with a lower (flopped) set managed to find a fold. Considering we both had 3 x buyins at this point, I was looking at a $570 pot if he'd been a tiny bit braver/more foolhardy.

p.s. why does my firefox no longer recognise the poundsign? Do I have to start writing GBP from now on?

Lowlight: QQ against Bluffin' Grandma, a genuinely terrible player who's gone all-in with garbage twice in the past five minutes and donked away about $300 in a half-hour. I raised to $12 pre-flop, three callers, check-raise to $20 post-flop (7-4-2, two diamonds), and everybody folds but Grandma, who immediately goes all-in on the Kc turn. No way she's got that king - I'm thinking A7d at best - so I call her, scare card be damned. Turns out Grandma's been slow-playing aces, and I wave goodbye to a day's work.

I'll let David tell the story of how he got his kings cracked, which is one of the most unbelievable things I've ever seen in a poker game.

The Rest Of The Story: after Daniel & I lick our wounds @ the buffet, we both decide to give it another go. This was around 6:30 - 7 PM. I cash in the remaining $200 I earmarked as Fun Money, & sit down @ another table. Dan & his buddy stop by a few hours later (where I hear about the QQ story), and I'm down another $100+, making my losses on the day a little more than $400. This included some shitwit chasing a flush & gutshot straight w/ (I think) A4 suited, despite me doing my best to bet him out. And said dude, of course, catches the STRAIGHT FLUSH on the river.

By the time I left (@ 5 AM), I was up $450. Doi. I actually blogged about it in a general-audience style (because what else am I gonna do after playing poker for 14 hours?), but the short of it: drunk Patriots fans that don't know when to bail out are the best guys to play against.

I believe I'm thinking of another bad KK beat (which doesn't seem totally out of the question, given how badly the first few hours at that table went for you). The guy you faced up (and I remember it being somebody else across the table sitting in the Raving Maniac seat, not her) was playing A6s with two spades on the flop and caught his ace on the turn and then his spade on the river, effectively beating you twice. No idea why he called your raise in the first place.

NB: I oughta point out that for every time I couldn't fold top two pair against a totally obvious flush draw or called a $30 raise to chase an eight-outer, there was the time I beat aforementioned maniac on a nut flush or rode AK to megabucks against some meathead; I only finished down $150 for the day, which isn't a huge amount of money by any means. I just wish we didn't have to leave so early to drive back, since by the sounds of it, it got as loose after the Pats game as I figured it would.

Nice comeback, though that dude's AQ story is the fishiest thing ever.

I'll see what I can do about the NYC game. We should definitely put together a bigger Foxwoods group next time.

Folks love them flush draws, especially if they have an A, regardless of how shit the kicker is. Folks just love playing hands, really - whether it has something to do w/ the mystique of the World Series & wanting to be the devil-may-care 37 maverick, or just wanting to gamble, it seems like a lot of folks just like throwing their shit around @ the lower stakes tables. I'd probably cry & piss myself if I sat down @ a high stakes table right now.

And, to be fair, DC, my streak happened around 2 AM, so it was well after the Pats game. Right after last call, I think. COINCIDENCE?

More tales like the above please! It makes online poker look like the glorified masturbation it really is.

But... it's glorified masturbation that's made me $10,000!! I did my sums the other night and worked out that between bonuses, rakeback and poker profits, Sunday night's play took me into 5 figure winnings. Man that felt good :)

I guess I owe Chris V half my winnings a hearty vote of thanks for getting me started - if he hadn't posted the opening post to this very thread I might never have given it a go :)

Seconding this request.

First thing you can do - register with Partypoker.com or pokerstars.com and start playing the play money games and reading the small tutorials if they'd be useful. The games'll be silly but you'll get a hang of the interface etc. If you sign up for Pokerstars (currently the biggest, most highly regarded site) and there's somewhere you can say that someone referred you, please tell them efil4elbmow sent you :)

If you can afford $50 or so, then deposit that and play the lowest buyin real money games - $0.01/$0.02 no-limit at Stars (double at Party), where it'd be hard to lose more than $10 even if you played blindfolded. It's a lot better than the play money tables because even when such tiny sums are at stake, people care about the outcome - when the chips are pretend, they could just push with every hand.

Anyway - AIM/MSN me when I'm next on and we can chat more. I have LOTS of stuff to tell you!

http://www.flopturnriver.com/US-Friendly-Poker-Rooms.php

It might be wise to cross-reference with this list, and also to consider that Full Tilt is basically the only solution for US Mac users at this point; Bodog stopped development of their Mac client last month, and Pokerroom no longer accepts US bets.

I had a pretty decent Jan - made about $1500 or so, played 11k hands of cash and maybe a dozen SNGs - and a couple of MTTs which both ended with bad beats a few dozen hands outside the money. I am still playing mostly £50NL 6max, but am getting frustrated with the lack of tables - even at peak times at Crypto there are maybe only a dozen, and I don't know of any other sites - apart from the Boss network which I am loathe to use as it doesn't support Poker Tracker - that provide £ tables.

The reason I am so keen to play in sterling is because I am an overall loser at $100NL but am making 10PTBB/100 at £50 which is very pleasing indeed. The game is simply far easier.

Think I'm gonna have to put the poker ambitions on hold for a little while, feeling too stressed/depressed about job/career/life changing plans to devote any energy towards it. May buy a book and do some offline studying.

small fish though really. but it made me feel better esp seeing all the addicts on l.t. losing $$$$$$$$$$$$$$s.

I also played poker during it but, after 600 grinding, tedious, painful hands I finished down £35 (though rb and bonus makes it about breakeven). Man I've seldom enjoyed poker so little - but in comparison to all these astonishingly self-deluded idiots (the Roberto Baggio/Toadfish out of Neighbours fellow in particular) I felt like I had a money-printing machine in front of me.