Tuesday night poker - too short to blog!?

Tuesday night poker, aka PAPT... maybe I'm cursed, maybe I'm just really really unlucky, or maybe I'm not as good as I think. Whatever the reason, being busted out in the first hour when the blinds are still $3/6 is pretty bad no matter how you cut it. Someone mentioned that I needed to be in the tournament a little longer if I want to blog about it. Not true! But point taken. I just had a feeling it was going to be a relatively short night for me when I lost about half my chips early... we started at $1/2 blinds so I really had no business losing off about $90 in chips that early.... but here's how it went down. From about two or three away from the button, I raised to $7 with AQ. I get only one caller who was the button and also a pretty aggressive player with relatively loose starting hand requirements. So needless to say, I didn't like that an aggressive player had position on me after I raised but I felt better when the flop came A-K-8. I bet $15 and he calls. At this point, I put him on a weak ace or maybe even a hand like KJ/KQ/KT. Turn comes a ten and I bet out another $15 and he doubles it. Now, I'm concerned that he may have ace-ten or KT and caught his second pair but I call. With approx $90 in the pot and $15 more to call, that's plenty of pot odds there. River comes another 8 so the board looks like this: A-K-8-10-8 with no flush possibilities. I check, hoping keep the pot small and he bets out $40. At this point, I'm pretty sure I'm beat. Unless he has K-T which was a possibility, the way the hand played out. So, literally, I put him on either A-10 or K-10 and with 145 in the pot and $40 to call, I was getting better than 3-1 odds on what I thought was a 50/50 situation between him having A-10 (which I can't beat) or K-10 (which I could beat, thanks to the 8 pairing on the board). So I call off another $40, just to see that he had a boat with A-8. Boom, there goes about $90 of my $175 starting chip.

After that, I really didn't catch anything but I didn't think I was really on tilt. I was just getting short stacked.... relatively speaking. I was down to $71 in chips and the blinds were at $3/6 when I got dealt AQ again. This time, I am on the big blind so I wait to see what happens. Well, early position player who is also aggressive raises to $20. Then right behind him, another player calls and now it's folded over to me. I was pretty sure one of them (if not both) had a pocket pair. But mainly, I put the initial raiser on a pocket pair based on the raise. Well, I figured that since I was relatively short and there was no way I was going to fold this hand, if I call, I'd be down to $51 and if I hit my hand, there was no guarantee that I was going to make any more money. And it's no guarantee that I hit my hand and I'm first to act. So, instead, I decided that I'd rather force it into a heads up coin flip situation or even better, have both of them fold. So, I pushed all in for another $51. Sure enough, I get one caller (the original raiser) who had JJ and it held up. I think I saw the flop 4 times excluding any unraised big blind situation and lost most of my chips in the two hands above. Was it a bad move to push in for another $51? Maybe. But I do know that I was not in the mood to try to grind it out with $51 and the blinds soon moving to $4/8. Again, I'm not sure if that's a result of me being on tilt or just a result of me being so shortstacked so early that I didn't leave myself the choice. I do know this. I never should have called that $40 bet on the river. My gut said fold. That's what I shoulda done.

On the plus side, there's a tournament online at Fulltilt that I wanted to play and it starts at 10pm. So, instead of playing till 11 or so and busting out 4th or something, I guess I'd rather be the first of the 9 to bust out and be home in time for this tournament. And there's always next week.