Winter report - brief poker summary

Ok, so my trip report is essentially done. I'm not even sure if anyone cares about the poker portion of the trip but I feel that I owe it to the title of my blog to talk about it. After all, if I don't talk about poker... hell, I don't know where I was going with that sentence. Alright, so I'm just gonna recap the sessions, not to the detail that maybe Jordan would do in his 5 part post about a hand or two where he recognized the twitch in his opponent and pwned him because he read it correctly as a weakness... :) I love your blog Jordan, just giving you shit cuz I know you can take it.

I started writing out this huge post about each of the sessions but I got bored as I was typing it up. And I didn't take nearly as good a notes as I should have on winning sessions... Just dollar amounts. So, instead of going into each of them, I'll just post by dollar amounts. On second thought, I'm not even gonna do that. Overall, in poker, I ended up about +$700. I started off the trip -$300 but from Friday night on, I would go on a mini heater. But again, no crazy hands, nothing too interesting. I think it was more that the players were loose so they were calling me down with worse hands. However, I know I was able to extract a lot of value based on that because of one consistent theme that I enjoyed through this trip.

My hand reading was on point.

There were numerous times that I would literally call out someone's hand in my head and sure enough, that's what they flip over. Earlier in the trip, I was watching the other players when I wasn't in the hand and I would try to make a read on them. Now, I hardly ever play live poker. So, I may not recognize the nervous twitch, the mannerism, etc etc, but one thing that is the same online or live is a player's betting pattern. And based on that, I was able to really narrow down the hand range and like I said, for several instances, I was able to exactly pinpoint what they had. One example was when BaconMary (this was Sunday night poker) got it all in against two other players... I whispered over to the guy who wasn't in the hand that she had top set, the other dude next to me had to have a set and the donkey in the other seat must be chasing a flush. They get it all in, flip over the cards and sure enough, Mary has top set with her JJ, guy to my right who was fairly tight shows his bottom set (I think 4s) and the donkey who stacked off earlier chasing was on a flush draw that never got there. Mary scooped up a nice pot. And I was proud of myself for literally calling out the hand. Sure, it could have been that I was lucky. But that wasn't the first or the last time during this trip that I felt I had a good feel for what the players were holding. And when that happens, it really helps, especially in extracting value. There were numerous times that I made a fairly thin value bet to get an extra $30-40 out of a person and again, this was one of those trips where that worked out.

None of it mattered though because my whole poker profit was given back to the local economy via craps. Probably no surprise to the readers out there. But remember... I am due!!!!