Last Saturday was a little unusual for me–I played both tournament AND cash poker in the same day! (Besides unusual, this was also awesome–all poker all the time!) I can’t blame my mediocre showing in the tournament (37th out of 120) on an inability to switch playing styles quickly enough; the tournament actually came first chronologically. Really, it was a combination of two factors, one of which I had no control over and one which I did have control over and am therefore a little embarrassed about.
The first was that I was card dead for nearly the entire tournament. The first serious hand I played was pocket eights; I was on the button and there were two limpers ahead of me, so I raised 3x the blind. Unfortunately, the small blind chose to go all in…and that was where I made my first big mistake of the game. This particular player had been moaning for the entire tournament how she was card dead, card dead! and visibly getting more and more frustrated, so I decided that she probably didn’t have a REALLY good hand–at best, A-K or A-Q, which would give me at least a 50% chance of winning the pot when everyone else folded (which they did), leaving us isolated.
Bad call on my part–she had pocket queens. Of course I lost–it didn’t put me out by any means, calling her had cost about 1/3 of my chip stack–but it was a third I could ill afford to lose given the utter lack of cards that had been coming my way.
My second mistake was my last mistake, as it took me out–I was down to about 2500 in chips and the blinds were 1000/2000, so I had two choices–go all in with the best hand I thought I was going to get before the blinds hit me or wait til the blinds actually hit and just pray to suck out on somebody with the probably horrible cards in my hand. I was half inclined to do that latter, as my hands were uniformly sucking, but then, when I was still three or four away from the blinds, I found myself holding A-Q suited. Someone went all in ahead of me, which should have induced me to fold–there were still a lot of people waiting to act behind me and A-Q suited, pretty as it looks, is still a drawing hand–but I couldn’t seem to stop myself, I went all in anyway, and ended up being all in with four other people in the pot, one of whom had A-K. So in other words, there were only three cards left in the deck that would give me a shot at having the winning hand; you can safely assume I didn’t get one of ‘em, and then I was out of the game.
The subsequent cash game was a much happier event for me–I ended up almost tripling up my original buy-in of $110. (That may sound like a strange buy-in amount, and it is–really I bought in first for $60, then rebought for $50.) Early in the game I ran into a flopped straight flush, which is the first time I’ve ever seen that happen–not a lot you can do ’bout that, eh? Well actually, I DID try to do something about it–I raised up four times the blind preflop with pocket kings and Miz FlopStraightFlush called me with 6 9 suited in hearts. So when 7 8 10 of hearts came out on the board, I had the king-high flush and, well. No, I hadn’t expected her to stay in with a preflop raise with the hideous crap required to make that flop a straight flush, so I lost $40 in one hand, necessitating the rebuy. Sigh. Oh well, I won it back and way more, so I can’t cry too much.