3am Ramblings

What's up guys? I know the updates have been lacking lately, but I've gotta good excuse...k not really. After a week of NL last week (ugh...live NL), I'm pretty anxious to get back into some chaotic 4/8-Kill games. Bring on six spewtards to the flop when I have Kings or Queens, I'm ready! I'm working Wednesday night into Thursday morning and am off Thursday and Friday night...so that means a couple nights of low limit fun.

So anyway, working graves gives me a lot of time to reflect back on my sessions and let's me think about things I want to try in the future. I guess I'm just going to ramble about them in no particular order...

First off, I want to become a better NL player, but I'm kind of lost on where to start. The NL games in Reno, while a bit bland at times, did give me a lot of room to play (150bbs deep) and the players weren't exactly great. The players who looked to be the "regulars" i.e "winners" didn't seem to do anything overly special...they were just a bit tighter and didn't spew in comparison to the donkeys. In my experience, live players on average tend to be much worse than your average online player, so starting out in LHE I was always a winning player. A lot of that was likely attributed to pre-flop hand selection and not much else. Eventually I learned how to play after the flop and my profit skyrocketed, basically what I'm getting at is...

I feel like there are just too many instances in NL where I don't know "exactly" what to do. Very rarely do I find a spot on a LHE table where I'm completely lost on what the standard/most profitable play is (not trying to sound cocky, I just feel like I know the game pretty well). In NL, I'm completely the opposite. There's usually a couple spots per session where I think to myself "wow, I hope that's how you play that hand" or "wow wtf did I just get away with there?"...

Anyway, I feel like I'm behind the times already. Here I am focusing on getting better at NL when pretty much everyone has had a couple years head start on me. Every donkey in America thinks NL is the "Cadillac of Poker," so wtf have I been wasting my time playing LHE for?! (lol) I'm kidding, there's a ton of donkeys playing live LHE too, but I think it'll be good for me if I change the scenery a bit more often than I have been. Another interesting note, playing in Reno last week was the first time in a long time that I experienced a moment of sheer terror/excitement/adrenaline pumping through my body in a long time at a card table. It was a hand where I was basically calling off my stack all-in with a gutty/nut-flush draw combo and there was a ton of money in the pot. The last time I experienced that same rush at a LHE table might have been 15/30 at the Bellagio last summer after I got hit in the face with the deck for a couple orbits. Anyway, it's a cool feeling to have, and I want to experience it a bit more.

Funny story and then I'll be done rambling: this one NL player sat down at my 4/8-Kill table about a month ago (V-Day I believe) and said he had never played "this game" before. After a couple orbits of helping him with the blinds/betting increments and talking to him, I realized he was talking about limit poker. He usually played NL, and this "limit texas hold em" game was "pretty intense." I laughed politely and said "oh? how so?" He mainly addressed the speed of the game and the amount of money in the pot every hand was "actually a lot of chips." "You'd be suprised how quickly pots can get built in this game" I remember telling him. "A raised kill-pot five ways is already ~$90, and that's just pre-flop." "Wow man...this game is kinda sick...I might have to play this again." Eventually his seat for NL was called and he took off, but yeah, changes in scenery affect people in different ways. His sense of awe with LHE is kinda like my new found awe with NL. Protecting my stack, raising to $75 on a turn vs only raising to $16, little differences like that kinda fascinate me at the moment.

Alright well that's all for now, look for some limit updates for Thurs/Fri, and maybe a couple NL updates for next week. See ya then.