One of my mantras in poker has become "focus on making good decisions not on good outcomes". Last Friday my patience was tested on this as I went an entire tournament with not even one pocket pair!! I focused on playing my position and my stack rather than the cards and found myself the short stack on the final table (45 players). I was forced to go all-in and behind a couple of times and got lucky, then I just focused on letting other players knock themselves out so I could advance in the money. The tournament paid 6 places and when we got down to 7, I was rooting for the shortest stack to lose. Amazingly, they just kept surviving (one example A9 vs A8 short stack who caught an 8). When a very good player got a bad beat and went on tilt (she still had enough to watch me get knocked out in blinds) she donked off her chips and went out on the bubble! One more player got unlucky before my blinds got me for 5th place and a $90 win. I consider it one of my more intelligent games cause I never gave up and just played the hand dealt me as well as possible.
Back in the tri-cities for a few days....Sunday evening very good to me on the $2-20 spread game. $220 in winnings for about 2 hours of play. The game does tighten my sphincter somewhat cause you can really lose a lot on one bad hand. I got very lucky with a QJ suited vs AA when the jack flopped with two diamonds. The ace jammed it and the queen came on the turn with another jack on the river. Unfortunately the aces ran out of money early or it would have been a huge win. But, that is a good example of me overplaying top pair, and aces overplaying a single pair. Someone pointed out that my top pair with flush draw was probably ahead of the aces on the flop. Last night I was watching high stakes poker and almost an identical situation happened with Barry Greenstein holding aces and Tom Dwan holding king queen suited on a queen high flop with two spades. Dwan ended up winning a pot of almost a million when they went all-in and he caught another queen on the turn. It was the largest single pot ever on the show.
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I saw that episode of High Stakes Poker earlier in the year and it was replaying on the TV screen at the Cable last night during the tournament. That was a great hand. Hope I will see you sometime this week - I still have 14 hours to go for the stupid Wildhorse tournament thing - don't think I will make it. Talk to you later.
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