Posted by Johnnymac 9:56 PM
I played tonight at the Friendship. 2 hours of 5-10 full kill and I lost $149.

In the spirit of the new year, I'm resuming my routine of early morning endurance training, except that I'm going to focus on bicycling this year instead of marathoning (my poor feet can't take the abuse anymore and I'm burned out on running, anyway). So this morning I was in the gym at 5:30 and needless to say, I was pretty beat by the time I sat down tonight.

Over the course of my two hours playing, I won a grand total of four small pots, the biggest being maybe $60. I didn't get any really good hands dealt to me all night (the best hands I saw were AQo (twice) and 88) and most of the rest of the hands I saw tonight were complete rags. And the remaining marginal hands that did end up being worth playing didn't hit any big flops. Add the fact that tonight's crowd was rather loose and aggressive and hunting the currently enormous bad beat jackpot and you have all the makings for a dangerous night.

One player in the game tonight was a regular I've seen before named "Al". From what I have seen so far, I think he calls too many raises and he plays too many hands, but unfortunately he seems to have my number at the moment. My problem against him is that he rarely raises before the flop unless he has AA, and he never raises after the flop unless he has the Nuts on the river. In between, he won't lead the betting unless he has the nuts on any particular street and instead he will check and call almost every other single hand he plays. This is quite unusual relative to the opponents I usually play against and I usually get trapped by my own aggressiveness. For example, in the first hand I EVER played in this particular game, I ended up heads up against Al in late position with AQo and an Ace on a very non-threatening board. Al checks and calls on every street and then turns over AKo to my absolute utter surprise. Tonight, again with AQo in a near-identical situation, I flopped two pair only to discover that Al had checked and called a set of kings(!) all the way to the river. Yes, I know that it looks as if he's trapping me on purpose and that I should be more careful against him, but Al plays this way against EVERYONE and he's usually a losing player. He will almost always check and call and then fold against any action on the end. This confuses me because my personal experience tells me I should adjust against him when I get heads up - that he's trapping me on purpose - but then empirical observations say that I've just had an unlucky short term against him.

Anyway, after two hours of bad cards and bad luck (against Al and just about everyone else) I could sense that I was beginning to steam. Since I was already tired I decided that the lucre of the game wasn't enough for me to try and steer clear of going on tilt and losing even more money and that my prospects were beginning to look quite risky. I looked at my watch, counted my chips, and decided that a moderate hourly loss with good (but unlucky) play was better than risking a much bigger loss based on bad decisions from negative emotions. I'll be back there soon enough anyway.

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