Kicked in the Pants ...

Well, after my last post; poker has given me a bit of a rude awakening. Right on cue, almost immediately after that post, my luck really turned. Fortunately, I still pretty much broke even at 10/20, but the 5/10 games, especially at the Cryptologic sites really hammered me.

I ended up losing about 13% of my bankroll, which isn't devastating by any means, but I will spend the rest of this month rebuilding and it sets me back a bit in attaining my year end target.

Thanks to my cohorts at www.poker-strategy.org, I found a new site to play. BetonBet poker, which is a Poker Room skin, offers a 30% rebate through psorg, which is better than Caribbean Sun's rebate of 27.5% and the players at BetonBet are simply not as good as the Crypto players, at least at the 5/10 level.

I'm getting back to the point where I need to make some cuts in my monthly poker rotation. I am playing BetonBet, Absolute, CaribbeanSun, Interpoker, and then Stars and Party if either have a reload. That is spreading things pretty thin, especially since I am mostly playing one 5 handed table at BetonBet, which is like playing 2 tables, and only one other table if even that (usually at Absolute if there is a game I find intriguing).

I haven't had much opportunity to play tournaments lately, but the few that I have played haven't yielded any success. I played in psorg's inaugural poker league monthly tournament. It's a $1 buy in tourney with $250 added to the prize pool, and normally I don't bother with those small stakes, but psorg has been so good to me, and the folks there are great people, so I have a great deal of loyalty and try to participate in as many events as I can. Plus, it's fun to play with a few people you know. Anyway, I went out of it after losing a race, I had AK and went up against TT, flop was 9JQ, which leaves me with 5 outs ... none of which hit. Would have been in good shape from there had I won the race, but alas.

My wife is going out of town this weekend, which would have freed me up for a big weekend of poker; but instead some of my buddies have wrangled me into going on a canoe trip.

Anyway, the rebuilding has begun; I've gotten 21% of the money I lost back. One thing I'm learning, just when you think you have things pretty much figured out; poker throws you a knuckleball that floats up and looks really enticing, you take a mighty swing and it dives underneath your bat for strike 3!

Fortunately, there's always another at bat, as long as you manage your bankroll properly.