Donkey says, "Whaaaat?"

I will say this about the mixed game last night. It was lots of fun. For someone else.

Limit is normally my wheelhouse game. I sit back and wait for high value hands and then crush the pot with bets. I get called down by draws, sometimes they hit and sometimes they miss, and in aggregate I'm up. It's a sound strategy which has served me well for years. Which is why I got a little tilty last night when I got sucked out on in nearly every big pot I was in. Not running good. Grrr...

More frustrating than that, I think, was that W and Darko, both avowed Limit haters, came in last night and rocked the game. I mean crushed it. All while they were spouting how stupid Limit poker is. I. HATE. HATERS.

Worst hand of the night had to be in Pineapple. I have QJT and the board comes 986. The bet comes out, gets raised, re-raised and capped. Matty Ebs, to my right, has a flopped straight, I know. I have the OESD re-draw and I'm not sure what the rest of the players have to call all of those raises. So when it comes to the discard, I sensibly give up my Q in order to take the top OESD. The turn comes with a Ten. Grrrr.... W leads out and gets two callers, myself included (hey, I still have the OESD right? Grrr....). The river is a brick and me and Matty both call W's lead out bet and she shows QJ for the top straight and takes down a huge pot. Ok, she got lucky to hit the guthshot for the nuts, fine. But when the Rooster, Matty and I all looked shocked that she would call 4 raises with the gutshot, her explanation put me on super-tilt: "It's Limit. That's what you do in Limit, right?"

OH. WOW.

Yes, I know over the long term, I will crush her in this game. But as it stood last night, W arrived late directly from The Borgata in AC, stayed for 2 hours and left with more than twice her initial BI. Darko also hung on to most of his profit after doubling up his BI. Serious Limit player, The Rooster, not so much. Serious Limit player, me? Not so much. Grrrr, Grrrr and Double Grrrr.

On the plus side, I've made a recent foray into online poker again. When someone mentioned I could fill my Full Tilt account with just a simple credit card, I didn't believe them. But lo and behold, it worked! I bought in for $200 just to mess around and I've built that up to $300 in just a few short sessions playing low limit (2-4, 3-6) O/8. God bless that game. I still have a complete fear of online play, so I'm playing super-tight and it's paying off nicely. Hope it keeps up.

In other news, I'm going to Florida this weekend and hoping to take down some of those wierd no-limit games down there. I heard a story that they're getting around the NL buyins there in an interesting manner. The max buyin in the NL games in Florida is $100 by law. So what they're doing is getting 10 guys, at say the 5-10 NL table to all buy in for the max and then all push all in at the same time! Then, when showdown occurs, they all deliberately muck their hands to the button who collects the $1000. They repeat this 10 times and now everyone at the table has $1000. Let the games begin! I don't think I'll be doing this, but I wonder if this little trick has filtered down to the $1-2 or 2-5 tables. Also, as Jordan pointed out, what's to stop anyone from simply picking up their winning when it's their turn and leaving. Technically nothing, except for a beating with a pipe in the parking lot I suppose.