Lazy Sunday

It's a wierd time in the banking world. Tensions are high and some very good people I know at Bear Sterns may or may not be employed in the near future. The credit market turmoil is affecting all divisions in my own bank and my own job could very well be deemed irrelevant at any point. Who knows? But in the meantime, there's work to do....

I spent the last hour or so updating my poker room map (linked at the bottom right corner of this blog page). So far, I've counted *70* official poker room visits in the U.S. My next trip is out to California for the first week of May, where I should rack up at least 6 or 7 more visits. I'm really looking forward to it.

I played poker yesterday for Andy Rettig's birthday. He hosted an all-day affair at his place and I was on fire at the table. For .50/1 NLHE, I bought in for $60 and cashed out for $243. Then, Paulie and I broke at 5:30 to go see Matty Ebs do a set at Comix. Good stuff. We came back to Andy's at 9, with Matty in tow, and played .50/1 Pot Limit Omaha until 2:00 am. I bought in for $50 and cashed out with a grand total of $335. A fine total and a good day at the tables for me. I made two excellent laydowns in PLO where I had the second nut flush, once on the turn and once on the flop and was able to get away from it when my bets were re-raised. Both times, my opponent showed the nuts. I saved myself at least $75 or more because of those lay-downs.

On a tangential note, there was a play at my own table on Friday which I want to put up for discussion. I was dealing a raucous game of 1-2 NLHE and a new player, Patrick, had raised the pot pre-flop in early position. Matty, playing his seemingly loose and aggressive style, re-raised about $25 more. Patrick immediately pushed all in for $300+ dollars! Matty was stunned. He was speechless for a few seconds, turning this interesting event over in his mind. The previous hand, Matty had tangled with Patrick and took down a pot. Was Patrick just being overly aggressive? Or was he pretending to be on tilt so he could induce a call with a monster hand he held. Matty thought for a few more moments and turned over his hand on the table to fold...KK. OMG. The table was in shock. Patrick, with a flourish, showed AKo to win the pot. A discussion ensued as to whether KK is ever a good fold pre-flop. I maintain that there is almost no situation in which KK is a good fold preflop heads up. Unless you have a dead read on your opponent. I mean an absolute dead on read, you are going to be ahead so often it's scary. I think your EV in the long run is so high with KK heads up that it doesn't make sense to fold.

I can't fault Matty though. He was the big winner of the night, leaving over $600 up. But it could easily have been $1000 or more had he just called. We ran the board by the way, and an Ace never materialized, just FYI.

Another poker chore I accomplished recently was to update my poker spreadsheet. I've been..um..lazy about it. Since June of last year to be precise. But I finally filled it in with all of my poker sessions since that time. The good news is that I'm up about $1,200 since I started keeping track. The bad news is that I started keeping track in late Sep. '05. Yeah, I'm a break even player all right. I'm in positive territory the last three months though. And I aim to keep it that way.