Monied in The Mookie... or... Man, do these cards suck!

If you're reading this from the actual blog page and not through an aggregator or reader, then off to the right is a list of poker books I've read. It's not an exhaustive list, just some titles that came to mind when I discovered the "list" element on the Blogger page template. Among those titles is "Zen and the Art of Poker". This is a book that gets a lot of recommendations. I personally found it rather repetitive, going around and around a central theme that can be summed up in two words -- Patience, Grasshopper. (Okay, only one word was really necessary, but it sounds a lot more Zen-like when you put "Grasshopper" on the end.)

And that pretty much sums up my experience at The Mookie last night -- patience. I got a long, long stream of some of the worst cards I've seen in ages. I don't mind running the occasional bluff, but I do like to go into it with something that has a slightly better than average chance of turning into a real hand. Last night I had few chances even at a reasonable bluff. (I know the hammer -- 72o -- is popular in these blogger events, and I've played it before. Franklstein even wrote about one of my luckier hammer plays. But after pissing away stacks of chips on this kind of bravado, I tend to stick with reasonable starting hands unless the situation is particularly favorable to a stone cold bluff.) So I did a LOT of folding. I don't know, maybe this turned out to be a good thing. At least I didn't waste a lot of chips chasing hands that weren't to be.

On the plus side, I was able to capitalize on most of my good starters, which is the only reason I was able to hang on as long as I did. That, and one lucky suckout fairly early when my pocket nines ran into surflexus' pocket kings and I turned the set. Other than that, it was mostly solid poker and getting cards at the right time. More than once I was on or near the ropes and managed to catch a good hand just in time.

Contrary to other recent experience, I was able to successfully pull off a couple slowplays last night. It's great when it works, but, man, does it suck when it doesn't.

The final table seemed to drag on forever. I don't know if it was my horrible wireless connection at the hotel or if people were busy playing three tournaments at once, but it appeared that some folks were really dragging their heels on every single decision. For a while there I thought I was playing near the bubble in some giant freeroll. The sense of dragging on wasn't helped by the chips aimlessly wandering from pile to pile. The chip lead must have changed hands about three dozen times before we made it past the bubble.

For me the marathon ended with blinds at 800/1600 and antes at 200. With my stack at 8k, this gave me an unadjusted M of less than 3. MaimiDon pushed his 7k into the pot and I called with AQo. His pocket 8's flopped a set and rivered full to leave me with crumbs that the small blind scooped up next hand. Oddly, my 76o didn't dominate, and I was out in fifth, the first money position.

Don't forget the WWdN: Not The Darzog Invitational tonight at 22:30 EDT at PokerStars. Password is monkey.