The Mookie

Excellent turnout for The Mookie tonight (technically last night, at least here in the east). Fifty-three showed up at Full Tilt to participate. I'm hoping this bodes well for the WWdN: Not The tonight. (PokerStars, 22:30 EDT, password is monkey.)

This one got off to quite the exciting start. The very first hand I'm in the SB and get dealt suited Big Slick. Love_elf, on the button, calls 30, I make it 120, the BB folds, and love_elf calls my raise. The flop comes AT4, rainbow, with one of my suit. I bet 150. Love_elf thinks for a while and makes it 350. I really hate making big moves on the first hand, but I'm thinking I'm ahead right now and there's enough in the pot already to make this a good first hand, so I want to end it here. I push. Love_elf pondered again for quite a while and, to my surprise, made the call. She turned over AQo. The turn and river brought her no relief. First hand and I've doubled up. Sorry, love_elf. That had to be a very tough call.

Sadly, I was not able to take advantage of my "big" stack. I dropped down to 2500 after one Tango with SurfKiller and hovered near there for a very long time. I was able to hang in by stealing the blinds every so often, but couldn't catch the big hands needed to get anywhere with this crowd. Finally, short-stacked and having gone all-in unchallenged once or twice a round for quite a while, ToddCommish called me. He showed AQs to my massive T9s. Neither of us hit anything, but he outkicked me and I was left with less than the ante. My 15-chip all-in didn't scare anyone away, and I was out in 16th.

Oh well, I won the SnG I played while waiting for The Mookie, so all was not lost last night. I've been debating whether I should move way up in tournament level while there's still a chance. I normally play at the $10 level, occasionally going for a $20 event. I'm thinking I should give the $100 tournaments a try. If I knew I could get a table like at that SnG tonight I'd jump on it in a second. Could be quite a while before I get much opportunity to play again. As they say, make hay while the sun shines. OTOH, I know it's a real donkey move to push a lot of money in the pot just because it's the last hand of the night.

If anyone has some tips for places to play live in the Orlando area I'd love to hear them. I was checking out the Hard Rock Casino in Tampa online tonight. They apparently run SnG's at various levels all day. Unfortunately, the price is just a bit out of my comfort zone and the rake at the lower end is rather steep. ($100+$20 is the lowest SnG they had listed on their site.) Ring games are a joke here since Florida law allows for a maximum bet of $2. So all that you can find legally is $1/$2 limit. The Hard Rock rake is 10% to a max of $5 with a minimum of $1. At $1/$2 that's effectively highway robbery. And I thought the $4 rake at the $2/$4 game at Pechanga was bad. Anyway, Streets & Trips says the Hard Rock is only an hour from here. Maybe I'll go check it out this weekend.

Hope to see everyone tonight at PokerStars.