Mid-week update

Not much excitement to report. I played the WWdN last night to little effect. Despite the opportunity, I didn't suck out on Hoyazo again. Broke my streak of crippling or eliminating him with suckouts. (Well, he called them suckouts. I prefer to think of them as optimizing the return on disadvantaged hands.) We were at the same table for quite a while but never tangled in a big pot.

I was doing so-so until somebody slowplayed AK on me and I fell for it. Somewhere inside me alarm bells were going off when he min-raised me on the flop, but I ignored them. Instead, I decided to flex my muscles, at exactly the wrong time. I've been doing that a lot lately -- the bad timing part. I got outkicked and went from comfortable to almost hurting.

Somewhat later, with my M down to about 4, I optimized the return of a disadvantaged hand. It looked like a rather nasty suckout, rivering an inside straight, but it was really just taking a 3-to-1 dog to victory the hard way.

My mini-recovery didn't last long as a few hands later I again pushed with a weak ace and got outkicked. I gotta stop doing that.

The night before I played Mondays At The Hoy. I was also playing a $1 rebuy at the same time. I don't know why I got into the rebuy. Generally, I don't care for these things. But this one seemed cheap enough to rebuy several times without serious damage and it would be a chance to play crazy. There should have been some therapeutic value in that.

The rebuy turned out to be a real snooze-fest. Literally. I swear two-thirds of my table were asleep or entranced by the magic of Howie Mandel in "Deal or No Deal". (Which has to be the stupidest concept for a show in the history of television. On the excitement scale it's just slightly above observing the gathering of navel lint.) There were no crazy rebuys and there were endless delays and timeouts from those who were clearly paying no attention. I only rebought once and then did the add-on.

Perhaps it was the stress of playing two tournaments at once, something I've never been particularly good at, or just the accumulation of boredom from the first hour of the rebuy, but I totally donked out of both tournaments within minutes.

There was one incident in the rebuy that bugged me, and bugged me even more that it bugged me in the first place. I get something like QQ in MP. UTG and UTG+1 both call. The blinds at this point were high enough that they were well worth taking, so I pushed all-in. It folds back to UTG, who had not previously demonstrated any obvious lack of attention to the game, and his timer counts almost all the way down before he calls. Then he turns over AA. I thanked him for the slowroll, but I think my comment went over his head. This is just the setup.

Maybe ten hands later, with me pretty seriously short-stacked, the same guy puts in a small raise before the flop. I've got 33. Not great, but I'm in trouble so I have no real choice but to push. He calls and, again, turns over AA. No slowroll this time. I comment that this is the second time he's turned over AA to my all-in. He makes some illogical comment and then, as I'm eliminated, types "LOL".

I don't know why, but this really pissed me off. Maybe I've played too many blogger tournaments where the level of civility tends to be considerably higher. Or at least the insults are aimed at friends (even if only virtual) and understood by all to be in fun. I'm far more used to people saying, "gg", as someone exits than seeing any kind of derogatory comment. The idea of someone laughing at my having been eliminated on a perfectly legitimate play just really got my dander up. I didn't reply. Even at the moment I knew there'd be no point in that. But it really made me wonder if the mature poker players have been scared off by all the UIGEA stuff, leaving only a few diehards and a bunch of immature kids.

Later I became more upset at my having been upset. Even if I hadn't been eliminated on that play I don't think I'd have gone on tilt big time, but I might have started gunning for this jerk, a less significant, though still potentially dangerous, form of tilt. Anyway, I just wanted to rant about it a bit and get it out of my system. I feel better now.

No Mookie tonight in deference to the restauranteurs', florists' and greeting card people's favorite pseudo-holiday.