I'm in the mood...

I don't know, maybe I'm back into the mood for poker. Two nights in a row working on the quest. And last night I actually made modest progress. Up $1.59 for the session bringing the bankroll to $23.30.

I tried a few times to use the Phil Gordon approach. As I suspected, it didn't work particularly well. If you raise it a reasonable amount, people seem to look at it like, "It's only six cents more." If you raise it a lot, they seem to think you're trying to buy it and will call anyway. I suppose that doesn't mean the approach is a complete failure. My pocket aces probably took a considerably larger pot than they otherwise would have due to my early raise.

I have no hard evidence to back it up, but I'm of the opinion that at this level a strategy I'll call "tight speculation" is the right way to go. Normal tight aggressive play, modified to play a lot more speculative hands where you can get in cheap. If you don't hit the flop big or have a ton of outs to a monster, bail to any pressure.

Last night I got mostly junk right up until just before I had to quit. I was down over $1 at one point, but slowly worked my way back up. Then I hit a couple big hands. I would have had a nice double-up in there too if the other guy hadn't hit a 3-outer at the river to split the pot. I ended up losing money to the rake on that one.

The Bodog Blogger tournament is tonight. Not sure yet if I'll make that one or not. Give it a try if you haven't already.