Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Stud

In order to spare my laptop the wrath of being tossed through a wall, I took a break from grinding 6-max limit today. Instead I played a couple really low buy-in tourneys, one no limit and one fixed limit.

I finished middle of the pack in the no limit tourney when I flopped a set and pushed all in on a brick turn to get knocked out when the river filled a flush. To her credit, she had flopped an open ended straight draw plus the flush draw and had enough chips to cover me, so c'est la vie.

In the limit tourney it seemed to be an awful long time before I finally played my first hand, when I got dealt pocket Kings and added over 50% to my stack. I stuck to solid starting hands and managed to take a few more pots down before getting moved to another table with approximately double my starting stack. I took a big hand without showdown on my first hand at the new table and took the blinds with another pre flop raise on the very next hand. This was the perfect set up for getting dealt pocket Kings on my third hand at this table, however, the river was uncooperative, filling someone elses draw, and I ended up back to where I was when I sat down.

I slowly worked my way up to the top 20 or so and fought to stay there. There was a player two to my left that absolutely clobbered me for the later part of the tourney. The table was fairly tight as the blinds increased and this player was the most aggressive player at the table. Other than myself, there weren't many opening raises and almost no 3-bets. Anyway, to make a long story short, he kept 3-betting my open raises, raising my blinds, and pretty much just beat me (and the rest of the table) up. We went at it a few times and any time it went to showdown he had the goods. With the blinds where they were and how aggressive he had been playing, I was at the very least calling down with two pair though and was dominated by him the few times this happened. I kept taking chips from the rest of the table and then promptly gave them to him. In the end he took me out with a rivered straight against my turned two pair which put him 2nd in chips with a little under 30 players left. So much for staying out of the way of the big stacks.

Again, I made the money but went out quickly thereafter as I have been doing a lot lately in tourneys. As I rarely play tourneys, I'm not entirely disappointed with results like this and in this particular case I was quite happy with my play. I didn't seize up and go rock tight, but stayed active and gave myself a fighting chance. Next time, I just won't run into bigger hands. Fool proof plan!


One of the last times I was on a big losing skid I switched to some low stake Omaha for a change of pace and had a blast. Today I decided to take a shot at stud and once again I had a blast.

I fired up some play money stud at Poker Stars and dusted off Super System 2 to see what Todd Brunson had to say about Stud. Strangely enough, people were playing the play money game like they were playing with play money or something and pretty much every street was capped the whole way, leaving me as the only person who knew a fold button existed. I quickly drained my initial 1000 play chips before realizing that Todd Brunson was talking about Stud Hi Lo, so I switched to Hi Lo and ended up on a play money table that actually had people playing very very reasonably for a play money table. It was also the friendliest table I have sat at in months, with two or three 'nhs' after every hand followed by ty's and tyvm's with 'yw' and 'yvw' chasers. So, apparently stud players are total hippies. Nice. Anyway, I loaded up another 1000 play chips and quickly ground that down to 300 or so before I slowly made my way back to 2000 and then tacked on a bit of play money profit.

Boosted by newfound confidence I marched off to find a real money table to tackle and settled into a high stakes $0.04/$0.08 with $0.01 ante table, buying in with an intimidating stack of $2.00. I'm sure I played like a total donk as I barely knew what I was doing, but I had a better grasp on stud than on omaha in the early going. The table was pretty passive with plenty of checking, lots of calling and very little raising. I tried to stick to decent starting hands but probably called down more than I should have once I was involved in a pot. I took plenty of 1/2 pots with lows and scooped more than my fair share.

My biggest hand was a well disguised full house that I capped the last two streets on with a couple callers. I filled several hands on the river, which probably means I was calling to the river too much, but I found that people left at the end of the hand often had very little. Winning hands were often a lot weaker than I was expecting. I ran my $2 up to $5.39 marking today as one of my best poker days in July!

I just love that there are so many different games at such small stakes offered on the internet. Stud turned out to be a very nice break and thankfully I could try it out with very little risk. I should play Omaha and Stud and other games more often as I am sure playing other games can only help my hold 'em. Of course, it would take a lot of work to get up to stakes that make it worthwhile from a money point of view but the way things have been going recently even just losing a few dollars on a different game beats the hell out of losing $100 in a night on hold 'em.

Yay Stud!

Special thanks to Felicia for always yammering on about Stud and Omaha which probably subliminally impacted my decision to try those games out in the first place.

2 Comments:

Blogger Felicia :) said...

" I fired up some play money stud at Poker Stars..."

I'm so sorry. Years of therapy will probably be required to get you past this ;)

Glad you had a fun time!

10:50 AM  
Blogger FloppyJT said...

Hey Felicia,

Yes, I'm afraid my Stud career is pretty much doomed from the start.

Play money games are hilarious but they did manage to teach me how the hell 8 people can get 7 cards each out of a 52 card deck at least. "WTF, why is my last card stuck in the middle of the table!?". Um, yeah, I made that up of course. Lots of fun!

Thanks for stopping by!

11:47 AM  

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