Warm Blooded, Check It and See

So I've been running... well, not hot exactly, but definitely not cold. Maybe warm is the best description. I guess I'm just riding the variance wave, but I've been making some changes in my game so it's hard not to take it personally. Last Sunday I had my biggest cashout in a tournament, and I've been slightly profitable ever since. Of course, this doesn't really mean anything, but it does give me a bit of confidence. I have vague hopes that some "real poker players" will be reading this at some point, so I should probably specify exactly what I mean by "profitable." I'd say I'm playing for peanuts, but that severely underestimates the cost of peanuts. Until just recently, I had mainly confined my exploits to the 1c/2c blind NLHE tables at PokerStars. Before that I played play-money poker for six months. Have you ever sat in on a play money table? Really? For how long? Uh-huh, that's what I thought. It's a totally ridiculous concept, any game theorist will tell you that. You can't have a wagering game for play money, not if there is any element of competitiveness at the table. To paraphrase one of those "real poker players" I mentioned (more on this later), it's like an existential meat grinder, times infinity. Everybody wants to see every flop, at any price. People going all-in like fireworks over your head. If you raise, you'd damn well better mean it, and be willing to defend it with all your chips against three or four people. You want to talk about heartbreak? I used to sigh when I picked up the hilton sisters, because it was about 10:1 I'd lose all my chips. The best bet was to pick your moments... 4am was usually a good one. By that time, the thirteen-year-olds and drunks had mostly gone to bed or passed out, and the only people left were those of us who were serious about the game, but dead flat broke as well. I learned a lot between 4am and 6am, and I wish I'd been blogging then so I could go back and look up some familiar faces, see if they ever funded up and how they did. Anyway, last February I started going to a friend's poker night. The first time he funded me, and I flirted my way into second place. I immediately realized that these guys had no patience, which is why none of them got my phone number that first night. But second place was $50, which was conveniently enough the minimum deposit at PartyPoker, where I'd spent the most time in the play money rooms. I have to admit that my initial plan had been to play in as many tournaments as I could before that initial deposit wore off. I figured if I wasn't ready for a one-table tournament, I wasn't ready for a satellite, and if I wasn't ready for that I'd certainly make a fool of myself in a real tournament. Assuming I could scrape up the cash. But then fate entered the picture (insert spooky music track later) in the form of a rejection message from PartyPoker. For some reason, they rejected my NetTeller transaction. Oddly, they have continued rejecting the same transaction, and offering me a 50% deposit bonus, every month every since. Go figure. Anyway, I was forced to try my second option, which was Paradise Poker. Why Paradise? Well, I'd been doing reasonably well in their Sunday freeroll tournament (oh plase, Paradise, please return my chance to win a chipset!), Unfortunately, they didn't seem to like my transaction either. I never did hear any more about that. So, despairingly I turned to plan C, JetSet Poker. "Whhaaaa?" you say to yourself (or perhaps even out lout). Well, um... I really like my icon on there, but I hardly ever played because there were more 13yos then I could handle (oooh, rad grafix d00d). So I started watching the real money tables and I quickly decided that their tourments did pay out enough and their cash games were too sparsely populated to be able to find a good table. I was sad about this at the time, but resolved to lose this found money before I went shopping with it, I decided to go to my last resort: PokerStars. Why was PokerStars at the bottom of my list? Well, I was kinda pissed at them. They let you choose your own icon, you know, but they rejected the first one I sent in. *I* didn't think it was pornographic, but I guess they disagreed. Anyway, I did the play-money thing there sometimes as well, but I always played with a blank face which felt so boring. I feel naked without my make-up, in a manner of speaking. Anyway, I went to deposit the money there and bam, in like flint. $50 ready and waiting. No deposit bonus because they hadn't offered one so far as I could tell. Couldn't really complain as I'd never really expected to clear the necessary points. I immediately ran to the SnGs and found the cheapest one, a five plus two bit 9-player NLHE tourney. "What the hell," I figured, "best time to start losing is now," and signed up. The best thing about PokerStars SnGs is that they take about two minutes to fill up. Before I even had a chance for second thoughts, I'd have probably bailed, but suddenly we were seated with less than a minute before play. I have to admit, I was somewhat terrified the whole game, refusing to gamble without a clear edge. I captured blinds twice, going all-in ATs and AKo. On the bubble, I called the short-stack down preflop with a pair of 9s and won the race, knocking myself into the money. Unfortately, I got cocky, bluffed with the worst of it, and was blinded all-in and all-out on the next hand. Still, I made a profit: third place in a 5.50 SnG is something like 9.50, so I was 4.00 ahead. Still, not enough of a profit to make it to another SnG as a freeroll. I was wondering how I could make a 30% profit on $4 when I discovered my newest addiction: the penny tables.