AKQJ10's Poker Blog

It’s a peculiar property of poker that I can leave the Gold Strike about $550 richer than when I started today and still feel like I was a colossal failure.   It’s an even worse property of NLHE that I feel this way as the result of one hand.
First of all, you should know that my [...]

Sometime soon I need to write about my change in emphasis to try to master 6-max NLHE cash games, and my coaching arrangement with my friend grindtofreedom that involves me receiving coaching in return for loans (and small donations, but mostly loans) through Kiva.  For now, though, I want to document an interesting hand I [...]

I’ve been really low-key about poker for the last week.  Over the Labor Day holiday I took some time off work and made three trips down to Tunica, but this weekend for unrelated personal reasons I spent several days away from Memphis.
Playing at Tunica last Sunday was pretty interesting, though.  It was packed not just [...]

Well, it’s been way too long since I’ve posted hands, in part because just running bad had been sapping a lot of my enthusiasm.   I have more to say about this that I’ll put off until later; in brief, I don’t want this to become my repository of bad-beat stories, but I think there’s value [...]

Stack size and in particular short-stacking has become one of my pet issues largely because there are so many misconceptions about it.   A convergence of a few threads in the 2+2 Brick and Mortar forum has really driven that point home today:

Actually I don’t make many bold bluffs at live no-limit, because I don’t trust many opponents to fold.   (The ones I make tend to be too small to be that effective; then again, the problem is that making pot-sized river bluffs seems dangerous until you know your opponent well enough to know his calling range.)   [...]

I took a little excursion tonight to check out the PokerTek PokerPro tables at Southland Park just over the lovely De Soto (I-40) Bridge in not-so-lovely West Memphis. I was really eager to see what the PokerPros are like. In general I’d say the general atmosphere met my expectations: A lot [...]

My second hand discussion from yesterday is a bit more straightforward.   I build a big pot with pocket tens, flop an overpair, and face a tough decision.

Yesterday I played at least two hands that I thought are worthy of discussion here. The first one I thought I played well, albeit unconventionally, but I’m open to criticism that I’m just guilty of Fancy Play Syndrome.