Happy New year and a +EV to all

Happy New Year,

I am glad to not be in Vegas tonight, in fact as I get older, I am glad to not be anywhere on New Years evening, where bullets can full on my head….. grin….

I keep realizing how important the mind-game is in getting serious about playing good poker all the time. Last night on Party Poker I played well in a $20 buy-in getting down to about 150 in a field of 1500, (hey, I didn’t win, but I beat 1350 players who think they are good enough to risk $20… grin)

So I went into Party Poker and played 5/10 in the bad/beat jackpot area and lost about $350…. I noticed as my buy-in of $250 got smaller I became more aggressive and played looser like in tournaments. That is a bad idea in cash-games, I think I just made my “running bad” just lose money faster. So I dropped down to 2/4 and caught jacks. The board came 4,4,7 so I bet and got raised, I re-raised and got re-raised back. Decided to look at one more card and a beautiful jack came on the turn. I bet, got raised, re-raised, and we raised to the limit on the turn and the river. He got angry thinking it was a bad beat when his 4,8 off didn’t hold up. So, I turned off the chat feature, played a little more, reducing my 5/10 loss by a hundred.

I do like playing where there is a bad-beat jackpot possibility… I won two different ones this year. Didn’t win one on-line but won the bad beat jackpot for $8900 with aces full of jacks beaten by 4A’s w/K, at Sycuan Casino in San Diego. In December I got the small end for $3,000 at Pechanga Casino in Temecula, by beating Aces, full of tens with 4 tens. (There is a long interesting story of how that hand finished 2 minutes after the time the jackpot doubled and what we had to go through to get the floor manager to pay the double jackpot rate. But, I will tell that story at another time.)

The bottom line is all my wins at the end of each month, are at live poker. I am down on-line the same amount I am up at live games. Yet, I don’t want to quit on-line I need to figure out my game and what kind of tables to play. Please feel free to email me any suggestions to pastorpoker at cardplayer.com

Again, Happy New year and may you all have a year full of +EV

Dave