HO Down

On the last Saturday night of each month, Dave W and I do a variety night at our game. It's helps to break the monotony of playing the same thing each and every week. Some of the variety tournaments we've done are a $50 Deeper Stack, $40 Bounty tournament, and $10 Rebuy-mania.

This month we did the HO Down. It's a NLHE & PLO tournament, and it alternates each level. The buy-in, add-on and structure are the same as our regular tournament.

We ended up with 31 players, including three alternates. That's damn impressive for an Omaha tournament.

As for my night, it was a combination of bad play and bad timing (luck) that ended my Final Table streak. I ended up 28th out of the 31 players. There wasn't one particular hand that did me in. It was a combination of many screw ups. For example, and for no particular reason, I tried to bluff a player who flopped a set of K, and turned quads. Surprisingly, he didn't fold.

The cash game didn't go much better for me. I bought in for the max of $150, and my stack slowly deteriorated to around $50, where it stayed until it was almost time to leave at 4:30 am. I then won two generous Omaha pots against the same player. He even called out my cards in the second hand, a flopped Flush Draw and turned Top Set. But he still reluctantly called. Why? Because it was 4:30 am, and he was getting a steady flow of annoying phone calls from home.

It's happened to me a lot, especially when I first started playing with the CPMG. I would play on Friday night. Go home at midnight. Go to work on Saturday, and play on Saturday night. By 1am on Saturday night, I was a zombie. And zombies don't play poker too well. I would stay later than I should and start bleeding chips. It was either one horrific donk move, or a series of questionable decisions that quickly snowballed out of control.

So I ended the HO Down +$37 on a night when I had no business winning any money.