Wednesday Woes

Beginning Bankroll: $10.15

I finally had a short work day, so I had some time this afternoon and evening to fire up the laptop and head to PokerStars to work on my bankroll experiment. Shoulda' kept the laptop closed.

This was one of those days when, when I wasn't completely card dead, my good hands got beat, anyway. I played at a 10-handed $.02/$.04 Limit Hold 'Em table, buying in for 80 cents. At that stakes level, you pretty much have to play straightforward, 'cuz the donkeys there will call any raise pre-flop with absolute junk, hoping to get lucky. And today they were, and I wasn't. Every time I raised pre-flop, the table turned into a call-fest. I don't remember a single instance when I raised and had fewer than 3 callers, and the norm was more like 4 or 5.

I tried to play aggressively, betting strongly when I had hands. Then I'd get rivered. Or my pocket kings ran into pocket aces. I rarely hit anything better than one pair when I was in a hand, though I would have made all sorts of good things on trash hands that I folded pre-flop. My chip stack would dwindle, then I'd win one pot and move back upwards, dwindle some more, go back up, and so on, and so on. After hitting a low of 27 cents early, I eventually grew my stack back to 79 cents, or only down 1 cent from my buy-in. But, naturally, being a grinder, I stuck around. Then got more good 2nd-best hands and dwindled back down.

Down to about 23 cents, I finally caught pocket aces. And I looked up just then and saw "Empty Seat" popping up all around the table. Everybody somehow picked that time to abandon the game. All that were left were me and one other player, and he had a stack of $50+. Sheesh! So those rockets didn't net me very much. Needless to say, heads-up I still couldn't catch anything, and my opponent cleaned me out pretty quick (I may have been tilting a little by that point).

So that was that, a downturn day for my bankroll balance. I'm a little roo steamed with the poker gods right now to go back and try some more, so that 80-cent loss is going to have to stand for today. Besides, it's been a long day and week on my real job, and tomorrow's going to be another long one. Thanks for dropping in today, and good luck at the tables.

Ending Bankroll: $9.35, down $.80