The last week has been full of ups and downs

Since my last post last week a lot has happened. I left you wondering about a bonus (actually I wrote another post, about O8, but that seemed to be lost by blogger...) and since then I've lost some money on Party, had thanksgiving, had my first casino poker trip ever and won most of the money back on Party again.

What does this all mean? Well, one thing at a time.

I took the Party bonus with the demands of 7x raked hands (525) and seven days to clear thinking I'd probably get some playing in on thanksgiving and the weekend and this would be no problem; it started out like that, some 200+ raked hands on thursday but turned out to be much harder work than I expected. Friday became a last-minute casino visit with my boss (more in a minute) so I lost that day and then, as much as I wanted to be motivated to play I never really felt in the mood. So I kind of forced 100 odd hands per day, never really enjoying the game buy because I was down maybe $50 at that point I felt like I needed the bonus to even my losses out.

Yesterday was when I realised what was going wrong and it hinges on table selection. I was looking at my sessions in poker tracker and saw that I had had a few big losses ($25-30) and more, but smaller, winning sessions. My losses came from tight tables where it would frequently be 2-3 handed to the flop. I just don't know how to play these, and I suppose that means I don't know how to play heads-up either. Big surprise. I also discovered how to search for better tables on Party, so that I could get bigger pots and a lot more passive play around me. Then I was happy. I enjoyed the game yesterday. I played well and won most of my money back over several hours. I finished down about $13 over all that time and would have been winning if I'd learnt to leave the silly tight tables and find a new one quickly.

The other problem with the tight tables is that hands are only raked once the pot reaches $5 and there may be only 2-3 of these per orbit. It takes forever to clear the bonus this way, lots of blinds and few wins. So table selection, table selection, table selection. My new party mantra.

Tired now, casino update will follow.

a.x