Moving up $0.04 at a Time

I have to dedicate this post to my friend Tim, who despite the fact that he has no interest in poker, and makes fun of us whenever we discuss it at work, called me a slacker for not posting in the past week. The reason I haven't posted of coarse is because I've been running all the over the place doing Christamsy things.

I did get in a small amount of poker in the last week. I was able to take most of last week off, so I was up kind of late one night just surfing the web one night. My wife had gone to bed because she had a huge deadline for one of her projects, and thus was not able to get any time off before the holidays. I was a bit bored, and felt like playing some cards. Only one problem. In celebration of my few days of vacation, I had had a few drinks earlier in the evening. I figure that I make enough mistakes at the table that I don't need to through in some extra challenges like drunken logic and the idiocy that often accompanies it. I usually don't even drink while playing in live games with friends. Another option was to try a play money table, but ever since I've started playing for real money online, I just don't find play games interesting anymore.

So what's an inebriated poker player to do? Well fortunately for me, a few of my nice readers have signed up with Poker Champs through my links. They had even earned me a fat $1.36 commission. This turns out to be perfect, as Poker Champs offers super micro limit ring games at $0.02/$0.04, with a max buy in of $2.00. I sit down with just a buck, figuring that I can play until it inevitably runs out. I get my poker fix, and the most damage I can do is losing $1, and it really wasn't my dollar to begin with, so who cares?

I don't know what happened, but apparently I play pretty good drunken poker. Or maybe people playing $0.02/$0.04 suck. Or maybe I got lucky. Either way, I turned that dollar into over $5.00. I wish I had some hand histories, to relate, but there wasn't anything particularly exciting. I think I just played good tight aggressive poker. I do know that I was very careful in my hand selection. I knew that I was somewhat drunk and so I tried really hard not to put myself in situations where I would have to make tough calls, or where I could get suckered into losing a big pot. Whatever I did, it worked, because I don't think I lost a showdown, not that I saw many.

I did have Aces twice, and both times took down some nice pots without reaching a showdown. I was OK with people folding in that situation because I was more afraid of having some suck out on me on the river and me over betting thinking I was ahead, than I was worried about missing some extra profit. I also double up with pocket jacks when a rag flop with 9 high came up. The player across from me bet big, and I went all-in. He called with A9. I picked up my third jack on the river just for good measure.

So all in all, I made more than 400% profit on my $1 investment. You don't see ROI like that very often. Hopefully now I can spend a couple bucks on their $1 turbo tournaments, and turn that into some real cash. Then I'm on my way to easy street. Or something like that.