More $1/$2

My wife has a pottery class on Wednesdays, so that means I can usually get in a fair amount of poker. I almost didn’t play yesterday. I was in a real pissy mood, the kind where you almost want to take some brutal beats just to justify the shit mood you were in. It had “lose your whole bankroll due to some complete dumbass move” written all over it. I had my yearly review early in the day, and it did not go quite as I had hoped. Rumor had it that we were getting a certain raise, and mine ended up being slightly less. I still ended up with a pretty big raise but it didn’t nearly make up for the fact that I had gotten some pretty crappy raises for the past few years. And to top it off they more or less admitted that I had been underpaid for the last few years, but offered nothing other than “that’s unfortunate”. Given the fact that about a third of our company quit in the past six months I was expecting them to do more to try to keep their remaining employees. (We’re a small company, so a third of the people quitting equates to 5 people) Anyway, without getting into too many specifics, there’s a good chance I’ll be looking for a new job soon, so if anyone in the Chicagoland area is looking to hire a programmer/database application developer/poker enthusiast, let me know.

Despite my mood, I decided to play. I’ve been pretty busy lately and didn’t know how soon it would be until I got another chance. I opted to try a little more $1/$2, and I’m happy to report that I was able to post another winning session at that level. I’m definitely feeling more confident about my decision to try moving up. I think I tended to gamble and chase more than appropriate at the lower levels, and it was hurting my overall results. Not that I don’t make stupid plays at $1/$2, I’m just a little more careful. The players so far have been sufficiently bad to overshadow the mistakes that I have made. They also seem to be tighter which means less players per flop and far less suckouts, which is the real key. Not that I really have sufficient table time to make any sort of valid scientific comparison between $1/2 and $0.5/$1.

There weren’t any exciting hands worth writing about as I was pretty card dead for most of the session. The fact that I was able to post a profit without getting great cards is encouraging because I think normally I would have gotten impatient and starting pushing with crap hands. I did take one tough beat late in the session where I had AQ and flopped top pair top kicker, and had someone with QT river a straight. I was afraid that would trigger a chain reaction of bad plays/beats that would dry up my bank roll pretty quickly, but I was able to recover, which is also a good sign. Hopefully I’ll get to play some more soon.

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In an unrelated note, PokerRoom is actually letting you do something useful with your player points now. You can turn in 500 points for a $10 bonus. I think you then need 5x raked hands to claim the bonus. Anyway, at least it’s something. I don’t know what else their points are good for.