Thank You, Poker Gods

I finally had a good session at PokerRoom yesterday, wiping out all of the ugly earlier losses and pushing me a wee bit into the black. Nothing spectacular, really, just the other side of variance catching up, hitting good flops, pocket pairs holding up, boring stuff like that.

Lately I've been experimenting with limping with a monster hand shortly after I sit down at a table. Not slowplaying, mind you, but checking or just calling on the river when I have the obvious nuts. But only when it's a smallish pot, with just two or three of us seeing the river (so as not to lose too many potential bets.) Can't always do it, obviously, as the cards don't often oblige and give you the chance early, but I've had some pretty good success with that particular advertising play when new to a table. In the right circumstances, it's a cheap way to make other players at the table immediately brand the newcomer as a timid, weak fish. For some reason it encourages people to think they can shove you off hands (which is backwards, as the logical assumption should be that when you do actually bet or raise, you must be betting something huge).

I guess the lesson is not to let first impressions at the table dominate your thinking, as it's easy to take advantage of the tendency to see a "horrible" play by someone who just sits down and salivate.

I'm about to take my first extended poker hiatus in awhile, basically out of the loop from October 29-November 10, for wedding and honeymoon fun. To be completely honest, I'm sort of looking forward to it. I've been hitting the bonus circuit hard the last month, raising some scratch to pay for the wedding and have managed to slightly burn myself out, methinks. I'm taking my laptop and may get in a little time here and there, depending on wireless access, and I might sneak off to a casino in Arizona somewhere, but for the most part I'll be poker-free. Well, kind of. I'll be working on assorted content for the poker site I'm working on, now that I have the layout and design roughed out. My better half isn't an early riser, and the last few years have doomed me to not be able to sleep past 7, so I'll have a good bit of uninterrupted free time to work on assorted projects.