Uneventful Homegame

The highlight, arguably, was that I was able to muster up the energy to stay up for this.  Not a heck of a lot of lowlights either.  I played looser and chased a few more hands with drawing potential.  Only hit one of them and, net-net, I had to lose out on that experiment.  I still firmly believe that there's only one or two people in the game whom you can bluff.  Your options are pretty much to pick up hands - and at the right times and against the right people. 

I think a realistic goal is to make it past the 3.5 hour mark, given our structure.  My thought all year is to not take myself out of an event yet.  I haven't done that, but I also haven't really put myself in a spot to go real deep either. 

I hit a few good hands early, and won a fair amount of small pots in the second hour to get up to an average or slightly above average stack. 

I hit top pair/good kicker too many times - even folded a bunch of hands that would've flopped hard.  Seemingly every time I put a probe bet out w/ the best hand, it would induce folds.  And when I put it out speculatively, it would trigger calls or raises.  I must have a tell either in my betting patterns (though I try real hard not to do this) or in my behavior. 

I made one weak call from the BB to a minraise when holding K2s.  The flop brought an ace and I bluffed at it, got minraised, and chucked those cards as fast as I could. 

In one hand, I flopped a gutshot, called a fairly sizeable bet from a good player, then landed the gutshot on the turn, checkraised myself all-in and it held up.  Horrendous play on my part.  Then again, when in Rome...

As the blinds shot up, I went on a streak of wretched cards.  Many steal opportunities were snuffed out by raises/calls by big stacks in front of me.  Finally at the 1k/2k level, I'm the SB w/ 5300 chips behind.  It folds to me and I take a meaningless look at my cards - I'm shoving with anything here.  It was hard to conceal my disdain when I looked down at 92o, but I shoved.  The BB thought and (properly) called with pocket 3s and I was through just like that - on the bubble.  Hey, that's two events in a row where I didn't go out on a brutal suckout. 

The highlight hand of the night - an UTG raise from the host, a pretty loose player.  It folds around to the SB who calls.  Flop is AKx.  SB bets at it, UTG raises (all-in, I believe) and gets called.  SB had AT while BB had a set of Kings.  SB is now 97% to lose the hand.  I think he had a runner runner flush possibility, a runner runner straight possibility, or the two case Aces.  Well he hit the straight.  Phenomenal. 

Once again, the short-handed play in the game was very passive.  I believe that I just need to get there and that I can make some hay. 

I'm still trying to catch up on sleep and get my strength back from last week's ordeal, which is now topped off by this week's sinus infection.  Hopefully I can get some more good shut eye tonight.  CHIMPS III begins tomorrow.  In the summertime, I'm no more than moderately interested in this.  Plus I'm more and more interested in pursuing my PLHE cash game experiments.