$3 + .30 Tournament and .02/.04 10 Ring from last night

When I joined the tourney they were in level 2 with around 30 people. It has a nice stack size (10,000) and decent time between levels (10 min). I need to learn to be more patient and to get off, a good hand that isn't the nuts when there are likely better hands or the nuts out there from other players.

My demise in this tourney was with 89s from CO that I decided to call  EP2 3 1/2 BB O-R by the EP2 player with 2 others, and pre-flop we had a total of 5 in the pot. 1st I should have paid more attention to the O-R rather than just deciding to jump in with my suited connectors. My idea was to call with a limp with others, but instead decided to call the much larger O-R. I wanted to start building a stack with lessor hands hoping to connect onf the flop while the blinds were still low, and I had a hand I thought I could get off of without too much trouble. That turned out not to be true. :-/

The flop came Qh 3c 10h, EP2 made a min raise of 40, rest called. Turn Jc. That gave me the lower end of a straight (8 thru Q). I thought the most likely hand that could beat me would be AK, but I didn't feel from the initial betting anyone had that.  EP2 bet 1.6x the pot, not a good sign for me. He was called, I and one other called. River 7c. If the betting on the Turn wasn't a clue I should fold, this was an even scarier card as there was now a possible flush out there. EP2 bet the pot of 7300, he was raised A-I, and I decided to call w/my last 8010 chips. EP2 actually did have the AK beating out my straight. There was no flush. I was gone.

All I needed to do was fold and be a bit more patient and I'd still be in the tourney and maybe make it to the top 15 and in the money. Still a very hard lesson for me to learn.

Although I can get the hand history for a particular hand, I've not found a hand converter that does a good job of converting PokerView's Everleaf Gaming hand. Flop/Turn/River, after I edited lowercase A, K, Q, J, T to uppercase, it saw the cards BUT in the final results it gave chips to two players who were All-In and lost. Not sure why and if it is possible to edit the hand history to prevent that. I tried a couple of other hand converters and they either didn't recognize the hand or they gave mixed results.

On to last night's Ring game. I played $.02/$.04 on a 10 player table, but we only had 3 or 4 playing at any one time, with finally 5 near my ending play. Ring games let you use the webcam option (they have tables for for both webcam and non-webcam), and so far, I like that added feature. It feels much more like you are playing a real person. I didn't notice a lot that it seemed you could pick up tells per se, but it does show you how much attention a player is paying. One player late in the session starting talking to someone out of camera range. A player would stretch and yawn and look like they might be getting tired. I know I did a lot of moving around that would indicate to other players that I was distracted.

My play was ok most of the time. My biggest blunder was re-raising A-I with pocket 10's post-flop to an aggressive player who, that hand, had pocket A's. Earlier I had got him off of some hands when I re-raised him and was hoping I would again.

Much later a player came in who either didn't know how to play the game or liked the rush of making big bets and/or going all-in with min cards. One of the 1st plays I saw him make was going all-in w/72o after he hit the 7 on the flop. He was beat by a Q7o. He would re-load after a defeat for the max of $4 at this table. A few hands later I had pocket 10's again (I seemed to pick them up a few times last night), and this same player opened all-in. Because of what I'd seen in his play I called him. He had Ax so now all I had to do was hope he didn't hit an Ace or suck out on the River. My pocket 10's held up and I was now above even again!! Not too long after that I called it a night as I was tired. It would have been nice to stick around and see if I could win some more $$ from that player, but it is not good to play when you find yourself feeling quite tired, at least it isn't for me. :-)

That's it for now. I need to play a few Double Up's and get back my $3 I lost from the tournament. They have 6 and 10 player Double Up's, and with only 6 players it usually doesn't take too long to get down to the final 3.