I haven't posted in awhile. It would be good to get back to that as it does allow me to analyze my play which I don't do often enough. Tonight I'm just going to paste part of email I wrote about these sessions.
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You probably read my email about Poker After
Dark doing a Pot Limit Omaha cash game this week. Each player starts with
$100,000. The usual announcer has Andy
Block helping with the commentary. Since I don’t understand PLO or even Omaha itself
that well, I decided yesterday to go to Full Tilt play money section and play
some hands hoping it would give me a better idea of how Omaha hand play . I
intended to play pot-limit but ended up in no-limit. I only had about 1200-1300
play money chips and I quickly lost those and had to reload another free 1000.
Then I got lucky with all the all-in 1000 chips players who drop in, shoot
their load in one hand, reload if they can, repeat the process. Anyway I
got decent chip stack so I could risk
that 1000. By the time I finished with no-limit I had 84,000 chips. Then I
decided to try my original plan to play pot-limit. Generally the players here
played in a more reasonable fashion, but I got lucky early on with the 1000 I
started with (max to start a session with) and by the time I stopped late this
morning I had another 30,000 plus play chips. I started sometime after 6PM and
ended around 9AM or 10AM this morning with a break to watch last night’s Poker
After Dark show. To say the least, it was fun, and since it was play chips no
pressure and dollar worries, and it did provide what I was looking for ….. how
do the Omaha cards play out with what kind of hands.
There were two things I didn’t realize about
Omaha and your needing to play 2 hole cards and only 3 board cards. 1) To make
a flush your two hole cards have to be the same suit, 2) because you have to
play your two hole cards, though the board might be able to go up to a, say Q
high straight, you may only be able to go Jack high, 3) having two pocket pairs
when one pair hits the board DOES NOT MEAN you have a full house (psychologically,
even though I know that’s the case, it still feels like it should be). That
last one caught me a few times when I
was wondering my the chips were going the other way when I had a full house!!! I
found myself looking back on FT’s hand history to find out why a hand won as I
somehow missed what happened, sometimes even when it was my cards (I was
looking for thing and thought that was why I won, when I actually won with the
flush).
Don’t know when I might try some play with real
money as playing Omaha isn’t high on my list at moment.
Tonight I was playing the Daily Dollar and
$.02/$.05 Rush (to get in my last day of Take 2 and qualify for my $5). Daily
Dollar was doing OK, but Rush was going poorly. Daily Dollar ended in a flash. Blinds were
100/200 and I had pocket K’s, the big stack had raised limps to 3 BB and I
decided to go all-in and if all goes well he doubles me up. The 1st
part of that plan went well and he showed A9o, one overcard. The flop was fine,
6 9 7 but the turn came up with another 9 and the river a Q and I was gone. The
plus side of it was I concentrate more on my Rush session As I said it had not been going well. After
100 hands I was down $1.99, 200 hands $1.76, and 300 hands $.400. Not too long
after that I was down $5+ and heading into a “poor me” tilt state. Then as I
was able to concentrate more, the tide turned and by the end of 400 hands I was
up $8.56 when I stopped. I was afraid I was going to have to play a lot more
hands before I got to the plus side.
I’ve been trying to do well in the $1 Rush On
Demand tournaments which don’t pay much till you get near the top but more
often than not I don’t make even the chump change money. Sometimes, of course,
it’s just one or two poor call decisions, but other times it’s less clear what’s
happening. Blinds are only 3 min and they can catch up with you before you know
it.
