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July 23, 2004
Sick Of Poker
Today in the $162 NL on Party I realized once again just how poorly programmed the site is. Usually when you get to one table away from the money they go into hand for hand mode, but today for some reason they didn’t. This caused my friend John to bubble when he likely would have at least reached bottom money which was pretty annoying but I was still in with a good stack so I wasn’t too upset. So he goes out and we are down to 90 (in the money) and sure enough hand for hand comes into effect. This of course cuts the hands played in half and more or less ruined the entire blind level since it took over 20 minutes to get down to 80 where it finally reverted back to normal play. Normally we would have been down to 60 people or less by that time so I was very annoyed with this, but I tried to remain calm since getting upset doesn’t help you win a tournament.
It is unfortunate that online gambling is not licensed and regulated in the US, since you have no recourse against these people and their defective product. I like to think that in the US no business that is run as poorly as theirs could ever have 3 times the amount of customers as ones which are much better. Of course I know this to be untrue and I expect in time Party’s lax attitude will catch up to them when the poker boom subsides. I hate to contribute to their success but even despite all of their problems the action there is unlike anything else in the world so in the interests of my bottom line profits I am forced to mainly play there. I take any excuse I can to play elsewhere, but those excuses are few and far between though they will hopefully grow more frequent.
So anyway the round was killed and when the big blind got to 1k I had a 16 k stack with 75 people left. There should have been 55 people left and the big blind 600 but Party was programmed by capuchin monkeys. From that point I got dealt nothing playable and blinded down to 6890 (BB of 2k) over the next half hour or so. I got one 9 3 after another the entire time, though I did steal the blinds once (with an A 5) when I was moved from my button to second under the gun, costing me 2 potential hands and forcing me to post a big blind and go all in with Q 7, which beat an A 6 and doubled me back to 13,780. I then went all in UTG with AK, was called by AJ, and somehow won (despite being a large favorite) to double up to hit 27k, which was about average, with about 32 players remaining.
After that we broke down to 3 tables and still none of my opponents seemed to even have the slightest clue what they were doing. Blinds kept coming and I found myself on the BB (which was now 4k) with 16k. An idiot named luke 88 with 12k limped UTG and I had q 5 so I checked. The flop came Q 10 2 and I shoved, and the idiot who had limped UTG called with A 10 but spiked a 10 on the turn knocking me down to 6k. Of course I couldn’t expect to win with a 4-1 favorite when it really mattered because this is the worst month of poker of my life. I then went all in with A 10 against 4 4, flopped a 10, but a 4 hit the turn and I was out in 24th. I would much rather have not even played in the tournament in the first place than play 5 hours and have to split a $750 prize, but that is poker for ya.
I still find it hard to believe that someone could play that badly with 25 people left. Calling UTG for 1/3 of your stack with A 10 is about as bad a play as you can make, but I guess that is the way Party works. Tomorrow is another day and there is a $215 Limit tournament for me to get bad beat out of.
After the tournament I jumped into a $10/$20 heads up game with a player named Arbitrage. I had about $1100 left in my UB account (though I did get back about $30 in bonus money, yippee) and he got it all. He really wasn’t very good HU, just insanely aggressive. He raised every hand preflop except maybe 10. In the hour and a half I played him I must have hit 5 or 6 flushes that lost to his bigger flush. He hit 5 outers on me somewhere between 10 and 20 times, all on huge pots. He had me down about 700 for a while then I came back and was winning for a time. About then I got tired and should have quit, but I didn’t and the rest is history. While I was wide awake he bad beat me hand after hand but he has some very easily exploitable weaknesses (mainly a willingness to dump in insane amounts with dominated hands) so as long as I kept my cool I was able to keep grinding back to even. Of course every time I got there he bad beat me for another huge pot, or hit a higher flush than me and knocked me back down again, but I could handle all the bad luck until I got tired. When I got tired though I lost it and started playing as badly as he did. This is the second time I have done that (played when tired) both times against simple maniacs like him, and both times cost me dearly. For some reason I can take all the bad beats in the world when I am awake and not care a bit, but when I am tired I go on tilt.
Yesterday I lost a few hundred playing the same game against an idiot named Offthenuts. I knew him from Party and knew he was an idiot, but he hit and ran me after playing for about 20 minutes. Fluctuations in heads up are so insane, I don’t think I will be playing it anymore anytime soon. My bankroll is getting too low for my liking due to the last few months. This bad streak is starting to get me down, so I think I will play in the tournament tomorrow and take the rest of the week off and maybe not play again until the 29th. I just am at the point where I can't stand poker anymore. So if you don’t hear from me for a few days I am just off trying to clear my head and forget that this stupid game exists. I am sure I will be back (we all know I'm not going to go out and get a job or anything) but after this 3 month bad streak I just need a long vacation.
Posted by themaroon at July 23, 2004 11:18 AM
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