How bizarre

Brief session on the tables last night - I hit up a 1/2 limit ring game for 20bb in 40 minutes. A cool run of cards, and then two pair from pocket q 10, spiking the 10 on the river to beat out a slowplayed top pair top kicker AQ. He took the suckout well. My best short session result in quite a while. And an interesting experiment, overall, in aggressive play.

I wound up slightly ahead of that after another 30 minutes of cold cards. A strange table, yoyoing from ultra tight to near family flops in the space of a few hands.

Play of the session, putting the bb LAG on A low when he raised preflop with one other player in the hand - me, and reraising with A6o to knock out the rest of the field and hit the flop heads up. The call could have gone all sorts of wrong, but his call of my reraise on an A Q 9 rainbow flop made me think I was right. He held A5, and failed to pair his kicker, and called to the river. 6 on the turn. Nice. A lot of bets to lay out to find out about a hunch though. The key....observation. He slowplayed premium hands shorthanded, and fastplayed a anything always.

But I've still got a lot to learn about the discriminate application of aggression.

Speaking of which, I read HDoubles post on beating low stakes no limit hold'em, and the profit prospects seem a lot more interesting than low stakes Limit. That said, I need to improve my Limit play before I can graduate to the heady heights of 100 dollar buy in big bet poker.

Sarcasm is entirely at my own expense.

Specifically. Pay attention. Observation, of betting patterns, showdowns, and position play (specifically how people ignore it). Tiltability. All these things conspire to make me money. Ignoring them is at best impolite. Not paying attention has cost me heavily, in both winning and losing sessions.

I have been getting better with laying down sucked out losing hands, and slightly better at betting back into semi/total bluffs. But it still needs a hell of a lot of work. Theres no need to rub in a losing hand by paying to see what beat me on the river every time. Observation is key here. Sometimes the congenital bluffers and the river rat kings are the same people. And sometimes they are not. And the difference in laying down a hand, or raising against the bluff is as simple as watching whats been going on for the last 20 minutes.

If I'm stating the obvious here, be assured, its entirely for my own benefit.