Wednesday, February 22, 2006

WWdN ITM

With the rules in place, I came home Tuesday from work with a plan.  First, congratulations were in order for my daughter who scored a 91 on her fractions test in 1st grade.  The reason it made me proud was because she had some difficulty with the concepts involved, so I gave her a bit of tutoring a couple of nights last week in preparation for her test.  When I made up my own problems, including a few tricky ones, and she got them all right, I knew she grokked it.  That’s a great feeling to see the light bulb go off in your child’s head.

Secondly, the Mrs and I agreed to watch some TiVo’d episodes of House.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.  But to be honest, I was looking forward to just hanging out.  Seriously.  However, after settling in after dinner, she mentioned that the women’s ice skating was on the Olympics tonight and she would rather watch that.  “Would that be OK with you?”  “You mean watching women athletes whose chosen sport requires that they have fantastic legs and buttocks?  Yeah, I guess.”  I only really said one of those sentences...

Then I remembered rule 1.

“If I bring down the laptop, would you mind if I played in a tournament while we watched?”  “Sure, that’s fine.”

It was an honest answer.

****

To me the WWdN tourneys on Stars are a total blast.  They’re cheap, the people that play are uber-cool, and sometimes I even get lucky and win some coinage.

I can’t share much poker insight based on last night’s play.  I got some decent cards and managed to use them effectively.  I won a race with AK vs. JJ where I spiked a King on the river that propelled me near the chip leaders in the second hour.  Then I sucked out on Mourn hard when my A4 ran into his AJ.  I was the SB and he was the BB and it folded around to me.  My M was 7 or so, and I figured odds were such that he wouldn’t have a hand he could call his stack off with.  I was wrong, but flopped a four.

Then it became time for opportunistic poker where recognizing the situation rather than requiring the cards becomes paramount.  I hung around and watched some eliminations and survived to the top three.

My undoing was A8o in the SB.  WWonka, the eventual champ (who earlier prognosticated we’d meet at the final table), folded his button and I raised 3x.  The remaining player (forget who) re-raised me 2/3rds of my remaining stack.  I went into the tank.  I couldn’t just call, that was for sure.  Eventually, I decided that my stack would be unplayable if I folded, so I pushed.  It turned out to be the proper move when my opponent tabled pocket 4’s.  I didn’t improve, but them’s the breaks.

I had heavy railbird support from the Good Dr., Spaceman, and Al which was super-cool.  It’s nice to have anyone in your corner, let alone the aforementioned blogging legends.  Thanks again guys.

****

No poker tonight, G-Vegas homegame on Thursday.  Rules are rules.

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