TL;DR I broke my Saturday curse and made a nice score; puts me at +$1,000 for the week.
Poker Income helps me track all of my cash sessions (I don't use it for tournaments). And one of the interesting things about it is it showed me that Saturday is my worst day to play. If I had just sat out on Saturdays, I would be up a lot more money right now.
But, since I believe in statistics, I decided to put that aside and go out at prime-time on Saturday night. I rarely do that, I usually hate The Strip at that hour - but, what the heck, let's try something new.
Consulting with @Natamus, PHO seemed to make sense and I've always heard that the games are soft there. I took an afternoon by the pool at home and then took a nap (that was much longer than I usually sleep) and woke up at 9:30PM on Saturday - pretty much perfect for going out!
I make it to my seat at PHO around 11PM. I can see why people like playing that room, it does seem soft. But those conditions are just not for me. I tried to like it, and there's some decent eye-candy, but for focused poker, it's just not great. I even tried using my headphones and my classical music but I just couldn't dial in my comfort the way I want to play (my ADD was going crazy!). So, I didn't really stay very long. I made a tiny score, like $40, and moved on.
I toyed with the idea of going to Mandalay Bay because I know conditions there are good. But I'm also playing in their tournament on Sunday morning so I decided to go to the Venetian instead. Easy drive over and I was seated right away.
My table was great, seated with at least 2 maniacs and loose players overall. I mean, these people were doing straddles, button straddles, blind call & raises (UTG) - and, in some cases, they were doing
all of them in the same orbit!
One of the maniacs told me that he prefers to do a blind raise UTG
in addition to the straddle because of the "silly" 1-raise cap on straddles and wants to raise more blind. God Bless America
I was reminded of something I read in a poker article a long time ago - I think it was Mike Caro: "when its a tight table, play loose; when it's a loose table, play tight". So that's what I decided to do. I folded a ton of hands - even things like suited connectors - because I just needed to wait for that ONE spot. Seriously, I think I folded
everything for like an hour, hour-and-a-half, maybe longer. I kept on telling myself "the action will be there when you're ready, they will pay you off". And that's basically what happened.
I woke up with KK UTG. Just as I had hoped for, I only called because I knew they would build the pot for me; I basically just went along for the ride. I don't remember all of the action, because there was raising and calling along the way from the maniacs. But the board was very dry on 4th street. It was late, so my memory is slightly hazy, but I think the board was Q74T rainbow with something like $100 in the middle. So I decided to shove at this point, I just felt like the overcards were good here, the money in the middle was just the maniacs doing their thing pre-flop. Sure enough, one of them came along for the ride - he had fallen in love with AQ, river came a blank and I took it down. He had me covered so I got total value for my shove.
That single pot was over $500, so it made the wait worthwhile. I didn't stay long after that because 1 of the maniacs left and I had already debilitated the other one. I had planned to play all night, but decided to keep my energy in reserve and at least sleep a couple of hours at home before the Sunday tourney. I closed shop with about $400 in profits.
This variance is just so fascinating to me. One week ago today I wrote about being stacked twice and down. Now, I've basically made around $1,000 this week alone. So, I'm trying to not be swayed by the results, I just find the "ebb & flow" of it all very interesting.
Thanks for reading.