Who would have thought that changing a blog name could have such repercussions? Tilt Tales has its first Tilt!

Last night saw my 2nd largest single session loss. Well, that is kind of misleading as it is only my 2nd session loss since starting to play cash games and chase a few bonuses. My first loss, the $100 dropped when starting ring, playing .50/1 NL still stands and I have been working this off while chasing the bonus at Interpoker and doing quite well multi tabling 2 x .50/1 LHE and 1 x 1/2 LHE working off the requirements for the bonus. Last night saw me down $41 at the end of about 5 hours playing time. Which I guess in the scheme of things is not that bad, but at the limits I am playing is not what we are looking for. The way things currently stand I will be just over breaking even when I clear the $90 bonus over the next two days, thanks to the $100 NL tilt, so this certainly needs to improve so that I can move onto Will Hill and bonus up there.

Last night was interesting - I had nothing, cold, cold cards. Between the two tables I was running (.50/1 & 1/2) I had one pocket pair (88) in 1.5 hours and managed a grand total of 4 flops winning a grand total of zero pots. This I think lead to a little bit of frustration in my game whether I was aware of it or not. Thus my Tilt. KK comes along on 1/2 LHE table and I am behind the button (not sure of what the position name is for this) UTG (that one I know) raises to $1, the player before me raises to $2, I call and UTG calls the blinds had folded. Flop KA8, so good for me, UTG checks, next bets $1, I raise $2, UTG folds. The other guy re-raises $3 and I call. Turn is a 2. Well long story short is that we get into a raise, re-raise stoush and I loose to his pocket AA. I never for one minute think he could have AA, not one.

Just showing my massive donkey skills on that one. Play so blind at times - this is the obvious failure of many players starting out and at my level. We focus solely on what he have - even more so when it is good and simply fire away on the bet/raise button in the blink of an eye. Just like a rabbit caught in the head lights of the on-coming car we are transfixed and cannot see that we are about to get utterly smashed. When putting money into the pot I really need to make a conscience effort to stop and think about the possibilities, count to 10 first each and every time. Then make a decision, not the RSI action of bet..bet...bet...bet...bet, damn I lost.

So that blew my $25 buy in. I close it off and focus on the .50/1 game looking to recover the 1/2 buy-in. That was pretty slow going and decided I need to loosen up a bit to get into some more hands as I was seeing a lot of pots being won with bottom pair despite two over cards sitting out on the felt. This went well and managed to get up about $15 on that table. I fire up another 1/2 table as I think I am playing well enough to dip the toe back in. But alas, no such love, the cold deck run continued and just got sucked out dropping another $25, bugger. I close it all down and look at a loss of $41 for the night. The only good aspect of this was that I could almost reach out and grab the bonus, so a positive there.

Now the ironic thing - earlier in the day I purchased Poker Tracker and downloaded the default rankings (http://www.pokertrackerguide.com/ebook/ptguide_autorate_rules.txt.) offered by the authors Henry “HDouble” Wasserman and Iggy. PT goes through and ranks all the players, and WTF, I am ranked a "good player" despite having a career loss at ring games. That was too much for my mind to handle at 1am, after losing $41 for the night and promptly closed off.

Poker huh.

¶ Wednesday, January 18, 2006