Tuesday Notes

Last night I played at a local home game. He used to run a regular game out of his house for about 2 years and then it just ran its course and died out. He has started it back up and seeing how I live about 5 minutes from him it is easy for me to get to. The game was supposed to be a round of Holdem and a round of Omaha but the first night of play the field was decisively Holdem players and only a few of us wanted to play Omaha so we wound up playing only Holdem. It was a good lineup of players and as usual everyone was well behaved and made the evening entertaining.

A couple hands of note that I was involved in follow. I really have been trying to make good reads lately and put people on hands and follow through with my reads. Last night pushed my reads. Button raises the 5/5 blinds to 20 and I look down to find AJ offsuit, I call with about 4 other guys. The flop comes all diamonds including the Ace and Jack of diamonds and it checks around to the button. He bets $30 and it folds all around to me, I have a hard time putting him on diamonds from his preflop raise and want to know where I stand so I check raise and make it $80 straight, "G" then pushes all in for another $240 or so. Huh? I say to myself. What do you have exactly? I really go into the tank and take a couple of minutes to play the hand out and finally say out loud I believe you have the Ace of Clubs and the King of Diamonds, therefore I call. "G" looked a little surprised and turned over his hand to show me the Ace of clubs and the Queen of Diamonds. The turn brings another Ace which fills me up and takes away any flush draw but "G" can still hit a Q to fill up bigger, thankfully a blank comes on the river and I double up. I thought that was a great play by "G" in that he really made me think long and hard about folding. There were a couple of other hands that allowed me to cash out $400 winner. Nice evening considering the lineup and amount on the table.

One thing I have been trying to work on for quite some time now is bluffing. I don't do it often and when I do it is not really a huge bluff, more like a cheap shot at the pot if I feel everyone else is weak. I have a lot of respect for players who can with a straight face push their entire chip stack in the middle on a complete bluff. The Juice comes to mind. It is plays like that that allow him to get paid off when he has monster hands cause everyone always thinks he is bluffing. A week or two ago The Juice made a great bet on the river and I paid him off. He flopped quad Kings and checked it all the way to the river and allowed me to fill up on the river and I surely paid him off. I have been telling Senior Juice I am going to pull off a huge bluff on him and then show it when I do. I figure if I can bluff the master then it is worth showing. I'll check back in once this happens.