Arg!

Well, I guess I knew that I couldn’t do 40BB every night on Empire but man, what a tough night. I still walked away with a win over my two Empire sessions so I’m not crying too loudly but the part that was really getting to me was that I was getting pretty good hands. I couldn’t make them win though. I was dealt AK more times than I care to remember and still lost 5.5BB on that hand.

I’m sure my perspective is a little skewed at the moment but there seemed to be a huge difference in the texture of the games between Empire and Paradise. A lot more guys were seeing the showdown than I’m used to. If you’re heads-up you’ve got a chance of avoiding three suited cards on the board but when there’s four or five guys seeing the river there’s almost no way somebody doesn’t have a flush. Again, it could just be my being slightly tweaked from a couple hundred hands of being flogged but I can see how that same behavior might have put me up 40BB my last session too. If you can pull the cards, enough people will see you all the way to the river to make the hands more profitable than they might normally be. I’m not ready to call it fact just yet but I’m going to be paying a lot more attention to that in the future and adjusting my game accordingly.

It was entertaining though. I was at one table where this guy was doling out his poker wisdom while getting caught playing total trash hands. It’s always worth a chuckle to have some guy schooling a newbie and bragging about reading Lee Jones’ book and then turn over J5o after raising pre-flop and leading out the betting on every round without even a pair. I had to turn player chat off because I wanted to keep asking him, “I haven’t read Lee Jones in a while but I’m pretty sure that’s not a recommended starting hand.” I guess turning off chat is the online version of biting your tongue 🙂