Progress Post #5: Home Games are fun! Adjust!

I played a home game last night with some friends of mine. I had a blast playing low stakes and generally just enjoyed myself. I had some very interesting hands that I'll discuss later.

First, I'll report my online winnings for the last week or so.

Game played: $10nl, a little $25nl
Hands played: 1937, in 5 sessions
Net Winnings: $56.94
Quality of play: Good. I deliberately didn't play when I didn't feel like I could play well.

I'll write some about game selection later. I came home on the January 1st at 2AM. I actually didn't drink at all, so I decided to play some poker real fast and take advantage of the drunk people. I won about $25 in about 20 minutes, so I just quit before I got too tired to play well.

In the home game last night, I decided to experiment with a style that Winston uses. He tends to play extremely loose, and uses his hand reading skills to get money in good postflop. This works when the people you are playing against either don't know how to adjust or adjust poorly when facing good loose play (which is hard to do, and I would suggest playing tight for beginners.)

Anyways, we played a tournament at first. A small buyin $10. There were only five players with winner getting $40 and second getting $10. I managed to go heads up with a 2:1 chip lead on my opponent. I managed to increase that lead to almost 3:1 when he caught AA vs my AK. We got AI preflop and I doubled him up. Two hands later, he raises preflop, I call with K9s. The flop comes out 9c6s2h and I check raise all in. He snapcalls with AA! It's very rare to catch pocket aces twice in the space of three hands, and even more rare to get them against such other strong hands. He played well though and I played well, so I have no regrets. Afterwards, we played a cash game.

A sixth player showed up. Each of us bought in for $10 and the blinds were $0.10/$0.20. The game was extremely loose, and most of the people were playing pretty poorly. Using Winston's style, I messed around in a lot of small and medium sized pots. I tried to pick up a lot of small pots to win some money while I waited for a big hand. Eventually I turned two pair and got all in vs an overpair + and OESD. I held up and doubled. After this, I dominated the table, because of their irrational of a chip leader. I built my stack playing nearly 50% of my hands and winning most of them. I extracted value out of weaker pairs and snapped bluffs. I even called a guy when I just had Queen high! And won. I ended the night by busting a player when I pushed over his reraise with AQ. He got frustrated and called with K4d. I held up and won like $25 at the end of the night.

Adjusting to your opponents is absolutely critical to poker. Throughout the course of the night I figured out how they were thinking and constantly adjusted to them. I figured out Yoshi would get frustrated and would reraise with less than a premium hand. I also called with Queen high when they figured they likely would bluff at me with any two cards. I even told him I had Queen high, and figured he would bluff at me.

I'll write more about adjusting in a real strategy post later.

Good luck at the tables guys! I'll see you later.