The Poker Gods Giveth...

...and taketh away.

What a beating I took last night at the Omaha tables!! Even Rocky would have been on his knees crying 'No mas' by the end of the night. FIVE buy-ins frittered away.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

- I played a few monster pots abysmally
- The man with no fold button hit every draw imaginable
- Every flop I hit seemed to give someone else a huge draw
- My big draws wouldn't come in
- I just couldn't get anyone to fold to a bet
- As the night went on, I let it get a bit personal

By the close of play, my head was spinning. My screen name should have been Tilty McTilter.

Unfortunately I don't have time to go over it in detail tonight, but I reckon maybe two-thirds of the losses were self inflicted.

Mostly from a huge pot where having almost doubled my buy-in on one table, I got massively involved pre-flop with AAxx single suited, against the table idiot, who held AAKQ and hit a Broadway straight.

From that fiasco I've drawn two lessons. Don't overvalue your hand pre-flop, and even morons get dealt monsters.

The same guy outdrew my made hand by calling pot size bets on flop and turn to hit a backdoor flush holding the TWO AND THREE of spades. So much for only drawing to the nuts!

Another big pot went down when I flopped top two pair with the nut-flush draw, against a guy who had slow played aces and flopped a set.

With my AJ and two hearts I knew I might be behind to a set. However the way the table was playing, I could easily be ahead of a smaller two pair, or someone drawing to a smaller flush, so I figured it was worth the gamble.

That was late on and the tilt factor was high by that point. At the time it felt right to get all the cash in on the flop, but now I'm not so sure. I need to run it through Cardplayer to see just how good/bad a move it was.

Still, we live and learn, and there's no harsher way to learn than bleeding your cash across the ether.

I ran into quite a few situations last night that I hadn't previously experienced, including the classic Omaha hand where my top two pair were actually a very marginal dog to the foe with an open ended straight draw, and the nut flush draw with two overs.

My initial reaction when he outdrew me was that it was a suckout, but I ran the cards through the Cardplayer simulator, and there is was in black and white, the cards ran true!

It's one thing to read that in a book, it's quite another to actually have it happen to you for the first time!

Last night's cards go into the 'Lessons Learned' folder. Next session I hope to apply those lessons well.