Small Win

The wife told me to go to the track today and win at least $100 cause we needed to buy some stuff at the mall. Who am I to deny her that right. Plus I get to play poker. Win win in my book. I got there when they opened at 12:30 and our table was filled and started about 10 minutes later. I could quickly tell that it wasn't the normal horrid players I usually see during the week. Of the 9 other players in the game I would say that 6 of them were solid. I blinded away about $20 before the first key hand of the day came up.

I called a raise to $20 in middle position. Someone behind went all-in for $31 and both of us called. We checked all the way down and the all-in had 10,10 which was good. After that hand I had around $50 when I picked-up 8,8 and called a small $7 raise. On a 7,5,2 flop the pre-flop raiser who seemed to be raising light lead for $20. I shoved my last $50 in but unfortunately got a call behind and I knew I was no good. Original bettor folds. The caller had 7,7 and I was drawing to the two outer. I missed and reloaded for another $100.

I ran that $100 down to around $50 when I played the next big hand. I called a raise to $6 with the 7,7. The flop came 6,5,4 rainbow. The original raiser made it $20 and I shoved for my last $50 again. Damn it if he didn't flop a set on me too. He had the 6,6 but I had quite a few outs. The 8 hit the turn and the river was a blank and I nearly tripled up to $140.

A little ways into the session a younger kid sat in the game. He played around 95% of his hands splitting them between raising and calling. He led out at most flops too. I just seem to have a really hard time with this kind of player. I think I just have to tighten up a lot more. I always seem to want to play pots with them with ATC which is definitely not the right line. I don't see too much of it around here but when i travel I see it a lot more and need to improve against them. What usually happens with players like this they build a stack early, in this case to around $300. He made hero call after hero call to get the stack. After that people value bet him large on the end and by the time i left he had around $50 left.

After I got the stack to $140 I was able to slowly grind it up above my starting stack to $205 after I called it a day 2 1/2 hours into the session. Not the $100 I was looking for but a winning session none the less. I am more proud of wins like these when it is a tough line-up compared to bigger wins against fish. Its starting to tell me that I can be a long-term winning player in the cash games and can adapt to the different type of games that I run across.

Hope the winning keeps up. I should be able to play a couple more sessions next week.