The Cards are a Harsh Mistress

So with the wife and kid and the little olive all down in Miami for a week, I headed back down to my old second home town of Columbiana this weekend. I did a little partying at Heff's on Friday and Saturday nights, and spent most of the day Saturday running around my old hometown of Westover with my nephew Garrison. We visited three cemetaries and several relatives houses to see how everyone was doing. When we pulled up at the last cemetary, my 6 year old nephew said "Aw man, are we going to see more dead people?"

I found out a few weeks back that there was a cash tournament tonight in Columbiana. Heff and my brother encouraged me to enter, so I decided to enter my first cash game. It was a 40+5 freeze-out and you got $500 in chips to start. You could buy back in during the first hour for either half or the full amount of the original buy-in. There were about 45 or so people to start, so the top 6 places were going to paid.

I started out strong and won two big hands right off the bat. I was playing fairly aggressive, but only playing good starting hands. I have to admit that playing for real money makes a difference in how you play, plus I had never played with any of these people so I didn't have many reads on them.

I ended up not needing to buy back in, since I had a pretty good chip stack after the first hour. After the second break the cards turned cruel on me. I kept getting hands like AQ or AJ and just couldn't get anything to match them. This ended up dribbling me down to where I had about 350 in chips left after I lost some fairly large pots.

I got QQ and pushed all in after the flop and managed to take down the blinds. The next hand I had AKo and a kid across from me raised it to 400. This was pretty much an all-in situation, but I just called. The flop and the turn was garbage and he raised me all in. I was pot committed at this point so I threw in the last 135 in my pile and he flipped up A10o. So with one card to go he had 3 outs, or roughly a 6 percent chance to beat me. Of course the river was one of his 3-outter 10's, and I had to walk away empty handed. I guess I probably came in about 24th or so overall.