Monday, March 3, 2008

$4.00 and a dream

The New York State Lottery used to have an ad campaign that's tag line was "All you need is a dollar and a dream." and if you a degenerate gambler all you needed was a few hundred dollars and a dream. My father used to buy a couple tickets a week and I really don't know how much he invested in his dream but I know it really wasn't much. Then one day when I was 25, I was living with my parents after college and waiting to get married for the first time and my father knocked on my bedroom door and and came in and closed the door behind him. this freak me out because even as a child this wasn't something that he would have done. He told be he needed to tell me something and if he didn't tell someone he was going to explode but to please not tell my mother. Now thoughts of him telling me that he was in the CIA and had assassinated some world leader and saved the world. No, it was that he finally had hit something in the lottery. He hadn't hit the jackpot but he took home about 5K for hitting 4 out of the 5 numbers needed to win. Not to shabby for a days work.

I have been thinking about the lottery a bunch this last week only because the Powerball jackpot is now up in the neighborhood of 175 Million. I have drop a couple of bucks this past week and actually took home a few bucks for hitting the Powerball number and nothing else, paid out a whopping $3 so I am down $2 for the week. I guess sometimes playing low level poker online can be like playing the numbers from your local variety store. That what it has felt like for the month so far. I started of with dedicating $4 to playing Pot limit Omaha in the beginning of the year. I had been playing O8 for a couple of months and was getting burned to may times and gave back about half of what I had won over those months. So inspired by Chris Frueguson's zero dollars to 10K story I decided to give it a try. I wasn't going to be patient enough to play the free rolls to start building a bankroll. I decide to start with the minimum buy in at the .05/.10 table and see where I could go with that. Well a month and a half later I haven't had to rebuy and I have turned that $4 into about $70. It was up around $100 but the first three day of this month haven't been to kind to me. I know it is variance and I can't have all of my redraws hit every time and it is low level loosey goosey kind of play. I haven't decide if I am being to tight or if I should loosen up my standards a bit. I have been shock at what some people are playing but for the most part I'm usually right about where I stand and when all the money is in the pot I haven't been all that shocked about what they are turning over. But man I have seen some crazy hands. My favorite was one of my own I raised all in with AATJ double suited and ended up winning not with the Aces holding up but with Quad tens. I have also be giving and receiving almost equal numbers of suckouts. I know it's a game of redraws but some times I think I am going to have a heart attack as the cards come down. I don't know if I will ever be ready to play this game live but it has be fun and frustrating all at the same time. I will continue to play it for as long I feel I am running reasonably good at it and still having fun playing it. Isn't that the truth about anything anyway.

On a side note I am really craving some live action so I think I need to play hooky from work soon and get my ass up to Foxwoods for some real donkalicus $2/4 hold'em and see if I can satellite into the next WPT event that is coming up the end of this month.