One step forward, two steps back..

Have you ever had one of those nights where you put your brain on hold and play really bad Hold Em? I will not bore you with the details but for some reason I went back to the way I used to play, thinking TPTK was a good hand. I think TP is the hardest hand to play in Hold Em btw, limit or NL.

In Limit you could already be beaten by two pair, trips, whatever, and whoever has that is going to lead you to the river, maybe raise the turn. Hey, is he bluffing this time? Does he think his A-10 is better than my AK? Tough call.

In NL it is hard also. So you hit you’re A on the flop. You have TPTK. You bet the pot. Your cold called. Now what do you do? If you check the turn any baby ace is going to believe your bluffing, or at least try and force you off the pot. You cannot call a huge raise. Unless you have a brain cramp like I did last night. Twice even! So what the hell do you do? Do you put in a few bucks and wait for that guy to go all in on the river when you cannot call him? Do you do another pot sized bet and have him go all in over the top of you? It is almost as if you need to flop two pair at least to not fold a hand after the flop bet.

Any idea’s? BTW – I am purchasing an NL cash game book so I do not keep asking stupid questions. I have had several suggestions already, but if you want to throw one in too go ahead.

After I dropped 1.5 buyins last night (not too horrible), and being more upset that I did not play well, and also I kept running into monsters, I.E. I have 7 bucks left. I have AJ. I raise 2 bucks when everyone limps. The flop is an AEWSOME J64. Nothing even remotely scary. So I figure I have five bucks left. If I put a pot size bet in I am going to not have much left anyways, so I go all in. The other guy flips over his JJ for the win. I do not feel terrible about this play, but I got to take my finger off of the all in button sometimes. Anyway like I was saying AFTER this, I decided to just play a Freeroll. I ended up 192 out of 1700. I am the master of doing well for the longest amount of time but not making any money. Mediocre. I was short stacked (1700) when the blinds were 150/300 and soon to go up. So I decided to push with KQ. I ended up facing down one guy with A-10. He had huge money, and I did want to double up, so this was an ok thing even though I was the underdog. As indicitive of my night the flop was of course A-10 and I was drawing dead from that point on. I really enjoy MTTs. I would like to make some money on them but it is fun trying to figure out how to get a large chip lead early on. I usually stay in the middle of the pack for the first part of the tourney and then get blinded down towards the end. Oh well. There is always tomorrow.