Short winning session at $25NL

Well my second session at $25NL was also a winning one. I’m treading very carefully still, trying to play uber ABC poker and no fancy stuff or marginal situations so as to keep the variance down. This is because I really don’t want to have to move back down to $10NL. This means I’m playing a bit weak tight, but hey, it seems to be working. I just played one table and selected it very carefully. I’m still amazed by the number of fish at this level. Sure there are some solid TAG’s too, but there always seems to be about 2-3 villains with crazy loose passive and loose aggressive stats.Here are a few hands:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1495677

I never play AK like this usually preflop, but one of the villains behind me had been raising every hand, so I thought I’d let him do it again. Sod’s law, he just limps behind. Obviously with so many opponents seeing a flop, I wasn’t going to get too attached to my hand. Nice of everyone to check it to the river to give me my flush. I was obviously calling the river raise with just one card in the deck that could possible beat me.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1495696

UTG’s min-raise set alarm bells off here. His standard raise up til this point had been bigger than that so this looked like a raise to build the pot but begging for action, so I decided to call behind. With hindsight, this wasn’t a great play because I still didn’t know where I was in the hand when the flop came. I therefore had to bet to find out where i was. The flop was quite dry so a half-pot bet was enough to test the water. I was relieved to see UTG fold and not too bothered by the call from the other villain as he was a complete call-station and he always raised when he actually had a decent hand. I decided to fire a second barrel on the turn and he instafolded.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1495725

Ok, I had a very strong read on this player to make this call on the flop. First of all, he was very loose and very aggressive, particularly preflop. Secondly, he had just lost a HUGE pot and was on tilt. And thirdly, I knew his preflop range had to be even wider than usual since it folded all the way round to him. I was willing to call his all-in preflop, no problem, but then he just called. The Ace was a pretty bad card for me obviously, but I didn’t think he necessarily had an Ace. I reckoned he was more likely to bet this flop than to call a bet, so I just checked with the intention of reraising all-in. His all-in took me a bit by surprise, I was expecting him to bet about half that. I tanked for a bit, then decided I had incited the bluff so I had to call it.

Session stats:

Number of hands: 72

Net profit/loss: +$9.30

Winrate: +25.83 ptBB / 100

Bankroll: $424.40