Vacation is over, time for the welcome home party

It is good to be home. You know that your vacation was full and complete when everyone is excited to see their own beds. Even my kids were glad to finally sleep in a familiar room. I've been posting the latest pictures on my photoblog. Hopefully you find them not to be just your ordinary vacation snapshots.
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I did play some poker on vacation, nothing live, but every hotel we stayed at was serving up the free wi-fi. For the most part, being on the east coast was horrible on the ROI. I don't think I won or even cashed in a single SNG. The sheer volume of coolers I was taking caused me more then once to consider the nuclear option and send my laptop into the wall.

The whole family was exhausted from a day of travels and the change of time zones allowed me to play the Mookie on Wednesday. I played two hands. I raised it up from UTG with KK and you lucky scumbags mucked, mucked, mucked, mucked, mucked, mucked, mucked, mucked and mucked. Dear God! Its a donkament and not one of you could call a standard raise! Not that this last long. I got moved to a new table and shortly after that played AA. Got called. Got it all in on a 9 high board and only to realize that I was up against a flopped set of 4s. Sigh.

As any good Minnesotan will tell you, summer is a hectic time of the year. We are jamming as much activity into 3 months as most of you do all year. With vacation, the return to work and my last birthday as a 30 something all occurring this last week, it was nice to finally relax in the Friday Night Donkament host by the lovely Kat.

The Donkament continued my frustration in poker lately. Seems if there is a way for someone to catch up in a hand, the will, or if I have someone dominated, there is a gurantee that they will hit their bottom pair. I was catching cards, I got KK and JJ 3 times a piece. Each failed miserably. With 5 minutes left to go in the rebuy period, I rebought one more time. Thankfully, I was able to triple up just before the break. Not where I like to be in the big stack portion of the night but I'll take it.

I'll need to go through the hand histories to figure out just exactly what happened, but somehow, I was able to take my meager little stack and put myself towards the top of the leader board. JJOK and Easycure had made an insane amount of chips during the rebuy period. If memory serves, JJOK had 10 times as many chips as me. No matter. For the first time in a long time, my hands started holding up, I was hitting my sets and some how, some way, my reads were correct AND the other player didn't hit two miracle cards to still win the hand.



And shortly there after, we lost JJOK.

We got heads up, and Easycure offers me the chop. I had over 100,000 in chips and he was hovering around 70,000. I just didn't feel like I needed to chop. I was in a good position to win this thing and I love HU poker. These next two hands pretty much sealed my fate.





Well fought game boys. After the rebuy period, I would have just been happy to cash, but building my stack to chipleader but a bunch, losing pretty much blew. I did probably overplay my ace in that first hand, oh well. It was nice to finally cash again. Hopefully this means the tide is turning.

I'm working on a post about Poker Tracker 3. Let's just say, I'm not very happy right now and that product isn't even close to ready for primetime.