Got Married last night...

Yes its true!

" Do you Mr Acornman take thee AJ and KK ( twice) to be your lawful wedded hand,To love and to cherish from this day forward,To have and to hold from this moment forth until busted by trips?"

" I Do".

"And in the presence of the poker gods will you deny the absence of any tilt and blame any losses soley on a cashout curse?"

"I will"

"I now pronounce you $290 worse off.You may kiss the variance bitches ass"


I'm joking about blaming any kind of cashout curse of course.I spent most of last night playing with my Grandson ( Mrs A's older sons wee boy) and trying to stop Nacho trying to lick icecream off his face.

Later on when all was quieter I logged on to Ladbrokes and was up around $8 for 3/4hr play when their server froze.I left the game and site and moved over to Interpokers 6 max tables and bought in for $80.I waited patiently for the BB and picked up AJ as my first hand.

No raises and I check and am delighted to see a 2 7 J rainbow board.I bet and get raised.Now I've no read at all on the villan as I've just joined.My only "read" was that the table was loose so I decided I was good and made a large reraise.When I was reraised back instead of playing my usual cautious game and waiting for a better spot to commit my chips I stuck 'em in and lost to a flopped set of twos.Hmmm nice!

Left and found another table.This time £.50-£1 nl 6 max.I've done this before after a loss and as the £ is worth roughly double the $ a small win at the £ table usually gets me back on track.

Only a few hands in and I get KK in late postition, bet and get reraised.After my run ins with AA recently I wonder if a fold is in order but decide I'm not folding the 2nd best starting hand without seeing a flop and it comes 5 5 J.Villan bets out and I reraise which is called.The dreaded A comes on the turn and I check raise the Villan only to have him make a massive reraise which I fold to.( I was representing the Ace,his reraise told me he had it hence the fold)
Fairly sure he had AK ,JJ or AA.Possibly QQ or 1010 but not as likely.Only guesswork though as once again I'd not been at the table long.

Top up my depleted stack and plod along for 1/2 hour picking up a couple of smallish pots and trying to constantly question myself as to how I'm coping with my bad night so far.The answer I felt was reasonably well.Hmmmm.

Pick up KK again and this time I simply call an average raise from mid postion.I let my previous recent KK experiences cloud my judgement and remember thinking "I'll see a Ace free flop first before pushing hard". I got my wish and pushed hard into another flopped set ( threes) on a J 3 5 board rainbow board.I wish I could say I 'd got my stack in preflop but the truth is when I bet out on a blank turn and was reraised instead of taking stock and reappraising I pushed all in and KK bit the dust again!

As I tried to work out where I'd gone wrong my first thought was simply that variance had caught up with me and these were bad beats.On looking closer though I think while there was an element of bad luck involved but that was not the reason I lost $290.

I read CJ's fine Upforanything blog and enjoyed the most excellent ( Bill n Ted were on again the other night!) posting from Nov 15th about tilt.

"Tilt: An altered state of mind that adversley afects a poker players game".


Having read that and given it some thought I'm certain that I was afflicted by a subtle case of cashout tilt.I had $1235 at Interpoker which was great but it wasn't the $1735 I had before Sundays withdrawl and obviously I'd like to be back to that level asap.Nothing wrong with that but pushing too hard with pockets pairs and TPTK is not how I've built my bankroll so far.
In fact I'd love to have been playing against me last night!

Not going to panic over a losing night.I've still got $2659 online after my $1500 Sunday cashout but I'll need to look even more closely at my own play and mood over the next few sessions.

Apologies again for the disaster that was yesterdays post.The idea was there but writing it up on my lunch hour without writing out some notes first wasn't good.( Glad you liked the jokes though Veneno ).

I mentioned something about "tuning into the emotion" of the table and before last nights loss I had proposed giving an example.I wrote about tuning into the individuals but being aware of the overall table mood is important too. 5 from the 6 players at a 6 max table are in an unraised pot. Board is K Q 7 J 9 rainbow.Checked all the way down and someones who managed to pair their 7 won the hand.

Now nobody at the table is feeling good.We all know if anyone of us had made a stab at it we'd have won it and we're all probably privately berating ourselves for not at least betting the minimum to try and take it.We all know that according to the theory of poker if we could have seen the other players cards we'd have played it differently therefore we've all made a mistake.

The difference is paying attention to see how we all react to that mistake.Does someone now start make bluff steal attempts they weren't making before? Has it changed the table dynamic in any way? Do we all get a badge for honesty?

To jump back to the 3 badly played hands for a moment and just how subtle the tilt was.It was so subtle that it took me back to my days when I started out playing for real just over a year ago.

There are several stages of thought during a hand and I cocked up number two due to being so sure about number one.

1) What do I have?
2) What does he have?
3) What does he think I have?
4) What does he think I think he has?

The other lesson from last night is to try and wait until I have a read on the table before commiting my stack.In the AJ hands I loosely put the villan on J10 or KJ due to the the poor quality of players I usually come up against at that site.I should have read yesterdays post where I mentioned all players starting as even ( average solid by the book) until they start to show otherwise.




Rangers play Porto in Portugal tonight in the Champions league.Our manager is not even drinking in the last chance saloon anymore.He's stumbled into the kebab shop on the way home.
The chairman even says that Mcleish knows who his successor will be if he fails to turn round the dreadful form the team are in.I like Mcleish and his record is good but things have gone stale this season and he should have been replaced weeks ago.

If Rangers pull off a miracle and somehow managed a win tonight we'd be through to the 2nd stage of the Champs league for the first time since it started in the early nineties but its ( sadly) highly unlikely to happen.Nacho Novo,Prso,Buffell,Neito,J Rod and Bernard are all out and Porto are hot favourites.

After last night maybe a wee break from the poker would do no harm either.

Which means I'll probably log on about 10pm.......