As the World Tourneys

My bankroll yesterday morning had dipped below the $40 mark. Now, I'm no accountant, but that can't be good. The early part of this week has been brutal, as you all no doubt know from previous entries.

The play at Party is absolutely mind boggling. I can't believe some of the utter crap that ends up making hands at the end of it all. I know that I should, by all rights, enjoy these idiots being in the game since, statistically, they're ATMs. Trouble is, with a $40 bankroll, I just can't deal with the variance anymore. Once I'm back over $100, and better, over $200, I can much more confidently attack these Brainiacs and make them pay the meter.

After another hour or so taking an initial loss at the 50/1 table at party, I scratched back to within $.75 of my buyin and got the hell out of there. It was decision time. Clearly the ring games are out of control at that level. Any attempts to read into what anyone is doing there leads to intense headaches and a burning desire to commit a homicide. Given the need to control my rate of loss, I've decided that, for the immediate future, I will only play S&G's at Party.

And about those S&G's. They should give you a bonus just for getting a seat in the damn thing. Party's most excellent software, at work again. It looks like they turned the refresh rate down again for the tournament tables, so now they only update every 30 seconds or so. Of course, by then, three tables have appeared and filled up. It's a twitch-fest akin to playing Doom online just to get a seat in the thing. I'm beginning to think that Party's software was written as a high school project, and the server farm is being maintained by a college radio station.

I got to play several tourneys yesterday afternoon on Party. I did manage to break my intense losing streak and mark a couple in the money, but I have yet to break my winless streak. All in all, I managed up about $3.

I did accidentally click into a $10 S&G, since you know, you have to play "Whack-A-Mole" just to get the clicks in fast enough to get in. Now, the $5+1 S&G's I'd been playing in were remarkably tight... Seems everyone there is waiting for the blinds to get bigger before they make their moves. Not so at this 10+1 I sat down at. No sooner had the cards been dealt then one guy was leaving to go to the bar. It was unreal. By the time we got to 15 hands dealt, there were 5 of us left. I could have folded into the money, and damn near did. Unfortunately, I wasn't in a very good chip position with around T800, with the guy to my right holding over T6000 and the guy across from me with around T1200. I managed to hold my own with several bold all-in moves that got called up and I doubled up, but with such a small stack to start with, my gains weren't enough to get me into a comfortable position and they just waited me out. I left with a 3rd place, but at least I took away $9.. Could have been a lot worse.

On the UB front, I seem to have hit a little bit of a wall. I find it remarkable how much better the players are there though, even at the .25/.50 level. I was on a bad slide, but I was getting beat either by solid opening hands that turned into winners, or lucky blinds that were well hidden. I must have gotten 5 or 6 four-to-a-flush opportunities too and not one of them materialized into an actual flush, so that hurt some too. All in all, though, I'm still above the $50 mark there, so I've effectively doubled up in the week or two I've been there.

Fun with work tonight, so I'm sure I'll probably write more tonight once things settle down. If the settle down. We shall see.