Tough opponents

Had a reasonable night last night, more educational than profitable as I ended up a very small winner. I started off at HU SNG, finished at HU cash. It's certainly a different world at cash, and I think I like it. The biggest problem with SNG's is the lack of poker involved. Poker is when two players (or more) have to tussle it out and make decision right up to someone calling on the river, or even the turn. But poker is really about making big laydowns/calls/bets/raises on later streets. You are using your skills to determine what he has, what he thinks you have, and how he will react based on that to betting/checking/raising etc. It's an infinitely hard skill to get this right a lot of the time, but it's fun trying. Beating a guy down in a SNG, and then having a shove war isn't poker, it's just who will win the flip (even AJ vs AQ is a flip, because he could have had AT or AQ or 55 when you called with AJ).

So I got in a tough HU match after making some money from a couple of softer spots in the HU cash games I played. I must say I was owning a soul in one match, then he quit, and I got owned myself. If it was all about money I would have quit pretty early, but decided I would try to work this guy out, and see if I could pick up "tips" or even see if I could exploit anything. Unfortunatley this guy seemed pretty solid, and I'm not really sure how much I picked up. I am going to do some investigating and come back on some of the things this guy was doing that made my life difficult. Hopefully I can learn a lot from these early experiences.

2 more nights and I'm bronze in the Iron Man... woohoo. In all honesty it is a good thing to make it this month, as the program gets more valuable as you keep it ticking along, and it's also an achievement of sorts. If I could round off the month with 2 wins (famous last words), I'd also be very happy with my first month of HU play, but we'll see how we go. Next month will start off slow due to a small trip this weekend, but I'll be planning a lot of HU poker at Full Tilt for August, actually that's pretty much my entire August goal so I saved a post :)