Live from the "Litter Box"

The first of what hopefully will be a regular, rotating blogger game happened last night at CC's "Litter Box," the nickname created for his really nice poker room after he revealed that cats used to like to relieve themselves in the room when it was unfinished.

And as someone pointed out, that has to be an advantage for a poker cat. It's like building a resort hotel on an old Indian burial ground (The Shining) and not expecting fireworks to happen. lol

I wasn't sure how the evening would turn out -- after all, the players there would have had plenty of experience playing poker and I expected we would just be trading money back and forth. I started out with tradition, having a pre-game dinner with Sham that reminded me of how I'd go and eat with Gnome before the old Emory game.

But it turned out the results were good, I cashed out nearly a full buy-in (Lookouts 9-1).

Things didn't start out very well -- I misread a hand again, just like I did last March when we were over at CC's, as described in this post here. In last night's game, I thought that I had trip 6s when I didn't and lost $35 right off the bat. Two pair took the hand. But maybe I could have kept betting it out.

And although the original plan was to play NL, 23skidoo's neighbor suggested playing PLO and it reverted to a mixed game, which was awesome considering how much experience I have with the crew since all of our home games are mixed.

I scooped an O8 pot with Q3 2 pair and a better low with 25. I made a boat in the "machine gun" portion of reverse-flop hold'em and did ok in Pineapple, making an OESD to chop a pot in one instance.

I felt it was another good showing for the CR offense -- I know it looks tight but there are a lot of moving parts that frequently cause players to misread hands, especially if they have experience with games where raises mean only the most premium of hands.

Having an open range of preflop raising hands is like an aggressive variation of people who call raises with any two cards. A main difference is that when you raise preflop to open up a hand, you have a great opportunity to take the flop down without a fight.

I saw a lot of preflop calling to raises and folding on the flop. I felt like there was a lot of chasing in the mixed games -- and that can get expensive! My basic rule is that in everything, from razz to Omaha, your cards have to work together somehow and coordination goes a long way.

Thanks again to the host and fellow players -- it was really nice to get together and hang out over some cards!!