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Saturday night, I got invited to a home game, and I cleaned up majorly. We played two small tournaments for $20 a piece, the first with 6 people, the second with 5 people. House tradition is to give 2nd their money back, and 1st gets the rest. I swept both games. Sweet. :)

I changed up a few things while I was there against the bad players. For one thing, I limped a lot, which goes against conventional wisdom. Some of them might have let me steal their blinds, but I found it much more profitable just to see flops with them, because they would stick in with any pair, etc, and there was almost zero risk for me. I didn't want to give them the chance to accidentally make correct plays by inflating the pot, so I kept it very small and just made effective post flop value bets. I've heard Grinder does stuff like this because he likes to put people in marginal spots, and even bad players are decent preflop players nowadays. Anyhow, that $140 profit was much appreciated, because I'm still on a 5 BI downswing in PLO.

OK, last night was a very frustrating PLO session. Lost less than two BI, but I had some wicked suckouts. Lost AAxx double-suited preflop to a total idiot (standard), had a huge 300 BB pot get shipped to a guy when I had top set and he had bottom set and an 8-out straight draw.

The the most frustrating part. An action donkey who runs hotter than the sun, and I cannot get his money. I chased after him for two hours, but his stack kept getting bigger, and I kept missing every single flop. Even the times I thought I might have had him (turned top set, rivered straight, he had a flush when his range was soooooo wide), he somehow hit the exact cards he needed not only to win, but to get paid off. Eventually, I just had to give up and go to bed with nothing but a losing session and pent-up frustration to show for it.

Oh well, PLO is swingy. My girlfriend made a good observation, though. When I complained about how I was running, she said, "I guess you know you're playing well when your only complaint is that you get bad beats, though." That's actually a pretty brilliant statement from someone who plays hardly any Poker.