By Adanthar on June 15th, 2007 (more posts by author)

The good thing about being a poker player is the ability to set your own hours. A lot of people in and around poker have written a lot of things about keeping yourself in prime shape to play, and some of that is knowing when to take a couple of days off. After the shootout the day before yesterday, I was pretty ready for a nice break, and since there was only a 5K NL event yesterday/no event at all today, it seemed like a good time. Putting in a few hours playing different games instead of grinding out SNG's and tournaments was a nice touch; instead of trying to pushbot and hoping not to get called, I spent some time making street by street decisions in limit and (tonight) some 15/30 razz at the Rio.

Razz is a game that is almost always played in a mediocre to bad fashion (I'll be fair and say I'm mostly including myself here) because it's so math heavy and compounds errors so much - one loose player who makes big mistakes on third or fourth street and locks himself into hands to the river can pretty much make the entire game. Tonight, I played with an Omaha bracelet winner, a guy who presumably understands poker, who was far too loose on third, made himself keep drawing with marginal hands because of it, and visibly tilted because he wound up down so much to people who (despite making big errors like betting with no edge themselves) just destroyed him with their better hand selection. Unfortunately, you never see this game anymore, because of the variance associated with good players playing each other and because bad ones get wiped out ridiculously fast. That's too bad, because it's one of the most fun, and the easiest to play 'decently' - while also giving you the chance to make some nice, thin value bets. It also lets you play one of two diametrically opposing styles depending solely on the guy across from you - you can either bloat pots early, tying both of you to a pot where you have a big equity edge on third, or keep them small and let the other guy make huge equity mistakes on fourth and fifth. Add in some obvious crazy semibluff spots, and it's a very subtle, but rewarding form of poker. I don't pretend to be great at it - I probably give away equity to most of the top FT pros - but, wow, did I ever have an edge over the non-2+2'ers at the table tonight. With that, I've basically talked myself into playing the razz bracelet event on Sunday.

But enough about a game none of my readers care about...tomorrow, it's back to the grind. Three hours of totally different games later, no limit sounds good again.