Moving on

If you listen carefully, you can hear the clinking of a single champagne glass.  I’m finally done playing on Paddy Power Poker, and that’s cause for a mini-celebration.

I actually quite like the iPoker software and there’s usually good game selection at the levels I play, but the problems is that I never really knew where I was with those games.  Mixing and matching so many different limits probably didn’t help though.

I was up and I was down and I was swinging all over the place.  Every limit I played I was in the green for a while, and then it swung back in to the red and back up again.  Some of them stayed there.  While 23,662 hands is be a reasonable number to start seeing getting an idea of how I played, it’s not much use with only a few thousand hands on each of the fixed limit games. 

However, looking at the percentage of hands I played at $3/$6 compared to the other limits, I should probably re-evaluate whether I’m actually comfortable playing for those stakes.  The only thing that kept me coming back was my data on the players at that level suggested they could often be much looser than the usual nits at $2/$4, and so I thought I was finding good spots.  I just never really made them pay.

The good news though – despite being a loser on paper, I’m still leaving the site with about a grand more than I came with, thanks to signup bonuses, monthly cash rewards, player point redemptions and a friendly affiliate referral.  But boy was it hard work, and barely worth it.

But now that I’ve used up all of the $600 sign up bonus and been left with a mountain to climb to get back into VIP status (their member level formula looks at the last 3 months activity, so I’d now have to over-compensate for a quiet January) and I’m moving on.

At least I got a nice little hot streak to end it all with.  These all happened within five minutes of each other (check out the timestamps on the screenshots!) and were part of a very welcome $200 upswing.

1. My biggest pot ever at $1/$2

Well, I can’t be sure it was actually the biggest I ever had but it felt like it, and the action was amazing.  $65 is a 33 big bets pot, and I took it down with pocket kings which made a full house on a board of 556KQ.

It was capped on every street except the flop, with the two other guys involved seeing something I obviously missed in their KQ and 99 hands.

Click the thumbnail to see the full hand history.

2. Table selection paying off.

I’d seen a particularly juicy-looking $3/$6 table but it took me an hour to get the right seat.  I’m quite fussy about where I sit now.  Playing fixed limit in particular, there’s so many good players that you have to try to sit as close to the immediate left of any mark you find to play the maximum number of hands against them in position.

I’d had my eye on seats 6 and 9 who were both seeing over 40% of flops.  By the time I got into position in seat 2, two other seats had also been filled by fishy players.  Click the table thumbnail to see what a good game should look like.  On iPoker, this almost never happens, and especially at this level.

The first hand I got involved with was perfect.  Mr Loose had limped in and I raised him with AJs.  Everyone else got out of the way for a magic all-heart flop.  He’d limped in out of position with two small hearts, I had two large ones and he paid me off very nicely thankyou.

3. Royal flush, baby

It’s only seven months since my last one, but this always deserves a picture.

I got called to the river by pocket kings, which had flopped a set but got scared by the possibly flush and straight options.

Shame the board didn’t pair on the river, really. 🙂