Home games

Played a couple home game tournaments over the last two days.  Just friendly type of games with people from work or other people we know.  Super low stakes.  Overall ended up losing money, although I did cash in two of the tournaments.

Played on Thursday with some people from work.  Played a $20 tournament with rebuys for the first hour.  Wound up buying in twice and taking 3rd place (out of like 8 people) for 20 bucks.  No interesting hands to report really.   I tripled up with pocket aces on one hand, and ended up going out when we were 3 handed and I pushed all in preflop with A-5 and got called by the big stack who limped in with Q-Q.

Friday home game

On Friday I was excited because we were going to this guy's house to play in a $100 tournament, which is pretty big for a home game tournament with the people I know.  And I know all of the people there would be morons.  I was half right, the people there were terrible at poker.  Unfortunately when I got there, $100 turned into $20.  So I ended up playing two $20 tournaments.  In the first tournament, I got heads up with a guy with a massive chip lead, got back to almost even, then took a few beats and got back down pretty low and ended up chopping.

I probably made a bad deal really.  The payouts were $120/$40 and I ended up taking $55 and giving him $105.  He had probably a 5:1 chip lead on me (not sure though).  At the time I thought it was decent, but now that I'm thinking about it I'm taking $15 to give up a chance to win $80.  I could have doubled up and have been around a 2:1 dog.  When you take into consideration that this guy has no idea how to play poker, I guess it probably would have made sense to just gamble and try to win it.

I generally don't like making deals, but I've been listening to a bunch of podcasts where they talk about making deals and how you can get a bunch of added value by taking deals in the right spots.  Especially when you get down to the late stages of a tournament or satellite when a ton of luck is involved and people are all in a lot, if you can get some extra value out of it by making a deal then it's a good idea.  That's what I was trying to do here but I think I messed up.  Not a huge deal obviously, there was like no money involved in this tournament.

Then I played another tournament, got all in preflop with AKs against KK (who had me covered) and A7, and did not hit my 2 outer or flush.  Weak.  I spent the rest of the night dealing that tournament which was pretty brutal.  Some drunk woman was playing and refused to understand what the chip denominations meant, so literally every hand I had to be like "if you want to call put out 2 black and 2 grey chips", it was very frustrating.

Afterward they were going to play a NL cash game.  It probably would have been the juiciest cash game that I have ever played in, but my wife wanted to leave and honestly I didn't really want to play either.  The reason being, nobody has any idea how to run a poker game there at all.  In the tournament, who cares because it's super low stakes.  In the NL game they were going to play 25/50c blinds and a $20-$200 buyin.  They would have played with the same chips that were in use in the tournament.  The table itself was shaky and people were dropping chips all over the floor.  So if someone dropped a red chip on the floor during the tournament, I guarantee nobody would have picked them all up.  In fact I 100% know I dropped one I never got back.  So what, is that now going to be used as a $5 cash chip?  My concern is that everyone puts their money in, some people cash out and get their money, and at the end of the night people fuck up the money and they are short.  And I know the guy who has the house is not going to just make up the difference.  It would just be like, oh, thats weird, sorry we don't know what the fuck we are doing.  I'm willing to deal with that in a stupid tournament but not a cash game where I could potentially lose a ton of money just because nobody is paying attention or knows how to run a cash game.  And if some decision needed to be made obviously I have zero confidence the right call would be made.  Like if a card was shown early, or string bets, etc.

So I lost $20 on Thursday and won $15 yesterday.  Not extremely lucrative poker, and honestly not that fun either.  Hopefully I get back to the cash game tables soon.