In the Garden(s) of Eden

I met Rick at Hawaiian Gardens today in the afternoon. I usually dont play afternoon sessions mostly because I am just waking up but I find that people tend to play a bit "better" during the day. Well, that's a bit of a moot point at Hawaiian Gardens. HG can sometimes be more action than Commerce depending on the table. I can't count the number of times we had 7+ people to a flop today. Despite this surprising fact I had only 1 (!!) bad beat. That got evened out by my getting lucky once. I got lucky when i raised with JJ out of the BB and got called by only the UTG limper. The flop came K J 10 with two diamonds, I bet big, he raised all in and I called. The board came 9 Q and he turned over Q9. I went runner runner to chop while still having all my boat outs. When I got bad beat I got it all in on a board of 6 9 10 2 with 69 out of the small blind and surprisingly got called by a J 9. Of course the river was not a J but a 10 to counterfeit me and he beat me with a higher KICKER and not a higher two pair. That hurt a bit but i was running good the whole day and making some pretty decent hands while getting paid off. I essentially had no tough decisions and stayed 5 hours and walked out up $2000+. That's the type of poker I like.

Since I am leaving for Chicago tomorrow morning for 5 days I will not be playing any serious poker and most likely not blogging until next week. But when I get back, I definetly will be heading back out to HG which is a bit of a drive for me (30 minutes with no traffic, 1hr 15 minutes today with traffic). Now that the upcurve seems to be making a realistic comeback I can close the month of March on a high note. While I am currently in the red for 2007 its not that much. Only about $5000. So my goal is to have an awesome April and get back even for the year and maybe squeak my way into the black before may. I want to have a stellar May in LA before I go out to vegas for the WSOP for a month or so.

I play on playing a few of the Stars and Stripes events at the Bike coming up in mid april because they are relatively cheap and i want to work on my tournament game a bit before the WSOP.

More on that next week when I get back.