Well, I guess thats ONE way to kick it off

Well, since today is the first day of 'recorded poker' I suppose I must report my first game I've played as such. It was one of our many 'barracks games' that we play here, pretty casual, and the best rule in the world: rank is.. nonexistant.

Buy-in: $5+R (the '+R' means you can rebuy if you get busted out.. its a way to increase the prize pool and keep the weaker players playing for longer)
Total Players: 8
Total Prize pool: $50

The night started off like normal- lots of raising and calling with pretty crappy cards, and at one point in time if I had called (with a bad hand) I would have hit quads (four of a kind). Still, I was biding my time, only calling with hands I figured were best, and was slowly building my chipstack, when a situation arose:

A girl who was sitting on a small chipstack pushed all-in, the OTHER short-stack (what you call someone without many chips) thought for a minute and just smiled and also went all-in. The chip leader of the game (who plays with pretty bad cards and gets lucky quite a bit or busts out really fast in a game) decided to JUST call, and I looked at my hand while I was on the button... to see QQ (pocket queens). I was the 2nd chip leader, and ONLY calling would put me in a bad spot if an Ace or King came out on the flop, so I decided to go all-in and hopefully make the chip-leader fold his hand or at the very least I'd win a big side pot from him since I was pretty sure my queens were good.

Anyways, he calls my all-in, and everyone flips their cards over: chipleader and the first player to go all-in BOTH have KQ off-suit, and the other guy had 9-5 offsuit (offsuit means the cards in their hand aren't the same suit). I'm sitting VERY nicely to eliminate 2 players and just about triple up my stack, almost taking the chipleader out of the game, since there ARE no queens left in the deck, and the only 2 cards I need to worry about are K's. I'm more than a 5:1 favorite to win this hand going into the flop when... a K came out and suddenly I was out.

I guess it goes to show that even if you wait for your perfect spot, sometimes it just doesn't work out for you. If that exact situation happened 6 times, I would only lose once, with the other 5 turning out as a win for me. So, would I do it again? yessir.. every time. A good poker player can't be afraid to take those sorts of 'educated' risks, and if I HAD won that, I would have been positioned to win the game. Still, if you can't mentally handle losing when your hand is clearly the best and you SHOULD have won, you shouldn't be playing.

So, after a somewhat disappointing night, my stats are:

Total money won at poker since the start of this blog: -$5

haha, sad story. take it easy y'all!