Sad day for Winnipeg poker

As I'm sure most of you have heard, Barca, Player's, and Hong Kong were all raided and shutdown. I've been talking about this on the PCH message board, so I won't babble on here. But, needless to say, this has really disappointed me. I really enjoyed playing live occasionally in the local private clubs and I'm made countless friends who I see in these clubs regularly. We'll see what happens, but this really doesn't look great for the poker community. I'll wait it out a bit, but hopefully PCH can aid in getting the word out about home games and such. I really hope none of my many close friends involved with these clubs get in "serious" trouble over this. My guess is everything will work out alright legally for most involved.

Anyway, despite the bad news about the local clubs, I've been running alright online still. I also joined cardrunners.com and am finding all their instructional videos (with pros basically just playing online and talking) quite helpful, I've barely begun wading through them all. I paid $250 for 6-months, but if it can make me play just a little better, it's obviously more than worth it. If you decide to ever join Cardrunners, put my account "GroovyT" as the member who referred you when signing up, I'd appreciate it!

I'm pretty tired, and it's late, so I'll just give a quick summary of what I've been up to.

Started a few days ago with a UB 5/10 session and scraped together $800. Then, final tabled the Regent re-buy tourney for another $800 CDN. Played a couple sessions at Barca (didn't realize they'd be my last there) and was down $265 CDN total. Followed that with a sweet little PP 5/10 and 10/20 session for $2920. Did a little hit-and-run on Betfair for $590. Made $40 showing my Mom how to play two PP $55 SNGs (she might be a pro in the making). Next, I dropped $520 in a short PP 5/10 session where this happened (this is what I wrote immediately after the hand):

The hand. Why? Gah, why? He obviously has AA and I can't let go of KK. Fucking amateur play by me. This majorly makes me feel like a tool. How obvious do I need it to be to fold KK pre-flop? I was handed the opportunity to get out of this cheap and I screw it up. This is the type of stuff that makes me the most angry: having the opportunity to make an exceptional play and not having the discipline to follow through (though like I said, this is pretty obvious). I'll say it one more time: stupid!

Finally, tonight, I had an interesting Betfair session. I started good taking $1k off a fish in 10/20 heads-up, then another super-passive calling station fish (NIK777 or something like that) sat with $2k against me and proceeded to suck out the ugliest hands against me. I don't have hand histories, but this is one example: I raise KJ, flop KT9, I pot, he calls, turn 8, I almost pot, he calls, river Q (making KT98Q board), I shove all-in he calls with AJ. Must be nice. Before that I also got a little carried away with AK and lost a race versus QQ for my stack. He worked his stack all the way up to $7,200 from the initial $2k. However, I knew I was ridiculously outplaying this fish and tried to keep playing strong. I grinded up to around $3,500 then wavered between $3k-$4k for over an hour, still feeling like I was controlling the match. Eventually, his luck ran dry and I busted his entire stack. Feels good to get unlucky against an idiot, keep plugging away, and score all your money back plus a bit. During that match I also (maybe unwisely) hopped on a 25/50 table with $2k versus a guy I played before. He got me down to $1200, then I ran it back up to $2k again and pulled off a big 3-barrel bluff, and grinded it up to $3,500 after that. Then, I started feeling uncomfortable against this guy and started thinking he wasn't as bad as I thought. As soon as I start getting this feeling, even if I'm up, I just get the hell out of there. I pissed around with 5/10 tables a little and probably lost a few hundred. So, to make a long story short, I booked a nice little $3,900 win on Betfair.

Hopefully I still manage to see many of you around town now that the clubs are gone. We'll see what happens in the weeks ahead...