I wound up playing for more than two hours today; four hours in total.  On the day I finished down 40$.  Notable hand include beating AJ with AQ for about 20$ and losing with queens to to aces for another 15-ish$.  Another hand that didn’t go my way was my queens against AK, all-in preflop.  It’s basically a coin flip but I lost about 40$ on that hand.  Truth be told, it was a mistake to have that much of my bankroll on the table.  I was playing .25/.50 tables, sitting as second biggest stack at a table where the third stack was around 20$ (lost to the big stack obviously).  A final hand worth mentioning was when I caught A-4 in the BB.  Someone had eights and let me limp, where I proceeded to flop a flush.  He was busted.

While I never really stacked off to anyone, although I wasn’t consistently playing the tight, conservative game I usually do.  Other times people would play back at me and almost without fail I’d resign myself of the pot.  For the most part I played position well, but for the most part I never rarely had an optimal seat (left of the loose money).  And because I wasn’t doing so hot at the .25/.50s I moved down to two .10/.25 tables, buy-in in for 10$ at each and cashing out about 35$ in total.  Had it not been for those two tables I’d be more ready to call today a bad day.  Instead it was just a costly refresher.

There’s one last observation I’d like to make.  I’m not sure there’s a proper name of it but I’m thinking of the phenomenon where you sit down at a fresh table and nobody knows you.  Since I’m on a new account, no one can possibly have any notes on me, most of them won’t even have seen me play a single hand.  In this crucial part of the game, the person who identifies the fish the fastest has the advantage.  Usually it’s safe to infer that big stacks are solid players, but when it comes to the smaller stacks, you need more evidence.  During this period of general uncertainty, you can blindside people and be blindsided by them.  For this reason people tend to shy away from the newcomers until there some data on them.  For example, the first hand a newcomer plays aggressively is almost always to their advantage because it’s more disguised than if they were acquainted to the rest of the table.  As far as I tell most newcomers use this to their advantage—if even sometimes accidentally—and the people who are already their, just can’t do much about it.  I mean, on occasion people will play at a newcomer to see how they react, but that’s dangerous and it’s often better to just sit and watch how they play with other people.

Tomorrow I’ll start on the .10/.25s.  I might not even leave.

On Stars the FPPs you earn are grouped by months.  That alone dissuaded me from playing any cash games today since any FPPs would just get reset tomorrow, rendering them useless.  So instead I donked around on the free money tables.

Playing the free money tables turned out to be a prudent choice.  Right away I’m made aware of just how out of shape I am for this sport.  At times I’d lifelessly check/call when I detected weakness.  I got involved in too many hands.  I let people play too cheaply.  All-in-all my play was dreadful.  Naturally I lost my first buy-in.

Another thing that took some serious adjustment was the accelerated play of the faster tables.  If your initiated to any level of poker then you know that 90% of the time you immediately know what you want to do, so you don’t really need much time to deliberate.  On the fast tables those relatively rare instance where you want to stop and think can cause problems since you feel rushed.  That’s not to say you’re actually rushed, you always have time to make a play, even if you catch yourself on the clock.  To remedy this discomfort I never played more than two tables at once.  To my embarrassment, most of the time I only played one table.  In retrospect an easier solution would have been to just play slower tables and enjoy the slower game but I expect to be on the faster ones once I return to form, so hoping on them right away was good experience.

Thankfully I was able to shake off just enough rust to outperform a few of my tablemates.  Good seating position, just clockwise to the people who would pay, also helped this performance.  Each new Stars account starts with 1000 free chips and at the day’s end I had 1600.  Probably not great, considering the competition on the free tables didn’t seem great, so it’s tough to gauge my performance on an absolute scale, but at least I wasn’t down.  Unfortunately, my play was sloppy enough that I could easily have been down.

In the short run bad moves can pay off.  So it’s important that I take the time to analyze my play in order to ensure I’m making profiting the right way and not just lucking-out on people.   Once again, I’m glad to have jumped in the free money kiddie pool instead of driving right into a cash game where a shark might have gobbled me up!  Also I’m glad to have started on the faster tables since that’s where I plan to go to work.

Tomorrow begins September, thus I’ll begin cash play.

I’ve decided to place 100$ into freshly new poker account on Stars.  With that tiny bankroll I’ll play small stakes poker for a couple hours each day.  My results will be reported on this site.

Full disclosure: Stars offers a a buy-in bonus of 100% for up to 600$.  So the 100$, the only money I’ll be placing in this account, while eventually be joined by 100$ from Stars, provided I meet their stipulation of making my money active (I most certainly will).

When I say that I’ll play only a couple hours each day, I mean it.  I don’t always enjoy playing and, even when I do, other interests compete for my time.  So I won’t be on ‘the grind’ in any strict sense of the term.  Despite this, I’m still a conservative poker player, not much of a gambler.  For the most part, hold’em is my game.

Also, this poker thing isn’t total unfamiliar to me.  In fact I’ve turned 100$ into a lot more several times before.  A while ago I gave up tracking my poker earnings on cardplayer.com and at that time was making roughly 22$/hr almost exclusively playing cash games.  What’s unique about this time is that it’s open to the public eye/blogosphere.  Oh yeah, I’m coming off a year long poker hiatus so I’ll be rusty.