A tale of two sessions

Experienced two vastly different sessions when I finally played for a couple hours last night.

In the first session, I was dealt an abnormally high number of premium starting hands. Playing 3 tables, 2 x 1/2 and 1 x 2/4, I scored AA 3 times in the space of about half an hour. Unfortunately the first time I ran into 2 pair hitting on the river, the second time 3 of a kind hitting on the river, and the third time I flopped an A only to lose to a gutshot on the river.

So out of my 3 tables, I was down $150 on one, down $60 on another, and up $50 on the third at the lowest point. By the end of the hour, I managed to claw back a little, and be approx $100 down in total, through basic play, as each table had probably 3 fish and maybe 2 decent players.

After a break for dinner I sat down for another 1 hour session. This time I found 2 2/4 tables that were relatively loose. The first one I managed to get good position to the left of a couple fish, and they managed to donate about $50 to me in 5 minutes before the table broke up. A little disappointing that they left, but you get that on some of the smaller sites.

On the second table that I opened, there were only 4 players initially, with 2 open seats. I noticed one player was a maniac in every sense of the definition, and was raising preflop, flop, turn and river with any two cards. I decided to sit down to his left so that I would have position on him. I've never really played a maniac, but I figured I'd give it a go. My basic strategy was to play possibly a little looser than usual preflop, and hope to iso-raise the other players out when i had a show downable hand. After that if I had a pair or better, I was going to showdown, either check/calling weaker hands, and bet/raising my stronger ones. The strategy seemed to work quite well, and when I did play a hand I was often heads up, and managed to make about $70 in pretty quick time.

Unfortunately one other player kept calling the maniac a fish, who responded by saying he usually played higher limits (20/40), and said he'd play properly from now on. So now I was thinking ... well great .. thanks for that mr muppet .. why not just let him play rubbish? Now I had potentially a decent player sitting to my right which is rarely a good thing. Funnily enough though he did limp in a lot, which I thought was odd for someone claiming to be a winning high limit player. Maybe I have a fair bit to learn about playing higher?

Anyways I think I played for another 15 mins or so after he changed strategy, and I must admit I did throw out one kinda nasty beat on him. He raised in MP, and I reraised AQ on the button. Everyone else folded which was nice, however, he reraised, and I called. Flop was Q72 and he raised. I then reraised, and surprisingly he reraised again. Hmm well he coulda had a monster I suppose, although the odds of him having QQ were a little lower as I had one Q, and I did suspect his reraise preflop may have been some of that earlier aggression. I decided I could be behind here and the pot was large already so I just called. The turn was a blank which he duly raised again, and I called. River was a sweet, sweet Q, which he raised again. Now maybe he had just filled up, but I thought it would have been unlikely for him to reraise pre with 77 or 22, so figuring that I was ahead here with trips and an A kicker, I reraised. He then called and flipped over KK. So I had hit one of my 5 outs, and I guess based on my earlier session of it happening constantly to me, they do even up at the end of the day.

So all in all I made about a $50 profit, where I thought at one stage I might have to spend another week playing just to make up for the initial loss.

Current bankroll: $4,650