As you can probably tell by the lack of action on the site the past couple of weeks have been pretty slow for me in poker terms. Real life is largely to blame and has been eating in to my poker playing time much more than should be allowed 
I did, however, get a chance to play some live poker in the Adelaide Casino a couple of Saturday nights back. The Adelaide Casino has a fairly small poker room generally offering quite a limited range of games (That night they were playing 4/8 and 10/20 limit Hold’em and I think 4/8 Omaha), the good news though is that on a Saturday night the 4/8 Hold’em is more loose/passive than your average 10c/20c table on Poker Stars!
Loose/passive is a good thing, especially because earlier in the night I may have had a little something to drink (OK, a lot to drink, this was after a bucks night for a friend of mine!). Playing after drinking is not always a bad thing for me, I tend to force myself to concentrate more and don’t try to be too clever which is a good way to play on these kinds of tables.
Anyway, I bought in for $200, sat down in seat 8 and started to play my normal game which mainly involved me folding a lot of hands while watching 9 way pots get called down to the river, there was no preflop raising (the only person to preflop raise the whole time was myself with AQo, everyone called anyway) and people would call to the river having hit any pair on the flop (regardless of kicker). All I had to do was wait. And wait I did, it was getting late, I was getting tired and all I’d managed to do so far is lose some chips limping in with hands like 88 (hit a set on the flop, got beaten by a flush on the river) and 99 (hit a nine friendly board against KK) and after the first hour or so I was down about $100 when I hit a streak of totally unplayable cards. I was folding so much even the most inattentive players were commenting on it! I decided I needed to play some hands and with no preflop raising happening I limped in with:
From middle position. My thinking being at this point that if I hit with these cards I’m making money and these are the last cards players at this table would expect me to be playing. Eight out of the other nine players limp in and we see a flop:
I’ve hit an unlikely two pair and decide not to muck around, the player to my right bets, I raise and everyone except the original bettor folds (which surprised me, I would have expected more action). We see the turn:
Lovely, the player to my right bets again and I raise, he calls. This repeats on the river which is a rag and he turns over:
For a pair of nines, I show him my full house to take down quite a nice sized pot.
A short time later I make another full house from my pocket 5′s and I decide it’s time to leave (it’s about 4am at this point), although I was only around $10 up at this point it was a nice feeling to have been able to fight back from so far down, really though I was just happy to get a chance to play a few hands!
