I made $300, which meant I could pay my cable bill, buy a bike (since Sunshine moved out along with the car), and still have a $200 buy-in for another session.
I played 2/4 limit the next day at Terrible's for seven hours and walked away with a whopping $2 profit, which was pretty good given the fact that I was down almost $100 at two different points in the afternoon and got rivered about six or seven times.
I played 2/4 limit at the Flamingo the following day and the cards refused to fall for me yet again (although I did make a few mistakes as well). I lost $80, leaving me with $120 in my tiny bankroll, so I decided to play $0.50/$1 no-limit at Bill's hoping to get lucky again and double up.
I lost it all.
It would be easy to say I ran bad, which is true. I had AK, AQ, AQo, all in position, and not one of them came though for me. I even three bet $23 with my AQo from a button straddle after the small blind made it $7 and the big blind called. The small blind folded and big blind called my three bet, as well as my $25 c-bet with a KJ after a K came on the flop followed by another one on the river.
I also picked up KK in the big blind when the small blind, a fairly tight player, made it $5 to go. A king came on the flop (giving me top set), along with two diamonds, and he bet $12. I called. He checked the turn, another diamond, and I went all-in. He called, fifth street brought the Jd, and he turns over two red aces. Rivered again.
It's easy to blame bad luck in poker, and sometimes it is the case, but I am also cognizant enough to realize where I made mistakes. For example, I limped in with pocket 10's from UTG and the player to my left, who hadn't played many pots and limped in to those he did, makes it $12, which screams aces or kings. I make a tough laydown and two tens come on the flop (which would have given me a $50 bonus for quads in addition to winning the pot), he pushes the rest of his chip in the middle and flips over KK (my read was right).
Yes, folding was technically the right play--especially given the fact that the player to my left didn't have enough chips in front of him to give me the implied odds I needed to make the call--and the pot was laying me less than 3:1 to hit my set. However, rather than limping with TT (a fairly strong starting hand), I should have raised it to $6. Assuming the guy to my left still made it $12 to go after that and got the same caller, the pot would have been laying me better than 5:1, still not the 8:1 odds of hitting my set, but for another $6, I would have seen the flop.
This brings me to the biggest lesson I took away that day: playing with scared money, a cardinal sin in any poker game, but especially No-Limit Texas Hold'em. Yes, I was playing fairly conservatively because that $120 was the only money I had to play poker with for the next 10 days, and the cards weren't falling for me either, which made me slightly more timid. With a bigger bankroll, I could have afforded to be more aggressive and probably would have taken down several smaller pots I ended up checking down. In theory, I could have done this regardless; I just would have risked a much earlier exit, something I was not interested in doing at the time.
At the end of the day, it was only $120, and I finally internalized the importance of having an adequate bankroll, an extremely valuable lesson. The loss didn't sting nearly as much as losing money has in the past either; I just shrugged my shoulders and walked away, another important step in becoming a poker pro. As my old boss Nat used to say, "That's the price of the education."
Plus, I was still freerolling off of my $300 win at the Riviera a few days before, which allowed me to play an additional 15 hours of poker. Variance will eventually swing in my favor, not to mention I learned a lot, had fun playing poker, bought a bike, and still have a roof over my head--with cable television I might add.
That's a lot to be grateful for.
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