Arrived in Vegas Thursday night 7/26 for a solo trip of mostly NL poker mixed in with a little blackjack. On a tight bankroll ($2000) and far prefer NL so I decided to stick to 1-2 and avoid the much higher variance of a 2-5 game. Stayed at the Flamingo, and I find their poker room very comfortable, with a good variety of tourist players. Until Sat. night I stuck to the Flamingo room. (I was the guy with the black or brown Kangol hat on backwards for any of you AVP'rs who might have been playing with me...)

I played a TAG game that I was very happy with with three exceptions (more on that in a moment). At one point a guy next to me commented "you play a very tight game", which must have been good luck because in the next 20 minutes I went on a tear and grew my stack from about $200 to about $900!

I made innumerable small potato continuation bet bluffs, and one big bluff when all I caught on the flop was bottom pair (4's I think) on an innocuous flop, the guy showed weakness on his call. I put him on top pair with a weak kicker. I fired again larger on the turn, he took a lot of time then called, and on the river I pushed my final $100 or so. He took about 30 seconds and chucked it, right to script...

For the most part I took advantage of players tendency to make the error of calling large bets on later streets with marginal holdings, the critical error in NL; those are the situations that really make the difference in stack size at cash in time. Unfortunately, this is and continued to be my major leak, as I've mentioned before in this forum. Twice I made horrendous calls against an all in opponent on the flop, both times with only two pair, losing once to a full house and a second time to a straight. A third time I hit my straight on the turn after semi-bluffing and getting called on the flop with a pair on the board. Some part of my brain said "he's got the boat", but when he push over the top of my large turn bet my greed kicked in and said "call anyway"! I even ran through the odds and knew damn well I was well short of having positive expectation for drawing. Of course he had the boat. Fold after my opponents push in those three hands and my total winnings of $480 would have been well over $900 instead.

I ran into the usual couple of Really Bad players this trip. One was an older guy at the Flamingo who was the classic super aggressive super loose type. Sat. night he shows up again, sits down, buys in for $200, first hand starts pushing it, soon is all in against someone who seems to know his style, calls him down with only top pair no kicker. The dude says "what, I don't have a straight?" as he gets up and leaves his $200. Nice contribution. It's really true that what that type wants from the game is "attention".

Later Sat. night I went to Venetian, and caught a little fire. There was a young guy at my table who was the classic newbie who probably thought he knew what he was doing, but didn't really have a clue, as he chased with junk, called down with junk, and then got upset when he lost all his money. It was kindof sad...but everyone was happy to take his money.

Also enjoyed double deck BJ action at Terribles. I liked it there, I spread my bets from $5 to $30 for severals hours over three different visits, never got any heat whatsoever. At one point on three successive $30 bets, the dealer caught the A and I bought insurance, and each time she had the BJ...someone at the table even muttered some suprise at how I seemed to keep getting it right! But no heat...overall I broke even playing BJ, which is always a victory in that game (the variance is so high even when counting and spreading well).

Oh yea, the muscle pull. I guess it just goes to show that as you get a little older, if you do ANY movement hundreds of times over a few days, you are going to suffer. Sat night my shoulder started hurting on each toss of my cards into the muck, pulled a muscle I guess, and it's still a little sore. I switched to tossing with my right hand instead of my left. "I hurt myself playing poker...". Unbelievable.

A good trip, and I'm confident if I can plug my falling in love with hands leak I can do much better next time...

-Zinc