Last entry, we left off with me accidentally turning top two pair into a bluff. Yesterday, I followed up on that with this hand about 45 minutes into the 6 max:

LAGgy Asian guy who's already 4 bet once preflop open limps on the button. I make it 200 with AKo in the SB with about 2600 behind. BB folds, he calls.

Flop 665r. I bet 275 into 450, he calls (standard).

Turn A. I check, he bets 525, I call planning to lead the river, since he's going to check behind a bunch of hands and I'd rather he hero call stuff.

River 7. There's about 2400 in the pot/effective stacks 1800, so I bet tiny - 750 - to encourage said hero calls or maybe induce a shove. He takes 15 seconds, fiddles with his chips, then flats the...86.

Sigh. *Really?* I think I'm overly good at making villains think I have the nuts.

After that, I pushbotted back to 2200, then busted hero calling TranquilChaos (a good CR pro) on an AQ52T board with QJ after I defended PF and he nearly potted the flop/checked the turn. On the one hand, his shove seemed pretty ugly; on the other, I was 100% certain he didn't have an ace and I was beating him on the flop due to his bet size, which means he was only repping one hand/two flush draws both missed. Unfortunately, he was actually repping two hands, since it turns out he hit a set on the turn. I'm not particularly regretting the call much (unfortunate outcome, but I think I can defend it), but hands like the first are beginning to annoy me. Needless to say, not making the first break *again* is/was, too.

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On not quite actual tilt but determined to make a second break at *some* point, I then entered the O8/S8 2500 mixed game event. On the one hand, these two aren't my best games in the HORSE rotation; on the other, I was still sure I was +EV in the field, which, seeing the play, was true.

The results were mixed; for the last four hours, an average stack could play less than 2 hands to the river, so everyone's stack, including mine, fluctuated wildly. At one point, I was at 1800 chips at 100/200, then at 12K at 200/400 after winning a grand total of 3 pots.

I did eventually bust towards the end of Day 1 with about 1/3 of the field remaining and feel like I played too passive overall, but going over a bunch of hands with my roommates, there was only one decision in one hand that cost me a lot of chips, and it was simply a bad preflop call in S8 that, it turns out, I played well postflop/at least my instincts are good. Everything else was simply a cooler (topped off by AA33 < A345, then AKK5 < AA33 within a 5 minute span...but these things happen in split pot games with lousy structures.)

So, the bottom line is, I got enough poker in last night to make sure I'm not playing terrible, though I'm still getting coolered a lot. There's only one event left before Wednesday that I care about being in - tomorrow's $2500(?) NL, with some newly deep stacked Bellagio events - they doubled buyins and tripled starting chips in their daily tourneys and are apparently getting quite a crowd, too - possibly thrown in. Sans that, I'll just be taking a break from making Wafflecrush effectively pay me $1500/hour to get owned by people making the nuts somehow by playing online.

C'est la vie. For some reason, I still don't mind the outcome of any of this stuff. "That's poker" sounds a lot more plausible when you can't ever be on the bad side of lifetime variance again.