I drove back to Saginaw today and just pulled in about an hour ago. I don’t remember seeing so much fog in an afternoon and I had it the whole trip. At least I didn’t hit any animals like I did on the trip up north. I hit a porcupine (pictures) and will have to get my frong bumper ever “rigged up” or replaced. Just what I needed less than 2 months before the lease is up on the vehicle. So we’re talking at least $300. Nothing I can do about it, so it doesn’t pay to go on tilt.

I didn’t think I’d get in any online poker over the weekend, but I got bored and installed Empire Poker on Mom’s computer so that I could work on the 1050 raked hands I needed to clear for their recent bonus. Playing $1/2 6-max it took me 1,600 hands to clear the $150 bonus. In addition to clearing the bonus, I came out 40 BB ahead for an average of 2.5 BB/100 hands. It was a good weekend for the bankroll. If not for a couple of 2-out suckouts in a row, it would have been much much nicer though. That’s poker.

I did manage to blow $27 of that in a tournament. I finished 64th out of 308. Only top 40 made the money. Here’s a recap of the hand I went out on. Well, first of all, I should give a little background info. Either I was getting raise hands or fold. Not many of those hands you want to simply limp in with. Because of this, I think the other players were noticing my play and were folding to my raises. If I get a middle pair in early or middle position I’d raise and take down the pot pre-flop. I just couldn’t get any type of hand to steal blinds with though. Ok…back to the hand. We’re getting close to the money line and I get 99 in early position, so I raise 3x BB. Everyone folds except the small blind. The flop comes QQT and he bets out into me for 1/2 the pot. What now? First thing that comes to mind is that he doesn’t have a queen or else he would have went for a trap. I take about 10-15 seconds and decide to push in. This is about 3x his bet. He takes a few seconds and calls with AT soooted. Another ten comes on the river to give him the full house and make me look even worse.

I’m bad in tournaments. I know this. I simply haven’t studied tournament strategy enough or had enough experience. If I do well in a tournament, it’s usually because I got the right cards at the right times. In this particular instance, I could have folded and still had about 9 big blinds left. Or I could have pushed like I did. I was thinking he would fold with anything but a queen. My read was right that he didn’t have the queen, but I still lost. If he would have folded, I could have pretty much cruised into the money. Can anyone suggest some good books for tournament play?

I also netted a cool $100 on the Super Bowl when my 0-0 square won the first quarter. I thought it was a good game from both sides, but McNabb just made too many mistakes. His receivers really bailed him out on a lot of plays with spectacular grabs.

In other news, I had my taxes done this weekend and will be getting a hefty refund. I normally do them on my own, but with all of the new income from the web sites and some other things, I didn’t want to make a mistake. I also visited the dentist today and had a root canal done. I swear I’m going for the world record in number of root canals performed in one mouth. At least they gave me a new prescription for Tylenol 3 with codeine.