Over the long holiday weekend I bonus whored Empire Poker for their quick 3 day reload and then Party Poker. I’m a sucker for the free $100 each site gave me. Or are the poker sites the suckers?

Playing 4 tables of $25 No-Limit 6-max it took about 5 hours to clear the Empire Poker bonus. I was up, down, up, and down again. With only a couple of hands left to clear my bonus I was up $20 and felt good. I was going to log my first winning session in a week. I cleared the required number of raked hands and played out my orbits, which I always do. I was still up about $20. On the 2nd to last hand I pick up KK. The board wasn’t scary at all and I ended up losing to a slow-played AA. It felt like a kick in the junk. So much for that winning session. I finished down $2.90 for the 5 hours, but still made about $20/hour because of the $100 bonus.

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It’s all Dr. Pauly‘s fault. I first read about the cheese balls on on his blog last Tuesday. Or is it Otis‘s fault? After all, he invented the holiday party Pauly was writing about. After reading about the cheese balls I got a craving. On Thursday of last week I finally broke down and picked up the 37.5 oz monster container from Sam’s Club. Let me tell you, those are some damn good cheese balls!

I finished off the container today and along with it went a $500 deposit that I made last week while eating the cheese balls and a $100 bonus I had earned during the same time. I swear, I didn’t have anything to do with the losses. The orange crunchy puffs of air brought about bad beats like I haven’t seen in a long time. Hands like AK were beat by A6, A3, and K3. Not on the flop either! Tonight the account which had the deposit finally hit zero. The last two hands went down like this…

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This morning and early afternoon I played poker for the first time in 2 weeks. In order to clear the latest $100 Empire bonus I opened up 4 tables of $25 6-max No-Limit. I made an early mistake when I flopped 2 pair against a flopped straight. It cost me a quick $20. After that haned I settled in and played my game. For an hour or more I was hovering about $15-20 ahead. I simply played the cards I was dealt.

Later into hour two I started to get some better hands, which all seemed to hold up. My AA went up against KK twice for nice pots. In another hand I flopped the nut straight with AQ. Another player also had AQ and one other had 2 pair. I went runner runner for the Q-high flush and took down the pot of over $100. I had forgotten how juicy the games are on the Party network.

In just over 3 hours of play I came out over $220 ahead and cleared more than half of the required raked hands for the bonus. Coming back from a week or two away from the poker tables always feels good.