PhantomMut

Not a huge win, but I left at midnight up $17, for an 85% ROI of my buy-in after three and a half hours of play.

I'd say that I'm not planning on quitting my day job, except my day job is having, ahem, payroll problems.

So instead I'll say I'm not planning on quiting my day job to play poker.

No really dramatic hands for me last night. The cards were never right for really dramatic hands (except maybe once, that I'll get into).

So what I should remember from last night is the following:

• Good reads on people make life soooooo much easier. (As opposed to simply good reads on individual hands; that kind of thing is highly variable, and I think even good poker players can spend a lot of chips just trying to see where they are hand-to-hand.) There's one Crackhouse regular who I don't even have to look at to get a read on where I am. Just the body language caught out of the corner of the eye tells me what I need to know. Of course, he probably isn't the hardest person for anyone to read, ifyaknowwhatimean.
• I'm mixing up my game well. This may end up being a real strength for me.
• I'm not doing a good job of laying down top pair, dodgey kicker. Against solid players this is going to cost me real money if I don't fix this hole.
• Finally, slow-playing a flopped two-pair is stupid, stupid, stupid! Ron Lad took some chips from me late when I let him river a straight. (Not a lot of chips, because I saw the skip straight that time, but I couldn't make myself fold when he bet pot on the river.) I should have taken the money and run early , and not worried about giving up on the possibility of missing a killer boat.

Things had just started getting nice and cracky by the time I left, but it was fun. Soon enough my runs to the Crackhouse are going to go on hiatus, with the twins on the way. That's a shame, because I like playing with the people there, and I'm sure the game has been good for my game.