Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Playing against the in-laws

On Christmas day my family went to my wife’s sisters house for a family gathering. I brought along my hold’em set. My wife has two sisters. I know both of their spouses play online.

I like face to face play better than online. So I hoped we could get a game going. I wanted to play against them to see how I matched up against them. After the turkey dinner, they readily agreed to a game and we got a small tournament started.

I set it up using the small poker tournament tips from the time I played before. It worked pretty well. About the only adjustment I’ll make for the future is get the blinds to go up a bit faster. I’ll do this by restarting the 10 minute timer for the blinds the moment it goes off. Don’t wait for the next hand to start to restart the timer. It’s too easy to forget to restart it. Plus restarting the timer right away will make the blinds go up quicker, which is what I want.

I did OK against them. I managed to win the first tournament. They were not bad players. They didn’t care for folding the preflop, so that tended to cost them some chips.

I still need to work on tells when I’m dealt a strong hand. One time I was short stacked heads up and I had KQo in the small blind. I went all in. My opponent said “I knew you were going to go all in” as I pushed my stack So I need to work on that. On this hand he called my all in anyway with KTo. He nearly formed a straight, but my dominant hand held up.

If you only play online, you should try out some face to face play once in a while. It’s good fun. I’m going to try to get some people together next month for a game at my house.

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