Whoo-wheee

Wow. Its been a while. Suffice to say, I got horribly discouraged after the tilt incident with Party Poker. I basically lost all of my "profits" and actually was down about $20 from my original deposit when I decided I needed to stop. Party Poker, it seems, is a bit strange. And rather suspicious. I can't say I have played millions of hands of poker but certainly by now it is in the thousands, and when I play on Party Poker there is a funny smell in the numbers. Hands like flushes should be relatively rare - that's why they are ranked 4th in the available hands. Only a full house, four of a kind or a straight flush can beat a flush because only those hands are rarer. In the last few days, I have literally seen dozens of flushes in approximately a thousand hands played. The math says there should have been only a little over a handful. There are also a lot of "power hands" head to head coming up, creating showdowns. If someone has pocket aces, they should win most of the time - but they are often drawn out by sets and the like. That should happen a few times, sure, but the aces should win, mathematically, MOST of the time. Not on Party Poker. To make a long story short - I quit Party Poker. Just cashed out my money and left. It was driving me crazy. I was getting nailed by bad beats constantly. Take a few, sure, but when every tourney you are in you are turfed when you have the best start hand, again and again? It wasn't for me. Thing is, as I studied more I read a lot of stuff online and found out an important fact - if you play ADVANCED strategy against the truly BAD players, you will get killed until you adjust. They just don't "get it" when you bet after something hard that it is not sensible to keeping chasing a draw. When someone busts your Aces full of Kings on the flop with runner runner deuces to make 4 of a kind after you went all in - you are playing some seriously bad players. I was really trying to play too smart for my own good at Party Poker. So, I took some time off and studied more poker, and I got a free bankroll from Titan Poker. Started with $50 which I can't cash out but I can play with as I choose. Trouble is, Titan Poker is very quiet. On Party Poker you can barely get into a Sit'N'Go tourney - on Titan you have to wait and wait and wait sometimes. I quickly turned my $50 bankroll into $40 and then floated at that level. It seemed I could play endlessly winning enough to cover my fees but never going above the first $50 until I hit D-Day. What was D-Day? D-Day was the day I was down to my last $7 after winning NOTHING something like 6 times in a row. I was just getting HAMMERED all over the place, although playing technically good poker. I was making few mistakes but the cards were killing me - the Poker Gods were apparently trying to teach me a lesson. So, I took $5.50 of my last $7 and entered another tourney. I played virtually the same game - and won. So, then I went in a $2+fee tourney and finished second. The next day I went in and finished in the money in another $5+ tourney and I had most of my bankroll back, where it is hovering right now. However, I didn't play on Titan Poker again in the following week because I got an interesting email proposition. From Party Poker. They gave me $20 to come back and play again. So... I figured I would go over there and give them back their money. This story has one of those things we are seeing a lot on TV right now - end of the season... TO BE CONTINUED.