Saturday Night Poker

Time to start contemplating how tonight's friendly neighborhood Texas Hold-em cash game is gonna go. I'll start by explaining that about four months ago a small bunch of us in the neighborhood starting getting together Saturday night for a game of poker. I had played only once before. Most of the others were more experienced but I thought now is the time to learn. For about the first month or so we played what is called "tournament texas hold-em". This is where you have a table of about 7-8 players, each player buys in for $10, and the winner takes all in the end after the losers lose their $10 worth of chips one by one. At the end of you have what is called "head to head" where the two players left with chips battle each other for the money.

Fun to play and good to learn, but if you are not the most experienced or the most lucky with good cards, hard not to lose your $10. I think I lost most of these games.

Then we came up with the idea of playing a "cash game". People would buy in for $10., play their chips and either stop playing when their chips were gone, buy-in a second time for more chips, or "cash out" their chips when they were tired of playing, had to go home, or just wanted to preserve their winnings.

We found this cash game way more equitable in that more people could leave with at least something rather than losing all, and the winner might make more money than the tournament style because people might be buying in for more money thus increasing the amount of chips being played. This happened two weeks ago when Kenny came in with an all-night long winning streak and won close to $90., a new record for us.

Most of us almost never play any time other than Saturday night but this week Keith came over to watch a football game on tv, we decided to play, invited our neighbor Greg to play, and Mark and I made 4. Fun night, with Keith the winner. Full disclosure, I lost my buy-in this time, and lost my buy-in at last Saturday's regular game over at Sarah's house. So my thoughts on tonight's game are leaning towards how to stop the two time losing steak and make some money!

"The book" says to succeed in these games to play tight and aggressive. (Meaning that you bid and bet on relatively good hands, but also bet aggressively trying to get other players to fold better hands.) This strategy has served me well during the last couple of months but lately, it seems Keith may have borrowed a page from this book. Should I start playing loose and timid, or a little bit of both styles? Follow tomorrow for results from tonight's game.