..or fast and unstable

The ultra-turbo thing took a bit of a downturn yesterday - nothing severe, but enough to get me a bit frustrated. Frustration is not conducive to any level of good play, so I shut down UB and opened up Pokerstars to go mess around with the $4 I still had lying around on there.

I decided to join a $3.40 8-man razz turbo. I figured that I really didn't care what happened to my pokerstars money, so I could go for broke trying to get it to a more enjoyable level.

The razz was actually pretty fun. I remembered just how many people have no idea what they're doing pretty quickly, as I watched all sorts of ridiculousness going on from at least half the table. I decided that there wasn't much point in trying to use my shown cards to scare off people, because if I had [KK]234 and someone else had [TJ]Q59, they'd likely be calling me anyway. So, I just sat back and waited for the right hands to extract whatever value I could from the donks before they got sent packing.

An example of the plays these guys were making: I bet into somebody at every single street in one hand (and got called) and ended up winning with a 7-low while they had a Queen low. It wasn't a draw, either - it was something like Q-T-9-7-2.

However, thanks to one bad beat on seventh street and a bunch of dead cards, I was eventually the short stack with five people remaining. I don't remember exactly how it happened and I forgot to save any hand histories, but long story short: I came back and won.

So, I now had $12. I left for a while, and when I came back much later, I decided to jump into a .10/.20 limit game with $4 and give it a shot. This table had more calling stations than I have ever before known to exist. The perfect example (and the easiest hand I've ever played) is in this hand, which I did save the history for: http://www.pokerhand.org/?1496088

Yep, quads. Always a fun hand, but much more fun when the betting is capped each round without having to even put any real effort into it. After watching people raising and calling to the showdown with two pair like that, I was ready to bet/call any good hands, and that was just the strategy I used. When I left the table, I had brought my buyin up to $16 or so.

And so, just like that, my bankroll was sixfold what it had been at the start of the day. Granted, that only means it's up to $25 or so, but it's still fun. Guess I won't be totally treating it as my 'whatever I want' bankroll, but it'll still be what I go to when my sit n go challenge on UB bores me.

I'm going to post some actual details on how that UB project is going in a day or two - I was going to today, but then the pokerstars thing came up and seemed much more noteworthy.