I was berated at the table playing Full Tilt last night!

Dear readers,

As a rule of thumb I would say that getting too involved in the chat while playing on-line poker is EV-. However, I play mostly live poker and when playing online is normally low-stakes cash or some tourney/SNG ...........nothing too heavy , so I can afford to "relax" a bit.
Last night I decided to grab the new Full Tilt bonus available for any player that had actually played for real money with a Full Tilt account prior to this week. Since I got a month to clear the bonus started hammering a table right away.
I chose a 0.25/0.5 NL table which look okish and played solid for about an hour. I always buy-in for the max and it kind of bothers me a lot to get too many short stacks at the table. Unfortunately that was the case towards the end of my session so I stood up turning a tidy profit of $36. Another negative factor playing online is how quickly tables change in a session, as I said I played only for an hour and in the end most of the table were short-stacks whereus at first they were mostly deep.
After that mini-session I was watching some old High Stakes Poker episodes on Pokertube when disaster occurred , the server crashed ! Oh well , the episode was very enjoyable. So what to do.........I went back to playing poker at Full tilt of course :-)
This time around I was wise enough to choose a deep stack table, on of those in which no one can buy in really shorty, also 0.25-0.5 NL. Table seemed to be quite good and I was playing well , making the most of position and reading people accurately. I would like to comment a few hands:

Hand 1. I was BB with 10-8 off, MP semi-tight medium stack raises to $1.5 , Cut-off medium stack calls $1.5 , SB folds and I make the call.
FLOP 4-6-7 rainbow ( POT $4.75). I lead for 2$ since I have a double belly to make the straight plus the others might have missed completely. Original raiser min raises to $4, cut off calls $4 so do I.
TURN ( POT $16.75 ) Kh , putting two hearts on the board. I check , MP bets $7 , cut off calls $7. Now , I think I could have check-raised here to something like $22 and take the pot down , did not feel they were that strong on that board. In the end decided to play it a bit weak passive and called the $7.
RIVER ( POT $37.75 ) 5x . So I made the second nut straight. Now , I missed some value here , thought that the cut-off was on some kind of draw and did not want to be raised by the nut straight so I checked so did they and took the pot down.
The original raiser showed AA and berated me quite a bit, the other guy also said how fishy my play was. I actually replied that those pocket As were in fact very poorly played. Had he bet big on the flop or flop and turn he surely would have taken it down !!!

Hand 2. I open raise in MP with 5-6 off to $1.75 , it folds to the SB that min-raises me to $4.25. The SB was short stack so there was really not much point for me to play that sort of hand but his raise was so tiny that I was priced in so made the call. He had only about $16 more behind.
FLOP 5-7-J all hearts ( POT $9 ) . I held the 6h so actually flopped a pair and a baby flush draw. SB goes all-in and to be honest I thought he could have AK /AQ, maybe with one heart or a decent pair. I knew I could be behind but did not feel like drawing dead and it was possible I was ahead so I called , turned a heart and won the pot against QQ no heart. Again people started berating me at the table. After that I flopped a couple of small sets against bigger stacks that had re-raised me pre-flop offering good set mining odds so I won two decent size pots.

At that point the chat was on fire, I was obviously in some sort of heater but seriously playing OK, it was not crazy "gambool". One guy said : " have you actually been ahead pre-flop all night?" to which my reply was "the money is made after .... honey". :-)
In my opinion you really have to mix it well playing cash games. Yes , I did raise with junk on a couple of occasions, got lucky and showed it to the table but the majority of my holdings were really solid and well played in relation to position and stack sizes.
At that point I picked up KK in early position, raised my usual initial $1.75 and it folds to the SB , medium stack who was one of the "beraters". He re-raised to $9 and I knew what was coming next. The guy obviosly thought I did not have much.........well , I did .......and 4 bet him to $22........he went all-in for about $38 and of course I called. V tabled QQ , my KK held and well.......ship it ! :-). That's clearly another advantage of a measure junk mixing strategy, people pay you off when you are big plus junk is easy to get away from if called and missed plus when junk hits it tends to win big pots as well.
Ended the session up $130, great for about over an hour of 0.25-0.5 ! So I went from $150 prior any poker yesterday to $316 after two short sessions plus am accruing that $100 bonus nicely so hopefully I'll get the first $10 instalment tonight or tomorrow. I really really like the new Full tilt software and I urge you to try it.

Please , if you do not have a Full Tilt account and wish to open one please let me know so we can use the refer-a-friend feature.

XXX