HORSE and donkey

Yeah, I know, I know--nobody is interested in my personal poker accomplishments. Tough. It's my blog, and I reserve the right to use it to mark my significant milestones when they occur from time to time. As always, though, I promise that it will never devolve into a blog that is primarily about what or when or how or how much I've won or lost. There are ten million poker blogs out there that do that, and nobody reads any of them.

I just won a limit HORSE single-table tournament on Poker Stars. This is only the third time I've even entered one. Both of the other two times I was first or second out, so taking it down was a big step up.

Without question, the hand that made all the difference was in razz, where four of us stuck it out to the end, with one complete moron who kept pushing it up at every opportunity, despite never having a decent made hand--he even started as the bring-in, with a queen showing! I started with an 8-7-6, which is really, really marginal, but caught good enough (there's one of those odd pokerisms that I'm still having to get used to: to catch "good" or "bad" versus "well" or "badly") to hang in passively, and my 8-low was good enough for the 33-big-bet pot at the end. That gave me a massive chip lead, and allowed me to pretty much duck my head under the waves and fold-fold-fold through the Omaha and stud portions, where I am still basically clueless about sound strategy. A few killer hands in the next round of hold'em got me to heads-up, which I won in Omaha-8 with, first, a big scooper making the wheel, then flopping top two pair. In other words, after the big razz hand, I (1) coasted and (2) got very lucky. But a W is a W, right?

A $20 cash isn't exactly going to bump me up into a different tax bracket or anything, but it's quite satisfying to be making these baby steps of broadening my horizons from playing nothing but hold'em, which is where I was just a couple of months ago.

Now I just have to round up $50,000 so I can enter the Chip Reese Memorial HORSE tournament at the WSOP next month. I feel ready! Those guys can't be that much better than me, can they?