Bad Grump! No brownies!

I have been playing much more online the past three days than I have in a long time. After a couple of nice wins, which I described here, my $200 deposit on Black Chip Poker had been turned into $661. Josie challenged me to try to get it to $1200 by the end of the month. It's a tall order. But she promised me the world's best brownies if I managed it. I cannot resist brownies. (They better not have nuts in them. I'll never understand why so many people ruin perfectly good brownies by adding nuts. Yuck.)

Whether or not they are the best, at this point, I'm afraid that they will be the most expensive brownies on earth--and I may pay for them and then never get to eat them. I have just been completely unable to win anything.

Tonight, first tournament I entered, second hand: AA. I raise and push it on every street, including a shove at the end. What was I up against? The Mighty Deuce-Four, which had turned trips on me:

Betrayed by the hand I have done so much to promote! It's an outrage, I tell you.

But I did take my small measure of revenge. I entered another tournament and started to beat other people's 2-4:

And as if in a feeble attempt at an apology, Deuce-Four did win me one pot tonight:

It wasn't enough, though, to overcome other horrendous beats I was taking. Here's a nice, clean five-outer, for instance:

I've been losing with K-K versus somebody else's Q-Q all in pre, with A-K versus A-Q all in pre, etc. Brutal, brutal, brutal.

But on the bright side, Josie and I were at the same table for quite a while in one of the events, and I was able to torture her, which is always fun.

Here, for example, she raised with A-8 and I called from the small blind with A-3. I flopped trips and let her bet the hand for me twice before check-raising her. She called not only that, but a healthy value bet on the river, too. The board was double-paired and she thought we'd chop it with an ace each. Uh, nope!

(Sorry I didn't do the screen grab right on that one, so it doesn't show our names or starting hands. But trust me on that history.)

A while later, I pulled this very ugly bit of nastiness on her, again with the treys:

(Ignore that colored stripe. I don't know how or why that got highlighted.)

My excuses (which admittedly is all they are): She only min-raised pre-flop, so it was cheap for me to call from the big blind. Then I flopped a pair. Who can fold a pair for one bet? She might have had A-Q and missed completely. And even if she had an overpair, my 8 gives me a draw to two pair. Then on the turn I added a flush draw. Fold a pair and a two-pair draw and a flush draw? Who ever heard of such nonsense! Then I rivered the trips, moved in, and she called with top pair/top kicker. What a donkey!!!!

(OK, truth is, if you want to tell me that I did everything wrong in that hand except shoving the river, I won't argue with you.)

Would you like to guess what that hand got me called in the IM chat? Hint: It rhymes with "door."

But Josie takes her revenge seriously. She dinged me something fierce with this hand later:

I lectured her about playing that one badly, but it likely fell on deaf ears, coming from somebody who had called her raises from out of position with A-3 and 8-3 and had gotten ridiculously lucky.

We both had barely more than min-cashes in that tournament, but it was a small prize pool, so not much more than the buy-in back.

I may try again tomorrow night. But the results had better turn around pretty quick, or I will be out both the money and the brownies. I'm not sure I could live with myself if that happened.