I'll take Potpourri for $800, Alex

I caught about five minutes of first-round WSOP coverage on ESPN early Tuesday morning before passing out. Matusow sat at the featured table. Lon (or was it Norm?) casually mentioned how Mike had dropped $500K online in a short span this summer. Suddenly, I didn't feel so bad about my current cash streak.

Shite. It's not as if this slide is my first. Far from it. There were plenty in my former life of limit poker. (Nor am I stranger to the sickening wonders of tilt.) But just as I thought I had gotten a decent handle on NL, I apparently lost my grip and tumbled headlong into the abyss. I'll be jumping back into the game soon, but in the meantime ... there's HORSE. I do like playing games other than hold 'em and HORSE satisfies all sorts of poker joneses. Whether it makes me a better poker player or not remains to be seen.

Played some $1/2 limit HORSE on Stars last night for the first time and eked out a small profit. It would have been more were it not for the moron who made trip queens on fourth street and watched as the woman to his right made a 6-high straight on fifth street and eventually scooped a $64 pot. At least the moron only called on sixth and seventh streets after guessing correctly that his queens had fallen behind.

Finally, an interesting hand from the WWdN. I coughed up two-thirds of my starting stack early on a bluff that went awry. I crawled into the bunker at that point and waited for a hand or two. After 40 minutes of popping up and lobbing the occasional grenade, I built my stack to a whopping 1,355 when this hand occurred:

Seat 1: ricoM (2285 in chips)
Seat 2: louddwnunder (2935 in chips)
Seat 3: TransFish (3360 in chips)
Seat 5: Ganton516 (3520 in chips)
Seat 6: Guinness (615 in chips)
Seat 8: Astin (9518 in chips)
Seat 9: hacker59 (1355 in chips)
ricoM: posts small blind 75
louddwnunder: posts big blind 150
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to hacker59 [Kh As]
TransFish: folds
Ganton516: calls 150
Guinness: folds
Astin: folds
hacker59: raises 450 to 600
ricoM: folds
louddwnunder: folds
Ganton516: calls 450
*** FLOP *** [4c 5h Ah]
Ganton516: checks
hacker59: bets 300
Ganton516: calls 300
*** TURN *** [4c 5h Ah] [7s]
Ganton516: bets 600
hacker59: calls 455 and is all-in
*** RIVER *** [4c 5h Ah 7s] [3c]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Ganton516: shows [6c 6d] (a straight, Three to Seven)
hacker59: shows [Kh As] (a pair of Aces)
Ganton516 collected 2935 from pot

I'm guessing he read weakness with my wimpy bet on the rainbow flop, which believe it or not, was my intention. The bet on the turn signalled it had worked. Too bad the river did not cooperate.