Poker this week, Main Event

I played twice this week though neither of those were the most interesting poker of the week.

I played pot limit Omaha at Snoqualmie on Tuesday. Generally I've found that Omaha games are very profitable. Take all the hold 'em players who look for any excuse to play a hand and love Ace-rag or king-seven and give them four cards and their in heaven. Watch any Omaha game for 15-minute and you'll be amazed at hands people turn over -- 8876, Q973, etc. If you play a decent game, you start out so far ahead of your opponents' average hands that it's easy to make a profit. Of course that's a long term thing and over a short session anything can happen. I started off way ahead when I won a huge pot with full house over full house (rare in hold 'em but common in Omaha). But over the course of the session I lost most of a buy-in. I wasn't very happy with my play -- I bet a couple of times when I checked behind -- but basically I ran bad, making lots of second best hands.

Wednesday I played in my semi-regular home game -- blinds of 10 cents and 20 cents and a $10 buy-in. I got great cards and people made loose calls and I quadrupled my buy-in over 3 hours. We started only five-handed and ended with only four players. I think we were mainly screwing around rather than playing actual poker most of the time.

The real poker highlight of the week was watching the final table of the WSOP main event. For the final nine players at the biggest poker event of the year, there was some amazingly wild and poor play. No doubt Cada and Moon are good players but they made some incredibly terrible plays and got lucky. Cada should have busted several times but won as a 4:1 dog and wound up winning the whole thing. I commented that the only player at the final table who would scare me in my home game is Phil Ivey and stand by that. I think this will be great for poker. Watching the play will further convince casual (bad) poker players that anyone can win the main event. I think we'll see a second poker boom and that's great for regular players.