A little Omaha Experiment

So last night I was trolling for fishies at Party's $25 NL table (caught a couple, but ended up with a hook in my mouth once or twice, too. Remember - Don't get cute in No Fold 'Em Hold'Em - just play the cards, cause most of the time your opposition isn't good enough to get out of the way if you try anything cute). After a little of that, I decided to enter a $5 Omaha HiLo SNG. I had played one or two O8 Multi-Table tourneys on Stars (even made the money in one, a whopping $3!), so I thought I'd give this a shot.

An hour later, I'm the last man standing not really understanding how that happened. After looking at the hand history today, it looks like I did the following things right -

1) I only played hands with a pocket pair, BIG flush cards, an Ace and a low card (2-5), or at least 3 parts of the wheel (A,2,3,4,5). This gave me not a ton of chances at high pots early, but a lot of nut low pots, without a ton of them getting quartered. It's harder for me to figure out the nut high hand in O8 as yet than it is the nut low, so unless I had a full house, I didn't mess around a lot trying to win the high pot. But I can usually figure out if my low hand is strong, so I went for that a lot.

2) I played really aggressively in the hands that I played. I called a little, raised a lot, and led out a lot. This was a Limit O8 Sit n' Go, so that led to me playing against fewer other players each hand, which I thought was really helpful.

3) I cut loose a lot of hands that couldn't play both ways. If there were 3 unpaired high cards (like 10, J, K) I frequently released them if they were unsuited. I have in the past played a lot more of these hands, but I thought to myself "If you're in a hi/lo game, why would you play a hand that has no possibility to scoop the pot both ways?" Obviously position played a part in that, too, since I went for a few more Hi pots in late position, but for the most part I tried to grab hands that would play both ways. We'll give it another shot maybe tonight, but I've got tech rehearsal, and that could run long.

One the other front - I'm in tech rehearsals for our Production of Anna Karenina, a Helen Edmundson adaptation of the Leo Tolstoy novel. Glennio is directing, I'm designing the lights, Lilo is Stage Manager, Twitch is acting, and Suzy is costuming. So I get to be with all my friends as we get grumpy, pissy and generally frantic as the show opens Thursday, and I've only written cues through 3/4 of Act I at this point. I've never run this behind on a show in my life, but I'm really confident that I'll get it all done. This is our first show in the new facility (we moved our theatre into SPAC in January), and it's taken a lot more time than I expected.

I did get a pair of Apollo SmartMove Color Scrollers and demo'd a pair of Wybron Forerunners for the show. They are AMAZING! We've got a 14' ceiling, which is 4' more than we had in the old space, and these 4 scrollers are adding an incredible amount of flexibility to the show. 4 instruments with 16 colors in each is just a beautiful thing! I also have a Selecon 90-degree leko for the show, which lets me cover the whole stage in one leaf breakup pattern with one instrument. I love big light sources, and the Selecon allows me such opportunity for big light, it's great. The show is coming along well, I'm sure it will be ready in time, but this is tech week, which always means not enough sleep. And my da job is really cutting into my poker playing. If it weren't for that pesky crap of paying the bills and eating (which I am inordinately fond of), I'd so be outta here and playing cards for a living. Maybe someday. Maybe Richard Brodie will adopt me! I'm already housebroken, and I'm done with college, so it should be fairly cheap. HMMMMM...