The LAST Bad Beat. (I promise).

I detest bad beat stories.

So much so, that I wish there weren't any in this here blog at all - though sadly, if I look back, there are more than a few too many.

Nobody wants to hear how I got coolered, no one wants to read how I did everything right and was punished for it. We've all been there and then some.

So much so that the word "standard" has become a catch-all phrase meaning - "Your hand and situation are NOT unique. Your impossibly horrific one outer on the river has happened millions of times to millions of players before and will continue happening for a millennia to come. You are nothing special. Please go away."

That said - I do believe that everyone is entitled to one poker sob story in their lifetime. I'm going to tell mine, but I promise that from here on out, you won't here any more.

If I could tell only one epically tragic tale of my poker career in micro-stakes, this would be it.

Yesterday I played in the Daily Dollar Rebuy. 8000 entries, a prize pool of over 10K. First place approached 4K.

I have gone "deep" in this one before, cashing for a few dollars in the top 200 and top 100 on more than several occasions.

Yesterday, I went super deep - busting out in 48th place for $26. But I could have done so much more.

I had a big healthy stack of nearly 150 BB in the cutoff. UTG+1 lead out for a standard slightly less than x3 BB. My rudimentary HUD (Head's Up Display) told me that he had voluntarily put money into the pot on nearly 60% of over 100 hands. At this table and in this tournament, he was a maniac who had often got it in way behind, but had sucked out enough to have a healthy stack.

I had kings. I shoved. He insta-called with pocket 7's. He barely had me covered. I was ecstatic at this chance to double up to a prohibitive chip lead over most of the field.

The flop came out harmless rags, with two clubs. I had a club, he had none. The turn was another club.

Understand; now he was down to a single out - the seven of diamonds. A seven of clubs would give me a higher flush.

No need to finish this story.

It really sucked, because, as I said, I would be a monster chip leader, in the top five of 48 players remaining. And have enough chips, to basically cruise to the final table, where the bottom spots started at $100 and jumped dramatically every few spots - culminating in four 1K+ payouts!

I had a real shot at real money - and I was one-outered. Sucks.

But it is what it is, simply results.

Before the final card hit, he had less than a 2% chance.

The chat box lit up with sympathy for me after the brutal one-outer. I have, for a long time now, become a mute in the chat box, but it was nice to see the kind words.

So what did I do? Ponied up another buck and registered for the already running Daily Dollar Freeze Out.

I cashed in this one too - but only for $2.50. It still felt good.

Embracing the Rush

At the beginning of the year my Full Tilt bankroll had settled down to a new low of around $150; starting from zero in 2007 I had quickly built it up, thanks mostly to a big cash in the Sunday Double Deuce, to over $400. Over the next two years I had slowly been whittled back down to my current state.

I had occasionally taken shots in bigger MTT's and SNG's, with no success, and I had also found that even though I cashed around 25% of the time in the micro-sng's, it still wasn't enough to turn a profit with the rake I was facing.

Then along came Rush Poker.

It has been an absolute blast to play - and I truly feel while I'm playing it (the $5 NL version anyway) that it is beatable. But up until this last month, I was not a winning Rush player.

Today, I am up to just under $200; thanks in large part to both Rush, and a $20 cash the other night in a $2 rebuy MTT.

I have to say, I think I'm grasping the game pretty well - I can usually look back on my mistakes honestly, and also recognize when variance has come into play. True, I would love to be crushing Rush in the micros so I could move up, but I also recognize that even (or perhaps especially, with the rake) at the micro level, winning is something that requires my full mental focus and attention.

I've always had success at poker, whether it's in terms of enjoying myself, or turning a small profit - but I've always had to work really hard at it. I am no Michael Jordon that's for sure - but I feel some day I could be a minor league Larry Bird (small ability, big effort) if I could get some momentum and confidence from more frequent success.

In the mean time, I do feel that I'm successful now, and have a progressively deeper understanding of the game as I go along.

Rush has been instrumental in this - by sheer volume of hands alone. I find that now I can pop on and off for an hour or so and still play 500+ hands, this is a LOT more than I've been able to have time for in the past. In this month alone, even with mostly sticking to my resolutions of limiting my play (I say mostly because the wife has been away in Vegas for work, so I play after my kid goes to sleep) I have probably played over 10,000 hands of poker.

This kind of experience is so invaluable, in so many ways - I've had 5 buy-in swings in both directions, once I was down to nearly a $100 BR, in a very short time. So I've really gotten an excellent, and cheap, lesson on handling the pendulum of poker bank roll management.

The sheer number of hands has also, I feel, helped my live game tremendously. I can sit down at HPC (as I did recently) and know that there may be half a dozen old codger regulars at my table, guys who play the Saturday $70 every week, who haven't played as many hands as I have. It's given me tremendous confidence - so much so that I for sure would've cashed recently had not my cards run extremely cold and my expertly timed AQ shove not get snap called by Q4 which of course spiked 2 pair on the flop.

Two Sundays ago I finally got to attend a long time friends often talked about home game tournament. I won the whole thing, running over the table pretty effortlessly. I doubt I'll get invited back, but it did feel great to come in and lay waste to the place. I credit Rush so MUCH for this, sitting down with a bunch of unknowns and intuitively being able to peg each of them very quickly - and then c-bet my way to victory without a single premium pair other than two queens that showed up at just the right time.

Paradoxically, Rush discards the table image and reading player tendencies - so I can focus almost entirely on betting patterns, both my opponents and my own. I can literally raise every single time it is folded to me on the button, and show a profit - simply by c-betting most boards (I prefer the ones with larger cards, whether I hit them or not.) I know this would be impossible in a live setting, but it still helps me tremendously when I do sit down at a home game or casino.

Somehow, playing thousands of hands without the concern of table images, doesn't dull my player perceptions at all. On the contrary, when I'm thrust into a live situation with flesh and bone human beings that I am going to sit with for several hours, I have found that now more than ever, I am able to quickly classify my opponents very well and play them (and not the cards) accordingly.

Two of my poker confidantes, Sven and Potter, have dabbled but since sworn off of Rush - the former claiming he wants to focus exclusively on tournaments and the latter lamenting Rush's absence of player image. I can't tell them that they're wrong, they very well might be right for them. But for me, I feel my game has grown SO much over the last two months because of Rush, that there is no going back - at least until I lose my BR.