The icy cold deck of cards

Yesterday in my local 5 dollar buy in no-limit tourney that I frequent I was put to a true test, it was no longer me vs. my opponents it was me and the deck and we were at war. I started the game playing tight, we like a longer game so we use 15 minute blinds with a starting stack of 5500 chips the blinds starting at 25/50. This may seem short however we generally play with as few as 3 and as many as 6 players. I played a few hands early on with no sucess on flop turn of river. I tried to steal a few hands and found my self down to 3700 in chips with the blinds going up. The only problem with our small blinds is that my friends over play in the early structure of the tourney, today however the game was tight. I find that I control the pace of the game which makes me feel pretty good because I can steal small pots in position and get a good feel of where I'm at in any given hand.

Yesterday would have been the same however I was just cold, in the first 45 minutes of play I had not made even a pair on the flop and that does included my mucked hands. I didn't get to concerned yet so I just was sitting low trying to improve my reads on the guys a play with two to three times a week. My thought was wait to wake up in a hand and double through after that I can switch gears and give theys guys a run for there money. Well with the blinds a 150-300 and my best hand of the night a pair of nines not holding up it was time to take a stand. I had 1100 in chips left and they were going fast, I was in the big blind for 300 and had two limpers to me. I looked down at Qs7d and made up my mind, I had the computer hand half the hands people hold are worse than mine half are better and I was about to find out which half both the boys fell in. I raised all in and was called by both within a heart beat. The flop comes with no help and the turn and river don't improve my hand, at the showdown the button flips two aces and the sb turns AJ off. OUCH!

After that I spent my time watching both the players in a heads up match that could put a monk to sleep, there was no play for about 25 minutes then they both went all in preflop with bad aces (a3 off vs a7 off) and the A7 took it down. In this time I didnt even see a show down once so was unable to improve my reads at all. We were able to get one more player however and got another game going and it was on like donkey kong. The cards started to flow and I was able to clean up in two rounds of blinds. The deck lost this battle and I still netted a 10 dollar win for the day!